For over 800 years, the Academy has been the shining light of Earth. Its founders pulled civilization from its last fall, a catastrophic war of tribal and religious conflict, where diseases and machines were the weapons and most often only victors.

The Academy is the beacon of the hominin mind. In intellectual endeavor, it is unparalleled, replacing scarcity of resources with abundance of thought. It applies a powerful, rationalist philosophy to focus the faculties of the mind to explore, to understand, and to use new understanding to improve the lives of all those within its reach.

...

Earth’s past contains many accounts — some recorded in writing or video, some only discovered archaeologically — of exoduses to the stars precipitated by sociopolitical shifts in the life of Earth.

For the last three centuries, the Academy has been recording the bubblings of civilization on distant stars. Sometimes, recording the reinvention of radio, sometimes the encrypted cacophony of information networks. And sometimes something most likely a signal, but offering no clue to its nature.

The time has come to say hello.

Moon's good stuff. Very Shock:ulent. But also quite different from Human Contact, which concentrates on clashing societies.

Make sure to sign up if you want to play. I'm always waaay overbooked, and I don't think I'll be able to break up into a bunch of tables this time because I need to see the experiment happening.

Posted By: Joshua A.C. NewmanIt applies a powerful, rationalist philosophy to focus the faculties of the mind to explore, to understand, and to use new understanding to improve the lives of all those within its reach.

Posted By: Joshua A.C. NewmanMake sure to sign up if you want to play.

I have great hope for private spaceflight programs, but private enterprise is really best at picking up after the hard part's been done by society as a whole. Figuring out how to game it for profit. In the 50s, it wasn't clear if people could get to space. Now that it's clear that they can, private enterprise is saying that NASA, with a tiny fraction of the budget it once had, can't get the job done as efficiently as they can.

I have great faith in Burt Rutan. He's a brilliant engineer and the archetype of the Great American Coot Inventor. He lives on the same stratum as Tesla, Edison, and Franklin. But there are reasons you still, to this day, see NACA and NASA references in all the engineering documents: we got together an an entire society to do something that no one would ever have the courage to do if they had to answer to the stockholders.

The Academy in Human Contact is a society with troubles. It's homogenous and stretching itself to find challenges on a scale it hasn't seen for centuries. It exists in a golden age, and it will encounter societies in all different stages of development, and it won't necessarily know how to deal with them. But whatever its flaws, it knows better than to trust huge, difficult investments to the concerns of short-term gain. It's a society in the dynamic concert of cybernetically enhanced democracy, not a corporate, profit-driven society.

The movie also made me really sad because there isn't any sort of celebration of these brave people like there was during the sixties, or even when I was a kid. I can clearly remember watching shuttle launches in class, and when Challenger went down my school went dead silent and we talked about it in my class.

If you've seen Apollo 13, they have a similar issue there: public interest has waned completely and the astronauts themselves aren't completely sure what they're doing on the mission. They're certainly excited to go, but they're just doing it again, as far as anyone else is concerned.

The Shuttle program is about to end, and without the Orion system, the US will literally have no spacecraft capable of putting a human in orbit. We'll be riding Soyuz for the next couple of decades. It turns out the Soviets got it right first and even managed to make it last.

Not that I think Stalin-era spacecraft design is where we should be headed, but I bet they blew up more rockets than any board of trustees would have allowed.

I'm not glad about that at all.

Because yes, it is.

I look forward to it! Because I bet you flinch before I do.

Dan, was that the one with the state-mandated reincarnation?

Edit: waaaaait... I think I remember a particularly jizz-splattered session... Refresh my memory?

Posted By: Joshua A.C. Newman

Dan, was that the one with the state-mandated reincarnation?

Edit: waaaaait... I think I remember a particularly jizz-splattered session... Refresh my memory?

Shock:Human Contact Dreamation 2010 Preview is at the printer! Hooray!

I've had a few people ask me to sell them copies, old-school, through-the-mail style, so I printed a couple of extras. I don't have many, though, so let me know quick!

OK. That's gonna be in a year, probably.

The Ekumen is the star-spanning culture that fishes around in other people's cultures from Ursula K. LeGuin's novels.