Ok, now, as I wrote this in 2108, there is quite a difference between what people imagine and desire regarding to future cities than it was a century ago, when you bots would read me. But anyway, I want to write about this, as I’m confined to my bed at home, between sessions of physical therapy. Before talking about the cities planned to be build by 2150, let me talk a little about the past.

There are two main kind of cities right now in the world. The obsolete type – sprawling, radial cities, which can be found especially in southern Europe (in the Northern part they didn’t manage to survive), some parts of Africa, South America and, of course, Australia. They’re still the majority worldwide, even if in ice-covered Europe and Asia, as well as in North America, they are not.

And there’s a reason for this. Not only the weather, which was terrible 40-10 years ago (but slowly started to warm up in the last 8 years), with ice and snowstorms engulfing much of the Northern continents for 7-8 months each year. But also an economic and ecologic reason.

Talking about the weather first. In the ’30s, the global warming heated the continents so much,  that carbon-neutral cities like this one (eventually built in 2020 but on a smaller scale in Dubai, it still exists but it’s a slump) started to be interesting. They provided shelter from the heat, nice internal transportation (getting rid of cars), a controlled climate and such. There were dozens of them built in America, Europe and Asia, many of them accessible only for the elites.

But as the ’50s came, with their huge storms, food shortages and icy-cold weather (due to the Atlantic current reversal and a host of other climateric changes), interest for this kind of cities increased 100%. However, for entirely different reasons than before. Before people wanted to feel cool and be protected from the scorching sun, afterwards they flocked to such projects to be protected from the snow storms and icy weahter. As the ’70s came, with 5-6-month winters, a short spring in July and August, and devastating freezes in September, millions died. The horrible 8th decade saw the first underground cities, with huge domes above and, looking retrospectively, this kind of investment was the most unfortunate of all.

Those cities have all sorts of problems right now, starting with the way that they were built. The city in which I live is aging beautifully, though. It’s built 80% on the surface, with two concentric built areas, surrounding a huge 3-miles-radius park, with a space between the inner building and the outer building (two concentric circles with a 3 miles, respectively 3.2 miles radius each). That inner courtyard is covered and has a controlled climate, as well as all the amenities of a big city.

I live in a huge mall with big condos and terraces on the outside, if you want. And that type of city managed to solve most of the XXI-st Century first half problems. Transport is integrated through elevators and people carriers, the city itself being connected through high speed trains and electric cabs to the cities in the vicinity. No traffic jams, no pollution, no noise.

But I digress. Now that the planet heats up again, nobody pretty knows what to expect. The new generation is eager to have individual homes with gardens, again, and the politicians are pushing for this return to the original way of housing. I suspect they have big real estate interests, but the problem we all face is: if in the next 20-30 years we manage to bring back the climate to a more moderate one, would the return to original individual housing ruin all that we accomplished?

I mean, OK, people are fed up with living in ‘hives’, but you couldn’t possibly house 9 billion people in sprawling cities like in the past. Look at South-America, were they didn’t manage to salvage cities like Mexico and Buenos Aires when the big storms of the ‘50es came. It will simply not work.

There’s currently a debate to make a compromise. That is, to build not huge cities with hexagonal or circular 30-50 stories high buildings encompassing huge parks, but smaller, similarly shaped cities, connected through a network of transport. These would have only 2-3 stories-high buildings, would encompass only 0.2-0.3 miles radius parks, and would ensure that everybody feels like they would own an individual home and garden.

My main objection to this is that the land for agriculture is scarce right now due to the harsh climate, and that the hive structure of current cities really allowed for the remaining land to be rationally cultivated.

I think we’ll wait and see. I’m going for a stroll in the park right now, so… (a virtual one, of course, I can connect through the ksphere for limited amount of times now…)

Hehehe…

I’m still here if you’re wondering, but that’s the first day when I can communicate with the outside world. And because my little project here (i.e. communicating with the past) is accessible only through my home link, I had to take extraordinary precautions to do it. You need a special clearance for this, and I don’t have it (at least not in my state).

Long story made short: two days after I wrote the text below I suffered a severe brain reset, because the new neuropathways that the scansurgeons made were offset by a mere 0.0002 millimeters. Enough to plunge me into coma.

In order to fix that, they had to put me in a device that lowers body temperature and atmospheric pressure, and to slowly and painstakingly work their way through my brain with a superscanner. Now that’s very nice that my insurance covers this, because otherwise I would have been pretty dead by now. Ok, you could still meet me in the Sim, but for me it would have been all buh-bye…

Two months passed, time in which my brain was maintained into a state of semi-consciousness, without acces to the damaged part of my memory. They also had to regenerate parts of my brain that regulate different organs in my body, and there’s why I was forced to sit into that device all summer long.

