World 2.0

World 2.0 – Trans-Human Zeitgeist

Part 1 : Birth of the Neosapiens (Fuck yea Exosquad! Wait… NOOOOO LEEEEOOOOONNNNN!!!!!!!! :’0 +100 cool points for anyone who gets that joke about the first cartoon that made me cry.)

The moon looks a lot different now that the settlement is in full swing. The orb hanging in this hazy, polluted-pink sky is much different than the one I remember from 50 years ago. It all started with a movement called The Zeitgeist. Named after the very ephemeral element of mankind they wished to improve. This group of visionaries in social engineering, technology and philosophy hoped to attain a true self-sustaining and open-source society. A society constructed from the ground up with inherent protections against greed, warmongering, power structures and hierarchies. A society of ubiquity and affluence, where the real defining choice the daily grind is simply, “What amenities do I prefer?”

Google’s CEOs Larry page and Eric Schmidt happened to fall into a unique category of the corporate ultra-elite of human history. They had all the money they needed to do whatever they wanted. They could entrench themselves forever in power and money, like so many before them, but instead they wanted change. In their mind, they wanted to use their affluence to give the ultimate gifts back to humanity, instead of hoarding their fortunes away in a mighty palace. It just so happened that never before in human history had people so forward thinking been in such a privileged position. They didn’t postulate about this anomaly though, they acted. They spent multiple years and billions of dollars to get the framework, the laws, the technology and a strategy written out in plain English. Their singular mission was to transcend the shackles of the entrenched technocracy, to free mankind from monies and currencies and to get even the common man to focus not on survival but, finally, on the greater good, on invention and art. They went on to use a big gift from their’s and other’s corporate coffers, and the advent of new technology, to finally achieve true post-human society.

The plan was set out in multiple stages, given in brief here as I remember them happening. Build a space elevator, the oft-thought of brass ring of space expansion. Then, build manufacture facilities on the planet for production of robots. This goal has an inherent fractal expansion element. The first factory builds the robots which build the next factory, and so on. Essentially, perfect binary expansion until saturation. The first factory was the only one they needed to build with robots carted up, fully assembled from earth. The rest would be assembled on-site from much cheaper (to transport and to purchase) raw materials and mass fabricated, modular parts. The dusty surface of the moon was even found to be a great composition for making concrete. With the space elevator and recently mastered ion-thrust drives, the entire process of transportation was fueled by electricity, which rained down free from the sun and rolled in with the tide and swept in with the wind. Google’s clean energy initiatives of the early 21rst century actually paid for a large part of this project, selling cheap efficient energy to the world at large. Lastly the robots would build the starting point of the moon colony and receive their human hosts upon completion.

They figured out through simple arithmetic and best-guess statistics that all of the energy needs of this society could be satisfied by covering roughly one quarter of the moon’s surface with solar panels. These were the first items to be spearheaded by the automated construction robots. Large, hexagonal plates, miles across, were arranged on the surface at neat, regular intervals. They were built on platforms that could be lifted if, in the distant future, the real estate needed to do double duty, other than just for energy production. From earth, the moon kind of looks like a golf ball, but there are more dark spots in the middle where the sunlight is gathered at the highest efficiency. As the solar panel infrastructure neared completion, they had such a surplus of energy (from the lack of the human guests) that they regularly let out a giant spark on a massive Jacobs ladder, just to remind the world that they were still up there busily crafting their little robotic hearts away.

The robots would build continuously and furiously. The factories employed highly efficient fabrication techniques, where tiny machines did tiny work and created very intricate designs in a seeming frenzy of construction. The progress ramped up exponentially. So startlingly quickly was the task completed, a mere 10 years after the elevator, that the pundits were deeming it a dismal financial failure for the companies involved just as they revealed that the colony was up, running and waiting for people to join their cause.

The first city cut its tape and allowed the first envoys two months ago, and last week I got an invitation. The invitations were given out pseudo-randomly, with a good cross section of peoples, cultures and skills. This was all very carefully crafted by the data mining techniques Google was so adept at in their early technological developments. I was just one of the lucky ones, I suppose. I’m standing now in the waiting area of the Virgin Space station in Palo Alto California, which will take me halfway across the world to the Universal Space Elevator, ten miles off the coast of Japan. The space elevator will take me out to the inner edge of the upper atmosphere, a point of such low gravity that the small push of the ion-thrust drives is more than enough to take you all the way to the New World. In the two weeks it takes for the entire trip I’ll be reading and watching movies about what awaits me in my new life in the New World.

