by Kluwe, Chris
Here’s the deal. First thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers. (Joking! Maybe.) The first thing we do is create several survey craft to go check out the asteroid belt and see if there are any promising resources that can be hauled back with a gravity tractor (a small spaceship that uses its own minuscule gravity to change the asteroid’s path) to low earth orbit or one of the Lagrange points. This will take a while, so we’ll need to be patient. We should also check out Saturn’s rings; there’s a lot of ice there that would be very helpful in providing water for both Earth and our future space efforts.
While we’re patiently waiting for the asteroids to arrive, we’ll be working on developing a self-sustaining no-grav ecosystem to keep our astronauts and orbital workers fed. This will require quite a bit of technical ingenuity that we will then offer to communities on Earth so they can create a more sustainable agriculture base. The basics will be energy (likely in the form of solar collectors, since there are no clouds in space—quiet, yes, I know about nebulae), water (from Earth at first and from asteroids and comets later), plants for recycling carbon dioxide and producing oxygen, bacteria to break down waste products, and perhaps a small animal farm for variety, if resources allow. We’ll also need to continue research in genomics and genetics so we can deal with the problems of bone-density loss and cosmic radiation that afflict those who have to spend long periods in no or low gravity (which will lead to useful health breakthroughs for the rest of us), as well as with the psychological issues people experience when they spend extended time in space.
Once the asteroids arrive in a stable low earth orbit, or possibly at one of the Lagrange points, we can start mining them for various resources that we need to create an orbital infrastructure (stuff like iron, gold, magnesium, and so on). Having an orbital infrastructure is key to future expansion efforts because it brings the cost of creating spaceships and orbital goods way down and also allows us to send resources to Earth if necessary (just drop them at the planet and let gravity do the rest). Now, the goal here isn’t to mine the asteroids and destroy them, as tempting and easy as that seems, because if we hollow them out but keep them intact, we have ready-made habitats and workstations for people to live in (a couple meters of rock makes for great shielding against cosmic rays). This gives us a foothold in space for part two.
Part two involves creating multiple excavation craft we’ll send to Mercury to build an underground manufacturing base near the equator. Mercury is traditionally thought of as a boiling fireball of death, because it pretty much is, but if we build near the day/night divide and underground, it’s actually fairly temperate. The soil insulates us from drastic temperature shifts, and we don’t really need to be on the surface to mine stuff anyway.
But why Mercury? Well, it’s because it has large amounts of useful minerals we can use to create the solar-power collectors that we’ll then send into orbit around the sun in a modified Dyson shell (no, that’s not a vacuum cleaner joke, it’s actually a thing).
A modified Dyson shell is a series of platforms designed to harvest solar energy from the sun and then beam it back to where it’s needed—we’ll send it to Mercury at first so we can create more platforms, and then to Earth and the orbitals. Ideally, we’ll be able to power other colonies in the solar system as well once we start expanding farther. This will provide humanity with effectively unlimited energy, which means a lot of problems will become much easier to deal with, and it also leads to part three.
Part three is where we get off Earth in numbers that matter. At this point, we’ll have a fully functional orbital economy, enough energy to do whatever we want, and an established method of setting up sustainable ecosystems on other planets. Now we’ll need to start seriously colonizing Mars, Titan, Europa, and any other likely location we can find.
Why?
Because if all humanity is located solely on Earth, we’re one extinction-level event away from vanishing into the mists of history. One dinosaur-killing asteroid. One Yellowstone supervolcano explosion. One massive solar flare in the wrong direction. One runaway greenhouse effect, unstoppable virus, or nuclear war; any one of these, and it’s fat-lady-singing time. The only way to ensure our continued survival on a geological time scale is to get our eggs out of the one basket they’re currently in.
People of Earth, this isn’t going to be easy to do, but it is definitely doable. We have the technology right now to create automated surveyors. We have the scientific base right now to unlock our genetic code and create sustainable ecology. We have the time and the resources right now to plan for our long-term future, but if we don’t start the job, we’ll never finish it.
Make no mistake, this job will require sacrifice, patience, and, above all, the ability to resist temptation. And, oh, will there ever be temptation. Asteroids in low earth orbit? Perfect kinetic weapon platforms for any government that wants to drop a couple rocks on people. Orbital resources? Everyone’s going to want to make the quick buck and send it all down to Earth, not invest in expansion efforts. Dyson-shell solar collectors? Platforms that beam energy at something can also be referred to as killer-death lasers if they hit the wrong target. All of these temptations (and more!) will be sitting there waiting for the wrong hands to grab them and misuse them.
Resist! Think about the long-term goals, the future of our species, and how cool it will be when our far-distant children point back at us and say, “They were the ones who made it possible. They were the ones who brought us the stars. They were the ones who finally looked past the now and planned for the later.
“They were the guardians of humanity.”
