neurofuture
Oct 12, 10:08 pm
From: neurofuture
Date: Sun, 12 Oct 2008 22:08:54 -0700 (PDT)
Local: Sun, Oct 12 2008 10:08 pm
Subject: [Cognitive Labs] Game Developer Blasts Off with Digital DNA
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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 Baiknour 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 novelist David Brin's Startide Rising where
cognitively boosted cetaceans (dolphins, in this case) team up with
boosted primates (hmm, Asford 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
Sergei 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.
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Posted By neurofuture to Cognitive Labs at 10/12/2008 09:01:00 PM
