Gerhard’s Reviews > Open Space: From Earth to Eternity — the Global Race to Explore and Conquer the Cosmos > Status Update

Still, the idea of a thousands-year journey that depends on scores of generations of uninterrupted human procreation inside a ship transiting the vastness of space might not be the most reliable way to settle distant star systems.

“I think Abrahamson originally thought that he’d use me as an executive assistant. It’s basically a bureaucratic job that I was terrible at.” For instance, “I was sitting in a chair right behind him, and he had some people in the room. He then turned to me and asked, ‘What’s the colonel’s first name?’ And I said, ‘Colonel.’”

“If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans,” he said during a 2010 Discovery documentary. “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet.”

...in the context of growing efforts to forge a kind of “digital twin of the world,” or a virtual representation used to simulate a barrage of scenarios to assess real-world situations and their prospective outcomes. Everything from global trade and climatic patterns to holiday shopping habits and enemy troop positions was on offer.

The personal computing age had begun, with the Kenbak-1 (a machine equipped with 256 bytes of memory and a single circuit board) hitting the market just three years later in 1971. Three years after that, it was the Altair 8800, which lacked a keyboard but nonetheless graced the cover of a 1975 edition of Popular Electronics...

Advanced data processing that served as cognitive support, while bridging gaps like language and cultural barriers, might then be just the beginning.
It could even help with dating, Song explained with a chuckle.
“A lot of engineers don’t know how to talk with other people,” he said, “especially cute girls.”

The Artemis Accords had, in effect, been inspired by Star Trek’s Khitomer Accords, a reconciliation between the federation and Klingons.

Go to the wild places.
Travel to where only pinpricks of starlight interrupt the blackness of night, where nature’s raw struggle is more evident. Then look up, as our ancestors did, and tell stories.