The planetary transit system

As distances vanish and the people can flow freely from place to place, society will cross a psychological specific heat boundary and enter a new state. No longer a solid or liquid, we have become as a vapor and will expand to fill all available space. And like a gas, we shall not be easily contained.

– Sister Miriam Godwinson, “But for the Grace of God”

Most secret projects are solutions to recurring problems on Chiron. The Planetary transit system solves the problem of how to get from one base to another. Indeed, how to get from any base to any other base. In the early days, taking five steps outside of the perimeter of a base meant a high likelihood of a mind worm having you for breakfast. This is not conducive to planetary-wide commerce or the free exchange of ideas between factions. What it meant was that for most colonists, the base and its immediate surrounding was the entirety of their lifeworld; like an ancient Greek city state, the polis was where it was at.

In the earliest of early days, the impact of this local focus was a function of necessity rather than anything else. When every day is a new all hands on deck situation, there is little time to think of taking a leisurely trip to the next base over. As the colonists settled things down (in all senses of the word), inter-base travel gradually changed from a hazardous anabasis to a routine commute. Ever so slowly, the hardy pioneers were replaced by conference attendees and motivational speakers going to and fro. The grim realities of survival of an alien world were pushed aside for the more intricate problem of how to survive in a highly specialized industrial economy.

We might compare this project to the expansion of railway systems on Earth. The completed construction of a train station meant not only that trains could arrive, but also that the imperatives of places far away could make themselves felt on a very immediate basis. Local goods could be transported and sold to far-off places, which meant that it became profitable to produce more of them, more than the local population could ever use. If prices went up, this meant good times; if prices went down, the company town faced hard times. In both cases, the fate of a local city was determined by factors far away. What arrived on the train was not only goods and people, but a new social order, where the immediate felt experience could not be relied upon to predict how the future would shape up. The arrival of the railway meant an abstraction of reality.

The same goes for the Planetary transit system. The heat boundary that Miriam mentions marks the transition from a precarious colony barely scraping by to a society where everyone can go everywhere. This means that ‘everywhere’ goes from being a set of very particular places (a city), to becoming possible destinations with varying degrees of sameness (a global village). The thing that separates place a from place b is that it takes slightly longer to get to the one than the other, which in the grand scheme of things is not much of a difference at all. Whether this heralds a new golden age of cosmopolitan exchange (as envisioned by Kant) or the nivellation of difference under the indifferent brutality of sameness (as per Kunstler), remains to be seen.

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Hab complex

The chief aim of their constitution and government is that, whenever public needs permit, all citizens should be free, so far as possible, to withdraw their time and energy from the service of the body, and devote themselves to the freedom and culture of the mind. For that, they think, is the real happiness of life.

– Sir Thomas More, Utopia, Datalinks

The process of automation outlined in the previous entry is, as noted, not limited to remote industrial settings. It also takes place closer to home. More specifically, it is used to build and maintain said homes. In the early days of the colony, everything had to be built by manual labor, which put an effective upper limit to how big a base could be. The bigger in size the built environment, the more people are required to maintain it. This relationship might be expressed mathematically, giving a rough outline of just how big a base can be before it can not become any bigger; the game shows this mechanically by limiting base sizes to 7 before building this facility.

More, in the quote above, makes reference to a freedom and culture of the mind, in contrast to the service of the body. Under conditions where a healthy base with a functioning life support system is a healthy body, this service takes the form of making sure that all facilities required for future human habitation are kept in working order. When all hands are required to do this, the opportunities to do something else are few and far between. Devoting oneself to the freedom and culture of the mind is a luxurious dream under conditions where the oxygen tanks are springing a leak every fifteen minutes. That is, until a robot can be put to work to fix those leaks automatically.

Having thus freed humans from the service of the body, the hab complex allows both for a larger population in general, and a more diverse division of labor in particular. People are freed up to become artists, librarians, engineers, designers, politicians, authors – all those activities which do not provide immediate benefits to society, but which if performed well become incalculable sources of positive change. Freed from the constraints of immediate survival, humanity is finally allowed the breathing space required to flourish.

