Outer Edges (Session 7)

Hello everyone, welcome to the seventh session of Nick Land's Outer Edges Spatial Metapolitics Seminar. I'm going to pass the mic and the camera to Nick to begin the seminar. Okay thanks Mo so this week we're in outer space and I think that I was just saying to Mo I think there's so much to talk about I've almost thrown up my hands in terms of fascistic direction and we'll sort of

try and open up a few lines and just see where people go. My intro is going to be even more hand-wavy and negligent than usual. I also, when I saw my reading recommendation, I initially had a feeling of massive guilt that I just had one article on our reading list. But then I just reminded myself how fantastic it is It's this big Tim Urban piece. I hope everyone's had a chance to look at it. If not, I don't think it's going to make it impossible to contribute. I wouldn't sort of flee in self-disgust from the seminar, but I'm just going to put the

link up in case anyone could have missed it. Sorry, the little two on the end is just because that's where I happen to be now. the whole thing is Tim Urban's discussion of Elon Musk's new space activity and it's such a fantastic, it's an absolute model of what the internet can do in terms of the ground he covers and the number of topics and everything in it, so it's just fantastic. I thought that there were just isolated four topics that seemed to me really worth digging into if we have the time, or maybe we'll end up being selective about it.

The first one is something that I've kind of been obsessively nattering about since we started the whole course, however long ago that was now, at the start of the first module, which is Musk's notion of forcing functions, and as you know I absolutely think this is such a crucial piece of conceptual apparatus. I really love it, I think it's incredibly important, and we've talked about it quite a lot already. I think this sort of outer space context pushes it right up to the limits and so maybe we've already discussed that enough, maybe we want to come back to it but obviously the main

notion here is basically the application, the strategic application of cybernetics to this question of opening up some radically new zone of integrated business activity. And it's reciprocally connected to the notion of network effects. So I'm going to be a little bit repetitive, but I'll also be very quick just to say that the fascinating thing about network effects, one of them that Musk is really attentive to, is the fact that what seems like a very hard, self-propelling process of inevitability,

an artificial destiny once you're inside, and all the tendencies that go into this lock-in phenomenon that network effects produce, when you're on the other side of it, when you haven't crossed that threshold, look like a kind of paradoxical state of impossibility. It seems to be just an uncrossable frontier of this chicken and egg kind. You know, in order to do X, we need Y, but in order for Y, we need already to be doing X. It's a paradoxical thing. It's totally obstructing us. How can, you know, this simply can't be done. And obviously what Musk is seeing is the fact that this is just seeing network effects

in the mirror of the threshold. You know, on the other side of the threshold, exactly the same thing that is being seen as this impossible obstacle becomes this massive wump. It becomes this self-propelling, take-off, accelerating, self-regenerating process. And it's exactly the same thing that is causing the impression of impossibility on one side that produces the sense of inevitability on the other side. And so this is what I think this term forcing function is about. It's about dealing with that threshold, dealing with that catastrophe that takes you from what seems to be an impossibility to what seems to be a self-propelling destiny.

So I think the space activity, Musk is very explicitly saying that space activity is totally like this and all the reasons that we that it looks impossible to us that it produces this deep skepticism deep sense that none of this can be made to hang together because it has these sets of nonlinear dependency chicken and egg problems that can't cross these are the very reasons why we should think that one that if we can cross this threshold it's going to massively take off. So there's that, that's my first topic but I'm not saying it's not first in linear order, it's first in terms of random walkthrough of my own brain.

The second topic is to do with disintegration that I think again has been a topic, a theme through all of this, the gravity well, the terrestrial gravity well dramatises this question of disintegration to its realistic limit. And I'll just say at this point, non-contiguous political units are extremely unusual. Like ex-imperial powers, my own beloved nation being an example, obviously has these little bits and pieces scattered all over the world, but only a few of them, and they're all very problematic and they all need defending in ways people find it hard to defend, and they

all involve particular administrative and geopolitical challenges. And as a general rule, if you can't ensure substantial level of geopolitical contiguity, you almost certainly cannot maintain a political unit. And I think it goes without saying, therefore, that the challenge posed by space colonisation, even in very modest forms, i.e. anything that crosses the terrestrial gravity well, produces a non-contiguous relation of a kind that we have never seen.

There is no problem of contiguity that has ever been posed to human geopolitics before, remotely comparable to the problem that will be involved in maintaining political unity on both sides of the terrestrial gravity world. it's just completely unexplored issue I mean in a stupid tweet I said territory just to be annoying but of course it isn't territory you know it's unexplored non-territory so this I think just folds back in the strong form it is a really good fodder for I think extremely plausible conspiracy theories

about why there should be massive political resistance to space activity because space activity is intrinsically to use the word we've been using it's intrinsically catabolic in terms of political organization it's highly disintegrative and it would be very strange if any kind of insightful political authority was relaxed about what was involved in shifting substantial resources outside the terrestrial gravity well. Okay I'm just going to leave that hanging for a moment. Third little theme,

which is also inescapable, if this whole issue is carried by, is of course robotics. And I think this comes in a lot, starting from the Musk thing, the whole Musk issue is obviously to do with human space colonizers in a very strong way, that's how he sets it up at least. He's worried about existential risk, he's worried about the Fermi Paradox, he wants humans living in outer space that's a fundamental concern at least promotionally for his new space activity and yet it's completely evident that humans in space is for the main part a

theatrical activity you know it's done because humans in space are good politically, humans in space look good on TV, humans in space sound good in political speeches, but when you actually want to get things done in space you use robots. Robots have just done vastly, vastly more in space than humans have done in space. Humans generally go into space to have their photos taken, robots go into space to do stuff. And I think this obviously deepens the political issues probably to a degree that exceeds what is the reasonable frontier of this course. It takes us maybe back into Anthropole territory, back into these larger questions about technological

singularity. But it seems to me an inescapable fact that space colonization hugely accentuates these questions about robotics, and because of the fact that space just seems to belong to robots. Robots like space, and humans really have a difficult time there. I don't know whether people have seen that in the Martian movie, but it's pretty great like this, about just humans really have a hard time, even on Mars, and Mars is not, Mars is a relatively, you know, it's at least a planet, they're not just out on some piece of space rock.

So I think there's a whole bunch of questions about the relationship between automation and autonomy. We've sort of tacitly introduced the notion of autonomy in talking about disintegration and the problems of political unity and now we get to the question of automation in the sense that because it's so expensive to put people into space because people don't operate very well in space, people are a nightmare if you're trying to do some kind of business activity in space, they're generally dead weight, so you want to automate everything. So you want to put capital in space and you want it to be as highly automated as possible just for simple technological business logic.

But if you're automating your activities in space you're also intrinsically autonomising that activity. The more automated it is the more it's actually independent of terrestrial control, the more there is a specifically technological escape vector associated with leaving the terrestrial gravity well. And the fourth, and I'll stop after this, the fourth theme that I thought is really interesting is perhaps a more philosophical one, but it's just to look at outer space not merely as a kind of trivial empirical modification of our notions of space but as a true transcendental

provocation and I think we've touched upon this a bit through what has been a kind of regular invocation of this Deleuze and Guattari distinction between smooth and striated space. There's lots of interesting things about that distinction, but one of them, clearly, is the fact that it draws a transcendental distinction through space that is not empirical, that's to say it's not just a matter of being here or there, but it's also transcendental in a way that would have been confusing to a very rudimentary Kantianism, because it's It's not drawn between space and something outside space, and it's not drawn between

some universalised Euclidean or non-Euclidean geometric spatiality and something outside that. It's drawn in a certain sense within space, although the sense of within space is different on both sides of that light. And I think, to make this much more concrete, that when you cross the gravity well, when you go from terrestrial space to outer space, the nature of space is radically transformed. I think our... This is... I'm going to add just a few confusing nonlinear loops to this, because our notion of space,

and I already see this happening in Deleuze and Quartart, it's over a thousand plateaus, is being formalised by GPS. So ironically, a system of satellites have basically produced the first definite instantiation of striated space. You know, what might seem to be a sort of metaphor, a kind of relatively loose conception, is now absolutely technically,

mathematically instantiated. And this came up last week when we were talking about this thing, about anywhere you are, this was, I think, Derek's point, anywhere you are on the ocean surface, you have these GPS coordinates now. So we have this, I don't want to fixate on the Deleuze and Quartile and so I keep talking about it straight to space, but I mean something that's completely, I mean GPS space, I mean something that's really colloquial now, and that's something everyone understands, that you have this coordinate system. It's not simply Euclidean. You know, that would be a mistake. it's much more to do with geodesics and to do with the actual realistic geography of the Earth

and when it radiates out into space it radiates by drawing a vertical line that I guess would follow the axis of terrestrial gravity indefinitely into space and so you'd have a set of concentric spheres that would replicate the terrestrial GPS coordination system endlessly outwards into space. And so that is the terrestrial perspective of space as a universal model, but it's a universal model that obviously would not be applicable off-planet. It's unimaginable that some autocatalytic robot colonization cluster on an asteroid

in the asteroid belt is going to make sense of its position in space by reference to some extrapolation from the terrestrial GPS system. I mean, I take it it's uncontroversial that that would be an absolutely senseless way to do that and the only conceivable way that that would make sense is as some political statement about preserving fidelity to the hegemony of the terrestrial perspective on the whole of the cosmos. It would be a political sign to do that. It wouldn't be something that made any kind of technological sense. So there's a totally different spatiality associated with outer space.

And the concrete way it comes up is it cuts across the political economy of space colonisation, because when space colonisation is being sold politically, it has to be sold obviously from a terrestrial perspective. There is no extraterrestrial perspective of political consequence. Maybe I'm going out on a limb to say this. I'll get all kinds of weird Pleiadian and UFO cultists telling me that I'm engaged in disinformation at this point. But if I can just bracket off those perspectives momentarily and just say there is no extraterrestrial perspective that is of any political consequence at the moment. So of course the interests of space colonization

have to be solved from a terrestrial perspective. And therefore they have to be solved from the perspective of acquiring resources and they can be services, goods and services, raw materials, goods and services and bringing them to Earth, enriching the Earth, using space as a kind of resource depot for the Earth and we've seen this before in the history of colonialism it's not as if there's anything on that level that is totally new it's just as with everything with the terrestrial gravity well massively radicalised and the GPS system is obviously an example of this in action you know you put satellites in orbit

so that human drivers calling their Uber can access that service reliably it's a terrestrial service that is enabled by certain types of space activities. And this is obviously crucially the crucial catalytic stage. If this narrative doesn't hold together then the whole thing stops, you lose your forcing function, you lose your catalytic process. But from the other side, from outer space, it totally makes no sense. On the outer space side, putting things deliberately into a gravity well is the closest to a definition

of madness that you will possibly find. A gravity well is a trap. You do not want to be in a gravity well. It's extremely expensive and difficult to get out of gravity wells. You do not ever put resources into a gravity well, any more than you would chuck them into an active volcano. It totally does not make any sense. So from the other side of space, from the other side of space, you're trying to pull things out of a gravity well into outer space where they are finally liberated, where they They are finally in a space of absolute escape. You know, there's a famous, obviously slightly misleading and hyperbolic statement about

this thing that when you're out of the terrestrial gravity well and halfway to somewhere, you're halfway to everywhere. It's a really crucial little statement because it captures an important truth. It's exactly the same truth that Deleuze and Quattari are trying to say about smooth space and the ocean and the fleet in being. The fleet in being in smooth space is not anywhere, it's potentially everywhere. That's what it is to be outside of a gravity well. And so once resources are in outer space, they're out of the gravity well, they're in deep space, they're open for relatively economically plausible deployment. But in a gravity well, they are locked.

