Star Trek Future - The Whys

A few years ago, while I was traveling across the country, I was also reading David Brin's Earth (obligatory Amazon link), and I realized what I wanted to do with my life.

I want to save the world.

Or, at least, I want to hack the world. I'm only being slightly melodramatic when I say that, too. Truly, there's nothing we humans can (yet) do to the entire world, it's a giant ball of molten rock and metal, even all our nukes couldn't do much more than scratch the surface. So, yeah, the Earth itself? It'll be fine.

Our civilization, however, may not. So that's what made me decided on what I wanted to study and head back to school, not just take the random gen-ed classes any more. Now I'm trying to finish up engineering, the large scale kind, buildings and cities and regions and things. Our systems are big.

Hacking the whole world is a big project, which will need lots of help. It's the ultimate open-source project, too! Everyone is contributing already. But if you walk into a project without an idea where you're going, you're going to end up making mistakes until you figure things out, and then you're going to have to fix them to get where you wanted to go. And so far we've been all too often bumbling in the dark, and making some awful big mistakes. I wanna help clean those up, and keep from making them again.

But where do I want to go? Well, I've been shorthanding it as the "Star Trek Future", not because I want or expect anything exactly like Star Trek to happen, but because it's more familiar than terms like Bright Green Future as coined by the folks over at Worldchanging. Since it's what I'm devoting a lot of time and thought to, it ought to be reflected here, too.

That didn't come out quite as clear as I was hoping. I'm going to spend the next few posts hopefully clarifying, starting with the twin poles of where we ought to be going, and where we are now, some of which I covered in a post a while ago about the Grim Meathook Future. There's a few other snippets on these thoughts all tagged as "the future", including this one about defining win conditions.

One final thought, from Finite and Infinite Games. Finite games are played until somebody "wins" and the game ends. An infinite game's whole purpose is to keep the game going. Life is an infinite game.

Star Trek Future - Viridian

Most of you probably know, or at least know of, Bruce Sterling, the science fiction author, famous for cyberpunk novels. He's also been a general futurist, ranter, cyber civil libertarian, and general internet opinion guy. He also basically started the whole Bright Green movement with his Viridian Manifesto which was part of the kickoff of the Viridian Project. I'm not going to summarize the whole Viridian project, in part because I was never an active participant, just followed from a distance.

The Viridian project is over, at least in that form, and the Last Note is full of good advice, not all of which I've yet been able to follow. At the very least, it crystallized my desire to get a multitool, a present from my parents last Christmas, and one from my wife this year for my birthday. And much of what he says of it is true, because carrying it has changed how I look at things. Loose threads do get cut, loose screws get fixed, and I have to remember to leave it behind before I go to the courthouse these days. And after moving, I really do appreciate the advice to get rid of stuff you don't need or use. That's one of the goals unpacking.

And it includes another formulation of the Samuel Vimes Boots Theory of Socio-Economic Injustice.