The downside to this is, of course, that being freed from necessity has the potential to render people superfluous. Moreover, the large scale thinking inherent in automated base-wide systems tend towards the kind of functional separation lamented by Lefebvre in his description of a newly built residential block. There was only and exactly one thing to do in this new construction, Lefebvre noted, and that was to reside. The buildings were all furnished with the most modern of conveniences and appliances, built to the highest of standards, but walking through the area filled him with a sense of dread. For one, there were ironically no people there – during the day, everyone was at work, elsewhere, and during the evening they were in the leisure parts of town, also elsewhere. The only people at home were those who did not have anywhere to go; they resided, but given the lack of human activity available to participate in, it is questionable whether they actually lived.

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Industrial automation

In the borehole pressure mines 100km beneath Planetsurface, at the Mohorovicic Discontinuity where crust gives way to mantle, temperatures often reach levels well in excess of 1000°C. Exploitation of Planet’s resources under such brutal conditions has required quantum advances in robotic and teleoperational technology.

— Morgan Industries, Ltd., “Annual Report”

In 14th century Europe, the Black Death killed off a third to a half of the population. This, to make an understatement, meant that there were less people around. An indirect effect of this is that economic activities that previously depended on a ready supply of abundant, cheap labor simply could not be performed at scale any more. While by no means impossible, the combination of having survived the plague years with a new reality of scarce, expensive labor meant that it became imperative to automate (as best things could be automated in the 14th century) as much as possible. This lead to a significant stride forwards in adoption of various mechanical tools for getting things done. While the technologies might not seem much to our future-enhanced eyes, it was a step up from doing things by hand.

The same situation faces the colonists on Chiron, albeit without the context of mass death by inexplicable diseases. The infrastructure, mental and physical, brought over from (the ever-fading from living memory) Earth had the built-in assumption that there would always be cheap, abundant labor involved somewhere in the process. Individual work sites might be staffed by a relatively small number of people, but they could always be resupplied from more numerous locations. This assumption does not hold on the early days of habitation on Chiron, where the makeshift industrial base was all there was. In the long run, automation had to become the explicit norm.

The same goes for the kinds of work being performed; a non-trivial portion of it no longer happens in environments suitable for human habitation. On a planet mostly unsuitable to human habitation, this is not news by any means, but as the above quote suggests, humanity is always prone to find new and uncomfortable regions to stick their noses into. The borehole, a massive hole beginning on the surface and proceeding straight down for kilometers on end, is just such an uncomfortable region. The further down one gets, the hotter and less accommodating to life things become. Thus, the correct move for increasing productivity is to abandon the notion of live participation altogether. When encountering certain death, humanity has traditionally opted for the machine.

The process of automation is not limited to remote inhospitable regions, however. As ever more activities become automated, the colonists find themselves in an ambivalent situation. On the one hand, they are freed from doing the mundane tasks of keeping the pumps running, and can pursue more spiritually fulfilling work. On the other hand, whole professions find themselves wiped out, with mass unemployment as a result. In-game, this is represented by the Hab Dome lifting the population limits on bases – it can either be a boon to productivity, or an inevitable descent into drone discontent and revolt. When the necessities of life are taken care of, the teeming masses require some other reason for sticking around. Being left to one’s own devices with nothing to do – all dressed up with nowhere to go – is not a pleasant place to be.

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Research hospital

Some civilian workers got in among the research patients today and became so hysterical I felt compelled to have them nerve stapled. The consequence, of course, will be another public relations nightmare, but I was severely shaken by the extent of their revulsion towards a project so vital to our survival.

— CEO Nwabudike Morgan, The Personal Diaries

This quote is a showcase for how much a single word can alter the meaning of an entire passage. For years, I thought it said “the consequence, of course, would be”, implying that Morgan momentarily considered nerve stapling the perturbed civilian workers, but then thought better of it in light of the inevitable PR blowback from such a move. The “would” indicates a potential path not taken, a course of events within the realms of possibility, but not this particular time. The fact that the quote says “will”, however, indicates that this very thing actually happened, and that Morgan at the time of writing is both dreading the upcoming PR debacle, as well as not too bothered by the fact that he had people nerve stapled. One gets the impression the former will weigh more heavily on his mind over the coming days than the latter.

