The first galaxy-shot mission launch crews have been posted in the common areas.
>> This is code: Alpha Ceti 5 Azure Kraken <<
>> Repeat, Azure Kraken level emergency <<
This is our Prime Directive
We have eight years to pass through the eye of a cosmic needle, launch our first galaxy-scale mission to save the only forest – and Earth’s 3 billion+ year R&D lab of life – in our known Universe.
For context about the wormhole we must pass through by 2028, review these log files.
Breaking Boundaries
Below is the initial launch mission team roster – immediately review and sign up based on your learning engine journey mapping.
if you have experience in prosocial methods and Ostrom’s Razor, or deep knowledge in deprogramming cult members, report to the ready room immediately to assist in waking up the sleeping members of Starship Earth.
Initial teams?
A – Gaia Herself: Otherwise known as the David Atten-Bureau or The David Atten-Burroughs
Mission: Protect the only ~three billion-year-old R&D lab for life we’ve found in this realm, and, via humanity, the best chance for the Universe to become self-aware and understand the wonders of its own glory.
B – Miyagi: Also known as (AKA) Infinite U or the networked matter Dreaming initiative
Mission: Foster lifelong learning for upward mobility–using autonomous learning loops of embodied machine/human learner collectives–to accelerate and deepen human learning and growth in a time of accelerated, unbounded malignant complexity.
C – Ostrom’s razor: AKA This View of Life
Mission: Leveling the field for fair-play using prosocial design patterns/mechanics, along with the evolutionary basis for scalable collective action. This team’s ethos is based on the seminal Nobel-winning work of Elenor Ostrom and the continued exploration of how collective action evolves within and between communities by David Sloan Wilson and his collaborators.
D – Gaiatime.today: AKA The Ministry of Truth
Mission: Build a propaganda machine to message – massage the narrative over the next 8 years and shape beliefs that it’s not too late, individual crew members have the agency to take direct action now that can guide us through the bumpy shoals and whitewater ahead as we near the eye of the needle.
E – The Department of Strategic Surprise: AKA the Hello Tomorrow Observatory
Mission: to surprise ourselves before the Universe, humanity’s baser instincts, or an over-entitled tech billionaire/villain from central casting, surprises us and sabotages the mission pre-launch. Example organizations and initiatives that will seed this team’s work include: The Deeptech mission for Good, Hello Tomorrow, DARPA, JEDI in the EU, and the Actuate Innovation Foundation.
F – The Longer Now: AKA the Pace-Layers
Mission: Building the deeptime one billion year “optimist’s telescope” to simulate – at an accelerated rate – our trajectory should a mission team or teams pilot a divergence from our current path and disrupt the pace-layered evolutionary system models we rely on as we get closer to the singularity. Further, the team is tasked with developing methods for longer now/deeper time distributed archiving that builds an ancestor family trust for our thousandth born generation and defines diverse bootstrap protocols to up-lift candidate species.
G – the Boffins & Black Swans Clubbe: alias the Ergodicity Economics Code Breakers CABAL
Mission: Modeling and simulating the value of everything as we approach the needle in an effort to support the Ministry of Truth’s efforts to shape the narrative based on refactoring how we value public purpose-based missions. Examples of guiding crew members include Mariana Mazzucato’s Institute for Public Purpose, and Ole Peter’s efforts at the London Mathematical Laboratory.
H – The Undiscovered Country: AKA The Casual Creator Corps
Mission: Mapmakers and geographers of the ineffable ways different people create and play together. Fostering cross-disciplinary translation/use of analogies & metaphors to see the challenge in new light & extend the work of experts in non-adjacent/disparate fields of curiosity/discovery. Amplifying machine learners to accelerate fruitful combinations of thinkers from all fields of inquiry & help them navigate the “undiscovered country” of the scientific method/history of science papers for conjecture, proof, dynamic conjecture/proof matching, ontological zookeeping, and menagerie building. The team will use emergent generative game mechanics, the casual creator corps, imagination looms, tools for thought, and abstraction laddering for anti-disciplinary groups. They’ll also Scale the platform to groups of millions of crew members at a time, and fostering a dynamic retooling of science itself and its underpinning conceptual framework to foster faster breakthrus by reframing key challenges, and providing a navigation aid from what is known, to what might be.