That's what a gravity well is. basically as a resource-locking constraint. And the whole of this process, the whole of space colonization, is about unlocking them and getting them off-planet. And so the one point I'm really trying to make here is that there's an implicit perspective in all of this. There's an implicit perspective that comes just from understanding what gravity is, that is massively challenging to, by definition, any existing terrestrial interest, political authority, even economic organisation.

Because it's basically saying that anything locked in a gravity well is waste. The whole point is to get stuff out of gravity well, is to take it out. It's the absolute opposite of the narrative required to sell their stuff. We want to bring things down here is the only way to make these things happen, but once they start happening, implicitly the perspective is exactly the opposite, which is that of course we would never, ever send anything down there unless it somehow was a way to

get more stuff out. So anyway, yes, sorry, I feel that I'm kind of getting ragged edges on this point. So I think I'll stop and let people pick up either on these or other hopefully vaguely related issues that they think is appropriate. Yeah, throwing it down the drain is exactly right when it is mature.

And I think that it's like, I don't think we know, I don't think we understand the concept of capital until we understand that unless it's off-planet, it is in a larval, a larval-inhibited, constrained form. that outer space capital is the only essential definition of capital. And retrospectively looking at it, that will obviously be true. You know, the whole point of having any capital on Earth at all is to get capital into space. And anything else that it happened to do on this planet was completely like an irrelevant

side effect of that. Yes, exactly. Ask not what outer space can do for you. It's like some sort of absurdly fast spore reproduction lifestyle, right? this sort of thin mycelial circuitry of urban areas like arises in a few thousand years and then just sort of spit stuff out in a cloud. Yes, that's definitely one, that's a kind of biospheric picture of it isn't it,

for sure, yeah. That there's this kind of, I mean, Octavia Butler I think is obviously fantastic about this, where she just, she's got a very very strong sense of this. And the end of her Xenogenesis trilogy is really dark from a terrestrial-centric point of view, because the Earth is just basically stripped down to bedrock, and everything is just taken off planet. And from the perspective of the Wankali, of course that's right. Those resources have been harvested to somewhere that makes sense, like leaving them on a planet is neglect from that point.

And I mean, really, given the actual mass ratio of the Earth relative to what's available out there, it's interesting that the stripping to bedrock thing doesn't really make sense or doesn't quite capture it. It's more based on the climate situation is that we've used it as an entropy sink. I mean, that's the resource, is the ability to dump a ton of entropy into something. I don't imagine that like even for an AI, a paper clipper unless you're just like an arbitrary ability to convert mass like I don't see most of the stuff like most of the stuff that makes up even the surface of the earth being particularly I don't know, cost effective Right, yes in terms of just substance I don't know, it's really

it's an interesting question I mean, there's obviously this very famous like Kardashev scale of civilizations which is all done on energy consumption, you know, so you use all available terrestrial energy, then you use all the available energy output from your star, I think then it leaps straight to the energy output of your galaxy or whatever, but that evades this gravity issue completely, you know, and I think there's a different Kardashev analog scale that's done totally in terms of gravity and it's like that all resources

locked in gravity wells are a sign of primitiveness and that the ultimate structure of technology is about disintegrating gravity locked resource deposits and diffusing them into deep space dust clouds, which is, I mean, a deep space dust cloud is, I mean, I'll go out on a limb here, it seems to me the obvious teleological destination of all cosmic matter, you know. I don't know about, I've got a problem with black holes because we've talked to people before about this, black holes have a kind of interesting thing.

But basically speaking, if you're not in a dust cloud, you're a savage of really pitiful pitiful condition, slave to gravity. Because only a dust cloud is in smooth space. freely, it's in a condition of free deployment, free deployment unconstrained by gravity gradients. Yeah, even I was thinking like maybe, you know, we're throwing out stars as a teleological destination, but then realize that really the dust cloud unilaterally subsumes stars

from the perspective of something technologically manipulating it at least, like it is protostar. Yeah, disintegrating stars is obviously something that needs to be done. That's true. I think it's ambitious. They are absolutely… The more you think about a star, the more you realise how deeply abominable they are. you know hydrogen is just being you know wasted in this giant squandering stellar horror you know when where it could be diffused into dust cloud and then used for a nano fusion

you know nano fusing hydrogen is clearly this is what Al Gore should have talked about and failed to talk about as the big ecological problem is how to convert solar systems hydrogen nanofusion rather than stellar auto combustion Well, I feel like, so this is, I feel like, where black holes, like, come in as a problem for the dust, because really, what's the only way to, like, liberate star mass? Like, you have to herd them into a black hole and then do something with it, with the fact that you did that. Because there's no other, I mean, like, I don't know, I can't even really comprehend,

and how dismantling... I mean, unless you somehow starve to death, it looks like the alien megastructure star is like in the university. I don't know, it seems like the most... Maybe I'm just pulling this out of Alastair Reynolds' ass is just like... No, but it's like, I think Greg Bear and who's the manifold time guy? Stephen Baxter. Yeah, yeah. Have all tried to hit this idea of herding stars into black holes. living on the event horizon or something. I mean, that is obviously going so far in the opposite direction. And it is interesting because it is an interesting direction. There's a whole set of black hole cults that have a lot of interesting things to say.

I'm trying to think. I was talking to, I think, some of you guys in New York about this theory that cosmic evolution is about black hole production yeah Lee Smolin's thing oh yeah Lee Smolin that's right yeah yeah yeah so that's obviously moving that's obviously moving totally in the other direction and yeah I wouldn't want to be casually dismissive of that and the other the other really interesting black hole guy I think is this guy called John Smart and his his pick is to say that it's the ultimate

consequence of this trend towards technological density that you have to here let me just get grip on his vocabulary just one minute sorry one second don't let me stop you talking among yourselves I was totally sure I had a link to this thing.

OK, I can't waste any more time on it. But John Smart's got this thing that, what he calls, STEM compression, space, time, energy and mass, are all over the course of technological history subject to this process of compression because of the fact that any bit because of spatial and temporal difference is becomes lag time that with the increasing sophistication of technology becomes more and more and more of a problem and that the only way to finally overcome this is for something to actually implode deliberately implode into a black hole in order to sort of reduce its lag time problems

to a minimum. And the great advantage of this story is that it's a really good Fermi paradox solution, that he says any sufficiently advanced civilisation has disappeared into a black hole as a, again, teleological inevitability of its basic process of civilisation and therefore is of course invisible to everybody. I wish I had a name for that expression, it's an absolute classic expression. Deeply quizzical. It's like high frequency trading, right? You do co-location with exchanges, right?

So you basically… Right, yes, yes, yes. …you need to co-locate your entire lifestyle nanometers from your… Yes. …the whole rest of your mega, gigacity at the center of a gravity well. Yes. You can't go anywhere, but why would you need to? Yes. Yes, this is his… Black Hole is the most amazing place in the universe anyway. When you're tired of Black Hole London, you're tired of Black sort of thing. Absolutely, you're totally getting it. This is John Smart's story absolutely right. He says you can already see in all of these big cities that exactly as you've just said,

that it's an inevitable tendency that they more and more think anything interesting that could possibly happen is happening inside themselves anyway. So why would they, you know, it's for the rest of the universe to be sucked into them rather than for them to waste communication resources looking out into what is mostly a chaotic wilderness of stupidity outside their own event horizon. So you're totally getting it, totally getting it. So that's John Smutsk. So I'm having to put that, yeah, I think I have to allocate one cerebral hemisphere to each of these two cosmic models because they clearly do not coordinate neatly at the

moment. Yeah. I think I have to shelve the John Smott one because of the fact that in his model basically here let me just take one step back from this because I think there's this really interesting thing that happened with the cyberpunk transformation of science fiction which coincided with the collapse of space ambition. So Tim Urban's whole, as I say, I'd rave about it again, I think really excellent long blog entity on all of this. he starts with the fact that it looked it looked as if the world was on this

curve with the space program and Apollo and moon landings and all of this into this wonderful new space age of all that and it collapsed and he does these nice little diagrams and they look like absolute classic hype cycles of course you know that you just have this hump, period wild excitement, disillusionment slump and then you start crawling up a more sustainable pathway I think he thinks that pathway is going to start curving up excitingly and that's where this whole thing starts and cyberpunk obviously is a downslope phenomenon so you know the the notion of cyberspace gets invented exactly at the moment

that an extraterrestrial ambition ceased to be a compelling, central element of the science fiction narrative. Sorry, I was just trying to think where I was trying to go with that. So yeah, it's just to say that we're in this world, this sort of cyberpunk world, which is based, in a way, on this deep scepticism about outer space. It became sort of ridiculous and uncool. And I think the John Smart type thing is definitely in that. It's a very, very cyberpunk in this sense configuration of singularity in which implicitly

the collapse of expansive spatial ambition is a sort of intrinsic feature of the singularity model and I think you could tie it up very much to things like nanotechnology and the whole Feynman, Drexler, nano thing where rather than thinking about how you're going to dismantle Jupiter, you should be thinking about how you can build a civilization on a pinhead And then you just, just by going, you know, doing the find when there's plenty of room at the bottom route, you just, all those, those resources for them are locked in a different

way. In fact, I think, oh, no, who is the guy? Someone who actually used that word, they're locked resources. Not locked because they're in gravity wells, but locked because we're in a gravity well, And the whole, there's a sort of mirage, there's a fantasy element about the notion of just accessing extraterrestrial resources. So I think we're, you know, we've been through this long cultural episode, extremely fascinating one, that involves a certain notion of singularity, a certain notion of sort of the attempt to have a sociological application of the notion of black hole, cyberpunk, the collapse of space program all of those things fit together very neatly and it would be kind of comforting

