Creating a United Confederation of Cosmists
Creating a United Confederation of Cosmists
Igniting a Bottom-Up, Interstellar Network Ecology. Abstract of my talk at the Terasem Space Day Colloquium 2023.
Creating a United Confederation of Cosmists: Igniting a Bottom-Up, Interstellar Network Ecology
In Isaac Asimov's iconic “Foundation” series, the concept of "psychohistory" is introduced as a potent blend of history, sociology, and statistical analysis. This powerful (fictional) science can predict the collective behavior of vast groups of people into the future. Based on the law of mass action, psychohistory asserts that large group behavior can be forecasted, even when individual actions remain unpredictable. It presents a deterministic vision of societal progression, aimed at predicting and circumventing societal downfall.
As a contrast, Black Sky Society posits “psychodestiny” as a counterpoint to psychohistory. Instead of predicting societal tendencies, psychodestiny focuses on molding individual dreams and trajectories to guide collective futures towards a positive end. It is anchored in the belief in personal potential and the capacity for self-transcendence.
Psychodestiny can be envisioned as a communal dream machine. In my talk at Terasem Space Day Colloquium 2023, I will illustrate preliminary thoughts on the psychodestiny “envisioning” process, demonstrating how we can initiate an international space program with a highly ambitious north star. Beginning in 2023, I will traverse through the forthcoming 20 then 100 years with speculative devices, presenting that it may indeed be feasible to start with a group of 10 spacefarers, which then expands to 100, and continues to grow until space sciences are part of secondary school curriculum worldwide and everyone has the opportunity to participate in space expansion and cosmic destiny. This presents a vision of a future where each person can contribute to a broader and eventual interstellar ecology from the ground up, cultivating a United Confederation of Cosmists, that is unbounded. Far future possibilities might even include the exploration of the cosmos with faster-than-light teleportation.
In 2017, Giulio Prisco and I joined forces to create Space Decentral, a decentralized space agency. However, the initial design ideas for this project were primarily top-down in their approach. The psychodestiny process presents a more bottom-up vision, designed to allow for emergence and a multi-leader coalition. This approach aims to enhance resilience and solidarity around common visions.
Stellar Magnet’s Bio
Stellar Magnet's self-guided and experiential research over the last six years has centered on cryptoeconomic network design related to large-scale cooperation networks. In this time, she has creatively contributed insights related to governance, mechanism design, and community tooling to over seven different Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) or open-source projects. She holds a Bachelor’s of Science in Mechanical Engineering from UC Berkeley (2008) and an Astronautical Engineering Certificate from UCLA Extension (2016).
I look forward to listening to your talk!
Re "Far future possibilities might even include the exploration of the cosmos with faster-than-light teleportation."
Teleportation is defined as transporting things from here to there in space (or spacetime) without moving them through the space (or spacetime) in between.
First, there’s a “pedestrian” form of teleportation through space based on mind uploading: scan a mind, convert it to a digital format, beam the information to another star, download the information to an electronic brain in a robot or to a biological brain in a new body (perhaps a clone of the original, since the genome can be beamed alongside the digital mind). This is described by Richard Morgan in the novels Altered Carbon and sequels. This is a relatively conservative form of teleportation.
Of course this teleportation method is not faster than light. Enter wormholes, which can transport matter through spacetime without moving it through the spacetime in between. Teleportation via wormholes can transport matter besides information and is not limited by the speed of light.
Wormholes are somewhat equivalent to quantum entangled connections. The idea is that ER=EPR: two entangled particles can be thought of as connected by a wormhole. If ER=EPR, then it begins to sound plausible that entanglement could be used to transmit information faster than light (which is forbidden in quantum mechanics as we know it).
So yes, teleportation IS scientifically plausible. The first method could be practical in a couple of centuries, for the second and especially the third we’ll have to wait (much) more.
High forms of tech magic could allow very advanced beings to teleport anywhere using only the power of their mind.