Project Persephone must connect people in conversation through a network. No network can succeed if it's not concerned with a world worth talking about in the first place.

Project Persephone aims to create engaging worlds in space: exovivaria - orbital ecosystems that would be managed cooperatively for their recreational value. The Project also pursues aid projects for impoverished communities in equatorial mountain regions, as part laying the groundwork for projectile space launch. Neither of these aims can be sustainably pursued, however, without the engagement of the developed world -- and especially in the space-faring democracies. Developed-world cooperation is needed to help transfer financial resources and technical skills to those best equipped to make it all work most economically. The Project aims to join these worlds of work and play into a small world of its own making. Electronic networking might bring the people in the various parts of this "small world" together, and can do so relatively cheaply. However - given all the other fascinating distractions cheaply available online - only the joint creation of a world worth talking about can keep these people together.

Making such a world poses unprecedented problems. Making that world worth talking about even before it exists won't be easy either -- the goal of meeting the SPEC, with all its potential conflicts, might mean that a lot of the ensuing talk will consist of argument. But even if exovivaria and projectile space launch problems are unprecedented, it helps to look at precedents - worlds and non-worlds to which comparisons might be made, and from which lessons might be drawn. What kinds of worlds do we already have, in space and on Earth, as a starting point for discussion? How much do we talk about them? And how much is that talk worth, to most people?

We already have a great world made for us in space: Earth. We got this Spaceship Earth for free, and almost everything people are talking about happens on it. At any given place on Earth, we even get some free "network infrastructure": if we're close enough, we can hear each other through this planet's air, and we can see each other's faces and movements for that 90% of communication that's nonverbal. Communications technologies -- from papyrus to the iPad -- have only led to learning about ever more things on Earth worth talking about, as we float through space. Those technologies are made of stuff that we dug out of this planet. We talk about Earthly things over meals made from plants and animals that were raised on free dirt and free sunlight, or fished out of free water. We don't need to send ruinously expensive mining expeditions out to the asteroids, or set up farms on the moon -- not yet, anyway. In cost-benefit terms, Earth is clearly the best single conversation piece in the Solar System.
Not all Solar System planets are equally "worlds worth talking about." For example, we also got Mars for free. We've got some stunning pictures of it. But nobody's there. We can't see anything living there (and probably never will, except perhaps through a microscope). Not much seems to be happening there except weather and seasons. And only a handful people who boss around Mars rovers can make anything happen there. All of this limits how much people will talk about Mars. Even the idea of a Mars that could someday be much more worth talking about isn't much worth talking about, at least for most people. We can't get there now, and it will be a long time before anyone does. Robotic exploration of Mars has increased talk about Mars, but only at some cost. Ecopoiesis -- making Mars more of a living world -- would have to wait until scientists are pretty sure it's a dead one. Terraforming Mars is not a reasonable prospect for anyone now living.
From C.S. Lewis's Ransom Trilogy to Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy, stories in which a planet (or several of them) figure centrally have probably stimulated more talk about planets than all interplanetary probes and telescope observations combined. Talking about Mars-related SF doesn't really count much, however, toward making Mars itself "a world worth talking about." The author only creates a "paracosm" packaged as a mass-market entertainment. That paracosm is the world people are really talking about: an imaginary one. These paracosms might be cleverly designed to support beliefs about our real world, our own time -- for Lewis, a Christian statement;1 for Robinson, a Marxist one.2 Simplifications creep in because of these biases, but perhaps worse, many readers can feel free to reject a fine piece of literature out of hand, unread, because it was written with some ideological or religious agenda they don't agree with. The main strike against such worlds, however, is that they are, in the end, imaginary -- real worlds don't have fans and critics, they have creatures and citizens.
By our "words volunteered" measure, a space station "world" like ISS might seem modestly successful. Some space enthusiasts follow ISS developments closely, avidly discussing them, face-to-face and over electronic networks. Even space advocates who hate ISS get some conversation value, at least, out of deriding the "white elephant in orbit". ISS enjoys news coverage when there's a spectacle or an event of unusual human interest -- a launch, an arrival, a departure, a return; some particularly intriguing experiment; some especially harrowing accident. The Japanese Kibo experimental module will grow animals and plants, and thus resembles the concept of exovivaria. However, if measured by the dollar cost per voluntary conversational word generated, ISS is probably a dismal failure compared to your average aquarium.
Now consider something in space that's definitely not a world: a communications satellite. Its circuits might host thousands of long-distance conversations at a time, its antennae might relay thousands of e-mail messages per second, and on the TV programs you receive, people are gabbing away. No shortage of talk here! But only a minuscule fraction of all the talk the comsat carries will be about the satellite itself. The comsat is in space; through it, people talk about another world in space: Earth. But for most, it's hardly "a world in space" itself, much less one "worth talking about". As for the satellite network hardware, well, people talk more about their satellite dishes than they talk about satellites themselves; and they talk much more about what they see on the programs received by those dishes than about the dishes themselves. Network hardware - and talk flowing through it - does not a world make.
Finally, look at the software system behind an MMORPG?. It's probably much less complex than the electronics in a comsat, but it's definitely hosting much more of "a world worth talking about." The MMORPG creates a persuasive illusion of a populated world, moreover a world joyfully co-created by its paying customers. Somewhat in defiance of the predictions of most 20th century science fiction, in the early 21st century, cyberspace is far more colonized than any place in space, natural or artificial. Simply hosting MMORPG's on satellites doesn't solve the "world worth talking about" problem - it would just make any such gaming "paracosms" more expensive than their lower-maintenance terrestrial competitors. Nothing would actually be happening on that MMORPG satellite anyway, except things that only electrical engineers like to talk about: surges of electrical charge through circuitry.

