Preparing for the Artemis 1 launch service
Also, a tribute to Robert Forward and Arthur Clarke.
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:
I’ll host the first Turing Church meeting on Saturday, November 19, at 11am ET (8am PT, 5pm CET, via Zoom). The first part of the meeting will be recorded and published in the Turing Church podcast. The second part of the meeting will not be recorded, so if you want to speak off-the-record wait for the second part.
I’ll start with a talk on “More things in heaven and earth, Gods by any other name.” I gave this talk at the TransVision 2019 conference in London, but the conference was not recorded.
This meeting will be open, and you are invited. I look forward to seeing you! The Zoom access coordinates are in the Turing Church meetings calendar.
I hope this will be the first of many Turing Church meetings.
The second Terasem Colloquium of this year will be held on December 14, via Zoom, from 10am ET to 1pm ET. December 14 will mark the 50th anniversary of the last day astronauts have been on the Moon. You are invited! I look forward to seeing you on December 14!
My commentary "SpaceX fans should stand behind NASA and support Artemis" is published in the November issue of SpaceNews magazine. Zoom in the image below to read it.
The SpaceNews commentary is a slightly edited version of “SpaceX fans should stand behind NASA and support the Artemis program.” I look forward to publishing more in SpaceNews, which is a good way to connect with space enthusiasts and decision makers.
Artemis 1 is on the launch pad again and the next launch attempt is scheduled for Nov. 16.
I’ll be watching the launch with religious fervor. If the launch is not successful, I’ll watch the next attempt with the same religious fervor.
Because this is IMPORTANT. The Artemis 1 mission is the official opening of the road that will take us to the Moon, this time sustainably and permanently. And then to Mars. And then to the planets and moons of our solar system. And then, one day, to the stars.
To me space launches, and especially important space launches like this one, are religious services. If Turing Church has a ritual, this is it. Adopt this ritual as your own. Watch space launches and let your mind touch - and be touched by - our awesome cosmic future among the stars and beyond.
The stars… The editors of “Frontiers of Propulsion Science” (2009), a compilation of breakthroughs that could revolutionize spaceflight and open the way to the stars, “dedicate this book to Dr. Robert L. Forward and Sir Arthur C. Clarke. We honor these individuals for both the advances they made in spaceflight and for the inspirational effect their work had on the rest of us.”
Legendary space engineer Robert Forward (who was also a science fiction writer adored by space enthusiasts and hard science fiction fans) proposed next-generation space propulsion systems that could take us to the stars.
Forward’s book “Indistinguishable from Magic” (1995) summarizes the author’s scientific work and highly imaginative (but disciplined) speculations. This book has a honored place in my collection of Bibles. So I was happy to receive the picture below from Martine Rothblatt.
Forward was open to scientific conceptions of God and an immaterial, immortal human soul that could, somehow, survive death. By “open” I don’t mean that Forward was a believer, but that he was open to considering God and the soul as scientific possibilities to explore.
In the book, Forward says about God:
“If God does exist, then He must come under the purview of science and it is the job of the scientist first to prove He exists, and then to build up a body of experimental, observational, and theoretical knowledge that will ultimately enable the human race (or whatever the human race has evolved to by then) to understand Him…”
I tend to agree, with the caveat that a detailed understanding of God might be very far ahead of current science, or even infinitely far, at the unreachable bottom of a never ending fractal zoom on previously unknown aspects of nature.
Forward says about the soul:
“Could it be that as the atoms and molecules in our brain form into the pattern containing our intellect, that these atoms and molecules impress their pattern into the space-time matrix? If so, then we would now have the pattern that is our intellect impressed not only on some material object such as the nerve cells in our brain, but also on an ethereal object such as the space-time in which we live. This ethereal copy of our intellect could be the spirit…
We now begin to see how the matter in our body could form a pattern of our intellect in space and time. The ethereal intellect would change and grow as the body changes and grows. In turn, this ethereal pattern in space-time could possibly influence the motion of the electronic and ionic currents in the brain cells. The awareness and influence of the intellect pattern would be strongest in the immediate space-time region where the material particles of the nerve cells exist, but its awareness and influence could extend not only through the space around us, but could also extend into the time around us…
Note the parallels with the words of Arthur Clarke. In “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Clarke says that the creators of the monolith “had learned to store knowledge in the structure of space itself.”
Too bad that Forward didn’t elaborate more upon these thoughts.
In my book “Tales of the Turing Church” I speculate on how the quantum vacuum studied by Forward could support human consciousness after death. Perhaps the quantum vacuum is itself alive, sparkling with divine consciousness.
Forward continues:
It now looks like that the concept of our spirit as an entity containing our intellect, that is formed by our body, and yet is immaterial and exists after the body is gone, cannot be arbitrarily dismissed as unscientific nonsense. And it may be, that on some future day, rather than denying the existence of the spirit, science will prove that the spirit does have a physical reality and that there is life after death.”
I hope some version of me will live after death and get the chance to meet some version of Robert Forward.