Saturday 27 May 2000

Pic of the day: OK, who let those Sims into my neighborhood?

Immigrants from ImagiNation

Normally I wake up earlier on Saturdays. But today I just slept and slept and slept till 11 and then some. Eventually soiled myself with semen like a teenboy. Eeeww! I guess I wasn't built to get up at this time, after all. I had dreamt about shopping, btw. Another detail about the shopping dream: I was shopping in the afternoon, and the people who worked in the shop were public servants who worked there after their offices were closed, to add a couple hours of extra income to their meager earnings. Heh. See how everything comes together... in dreams.

With my breakfast yoghurt, I read Al Schroeder's daily Nova Notes for May 26. Here he makes a creative leap, expressing something that I have felt before but never quite put the right words on. "An illegal immigrant from a fantasy, somehow lost in reality." Actually, I don't agree with the illegal thing. I think it is quite all right for reality to have a certain influx of people from the land of imagi-nation. After all, it is a fair exchange. Some imaginary people are so dreadfully mundane that they could be your neighbor's twin. So it just makes sense that some others of us feel more at home in fantasy than in reality.

***

But what fantasy? That's harder to pinpoint. One option would be a science fiction story. I know that the sight of space touches me very strongly, emotionally. Seeing pictures of Earth hanging in the void among the countless pinpoints of light, the stars unblinking in the trackless black sea ... it gives me a gutwrenching feeling that I can only call homesickness. Irrationally I feel that this is where I belong, this is where I would want to return at least once before I die. Fat chance, I know. We should have glittering cities in orbit now, in the magical year 2000. But we failed. I'll have to live with that, and eventually die with it.

A year or so ago I was talking with a comic book dealer in town, and we happened to talk about the international space station and such. And the guy, who is about my own age, confessed that he was dreaming of spending the end of his life in space. Just like I. We'd wish to retire to a space station when the end drew near, to live out our last days in the serene vastness of space. I wonder if this is something that follows our generation, or if it is just a few scattered freaks?

Of course, I'd prefer not to die at all, at least not for some million years, but rather travel from star to star, from planet to planet, and see all the countless wonders. I do not really believe that our planet is the only one with beauty, though it is very special. But already the immense canyons of Mars hints that other planets have their own wonders; and there must be millions and millions of them just in our own galaxy. Smaller, larger, hotter, colder, all different, all unique. It is hard to say how many of them hold life or equivalent self-regulating processes; probably only a small fraction. Even so ...

Actually I would not need to go there myself. I'm not a very "physical" person who need to touch and feel and smell things for them to be real to me. I don't travel much here on Earth. Even so, I feel that many of its wonders are familiar to me. From seeing them on pictures, but also from my fellow humans describing them. As a kid I loved travel stories. We had one of those books from Readers Digest, I'm pretty sure it was them, with people telling and showing photos of various places: A riverboat on Mississippi, a large Chinese dinner, the arctic landscape of Spitsbergen.

Life is not only short, it is also very narrow. Sharing in others' experiences broadens it.

***

While our colonization of space has been flagging these last decades, we have unexpectedly settled another frontier: Cyberspace. Computing power has been growing steadily - actually faster and faster - and is expected to do so until ca 2008, when the laws of physics stop the shrinking of silicon components. At that point, alternative technologies will be necessary to provide more bang for the buck. But within then, a lot more will be possible. Unless someone does something incredibly stupid with nuclear or biological weapons, we in the rich world should have supercomputers at home by then. And I have an idea of how to use them.

"We create worlds". This was the slogan of Origin, a company making computer programs. They were later swallowed by Electronic Arts, and fans claim this was not a good sign. Be that as it may, some of the Origin games in their golden age were awesome. The technology was rather primitive compared to what we have today, but still games like Wing Commander were very immersive. They also released fantasy games like the cult hit Ultima series. In another corner of the computer game field, Microprose created variations of our world for their strategic simulations like Civilization and Railroad Tycoon, and simulated terrain for their flight simulators.

What I would like to see is software that can take the basic parameters for an earthlike planet, and make one. We are not gods, and even less so are our computers. Still, it would be interesting to have our software create an alternate Earth, for instance. Take what we know about our world as it was 65 million years ago, and then evolve it. Put in a small change in plate tectonics, so the continents don't align just right. Calculate climate, effects on life etc. I'd be happy to have a computer churn away at such a work for days or weeks, to create a detailed alternate world for me to explore. But there is more. More people.

***

With the coming of reasonably fast Internet access, we have got online multiplayer games like Ultima Online, Asheron's Call, and The Realm. We have also got attempts at virtual worlds without games, like ActiveWorlds. They are all pretty cartoonish by now, but this could change. With time, we may share virtual worlds so detailed that we can count the leaves on their trees. (Not that I tend to do that much in real life.) Worlds strikingly similar to our own, or strikingly different, or something inbetween.

And whatever dream we feel we belong to - be it Star Trek or the Hyborean Age - there would probably be others who felt the same way. Refugees from reality. Actually this return to imagination started many years ago, with the coming of the MUDs, text-based multiplayer games for networks. There are hundreds, probably thousands of them on the Internet now. They pop into existence and pop back to oblivion virtually by the day. But in the future, "virtual worlds" could be a pretty common meeting place, used for anything from business meetings to carnal flirtation. Or just to explore ourselves and our own imagination.

Not that we aren't doing just that already... :)