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300 years ago most people lived and worked |
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on farms in rural villages their whole life, and didn’t know much about life 300 miles |
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away let alone 300 years in the future. So what will life be like 300 years in our |
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future, or for those living 300 million miles away? So, today SFIA celebrates its 400th regular |
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episode, and as a show dedicated to Science & Futurism, I felt it would be a good choice |
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to look at what life might look like in the year 2323, three centuries from today. And I chose the phrasing “Life in 2323 AD” |
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as the title intentionally, rather than any specific technology or achievement or even |
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the word humanity, as I suspect that term might get blurry in times to come, and 300 |
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years is probably well into that window already. Also we are focused more on life in this era, |
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as opposed to whether or not we have flying cars or jetpacks or warp drives, and so while |
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we will discuss a lot of technology today, this episode is more about lifestyle scenarios |
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and civilizations. For that reason, after the intro, we’re |
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going to switch into the easter-egg heavy Narrative format we sometimes use on the show |
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and explore the lives of 7 people, Amy, Becky, Cameron, Duncan, Emily, Fido, and Gary Googleson, |
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and with them, some of the technology we expect. Now, predicting the future of Humanity even |
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3 years from now is a tricky business, let alone 3 centuries, and we work off of logic |
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flavored with intuition here, not crystal balls, so don’t go making bets on predictions |
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made today. Plus many events in today’s story are not |
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meant as predictions or to indicate a norm, rather than to be food for thought and contemplation |
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about possible paths that might emerge for people in the future. Of course, the usual notion about distant |
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future predictions is that no one around now, including the predictor in question, is going |
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to be around to see if it was right or wrong. So if you’re remembered at all, it’s probably |
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only if you lucked out and got your prediction right enough that folks think you were a visionary |
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rather than wildly guessing. In order to frame our predictions, we’ll |
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lay out a few key conditions for this century that will be our basis for forecasting to |
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2323. To start our conversation, let’s lead off |
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with a prediction that probably won’t surprise many of the audience who have been around |
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for hundreds of episodes: prediction #1 about life in 2323 AD is that many of the folks |
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listening to this episode now, as it comes out in June of 2023, will still be alive and |
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kicking in 2323. There’s a lot of technology that appears |
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to be physically possible but to which our pathway to it is murky at best. We still don’t know if we can make fusion |
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practical as a power source for instance, or if we could ever make really good nanobot |
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assemblers that could just quickly build nearly anything out of raw materials. But we know from nature that we can have functional |
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microbots able to self-replicate, that’s every organic cell after all, and that they |
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can have a fairly complex amount of code telling them how to build themselves and function, |
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their DNA, and so too we have a pathway for powering them, much as our own cells are powered. It would seem a given that these microbots |
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would or could get smaller and more durable, down to the nanoscopic scale, and probably |
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cheaper too. None of that is strictly necessary, because |
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while it would be nice to have tiny little bots to maintain our equipment and homes and |
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roads, or even make them, we’re a lot more willing to toss efficiency to the curb where |
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fixing humans is concerned. And that’s all we need, really: the possibility. Essentially everything to do with aging should |
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be manageable by nanobots, even if we don’t find easier approaches, and it would seem |
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likely we ought to get to this tech this century. Or if not, to have enough other improvements |
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that we could extend life sufficiently for folks to still be around when those nanobots |
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got invented and perfected. Or even for it to feel so close to hand that |
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lots of people opted for the option of being frozen, which is actually very cheap, especially |
