My first year seminar in college was all about Colonizing Mars, and it was built around the Mars Trilogy (which I’ve been writing about rather a lot these past few weeks, but I must admit that my first encounter here was not as fruitful.) Even though I spent most (all?) of my college years away from the science fiction world (long story, sorry BSFFA), the whole idea of space travel and colonization has been a fascinating problem.

And not just the recent hubbub about one way journeys to Mars, which I think Karl Schroeder does I fine job of dispelling, though I think there’s a much more thorny problem around population pressures and the cost of emigration that deserves some attention than the common discussion about space settlement has really been able to spawn so far.

Space is really big. Right? Like huge. The colonization of space if it is to be successful--in its own right, building settlements takes the efforts of a lot of people--is really about moving millions upon millions of people to Mars or the Moon not to mention other possibilities like constructed outposts and longer range colony ships. And that’s an incredibly huge proposition. Of course, the there would be some sort of pioneering group, but you’d need to be able to commit to being able to send a great deal of people out there in pretty short order. Think a million people a year for ten or twenty years? That’s 2,700 people a day and some change. If you wanted to ship a billion people off world over ten years, you’d need to lift almost 274,000 people a day.

Which isn’t anywhere near feasible, with transportation costs, equipment costs, let alone the logistics costs of getting a quarter of a million people to do anything in a concerted fashion every day for ten years. But the truth is to make a settlement viable out there you need a lot of people, perhaps I think more than can be easily transported from Earth.

Space is huge, though. Even our little corner of space is huge. Mars, because it doesn’t have oceans, has as much landmass as Earth. That’s a lot of room, and while I’m certainly not saying “we have to work to fill up the rest of the solar system as fast as possible,” I think there are likely critical mass and critical densities of people that would be required to make the settlement of space viable.

On top of Schroeder’s simple point about the role of launch costs (using current/Apollo-era technology), there is a whole other issue of “what to do when we get there,” (and how we’re going to sport that, whatever it is) are equally important considerations.

I guess my point, insofar as I have one, is that while we might start to feel a bit crowded on earth in the next hundred years--which may or may not be real--using off planet settlements as a “population shunt” is difficult. (Anyone else have a good way to get 20k people a day off world. Or more? Way more?) It would be hard to move people off world fast enough to make a dent in the population here, and also hard to move people off world fast enough and in great enough quantities to sufficiently populate those settlements.

One of the things I adore about Samuel Delany’s Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand is the huge scope of the universe, and that it’s huge not just in the traditional conception of “space is big,” where we put a lot of thought into “Stars are really far apart,” but also in the “Planets hold a lot of people.” There’s a segment, which is otherwise not particularly notable, where the narrator talks about the population of the settled universe, and he is--to our eyes--incredibly out of touch with the actual number of people in his “world” (universe,) and I think the figure the narrator gives is unspecific to the tens of billions of people. Which is sort of boggling.

And I think I’ll leave you on that note. Food for thought! Cheers!

• Who are you? What do you?

  I’m a grad student at Washington University until the end of this school year when I will have hopefully finished and defended my dissertation on Hermann Hesse. In general, I’m really interested in modernism specifically, but I’ll take an intellectual stab at about anything written from 1890 to the present. Despite being a humanist, I’m a bit of a computer geek: I’m writing my dissertation in LaTeX and a religious Lifehacker reader. I don’t really do code, though, apart from the occasional Automator action or Applescript.

  Someday I would like to have a real job and maybe another cat or, dare I say, a first kid? I love a good book, but usually something that is a balance between complicated/dry and entertaining. I can tolerate a lot of craziness in a book, but let’s face it, Ulysses is incredible though not exactly fun reading.

  I’m an avid knitter and sometimes spinner. I learned when I was about 6 or 7 from my great aunt, had a long hiatus, and started again in about 2004 with a pair of really loose socks. I also have a bin of worms in my apartment that compost food for me. Oh, and I love my cat, Dot.

• Merino vs. Blue-faced Leicester?

  Blue-faced!

• Lets talk about technology: What kind of technology do you use, and what’s the coolest thing that technology enables for you? What about your technology do you find frustrating?

