-Caveat Lector- ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 24 Sep 1999 12:39:24 -0700 (PDT) From: Franklin Wayne Poley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [FUTURE-CITIES] Mars City...and the Social Class War. From: Franklin Wayne Poley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> A political after-thought on this is that technolords along with high finance people may already be creating a "Mars City" within each nation already. So much of high technology is "classified" because of its military implications that they could already have Mars City designs on the drawing board. You can do a lot with the tens of billions or more which even the best of public accountants have no accounting for! FWP. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- The material below is from Chapter 13 of "Everyday Robots". In order to understand the full argument as to why Mars City can be built now and is within current technologies and budgets, the reader should also examine the rest of Chapter 13 (44 k.) and Chapter 12 (Roboeconomics/Robopolitics), which is 37 k. FWP. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Preceding units clipped http://www.nas.com/venus Jacque Fresco's Florida-based Venus Project provides a 48 minute video on highly automated or totally automated Future Cities. The economic model is called "resource-based economics" which is a good way of expressing the idea that intelligent machines can take raw materials or starting materials and then process them, step-by-step into all of the amenities of life. Fresco is one of the great visionaries of our time, rightly described by the editors of "The Futurist" magazine as in a league with people like Buckminster Fuller. http://www.freedomship.com Richard Nixon's "Freedom Ship" captures the imagination as a giant city at sea for 100,000 people which would, I expect be a sovereign state in its own right. Would it be accepted for UN membership? Perhaps if it were to purchase an island or claim a "near-island" (submerged island) in international waters, it would be accepted. Freedom Ship is having some success in pre-selling homes onboard. http://www.new-utopia.org/new.html Lazarus Long's project, despite the unlikely name (Utopia) is also having some success in getting people to invest their money in a project to develop a submerged "near-island" in the Caribbean. Also unlikely is the fact that this is planned to be a principality with "Prince Lazarus" as its supreme leader. Prince Lazarus is serious about having New Utopia accepted for UN membership. He may succeed, allowing that there are many different choices made by people as to their "way of life". http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/~bat/sea-city.html This is another City-at-Sea project, in this case for 30,000. Another interesting feature is that it intends to maximize automation. While automation is not a focus in projects like New Utopia, it is unlikely that such a factor could be ignored in this era. Investors will bring it up. Sea-City could do very well if some of the automation experts who abound in UK should decide to back it. http://www.ntticc.or.jp/special/utopia/model/prototype/scheme1_e.html Here we have a proposal for a high tech model habitat with the backing of a well recognized university (Waseda University). Despite another unlikely name, "Mirage City", this is a project to watch. http://www.juga.com This project may signal the way planning for future cities and even new sovereign nations will be done soon. The web site proposes to organize 5,000,000 people by Internet and when that is accomplished apply for UN membership. So far they have almost 5,000 citizens signed up. There are other projects along these lines and to keep up to date I would suggest subscribing to [EMAIL PROTECTED] There is every reason to expect substantial progress somewhere on the planet in planning such cities and when that happens it will usher in a dramatic new era in global designing and planning of new cities and states. The world population is after all expected to keep increasing at 100,000,000/year for at least a few decades and most of that will accrue to cities. Miscellaneous thoughts and other new city projects can be found at http://users.uniserve.com/~culturex. For example there is a link to the new city, Cyberjaya being planned and built by the Malaysian Government. Though such a government-backed high technology city is likely to be cautious and conservative, it is almost certain to carry through to completion. And yes, those words are "cautious and conservative" which means there is a large technological lag between what technology can do within current technologies and budgets and what governments and the plutocracy which controls governments will allow in the public domain. With the "Mars City" proposal below there are no such inhibitions. Mars City Let me propose a city plan for a Future City on Mars. However, we will build it first on planet Earth and then relocate it to Mars. Mars City will be a contribution to earthling culture because it will give the inhabitants of this planet an opportunity to learn how a habitat approaching total automation impacts upon Earth civilization. As Wendy B. Rauch-Hindin writes in "A Guide to Commercial Artificial Intelligence" (1988), "...even though the experts know what to do, they cannot explain how to handle a problem unless they are immersed in the actual situation. What knowledge engineers must do, then, is live through various situations with their experts over a long period of time." (p. 105). Even experts on community planning, sociology, anthropology etc. cannot predict very well how humans will adapt to total automation as explained in Chapter 12. Having such experts as well as knowledge engineers