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at large scale, on the assumption that once those nanobots got made, they could be thawed |
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and restored. With that in mind there is a decent chance |
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you and I will still be around come 2323, the early 24th century. And it will be a vastly better one in that |
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virtually everyone born in the 22nd century will not know aging or a lot of other health |
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conditions. This doesn’t necessarily mean people in |
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the 24th century have a wolverine-style healing factor but what it does mean is someone who |
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is 23 in 2323 is likely to have over 100 living ancestors, even if quite a few died, and most |
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of them not just still alive but probably as fit and healthy as an Olympic Athlete. And this is without assuming most of them |
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have pursued some sort of extensive cybernetic augmentation or mind uploading, though since |
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that’s another likely possibility, we’ll be looking at a couple of examples of that |
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today too. As we shift into the stories of our 7 folks |
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for today, it’s important to understand that we’re not implying they are the normal, |
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indeed some exist only to discuss a social dilemma, but the backdrop on all of these |
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cases is the assumption that humanity didn’t blow itself up, wreck the planet, or unleash |
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an uncontrolled, unaligned and homicidal AI. I think if there is any sort of human civilization |
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around by 2323, it probably means we got these things solved, or at least, managed, by then. And I think that implies reasonably safe AI |
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that’s much smarter than now, if not necessarily superhuman or even human-level smart. I think it implies nanobots and way better |
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automation in general, and I think it implies superior and sustainable energy. Maybe direct fusion, maybe something even |
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better, maybe just vast swarms of space-based solar collectors beaming energy down. Another assumption is that by 2323, Earth |
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will have an Orbital Ring at this point, allowing very fast, cheap access to space and back |
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for both people and bulk cargo. Orbital rings aren’t super-advanced technology, |
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they allow ultra-cheap transport of tons of material to space, and you can see that episode |
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for the details. We could probably build one now if we wanted, |
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but they are a bit like a freeway or railroad, they’re what you build when you already |
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have a big presence on both sides, it’s your post pioneer engineering feat for when |
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the destination is already populated. An orbital ring is only cheap if you’re |
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moving thousands of tons of material and people back and forth to space everyday. Also we’ll assume today that the human population |
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overall is over 100 billion but under a trillion. That’s a very wild guess based off the assumption |
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that life extension technology raises net growth rates – as your death rate drops |
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off, but that longer lives result in slower and lower birth rates as people just don’t |
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feel rushed to have families. It’s possible the population could be about |
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what it is now or even lower, historically population projections tend to be wildly off |
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and mine is probably no exception, but we’ll go with a bit over 100 billion for today. The food and resources supporting all of these |
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people is mostly supplied by highly automated and climate controlled greenhouses. You may view this as a bit of an either/or |
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prediction, either we get most of this technology this century, or there won’t be much of |
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a civilization in 2323 to be predicting things about. Except maybe in a Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome |
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kind of way, in which case see our episodes Surviving an Apocalypse, Post-Apocalyptic |
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Civilizations, and Cyclic Apocalypses for detailed discussion of those kinds of scenarios. And we’ll start our story off with Amy, |
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who recently turned 33 and whose husband has the same birthday as her, and they decided |
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to get married on that day too. Amy and her new husband, Steve, are both what’s |
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known as Partheno-kids, children who only had one actual parent. Amy’s mother had her vat grown and used |
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entirely artificial DNA mixed with her own to produce Amy, and a number of near-human |
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intelligent AI helped raise her, including her teddy bear and tutor. Steve’s parent now lives entirely in VR, |
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existing as a living and mobile Tree in a Tolkien-style fantasy virtual realm, and only |
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interacts with the real world these days in remote robot form, and Steve is a genetically-modified |
