Forty Suns - Blog

  May we present, a conversation starter for your next social event: In the words of Douglas Adams (of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy fame): “Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.” Nearly 50 years ago we humans here on Earth launched what would become our best demonstration of exactly how true that is. In 1977 Voyager 1 set out on its mission to Jupiter and Saturn, before continuing deeper into the solar system and beyond. It’s now out there in interstellar space, covering over 10 miles each second, and after a million more years at that pace (imagine how quickly you could get to the chemist at 10 miles per second), it will be roughly here in our galaxy: 10,000 centuries at 10 miles a second. Of course, even examples like that don’t really help us grasp just how “mind-boggling” big our own galaxy is, let alone the unive...

  Tai’s Take Tai here. I'm always pitching hard to open the next frontier, yet I realize such a future isn't a guarantee of teacups and rainbows. Possibly worse things will come with the good. Cyberpunk lunar gangs? Could happen. Martian warlords? That too. Space is complex, and will bring with it whole new dangers. There’s beauty to simplicity. I get that. A life on the farm, say. A fantasy setting; castles and princesses and noble quests. More wholesome ways of life. Something akin to an Avatar-like existence, for instance, living in harmony with an energizing ecosystem. There are ways to have such an existence right now, right here on Earth. Yet that existence will live within a world of technology. One can, for example, with effort, get off the grid. Lead a simpler life, if so desired. Still, the foundation of that existence will be civilization. What I'm pushing for is more playing fields, not a way of life. Some of us may not want spaceships and laser guns. Some of us...

  The Old Guard & The New Space Age Contents Sanity Checks The Role Of Oversight Fortifying Our Teams A New Era What Needs To Happen? Estimation Of Effort Our Space Future Civilizing The New Wild West ___ One of our strengths as humans is the ability to evaluate the future and make plans. It’s how we have civilizations, train schedules, tiered prizes for ugly sweater contests, elections … You get the idea. We look ahead. We estimate what will be needed. We prepare. Not always perfectly, of course, sometimes quite horribly, but the fact that an Empire State Building exists in New York City – or that a New York City exists at all – would seem to speak to the notion that, mostly, we’re pretty damn good at figuring out how to do stuff. When it comes to space a storm is brewing. One we may not be planning well enough for. A wave we need to get ahead of. Many are aware of it. Many are pushing for action. It’s time to give it the full focus of our attention it deserves. It’s time to a...

  The Moonshot Mindset Contents The Moonshot Mindset Doing It Moving the Needle Responsibility Good Control The Importance of Asking Questions Ethics Greatest Good Trade-Offs > Failure The Turning Point __ We used to live in caves and fear tigers in the bushes. We no longer live in caves and no longer fear tigers in the bushes. Today we live in cities and fear other things. One day we’ll live on entire other worlds and have all-new new fears, but the fact is we’ll be living on other worlds and all our troubles of the present will, in the same way, seem quaint. Progress is part of our existence. The Moonshot Mindset So what are we dealing in? Growth. Big Think. Gains. Pushing the technology envelope. Creating bold futures on all fronts. In short, the “Moonshot Mindset”. You’ve probably heard the term before, coined during the Space Race of the 60s, where it epitomized the thinking behind the literal slew of incredible, impossible, can’t-be-done items on the checklist to get a ...