The quote also indicates what kind of research takes place at this kind of hospital. An initial impression upon reading the words “research hospital” might be that it is a standard hospital which, above and beyond its routine treatments of common medical conditions, also has a special unit engaged in data gathering and research (common in cities featuring universities). The reaction of these unfortunate civilian workers, however, suggests it might be a facility more along the lines of the one used in the Vipeholm experiments. These experiments consisted of feeding mentally ill patients nothing but candy, sugar and more candy in order to study how fast their teeth would rot. One “treatment” consisted in leaving a big ball of sugar inside the patient’s mouth for extended periods of time, to speed up the process. At no point had anyone involved agreed to participate.

On one level, this is an ethical abomination whose mere mention should force a thorough bout of self-examination in anyone even remotely associated with medical practice. On another level, the data gathered from these experiments have been instrumental in treating dental patients for decades, making for robust practices worldwide. Dentistry textbooks may or may not mention the source of the data gathered there, but it would be a step down from best practices to not include said data. Medical science progresses on the suffering of these innocent people.

What Morgan seems to have in mind is a utilitarian line of reasoning where this is an acceptable tradeoff. Moreover, the fact that the research hospital facility reduces the drone count of a base raises the question of just where said drones go. One interpretation is that the overall increased level of healthcare allows these individuals to live happy and productive lives. Another is that their lives are indeed productive, just not in the way envisioned by those happy to use such phrasing. Perhaps, when the victims are long forgotten, humanity will be better off for it.

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Gene splicing

The genetic code does not, and cannot, specify the nature and position of every capillary in the body or every neuron in the brain. What it can do is describe the underlying fractal pattern which creates them.

— Academician Prokhor Zakharov, “Nonlinear Genetics”

Genes punch way above their weight class when it comes to having a material impact on the world. For such tiny things to have such a dramatic effect on the material world is nothing short of remarkable. Being able to affect change on a genetic level thus becomes a very powerful tool; seemingly small edits can end up producing very large differences. The outcome is not proportionate to the input, as it were.

As Zakharov indicates, however, the outcome is not a linear process corresponding 1:1 with the alterations made. It is not possible to look upon a genetic code and immediately be able to visualize the fully formed organism; too many things come down to the biographical history of the organism in question, and the specific circumstances within which it lives. For plants, it might be as simple as gaining different colorations depending on the soil; for humans, far more factors play in.

This makes the prospect of gene editing a very indirect proposition. Unlike computer programs, organisms can not be written from scratch. There is simply too much going on, at too far a remove. For the same reason, it is not clear where to begin making alterations; where, amongst the myriad of genes, is the one thing which controls the desired aspect? It has to be somewhere in there, but where?

Like teenagers of the early internet years learning HTML, the key is to copy what works on other pages and splice it into your own. There is a process through which the incomprehensible series of letters and numbers is turned into a web page, and while this process is not entirely known (yet), the various small changes that can be made are predictable and immediately applicable. The same goes, mutatis mutandis, for genes. Take the genes which seem to correspond to the desired trait in one genome, splice it into the genome which you want to exhibit the same trait, and see what happens.

If it works, it works. If it does not – well, the search continues. Sooner or later, something has to work, given enough monkeys with enough genetic typewriters.

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Skunkworks

The popular stereotype of the researcher is that of a skeptic and a pessimist. Nothing could be further from the truth! Scientists must be optimists at heart, in order to block out the incessant chorus of those who say “It cannot be done.”

— Academician Prokhor Zakharov, University Commencement

There is a lot of non-scientific activity going on these days, most of it conducted by non-scientists. Naturally, when scientists notice these shenanigans, their natural instinct is to say that these things do not work and (more often than not) can not work. While correct in detail, the overall result of this impulse is a seeming chorus of people saying it cannot be done. The “it” in question varies, but the image of researchers saying “it cannot” remains static.

