Corporate Kaijus

I've been reading through entries from this Memory Hut, and it's 90% prattle. Animal noises. 

It is a rarity I am impressed by something I wrote. I also notice I'm still stuck on the same subjects a decade later. One of them was the surmise that humans are a super-organism as surely as ants and bees. Smaller cohorts of humans are also super-organisms as well, with their own pecutliarities and talents.

As an illustration, Blair Fix, in his essay The Evolution of 'Big': How Sociality Made Life Larger, estimates that the US Federal government is 10,000 times bigger than a blue whale.

"Were this mass packed into one animal, the beast would be three quarters the height of the Empire State Buidling".

I assume he equates employee count to pounds. Our metaphorical US MechaGodzilla is 938 feet tall. The largest movie godzilla to date is 1,043 feet. With this simple comparison of super-massive animals based upon human average weight, we can derive lists.

Wal-Mart-zilla: 1031 feet tall, McDonalds: 540 foot tall clown. The Chinese Communist Kaijus? Dwarf everything. 

How about instead of employee numbers, revenue size, or wealth or what? You can see where this is going. Portraits of Corporate Kaijus and Government Mechas.

Sounds lika a great landscape to explore limited only by yours truly. And see how that works? I am lazy and bore easily and am already talking myself out of the project. I should start hiring people to do this shit for me. They will have more and better ideas, and I just have to give it the nod and take the shit when it doesn't work. 

I imagine Elon Zuckerbergs, or Mark Musks, piloting their mega-mecha-zillas from stratospheric heights, feel like unto gods.

Zoom away one thousand yards, and you see a lizord with a pea brain.

For all practical effects, a small guy on guy-wires waiting to get rattled inside a metal skull. Happens to princes and paupers all. 

Best, my lovelies, to find Flow.

Flow destroys the ego.

You fade into the task.

All that remains is the work.

Close the Blast Doors!

Blast doors won't make a difference, not when your wormhole collapses into a false vacuum bubble.

And just be glad there is no false vacuum decay, else you, me, all our favorite stuff, suddenly swept away by a true vacuum bubble accelerating towards infinity. 

These scenarios are part of the superposition of stories when you operate a faulty Time Tunnel, part of OPERATION TIC TOC, buried somewhere in the Arizona desert. There is no such thing as a beta test for time machines. They either work, or work wierd. And weird may be great for a TV show. Not so great when you are lost in a swirling maze of past and future ages.

Before Irwin Allen became the Master of Disaster with the Poseidon Adventure and the Towering Inferno, he did cheesy scifi TV. 

Land of the Giants, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Lost in Space, and The Time Tunnel. The shows didn't usually start out cheesy and frantic, but TV ratings of the 1960s demanded increasing titillation. Irwin Allen was up against Batman, so race to the bottom. Couple of things that thrilled me as a boy: sparking explosions and scene shake. Irwin Allen was addicted to shaking cameras and rattling hammers in buckets.It's an unfortunate cheap practical effect still in use. Sparks? Irwin Allen did not know what a fuse was. 

The advantage of the Time Tunnel was Allen had access to 20th Century Fox film and TV footage, props stock and sets making historical scenes going back to 1,000,000BCE available for free. Still, it was one of the most expensive TV shows for 1966. When ABC told Allen to cut the budget, he refused and the show was cancelled after one season. I'm betting Irwin Allen made some serious coin here.

TVTropes is the best. There are other fan sites, but TVtrope cuts through the bullshit and gives you the insights. Best to read before continuing. I'll wait.

Two things from TVtropes I think are important. The only lady scientist, Dr. Ann MacGregor, is Smurfette, who I guess is making sandwiches for the boys. She's always being carrried out of harm's way the second shit hits the fan. Playted by Lee Meriwether She was 31 at the time of filming which made her a Handsome Woman, in other words a Living Prop.

