BLAXXKY: a new kid on the futurist media block
Also, Terasem Colloquium & Journal updates.
Greetings to all readers and subscribers, and special greetings to the paid subscribers!
Please scroll down for the main topic of this newsletter. But first:
The first confirmed speaker for the Terasem Colloquium on July 20, dedicated to space expansion in the age of artificial intelligence (AI), is Robert Zubrin.
Robert Zubrin doesn’t need an introduction: he is the legendary founder of The Mars Society and the author of many great books on the colonization of Mars and space expansion in general.
We’ll invite other speakers with diverse points of view and different answers to the question: Should we still want to send human astronauts to colonize space? Or should we want to leave space expansion to AI?
My own answer is in this post. It may seem ambiguous, but I think it is crystal clear.
As usual, we’ll encourage synergies between the Terasem Colloquium and the Terasem Journal.
“The July 2025 issue of Journal of Personal Cyberconsciousness will focus on the topic of expansion of civilization into outer space during the age of artificial intelligence (AI),” writes Bill Bainbridge in a call for papers. “Given the theme of Journal of Personal Cyberconsciousness, the interaction between human minds and artificial intelligences should be featured, but authors may differ in their predictions of how the two will relate as civilization expands out into the universe.”
Please let me know if you would like to speak at the Terasem Colloquium and/or write for the Terasem Journal.
I’ve hinted a couple of times at a new media project that
and I have been working on.I call it a new kid on the futurist media block, using “futurist” in the sense that I explored in my last book.
From Stella & me: Greetings fellow Earthlings and nonhuman intelligences, today we are soft launching BLAXXKY. BLAXXKY operates mainly in cyberspace through media, art, virtual reality (VR), events, zines for education and fun. We are inspired by the likes of Mondo 2000, Extropy, and the Whole Earth Catalog. High Quality Weirdness is our motto.
From me: So what kind of content can you expect to see here? This post by Stella R. Magnet is representative. I’m known for writing weird stuff about science, philosophy, metaphysics and even (God forbid) religion, but be warned, my writings so far are a model of unimaginative restraint compared to the wild unhinged weirdness (but, mind you, high quality weirdness) that you’ll see here.
This is the header of a BLAXXKY zine that we’ll distribute now and then to collect especially interesting posts and comments.
This is the icon used for the blaxxky.com website, X and other social media. It is adapted from the drawing “Star Cluster in Hercules” by Étienne Léopold Trouvelot. Trouvelot described this and other astronomical drawings in “The Trouvelot astronomical drawings manual” (1882), a masterpiece of 19th astronomy literature. The original drawing has other colors, but we feel this recolored version works better here.