because we're already there to just extrapolate that trend you know I think that would be easy and I think that what we're doing is not that you know it's not that because we're on this course have a certain sense of commitments and questions and trajectories that are being open, but I can fully understand, and I think everyone should fully understand why it might seem unnatural now to start taking outer space seriously, you know. And this is what I think the Tim Urban thing is doing really well. He says, in the last few months as I've explained to friends what I'm doing with this post series,

there's always that distinct moment when I mention the whole Mars thing. The facial reaction ranges from what no to oh too bad up till now I was thinking Elon must sound pretty awesome and didn't realise he was a silly wacky billionaire to can I laugh or is Tim all serious about this and he'll be annoyed. One reaction I haven't seen is cool, that makes sense. So I think that the, you know, in so far as we're being, we're doing cultural history at all with this, there is a really deep structure of cultural history that we're involved in now. And that cultural history is about the meaning of the disappearance of outer space as a relevant

category for a whole bunch of different things. And so to reintroduce it is a jolt for sure and naturally elicits I think potentially very interesting sceptical reactions but also sceptical reactions that are just merely inertial because they're just following that downslope into the trough. Yeah, in that vein, I kind of, it's both optimistic and ominous. But the M drive, it seems like, after all of those tests scheduled, like five or six in a row or something in the United States,

for the past 18 months has just gone quiet. There hasn't really been any news about it that I've seen, new experimental news in the US aerospace context. I think that means that it suggests that it works and that that's the problem. Yes. No, I think that's good. And I think you should push on that neurologic point because I think that opens up a lot. I think that opens up a lot. Why would it be naive to think that innocent, untrammeled public discussion of space technology

was — I'm trying to avoid using the word unproblematic, but I don't think I can. I have to say unproblematic one more time. And I think we can see some guidelines of why that might be, because of the fact that we have this rupture in space, this is what we're faced with. If any of this stuff is happening, if we're on a trajectory that reintroduces outer space, we're talking about a rupture in the nature of space of huge implications. And one of the implications of it is clearly that there is no plausible way this history

goes that involves massive Noah's Ark style transportation of human meat units off planet. That is just not the story. That 1950s story, you know, that somehow there is some, like we were talking last week about the wagon, you know, I can't even remember its name now, Tango Wagon or whatever it's called. There is not imaginably something like that for space colonization. It's completely inconceivable. So we're talking about something else and whatever else that thing is involves a lot

of robots, a lot of escape capital, a lot of political disintegration, a lot of loss, a lot of deep catabolic politics. These are things that would definitely inhibit relaxed conversation. Anyone wants to ask a question and contribute? I think my question, Nick, might fit, but I'll wait for others to first propose something.

Well, we can cycle back. As you can see, Mo, we have what is called technically a loose spiral discussion structure in ProSair, which I think definitely facilitates you asking the questions. Oh, am I buzzing somehow? Is that me buzzing or am I somehow the only thing that isn't buzzing in Anders' question? Yeah, I thought that was wonderfully transcendental phrasing. Buzzing in your silence. Yeah. No, but I mean, is there something I should be kicking my computer or something like that? Okay. I don't hear anything.

Okay, good. Okay, yeah, no, why don't you go for it? Because I know that you've got some things you want to say. I think we're pretty... My question last week, and actually this week, it gets part of this, it's sort of like I wrote on the sidebar, the bottomless ocean, or like this GPS with no point of reference or whatever you want to call it, is that colonization on earth always had the obstacle which were already existing so-called natives or aboriginals. Right. Or original humans who were already there.

Like it never was like an empty space. It never was like, you know, let's just get on our vehicles and move towards the West like Manifest Destiny was. Right. Because there are always humans. There are always others who existed. But when you enter the space, that element is, I mean, to the point that actually it's not humans who are going to the space. So there's no human on either side of this in a way. Yes. Definitely. And the movie Moon, I don't know how many people have seen it. Oh, yeah, that is so good. If people haven't seen it, they definitely need to. It's excellent.

As you were speaking, the images from the movie Moon kept popping into my head. Yeah. So how do you, basically, because the question was from last week, How do you complicate the picture you drew last week with the natives or aboriginals? Because they were also kind of missing from your conception of colonialism as well. I mean, ocean is halfway, right? Because with ocean, what you have is like a base that is sort of like empty, but on the other side of it, there are other people that existed. or like there's still possibility that some other people had the power to navigate the ocean.

So how do you complicate that colonial picture with the Aboriginal or with the other or with the... Yes, no, it's interesting. I think Amy also was talking a bit about this in a way. Like when she was talking about there being an Orientalist model, sort of haunting it. I'm not 100% sure that I think what orientalism is actually the word we want to end up with this but I do think that there's something that we maybe lack a word for or maybe I just don't know what this word is that I can definitely see orientalism capturing tentatively. Well, can I just say Mo, I think where we were when this came up before is also where

I want to try and get back to in responding to your question, which is again part of this thing about what is your angle of perspective, you know, I think this problem looks extremely different if you're looking at it forward out of colonial history into space or backwards out of outer space into retrospectively into colonial history I think that those two perspectives are not symmetrical they're not symmetrical and they have very definite features that and cross them in these two different directions. And of course we're bound to find prospective pictures

that run forward out of the past, neater and more tractable and more comfortable than pictures that run backwards out of destinations or attract estates or teleonomic or teleological outcomes. I think that's just something that's going to be inevitable. But the way that these kind of political issues line up are not going to be independent of that at all. Obviously, if you're coming, exactly as you said, if you're coming back out of deep space and you're defining colonization in that way

so that the essence of colonisation is captured by the intersection of these notions of automation and autonomy as they are instantiated by some self-catalyzing process beyond the boundary of an existing political territory. So that would be a colony that was colony-defined in such a way that would be attuned to space colonisation. And then going back from that, we would say, looking into history, well, to what extent do concrete historical processes provide us with some larval examples of this kind of process?

And I think clearly they do. I mean, you know, I think that there is some continuity of the word colonization that would go right back into colonial and imperial history in all its political, ethnic complexity and controversy and all of these things. I don't think that you just want to be using a different word because I think that the strand of continuity is too strong. But obviously then, if you're going the other way, and you're saying, look, we have to do this out of history, then you lead to a discourse that I think does also exist. I'll just see if I can find a reference for this.

Where the notion of space colonization is, I don't know what the word would be like, deconstructed or in some way attacks for the notion that it's blind to its own ideology or legacy and its own complicity in various processes I guess fundamentally European colonial endeavour. So I don't know whether I'm answering your question at all, what I'm trying to say

about it is that I think you're saying there is this other way of looking at this and I think absolutely that's right there is this other way of looking at it and I think this other way of looking at it is the dominant way inevitably, that there's examples of it, that there's a whole literature that is doing this. My own sense of it is that this other way, the sensitive, the politically sensitive approach that is compliant with ordinary intuitions of time is less successful at understanding space colonization. I think it ends up being metaphorical about it, it ends up projecting and extrapolating episodes of terrestrial history into an environment that doesn't really

support them. Well that's the thing, so to bring in what Amy said into it, if on Earth the project of colonization always had to deal with Occident versus Orient, in space there's no Orient, like there's neither Orient nor Occident and you have to somehow deal with the fact that you you don't have either of them, and perhaps the new term that you're talking about has to consider the sort of like alien slash robotic nature of this endeavor which is alien being neither Occident nor Orient Yes, that would definitely be in tune with what I'm saying, yeah, but in saying that also

the fact that that optic is structurally controversial, I think is absolutely necessary to defend. So I think it's completely right to bring up the fact that there is a very different way of looking at this stuff. and I think that the other way of looking at it is more, is in every way more intuitively persuasive to people. Hi. Yeah. I was going to say, I think that in the Urban article,

which I haven't actually finished reading all of the parts of, but I think he anticipates this really neatly. in the very first way he phrases the question of interacting with the universe. And he asks this question, where are we, not who are we? And so he immediately kind of frames it in terms of a spatial functional ontology rather than an identity-based or an essentialist one. And this kind of unfolds into the point that seems to be playing throughout this article. I've only read the first two parts. which is a Kantian point, so it's immediately suspicious. This problem of the fact that the Copernican turn

always leads back to this kind of humanist perspective. Every time we see something external to us, we end up directing our gaze back to the Earth, to ourselves, as a sort of maybe defense mechanism. So this kind of early invocation of this human spirit of adventure and discovery, I think he says, which is the kind of exoteric wrapping for all of these endeavours, turns into the question of what, and I think this is the question that we're asking, what would an anti-humanist space project look like? One that's driven by kind of alienation and humiliation rather than a search to consolidate

our own perspective of our place in the universe. I mean, this goes with all of the dismantling of stars kind of stuff as well. So the thing, I don't know, this is like something that I've been thinking about because we've been playing in our house all week, No Man's Sky. I don't know if you guys have read about it. Interesting game. But it's kind of cool because it does occupy this particular temporality that's being invoked in terms of the fact that, I mean not perfectly, but you play as an avatar that you never see, so you don't know what you are, and you start from the very edge of the universe, which has something like 81 quintillion real-time

generated planets in it, and the goal of the game is to get back to the center of the universe. So you start from the very edge and you try and, I mean, and you're kind of completely isolated. You never come across any evidence or other players. And as you kind of, I guess, the incentivization of it for human players is that you gradually start to see evidence of other people's colonization of these planets because they've named them and documented their species and stuff like that. So I mean, there's nothing happens in the game. It's interesting because it is this. I posted an article before which calls it an existential crisis simulator disguised as a space exploration game. Right. Okay, that's cool. Yeah, and the writer of this article links it to

Musk's comment about the fact that we could be living in a simulation and talks about how it actually foregrounds the absolute pointlessness of everything that's done within the game as opposed to other video games which try to make the goals that exist within the game seem somehow mappable onto real-world human desires. So, I don't know, I just wanted to kind of drop that in and talk about how I think this particular framing, in terms of what you're going to do with these kind of concatenations of Copernican terms, re-orients the question towards non-orientation

rather than orientalism, maybe. I can't get over the storyline and the whole the aesthetics of the movie Moon. Because, say, in Moon, right? how many people have actually seen the film because maybe it's pointless to keep talking about it if not enough people have seen it I haven't seen it I've downloaded it so please don't spoil it maybe we could get a strong commitment from James to watch it before next week and next week is a kind of

round up week with a very even, by my standards, loose agenda. So I think a moon segment on that would definitely be. I won't spoil it, but I just want to say for, or maybe like a frame for it, right? I'll be not spoiling the storyline. Yeah. The way the film, because you know what? The way the film deals with sort of like the notion of like, Solarsky notion of manifest image and the scientific image, right? And like how basically the the responsibility of philosophy in relation to science is to provide science with its ethics, right? Or somehow locate locate the purpose of the science somewhere in the universe of

humans, right? And the way the movie deals with that is really beautiful because the way it deals with it is basically it creates this like fake family and fake connection to earth and fake humanity for these people, right? And that basically comes through only through this like video interface with earth, right? And then we, I mean by the end of the film we know what's the truth of that, it's just basically like the theater you were talking about, right? You said humans in space are basically a theater and then immediately the image that came to my mind was like the video interface in the movie Moon. So it basically kind of like it just eliminates this whole like, it's sort of like I mean I'm very committed to

sellers and I'm very interested in people who passionately argue this with people like Ray and Reza and but it kind of like the movie Moon kind of like basically reduces the whole argument to like a cheap video interface and some like pre-recorded tapes right basically because there's nothing left of that sort of like humanity. Yes. No, it's actually great. I think there's a lot of support for talking about this next time. I can't comment without spoiling it, I'm afraid, because I don't trust myself. I hope I didn't spoil it. By saying that it disrupted the Szilazian distinction between the manifest and scientific image, you have totally spoiled the plot for James now. I'm joking, I'm joking.