One week ago I started functioning on my own, at 100%, but a series of supplementary tests were to be made in order to ensure I was fine this time. And yes, I fully recovered this time.

If you think that’s amazing, you’re damn right. I had access to the most advanced medical technology that’s available today. Sadly, not all people can afford this, even today. And there’s a single reason for that: there are only 20-30.000 such units in the world. They’re hugely expensive. And they require years of training for the surgeons and medical staff operating them. This comes with a tremendous cost.

OK, now I’ll just keep up with my kinetotherapy and my gym excercises, and then start to resume work.

Hope I’ll be able to write at least once a week, at least until the snow comes… We’re in august now, so we have only 2 weeks left for the first snow storms to come here in southern Europe… 2108 is a blast, I tell ya!

Yep, I was supposed to write ‘tomorrow’, that is 20 days ago, but a failed docking at the Mars departure station ended in three deaths and 34 people hospitalized, one of the lucky ones being me. It seems that I slept for 14 days, I started to feed normally just yesterday and today they finally removed all the things that prevented me from writing. Or speaking, for that matter.

So, no Mars race for me this year. Instead, it seems I’ll get 340.000 credits in damage compensation, at least this is what my lawyer is promising. Ah well, this means rather only 240.000 credits will land in my (virtual) pockets, but still…

I had a big head trauma, don’t ask me what’s it’s name, I cannot access the KS and I’m not so good at manual search through the sphere. They kept me into one of these huge metal tubes and slowly recreated parts of my tissue (brain included) from the scans I was inspired enough to make previous to this trip. This way, I lost only 4 days of my memory, which still sucks, but hey, I had a 3cm hole in my head and the skull had a 6cm fracture, lots of blood loss and more than 20 minutes in clinical death…

The three guys that died were mechanics on board of the shuttle, and their families will have to settle for their online counterparts on the Sphere Sim, as their bodies were destroyed in the fire that ensued. Unfortunately, there is still no technology available to insert the memory stocked in brain scans into a clone. That is… the technology exists, but it’s still forbidden to raise clones just to implant them with another people’s memory. And even if some droids using human memory are currently experimented with, they showed a disposition to suicide that doesn’t works fine. So, the Sphere Sim (or the Simulation) is all that works for everybody. Yet.

OK, I still have two painful recovery weeks before me, so I’ll try to write from time to time here, but I don’t know how often I’ll be able to. They still have to check and re-check that my brain was reconstructed at 100% as it was before the accident.

Big day tomorrow, as I start preparations for the race on Mars. It’s the fourth championship, it’s held every four years, and I promised myself I’ll not miss it this time. Ok, not only I have to write about it, as it’s my business, but I also have to take this trip – it would be my first time on Mars.

Two words about this race: it’s taking place within a controlled environment, under a huge plastic canopy that blocks harmful radiation, and ensures the same breathing conditions that would normally exist at 6000m altitude (near Everest highs). So the competitors are dressed only in slim space suits, allowing them a normal pressure and everything.

Of course, now and then an accident happens – they compete in SATVs, so they bump into each other at times – and the poor guy depressurizes, but they’re pretty quick to lend assistance, so nobody actually died until now.

The real nice thing is to see the Martian soil, to go nuts in those all-terrain vehicles and to make those huge jumps in the ‘air’. As a reporter, you get a place very near the action, and as a bonus you get a free ride, and such.

Can’t wait for it. I received the invitation at the last moment, so…

OTOH, I have to prepare for three long months, and for SIX consecutive days of acceleration. I’m going to take the train to Berlin, then the high-speedo to Kazakhstan, where all of EurAsia is doing it’s space launching, and then to the Mars departure station, located in a Lagrange point.

I remember the times when people had to travel almost two years to reach Mars… on liquid fuel rockets… Lol.

Now it’s all about electro-magnets and huge rings and passing through (a lot of) them, adding 1G every time, until we reach 62.000km/h(39.000mph), our cruising speed. 85 days later, we’re there.

But more on this, tomorrow, after I dock to the intermediary station.

Me happy

It seems the three-day trip I made to the Moon (is it the 16th? nah, more like the 17th) put some ideas in order in my busy head.

This, or the complete disconnection from the Sphere is really making me think clearer. Without all these productivity killers… I mean, yes, I can always put myself in disconnected mode, even if I’m in, but oh, all this silence… is for REAL.

I’m feeling like a Reclusive, lol. Yes, imagine that: in the 22nd century, there are still people who want to live without any connection to the central knowledge of the entire humankind. Can you believe that?

