A Quick Rundown and a Change in Delivery

Do you remember looking up at night and wondering what stars were?

I remember moving to Houston as a teenager and being unnerved at how pink the sky was at night. It took me awhile to realize it was light pollution.

With fewer people seeing the stars every night, are there fewer people looking up there and thinking “What’s up there?”.

Regardless, you’re probably reading this because you’d benefit from getting an idea on who’s looking up and thinking “we have to go there”.

The one thing life’s been doing for millennia is spreading, and it only makes sense that it would want to spread further.

We’re here to help that happen.

We can thank science fiction for some of the first moves, at least in terms of planting idea’s in the minds of people who would play with rockets.

But who wants this today?

Besides the billionaires people like to make fun of, there’s the Longnow Foundation. It turns out, thinking in longer timescales tends to lead people to consider what might happen if we stayed on one planet.

Like species that stayed on one island, we’re not going to make it if something happens to the island. And on a long enough timescale, something happens to the island.

Casey Handmer of Terraform Industries is working on the energy question. His blog offers detailed thought on what it will take to go to space.

We’ve already talked about Zane Mankowski, whose game Children of a Dead Earth works as a space warfare sim.

We’ve talked about Robin Hanson before, and we’ll talk about him again, especially as it pertains to his Rapacious Hardscrapple Frontier.

Confined Environment Psychology is a discipline that grew from submarines to Antarctica. Of special interest to us was Biosphere 2. It leads to questions like “what if the people who went into the Biosphere had a solid history of achieving great things together?”.

In almost all of these (besides Biosphere 2), there is little talk of culture.

However, a culture is what can make getting stuck in a confined space with eight people beautiful.

Confined spaces, limited communication with a home base, and vast travel distances are things we’ve dealt with before. Most clearly, with any frontier. Especially one that involved ships before the invention of radio.

We also have much to learn from cultures that win wars.

Not only are we their descendants, but wars provide high-pressure environments to test cultures.

So here’s what we know about the culture we’ll need:

• The people in it will be able to coordinate with minimal direct communication, like medieval merchant’s leagues.

• Each individual and smaller groups will be able to make decisions at the point of hard contact with the environment.

• The culture will be like plant cutting s that can grow into whole plants from a cutting of a small part.

• The culture will be united by a single purpose: propagation. “Spreading”.

In the following letters, I will explain why these are necessary features of a culture fit to seed an interstellar empire.

You Will Get This Newsletter Every Weekday

Which brings us to a change in our format.

I’m going to continue posting longer form letters fortnightly on Fridays.

Starting next week, though, you’re going to get a super short letter from me every week day.

Yep!

I understand this isn’t what you signed up for, so feel free to unsubscribe.

Thank you!