and programmers living in Mars City would give the planners a close-up view of their creation and a chance to reprogram it as required. The name "Mars City" would convey quickly that this project is very much for pioneers; that it is radical enough to be considered as "out of this world". For Earthlings it provides important information on where its civilization is headed in C21, more likely in the first half than the second. For prospective Martians it opens the door to a "brave new world". Though its first destination would be Mars, it could relocate to many moons and planets and it could do as well in the vacuum of space, eg in orbit about various solar bodies. Mars City would of course constitute a sovereign city state on Earth, commanding respect for various reasons, not the least of them being that it could lob asteroid cannon balls onto Earth at any time and utterly obliterate this planet. We don't call it "Mars" City for nothing! Though its initial features of "Advanced Automation for Space Missions" (title of the 1980 NASA Study described above) may seem primitive compared to later features as it evolves or self-improves, remember that Robert Goddard, the "Father of American Rocketry" was launching small hobbyist-sized rockets from farmers' fields in the mid 1920's. Only 40 years later it was possible to send men to the Moon. Once the Mars City evolving/self-improving programs 'take off', the evolution of this city will proceed at a blinding rate. As science fiction-like as Mars City may sound, there is nothing to prevent, let us say 1,000,000 people from building it as the city centre for a new city-state on Earth. If Mars City can hold only 10,000 as is the case for NASA's SP-413, then the 10,000 could be chosen by a lottery and when it returns to Earth another 10,000 could set out. Mars City would be one mile in diameter as is SP-413. It would have a Fuller dome in the centre of the toroid, perhaps 1,000-1,500 feet high. It would be...a flying saucer. If the typical citizens of North America do not build such a space city they may find that the 500 or so billionaire families of the planet have done so. Perhaps they will plan for "The Ultimate Migration" surreptitiously. And those typical citizens will some day be watching the skies to discover "flying saucers" and other UFO's which they will of course believe to have come from Mars or some other exotic place. Mssrs. Rockefeller, Rothschild et al. will be laughing from the command bridge of their flying saucer and to entertain the bourgeouisie they may send out small grey chimeras from the mother ship, a product of their genetic engineering labs. The Mars City Project should at least kindle the imagination. Given that it is reasonable to plan Mars City such that it will have more economic power and more military power than all nations on Earth combined, it should also appeal to the imaginative. Indeed, one has to ask if there would be any point to Mars City, ca. 2050 let us say, undertaking trade and commerce with the Earthlings. Earth would have nothing that Mars City could not create by itself. Warm air lift plus laser boosting, if Mirabo's technology advances soon enough, would take Mars City to 20-30 miles and from there it could leave Earth by laser boosting (again if the technology is advanced far enough at the time) and/or by using conventional rockets. The entire space city of 1,000,000 would be maximally automated. Mars City would be designed for space mining and for sending electricity back to Earth in order to generate revenue. Expectedly it would yield an awesome return on investment to be shared by all 1,000,000 citizens of Greater Mars City. Is 1,000,000 a reasonable number? Consider that a New Scientist report of Feb. 24, 1996 (p. 46) tells us that a Japanese survey revealed 1,000,000 people would pay $10,000 each just to take a single flight into space. The early success of http://www.juga.com in organizing a population for a new nation by Internet tells us Mars City could also be planned this way. Early flights might be totally unmanned as a safety precaution. Mars City would have the capacity to function as an autonomous, learning and teaching robot, more intelligent than any human on Earth. Indeed, if Peter Cochrane, Head of Reseach at British Telecom's AI Team is correct, we can expect a computer as powerful as a human brain by 2015. (Discovery Television, Feb. 16, 1999). The super-intelligent Mars City will be able to travel about the Solar System and tell Earthlings everything they need to know about it. Thus even the multi-trillions of dollars in revenue from mining and energy extraction pale in comparison to what Mars City will be able to teach humanity in the longer term. Selling "intelligence" to Earthlings could be its major source of revenue. Some people will argue that Mars City is itself a living creature meeting the criteria of a new life form as discussed in Chapter 6. Thus the question is, Given that this living, autonomous robot can learn and teach as well, what can it learn and teach NOW? How far and how fast can it progress, self-improve, evolve, on its mission of learning and teaching? (copyright, 1999, by Franklin Wayne Poley) Next and final chapter on learning and teaching machines. --------------------------- ONElist Sponsor ---------------------------- Share your special moments with family and friends- send PHOTO Greetings at Zing.com! Use your own photos or choose from a variety of funny, cute, cool and animated cards. <a href=" http://clickme.onelist.com/ad/zing11 ">Click Here</a> ------------------------------------------------------------------------ *** Space has unlimited carrying capacity *** DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! 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