This is something of a challenge for science communicators. It also casts the Skunkworks, as base facility and general concept, in an ironic light. These are places where everything goes, where balls to the walls insane projects are given a green light and highly speculative, low-probability theories are tested out. The prototypical advancement of science is conducted through the steady iteration of repetition; most of it consist of a rather unglamorous going through the motions. At the Skunkworks, however, anything goes. Sure, let’s see what happens if we fire a giant space laser whilst it is half a centigrade from turning into superheated plasma! Let’s find out what happens if we reverse the polarity of a mind worm! Can we modify the morphogenetic field somehow? Do progenitors like K-pop? Let’s find out!

Most of these speculative ventures will, inevitably, not work. Null results are also results, however, and a non-trivial amount of knowledge can be gleaned from the process of repeatedly trying supposedly impossible things. For one, there is now more experimental data than there was before. For another, the scientists, lab technicians, engineers and everyone else involved will have gained valuable on the job experience. The most immediate benefit of this is better trained science crews able to conduct a wide variety of experiments. A slightly less immediate, but potentially more significant, benefit is the opening up of conversations along the lines of “hey, remember that time when we did x? what if we tried it on y?”. Even if x didn’t pan out, the impulse to try it again on y just might.

If this makes you think of Feyerabend, the firebrand agitator against methodology in scientific exploration, then you know where this is headed. The key to reading Feyerabend, however, is to do it from the point of view hinted at in Zakharov’s quote: as an optimist seeing the potential things within reach that are yet to be done. Science is fundamentally a process of retroactively verifying and corroborating, but it is not only that. Zakharov and Feyerabend, optimists both, argue that it is very pessimistic indeed to reduce science to a mere process of going through the motions. Zakharov goes ever so slightly further, and adds that sometimes the scientifically prudent thing to do is to build a prohibitively expensive and ethically dubious facility specifically dedicated to conducting the most outlandish experiments possible. After all, it just might pan out.

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Advanced subatomic theory

The substructure of the universe regresses infinitely towards smaller and smaller components. Behind atoms we find electrons, and behind electrons quarks. Each layer unraveled reveals new secrets, but also new mysteries.

— Academician Prokhor Zakharov, “For I Have Tasted The Fruit”

The universal state of things expressed in this quote is not only applicable to the natural world at large (or small, as the case might be), but also to the lifeworlds of humans in general. The discovery of ever smaller components is equally a function of how the universe is structured, and of how knowledge is built upon previously accumulated knowledge. In order to find a smaller component, it is necessary to have discovered what said component is smaller than. It is, as Yang said, an iterative process.

Secrets and mysteries depend fully on the point of view adopted at a given point in time. On the one hand, it is necessary to know enough about something to know there are things not yet known; on the other hand, secrets unravel and mysteries unfold as soon as they become knowable enough to be subjected to systematic study. There is at all times a finite range of conceptually available objects that are not yet fully understood, but also not completely unknown. As Gadamer would have it, there are always things just beyond the horizon, and as we move towards it, new horizons come into view. The specific secrets and mysteries of the day tend to be discovered and explored, but there will always be new ones lurking just slightly further into the future.

This parallel between physical and mental universes can – it is assumed – only be pushed so far. Eventually, we will run out of physical universe; at some point, we will have found the smallest component there could possibly be, where venturing into smaller scales simply would not be a meaningful thing to do. Zakharov’s infinity is not quite as infinite as it is made out to be. It is, however, infinite enough to last for the rest of our lives, and possibly the lives of many generations to come. Which, for all intents and purposes we might have, is infinite enough to suffice, and to warrant the active seeking out of new mysteries and secrets to uncover. We are not done with the small secrets of the universe just quite yet.

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Adaptive doctrive

War is war; destruction is destruction. You think this is obvious. But war is not destruction, it is victory. To achieve victory, simply appear to give the opponent what he wants and he will go away, or join you in your quest for additional power.