  I’m a total mac person, but I dabble in open-source things. My favorite ability at the moment is to be able to sync bookmarks and notes to my computer and iphone via Evernote. I’m hoping I don’t tire of it. I’m very forgetful, so knowing what’s on my grocery list at any given time is awesome. I’ve even got a notebook of knitting ideas and patterns on there.

  I find Twitter completely frustrating, yet I find myself tweeting all the time. I’ve tried about 5 different clients, but none of them hide the messages I’ve already read and keep them hidden between computer and phone. Then there are those folks who write drivel constantly, but I can’t unfollow them because I’m afraid they’d be offended. The worst, though, is that people think it’s an acceptable form of news reporting.

• Favorite book you’ve read in the last year? Runners up?

  My favorite book for the last couple years has been Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. I’m thinking about reading it again, that’s how much I liked it! I tried and got through 3/4ths of Crime and Punishment this summer, but have since abandoned it. Right now I’m reading Smilla’s Sense of Snow.

• Favorite Website?

  icanhazchezburgur although my browser says that I visit Ravelry more often!

• What do you think was the most important event of the last 15 years?

  It’s really hard to even begin to answer this question, but I suppose I have to give it a shot. I’d say it is probably the proliferation of wireless phones. Especially with the ability to take pictures and send text messages internationally, hostile leaders and regimes can no longer squelch the voices of their people. Honestly, in 1994 I never imagined myself owning a cell phone, let alone one that would be able to let me surf the internet or send email. For that matter, even when I was in college, email attachments were problematic: I also wouldn’t have imagined me writing my dissertation in a city five hours away from my advisor.

• The next 10?

  This will be us as a society learning to deal with this technology, especially for the type of people not used to teaching themselves to use new technology. Some people, like my parents, are slowly adapting to a digital lifestyle and are even fascinated with new gadgets without being pressured by people like me. I never considered myself a computer person, though, but rather one who could read the instruction manual. So much of the new technology assumes the user has a basic grammar of what it means to interact with a machine. Graphics replace text menus, and all of a sudden squares and triangles are essential instead of quick references. What this also means is that people like my grandparents may soon be completely left in the dark. I find it laughable that stacks of paper phone books still show up on my building’s doorstep, but my grandparents would have no idea of how to find a phone number, even if they had a computer.

• One thing that you’re most looking forward to in the next year?

  I’m very excited about finishing my dissertation and to finally become what my family refers to as “Dr. Ted”.

• One thing that you wish you could learn?

  I would really like to be good at yoga, enough to give me exercise in the winter time and relaxation in the summer. I always feel like I will have to spend a fortune on lessons or classes. I’ve tried watching tapes, but I need someone to bend my legs and put my feet where they are supposed to go.

• Hegel vs. Heidegger?

  Hegel wins in my book because I use his dialectic all the time. Sadly, I don’t know much about Heidegger at all.

• Where can we find more about you/your projects?

  • I’m Stricken on twitter,
  • On Ravelry, I’m tedberlin,
  • There’s the Personal blog, and
  • Professional website

I think that I seem to have acquired a new hobby.

I’ve known about shape note sining for years and years. The Weavers did a few songs on some albums that I remember from when I was a kid.¹ And Cordelia’s Dad (with Tim Erickson) came through town when I was kid and they sang a few Shape Note songs.² And the Morris Dancing gathering I attend has a lot of singing and a number of really awesome singers (many of whom, I think, read this blog, so hi folks.) It’s been around.

I’ve always been intimidated by it.

I don’t come from a singing background. I made the valiant effort to be musical as a kid: I washed out of choir in fourth grade; I played clarinet in middle school but it lost its wonder about half way through (though I still have a clarinet, I don’t really play);³ I’ve done some very ad hoc harmony singing with Morris Dancers and elsewhere, but my memory for lyrics is bad and while that’s a bunch of fun and I don’t think of that as a “hobby,” or as the kind of thing one really does except when one happens around other singers. And the whole “book thing,” about Sacred Harp singing always confused me.