Then there is Technician Jerry, played by Sam Groom. Jerry was offering ideas that the officers and scientistts rejected. Only to have them work in the end as a last desperate measure. So all the eggheads and authorities should have listened to Jerry. Why, Jerry had his life saved by Ann. He had a heart attack and Ann revived him with the severed ends of a power cable to restart his heart. 

I'm guessing some ninja reverse judo resistance fighting against the white patriarchy, a little class warfare. But you how it goes baby. We are a super organism like ants and bees. We have castes, a 40,000 year old adaptation. Castes as strictly defined as electron orbits.

My 2021 reimagining of the Time Tunnel  is a superposition of events and outcomes. Most of the stories are episodic, but the theme would circle back to Billy Pilgrim is Unstuck in Time meets The Ann and Jerry anchor team time machine.

In the 1960s, PROJECT TIC TOC is the US wormhole project. (Because wormhole=time machine).

A visiting Senator to the site is not pleased wih all the wasted taxpayer dollars. He demands a show or the carnival gets sold. Scientist James Darren (played by Kiki LaRue) steps up to the plate and is POOF GONE for all we know vaporized. But no, the Time Tumnel, she worked and they can see them backwards in time in chronoscopic bolzetron! So, they try to get them back but no go. A tether approach might work and Guy goes into the wormhole aperture with a rope like Poltergeist. And now they are swirling in a maze of past and future ages.

Episode 1,  an hour long unavoidable disaster. At the end of the first episode the universe and everyone dies. 

Episode 2,  an hour long unavoidable disaster. Same as the first episode, but its a time loop. 

Episode 3, Kiki and Guy end up on the Titanic and find some socialites with really good cocaine and booze and weed and opiates. They get really fucked up and then the iceberg hits. They get on a lifeboat and are picked up the next day by a tramp steamer.

Episode 4,Kiki and Guy end up at Pearl Harbor on the Arizona Sunday morning December 7th. "We gotta get the fuck out of here,pronto!" They do,

You can see the pattern, They're party ghosts, as well they should be.

Episode 30, Kiki and Guy are augmented in the future and sent back to kill themselves by the ape shaped ant-wasps of  Year One Million. Whic they do. Season Two is augmented Kiki and Guy Show.

 You gotta wonder why so few episodes are about the future and that is the same problem as the Fermi Paradox.

100 ton racks and the Cloud above the clouds

Elon Musk may not be as dumb as he looks. 

Over at Antipope, Charlie Stross argues that Elon Musk is going to build space based solar power generators. The satellites are in geosynchronous orbit, exposed to sunlight 24/7, and we are much better at broadcasting and collecting microwaves than when this was first seriously proposed. 

Starship has yet to do anything like orbit and return. Still on paper, it can launch 100 tons in orbit and return, 250 tons expendable. (250 tons is half the weight of the ISS). Other than canned ape there is really no call to put 100 tons in orbit for most anybody outside the military.

Still, 100 tons at geosync with current solar cells gets you on the high end of 2GW. Stross figures a 70% loss to the rectenna on Earth, gets you a 6 megawatt power plant.

That does not put much of a dent in the global appetite of 18TW per hour.

If  Musk comes even close to his goal of 1000 Starships launching every day, then after a year he has around 3 million tons in orbit after a year. 300,000 geosynchronous power satellites. 70% of 300,000 times 2 GW is 420TW. That is an insane amount of power.

Of course its all bullshit. 

What if Musk doesn't give a crap about power transmission and is instead interested in information? It's easier to compute above the clouds than broadcast power. What if Mush is building a 44,000-mile sized Matrioshka Brain? Granted you got big problems with cosmic rays and solar flares. Still, lots of people are seriously thinking about putting racks in space. 

And why not? If losses prove acceptable, 50 tons of data center powered by 2GW in geosynchronous orbit, talking to its others in orbit?

And since we've already established this all pie in the sky bullshit, cold edge computing. Literally cold in the shadow of field of solar panels. Cold plasmas, cold Bose-Einstein condesatesm time crystals, you name it. 

