Cognitive Labs

It's another milestone for manned spaceflight. Austin, Tx based Game designer Richard Garriot, who started by creating numerous popular text-based role playing games (RPGs) back in the days of peek and poke, gosub, etc. blasted into space from the Baikonur Cosmodrome carrying digitized DNA of a representative sample of the human species, including Stephen Hawking (brain), as well as a gladiator (brawn), and Stephen Colbert, in a session that made lots of money for Space Adventures. There once was a mostly text-based game for C-64 (Mission Apollo, I think it was called) that required you to guess at a variety of launch parameters - when you made a reasonable estimate, a white-noise laced voice murmured 'proceed to telemetry' - it was back of the napkin physics, and when you made it through the hurdles, there was launch, followed by a retro-burn, attitude adjustment, lunar descent, and then return for a splashdown.

This is the first time a game developer has traversed near earth orbit, entering the realm of the mythical archons of the gnostic cosmology, the machine-like watchers or the celestial playground of Inktomi, the Lakota trickster. Hopefully some really creative and far out stuff will be the result of the experiment.

One day, neuroenhanced pilots will take ships (or electromagnetically charged consciousness packets) to the stars and beyond.



Refer to astrophysicist & novelist David Brin's Startide Rising where cognitively boosted cetaceans (dolphins, in this case) team up with boosted primates (hmm, Ashford did a lot of work with primate cognition at UCLA) and a few humans to explore the galaxy. Brin's book was a Nebula winner back in the 80's. I remember reading it at Berkeley in lieu of taking notes during a boring lecture. Like other slackers, I subscribed to the class note reprint service (warning: never, ever assume the service is a proxy for your own note-taking skill). Google's Sergey Brin was on hand for Garriot's departure.

Another one in a slightly different vein is Norman Spinrad's Void Captains Tale, where the human orgasm (specifically, of women) when neurolinked to the star drive creates a "jump circuit" that blasts a ship several light years ahead of its past position, like a needle through folded fabric rather than traversing the endless felt-like contours of interstellar space.

Labels: archons, brin, garriot, Google, inktomi, rpg, spinrad, startide