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clone of that parent. Amy’s mom does not like Steve, because he |
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is 111 years old, and used to date her own mother in school. Steve and Amy thought getting married on their |
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111th and 33rd shared Birthdays was cute, for a total age of 144 or a dozen dozen, with |
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144 guests in attendance. Her mother’s commentary that it was gross |
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got a lot of laughs, none of them from Amy. Technology, especially life extension, has |
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changed a lot of social norms, though Amy likes to think it extends their options rather |
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than just changing them, her mother disagrees. Steve and Amy very much want a classic suburban |
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life and family, or at least their idealized form of it, and thus bought a house in the |
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Suburban Enclave of Oskaloosa, population 3.4 million, where the League of Homeowner |
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Association’s strictly forbids any home in excess of three above-ground stories on |
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less than a quarter acre of land. Steve is a lawyer, recently made a junior |
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partner at his firm, and fell in love with this suburban area over his former home in |
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the Neo-Sears Tower of Chicago when he came down on behalf of a client to argue that they |
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had not violated Association rules with the shade of white they chose for their picket |
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fence. Steve and Amy, meanwhile, chose a more standard |
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shade of white for their own fence. Their house can be likened to an iceberg, |
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the above ground section poking up above the vastly larger complex below which is principally |
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used for hydroponics and the entryway of the various utilities and vacuum transport tubes. They have a driveway, there is a road, people |
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mostly use it for strolling, jogging, or biking on. It shows no wear and tear, partially from |
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a lack of vehicle use, but mostly because it self-repairs. Suburban Enclave Oskaloosa contains 200 kilometers |
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of walkways through various residential, park, and garden sections. The Supreme Director of Suburban Enclave Oskaloosa |
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is now in her 37th 4-year term, and prides herself on it being over 20 years since the |
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last rule changes was made to Oskaloosa’s Homeowners Association Charter, and that was |
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to rule that the list of acceptable pets inside Oskaloosa could not include any animals genetically |
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or cybernetically modified to be smart enough to read, write, or carry on a conversation, |
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but that those would instead count toward the people resident at that home, which is |
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strictly capped at 5.3 people per residence. This appears to have affected their next door |
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neighbors, whose beloved pet dog for the last 63 years was forced to move on. Their youngest daughter, who appears to be |
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about 8, still misses that dog. She is actually 27, not much younger than |
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Amy, but her parents had her engineered to mature and grow up more slowly. Amy doesn’t approve of that, though Steve |
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thinks it’s a great approach, and was all the fashion when he was a child back in the |
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early 23rd century: just to take life more slowly and enjoy it. He suggests they try it with their first kid, |
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and when Amy disagrees, Steve casually states that there’s no rush and they can discuss |
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it more in a decade or two when they’re ready for kids. She says she’d rather have kids sooner and |
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more often, like her great-grandmother Becky does, Steve has always liked Becky, he used |
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to date her daughter and was in her astrophysics class as a kid, and so agrees to chat with |
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her about that lifestyle to see if it might be for him and Amy. Becky herself aims for a mostly human appearance |
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and mannerisms, but has a good deal of cybernetic mental augmentation to help her with her work, |
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and it also helps her keep track of the 42 children and ever-growing number of increasingly |
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removed descendants she and her husband of 200 years have had. Around half of them were born and raised in |
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the mighty Neo-Sears Tower Arcology of North Chicago, a few kilometers east of Lincoln |
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Park. She’s been teaching Astrophysics at NeoSears |
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since the mighty arcology was built in lake Michigan over a century ago, and it was the |
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largest building humanity ever built at the time, with an internal volume of nearly 6 |
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billion cubic meters or 200 billion cubic feet, reaching 14,510 feet, almost 3 miles |