I – States of Grace: Alias The Matryoshka Dolls
Mission: Providing a framework that shifts focus from a state of governance, to governance of states—physical, mental, emotional, social—within & across our community. Reducing algorithmic frictions that cause increasing polarization & make it harder for people to believe – that if someone else flourishes – it won’t steal their capacity for a safe, “good life.” They’ll also develop tools based on stable layers of complexity to allow experimentation within a given semantic/pace-layer without being flooded in overwhelming static/noise. Fostering dynamic ranges of scale—from the smallest beings w/consciousness—to networks of trillions across Galaxies. Ultimately fostering Matryoshka-layered governance of states of being that may be infinitely different–yet nested within & around an ever-larger state of flourishing.
J – Barbwire: AKA the Duende Dance
Mission: Recruiting, on-boarding boot camps, building health, well-being, & ritual, followed by encouraging fallow beings to take time to rebuild and refract. Over the mind span of a crew member’s tour of duty, some will opt to join the Oddfellows Trust and foster allyship. This group will also build on their local works to frame post mortem scenarios that flag global emergent areas of harm that the entire crew has a solemn duty to rescue.
K – Every Tool’s a Hammer
Mission: Safety and security and training on all toolsets, skillsets, and mindsets required of crew members on various launch teams. They will track very closely with the Department of Strategic Surprise, and other “learn to do by making and doing” teams. They will also manage equipment exploration, acquisition, lifespan maintenance, tutorials, verification, prototyping, and on-ramping crew members to safe lab/shop learning.
L – Special Circumstances
Mission: the culture team that takes on—and makes—Excessions. Science friction & cognitive illusions come together. Mathemagicians, Robert Di Niro ziplining rebel alliances of plumbers, theater craftsmasters/sorcerers apprentices, & native borne curious experimentalists/students of misdirection–akin to the World War 2 “Ghost Army” that Ewen Montague led, yet, mashed up w/dogtown, zboys, ghosts in the machine, & shelled shock forces—to win the existential threat of fascism. Crew member Martin Gardner set the stage with his 60+ year focus in the last pages of Scientific American with his column titled Mathematical Games.
M – The Cognitive Protection Agency
Mission: Protecting our ability to think, as a universal right for all crew members–from the smallest protozoans to the largest collective legion. This would be both a regulatory & reinforcement arm of the InfiniteU guidance system.
N – The Rescue & Repair Force
Mission: Protecting the least among us and helping them move from abuse through numb acceptance or apathy to a sense of agency, critical truth, reconciliation, reparations, and ultimately on to wonder. Once rescued this force focuses on identifying systemic levers to reverse larger ripple effects that might destabilize Gaia or its local neighborhood.
O – The Oddfellows Trust
Mission: Similar to the historic Oddfellows clubbe borne in the 17th century, this team’s focus is fostering reflection thru leadership coaching, challenging a crew members mental model, fostering optionality, and, through the use of differing “Debono-style” hats, a shift back and forth from operational to consultative to advising to coaching to improve the mental health, agency and well being of the crew. This group will work closely with the Casual Creator Corps, the Rescue and Repairforce, and the Cognitive Protection Agency.
P – The Conflagrationalistas
Mission: Akin to the difference between Catholic, top-down indulgence-seeking priests & Darwinnowers versus Protestant Congregationalist & Martin Lutherians who organically grow non-0-sum mindsets and replicate cells of fellow beings like wildfire. this team will foster direct connections of the crew members to our sleeping yet soon to awaken starship Earth.
Q – Culture Cool-Aid Stands
Mission: This will be a collective brain trust that weaves the collective culture together across all crew members. It is comprised of cross-cutting disciplinarians, rule breakers, rule makers, Che Guavarians, Rescue & Repairforce veterans, Disastronauts, Palandromadarie, Rubickaneers, & sidekicks to victimized Superheroes to build new stories for their next chapters.
