New possibilities for space commerce
Many small steps.

Inspired by Robert Zubrin and Stephen Petranek.

Project Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nff2CiAydTo
Territory ideas: Animations start at 8:12
1-Page Summary: https://davehuer.com/plan-b-summary/

Before starting OrbMB, I’d separately started exploring ideas to grow our capacity to become a fully-functioning, off-Earth society: ways to tackle the wicked problem of building “secure, resilient, rapidly-evolving distributed systems at scale.”*

We live in a new age, with enabling technologies and possibilities. This project proposes ways to use property rights and commercial law to de-risk the uncertainties, to bootstrap the trading webs we need to grow ourselves to sister worlds. The goal being to spark new thinking about what we want, as we transition to systems of sustainable commerce. Here and out there: #spacecommerce

Many thanks to all contributors. Special thanks to cg artists Evgenia Tikpapanidou & Guy Brochard and voice artist Marek Montoya for animatedly bringing the project to life.

Inspirations:

(2014) The Mars Underground: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcTZvNLL0-w
(2016) Stephan Petranek: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9c7aheZxls
*(2018) N.Forsgren, J.Humble, G.Kim: Accelerate, p.4: (Amazon book link)

The Atlantic has published a piece about surviving uncertainty: https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/08/how-embrace-uncertainty-pandemic-times/615634/

This is powerful stuff. I’ve done intensely challenging whitewater kayaking, learning through the discipline and art that there is a place beyond the edge; and learned that some of us have deep need to go beyond that edge to know where it is. This is where we all of us are with this thing. I, for one, have hope. Our species has a bright future because we are learning to manage deep uncertainty together. And we will learn to thrive.

From How to Solve the Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever, by Nautilus‘ assistant editor Brian Gallagher, comes a study of Raymond Smullyan’s logic puzzle of the same name, deriving from use of a logician’s law; the “law of the excluded middle”, which is that “every statement is either true or false—there is no middle ground.” And “In the hardest logic puzzle ever, one must determine the true identities of gods named True, False, and Random.“

The law is a law of statements, not a law of answers.

Could we entertain banqueting with the god named Both? Could the conversation take us out, flying into the real world, flying to divers places, accompanied by Mercury to get us everywhere?

Image: “Mercury Bronze 1570 van der Schardt 5” by mharrsch (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0): https://ccsearch.creativecommons.org/photos/2d615852-04af-4e54-8850-956ddf5ba076