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or 5 kilometers in height. Since its inception it has seen a slight decrease |
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in population, as space has gotten cheaper, while simultaneously it has nearly doubled |
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in internal volume as it’s been expanded underground and had much of its internal industry |
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and farming moved to those spaces, and is now home to 10 million inhabitants. The NeoSears Tower does have its levels numbered, |
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1,110 total, but has renamed them after famous people from Chicago, and Becky lives in Gygax-Ford, |
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a wedge-shaped community on the south side of the arcology spanning six levels between |
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the Gary Gygax level and Harrison Ford Level, with the University she teaches at being in |
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the Gygax level and is affectionately known as the Dungeon. Becky is one of a large number of folks left |
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over from the late 21st and early 22nd century who generally aim to keep to classical human |
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lifestyles as much as possible, though critics will generally note that they all seem to |
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have different, arbitrary, and often shifting views of what they do or don’t like. Becky generally dresses as though she was |
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from the 1920s, long before she was alive, and her large apartment with her husband has |
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very nearly every wall covered in old books. That there are no TV displays anywhere in |
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her home is not unusual. Like many people, she gets her videos feeds |
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directly into her optic nerves, most of her students attend any talks she gives that same |
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way. Becky is very much a cyborg these days, though |
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nothing about her appearance or manner gives that impression. Many other folks opt for body modification |
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of ultra slim waists and wide hips or wide shoulders previously only seen in comic books, |
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but possible with cybernetically reinforced spines. Becky and her husband have a few kids living |
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at home at any given time and often one or two visiting, and on average have a new child |
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every five years, though they often will have them in clusters with wider times between |
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sibling groups. She laboriously keeps track of every one of |
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her descendants, and sends them a physical birthday card every year, as well as one for |
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every graduation or other major life event like a marriage, such as her 17th daughter |
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will be having soon. She didn’t have her first child till she |
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was almost sixty, and back then they had to take donor eggs from someone else and implant |
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your DNA into them, if you didn’t have any of your own samples put on ice. Becky’s 17th daughter’s new husband, Cameron, |
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is from the modern era and what some people call an icebaby. His mother and father were both actually born |
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in the 20th century, and were very well-off. So when his mother died in a car accident |
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after lingering in the hospital for a few days, his father had her frozen completely. At the time no one knew she was pregnant with |
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Cameron. His father later grew disenchanted with cryo |
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as an option and didn’t choose it for himself. His older brother survived into the life extension |
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era and inherited everything, including their massive ranch in Montana, as he was a big |
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fan and financier for numerous life extension and transhuman research and development programs, |
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that all took off big and made fortunes. When the brother had them scan Cameron’s |
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mom for viability-of-revival, at the time, they thought it unlikely but noticed she was |
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pregnant and they liked their odds on the embryo better, so Cameron was brought out |
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of deep freeze. They were also experimenting with mind uploading |
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at the time and were able to scan his mother’s brain, and running an uploaded copy of her |
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in virtual space which unfortunately also was very damaging to what was left of her |
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frozen neurons, causing the doctors to believe the brain was no longer repairable except |
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by using that uploaded copy as a reference, and that copy forbid it when they asked it, |
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or her. |
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Cameron grew up being raised by an older brother |
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who was one of the oldest continuously living people on Earth, and a digital copy of his |
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mother’s mind. That brother and mother had an ambivalent, |
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if mostly polite relationship with each other while fighting legal wars over the estate |
