Meeting notice: The 00.05.16 meeting will be held at 7:30 p.m. at the Royal East (782 Main St., Cambridge), a block down from the corner of Main St. and Mass Ave. If you're new and can't recognize us, ask the manager. He'll probably know where we are. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Suggested Topic: NT and the Colonization of Deep Space Many of us feel that the colonization of deep space (defined as habitats in galactic orbit) is both desirable and inevitable. While nanotechnology will make DS colonization technically possible it does not require it. Motives that will do so are not obvious. Historically SF writers have extrapolated from our own history to associate deep space colonization with exploration. This association may well be problematic. On earth exploration secured productive resources (land) that could only be exploited by residents (farmers); there almost certainly are no productive resources with the same constraints in deep space; if there are, the lightspeed barrier will almost certainly make these resources unmarketable; if for some reason a market appears, exploitation will almost certainly be cheaper to do with machines; and even if it is not, not many humans would be required. Certainly there will be tourist facilities scattered through the solar system, but there is no obvious way of connecting these with the establishment of permanent residences dozens and even hundreds of light years away. Possibly some day colonists will be attracted by the huge volumes of buildable space (and enormous ambient energy resources) available in solar orbits, but again, it is hard to see how that motive will get us living halfway to Alpha Centurii. It seems unlikely that we are going to run out of local space any time soon given that 'r' term in the relevent volume formual (4/3*pi*r^3) is more than 10^9 miles. Some argue that the need of malcontents, anarchists, dissidents, and misanthropes to escape the constant supervision of the global or system-wide nanny- state will spur a migration, but it is not clear that an outcast culture will be able to afford the technology required to outrun the regulators, and in case the numbers will probably be small. In general one can say that to be plausible as an engine behind the colonization of DS, a motive must be autocatalytic. It must lead people to want to live -- not 'explore', but reside -- at X AU, then once they are there, make them want to move to 10X AU, then 100X AU, and so on, over and over, further and further out into the galaxy. I can think of only one candidate. In the old days status was asserted in part by how far you could force people to come to visit you. People reading the New Testament knew that Jesus was the real deal because He forced the three Kings to come hundreds of miles for a social call. The declining costs of transportation have lowered the power of the rich to force petitioners to pay for the privilege of access. The cost of getting to orbit might restore it. The value of residence in an orbiting hotel might lie almost entirely in that only the rich, powerful, beautiful, and talented will be able to afford the address. Of course the drama of the landscape, the sense an observer in an orbiting hotel has of the planet being at his feet, will not hurt much either. Orbiting hotels might well become the glamour centers of the global civilization -- belonging as they will to no nation but the nation of the monied and celebrated elite. In time, as more people spend longer in orbit, the hotels might be built out into the ultimate gated community - the celebrity neighborhood that every celebrity, aspirant, and pretender wants to live in. And eventually, as prices fell, they all would. First the upper middle class, then the middle class, and then finally even trailer trash would move into orbit, trying to inject a little glamour into their pathetic lives by establishing proximity to the rich and famous. Of course by then the trillionaries would have piled into their space yachts and moved out to another orbit, one convenient only to those with the newest, fastest, most expensive rockets. For a few years they would be safe there, but as technology -- nanotechnology -- rolled on, eventually the pushers and the climbers would show up, sending obnoxious invitations to taxi over for bridge. So the rich would trade up again to a newer, faster class of space yacht, and move out still further. Eventually most of us would end up living in deep space, spending our time dreaming of being able to buy a faster ship and live somewhere even deeper. This scenario seems to get us where we want to go, but it assumes that status anxiety will continue to have the same importance in our lives and culture that it does at present. We might experience a religious rebirth, and find ourselves dedicated to lives of voluntary simplicity; perhaps generations of abundance will extinguish the evolutionary context that selected for status drives in the first place; perhaps we will discover the genes for status hunger, declare it a disease, and fix it on the deepest level, or just become so mature that we transcend it by sheer force of insight, wisdom, and will. In some respects we might gain if we did, but if we do any of these things I think we can kiss deep space colonization goodbye. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> One of the most interesting machine evolution projects out there (and this project is definitely out there): http://www.demo.cs.brandeis.edu/golem/ <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Announcement Archive: http://www.pobox.com/~fhapgood/nsgpage.html. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> If you wish to subscribe to this list (perhaps having received a sample via a forward) send the string 'subscribe nsg' to majordomo@world.std.com. Unsubs follow the same model. Discussion should be sent to nsg-d@world.std.com, which must be subscribed to separately. You must be subscribed to nsg-d to post to it and you must post from the address from which you subscribed (An anti-spam thing). Comments, petitions, and suggestions re list management to: nsg@pobox.com. Dedicated to the memory of Alexander 'Sasha' Chislenko