#3 - The Startree Biosphere
The Startree Biosphere
Welcome to the third issue of “Camp of the Children”! This week’s newsletter is a bit shorter and is based on some reflections from recent reading, rather than a collection of interesting links. Hope you enjoy!
As always, please reach out by emailing me if you’d like to chat, or if you have any feedback.
The Rise of Endymion
The front cover of an early edition of the book, very clearly dated.
I said last week in my “Status Board” that I’ve started reading The Rise of Endymion by Dan Simmons, the final book in the series that started with Hyperion. I’m nearing the end, and while I initially felt that it was not as exciting as the first two books, I’ve grown to love it. It relies heavily on exposition, with extensive monologues by Aenea, a central character and a messiah of sorts, but I, for one, don’t quite mind that technique. After four books of extensive world-building, some exposition that unwinds many of the prior plot points is very satisfying indeed.
There’s so much in there that is thought-provoking, but I’d like to focus on one concept found in the last book. Without revealing too much, let me simply quote from the book:
What stretched out on every side of me, curving inward across expanses too large for my planet-formed mind to take in, was a branched and interwoven sphere of living plant material—trunks tens or hundreds of kilometers across, branches klicks wide, leaves hundreds of meters across, trailing root systems stretching like God’s synapses for hundreds, no … thousands of kilometers into space—trellised and wrapped branches stretching out and inward in all directions, trunks the length of Old Earth’s Mississippi River looking like tiny twigs in the distance, tree shapes the size of my home continent of Aquila on Hyperion blending into thousands of other clumps and masses of greenery, all bending inward and away, on all sides, in every direction … there were many black gaps, holes into space, some gaps larger than the trunks and greenery lacing through them … but nowhere were the gaps complete … everywhere the trunks and branches and roots intertwined, opening uncounted billions of green leaves to the star blazing away in the locus of vacuum at the center of …
This paragraph describes something that is so otherwordly, so incomprehensible to our present life, that it is difficult to get a frame of reference. Put in more prosaic terms, Dan Simmons describes a system where plant materials have spread through a solar system, where life has parted from the planets it was once bound to, and now extends in space to take up the whole space of a solar system. Imagine, instead of living on planets, life expands to space and creates habitable spaces. In this massive structure, humanity harnesses the comets to water the plants that make up the structure, and solar energy is manipulated to provide energy for billions upon billions of living beings in something like a Dyson sphere.
What Raul Endymion sees is a green world around a sun, a mass of life that is no longer tied to any single planet, but spans the space between planets. Life, the abundance of life, overflows and reaches into the once-nothingness of space, and all is made alive. In this biosphere, mankind, together with other species, work together to cultivate the roots and branches that form the structure of this massive sphere, a ring of trees around the sun — the Startree Biosphere.
The Future
As we look around us, it is clear that we’re nowhere close to that. But as humanity wonders about its future, do we dare to dream? Do we dare to consider what human beings in ten thousand years would be like? A natural reaction would be to scoff, saying, “There’s no way we can predict how our actions will affect the future, so why even try?” Another reaction is perhaps more polite, saying, “There’s so little we know, how can we possibly start trying to do any of this?”
Both of these reactions are salutary in their own ways. The first is a helpful corrective that reminds us that development is complex, and the future will rarely be what we envision it to be. The latter reminds us that we ought to be humble. A failure to do so would result in catastrophe as individuals seek power to impose their will on others.
Perhaps a clue to the path forward lies in one of the belief systems of the Templars, also known as the Brotherhood of the Muir, a quasi-religious group in the Hyperion universe that has dedicated itself to the spread of life. Those familiar with environmentalism will notice that Dan Simmons has named this brotherhood after John Muir. John Muir was, among other things, a writer whose ideas sparked much of the modern environmentalism. He would never have dreamed of a tree surrounding a sun, of a green solar system or a green galaxy. But by using his name for a Brotherhood that eventually worked on the megastructure described above, Simmons suggests that thousands of years later, the seeds of Muir’s ideas will have transformed lives and thoughts in such a way that the Startree could be born.
We individually might never reach Muir’s statute. But in our own ways, we could start thinking about the future of humanity and putting these things into practice. Ideas don’t just need geniuses, but they need people to live them, to preserve them, to work them out. And perhaps these ideas will come to fruition, whether in this creation, or the next.
Status Board
This week’s newsletter is a short one (with more thoughts than links) because of work (surprise, surprise). Today’s format is also slightly different, but this kind of reflection is something I do want to publish once in a while through this medium.
Reading: Finishing up Rise of Endymion, and I plan on going into Andre Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time. The interest in science fiction continues unabated. Part of it is escapism, I confess, but I hope that a larger part of it is a desire to imagine better worlds (which gives me hope for the future after the eschaton — more on this in a future newsletter, I hope).
Listening: Nothing too fancy. I’ve spent the past few days listening to Accidental Tech Podcast’s Episode 360, which I enjoy as a companion to commuting. I enjoy listening to passionate people pick apart even small things — Casey’s breakdown of tips for DisneyWorld in Florida was delightful to listen to.
Watching: Without planning it, I’ve watched the second episode of You on Netflix (without having watched the first) with my wife. Interesting and quite smartly written, but I doubt I’d actively seek out the next few episodes. Watch me prove myself wrong.