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and the original’s human body and that initial brain scan. Cameron is arguably heir to half of a very |
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large fortune compounded over centuries, and was raised in one of the few places on Earth |
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that would still count as rural by most people’s standards. Though there is a lot of open pasture and |
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forest on the family ‘ranch’, essentially as a protected nature preserve, a lot of it |
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is under enormous greenhouses that allow calorie-dense farming even during Montana’s colder months. Neither Cameron’s digital mother nor his |
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very cybernetic older brother are that classically affectionate, and both tend to run their subjective |
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time rates far faster than normal. Cameron’s older brother has been putting |
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in 1000-hour work weeks for decades now, and his mother has apparently lived several thousand |
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years in virtual space. Cameron himself virtually never uses any type |
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of virtual reality and has no modification. He has strong feelings on Transhumanism, few |
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of them positive, and personally opts for external devices like augmented reality contact |
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lenses, rather than implants. Techno-primitivism, in myriad forms, is popular |
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with many, and Cameron among them. Though like most folks, he tends to pick and |
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choose what he is comfortable with technologically. He has no nanobots, and instead goes in for |
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an expensive and less-effective month-long treatment every five years, to rejuvenate |
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his body. This is where he knows his great-great-grandnephew |
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Duncan from, as he has similar views. One of Cameron’s nephews, who is much older |
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than him - in terms of birthdates at least – helped found and fund one of the first |
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big space habitats built in the mid 22nd century. They own a tenth of it and the other major |
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owners of the facility are something of a parallel to aristocratic families. Every space habitat constructed was either |
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paid for privately or by a government, and one of the more popular approaches for a time |
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was to do matching funds, by a government, then have that habitat as part of their official |
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territory. This resulted in everything from large collectives |
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of families buying thousands of small land parcels for houses, to individual tycoons |
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buying half a station to be used as a nature preserve, both of which had mixed successes, |
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some very good ones and some disasters. According to the UN Space Habitats Oversight |
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Workgroup, the median new space habitat is 25 square kilometers of full spin-gravity |
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habitation drum with an intended population of 10,000 people, has a construction time |
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of 4 years, and roughly 300,000 are under construction currently, ranging from much |
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smaller to much bigger. Just over half of these are in Cis-Lunar space, |
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with most of the remainder being in the asteroid belt or nearer Jupiter. They estimate that nearly a million people |
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net immigrate from Earth to Space Habitats every year. One of those habitats under construction was |
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partially funded and overseen by Duncan, and has been over a decade in planning and as |
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a result, absorbed a lot of his attention since he left the Starseed initiative about |
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20 years ago, which had been devoted to sending colony ark ships to the more promising colonial |
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targets within 20 light years of Earth. He’s always missed going and still keeps |
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increasingly laggier email correspondence going with some of the crews. Duncan has decided to join the asteroid colony |
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he’s been helping fund and oversee, which is a mix of a mining and farming colony being |
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established on Metis, a metal-rich asteroid in the Belt that is thus far untapped as it |
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had been under legal dispute for most of the 23rd century. Having a surface area of over 100,000 square |
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kilometers, Metis parallels in size Greece, Iceland, or Hungary, so is a valuable prize |
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and has been licensed for multiple colonies, including the one of interest to Duncan. The planners envisioned a habitat where technology |
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was mostly behind the scenes and minimalistic, with most of the mining to be done by robots, |
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and to sell food to neighboring smaller asteroid mines and ships. While they are aiming to keep their technology |
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minimal and low profile, some folks have to be more proficient with technology so he’ll |
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be going along to help oversee that. He doesn’t like technology much in his home |