Can I just say something for Amy's point, which is a kind of preliminary thing, but I think it's relevant, it doesn't get into the deep meat of the thing. But it's just about this question about Kant and Copernican revolution, where I just say, I think there's two ways you can take what is going on there. And I think the way Amy plays it is to say it's like this return to the human perspective. But I think that that also can be flipped to say that it's the only way to release the absolute outside is to do that. You know, it's like, it's to say, because in the Kantian structure you're saying that the conception we have of the outside is a fake outside until we do Copernican revolution.

We don't even know that we are centralizing things humanistically, and so that anthropomorphic centralization is metaphysically installed in our view of the world. And so Copernican revolution formalizes and makes explicit the fact that that has happened in order, I won't obviously say deliberately, but in order, I think, quite explicitly, to release a sense of what actually would be the outside, or in our sense, here, outer space. Like, you know, it's only if you can see, if you're forced to see explicitly what already you're doing implicitly about anthropomorphic centralization,

that you can really raise the possibility of what the outside of that would be. So obviously the Kantian thing in itself is a far more extreme definition of the outside than anything that has ever previously been achieved in the history of philosophy, other than esoteric hints. As something that's kind of technically structured, I think I would definitely say there's never been any conception of the outside close to what is initiated by the Kantian project. And that's why all of this kind of weird theory and the invocation of the outside always invokes

Kant. And, you know, the thing and the thing in itself, the horror thing, the thing in itself are just running fluidly into each other and dissolubly. So it's not exactly a defense of Kant, I don't even know what that would be, but I'm just saying I'm not sure that this move of the Copernican revolution is actually as domesticating as you might be suggesting it is. You know, I think it may be easier for everyone who's maybe not losing so much sleep over Kant as a few people here are, to put it more concretely in terms of this space activity.

And I think we need a Copernican revolution in terms of our understanding of new space and the political economy of space colonization, that makes totally explicit what the humanistic, anthropomorphic, terrestrial agenda of space colonization not only is, but has to be catalytically. I mean, it makes absolutely no sense to say that human societies should be massively investing in space activity in order to liberate the absolute outsideness of extraterrestrial robotic capital.

I mean I don't see that as a platform that could conceivably be pushed beyond very narrow micro cultural niches. And obviously that is also a Copernican revolution of exactly the same kind. And it's only when I think that you can see what that constraint is, what the necessity of the anthropomorphic perspective, not as some random metaphysical error, but as an natural inevitable structure that has to dominate a process at a certain stage that one can

get a glimpse of what actually would be definitely outside the bounds of that perspective and that horizon. I mean, sorry, I know this was like your first sentence that I've just totally fetishistically structured on a totally, you know, the whole No Man's Sky thing and all of the rest is left unaddressed. Well, I like sort of a synthesis of this with No Man's Sky in terms of this, like, you don't know, you appear somewhere in this void and you don't know where you are or what

you are or whatever, and then you sort of move in this convergent wave into some sort of larger, like the Dust Destiny, for example, as being this sort of always already existent medium of pure production that you tend to move into. Just like the idea of an unhorizon. So rather than some sort of homogeneous thing that you move towards, like something you move into from outside. there's a whole transcendental aesthetic here really to go touch back on the content right so can I just ask technically in terms of the game I've read a few things about it and I've seen some promo videos and stuff but I haven't heard anything of the kind

that Amy has just said about it how are you told how is this impulse communicated to you that you should be migrating, as Jake says, in a convergent way to the center of the universe. How is that made? How are you instructed to do that? I'm not exactly sure. I mean, it's kind of made explicit as the goal of the game in all of the material that's released with it. And I don't know, actually, if you can travel laterally. I think every time you move to a neighboring system, you implicitly move towards the center of the universe. Oh, really? So it just sucks to you in automatically. Yeah. I have to think about it more.

I mean, obviously I'm giving it a particular interpretational spin, but one that I think is completely latent to it. And there have been a lot of people who've been, you know, it's gotten a lot of bad reviews because people were kind of upset about its goallessness and the kind of repetition of its gameplay. I think Anders posted a gif or a kind of thing before about it, which quotes this line from one of these reviews about being stuck in this endless monotonous loop. Yes, yes. I posted a very critical review that I'd seen, actually, saying it was like a million different varieties of oatmeal. And from what little I've seen, it seemed to me telling.

But then I haven't... This whole thing that the whole thing is this massive collapse process that you're caught in being sucked into the center of the universe. I just had not come across that at all. So it puts a very different perspective on it. Yeah, I mean, that's how I think about it. Maybe not everyone's thinking about it that way. For obvious reasons. Today's discussion was really fascinating. And I cannot believe that it's already like we're almost over. Like we have only like five minutes.

I thought we went on for another half hour, isn't it? We can definitely go on, but like we began at… It's one o'clock, right? Two and a half hours. Two and a half hours is 1 o'clock. We started at 10.30, and it's like... But, I mean, we can go on. I mean, last week also we went on an extra half an hour, and I have no problem extending the conversation, but... Okay. But there's no limit right now. Pardon me? It's noon right now. It's only been one and a half hours, mate. You're an hour out. Are you still in Korea? Oh, yeah, no, that's right. Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself. Yes, no, you are. I think we're still okay for time.

We're still okay for time. I mean, it's always good to have these the end is nigh type comments inserted in a certain... Actually, my phone was fooling me because it gave me the wrong time in New York. So actually, you're right. Yeah. So, I really left a comment that I just been reading it several times, but I don't really like understand what it says.

Maybe one of you can read it and try to like make sense of it. This comment about is it possible that civilizations never reach computerization, if so where was the turning point? Is that the comment you're talking about? Yes. Maybe you want to develop on that. Sorry, I obviously missed the background to it in terms of what was happening on this thing.

It might be worth, if people are feeling quite just, there's obviously some tension between Patrick Friedman's thing and the whole space emphasis that might be worth just poking at a little bit because I mean the quickest way to get back to that is just to get back to this whole wagon notion like the reason that it's called seasteading as we saw last

week is because it's drawing very explicitly on this historical experience of the frontier and about a certain kind of, I guess it would be reasonable to say, in a new sense, democratization of the colonial impulse. And it certainly seems to me that that is completely blocked in this context. I mean, maybe I'm being overhasty on that and people would want to resist it, but it's hard to imagine even with an extreme development of a forcing function that produces vastly more efficient technology, massive reductions in costs, all of this kind of thing

that you're going to see anything like... Adam very neatly reminded me what it is, but I've already forgotten. the what's that wagon called anyway you know the wagon the Conestego wagon or something like that maybe I should really try I mean that's just not going to happen is it if the only thing I could see that's even remotely in that neighborhood is a space elevator and obviously a space elevator Yeah, Conestoga Wagon. If I could pronounce it, I might have more chance of remembering it. But obviously a space elevator,

you can imagine that you could get people up into space at a cost that would seem unimaginably low by present standards. But it's also you're committed to this huge infrastructural, comparatively highly concentrated technological artifact. So it's not going, it's like, you know, if the railroads are too concentrated for the seasteading types, then a space elevator is definitely not going to look to them like the way to produce this kind of highly individualistic form of migration off planet.

So, there's obviously, we have a kind of rupture in this respect, and I think we have to see that seasteading by its very nature is somehow foreclosing the question of off-planet activity. There's a certain choice that's been made there that is taking it in the opposite direction to the one that we're, that Musk is taking us down. Yeah, well there's an acknowledgement of that in the Tim Urban piece, I think because

it specifically relates to, specifically in relation to rocket technology, wasn't it? I think there's a discussion of his other business, Tesla, and basically he sort of conceded. I think he said something like, if we're going to get to rockets without gallons and swimming pools full of rocket fuel, there will need to be several Nobel prizes, several Nobel prize worthy science in the way. Yes. But I suppose the what's not what's at stake, but, you know, it's much more limited, isn't it, seasteading in its sort of aims? There's none of the transcendental stuff.

Well, I mean, there's transcendental stuff at the level of political economy. Yeah. Yeah, of course. Yeah. And so, I mean, I guess the other side of what I'm saying is, so how much of this, of that side of the dynamic geography project is transferable into these questions about space colonization? Or is it rather that we've come to such a sort of rupture that we're really, you know, we've parted ways too much to transport these things across? No, I think the two are... It goes unsaid, but I think that the two are really, really potentially very, very closely related. Because, and it goes back to, I think last week you mentioned the, that quotation about

the easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, and about how most of the sci-fi things are presented as sort of communistic. And it goes unsaid, but that's the way they're structured. But I mean if you have your colony on Mars, it's going to have to have some kind of political structure, some kind of governance structure. And so radical experimentation through seasteading is a platform for determining exactly how these things should operate because there'll be similar problems that have to be managed, like making themselves sustaining and limited resources and that sort of thing. I mean, Tim Urban doesn't really deal with it.

