From: Greg Burch (gregburch@gregburch.net)
Date: Sun Sep 29 2002 - 11:50:56 MDT
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Technotranscendence
> Sent: Sunday, September 29, 2002 11:15 AM
>
> Over two weeks ago, I sent this to Starship Forum, an egroup
> that focuses on this and related issues. See
> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Starship_Forum/ for more on
> Starship Forum.
>
> "Mars Needs Saloons!" (see http://www.webleyweb.com/tle)
> should have started a raging thread here with many members
> participating. I reckon part of the reason this hasn't come
> to pass is that most or all of us agree on the basic issues
> here regarding freedom and space settlements. (Do we? If
> anyone disagrees, please post to the list and let's discuss
> the matter. I can see a big area for disagreement around the
> area of the stability of freedom and threats to freedom and
> civilization. I would focus on internal threats rather than
> aliens and the like.)
If any subject can pull me out of my skim-lurking while I'm busy with
work, it's this one. I don't have time to write much now, but what I
did do in response to your post this morning is finish a first version
of the revision to my "space" web page:
http://www.gregburch.net/space.html
The part of this that's responsive to your post is this link:
http://gregburch.net/space/2050.html
While I was working on this, I sent a note about this project to a
friend, which briefly explains my current thinking on the subject:
- - -
The collection of images here is from the "big project" I've
been working on for a while, a series of models and pictures I call
"From the Earth to the Moon, 2050." These are an attempt to be as
"accurate" as I can be with the modeling skills I have in depicting the
technology that could be created in a hypothetical world that has
something approximating very early nanotech, but hasn't yet gotten into
what would appear to us to be magic (which ought to happen not too long
after).
I've put way, way too much time into building these models, but
in a sense they represent the expression of a lifetime of mental and
emotional involvement in the idea of us monkey-men getting off the
planet. When I get immersed in building these models, hours can fly by
and I completely lose all sense of time . . .
It's funny, but even though these pictures show a very concrete
and thoroughly "thought-out" technology, I'm coming more and more to
realize that machines like this may never be built - or if they are,
they will be used for only a very short period of time. The truth is
that it is very hard to send monkeys into space with rockets and, sad to
say, other than for the sheer fun and adventure of it, there's really no
need, ultimately, to send people into space. If I'm right about the
radical direction that technology and civilization might take, it won't
be bags of protoplasm that ultimately make a civilization off the
planet. So these images may be as "fantastical" in the end as pictures
on unicorns or dragons ...
- - -
I apologize for the large file size of the full images -- these are the
original renders and I haven't had time to reduce them, so the
bandwidth-challenged should beware.
Greg Burch
Vice-President, Extropy Institute
http://www.gregburch.net
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