And then, I had a series of pretty great experiences. I sang at the Morris Ale and had a great time, a couple or (three?) years in a row, and this year, I think something clicked. I got to sit behind a really strong bass and suddenly I could hear “it.” The harmonies made sense. The book was helpful, but I stopped worrying about getting every note right, and had fun in the moment, and somehow I was able to sing better, or something. So I kept doing it. I went to a local singing right before I moved, and I’ve been to four local signings and since I moved out east, and then I went to a singing convention in New York City, and sang for a whole day.

And it rocked. I’m still clearly a beginner, but I’m starting to be able to see patterns in the music, and learn the words and tunes, figure out the rhythms and all that. And given that I’ve failed at doing the musical thing so much before, it’s so interesting to me that I get it about something musical. That I can have fun and contribute to something that’s kind of awesome to be a part of: both of the tradition, and of the really intense and awesome moments created during singings.

I wish there were better words to describe all this. The appeal of driving hundreds of miles to go sit in a room with a hundred or two hundred of people you don’t really know, and sing these very “rustic” 19th century protestant hymns, and have it be both a very spiritual experience, and somehow that it not be a very religious experience.

The NYC singing that I went to--on Rosh Hashanah--had the opening Prayer in Hebrew. And the Sacred Harp tradition is intentionally very ecumenical, within of course the various American Protestant communities of the 19th century. I’m very strongly of the opinion that the appeal of this whole thing is this really hard to describe thing that happens in the moment. The sense of community, the ecstatic experience of the music, the nifty thing, when you feel the harmonies in your chest and the pulse of the rhythm in your whole body. Like that’s really nifty, and special and totally worth while.

I also feel a certain failure as a writer because I’m totally unable to communicate this in a way that I think borders on being sufficient. So I think I’ll stop trying for the moment, and hopefully I’ll sing with some of you soon.

Cheers!

From the file of “things I would like to be writing if I had more time.” Please, if you’re inclined or would like to use one of these ideas for the basis of a story, please feel free to.

1. A distributed space opera

I’ve been telling very tight space opera stories for a while now. Stories set within the next 1000 or so years that revolve around our sun, where the civilization shares much of our cultural background. Stories set in the future chronicles of “Western Civilization” as it were. I’d like to get away from that and tell stories that are bigger than that, stories with less ubiquitous communication between worlds.

2. An Alien Story

As a kid who grew up with ubiquitous bipedal aliens in Star Trek, I’ve been wary of alien stories, as I worry that the aliens will be too campy or too human like. Or I’ll fall into the exoticisism trap and have my aliens be too wondrous, and that’s not good either. Despite this avoidance, I love alien stories, and I love stories that can take advantage of this additional spectrum of difference and diversity, to mention nothing of the potential communication issues.

3. A Planet-bound Space Opera

Back to space opera. If this is my thing then, I’m happy for it. One of the things that I like about the forum are the ways in which it forces us to expand the limits of possibility and difference, it makes us thing big. The distributed idea above makes the world huge and vast by disconnecting the story-world from ours. I think setting a story on a planet or outpost, in a world where there’s a interstellar economy/culture, I think it would be interesting to explore the vastness and world view from the perspective of people who don’t actually travel between the stars very much.

4. Cyberpunk and Internet Networking

I’d like to write some sort of story that addresses some of the problems with managing “big data.” Which is to say, we’re collecting so much data right now and there’s so much raw information that it’s difficult to keep track and store it reasonably, much less find a way to make use of it. I think this is a hugely interesting problem, but I think as we begin to expand a little bit the there’s going to be technological limitations to the accessibility of data in some locales based on distance and local capacity. Exploring how this plays out practically in cyberspace is I think important. There will clearly be massive shared data collections, and computers will be networked, but will there be one data network in the way that there is now, or will there be many data networks? And where are the breakpoints socially?

5. A Story about Death and Closure

In my psychology major days I was very interested in development processes and moments around death and dying. Maybe I read too much Irvin Yalom, but I think a science fiction story--perhaps a sort of claustrophobic inmate story about the death of a civilization/society/planet (i.e. a “Cultural Fugue” to borrow an idea from Delany) handled in an optimistic sort of way, but not terribly sentimentally, to be fair. Because I like that kind of thing.