He just sort of... Yeah. I don't know. Again, it just sort of goes unsaid. Well, I think they are probably unhelpful questions. You know, like, I'm assuming Tim Urban wouldn't want to talk about them for the same reason that Elon Musk wouldn't want to talk about them. Because of the fact that they're awkward. they're awkward questions aren't they? Let's just think about this just for one minute, this question about the relationship between off-planet human communities and experimental government. Now obviously we have to bracket the fact that this whole human communities thing is complex

for reasons we've said. Capital is not that interested in building off-planet human communities. So the motive for that is this extraneous, we'd say, because it's transcendent ethical motivation, that in order to preserve the human species in the face of existential risk, we should have an autonomous human population on some safely distant astronomical body. I think that's the way it goes, isn't it? It's not something that, you know, you're not going to get a space colony just purely because it makes technological or economic sense

to build a Mars colony. Or maybe I'm making a big jump there, but that's the way it seems to me. So, yeah, we can come back to that. I just want to make one more point before that, or subsequent to it, which is that obviously the cost of failure in this case is vast. Now part of the attraction of the seasteading thing from this kind of libertarian point of trying to basically commercialise government is to try to systematise state failure so that you have a just massive proliferation of national entities so that they can be kind of subject to these kind of harsh Darwinian dynamics

that business entities are subjected to. And they can try out crazy stuff and fail, and it's no big deal. And so part of his diagnosis is, look, it's just too big a deal for a government to fail right now. So that means if they can't fail, they can't try the sort of things that they should be trying, they can't really experiment, they can't do anything dangerous, dangerous and so you get this kind of stagnant lack of innovation in government it seems to me that that doesn't transport very easily off planet you know in the sense that you really have to be pretty hardcore to say to look to a future where there are these off planet human communities

engaging in radical forms of political experimentation such that systematic failure would be expected. You know, I mean even, I think there's kind of obviously humanistic concerns that I always try to kind of numb myself against to the greatest possible extent. But there's also just simply economic concerns. How much does it cost to establish a human society off planet and then to say it's going to try a form of let's just say completely randomly maximally accelerated fully automated

luxury communism and that leads to mass starvation, social collapse and bodies floating about pitifully in the asteroid belt. It's hard to see that being encouraged in the same way that you could see it being encouraged on the high seas where people could say well they can get in a lifeboat and some of them would survive. Yeah, that's true. One of the things that was interesting was when you said that the stakes here with the outer space thing are exceptionally high.

I mean, that's true, but it's only surely at a sort of species level. The stakes aren't really that high for me as an individual because we're probably not going to have that kind of catastrophe during my lifetime. You mean the X risks we're talking about? And the question is, with your competitive government, the risk is to the institution or to the private company or whatever it is, the eccentric billionaire. There's at least an identifiable organisation that takes the interest in doing it. Yeah.

And I don't know, maybe that sort of maps into all these sort of rather speculative treaties about space that they've done, and the United Nations and all this sort of… you know because well who's bearing the risk who's paying for it I don't you know it's it's... Right yes but that I mean maybe people think it's a it might be a bit of a red herring to go too much into what's going on with this Musk project in particular but obviously it's interesting to me at least that it has so much backstory behind it you know I mean any everyone who takes the slightest interest in what he's doing knows that there's this huge cosmological narrative behind there, you know, to do with

the Fermi paradox and the risk and the X-risk and all of this kind of stuff. It comes in a package really neatly alongside this actual SpaceX activity that you see this distant goal and all the motives for that goal and the whole storyline is really fleshed out a lot and if you compare it to other companies a huge amount, I mean there's just almost no comparison how much narrative structure there is behind what Musk is doing and what any I mean you give me an example of any other business that has the same kind of storytelling structure behind what it's doing that Musk has got.

I mean, I can't see it at all, you know. And that can't be incidental, seems to me. I think it's multifactorial. I think part of it is the fact that because of his forcing functions line, he realises that he has to try and push people down these narrative grooves to the point where you start actually getting the automatic mechanism clicking in, you know. So I think that that's one aspect. But I'm not sure that that's a sufficient explanation for it. I think there's more than that.

And part of it is this whole thing about, which is one of the themes of this, of humans in space. Humans in space is a narrative that collapsed entirely. And you've got lots of sort of, I think, actually quite interesting but low key because no one was interested in it, because it's not a human interest story. But during the sort of space lull, there was lots of discussion actually about robots in space, where NASA people were saying, can we just get over this bullshit about trying to stick humans in space? You know, we're doing great stuff. Everyone got so excited about us putting a couple of meat units on the moon, and instead,

you know, look, we've got this thing that has reached Pluto. seriously going to tell me that that is regression, you know? And then obviously the counter to that is to say you're just not seeing the politics of this. If you want to get funding then you need to put this humans in space story back on track because people are just tuning out when it doesn't have a human interest angle to it. So obviously Musk is feeding into that. He's found some way of rebooting a type of humanist storytelling about outer space that

everyone thought had completely disappeared. Nick, there was something else I was going to bring up if people allow me. Yes. Another way of understanding what you brought up today is to actually fold it back into planetary life, to what do you call the gravity-based life on the planet, which is almost – can we say almost any of these propositions that you brought up can be brought back to Earth?

if the post-Antropocene really begin to take hold, if Earth becomes unlivable for humans, if you have a breakdown of planetary computation in a way, that will make something like GPS impossible on Earth. That capital can continue on without humans on Earth. that robots can kind of like roam around Earth without humans. Right. Like almost every term of it can actually be applied back to Earth without really even needing to get out. So another like resetting of the zero,

but this time with the alien, with the robot, rather than with the human, like a recolonization of this human-less earth by the machines, for the machines, with a new way of mapping it, rather than the way humans have historically mapped it from sort of like Copernic forward. Yes. I mean, everyone, I don't know, I mean, I'm a bit of a kind of Musk junkie, you know, because I think his sentences are so good. And I'm sure everyone has heard this other one about where he says... Now, this is in the context

because he's also in the whole AI risk world. And he says, it would be a shame if it was to turn out that humans were nothing but biological bootloaders for artificial intelligence. So, you know, he's always... He's very systematic in terms of his narrative position. He's always firmly ensconced in a certain kind of sophisticated neo-humanist narrative construction. And this is the version of it in the AI X-Risk. So I think what you're saying, Mo, is to say, well, to what extent do those two types of Musk story connect?

You know, can we really see a deep continuity between these two sides of his intervention? I don't know really what the business activity on the AI side is. I mean he's bought into a whole bunch of AI companies supposedly because he wants to keep an eye on what they're doing. But he doesn't have any giant business ventures that obviously are exceptionally connected to the triumph of certain types of AI programs.

I mean, obviously they're high-tech businesses, but I don't think to some degree that would make that kind of rhetoric intelligible. So I think there's something else going on there with him. Obviously, if the Earth becomes uninhabitable, the human race is extinct. I think that goes without saying. The notion that we can... The notion that capital just going full throttle to just get stuff kicked off the planet into orbit is going to turn the Earth into a Mars-type environment is so extreme, it's kind of awesome. But I don't think it's... Well, should I be comforting people by saying?

I guess going back a little bit but related to this. So, I mean, there's a big capital expenditure to get out of the gravity well, right? So, you know, Mars would, you know, Musk and urban relating Musk have said, okay, Mars is the obvious sort of target as somewhere that's not Earth in space, right? Yeah, for us. You know, yes, for us. So I think the analog of like the space elevator or the ticket to get there or whatever, once you establish the colony, I think, yeah, that establishment process is very sort of centralized and it's not this sort of frontier auto catalyzing process or whatever.

but once you have that established, that's where the frontier starts. And that's, like, once you get to Mars in that jump, then, like, colonizing the surface of Mars, I can imagine being very auto-catalyzing and getting all sorts of political experimentation, you know, once you're over that hump, right? And I guess the technology that I would bring in there is a little bit of a throwback in that it's, you know, actually prostatic implants have come a long way. And so, you know, changing yourself so you could live more healthily on Mars or more cheaply on Mars, that seems like a technology that might be accessible

in the way that the wagon that we keep talking about is accessible and might be sort of an enabler as well. And there's a hybridity to that. So it's self-modification. Yeah, self-modification. So if you're easier to regulate in a low oxygen environment by managing yourself mechanically, Yeah, I mean that might be interesting or there might be something for that. I think obviously there's a lot going on in that. I mean my kind of counter scenario, which is, let's see how you think these kind of

connect is that my assuming that at his most libertarian, Musk is thinking not that the Mars colony itself is going to kick off these kind of dynamics, but that the bridge, the activity that is required in getting stuff off the Earth and then across to Mars and then down to Earth, that whole space bridge, that whole new logistics system of space activity, that is the frontier for truly experimental sort of catalytically explosive off-planet business activity.

And my guess, honestly, is that the Mars colony, you know, if I was interested in an extreme socialist experiment, I would be looking at a Mars colony, because I think the amount of investment involved in it would mean it would have to be buttoned down so tightly in terms of the fact that it would have to be completely consensual. I mean, the room for kind of maverick private initiative in a moon colony, I would have thought was as low as anything that has ever been seen in the history of the human species. I mean, it's like, you know, even when we go to these body modifications,

you know, you're locked up with whatever it is, a hundred people at first or a thousand people in this bubble. you know anything goes wrong with that bubble everyone dies anything goes wrong with the ecological self-support system everyone died any any kind of malfunction at all in that sort of social machine everyone dies how much room do you think individual people are gonna have in that situation to try wacky private things and then tell people hey it's not anybody else's business what I'm building in my unit of the bubble pod you know I mean this this machine I'm that this private

machine that I'm working on and that you guys think might explode and produce a catastrophic atmospheric collapse in the whole colony don't you you know bug out and leave me and leave me to my to my thing I mean I just think that there's just going to be no room for that type of thing. I think within a colony that's quite possible, but once you're on Mars, if you're able to get one colony in a self-sustaining mode, then you would then, I think, it would be very cheap, relatively, to establish a second and a third. Well, this is an interesting question, for sure, yes. Because this is then, you know, back into our sea-staking language,

this is barriers to entry for state formation, isn't it? Now, would they be low or would they be high? I mean, I would have thought barriers to entry for a new Badoff colony on Mars would be at the very least substantial, wouldn't they? I mean, you have to get, you know, you have to have enough people and resources to quickly put together a self-sustaining, ecologically coherent, viable social unit on a planet without a breathable atmosphere, that you're cooked by radiation if you're out on the surface, that has no, you know, minimal food production resources.

I mean, so I'm not seeing how that is easy to do. I'm not seeing that. Even with automation and like a fairly fast curve of sort of automation development, like that still doesn't get rid like in this extremely hostile environment of like of choke points where it's like, yeah, so 95% of this can be automated, but if you don't have enough humans to take over the task of the other 5%, then you're still all going to die. You're going to be missing certain mission-critical competencies if you don't have at least this bare minimum number of humans.