It takes a lot power for all global IT stuff, like 10% of the world's electricity. I figure a much higher profit can be made at less cost by sending all that stuff into orbit.

Signed, George Jetson

When I hear trhe word culture, I reach for my petri dish

I'm a Uranium-6. More later on this. I'm languishing between ideas and finally realized I have wasted an entire year on episodic CGI sculpture when I should have been storyboarding. I should have fed all my art into a GAN or two and let them generate my art to my satisfaction. Hindsight is golden.

What kind of story? Well, this whole memory hut should have something in it for a story or two. Here's a story not from the hut:

Some years ago there was a couple on my walking route. She was stack-and-that's-a-fact bleached bonde. He was a bodybuilder type. She would be skimpily dress and doing provacative lawncare. He would scowl and brandish his muscles.I figured that was their thrill. Or they were a Venus Flytrap with a basement full of gimps. Or just regular swingers.

I figure the more fearful your imagining, the more rich you are. Rich become fearful for having so much to lose, therfore the more paranoid their scenarios and the miore nefarious the actors. The rich live in fear. The poor live in fierce, or should. 

If I were rich, like duh billions rich, here's my plan. What is the most reliable, durable information storage medium on the planet? Protoplasm. 4 billion years tested nanotech. So, I would set up a corporation that would pay people to remember shit, and pay them well. Since most humans have a pretty good memory, most people can do a primary and several secondary expertises or memorizations.

I say this after reading (online) that the Encyclopedia of Human Survival is mostly online. Sorry foks,  but electricity is almost always the first to go. If I got specialists and facilitators, I'm so much beter off than being surrounded by people who look at phones. If you think about it, Steve Jobs laid an egg in all our throats with those evil things.

I would also lobby Congress to pass the Extended Family Act and set up craft guilds to remember shit through the extended families, on the assumption that someone in the extended family will have an interest and the restr of the family can fuck off. The idea is borrowed from Kurt Vonnegut's C minus novel Slapstick. It had the one good idea of the government issue middle name, and the program was titled Lonesome No More! Go try it!

The point is the window is closing on democracy and we need to share the power as much as possible.

As President, I support #landback, giving Federal land back to the Native Americans and let them choose to either stay in the Union as the 51st state or become autonomous. As chaotic as this sounds, it can, through One Weird Trick, be a win/win/win. The Federal lands are worth quintillons, if not sextillions and a few trillion here and there are bedbugs and fleas. So, Bartender, Canfields for Everyone. Reparations across the board. All objections to cost are irrelvant, but prestige? the US of A will always be remembered as the feral child western flank of the British Empire. in a later historical flip, Constantinople to Britain's Rome. But we can get Even Steven. We can Get Back On Track.

The fact of the matter is, folksies, we are at the top of the S-curve plateau, heading south just as surely as a Petri dish of cream cheese germs run out of cream cheese. The Kurman Solution to the Fermi Paradox is in poker called All In, In the case of humanity, we need 14 billion brains, maybe 20 to break the Great Filter and we aint' gonna do it. To make it to Kardasheve One means eating the world.

Speading of eating, Earl Butz, Agriculture Secretary under Nixon and Ford. Kicked out for telling an n-word joke.

Gave us plant hedgerow to hedgerow go big or get out fossile fuel corporate agriculture. Learned the lesson of Famine, probably from Nixon about China. Point being the American people, not being well fed, get cranky pretty quick, and if things so South, in the 2020s we are on our second of third plate of The Rich.

Nixon, no dummy, saw it. You got to keep them well fed. In fact, the fatter, the better. Ad here we are.

It's not sustainable. If my hypothesis of Singularity or Bust is correct, it shouldn't be sustainable. In which case, it's not too late to make civilization cat friendly. And also make monkey cats, which kead toi chimp cats, which klead to Thundercats.