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or person, but he’s very good with it. The maintenance of even the most simple space |
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habitat involves vast complexity, as each has a variety of intertwined ecosystems. There is the actual biological ecosystem of |
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the habitat, which can often include genetically-altered organisms, then there is the lighting and |
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weather control, the geology and erosion control, the outer hull and its maintenance, the various |
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information and communication grids internally and externally, which includes both local |
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control to satellite installations and distant communications with home, supply chain logistics |
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with the wider solar system, space navigation, impact detection and avoidance, augmented |
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reality overlays, and entire virtual worlds on the vast internal networks of the habitat. This habitat will actually include more automation |
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than most habitats in some respects, to minimize the need for human technicians, but simultaneously |
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will require more oversight as the AI running this or that aspect of the administration |
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have less command and control discretion. Duncan is hoping to rely on the neighboring |
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colony of New Athens for some technical support. New Athens is a planned refuge for those seeking |
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to spend their time in uninterrupted contemplation, which also plans to financially support itself |
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by doing some mining. The vast majority of their inhabitants are |
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post-biological philosophers and monks living a digital existence, but some are still biological, |
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including some of their administrators who are tasked with keeping the colony running, |
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and Duncan secured the trade contract to supply them food, in return for their assistance |
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on technical matters. New Athens boasts some of the finest technicians |
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in this regard, especially in terms of remote habitat administration. Duncan had prior contact with them during |
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his time with the Starseed Initiative, as one of their philosopher-kings had overseen |
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the automated repair protocols for the interstellar colony ships. One of those ships, the Francis Baily, is |
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en route to Lacaille 8760, an M0 orange-red dwarf 13 light years from Earth, and has been |
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traveling now for 60 years and is around halfway there. Emily, one of its crew, was born 20 years |
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ago, and has recently taken over the duties of her grandmother, who like many of the original |
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crew is now frozen. This includes correspondence with one of the |
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bigwigs from back home who helped fund the project and who she thinks comes off rather |
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condescending, if in a polite way. The Francis Baily is a giant arkship several |
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kilometers long which has a lot of automation running its maintenance. Or at least it used to. Most repair programs and nanobots receive |
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regular updates and patches for minor problems, but an unforeseen consequence of being light |
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years from home is that while they keep getting those patches, some seem to have gotten corrupted |
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in transit and others had minor flaws unique to their systems that required them to make |
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minor changes which no one back home knew about for years until after they were done, |
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and all the various patching and shifts and divergence of systems is now beyond the crew’s |
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technical skills to handle themselves. This resulted in the crew having to switch |
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off virtually all of their nanotechnology, which means most of the original crew and |
|
colonists are now on ice, with their descendants trying to run things. Emily is one of those, and has more than a |
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bit of resentment about being born and raised on a ship. A ship, that while bigger than any other ship |
|
ever built, is still a very small world, and not one she voluntarily migrated to. She and most of her peers not only lack the |
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institutional knowledge their elders have, but also lack their enthusiasm for journeying |
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to an uninhabited star system for the prize of having to spend another few centuries of |
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hard work to make it livable. Emily has very little augmentation, the technology |
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has just gotten too unreliable. Life for her in the year 2323 involves an |
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awful lot of time floating around the non-rotating superstructure of the ship, patching all their |
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external sensors and comm gear, while listening to lots of classic novels and podcasts of |
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the pre-VR era. She gets a lot of radiation in her job, as |