What makes a world worth talking about? Four important qualities are:

  • Change
  • Engagement
  • Purpose
  • Connection.

Project Persephone must offer all of these.

Change

If nothing changes much, you run out of things to talk about. Even the most limited and controlled exovivaria will change unpredictably. They will hold ecosystems, after all, and ecosystems are never perfectly predictable. This instability can be bad sometimes, but also good: exovivaria can be a source of interesting surprises. As the experience of trying to balance Biosphere 2? should show, the surprises will keep coming. The very fact of change can help add to the experience.3 So long as change doesn't become overwhelming, it can help drive Engagement.

Engagement

We can't help but have feelings -- good and bad -- about living things.4 We might love butterflies even though we could live without them, but only "love" aphids as potential butterfly food. Living things evoke warm feelings when they are amusing or attractive or in a pitiable state or appear to love us back; they can stir us to lethally disdainful action when they appear to pose risks to what we see as good in an ecosystem. Try feeling nothing about something that's alive (or that died.) It's not easy. Some have tried to explain or formulate these feelings under the Biophilia Hypothesis, but obviously there's more to the picture than just liking things that are alive. Disliking troublesome life has its place too.

Purpose

Even exovivarium users who have no great interest in space, who are attracted to exovivaria only for their novelty at first, might stay involved with them out of a growing sense of duty to keep them healthy. They might stay involved even if the exovivaria are still only ground-based prototypes, operated telebotically over only terrestrial Internet links. For the unabashed space enthusiast, not employed in a mainstream space program, exovivaria projects -- research, prototyping, refinement, launch, maintenance -- would form a space program in which they could help directly, rather than simply observe as mavenish amateurs. For space development professionals, especially retirees, Project Persephone might provide a more creative outlet for their honed skills than any now offered by a national space program. For children curious about what happens in space, exovivaria offer a possibility (more realistic than ever becoming an astronaut) of being able to do things in space.

Connection

Change, engagement and purpose can grow out of working together, and can feed back into themselves, in a "virtuous cycle" to create more change, engagement and purpose. But much of the feedback has to move through human links, links that grow well and stay strong. Exovivaria will ultimately be more about the people involved than the plants, animals, and lowly microbes being kept alive in orbit. As one early pioneer of flight, St. Exupery, famously wrote: "Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction." Talk for its own sake can easily dissolve into boredom, if not acrimony and contempt. Working together to make something alive, and keep it alive, something meaningful to others in the effort, can forge precious bonds where mere talk would only yield casual (and soon enough, stale) acquaintance. When there are shared, tangible goals, fights can often dissolve or be averted when enough people see that the cost of obstructive, purely ego-driven conflict is unacceptable: something bigger than yourself, something with a little of your own life in it, something that could even outlive you, might fail to thrive, or even die.

 

1 See, e.g., Richard L. Purtill, C.S. Lewis' case for the Christian faith (reprint), Ignatius Press, 2004 ISBN 0898709474, 9780898709476 ⇑

2 "The Edge interview: Kim Stanley Robinson", 1996 ⇑

3 Even the experience of error can stimulate. In evaluations of remotely operated experiments for education, "[t]he students also stated that they wanted to be able to see any mistakes that were made and contrasted this with not being able to make mistakes in simulations they had used." (Cooper, Martyn (2005). Remote laboratories in teaching and learning �issues impinging on widespread adoption in science and engineering education. International Journal of Online Engineering (iJOE), 1(1), p.4.) ⇑

4 "Humans Hardwired to Tune into Animals", Jennifer Viegas, USA Today, Aug 29, 2011 ⇑


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