Endeavour Stage 2, or, Buggering around with massive rocks

For any of my imaginary readers who aren't familiar with the weird ideas of the That Lot, as of some time last Wednesday (starting with a throwaway comment getting out of hand and working up from there), me and a few of my friends have been designing a micro-nation, or rather a sort of Micro-meme-polity, not tied to any particular land. Think something like The Culture, except with an anarcho-democracy instead of the Minds, a much more open approach to morphological freedom, and an approach to external contact more similar to the Zetetic Elench (if you haven't read Excession, what I'm on about is that instead of buggering about with other people's cultures to make them 'better', we let them influence us a bit, learn from them). It's been named The Endeavour.

None of us can quite work out whether we're taking this seriously or not, but in any case it makes a wonderful excuse for siliness, thought-experiments about land which might teach us a few planning skills, writing up strange legal documents, giving each other silly titles (with associated Special Hats) and some fun speculative fiction about what might happen if the Endeavour was let loose on... well... anything bigger than a feild or two.

Plans for actual land for the Endeavour range from fairly feasable ideas of getting a few obscure feilds somewhere and setting up an earthship village, to my personal favourite "For when we've got a bit firmer footing" plan of colonising a big ****off asteroid. I've personally taken it upon myself to try and work out how we could go about actually doing this (with us somehow actually getting into space being a given). And I thought it might make for a fun blog post or two (maybe some stuff about proposed Endeavour demarchy systems, gift and barter economies, and conlangs later too... a theoretical entity like this can make for quite a fun sub-plex)

I've only recently taken a real interest in asteroid habitats (as opposed to slighly more ambitious constructs like Niven rings and Banks orbitals) when I heard about Cole Bubbles, which have an aesthetic I'm very fond of.

Essentailly, back in the early 1960's, when Men were Men and Aerospace Engineers dreamt BIG, Dandridge Cole of Martin Co. suggested making artificial-g colonies from nickel-iron astorids. Process was simple: drill a hole to the center of the asteroid, pumo a boatload of water in, then seal up. Then, using truly huge mirrors, refelct sunlight onto the asteroid until it nearly melted. The water inside would boil, and what with the nickel-iron alloy being soft and malleable, it'd blow up like a balloon... When i read about he concept and saw some of the rather ispiring illustrations, especially the ones featuring the landscaped interior. Strikes a personal vibe as well since it looks a bit like a scottish glacial valley from the 'gound'

As wonderful as the idea is... I'm skeptical of it in its simplest form. The steam would find a way to vent out of the rock waaay before the iron got soft enough to start expanding through pressure. It could potentially be done with some ridiculously intense magnetic manipulation, but it would take far too long. Put it in the 'if we discover force-feilds' pile for later.

Personally, I think a better idea would be to hollow out an existing really big C- or M- type asteroid with a rougly spindly shape, like 216 Kleopatra and terraform the inside surfaces once you have a large hollow cylinder. This would take a lot longer for the initial mining but does reduce the need for finding some way to contain superheated steam from rushing out of a huge rock... you could possibly even combine the two methods with an M-type by expanding some sections and mining others depending on the consistancy of different materials.

Later in this blog or possibly subsequent edits of this post, theres a lot of material that will be useful in plannig the terraforming process that I've downloaded but have yet to read. Expect:

Spin dynamics vs. human adaptability

Atmosphere

Laying down the ground

Water cycles

The Luminaire (artificial sunlight)

Dwellings, transport, etc.

Fun! (detailing the sorts of Wild Hoopy Stuff one can get up to in one of these habitats... this is the Endeavour, after all)

Corpses (a cheery title)

I choose this as my first musing because I've been thinking about it for most of the day and beacuse it's the subject I've chosen for my new college main project (we were given the subject of "The Living and the Dead" and they'll see what we do with it, basically).

Corpses, essentially, are animal organisms whose nervous systems are too badly damaged (esp. The brain). We label them as 'dead', though in fact this is so far from the truth that it boggles me... Anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of biology knows that a corpse is teeming with life, continues to be part of the biosphere (anyone who's read John Stewart Collis' "The Triumph of the Tree" may remember a rather illuminating bit about a cow's relationship to it's feild), indeed, eventually becomes part of the medium for new bodies with fully functioning nervous systems, a sort of materialisic reincarnation. Coral reefs could be described as remarkable biuldings made up of corpses (perhaps eerily paralleled by certian architectural oddities such as this chandeleir in the czech republic). An idea for a quick, simple, possibly slightly cheapskate artwork would be to scoop some soil up from a local forest and label it 'graveyard earth'. It's bound to be true, eventually.

Another thing I've always loved seeing are the corpses of towns and cities, particularly the wonderfully evocative photos of Pripyat near chernobyl, with it's moss growing over people's abandoned posessions, its wonderful un-lived-in-ness that's so utterly alien to a city, it's surprisingly sucessful animal population, and - a find so wonderfully strange that it tickles my xenobiology branches - an adapted fungus scraped out of the reactor that eats gamma radiation. Also of note are some of the ghost towns of america (at least the ones where there's enough plantlife to acheive the metaphor I've been looking for in the project). These are relevant as the corpses of cities - It can no longer support it's nervous system (humans) but thousands of different strains of life invande and grow out of the crevices to slowly bring it back to the earth.

A new polyp is formed

Greetings, salutations, whatever, you currently-non-existant people.

This blag is, essentially, a place for me to try and compose my observations, impressions and speculations on the nature of everything into a form that might be roughly legible to other people - my normal way of expressing my ideas is by the use of very scribbly and slapdash mindmaps with quick fineliner sketches and branches leading off to single words like "BRILLIANT!" or references to people's blogs, classical poetry, obscure books, and anything else that I think plexes well with my current multiple streams of thought - and possibly even induce people to comment with corrections, suggestions of things they've read that I haven't, or even general opinions (though that'll probably come later when I've actually, y'know, written stuff).

I'll be endeavouring to make as many links to relevant online sources as I can per post, see if I can commuincate the plexing process sufficiently, feel free to suggest new branches.

And for any imaginary readers wonderign about the blog adress, yes, effervescent is my word of the day.