I can’t help but get a little choked up as the polite flight attendants tell us to bid our last farewells to earth and all things terrestrial and begin boarding the craft. I have only one item in my possession, having rescinded all my worldly goods to the post-humanist society to be reallocated. All that belongs to me now has been digitized and placed on a personal tablet computer, which will be central to my life in World 2.0. Anything else I need will be provided as necessary. It’s essentially cheaper to build it there than to carry it with me. And knowing this, I feel so utterly liberated.

Part 2 : Life

Depending on which colony you are in, you could be looking directly at earth through your windows at all times. Some people like looking back at the old world to remember or reminisce. Others like to look forward, towards empty space and the blinding sun, which necessitates shading the glass during the full spectrum hours. A quick glance at our personal (the tablet computer terminal that essential to our way of life) would show us statistics and demographics of who likes to live where and look at what, but that’s a moot point.

From where we are right now we can see the space elevator stabbing up out of the sky, a tower of Babel, an epic, shiny, threadlike obelisk. On top of the elevator is a large flat wing. This wing surfs on the upper crust of the outer atmosphere 150 miles up, which creates enough lift to make up for the lack of support from below. It essentially holds up the entire structure. Deploying this wing was also a critical part of building the elevator, as it was built more from the top down than from the bottom up. This wing is constantly guided over the surface of the atmosphere, so as not to torsion or tear, the strong but flexible material that makes up the shaft of the elevator. Just as we’re looking out we can see another ship departing, new lives welcomed into the New World just in pace with it expanding to accommodate them. The construction workers, the robots, are just finishing the last aesthetic touches to the new colony.

Above the headboard, just as you enter this new colony from the landing site is a little known quote from Nelson Mandela from 2008 : “The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid but he who conquers fear. Where people of goodwill get together and transcend their differences for the common good, peaceful and just solutions can be found, even for those problems that seem most intractable.” The people have lived up to this ideal quite remarkably in the past 50 years. We can recall the stories from our grandparents and even our parents, about the state of transition in attitude. We feel so far removed from war and suffering that now they play no role in our day to day lives, and so much for the better.

A new vote is ready and waiting to be weighed upon on our personals. Today it is whether or not we should share, at no cost, our newest discovery in femptotechnology, which allows matter to be slowly transmuted from one element to another. This technology has allowed for the very useless dust of the lunar surface to be slowly (though at great energy costs) into something very useful. The plants which used to recycle the waste of the population are also slowly being re-tasked to transmute instead of reuse. Though this weighs heavy on our electrical systems, they don’t come close to sapping them entirely, and its expected the process will become much more efficient over time. By the end of the day, on average, 98% of the people in the New World will have said their piece on the subject. We fill in multiple choice questions and provide a brief essay of their personal feelings on the matter, if any. All of this data will be coagulated, analyzed and used directly on the policy decision. It is wholly expectable that some random citizen will have coined the feelings of the people so completely that her quote will be on the communication presenting our decision to the Old World. This further tightens the feedback loop of our society to our policy, to personalize it, and it has been very rewarding.

On the top of the bridge is a large surfboard. This surfboard provides all the lift necessary to make up for the lack of support from the ground. Essentially the elevator is hanging on this wing, skimming over the surface of the atmosphere as the world turns.

What its like on World 2.0? What people spend their time doing? How they become wildly productive and leap ahead of contemporary society in all tactile measures?

Cohesive transparent democratic governance through combinations of computer decision making, statistical analysis and ubiquitous computing and human input devices.

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This document contains plot outlines, reference material used and text that didn’t make it into the regular document… Spoilers below, this is a work in progress with hopefully three parts… you’ve been warned…

Part 2 : Life

On the top of the bridge is a large surfboard. This surfboard provides all the lift necessary to make up for the lack of support from the ground. Essentially the elevator is hanging on this wing, skimming over the surface of the atmosphere as the world turns.

What its like on World 2.0? What people spend their time doing? How they become wildly productive and leap ahead of contemporary society in all tactile measures?

Cohesive transparent democratic governance through combinations of computer decision making, statistical analysis and ubiquitous computing and human input devices.

Part 3: Death …aka Rebirth... Or The World of Birth Part Two... Or Birth The Reckoning… Or Afterbirth…

The evolution of post-humanist society. Trickle down to the rest of the world. The construction of slave states. The start of the Great War from the Technocracy to regain control. The digitization of the populace to escape from earth along with the great technologies they developed.

Sources, further reading :

http://thezeitgeistmovement.com/

Zeitgeist - A German term meaning "spirit of the time." It refers to the moral and intellectual trends of a given era.

Nelson Mandela Quote :

http://www.rd.com/your-america-inspiring-people-and-stories/eight-celebrities-share-what-theyve-learned/article98952-1.html