Beautifully Unique Sparkleponies: On Myths, Morons, Free Speech, Football, and Assorted Absurdities (14 page)

Have the courage of your convictions. That’s all I’m asking. Stand for something, or fall for everything; don’t hide behind lies.

Dear People of the World,

I would like to be your supreme overlord. Now, I realize that this is an extraordinary position to take, and some might view it as slightly megalomaniacal, but I think we can do some really great stuff together—stuff that will ensure our continued survival as a species and maybe lead to a better quality of life for everyone (unless it all goes horribly wrong, in which case it’s not my fault). Also, the reason you should choose me for leader of the world is that a lot of the things I have planned are definitely long-term, so I’m going to need to keep an eye on stuff.

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

T
oday 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 people 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.

D
rones 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.