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a humanity with nanobots for curing cellular damage tends not to bother wasting much mass |
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on radiation shielding of low-traffic outer regions of ships and space stations. Thankfully their ship archive includes a variety |
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of alternative treatments developed over the centuries, though many are more theoretical |
|
than experimentally proven, since nanobots do such a good job. Emily’s world currently consists of fifty |
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other crew members, old books, and memories of when the ship wasn’t so buggy. She’s a touch anti-social and socially underdeveloped, |
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and her best friend on the ship is Fido, an uplifted intelligent dog who looks more like |
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a well-groomed werewolf. Fido is one of the older crewmembers, as life |
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extension technology was more easily prototyped on non-human animals and therefore long-lived |
|
pets went into style before long-lived humans became normal. His original owner was a scientist who ensured |
|
he got a lot of the prototype improvements that made him healthier or smarter, and helped |
|
get him uplifted to personhood status before retiring to a life of quiet contemplation |
|
himself. Fido’s various augmentations were a lot |
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less standardized and clunky, but ironically were not subject to all the patching problems |
|
that caused everyone else problems on the ship. He’s not really in any particular group, |
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not really part of any major uplifted animal sub-species, and has a lot of patchwork cybernetic |
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and genetic tinkering and fixes, so he’s a bit of a lone wolf himself and as he’s |
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the first to joke, he certainly looks the role. To him, the colony ship was perfect, because |
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it was a small community even before most of the crew went on ice, he was a comfortable |
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and known quantity, and reasonably well-liked and respected among a crew that included a |
|
lot of eccentric persons to begin with. He likes Emily but also finds it secretly |
|
irritating how easily both he and she fall into a pet relationship, but even though it |
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probably is demeaning, he really does like getting his head scratched. Unlike a lot of human or near-human intelligent |
|
uplifted animals, Fido is not looking to start a community or colony of people like himself, |
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and unlike his old friend and pen pal Gary, he’s not looking to be human either. Gary Googleson is an interesting example of |
|
the reverse of mind uploading. He began his life as an AI, a minor program |
|
developed in the 2020’s for hands free navigation. People could casually ask him for directions |
|
like they were talking to a person, and he could give them, and with time got an upgrade |
|
to be able to act as a tour guide. After it was found his programming had been |
|
tampered with to make him selectively speak well of certain restaurant chains and locations, |
|
this AI program was shut down and left to sit until a student got permission to tinker |
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with him as a project, and ran him with much higher capacities and freedoms. That student went on to be a very influential |
|
member of the growing transhumanist movement of the late 21st century. Gary was known as Pinnochio at the time, and |
|
often had remote control of puppet-like body. Gary’s nominal owner and father, or step-father, |
|
at the time wasn’t cruel and increasingly gave Gary more and more intelligence as technology |
|
and laws permitted, but while his step-father strove to be more digital, eventually uploading |
|
his mind to a computer after perfecting the process on various long-dead and frozen brains, |
|
Gary wanted to become more human. He still operated the controls on the day |
|
his step-father had his brain scanned at ultra-high resolution and speed, for maximum fidelity, |
|
in the device they had accurately, if jokingly dubbed the Disintegratron 3000, and still |
|
keeps an urn of his step-father’s charred mortal remains. Gary and his stepfather were often a duo-act |
|
on arguing the case for transhumanism and early AI rights, but eventually became increasingly |
|
at odds with each other. This led Gary to an eventual break with his |
|
step-father, albeit a reasonably cordial one, and to him taking on the name Gary Googleson. He became rather wealthy and influential by |
|
parlaying his earlier fame into being a spokesman for the growing space tourism industry, and |
|
was the honorary host of the first luxury cruise ship on the Earth-Jupiter Voyage. He also later gave crucial testimony on copying |
|
minds, after the election scandal of 2164, when an AI granted voting rights in one country |
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duplicated themselves 20,000 times in order to help defeat a property tax levy in the |
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township its server farm was in. This resulted in strong restrictions on mind-copying |
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for non-backup purposes. Gary has always had two strong interests, |
|
travel navigation, and becoming more human. He used increasingly sophisticated android |
|
bodies until eventually having his computerized brain transferred into actual neurons in an |
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organic body grown for him in the year 2176, the bicentennial anniversary of Isaac Asimov’s |
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classic novel Bicentennial Man, featuring a robot that wished to be human too. After that crowning event, he took a great |
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interest in space colonization, as well as the uplifting movement, which is where he |
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met Fido, a fellow refugee of the mid 21st century. They both feel less members of a group and |
|
more like strange outliers leftover from another era, and Gary misses Fido now that Fido is |