And so if it's still really hard to ship more human population over, then I can see that. I mean, you're not going to fission to the point where everybody has their two-person colony to themselves. That doesn't seem... No, I'm not seeing much fissioning. I'm not seeing much... Maybe I'm over cooking this, and maybe I'm just trying to make a neat story about it. Because I guess my neat story is that Musk is writing a weird kind of socialist humanist science fiction story set on Mars in order to catalyze something else between the Earth and Mars.

And, you know, so the ways people can obviously come at this and contest this is to say, like Adam's point is to say, well, actually maybe this Mars, you know, maybe the Mars story isn't a piece of socialist humanist science fiction. I mean, we agree it's humanist, that just the fact that he's talking about putting a million people on Mars, I think surely that's uncontroversial. So the question is then, if we take all our apparatus from the dynamic geography seasteading stuff to do with what's required for experimental development, low barriers to entry low switching costs move them into our Mars environment

you know what's happening to those indices you know are we finding it easier to fission to you know innovate government to switch between different administrations on Mars than we are under terrestrial circumstances. I'm just not seeing that. I just really can't see that. But I'm very interested. The Mars Plan is an intellectual descendant of the Mars Direct people from the Mars Society, essentially. And they are very explicitly sort of frontierists, if you will.

Yes, yes. Dr. Zubrin, I think. Yes. So, the... And that whole plan is first you send robots and they mine oxygen and other useful minerals and they mine oxygen and rocket fuel basically for you for a couple of years and then when you finally send humans, you send them and they plant the flag and they have a fantastic theatrical, political photo opportunity on the planet and they live there for a couple of years and they come back and then with not huge amounts of funding you can kick off

a process which is metabolizing I guess. And that would spawn. That same process is so much cheaper to kick off because the thing about Mars is it has a soil. It has an atmosphere which is not breathable but it's pretty close to breathable. It's not that far, it's not that cold, etc, etc. Yes, radiation is horrific, etc, but it still doesn't immediately kill you. So once you're on the planet, you could start that same robotic autocatalyzing process fairly

cheaply and it's like, you know, that's why I see that extra colonization as, you know, fairly cheap and a different cost landscape basically. I think also the purpose is to produce a sort of self-sustaining civilization, a backup, you know, a backup civilization so that if the one on Earth goes, you know, or whatever the asteroid or the magnetic poles flip and everyone's dead, that it can sustain itself, which means it has its own economy. Yes. You know, and I suppose maybe there are people who, there are lots of people who believe that, you know, it could be a communist economy.

This is the chance to try that and see if that works. But there's a political element to the project. I think it's not envisioned as being like a colony in this sort of classical sense where it's administered from Earth. It has to be able to stand on its own two feet. at the right moments. So all those questions have to be thought about. And if you're going to do that, if you're going to go that far, then surely what Adam's saying is right, that there is going to have to be capability so that it is possible to have, say, political experimentation and that sort of stuff. You know, if you are talking about building something

that's that complex and complete civilization, then there are engineering problems, definitely. I think there's a lot of tension in this thing, and I don't know how seriously you take it because as I say I think that this is you know this is a narrative more than it is a project I mean you Musk doesn't need the project to be at all the Mars colonization project doesn't have to have any solution it just has to have narrative plausibility to serve his functions doesn't it of just getting a cumulative space activity I'm assuming

it as the goal, maybe that's also questionable and I'm just being too cynical about it. But let's just treat it seriously. And of course you're right to say that the whole thing is that it has to be autonomous, because it's supposed to be able to survive the extermination of all terrestrial human life. That's the big story behind it, that it's exactly, and here's a backup, a backup population. And so if it's not autonomous, it doesn't serve that function. So absolutely, totally agree. But then if you also then put it in this kind of political economy context,

and go back to some of this stuff we were talking about last week, about the consolidation of the notion of property rights as a kind of philosophical concept, and the relationship of that to the notion of homesteading and the frontier and to a certain sort of libertarian notion of that, where you own what you have just clearly produced yourself. So there's been a consistent beat of criticism, obviously, on the left that's not always uninteresting at all about this kind of Robinson Crusoe fantasy that is in a certain way related to what we're seeing here, where the homesteader has just built their own cabin,

they've built their own tools, they've brought just a little bit of stuff with them in their Costa Nego wagon from the East Coast, and because they've built it all themselves, they clearly own that and they have property rights to it and they therefore have a certain kind of manifest economic autonomy that then serves as a kind of foundation stone for a certain kind of ideological, I mean, a libertarian conception of the self and the property owner and all those things. Now, obviously, when we go to Mars, and, you know, we take what you and Adam have said about it, that there's a fleet of robots sent to Mars that do two years of preliminary work,

that build these massive stocks of useful minerals and rocket fuel and breathable air. Colonists have moved in in these vastly expensive space vehicles, transported across to Mars, deposited on Mars, inherit this vast capital stock of materials that have been put there and then use those in order to survive on Mars. So obviously there's no conception of a libertarian foundation myth of the autonomous property owner, is there? there's autonomy there's autonomy in this

hopefully if it all works out in this biological catastrophist survival mode that they have to with this stock of materials that they have been granted from outside transcendently they have to be able to survive for the whole project to make any sense but they can't even for a single second pretend to themselves that they have carved they have carved the conditions of existence for themselves out of the wilderness you know they haven't done that they have inherited a massive stock of invested terrestrial capital that has been you know so now it seems to me surely naive to imagine

that there are no political implications to this that they're going to be given some radical autonomy in terms of their political decisions is compatible with this legacy. I mean, at the same time, obviously, I sort of want to agree with you in saying, look, as we started out on this whole thing, you know, there has never been in human history been, you know, anything even remotely in the same ball game in terms of a non-contiguous political unit. So it's not that I expect that they can be administered even if people wanted to, even if there wasn't all the extra stuff, of course they couldn't be conveniently administered

from the report. But it's more that if you're thinking, well what is this story? Why has the Earth invested $500 billion in supplying these bunch of pioneers with the equipment that they need to live en masse? Is it imaginable that that comes without some kind of political commitment? This is where I'm having trouble seeing it. I think if you just start from point zero, we just find ourselves on Mars with $500 billion worth of equipment, that's great. We now do libertarian pioneer stuff, then sure, but I don't think we can start the story

at that point in any way that is coherent. Well, you could do it. There are some parallels. the way they used to offer, I think they don't anymore, but they used to offer, you know, anyone who's willing to go to Canada get five acres of, you know, arable farmland. Oh, I mean, I would give anyone five acres of Mars right now. I mean, I don't think that's, I don't think that's a major obstacle. But I think, well, I think there was something similar alluded to, though, that Musk will pay will return flights for you for free back to Earth so you can, I don't know, visit family or whatever.

But the idea that you would have a central organization who's like the sovereign, SpaceX, and they try and lure people, you know, with some... Firstly, the idea that you're sort of... You'll be an adventurer who goes down in history as, you know, one of the first families of Mars. But also that you get, I don't know, you get your own little pod, your own bubble pod that's yours, and you get mineral rights or whatever to try to encourage people to come along. It could be oriented that way if there was the will. Yes, if people could think that that was coherent. Look, my sort of question and difficulties for this is just like,

this is obviously the amount of terrestrial investment that is required to make this happen is utterly massive. And I don't think there's any realistic way that we're thinking, well, maybe, you know, to correct me, I mean, I should put that in hypothetical way, I'm not seeing that these people are paying their own way on this. I mean, that just doesn't seem to me to make any kind of sense. That, you know, that this Mars colony is like happens to be a bunch of 500 terrestrial billionaires who've each paid vast amounts of money in order to sort of scrabble some tortured mode of survival for themselves on

the surface of Mars. That surely can't be the picture. So if that isn't the picture then they've been paid for by some extraneous agency, aren't they? And so at least in that sense they are agents of some project that is not of their own devising. And one has to assume that the people who therefore are devising that project would want their behaviour to be conducive of the fulfilment of that project. Now it might be that those people are themselves libertarian theorists and think the best way

I can achieve my goals, let's say my goals are to see the human race backed up to defend itself as Gaius. That's the supposed story. And the best way that could happen would be to have this bunch of extremely independent, free people reigniting a libertarian mode of existence in the deserts of Mars. It's possible someone could think of that. But it's a kind of strange story now, as naturally. Doesn't it seem odd to people? Yes. like you know you've said James that you know what's it to you what's this

backup what what is this human backup project to you I mean maybe I'm putting words slightly in your mouth but roughly I mean it's not you're not highly incentivized to see a mass colony thrive I took it that's what you were saying Yeah, well, it was more as well that the incentive is on a species level, you know, and that's the narrative that he's doing it on behalf of the species. But the species surely is not an agent, is it? Well, exactly, that was the point, and that was why, you know, the risk is posed to the species, and so there's no way of feeling it or experiencing it.

this is good, yeah, let's return to your language there, exactly like who's bearing the risk of this? So who's bearing the risk of this Mars colony as not the Mars colonists? I mean, they're risking their lives, but the economic risk is borne by some extraneous agency, isn't it? Now, I don't think it could conceivably be SpaceX. I mean, SpaceX is not in that role, is it? But SpaceX, I take it, is in the role of enjoying the fruits of catalytic space activity that would be required in order for this project to be executed. It's not in order to own a Mars colony. SpaceX doesn't want a space colony, a Mars colony does that.

SpaceX wants to be building space transporters, space refueling stations, space communication grids, surely that's what SpaceX wants, it wants to be providing, it wants to be like a railroad logistics company, it doesn't want to be Chicago. Well, I see what you mean, but he's been quite vague about it hasn't he? There's a passage in the essay where it says, he says there's no such thing as a company, that there are just groups of people working towards a common goal. So I think his goal, his end point, is the grand narrative, the self-sustaining Mars colony,

rather than a business that we are in the rocket building business or we are in the space class business. Well, this is interesting. And I guess there's no way of deciding on this. I mean I would definitely tilt strongly the other way and say my expectation is that Musk is totally in the rocket building business and he wants this story to be vividly exciting to people and compelling in order that he can keep selling rockets. But maybe that's too cynical on my part. I mean, for me that's not a criticism.

I think that's great. I think it's intelligent and interesting. I start worrying about him if I think he really wants to own a space colony on Mars, then I think what the hell is going on with this guy. Are you suggesting you don't believe him? Well, it depends what's meant by believing him. I mean, it's like if what I'm expected to believe is that the real motive for everything he's doing is that there's a backup copy of the human species living on Mars, doubt creeps in tsunami fashion, yes it does, I have to say, I have to say that, because it

just seems to me so unintelligent, I mean he's to me a model of someone applying cybernetic models to business development and then to switch from that to saying the whole thing is about some strange kind of Mormon type religious undertaking, where the whole business activity is purely instrumentalised in relation to that. That would be for me a relapse. But I'm open to the fact that we won't decide, and it probably doesn't matter, there were lots of Elon Musk models that we can float simultaneously.