 – Datatech Sinder Roze, “Information burns”

This is a surprisingly militaristic statement, especially when we consider Roze’s cyberanarchistic disposition. When considering the possibility of a faction based on Barlow’s Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace, the immediate association is not to this sentiment inspired in equal measure by Sun Tzu, Clausewitz and the Machiavellian Prince. As usual when things do not immediately add up, we must conclude that something interesting is going on.

Clausewitz defined the overall aim of a clash of military forces as the disabling of the opponents capacity to continue fighting. The aim is not to kill or destroy them, but to render them ineffective (caught in an untenable situation, starved of supplies or perhaps even just severely outnumbered). Once this is done, the outcome becomes a foregone conclusion, and the rational thing to do for the defeated party is to surrender. Conversely, the rational thing to do for the victorious party is to accept this surrender, and then move on to do whatever it was that motivated the clash in the first place. War is not destruction, it is victory; if victory can be achieved without destruction, then this is the preferred outcome.

Sun Tzu, similarly, did not define victory as merely the military defeat of an opponent on a given battlefield. Famously, he quipped that the general that can win without a single battle is a great leader indeed. Destruction is beside the point, and moreover tends to be a net negative after victory is achieved. Throwing more and more resources into the meat grinder of war to achieve progressively less profitable battlefield success is, in the long run, a losing proposition. When faced with a choice between victory and destruction, choose the former.

This sentiment is at the heart of the Data Angel faction. In order to remain a politically independent entity, they have to successfully (and successively) stave of destruction at the hands of other factions. Much like a Machiavellian prince of a small state, they have to navigate the realpolitik of factions vying for dominance and control. Other factions constantly want things, and Roze’s preferred way to stave them off is to appear to give them what they want. If this can be done by means of a peace treaty, then that would be the best possible continuation of the Angels’ perpetual war against servitude.

Attentive readers will at this point have picked up on the Miltonian sentiment that it is better to rule in hell than to serve in heaven. The hell, in this case, is the inherent contradiction of a politically coherent entity built on the opposition to politically coherent projects as such; the risk, as always, being that the final words of Roze’s quote becomes the overall aim of the faction as it moves into the future. Survival requires power, and the more of it you have, they better you become at surviving. The interesting contradiction here is how the Angels will manage to win without accidentally also losing themselves.

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Optical computers

We have reached an informational threshold which can only be crossed by harnessing the speed of light directly. The quickest computations require the fasted possible particles moving along the shortest paths. Since the capability now exists to take our information directly from photons traveling molecular paths, the final act of the information revolution will soon be upon us.

— Academician Prokhor Zakharov ,”For I Have Tasted the Fruit”

Optical computers is an interesting technology from a gameplay perspective, seeing that it does not provide any benefits whatsoever. None, zero, nothing. The only reason to research it is that it is required for other technologies further down the line. Thus, this technology is as close a representation of pure science as the game gets – the advancement of knowledge for its own sake, rather than for the promise of new toys and gizmos to play around with.

This can be contrasted with our intuitive understanding of the inherent usefulness of really, really fast computers. As Zakharov indicates, speed is the name of the game here; nothing being faster than the speed of light, optical computers would by definition be the fastest difference engine in town. Those of us who are old enough to remember when ordinary silicon computers made an entry into the lifeworlds of ordinary people, can remember the distinct difference even the slowest of these devices made. The same goes for old style modems, creating unimaginably slow connections which nevertheless opened up brand new worlds. What marvels are waiting just around the corner of the invention of these very, very fast molecular modern machines?

If the cyberoptimism of the late 80s or early 90s is something to go by – the low end modems would bring democracy, enlightenment and the whole accumulated cultural achievements of humanity into the living rooms of the masses – then the hype surrounding these newfangled optical computers ought to be similarly over the top. While these optical inventions may or may not deliver on these new cyberoptimistic promises, the hype might well be sufficient in and of itself to generate the societal enthusiasm required to transition into this new computational mode. It would not be the first time computational circuits came into being following this peculiar, circular mode of production. Whatever comes after their invention is a big, curious unknown, but once optical computers are in place, they cannot but produce the effects they are going to have. Sometimes the very promise of a better future is what brings it into being.