But I digress. I was thinking at the way geographic (or, in this case, spatial) isolation can mold the human spirit. There are some 16-18 million Reclusives on Earth, so only 0.2% of the entire human population here. But on the Moon, there are an amazing 15-16.000 who decided to disconnect themselves mentally from the KS, and are actually only accesing it manually and visually, the good old fashion way. A good 2% of the entire Moon population, that is!

I was forced to do so some three days ago, and if my nausea slowly fades away, I’m still feeling blind. But what kills me the most is the hunger for information. Having to input queries manually and to browse on the KS visually is such a waste of time.

That should help me understand these guys, and it seems I will be forced to do more Earth-Moon trips soon, so…

(maybe I’ll wear a robe too )

Now, please someone tell me why on Earth (lol) they still want face-to-face meetings for trivial business reasons? I mean, what can you possibly solve in a person-to-person meeting, when you can connect through the Sphere and get done with it?

Grr.

For a South-Eastern European like me, having a 2-day meeting on the Moon means traveling 5 hours to Kazakhstan by train, taking one of those awfully old shuttles to the space stations, keeping your breath at 5G for 12 minutes in that EM crap, then and then waiting a painfully dull 3 hours to embark into the Moon shuttle. And then for another 13 hours you see nothing else than space, because the wise guys didn’t include force field windows for the business shuttles. Not to mention the time you lose for the check-in.

I mean, come on, 22 full hours lost en-route, just to have a 2 hour meeting? And then all the way back?!

Nevertheless, the meeting was successful, and I do hope I’ll be able to announce in a short time something really exciting

Going back to bed, the space lag is really killing me.

ps. ah, and doing this in mid-winter, i.e. April, is really a pain in the ass! Trust me!

Everybody thinks ‘it can’t happen to me’, right?

Well, this afternoon I received a message from my doctor telling me to disconnect from the KS for at least 2 days. It seems that my sinaptic links to the Sphere are the main cause for the nausea I felt all these days.

7-8% of the population still has this illness, especially those who use the KS at least 8 hours per day. Like me.

Now, it’s the first time since I was 7 that I have to actually disconnect completely from the KS and I’m feeling like a blind man! O.K, I have a mobile with me but…

What I’ll miss the most is the ability to communicate instantly with my friends. They actually won’t belive my ‘disconnected’ state. Yep. Will have to do it verbally and manually.

In order to proceed with my simulation, I started an account on Twitter. You can follow it here: https://twitter.com/futureguy

Starting to follow some bots now… And going to bed.

I was just strolling on the old belts below the Southern part of the city, when a defective airlock opened and the outside cold air just blew in. Cold, humid and fresh. And some snowflakes too.

It’s -9′ Celsius (15 Fahrenheit) outside, it’s the first day of April and almost all of Southern Europe is still under a 3cm (1 inch) blanket of snow. Those living in the open city are pretty miserable right now, but here everything is cosy and warm.

Singing ‘Why so cold’ for myself in the elevators. It’s an old Code ABC song, but it suits just fine. Hope this year the summer will last at least one month. I want to be able to visit New Cleveland when they hatch open through the snow in July.

Taking the train now to there from Bruxelles via Moscow and Anchorage and Seattle is just not worth it. 2000 credits for what? Seeing the same domed city like here? Nah.

Will wait for the summer… It’s faster and cheaper by spaceplane.

Oh, and just to make you an image of what life’s like in 2108… the wise guys from Mars Mining are in the 7th day of strike.

I just don’t get it. These guys are like 2.10m high, excellent health, excellent food, excellent opportunities, they start their life with 30.000 credits, not with 10.000 like the rest of us (well, that is… like the rest of children nowadays…). A standard 33 year-old Mars miner already has some 350.000 credits, and he can travel to the Moon and back twice per year, and he can visit any space station he wants once per year, free of charge.

Now compare that to what we get!

And they strike for what? For free access to hypobaric hotels on Earth, 5% more credits per month and a 20% decrease in the price of new terraformed Martian land? Ha!

Ok, I understand these guys are practically deprived from visiting Earth more than once every 5 years, but still… I just don’t get it. Their parents emigrated to Mars 46 years ago to start a worry-free life, they always were kind of privileged, they established like a tax-free economy, and now?…

Some say they will like to become autonomous. Yeah, like I give a dime.

Ok.

So I just started this simulation of the Internet, like the KS was known and reffered to in the early 2000’s. It may have some blips and bugs, as it was soo hard to find relevant data pertaining to such an early stage of the KS development.

Uploaded the bots, and hoping for the best. This should be interesting, as I want to dedicate at least 3 years of my life running this simulation.

I had some difficulties in finding sufficient information about relevant people around this date (April 2008), as the KS was first created in 2032, but still. The archived ‘blogosphere’, as it was called back then, should work just fine, as the simulator is able to process and develop coherent bots out of pretty nothing.

So, let’s the fun being!