Because one of the things that I was wondering was whether you thought, I suppose it would be on that basis if you did believe him, essentially that the Tim Urban motivations are sort of too limited. They're certainly more limited than the transcendental escaping gravity wells. Right. we've been discussing today. But I don't think that... We want another gravity well, please. Maybe one more, just in case it really bad happens. Yeah, sorry to interrupt. That's a really good point. Is there more stunted vision than... Yeah. But the vision that I'm suggesting is the outer space vision I do not think is instantiable

by a human subject. I think it's completely emergent. I mean, I don't think anyone can have the interests of radically dehumanized, automated, autonomized, extraterrestrial escaped capital in outer space as a private incentive structure. It just can't see how that is compatible with the existence of the human organism. No. But yes, I think that's right. But I mean, the Tim Urban sort of goal is very limited.

I mean, there's one, you know, it's survival, that's, you know, and nothing really more. There's no... Yes, it's limited in some respects, yeah. But you can see how that might be considered the most, the ultimate goal from another perspective, can't you? I mean, there is a sort of... the preservation of the human species from a certain perspective is an ultimate goal which is incapable in principle of ever being transcended and actually that is that is humanism

ultimately isn't it you know to say nothing at all If the human race was to become extinct, this is back to Amy's Copernican revolution, if the human race was exterminated, nothing at all could matter in any way that we can understand. I think this sort of we haven't necessarily deprecated it but it's kind of it's hard to give a concrete description of but this sort of idea of human diffusion into machines like through augmentation and

cyborgization it's kind of an awkward word sort of like, and then there's this sort of point where it's like, unless you invoke uploading, it's difficult to describe what is the point at which we literally pass into machines, per se. But I think it gets interestingly easier to chart out, at least as like a real trajectory, when you talk about like sort of Adam with the radical human modification required to survive in space, and this idea of like a series of self-selective filters, where people, like willing to undergo more and more radical transformation, have more and more access to space as a resource and as a smooth space and this being a trajectory that eventually sort of bleeds out into the machine dust cloud well I think what you're saying now

and this was also Adam's point about this human modification is an interesting way to get into the whole into this whole current of neo-humanism that we're now seeing like in this neorationalism type trend where what matters is not species survival in any biologically determinable sense but the persistence of some continuous I guess you could say maybe cultural lineage passing through the accident of the human species towards some descendants that would be recognizably ours and would in turn identify with that lineage

and see it as where they've come from. Even if it was only to the extent of their synchronous or their synchronic relation with each other, that the only thing that binds, you know, I mean if there's a sort of like cladding orking that goes on in how this process is handled, that the only thing that binds them into a common light cone, a common historical light cone, basically, is this sort of path-dependent. If we don't just imagine that humans go extinct and it's like the discontinuous machine offspring that go on to inherit the universe, then there's some sort of path-dependent diffusion from human biology. Yes.

I mean, it is interesting. I do think all those, I think that whole discussion can be transported into this environment. And then the question, if you have an off-planet population that is kind of engaged in this radical bio-modification to cope with this new environment, such that it is actually speciation event so that the human the terrestrial human species has funded a bud off new species I think this question of political integrity and moral and ethical and ideological integrity

all comes cascading back at this point. Like, you know, I mean, from certain definitions, from certain definitions, you know, if we go back into that whole extra-risk literature, yes, this is sort of human survival still. Let's just say, I could see a very easy narrative that would go, you know, the human race doesn't want to be exterminated on the planet Earth by an asteroid. So it wants a backup copy. It spends half a billion, no, half a trillion dollars building this colony on Mars, kicking off the first extraterrestrial human population that engages in massive biological self-modification without restraint,

ceases to be recognizably human from any biological point of view quite quickly, and then considers itself to be the descendants of humanity, roughly as we consider ourselves to be related from some chimpanzee-like ancestor that then requires some form of off-planet management for its own benefit. benefit is that a successful is that a successful project from the from the perspective of the kind of constituency that might be used by musk's project like if we say it's very important that we invest substantial terrestrial

resources in becoming the crude ape-like ancestor of some some off-planet descendant species? Probably not. No. I think it's interesting in that vein to sort of wonder, so if you do, like, so you try to suppress, like, biomodification or, like, people's diffusion into space and maybe, like, stuff like the Lagrange points become, like, flashpoints of conflict for that. So at the end of the day, do you end up with, like, space people sort of reigning over the sort of control and not necessarily defence but like sort of be imprisoning in from causing problems of Earth or do you have Earth turn into this sort of insular guarded space that sort of fights the outside as a rebellious or transgressive

or orbitally militarily organised I've got an assumption here that maybe should be put on the table for challenges is that I think anything in a gravity well is intrinsically at every kind of strategic disadvantage to something outside that gravity wall. So I can't even conceive an established off-planet infrastructure not attaining total strategic hegemony over the activity of that species considered. Now maybe that is a questionable assumption, but it's not something I can envisage without help. Yeah, and in a certain sense it's one of investment,

and it's one of this sort of like immediate future path dependency because you're not really talking about like necessarily like planetary military organization against space military organization. You're talking about orbital versus extra orbital, right? Because it's sort of like a premise here that there is like a planetary securitization that makes it into like a fully sort of orbitally autonomous context. But I don't know. I think this is like the gravity well thing is kind of where the Lagrange points become so interesting because they're kind of an anti-gravity well really in the sense that they remain synchronous with different sort of orbital environments and you can, without using thruster, like investing in thruster usage, like reaction mass, you can just hang around in their orbital transit or transfer bottlenecks.

They're transition zones, aren't they? They mark a certain threshold, actually, or a Janus-faced... Yeah, they're the easiest... they're the lowest energy places to make orbital transfers. So anywhere else you want to go, like if you're moving around the solar system or like tugging in asteroids or something like that, like those are the places that are trading posts and or, you know, cashmere's or something. I think, I don't know, I see that as being, if we make it like over the next 200 years, being sort of like the defining near-Earth but extra planetary space like V8 Flashpoint. And I like, yeah, I don't know, it's very comparable to sea setting in that sense of you're looking for shipping routes,

you're looking for protected bays from storms. Like there's sort of like this fluid, I don't know, you converge on war overflows or like flow points. Yes. Sorry, how many lagrange points are there? Five, I think. Yeah, I think so. That's what I've heard too. It's an interestingly limited number, isn't it? Highly finite. That puts them in the range of terrestrial geopolitics very strongly, I would have thought. It's kind of astounding that there's not already been a war of the Grange Pines. I think, yeah, I guess the extent to which it does look like terrestrial geopolitics

at all I think is kind of the question of how radical the modification to do stuff around there persistently has to be. Like do we have to really fission off from the human species to do that? I don't know, Adam, like how far do you think this threshold is in terms of like psychological reconditioning and economic expense to make this kind of the necessary modifications. I kind of feel like there's an accessible spectrum that goes a fair way out. And maybe, sure, once you're a dust cloud that destroys stars because of their flagrant waste of energy and so on.

Okay, that's pretty inaccessible. But like the, like stuff like, you know, I went to Mars and I had a horrible industrial accident so of course I replaced my leg with a robot part. Like, you know, that's pretty accessible. And like the, you know, we have your truck drivers taking amphetamines and stuff like that. Like I kind of feel like there's an accessible spectrum. But you're talking about what changes, I'm assuming that would make you unable to live unassisted on Earth after you. Yeah, I mean in terms of this orbital transfer Lagrange point, without having to completely fission the human species,

like doing the hard gravity adaptations, like extraplanetary. I don't know, like what is the steepness of the curve between where we currently are and people who can sustainably live like in a zero-gravity environment? That would seem to be pretty key to me as a strategic or metastrategic question. So I kind of agree with that, But the other thing that's really striking is the experience of time. And I was trying to get a grip on this with the whole black hole versus dust cloud sort of thing. Because, you know, you've gone black hole super urban, and that's all about proximity and super low latency and massive information density.

Yeah. And in the gravity well. and then out of the gravity world, it's all about long periods of time and large expanses of space. It's almost like, you know, trees and humans trying to talk to each other at that point. Like it's... I think that's a fantastic point, but I just would want to say that I'm doubtful that it's symmetrical. Like, just the first part, it's totally right, and I think crucial, is that this black-holing model goes into accelerated cognition to the degree... Like, we were saying that the outside is boring, but the outside is so slow, it seems like nothing's happening.

There's not enough information to be at all absorbing or interesting or threatening, you know. like once you're in this super accelerated super concentrated zone there's simply nothing interesting or dangerous out there at all because it's also slow but I can't believe that on the other model, the deep subase model it could simply be the opposite of that you know what I mean, it just wouldn't be functional if it said look let's disassemble our synaptic connections over kind of astronomical distances and start, you know what I mean, thinking at a speed that is compatible with kind of astronomical latencies, at a speed

like a kind of Mars-Earth internet link, as if that was some integral cognitive component. I think it would have to go the other way still and be based upon a massive amount of highly localized autonomous concentrated processing that is just distributed in an open outer space. Yeah, it seems like it would cease to make sense to talk about it in terms of highly individuated networks at a scale much higher than local mass. It's more like a continuum of intelligent activity or of intelligent density, more or less.

Similar to the continuum of the underlying space, which is the dust cloud. Its primary spatial characteristic is density fluctuation, or eddies and density of flood. And that would sort of condition your localization of sort of an autonomous process rather than there being these sort of like static like reference frames connected by particular communications links, you know, as we're given to understand networks now. I think it's definitely an interesting, like, or it's asymmetric also in the temporal sense that there's like a smooth, there's a smooth increase in temporal and spatial scale on the side of the dust cloud.

But with the event horizon, I mean, you're scissioning off from the temporal strata, which anything else has access to immediately. Like, nothing or arbitrarily close to nothing of what you do gets back out. And time outside becomes completely meaningless, like, essentially, to, again, arbitrarily close to stand still. I don't know, and to the extent that it's possible, on a black hole to escape this continuum or something like that, it gets even more radical as a form of exit. An exit without going anywhere in extensive space. Walking radiation is like, bleeds black holes, right? But it's not high bandwidth, right? Isn't it always

at maximum entropy walking radiation? it's like there's some kind of debate or Hawking has gone back and forth about whether you can get state information about the pre-singularity state or history out of Hawking radiation, like whether it's in principle possible or principle impossible I can't remember what is last where he's fallen on this currently right, yes yeah No, but I think it is really, this is a really good point to just put a stick of flag in. I won't say nail down because we're not there with that, but I think it's really crucial to this thing that,

if you're going to say the temporality and intensity of intelligent processes in outer space cannot be symmetrical with those on the black hole model. I think that you then, it opens this question, well, how can they not be symmetrical? And the only way they cannot be symmetrical is by, is through disintegration. Like, within a black hole, a civilization could remain integrated. You know, even when its kind of processes are being accelerated to this degree that even the slightest latency becomes impossible to tolerate, it collapses into a higher density that allows it to become an integrated communication space.