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Chapter three – at the base of the tower

I want to dig a subterranean passage. Some progress must be made. My station up there is much too high. We are digging the pit of Babel.

– Franz Kafka, “Parables and paradoxes”, Datalinks

In the previous two chapters, we saw the laying of the foundations for what is to come. Chapter one answered the question (or solved the problem) of magnets and how they even work on this new planet. The premade ideas and tools brought from Earth were, by definition, initially not wholly adapted to the unique new circumstances the colonists found themselves in, and had to be adjusted accordingly. A new way of life requires a new way of thinking, and the only way to get into a new way of thinking is to learn by doing.

Chapter two, subsequently, answered the question of what happened when these immediate problems were solved and slightly more indirect issues had to be faced – issues such as how to organize a society, how to allocate limited resources, and how to cope with the exigencies imposed by a hostile environment and/or hostile factions. No longer were the colonists primarily responding to the immediate threats of survival, and the time to take a good long sit down to think things through had arrived. Building an ad hoc systems of wires to power the first fledgling outpost is one thing, but designing an entire infrastructural grid for a new base built to operate from the word go – that’s a taller order.

This chapter answers a third question: what comes next? What comes after ensuring the initial survival on a new planet (as players of colony building simulators know all too well, not a guaranteed outcome), and after the establishment of societal institutions designed to carry the bulk of human activities on their incorporeal shoulders? In other words – what happens after the immediate problems have been solved to such an extent that they can be delegated to specialists? Where does a society go after this?

The Kafka quote adorning the top of this page gives us an indication. The foremen and administrators, looking at the impossibility of building the Tower of Babel, conclude that admitting said impossibility would look very bad indeed on their performance reviews. They therefore swiftly proceed to reclassify their efforts to something more doable. Some progress must be made, and they are the ones who have to make it. Thus, rather than aspiring upwards, towards what we intuitively understand to be the conclusion of the project of building a tower, each specific branch of human activity digs in and becomes more of itself. Biologists become better at biology, engineers better at engineering, soldiers better at soldiering – and so on. The essence of specialization is to become good at a limited number of activities, a process which does not end merely because the initial problems that caused the specialization to appear have been – at least temporarily – solved. Progress will be made, even if it has to be invented.

Humans are territorial animals, which applies in equal measure to physical terrain as to societal divisions of labor. When urban theorist Jane Jacobs wrote of “turfs”, she pointed both to the literal interpretation of gangs claiming sections of urban territory as their own, and to the tendency of administrators and specialists to claim certain realms of human activity as their exclusive domain. Depending on where you are in the hierarchy of colonial society on Chiron, you may find yourself targeted by either or both of these claims to power. Drones are more likely to be caught up in the criminal undercurrents arising in all advanced societies, while talents are more likely to engage in the often inscrutable competition for promotion to the higher ranks of specialized fields. In either case, the olden days of taking things one day at a time are irrevocably over. You are either part of a specialization (formal or informal), or you get left behind.

The same tendency has been described in more terrestrial terms as well. Ulrich Beck called it the second modernity, to differentiate it from the first one (which we glimpsed in the last chapter). Late Bauman called it a liquid modernity, after having called it postmodernity for many years. Castells wrote of an information society, emerging wholly anew from the old order. There are a number authors making similar claims, but the overall trajectory is clear: something new is happening, which can not be explained fully in terms of the past. In our world, this means the dissolution of the expectation stable worklifes and the placement of everything under permanent precarity until further notice. Everything solid melts into air, as Marx phrased it. On Chiron, it means that the training wheels are off and that things are starting to become really science fiction-y real fast. Thus we return to Kafka’s introductory statement:

Some progress must be made. We are digging the Pit of Babel. From here on out, things will only ever become more of themselves. Dig in.

 

[A brief note to new readers popping in after the hiatus: it is highly recommended to read this text from the beginning. You can get there by going to the main page, enabling javascript and holding page down until the infinite scroll stops scrolling. There are two bibliographies, one listing all works cited and one listing per chapter. The sidebar, which can be found by clicking the menu button at the top right of the screen, will help you find posts by category (chapter, faction or in-game classification).]

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