R – Shannon’s Ladder & Erdös’s Couch Surfers
Mission: Fostering polymathic leaps across disciplines through curiosity, court jesting, juggling, and Las Vegas hacking hijinks. Inspired by Claude Shannon and Paul Erdös and their lifelong commitment to leap, blend, and caper across disciplines pollinating insights in science, technology, play, math, and physics or as Paul Erdös would say, “a new roof, a new proof.” This team will act as the connective tissue across launch sites and mission teams and will be modeled after Erdös’s couch surfing with $72 dollars to his name, a suitcase, and a bag of recent scientific papers from his last locale.
S – The Republic of Detours
Mission: Inspired by the New Deal-era WPA program that employed out-of-work creative writers & journalists to document the quirky wonders, roadside attractions & checkered history of the great migration across America of the tired poor immigrants looking for a better life and the pursuit of happiness. The nationwide effort led to a wonder-filled atlas and map of playful and rich detours. This team would be a subset of The Ministry of Truth and give equal weight across the spectrum from the ephemeral/intangibles of quantum science and machine behavior to the tangible beings beneath our feet or deep in the ocean depths, as well as the wildly differentiated human cultures that abound on starship Earth.
T – The Embodied Self
Mission: This team focuses on ministering to the physical, mental, and emotional health of our crew to rescue and repair trauma, and drive a move out of “bedzooms” and into the realm of the senses. it works thru massage, acupuncture, tai-chi, judo, forest bathing, & other ancient cultural technologies/holistic healing systems. Ultimately the goal is to reduce the untimely departure of beings within Starship Earth from this mortal coil.
U – The Things Fall Together Entropists: Alias the Practice Effect
Mission: Work with the Casual Creator Corps and the Every Tool’s a Hammer team to exploit 4D assembly via Life’s engines of creation to reverse human-created destruction of natural habitats via fabrics, forms, folds, and fields.
V – The Entangled
Mission: Quantum science is entering a second revolution and could be as significant as the invention of digital computing or the discovery of Newton’s three laws of thermodynamics or Einstein’s theories of relativity. The mission of this team is to track and deploy methods of harnessing this collection of phenomenas for human use. We believe it could be a major driving factor in solving challenges for both our prime objective — protect and preserve the biodiversity of life on Earth, as well as our secondary goal of supporting humanity as starship Earth passes through the eye of the needle and begins to give the Universe self-awareness.
W – The Wild-ing: AKA Nature and Nurture
Mission: Nature versus Nurture is often portrayed as a choice of one or the other, or as somehow an age-old battle between the two. the Wild-ing team’s focus will be to explore and navigate the intersections and collaborations between Nature and Nurture. They will lead oversight and support intersectionality between various sub-teams like Ostrom’s Razor, the Embodied Self, States of Grace, and the Boffins & Blackswans.
>> We need your help to review these draft team missions and nominate missing launch teams and candidates from our Starship Earth crew <<
Each mission launch team will have to assign a single point of contact who can make binding decisions & cut Gordian knots, up to four days a week, in our mission control room.
Finally, let us reaffirm our core principles.
These are things we believe:
– We believe certainty and the quest for perfection leads to stagnation and the end of flourishing and flow.
– We believe that embracing uncertainty—finding comfort in the inherent paradox and tension within any system interesting enough to care about and navigating ambiguity in the face of the great unknowns – with the ability to embrace imperfection, as learnings, on the path towards grace — represents the only way forward.
– We believe today few crew members get a chance to become citizens or even visitors to the State of Grace. They get stuck in their heads or trapped by externalities/illusions where they feel that success is a hopeless impossibility.
– We believe looking for yes/no, black/white answers to questions in an inherently complex ecology may give us momentary comfort, but will ultimately leave us open and naked in a Universe filled with apex predators and galactic intrigue.