A dust cloud, a distributed dust cloud, if it is going to remain, continue with sort of increasing high intensity cognitive process has to disintegrate. It simply has to disintegrate. It cannot sustain some consensual form of integration over an astronomical space without itself slowing to a speed that's compatible with communications across that space. So the crude example is exactly the Mars-Earth internet connection.

I'm assuming our Mars colony will have an internet connection. But the latency will be so disastrous that of course it's like in New York at this thing they did in the New School, Peter Watts gave a talk exactly about that bit, about the corpus colosum and he says you remain a human being at a certain bandwidth that is met by the corpus colosum and if you if you cut the corpus colosum and do the split brain thing the two halves of your brain still communicate with each other but they don't they don't communicate

with sufficient bandwidth to remain an integrated subjective unit. So you become a split brain subject. And that's to me, he's talking there implicitly about dust cloud consciousness or about distributed off-planet, distributed off-planet civilisation or off-planet activities, you know, you cannot, you cannot, given these Einsteinian constraints of communication, have an integrated subjectivity in those circumstances. You have to disintegrate. You have to either disintegrate or become stupid.

That's the only option that is available. Yeah, absolutely. Just loss of communication, loss of sufficient communication bandwidth between things. I think everything we've seen in history and in technology fosters the idea that it eliminates conditions for unity. It suffices of itself to create disintegration into multiple cores or whatever. And I think Peter's talk spoke to the entire asymmetry, because it was also this idea that as soon as you have a high enough bandwidth coming from one person's frontal lobe to a whole network of frontal lobes, through whatever he called Netflix, VR flicks, mind flicks, or something, then you lose individuality via the same process.

So speaking to this black hole, this idea that if the latency is low enough, there's no support for like disintegrated entities or individual and autonomous entities. Yeah, that's the reciprocal for sure. Yeah, which makes the whole question of high frequency trading quite interesting. Like what is the sort of theoretical eschaton of high frequency trading like, I don't know, are there separated finance entities or is it possible? But then if we go back to Adam's point on this, they are disintegrated in space by the fact that they have to localize together. So if you are just separated in space, unless you have all your financial activity in one

geographically concentrated space, then you have disintegration, you know. It's true that in one locality, one cluster, it could tend inevitably towards some kind of weird Borgian fusion for sure, but you can't do that globally by definition. No, I'd agree, but it's an interesting idea that the exchange like Arca or the the nice exchange, the electronic exchange, plus the co-located high frequency sort of participants

is sort of one entity effectively because they're so close informationally and so they're considered. So that's the sort of exchange effectively. Yeah, it's a brain. Wow. It's at least some kind of, or it tends to some sort of, like, synchronized state, or, like, sort of globally entangled state. It doesn't, you know, even if it's not necessarily, like, even if it's not not modular. So it still has, like, these urban, like, spatially clustered nodes or whatever, especially once you bring quantum computing into it, and you have, like, you know, physically entangled trading systems and so forth.

I don't know, it just reminds me, the quantum thief, or like, it's actually, I think it's revealed somewhere else in the trilogy, but it's like Earth crashes, because all of these quantum trading exchanges, there's an algorithm that they become vulnerable to that runs through them and just crashes the entire quantumly integrated productive financial system of the Earth, and leads to this space exodus, and it's all because of just sort of like a flaw or an exploited global state. synchronicity, or in quantum mediated synchrony through trading, like specifically through finance, in this sort of way that arbitrage creates a continuum. Yeah. Hello?

I've been thinking about can you guys hear me? Yes. I've been thinking about how and I haven't read these books but I need to because I really like the idea of the and how they harvest the specificity or the board does that, they harvest the specificity of different life forms that live in gravity wells so it's almost like the dust cloud needs to develop like the children and then harvest the children that we're thinking of and in order to create some sort of timeline where they're cut off from being a dust cloud which was the original nebula. Yes, I mean the dust cloud thing is slightly, we're bringing that in I think.

They're just described as a kind of interplanetary gene trading civilization. So I think our dust cloud physics is kind of something we're bringing on to that. But I think the abstract model definitely is right. So everyone, has everyone suddenly died? No. I was going to think, God, we don't even have a Mars colony yet,

but that's right. I don't think anybody's dead here. Not until I harp on the Quantum Thief, but I just remembered real fast that there's another, there's one other piece to this whole story of collapse through the appearance of this state that makes it more interesting for what we're talking about, which is that the reason it causes a space exodus is because the collapse causes them to lose control of, like, nano-assemblers and AIs and so forth, which just sort of, like, run ramp and transforming the surface of the Earth. So this idea that, like, the collapse of financial systems, like, ultimately becomes a collapse of, like, security controls, like cybersecurity controls over technology, I think is an interesting fate

for the Earth. Have we got a link to this book anyway, Jake? Yeah, sure. One second. I've got it on Kindle, and I have got stuff to rip things off. So I don't know. If anyone wants PDFs of various sci-fi books, I can potentially provide that. Sorry, I'm looking for the... Yeah, so I guess what I'm trying to bring up is the interplay between the dust cloud and the vacuum is this place where these images first start that then create specificity and

matter in order to then upload or extract that back to space as much possible just keep dissolving towards the vacuum again. Which then is the space where we have the quantum entangled minds. Yes. I don't know. I think someone else is going to have to have a go at this one. I don't know. Is that making sense at all? Yeah, it does, but I think it's like several notches up the kind of axis of cosmic spirituality than we've got to at this point.

So do you actually, do you mind saying it again, Anders? I'm like, my caffeine, my three caffeine sources have all run low, and I just like sort of lost something. Yeah, sorry. I'm sorry. Jay, could you say that again? I lost you for a second. No, yeah. No, I just said, do you mind like sort of like repeating or re-summarizing what the sort of idea with those books was? I just like, I lost track halfway through. I'm running out of caffeine. Yeah. What books? I don't think I was sorry the dust and vacuum and sort of the drive towards entangled minds I don't think this came from a book I think this came

from somewhere else entirely than a book yes so in these books there's the orangali where they are the spacefaring culture they kind of represent white hegemony because they come to planets and take your specificity, they upload you and make you into an oncology. Well, actually, you know, sorry to slow you down here, Anders, but they are totally commercial about it. So I think they're completely non-coercive, except by some, there's obviously kind of left critique of kind of commercial interactions that would make them coercive, but they don't invade in the sense of just compelling anything.

They totally respect people's commercial exit rights. They just come in order to trade DNA. And I think Octavia Butler's point, which you can, you know, it's difficult to know how much irony or, you know, which it's beautifully nonlinear in terms of I think you should take it ideologically in any kind of direction. But it's that this process leads to the complete absorption of the planet into this off-planet commercial gene trafficking network. So, you know, there are various, it's over three volumes, and there's various kinds of human resistance, this process, and people who want to extract themselves from it.

and it's all totally even though the one color completely non-violent it's all proves totally futile and just leads to the being as they say just left as this kind of just strip rock that everything has been just lifted off extracted into deep space but only by commercial processes I might have missed the last five seconds there. Yeah, just to say there's nothing, there's only commercial process involved in the whole Wangkali process. The Wangkali vacuuming is not, there's no militaristic component, I think, at all in it.

That's exactly why I think it's so interesting, is that just by exposure to the vacuum, this one civilization is developed in that network like you were talking about, I think Jake was talking about the Lagrange points, as the point of war because they're the point of connection and slippage across... That space-faring civilization has to then create isolated pockets in order for new complexity to develop. because there's nothing to that network. Ken McCloud has a sort of interesting version of that.

I forget, like, Engines of Light, I think, is the first book, or maybe that's the name of the series, but, like, the gods, that's literally what they call them, are this species, like, almost to use a strong term, which is like sort of hyper-complex coral reef ecologies inside of asteroids, like sort of like in an intelligent geode kind of sense that are just like extraordinarily widespread in like every system. But because they've got this sort of like black hole-like sort of like their great filter or whatever is that there's no reason to go outside or very little reason to go outside of their internal mental ecologies. and they've sort of already dominated everything and imposed, I don't know, like minimal order on human expansion

because they can just bombard any planet with asteroids that they feel like. Oh, yeah? With empty asteroids. Right, with empty asteroids. I mean, it doesn't take a very big rock to destroy. That's efficient speed, that's right, for sure. But then you're throwing that rock into a gravity well, which is an act of cosmic vandalism, of course. True. I might float past you guys the prospect of prompt disconnection. How do you feel about that? We're 22 minutes over time.

I've just been driven by nicotine delirium to become into fits of sociopathic. Nobody caught my joke on earlier that my vaporizer is actually Tesla, like a real Tesla brand. It's like holding a piece of... Yeah, it's look. Do they make those, really? Yeah, totally. Wow. That's the Tesla, is it? Yeah, it's the Tesla. The logo is always on the box, and this is like one of the more reliable brands. Yeah, the fog thickens. Really good. Yeah, I'm missing that a lot right now.

You're quitting smoking? No, I'm missing not now rushing out onto my balcony and immediately lighting up a cigarette is what I'm trying to communicate to you guys. I think me and Amy are on a competition yes, no clouds of smoke it's absolutely torture of course to watch so should we close? yes I think so if that's okay with everyone and I don't know whether anyone wants some kind of formal agenda but if you think you can survive with moon as a guiding thread and anything left over from this past seven weeks that you think needs some more running over, that would work for me for sure.

I have a digital copy of Moon. If anyone can get it, I can help them with. Okay, I've only got a DVD so I can't make that supportive offer to anyone. So let me know. Also, like, maybe, Nick, you want to, like, bring up the fact that we're organizing another seminar by you for the next semester, sort of, like, and the timeline and all that. I'm going to be posting it to the NewsCenter website and all that, so maybe just you're going to see it posted. Yes, okay. I think I'll wait and maybe do that next week. Yes, actually, that's right.

And also, like, if there's still an issue left with getting access to the classroom or having a user password, please let me know after I finish the broadcast so I can help you in the next 24 hours to make sure everyone is set up. Okay. So I'm going to end the broadcast. Thank you, Nick. It was a fascinating seminar. Thanks, everybody. It was great. Thanks, Nick. Cheers. Thanks, Nick.