Sincerely,
Not an Evil Overlord in Any Way
Whatsoever I TOTALLY Promise
Echo Chamber
Today I saw an interesting piece of news. It appears that the pope (dude with a pointy hat who runs the Catholic Church, generally regarded as wise and merciful by his congregation) decided to join Twitter,1 no doubt in an effort to sexify the Church’s image for younger generations. Surely—the reasoning must go—if the pope joins social media, why, all the cool kids who hang out there will want to hang out with the pope!
Unfortunately, I don’t think the Church quite understands how this whole social-media thing works (don’t worry, it’s not alone). You see, one of the uniquely intriguing things about Twitter is that it tells you who’s following you while also telling everyone else who you’re following and, by extension, what you consider important enough to allow to access to your main feed (the information you want to hear versus what other people try to bring to your attention).
You can learn a lot about people by looking at whom they follow. Some people follow everyone who follows them in an attempt to share the favor, collecting a form of virtual kudos, if you will. (The unspoken rule of Twitter is that the more followers you have, the more important you must be. I can attest to the inaccuracy of this belief, as I have a far larger number of followers than most of the authors whose books I read and whose views have shaped the ideas of millions.) I can only imagine that these sharers have the vast majority of the people they follow muted, because otherwise, the feeds would be incomprehensible—a gushing fire hose of food pictures, bathroom updates, the same joke retweeted a thousand times, and all the other minutiae people feel obligated to share on an hourly basis.
Most people tend to follow what they find interesting or helpful or what they want to connect with, and that offers insights into the personae they’re presenting to the world (never forget that on the Internet, you can be whoever you want to be, and it’s very easy to build a convincing facade, if you so desire). Someone who follows @YourDailyBible, @NRA, @Cabela, and @Romney2012 is likely to have far different posts than a person who follows @huffpost, @MSNBC, @greenpeace, and @BarackObama, and all it takes is a quick look at that list to get a snapshot of what that person considers important (for the record, I tend to follow people I find humorous and intelligent and who care about empathy, and, yes, I know how many peop
le I’m following) (what can I say, I’m a juvenile delinquent at heart) (unrelated tangent—in the future, people may follow thousands more than they actually want to in order to hide political/religious/social leanings from data-mining) (but most people aren’t thinking about that) (yet). If you want to get a feel for underlying beliefs when someone tweets something to you, go check out his or her Following section—it’s pretty amazing what you can find sometimes.
So whom does the pope consider important?
Well, the pope follows himself, in seven languages. This means that every time the pope logs on to Twitter (or, let’s be honest, every time his assistant logs on for him), all he sees is everything he’s previously posted bouncing back to him from seven different angles.
This is fucking beautiful. It is a modern masterpiece of epic proportions. I cannot think of a better way to sum up the problems the Catholic Church is experiencing right now (congregant dissatisfaction, declining attendance, internal dissension over core issues) than its using a social-media platform designed to allow interaction with an immensely vast audience and yet hearing nothing but the sound of its own voice in full seven-part harmony. (Full disclosure—I have nothing against religion, as those who’ve talked with me can attest, but when something this hysterically ludicrous pops up, I can’t just let it slide by.) After all, who wants to spend time listening to the unwashed masses? What are they compared to the glory of SeptaPope blaring forth his word? The pope has told us whom he considers important, and I, for one, am not that surprised.
(One last irony: The pope’s Twitter handle is @Pontifex, which means “bridge builder” in Latin. Unfortunately, it looks like someone forgot to tell the Church that bridges pass traffic in both directions.)
Lest I be accused of piling (Pilating?) on, the echo chamber isn’t limited to the pope’s Twitter account. No, we can see the echo chamber all over our society these days, aided greatly by the widespread communication tools we have at our disposal.
News channels running twenty-four-hour-a-day programming designed to appeal to a specific audience, slanting coverage and statistics for their target demographic so those watching won’t change the channel and miss out on advertising airtime, demonizing other viewpoints so the almighty dollar won’t be taken elsewhere. Echo echo echo.
Internet message boards for any crackpot theory, wild conspiracy, or niche subculture—find all the people who agree with you and ostracize those who don’t (no proof of anything required!). Keyboard warriors arguing over Kirk versus Picard, red state versus blue state, religion versus atheism. Bring out the banhammer and pass the three-day suspension. Echo echo echo.
Political factions that veer more and more to the extremes, listening to only the loudest, refusing to consider the other side’s point of view because that wouldn’t be good for the party image (never mind if it damages the nation). Vote the party line or be censured, demoted, replaced. Echo echo echo.
We’ve become so used to seeking out those who agree with us and ignoring those who don’t that we’re splintering into every sort of clade, faction, organization, gathering, and tribe possible—all too willing to brand dissidents as “other” and tune them out entirely. We slap labels on others and on ourselves, as if the complexity of the world can be distilled down to one easy-to-digest definition—echo echo echo, over and over and over; we’re shutting out all the wondrous variety that surrounds us in exchange for the gradually fading sounds of our own voices.