Onward, and of course, Upward!

I had this idea a few weeks ago, that to break things up during a particularly hectic part of my life--finishing a book, traveling, singing, and so forth--that I’d talk to some of the cool people I know on the Internet and elsewhere, and conduct a little interview series where I’d get to introduce you to some of the really interesting people that I’ve met in my travels thusfar, and ask them some questions about what they do, what they’re interested in and up to in the world.

The first entry in this series is by my friend Rich Russell who has a rather and I hope you enjoy this as much as I did.

• Who are you? What do you?

  I was supposed to be a Rachel. So when mom regained consciousness and dad told her he had named me Richard, you can imagine her initial confusion. And then when my sister was born and I, who liked to sometimes pretend to be a girl when I was little (it was the eighties, after all; what of it?), was confronted by this actual Rachel, you can imagine how threatened I felt; there could be only one Rachel in our house, after all, and the jig was up for me. Rachel is dead; long live Rachel! So robbed of my infant identity, I later became a teacher, like my mom, which was either flattering identification with her or an attempt at character annexation, I can’t decide which.

• Handmade or Store bought?

  Handmade

• *Really?*

  Well, unless I have to sew it, carpenter it, cobble it, tan it, cure it, or cook it myself; in which case, store bought.

• Lets talk about technology: What kind of technology do you use, and what’s the coolest thing that technology enables for you? What about your technology do you find frustrating?

  I’m teaching a few classes online this semester, so it’s nice to be able to work with students who might not otherwise be able to attend school, due to their hectic family and/or work schedules. (We use the Blackboard Learning System, in case you’re looking for shameless plugs that might generate ad revenue: “Blackboard Learning System, connecting students with their teachers and their futures.")

  And my sister lives out in L.A. now, so it’s nice that we can video chat once a week over coffee; there’s an added saccharin intimacy established by the video element. Because it’s not real togetherness, is it? It’s a kind of ersatz togetherness between my sister and me, the ersatz Rachel. E.M. Forster, in Howard’s End, compels us to, “Only connect!” I don’t know what that means anymore, though, when I’m teaching online or talking to my sister over Skype. Even when the wireless has a strong connection, I think, “This isn’t what Forster meant at all.” He meant that there would be nothing between human beings -- and other beings --except ourselves. I feel, in some ways, here has risen the connection that repels. We believe we are closer; we believe we are connected, unless Comcast is being a fuck-up. But, like my one student who says he has taken so many of his classes online at this point that he’s afraid to enter a real classroom and interact synchronously with fleshy classmates, have we lost the ability to be intimate? What does ‘intimate’ even mean anymore?… (But I love my iPhone. But I realize that is a manufactured desire.)

• Favorite Post-structuralist/Post-modernist? Who are the runners up?

  I was going to go with “Freddie” Jameson, because I loved what we read of him when I read him back in a Post-modernism course at the New School with Professor Joshua Gaylord (lol gay lord) in 2002. Or Roland Barthes; but I’m sure a lot of people will go with R.B. So I think I’ll choose Angela Carter instead, especially for her novel The Passion of New Eve, which still haunts me nine years after I first read it; some of the most sublime moments in all of literature. Runners-up: Muriel Spark, Laurence Sterne. (Miss Congeniality: Russell Edson.)

• The single scariest thing about the future?

  The future is neither good nor bad.

• Favorite Website?

  I subscribe to The Atlantic but still find myself spending a lot of time on theatlantic.com.

• What do you think was the most important event of the last 15 years? What’s going to be the most important thing about the next 10 years?

  9/11/99; I had been living in New York for about three weeks then. I was about to fall in love. It would be like a holocaust. (This is all about me, after all, isn’t it? Or did you mean for humankind in general? Yes, I suppose that’s what you must’ve meant; well…) In ten years, the most important thing for humankind (and not just me) will be to see what we have done to this planet. This feels like a lame response, because it’s so chic right now to care about the planet (I’ve always cared!), but I am curious to see. Will there be sulfur aerosol sprays diffused into the atmosphere like in Blade Runner? Will there be flying cars like we’ve been promised there would be flying cars ever since The Jetsons? (FYI: I think we’re past wanting flying cars, aren’t we? I’d be more happy for some high-speed rail.) Will I ever get to see a narwhal?

