Our Future is Kind is a collaborative guide to building the future one kind act at a time. 25 leaders, educators, innovators, and changemakers authored it. Publish date: November 13, 2026, World Kindness Day.

Learn about the book: https://www.ourfutureiskind.com/ofikbook

Join the Launch Team and get a free Advance Reader Copy: https://www.ourfutureiskind.com/earlyreaders

Come to the Launch Party! https://www.ourfutureiskind.com/ofik-launch-party?SQF_HIDDEN=MichaelNeece

Building the right future is important, and this book digs into 25 personal stories, 25 strategies, and helps readers revive their sense of agency to build it together. Join us!

I keep thinking about where cryonics and AI are heading. If a person can be preserved and brought back, or their consciousness re-created, then a leader would never have to step down. They could hold power through death and come back, with an AI version of them filling in until they're revived.

Once the technology exists, it feels almost inevitable that someone tries this. There's a term for it: contocracy, a system of government by one person whose supreme power follows their consciousness across substrates, through death and re-creation, and never passes to a successor. The ruler is called the contocrat.

The part that gets me is "never passes to a successor." There's no next election and no next ruler to wait for. Honestly, I'm not sure how I feel about that. Would you ever live under one?

I’ve often explored, on here, a ring of O’Neill cylinder-sized habitats at GSO. You can get some pretty impressive numbers, depending on how you stack them. Actually, it doesn’t matter how you stack them, you get pretty impressive numbers. You can also tether them to Earth reasonably nicely, with just a few lower-altitude orbital rings to keep your tether system nice and secure.

Its fantastic… but I always get hung up on how best to position the solar panels to power the thing. I keep coming up with new ideas on how to orient them, whether to include tracking actuators, how to make sure that the system doesn’t block too much light reaching Earth. Yadda yadda.

I think I have my best idea yet: polar rings of solar panels. We’re going to get some big numbers here, so hold on tight.

Assume a ring whose inner radius is 42,100 km (just under GSO) and whose outer radius is 42,200 km (just over GSO). The area of that ring is ~26.5 million sqkm. If you assume a modest 300 MW/sqkm, that the entire ring is covered in solar panels (front and back), and that the ring rotates once per day (so it only produces ~64% of what it would if it tracked the sun), one such ring produces over 100 petawatt hours, daily. Or 43.5 exawatt hours, yearly.

You have one of those on a polar orbital path, bolted onto the equatorial-GSO habitat ring (picture this looking like an armillary sphere), and you don’t have to worry about power. It produces almost 2,000 times humanity's current annual power consumption.

Now, this polar ring of solar panels doesn’t track the sun. That basically loses you 1/3 of its potential output. You know what else it does? It positions these panels, almost 40,000 km away from Earth’s surface, in such a way that they block almost no sun light from hitting the Earth’s surface, because they’re always perfectly edge-on relative to the Earth and Sun for the brief amount of time they’re in between.

This means you can put way more than just 1, or 2, or 4 up. Your limit is basically how close they can get to each other before they block each other too much (so you can’t just put them every 100 km along the ring, for example). You’re always going to get them blocking each other at least a little, but you want to limit that. I like the idea of 24 of these polar rings. So not almost 2,000 times global energy consumption. More like almost 48,000.

There is also another way they can be increased. I picked a 100 km width for the ring. That was pretty arbitrary, and the gravitational forces at these altitudes are pretty weak, so you could make the ring even wider. Since it is a ring, it isn’t perfectly “x times as wide gets you x times the surface area,” but its close enough. And, of course, the wider they get, the more they would block each other.

Been thinking about something for awhile now. Initially it was a 9 emitter convergence array (microwave, THZ would be difficult) in a spherical boundary chamber (such as a 3D geodesic array mounted inside a dielectric sphere) vacuum back filled with penning gas. 3 emitters on the equatorial plane spinning (mechanical or electronic phase rotation) around the center 120° apart, 3 stationary on top and bottom tight triad formation and a picosecond (maybe femto) aimed at the focal point. (That's the high level quick and dirty.)

If the sphere's internal radius is sized to a multiple of your drive wavelength, the spherical boundary should create a standing electromagnetic wave. The EF vectors from all 9 emitters should constructively interfere at the geometric origin, forming an ultra-intense central E-field node. That should create a stable (sustainable?) ball/toroid of dense plasma correct? In other iterations I thought about using 6 spinning emmiters. 3 on the polar axis and 3 equatorial or adding an x axis cut quartz (MgO coating?) at the focal point but I think I'm doing to much here. I feel like more is possible with less. I'm not a scientist but it's been a persistent thought for a few years. Has anyone tried something like this?

Apologies if this is not the place for this if there's a better one please let me know.

the site: https://playspinward.com/

the source: https://x.com/MaxXWilliamson/status/2108299902644039934

PROJECT HAIL MARY meets GAME OF THRONES

They crossed a wormhole to find a new world. To survive it, they'll have to break it.

SEASON ONE: TO BREAK THE NEW WORLD

The first season (123k words) is written and will be fully posted by December 6, 2026.

Follow now and join the mission!

THE PREMISE

In 1993, the Mars Observer probe vanished through a wormhole and discovered Vise, a world of intelligent reptilian civilizations whose technology resembles that of Earth's ancient empires.

In 2029, three spacecraft cross the wormhole to make humanity's first contact. Then one spacecraft crashes, and the crew of another is captured by Vise's dominant civilization. To rescue them, biologist Isaac Marks makes a desperate bargain with a ruthless rival alien queen: modern weapons in exchange for an army.

