space – Toby Weston

Aliens!

So, Aliens huh? My gut feeling? All this hysteria is just more of ‘THEIR‘ endless Psyop nonsense to distract us from the Fourth Turning. On the other hand…

I met a drunk guy in the park. He had one of those conference ID tags around his neck. He was sitting on a pallet of Bud Light raving about opportunities in post scarcity deflation. He was clearly making the most of the arbitrage opportunity, so much so, that eventually he staggered off and passed out. The guy was so sloshed he forgot to close his laptop. I had a peak. There was a lot of repetitive energy budgeting and genotype statistical analysis to struggle through but sensing my perplexity, the laptop suggested it could summarize and translate the data into Terran vernacular for aboriginals—

The Vetan, the Quagaars, the Vindaloovians, and the rest of the ten-thousand-strong coalition that make up the GPLC (Galactic Poverty Law Combine) have been visiting Sol3 for a hundred million years.

100M BP – Fish, big lizards, small hairy critters, volcanoes. Recommendation: check back in 50M years.

50M BP – Lots of hairy quadrupeds, some interesting aquatic mega endotherms, significant feathery aerial diversity. Recommendation: check back in 50M years.

1M BP – Bipedal hairy endotherms communicating abstract concepts via sonic telepathy, tool use, marine navigation. Standard technology curve. Recommendation: check back in 1M years.

10K BP – Significant depopulation of mega-fauna. Bipedal endotherms experiencing severe genetic bottlenecking due to comet strikes and a hemisphere-scoped extinction event. Standard technology curve. TTS (time to singularity) 10K years +/- 5K years. Recommendation: distal civilizations may want to start packing for a road-trip.

1K BP – Large-scale social mobilization. Extended cognition […] TTS 1K years +/- 500 years. Recommendation: step up surveillance cadence. Tickets open within the 500LY party zone—start boosting up now, you don’t want to miss this one!

100 years BP – Atomic theory. Branchial Theory. Digital Computation. This is it, galls and zims! The hairy bipeds are going Singularity any decade now! Last chance to book your tickets! This one is going to be a blast!

14th October 2017 – High-density probe insertion despite light sail ejection malfunction. Observation of critical ecosystem degradation. Significant existential self-annihilation risks: current odds are 3:2 against. Evidence of unsanctioned Quagaar technology transfer. Vindaloovian griefing sigils. Genetic diversity has been cached. Post-doc observers will remain on station for the final singularity end-run.

Interesting articles have been written about Sol3. Evolution between major lineages has delivered good papers on Dolphin and Fish convergence. Sonic-telepathy is pretty cool and unusual, remember way back when #GruntingHomo was trending? But you know the deal… there are a hundred billion life-supporting planets in the Galaxy. Dinosaurs are cool, they come in different sizes, but they all taste of chicken. The only thing that properly gins up the Galactic news cycle is some new Sophont species going full-blown Singularity!

This happens rarely; two or three per millennium. All the players like to have delegations on the ground when the fireworks start. Remote civilizations that miss-estimate kick-off time often arrive hundreds or thousands of years early—better a thousand years early than ten minutes late, right?!

We hang around in the Oort Cloud with our press passes around our necks (anatomical analogue) drinking too much (psychotropic analogue), fucking each other (physiological analogue), and killing time. Those of us with a few Singularities under our belt, know there’s always a black market for sneaking down early to get inside scoops or, if you’re from one of the non-compliant factions, negotiating deals before the GPLC lawyers stitch up exclusivity on all the good stuff…

You wouldn’t believe the price of beer down here!

Ooops, the red light just started going ape!
I’m off to put on my Singularity trousers! The fun’s about to start!!
See you on the other side!

Saloa caravan ship architecture

The Kin ships in the Plurality share a common architecture, with a ‘Spindle’, to which banana habitat modules are attached and attachment points for ‘Kataraa’ which provide the ‘Caravan Stack’ with thrust.

During the ‘thrust phase’, the habitat modules are fixed, parallel to the Spindle. During ‘coast phase the habitats detach and rotate with the spindle to create centrifugal gravity.

The Kintsugi – Homebrew Torch Ship

The Kintsugi, Zaki and Segi’s home-brew torch ship.

Heading up to pay a visit to Dr. Pritchard for the climax of ReImagination.

Printing had closed off the hull, hiding the fractal patterns inside a smooth shell of charcoal-grey diamond. In time lapse, this last phase had looked like a potter closing the rim of a bowl, bringing the edges up and together to make a sphere and smoothing over the seams to create a solid, blended whole.

Moving parts were few. There were no control surfaces that Zaki could identify. All but the most heavy-duty hinges were formed from graphene doped with crystalline polymers, the printing and subsequent baking process determining their flexibility and axis of movement. The few proper, full-scale, mechanical parts—like hatches and the crab-like undercarriage—had been printed together with the contiguous hull; then, a misting of acid—to which the diamond hull was impervious—had dissolved preprinted seams and voids, erasing acid soluble strata, to form independently articulating sections.

It was a technique borrowed from biology, where cells and tissues were grown bottom up, while groups of cells could be killed top down, in concert, to detach limbs and organs. It was how delicate fingers were cut from the blunt ends of embryonic stumps.

The last job of the print gantry employed the same misting head during a week-long controlled bake and baste. A shroud of super-thermal-insulator had been printed and the temperature inside kept at a steady, precise, 917 degrees kelvin. Every few minutes, the printhead had doused specific sections of hull with a solvent. The liquid worked its way into the graphene, crystallising and disrupting carbon bonds, changing the diamond from a dull, opaque grey to a polished, gem-like orange. The smoothed edges of the new transparent window panes faded organically into the hull. Just as dots added to a random doodle can turn meaningless squiggles into an unambiguous face, the transparent panels transformed the smooth, squashed ellipse into what was clearly an aircraft with a graceful, blended cockpit.

Rescue mission to Punt.

Note: After the war of ReImagination the shuttle was patched up and renamed Kintsugi.