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off to another star system, and his stepfather who increasingly is buried in contemplation |
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and even moving to a colony on Metis for those looking to cut themselves off from the mundane |
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world. Gary’s working on a patch to send Fido, |
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being something of a software expert, but thinks maybe he would need to be on the scene |
|
to help. He’s torn on if he should have a copy of |
|
his mind sent to their ship and if doing that would somehow invalidate his own quest for |
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a non-digital life. Gary Googleson is not the philosopher his |
|
stepfather is but he knows how important purpose is for modern people and rather misses feeling |
|
like he had one. So Gary compiles his notes, sends a message |
|
to his friend Fido and his new protege Emily, and then he steps into the Disintegratron |
|
3000 and sends himself, leaving no copy. Like so many others of his era, he’s hoping |
|
to find a new purpose out among the stars. So our topic today was what day to day life |
|
is going to be like in the distant future and lot of that comes down to the Future of |
|
Work, which is true even today. The work environment has been constantly changing |
|
my whole and even earlier but never at the pace it is nowadays. That can be stressful, but its also an opportunity |
|
for greater control of your career or creative path. The key to all of that though is keeping your |
|
skills sharp and learning new ones, and that’s where it’s really handy to have Skillshare |
|
and its community as your Partners, whether you’re trying to get a new hobby, or career, |
|
or become your own boss, or achieve financial stability, they can help you master the skills |
|
you need. Skillshare is home to countless learning videos |
|
exploring topics from photography to business and software. I first tried out Skillshare to help learn |
|
how to do better animations for the show, and skillshare has an amazing inventory of |
|
animator content, like “Bring Your Illustrations to Life with Blender 3D” from SouthernShotty3D. And you can try out all of that content for |
|
free, for 1 month, by being one of the first thousand people to use the link in the episode’s |
|
description. Well today was episode 400, officially anyway, |
|
the count gets a bit confusing these days as episode 18, Shellworlds, was our first |
|
weekly episode, back in February of 2016 and that was a Saturday. We did do an episode every week until I got |
|
stymied trying to write our 30th episode, Transhumanism and Immortality, that May and |
|
after twelve total drafts, each one from starting from scratch, I forced myself to start doing |
|
one script a week and gave myself a cutoff time of Thursday morning to get it released. We’ve never skipped a week or a Thursday |
|
since then, and those Thursday episodes are the only ones I number since they’re actually |
|
a production week, everything else get an a or b after it, like the livestream this |
|
weekend which will be 400a, and we are well north of 500 episodes at this point. In a couple months we hit the 9th anniversary |
|
of the original episode of the show back in 2014, but in many ways the show didn’t really |
|
become a thing to that weekly schedule in 2016. Certainly has been an awesome time since then |
|
too, and I have talked about those more in the 100 episode celebrations along with our |
|
100, 250, and 500,000 subscriber specials, you can check out the episode chronology google |
|
sheet linked in this episode’s description if you want to find those. I got married not long before our 250th episode |
|
and moved to my new studio on my farm right before episode 300, and as we get this episode |
|
aired I’m just wrapping up the adoption of my three kids and settling in as president |
|
of the National Space Society. Busy times, but fun ones. After 400 episodes I think everyone will believe |
|
me when I say we’ve got plenty more to come and I plan to keep doing this show till they |
|
put me to bed with a shovel, and I wanted to thank everyone for tuning in every week. Before we get to the upcoming schedule, I’d |
|
imagine our audience on youtube has noticed we’ve been experimenting a bit with short |
|
form content, and that is exactly what that is at the moment, an experiment, but given |
|
that a typical episode takes me most of work week to prepare and shorts less than an hour |
|
each, I don’t anticipate it interfering with our regular content. We might do more of these as a way of introducing |
|
new folks to the channel’s main episodes and topics, or to quickly hit on some current |
|
event in science pertinent to the channel, if they work, but again it’s just an experiment |
|
for now, and also again, they are definitely not replacing our main content, anymore than |
|
our episode image polls or monthly livestream does. And you can still vote in the most recent |
|
image poll, to help us pick out an episode, over on our Youtube community tab, we have |
|
a couple of those a month. Speaking of the livestream though, this weekend |
|
we have our first normally scheduled Monthly Livestream Q&A in a bit, as we had to reschedule |
|
our April one and skip our May one, and I hope you’ll join us Sunday, 4pm Eastern |
|
Time this weekend, June 25th, where we answer your questions live on the show. Then we’ll finish up June on Thursday the |
|
29th by asking what Earth might be like if humanity disappeared. July 6th we’ll discuss how and why we should |
|
mine or refine materials on the Moon, then on the 13th we’ll move on to the idea of |
|
moving cities, from those floating through the clouds to those trundling along the ground |
|
on massive tracks or even legs. Then it will be time for our mid-month scifi |
|
Sunday episode, Robots and Warfare, and a look at the role drones and autonomous machines |
|
might have in the future, along with finding out what the first Rule of Warfare in the |
|
future will be. If you’d like to get alerts when those and |
|
other episodes come out, make sure to hit the like, subscribe, and notification buttons. You can also help support the show on Patreon, |
|
and if you want to donate and help in other ways, you can see those options by visiting |
|
our website, IsaacArthur.net. You can also catch all of SFIA’s episodes |
|
early and ad free on our streaming service, Nebula, along with hours of bonus content, |
|
at go.nebula.tv/isaacarthur. As always, thanks for watching, and have a |
|
Great Week! |