Muskets. Cannons. Poison gas. A rescue mission becomes the catalyst for an industrial war, and humanity may help destroy the planet it set out to discover.

WHAT TO EXPECT

Hard Sci-Fi: Near-future spaceflight, grounded technology, and science with consequences.

Alien Politics & Warfare: Rival powers, strategic gambles, and a civilization on the brink of transformation.

An Ensemble Thriller: Multiple protagonists, shifting perspectives, and a story unfolding across ten episodes.

Dark Moral Dilemmas: Survival, colonialism, and the devastating consequences of intervention.

A NOVEL STRUCTURED LIKE PREMIUM TELEVISION

10 episodes, each with a different protagonist (think LOST). 51 fast-paced acts (chapters). 

RELEASE SCHEDULE: One act (chapter) per day, Monday–Friday, 2:07 PM ET.

CONTENT WARNINGS: Graphic violence, war crimes, and chemical warfare. The novel explores colonization and the ethics of survival through a dark, unflinching lens.

Both are made out of a Jupiter Brain or a Matryoshka Brain. The Subverse Time Machine simulates time travel with multiple branching, but only a limited number of multiple branches can be simulated at a time, so if you simulate an alternate outcome, you can continue simulating that alternate history from that outcome so long as you choose to devote resources to it. Simulating an entire galaxy means simulating all the star systems in that galaxy that you want, there is just one simulated reality here, the Galaxy is based on real world physics with some FTL loopholes added for convenience. If you don't know how to make a wormhole in the real universe, you just simulate one in the subverse that allows it to be transverse able.

I’ve been thinking about whether a civilization becoming more technologically advanced would necessarily make it easier for outsiders to detect.

We usually imagine civilizations far ahead of us using enormous amounts of energy, building massive structures or expanding across star systems. And I understand why those possibilities are taken seriously.

But is there any reason technological advancement has to follow that direction?

A civilization could become much more efficient, develop completely different ways of communicating, or eventually become something that doesn’t resemble our current understanding of a civilization at all.

I’m not suggesting every advanced civilization would become invisible or stop expanding. I’m wondering whether technological capability and detectability could develop in completely different directions.
If a civilization had a million-year technological head start on humanity, what would we actually expect to detect from thousands of light-years away?

And how much of that expectation comes from known physics versus assumptions about how technology develops?

The biggest issue with most interstellar mission plans is that we try to design the spacecraft as an isolated vehicle. The second you try to build a single ship that has to carry its own fuel, shield itself from debris, slow down at the destination, and blast data back across light-years, the math breaks down due to the rocket equation.

Instead of a better engine, I’ve been mapping out a decentralized, multi-layered logistical grid that spreads these tasks across thousands of simple, coordinated assets:

• The Power Array: Deploys a swarm of 1,000 ultra-thin mirrors (statites) directly into the Sun's corona, balancing gravity against radiation pressure to hold a fixed position. They funnel raw starlight into a central combining lens to drive a multi-terawatt propulsion laser.
• The Braking Matrix: Solves the "flyby trap" by having a fleet of 2,000 gram-scale probes execute a 180-degree flip years before arrival. Forward-facing, V-shaped diamond mirrors intercept the laser beam still firing from our Sun, bouncing it forward to act as a massive deceleration brake alongside the target star's photon headwind.
• The Relay Trail: Bypasses radio signal decay across light-years by having the fleet drop a trail of 100 to 200 small relay pods behind it mid-transit. The master orbital hub uses isolated infrared lasers to beam planetary data backward through this relay chain to Earth.

I have the full, detailed 6-layer breakdown written out. Would anyone here be interested in looking over the systems architecture to debate if the corona statites or the flipped-mirror braking array could actually work?

Чисто в теории если вернутся на много миллиардов лет назад, предварительно захватив с собой пару банок из бронированного стекла ( литров по 500) и поместить туда экосистему тех времён. "Я поверхностно интересуюсь темой эволюции и.т.д"

Ну примерно почву, воду и микроорганизмов которые вырабатывают кислород, одноклеточных ну и других микробов. Закопать поглубже до наших времён. Может ли в этих банках произойти своя эволюция? Эволюция подготовленная под данную среду. Я понимаю что скорее всего без солнечного света там не может быть растительности и.т.д. Ну а вдруг там будут медленно но верно происходить новые виды, которых раньше просто не существовало ( к нашему времени, маленькие люди кроты) Возможно ли это?

Apollo astronauts reported allergic reactions to lunar dust and regolith. It is cited as one of the most difficult engineering problems for a future moon base. It sticks to everything, degrades seals rapidly. As fine as smoke, yet as abrasive as sandpaper. Cleaning it off of a moonsuit, without wasting precious water, is difficult if not impossible. Regolith is probably as toxic to human lungs as asbestos fibers or coal dust. It is thought by some that a spacesuit on the moon would be a short lived accessory, and would introduce toxic dust every time someone re-entered. Regolith is nasty, toxic, and a serious engineering challenge. Some have argued it's a showstopper.

What if lunar astronauts just never go outside? Something broke? Call the robot. Gotta fix something in person, hop into a small pod though an airlock and manipulate whatever it is with Waldoes (does anyone call manipulators by that name anymore?) Drive about the surface inside vehicles clad in your shirtsleeves. Enter these pods and vehicles through safe and dust-free airlocks. People never walk on the surface except in dire emergencies.

Apparently moon base plans involve fleets of robots preparing in advance of serious human occupation. Maybe the humans hide deep in a lava tube permanently, operate on the surface mostly remotely or inside pressurized cabins. No moonsuits required. Thoughts?