Local Roadtrips - Portland & Vancouver

This week, and last, have blurred into one. Here’s an update for the last days of last week. More tomorrow. 
Thursday: Drove down to Portland to meet with David A, and retrieve all the Kickstarter Rewards that he had. I’m very grateful to David for his help these past few months! He focused on getting the postcards sent. I’m reviewing these, and it looks like (most) of them have been sent. A few have been returned to us, so we’ll have to sort out those address problems. It was a nice chat with David.

I then left to meet with Charles about the NASA proposals that are in the works. We were denied on two (we expected that) and there are still several that are processing. Charles and I also discussed our papers that we will be presenting in Toronto and here in Seattle this summer. All total we’ve got 6 technical papers, 2 posters, and 4 proposals that are being developed or are already being evaluated. This isn’t very exciting work, but it is very important if we are going to take our project from a group of ad hoc volunteers and turn it (back!) into a professional, globally recognized research program. 

Friday: After just a few hours’ sleep, I drove up to Vancouver. Normally, both Portland and Vancouver are just 3.5 hours roadtrip from my house. But for reasons unknown, this trip to British Columbia took almost 9! So I spent most of the day in the car. I was able to do some work because I brought my headset, and so I dedicated most of that driving time to talking with my team. Overall, the day that I had planned was a botch, so I tried recovering with telephone time. That kinda worked. I caught up on some long-overdue conversations.

Saturday: I spent all day getting to know my two newest team-members, Sumari, and Cameron. She is working on writing… tons and tons of writing. You know that that is a task I loath, so this helps me a lot. But it is also time-consuming. I’ve got to get her up to speed on various aspects of the project, so every time she writes a paragraph, there’s 15 minutes of explanation that goes along with it. But as she learns, she gets better at the assigned task. Meanwhile, he is working on our new website. I’m hoping it will finally be the web-portal that this project really deserves. We’ve thousands of photos, about 100 videos, and several hundred technical documents that will go online. This is something that I’ve wanted for several years – it feels especially good to finally have started this. We will release this new site as part of the upcoming conference in August. 

The evening was a little unexpected, I met with a local group of “trans-humanists” and ‘longevity’ enthusiasts. Now I’d encountered these folks many times – advanced technology folks tend to run in similar communities – and I always find it interesting to interact with them. Basically, they are optimists in the same way that I am an optimist. We watched the movie “Her” and talked about ‘the singularity’, uploading your conscience to the ‘net, bitcoins and other crypto-currencies, and of course, Space Elevators and expansion into the solar system. 

Sunday: More of the same. In the late afternoon, I had back-to-back meetings regarding bitcoin and space development. Those were interesting conversations. If anything develops from them, I’ll let you know. I learned a little more about my friend’s Jeff Garzik and Rick Tumlinson’s “BitSat” program. I’m going to investigate this further. I didn’t leave Canada until just about Midnight. I was dead-tired and pulled over to sleep in the car for a couple hours before heading home. 

Take care, Mjl 

​P.s., More on this tomorrow, but if you’re interested in long-term human settlement in space, you might be interested in this Kickstarter. I backed in 2 weeks ago. I think it’s important. bit.ly/TheSpacePlan