,
4 tweets,
2 min read
Read on Twitter
1/Since Elon Musk named his barges after Starship/Minds of the Culture series I am reading the series. The ideas of post-scarcity using space resources & artificial intelligence/robotics are right on, but I do NOT like the Orbitals people live in.(Credit: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_(…) 
2/ In the stories these orbitals are as wide in the short direction as the diameter of a planet so they hold vastly more people than a planet. Architects work with the AIs to design their geology: mountains, rivers... I didn’t realize I would dislike it until I read the stories.
3/ While reading about people living in these engineered worlds I kept feeling an entire dimension of our existence was missing. I realized it is the wildness of our planet. We get to discover it, and we fight to survive in it, but we didn’t make it and we don’t control it.
4/4 Maybe not everyone would feel this way, but I think I would. I would rather send robots into the galaxy to terraform planets & start complex ecosystems with a huge element of chance so when we arrive we won’t know exactly what we’re getting into. Maybe there will be dragons!