• One thing that you wish you could learn?

  I would like to read all of Proust. Because I have masochistic tendencies. And I like small buttery sponge cakes.

• Edmund Spenser or John Milton?

  Milton, hands down. I never did make it through all of The Faerie Queene(lol faerie queene). That old Spenserian scheme drives me coo-coo after awhile; I do believe it is the rhythm of madness.

• Where can we find more about you/your projects?

  I blog and am rarjr on twitter.

I posted a link to an article about the professionalization of blogging in an earlier link dump post, that I’ve been thinking about rather a lot in recent days, and I wanted to reflect on this.

The argument of the article, which I think is pretty much spot on, discusses how contemporary blogging has become this thing that that isn’t just the sort of thing that “nobodies” can throw up a blog with WordPress and become an Internet sensation in fairly short order. Now setting aside the fact that this might never have been true in the first place, I think there’s some serious merit to this argument: blogs have gone mainstream, lots of people read blogs, and the people who have the resources to write blogs tend to be people groups of people who have a lot of resources, and most of the popular/successful blogs these days require a lot of resources and sustained energies.

This isn’t a bad thing, of course, but I think it forces us to rethink what it means to be a blogger writer “internet content producer” both in the current moment and looking to the future.

There are a number of different factors contributing to this larger moment. Some of the more prevalent ones are:

• There are more blogs now today than there used to be, this means both that the “cost of entry” is higher than it was five years ago or even a year ago. This means new blogs will:
  • Need to focus on more unique subject areas, this is the “long tail” or “embrace your niche” approach. Rather than be the most popular blogger on Technoratti (do people still care about technoratti?) be the most popular blogger in the homemade breakfast cereal niche.
  • Blogging can’t be the casual thing that it was in the beginning, In the early days people started blogs and posted occasionally and it was just this novel little thing, and they were able to be successful as bloggers. Now, blogging is something that one really has to dedicate an embarrassing amount of energy to to be successful.
• The “Blog” as a literary genre, or media forum has become much more cemented, so that rather than be this experimental form that really only describes a website that updates regularly in a serialized format, there are now a whole host of expectations regarding the forum.
  • Blogs that reject the primacy of these forms will tend to be more successful, in that readers will tend to find them more innovative. Forum and approach, as much as a subject area, is one way that small independent content producers will be able to differentiate themselves from “big media blogs.”
  • Blogs can be projects onto themselves. We’ve seen a convention where every site uses a blog as a way of providing more up-to-date content, but independent bloggers are able to create independent blogs which accent other projects, but are nonetheless independent and self contained texts.
• Independent bloggers might not be able start up and field vast readerships on their own any more, but may be able to define their success on their own terms. Old media business models, that rely on advertising revenue and large readership numbers might not be the most stable anyway, and independent bloggers may be able to contemplate success on their own terms. Possible “new media” definitions of success include:
• Using a blog to support and promote a consulting or services based business, by presenting general information to help justify your expertise in a given area. Think RedMonk, Merlin Mann, and in some ways, me.
• Using a blog (and its moderate audience) to support some sort of “rockstar” business model, where you sell something (tickets to shows, dead-tree books, tshirts, etc.) that people mostly want because they know you from something which doesn’t make you much money (ie. record sales, blogging.)

There’s more. And I think that I might be talking about this kind of thing at PodCamp 3 Philly. I’d love to see you there.

