I grew up watching Star Trek and the race to our Moon. Both suggested an optimistic view of our future. Like today, that era had its challenges and the path to this attractive future were not clear. For a long time, I thought this path was blocked by lack of technical progress. Hundred of people have reached orbit, and that’s truly great. But I wasn’t getting beyond Earth without a space elevator or the ability to cancel gravity. And I wasn’t traveling to the stars without warp engines. I couldn’t come up with a way to advance these technologies so became a spectator to great science projects of our time like Hubble and Chandra and sequencing DNA and probes exploring Mars.
Being a crew member on a starship was not possible, but I still thought about it. I always imagined being part of the science team. I would spend my career trying to understand the cultures and physical phenomena we encountered. Maybe translating ancient texts of a civilization to understand its culture evolution. Maybe analyzing data from a probe sent between a pair of orbiting blackholes to better understand the formation of gravity waves. Was I just born a couple hundred years too soon? Sigh.
Since I can program a computer I created some programs to display and analyze scientific data. Back in the day, anybody could buy CDs from a NASA website with data from various probes. Individual file size was typically several megabytes and each would hold data for a region of a planet or moon a couple dozen miles square. I wrote a simple program to read one file after another, converting each data file into a huge image and displaying it for ten seconds. When my order from NASA arrived I’d microwave a bag of extra-butter popcorn, pop the CD in the drive and watch other worlds go by. That was pretty amazing.
Eventually I came up with what I thought was a big revelation. And here it is: you do not and I do not need warp drive or any other revolutionary technological breakthroughs to spend part of our time exploring the universe. We already have lots of data on planets, moons, black holes, ancient civilizations. For anything you’re interested in we already have so much data. Even in a universe with warp speed it still takes time to travel between stars. What does the science team of a starship do during the trip from, say Alpha Centauri to Sirius? They analyze data from where they just left and write-up their most interesting findings. Do they download data files from the ship’s servers onto local workstations, manipulate it via 2D and 3D displays issuing commands with a keyboard and mouse? Do they have meetings to talk about it build simulations to better understand it? It’s hard to imagine any other way they might work. But we can do all that now. Some small number of scientists are already living this life of exploration. Why aren’t more people spending time exploring the universe, exploring other human cultures? Some are. Have you heard of Zooniverse, it brings together a million people. Search for citizen science in your neighborhood and you’ll find something. But maybe some haven’t realized they can be part of the great scientific projects of today.
My insight regarding warp drive and an optimistic future wasn’t original. My purpose behind this post is to say we need a name for this optimistic future. Things with names are easier to talk about and can be more clearly imagined. It’s also important that the names we use aren’t a large company’s trademarked intellectual property. I suggest we call this optimistic future “starville”. At one level it’s a blend/portmanteau of Star Trek and The Orville. From another perspective it recognizes are future is among the stars. People have continuously living in orbit for over 20 years, soon we’ll have a Moon base. We are still Earthlings, but not as much as we use to be. The “ville” in starville also refers to a village, reminding us of the continued importance of community as we venture away from Earth. It add a neighborly vibe to the cold vacuum of space.
Thanks to Adam Mastroianni and his post An invitation to a secret society. It helped me stop procrastinating and write this post.