I’d ask the pope how to fix it, but he’s too busy listening to something else.
Five, Six, Eight, BOOM!
Drones are here to stay. That’s a given. Whether they’re the miniature plane Predators roaming our skies now, or nanobot clouds designed to skim information from unwitting subjects in the future, there’s no putting Pandora back in the bottle. (Hell)Fire has been gifted to humans.
Unfortunately, drones aren’t used just for surveillance. Guided missiles, targeted toxins, bioengineered diseases—all can be delivered to a target with minimal risk to the forces controlling the drone.
The subjects on the other side of the equation? Well, they’re not so lucky (and frequently neither are their neighbors).
So the question becomes: How do we utilize these constructs? What message do we want to send with our agents of remote operation?
Right now, the message we (we being the United States of America) are sending is one of fear, terror, and death. If you’re suspected of any ills against the United States in its War on Terror (an amazingly nebulous description when you look closely), well, I wouldn’t recommend geotagging your tweets.
And soon it might not be something that just those lucky folks living on the other side of the world have to worry about!
That’s right, our government, in its infinite wisdom, has decided that the criteria under which a drone strike is approved is clearly too much for our peasant minds to handle, and thus that information is only available to certain members of the government who “need to know.” Even that minuscule measure of transparency was only reached after intense pressure from the public on what someone has to do to find himself on the business end of an explosion, and we still don’t know the legal opinions the government is relying on to justify these strikes.
In fact, when initially asked, the attorney general of the United States, Eric Holder, said he couldn’t unequivocally confirm that a drone strike wouldn’t be used against an American citizen on U.S. soil. It was only after a thirteen-hour filibuster by Senator Rand Paul (who I don’t agree with on a lot of things, but who is absolutely right on this) that AG Holder penned a letter stating that the president does not have the authority to kill “an American not engaged in combat on American soil.”
Well, great! We’re safe!
Not so fast. “Engaged in combat” can be a very loose term, especially with prior precedents set by our government. Does writing propaganda make you “engaged in combat”? Does letting someone stay at your house make you “engaged in combat”? Does talking to a member of a terror group (again, as defined by the people in charge of pulling the trigger) for the purposes of research or journalism make you “engaged in combat”?
We don’t know. The reason we don’t know is that our government doesn’t want us to know. Why don’t they want us to know? (Insert known knowns and unknown unknowns speech here.)
I don’t know. But I can promise you that institutions that insist on obfuscation and denial of information are historically institutions that don’t fare well under future examination. Soviet Russia. North Korea. Egypt, Iran, Nixon, Mao. Religious institutions of all shapes and sizes. Financial gamblers and corporate boards—all concerned with hiding the truth of their actions.
And those are all within the last century!
Looking back further we have feudal Europe, Renaissance Italy, imperial Japan—hidden cults and secret handshakes taking place across the world, all to make sure the majority of people didn’t know what those in power were doing. Eventually, though, those people found out.
Reformations, revolutions, rebellions—the inevitable response to power and corruption lurking amid shadows (and, naturally, quickly co-opted by those very same shadows). Violent, bloody, disruptive change, ninety-nine times out of one hundred—anger finally boiling over at the lack of transparency.
Because that’s what this is all really about. As citizens, we grant our government the monopoly of legitimate violence, but in return that violence has to be legally employed. That’s the whole reason we have the Constitution, and why it spells out what the government can and cannot do. That’s why we have a legal system, with things like “due process,” “a speedy trial,” and “the right to face your accuser.” Above all, our government is supposed to be accountable to us, the people, not a shadowy cabal in a back room somewhere that no one ever sees.
That’s why transparency is so important. So we can hold the government accountable for things like budgets and drone strikes and wars. So we know that violence is b
eing employed within the constraints of our legal system and not to capriciously further personal agendas or desires for power. And, most importantly, transparency is so vitally important because it makes us face the choices we allow our government to make, especially those choices pertaining to violence.
Violence that historically never works. Violence that we allow to persist with our unwillingness to force transparency from those in charge of making decisions.
All the bombs we drop, all the countries we invade, all the terrorists we assassinate with a joystick and television screen—those aren’t the problem. The problem is instability, caused primarily through lack of food, infrastructure, and education. That’s what we should be fighting against (and not just overseas), but we buy into constant fear and think blowing up the symptoms will cure the disease. Another missile on the way, another insurgent killed, another five rising to take his place, angered and willing to do whatever it takes to destroy the threat they know is there, a threat they cannot see because it’s hidden by shadows and secrecy, a threat that won’t go away until it’s exposed to the light.
So the next time you see a report on body counts via drone, take a minute to wonder what those people did to deserve it.
If you don’t know, you might be next.
Janus
I, and many others, grew up along with the Internet. As servers and protocols stretched their digital limbs, we stretched with them—learning, playing, falling down, and standing back up. The slow crawl of dial-up modems graduated into the frenetic sprint of broadband and fiber-optic lines, data shared among us at an ever-increasing pace.