For your consideration:

• Paul Grahm on the Future of Publishing, which is of corse pretty darn spot on. Follow up, I guess to this link from the last link dump post. I think it’s generally true to say that the “post-publishing” world is here, as most writers/content producers--or the young and successful ones at any rate--are already working in post-publishing business models.
• SF Signal Mind-Meld about Short Fiction Anthologies. In a lot of ways I think short fiction “anthologies” are a great thing and answer a lot of needs in publishing. It’s a sustainable way to publish short fiction (in the way that magazines aren’t terribly,) anthologies have the potential to be greater than the sum of their parts (and thus better than single author short story collection.) And they’re typically great fun to read. The aforelinked article does a great job of showing the thought process of the editors and anthologists that make these collections possible.
• Organic Memory Transfer and neurotechology, I’m more interested in the limitations of input/output than in the “brute power” problems that Katz raises in this article, but its interesting.
• The Professionalization of blogging As an independent blogger myself, this article seems to mostly be true, though I’m not particularly happy about it, I must say. I’m interested in how the rise of the “big professional blog” integrates with the ongoing collapse of the media industry.
• Rough Type - Questioning Accidentalism I seem to be on a “posting links about the media today.” This one, is pretty historiographical, which is an approach to this “evolution of media” topics that I approve of with great vigor. I just wish there were a way to sort of say to the world, “lets do something different this time.” Alas.
• Gender in the Free Software World no matter how far away from Women’s Studies and “gender stuff,” it seems to follow me. That said, this article, which comments on some gender-related activism, if we can use that word, out of the FSF. The news is a bit old at this point (old links are old,) but I think the analysis here is pretty much spot on, and I’m not sure if I have anything that I could add to this. Go read. Also this which I’m still reading/groking thinking about.

Woot. Tabs closed for now.

I have an absurd number of tabs open, and I’d like to present some interesting reading that I’ve had on my plate for a while. Nothing incredibly current, but all of it’s good stuff. For your consideration:

• Interlaced Knitting Chart from Kim Salazar who is a master knitter/crafter. I’ve enjoyed her blog for years, and I keep coming back to this pattern and I’m interested in figuring out how to integrate it best into the project I’m thinking of working on next/soon.
• This Thread about Package Management in Emacs, which is an incredibly essoteric subject, but I think it’s a useful conversation, and I think something that will--if its implemented--make emacs even more awesome, and make it easy to spin off specialized instances of “emacs distributions,” which I think will help emacs be more helpful to more people. I’d like multi-threaded support though.
• I’ve had this article about Open Source Business Models open in my browser for weeks, and my mind boggles at it. I tend to think that Free Software and Open Source have pretty much the same business models as all software businesses. There are companies that make money on licencing free software (i.e. Red Hat, Novell), there are a bunch of companies that provide services and custom development around open source software (too numerous to cite,) and there are scads of companies that have businesses offering services that are enabled by open source software (i.e. every Internet company, but Amazon is a great example of this.) So I’m not really sure how to respond to this. But it’s there, and now I’m closing that tab.
• Open Source: The War is Over or so one blogger thinks. I actually think there’s some truth to the idea that proprietary software is mostly a failed project, and most people realize that--moving forward--open source methods and practices are ideal for technology. But I think “winning the argument and beginning to move toward open source,” and “the war being over,” are two different things. Furthermore, I’m not sure I’m comfortable equating “enterprise adoption of open source,” as the singular marker of success for Open Source (let alone Free Software).
• Michael Berube on Cultural Studies in the Chronicle
• I guess it’s hard to really take me out of the academy. I’m a huge geek for this kind of stuff still. I guess my thoughts are:
  1. Michael Berube might be a great blogger, and I think the thigns he’s thinking about in this peice are quire useful and worthwhile, but as a piece of writing, this article is too short to really get into a lot of depth about anything, and too long to be easily read
  2. American Academic Marxism is a mostly failed project, and I think the “inter-discipline” of Cultural studies has been a poor steward of said.
  3. While Cultural Studies is a liberating interdisciplinary proposition, it’s pretty unbalanced (English+Sociology) and I think a bit more economics and anthropology would be helpful. Berube is on the right side of this argument but I think he’s too kind to CS on this point.
• Gina Trapani’s Smarterware got a new look and it’s both amazing and I think points out the importance of leaving design to the professionals. Good stuff.
• Against Micropayments and the Media Industry Interesting post, that gets it right. The future of media and publishing of all forms is something that I think about more than a little bit. If people are ever going to pay for content again, it’s going to have to be tied into the way that people pay for connectivity, which is also a non-scarce resource, but one that we’ve grown used to paying for. There’s some unpacking and investigating to be done here, for sure.