Infinite Imaginings and a Portal for Practical Immortality

Welcome to Radio Hydrogen’s Newsletter, which is all about Science, Social Innovation and Wonder stuff, or Schemes, Dreams, and Infinite Things.

There’s chewy mind-bendy stuff, and there’s bite-sized snippety stuff, as well as information about new shows on Radio Hydrogen and collaborator projects. Scroll down and see what takes your fancy.

I am introducing a concept I call ‘Skateparks on Mars.’

While Skateparks on Mars can literally refer to Skateparks on Mars, and it does, it also refers to any wondrous, epic, fantastic, or even just nerdy schemes a person would implement if money, politics, and law were no object. I will include one or more “Skateparks on Mars,” items in every newsletter.

For the sake of future realisation - so that dreams may come true, I will keep S.O.M. concepts within the laws of known physics and achievable technology. With that in mind, I’m going to operate in the hope that someone, maybe you or I - anyone, will be rich and free enough to make them happen.

 Skateparks on Mars

Here are two Skateparks on Mars, then:

 1. Moon Cloud Recording Studio

(Skatepark on Mars 3 Minutes)

This skatepark on Mars is not so outlandish, but it is expensive, luxurious, and perhaps decadent. It was shared with me by musician and composer, Joe O’Donnell, having had a conversation with another musician who had recorded an album in a studio on a canal barge. A barge is a gorgeous setting for a recording studio, but after a bunch of beer and hyperbole, they agreed that the ultimate luxury setting for a recording studio would be an airship. Not a Led Zeppelin but a helium zeppelin, or hydrogen zeppelin if you are the band, KISS, or otherwise a bit pyro-saucy. It would, of course, be beautifully fitting for Led Zeppelin to record a new version of Stairway to Heaven in such a studio. Led-Zep would be one of the bands able to afford a stay in a custom built airship, complete with recording studio and luxury accommodation. 

It would be a high-ticket business, but as a concept, expensive though it maybe, I think even in these seemingly terminal economic times, an airship recording studio would be booked out forever! Imagine recording, writing, dining, sleeping, and dreaming up albums in the sky. Depending on where you were, you could open the windows for unique and strange ambient acoustics. Maybe you could record above the Pyramids for inspiration – or Battersea Power Station, of course. Oceans, deserts, mountains – all kinds of wildernesses and cityscapes would be your inspiration. You’re so inspired one night, you can’t sleep, you get up and the airship is above the clouds on a moonlit night, what would you do with a piano in that kind of ambience? 

The gondola and passenger decks would be plenty big enough for luxury cabins, dining, and a superb studio with epic views all around. There would be room enough for fans, friends, and family. UB40 would love it, they could bring their mums, and aunts and dogs and kids and everyfin! Orchestras could also be accommodated, and yes, an airship kitted out with big fat stacks would make for some magic live concerts in stunning locations.

I don’t know why I keep thinking of Brian May as I write this, maybe because he is a mega rich rock star and an astronomer and kind of belongs in the sky. But  even he might have to think twice about setting up a studio like this, crew costs etc. 

Airships have been trying to make a come back since the 1980s and have succeeded to some extent in their new incarnations as freight vehicles and science research vessels including whale watching expeditions. This is a very doable project. I will never be on such a ship as a recording artist, but I’d be more than happy just being the kitchen porter on such a gig - tips and selfies would make it worthwhile.

Come on, somebody, make it happen.

2. Uplift TV Series - The Antidote to Star Trek

(Skatepark on Mars 4 Minutes)

Don’t get me wrong, I AM a Star Trek baby. I was born in 1964, abandoned by father, bullied by my stepfather, and although Joan Crawford and my mother were soul sisters, my mother did at least allow me to stay up late on Star Trek nights, despite the protestations and attempted sabotages from my stepfather. Star Trek, with its post-Christian values and pockets stuffed full of wonderment; aliens, photon torpedoes, and win-win, nay, win-win-win solutions to ethical dilemmas, nourished me, and was, in the absence of any other moral compass, good ethical fodder – no doubt about it! Britain had the National Health Service, America had Star Trek. Both were hallmarks of civilisations heading in the right direction.

But enough already! Science Fiction itself, is an important faculty of the human mind, and Star Trek is by no means definitive SF. Real Science Fiction seldom makes it to television or the cinema.

And that’s ok, because the best Sci-Fi still resides in books, relying upon the unlimited effects budget of the reader’s imagination. Some SF simply doesn’t translate to screen - Dune still doesn’t work.

“Boo….hiss…”

Boo and hiss all you like, Dune will never work on any screen. It doesn’t fit.

“Oh yes it does!”

“Oh no it doesn’t!”

And so on and so forth….

Thinking about it, actually, no, it’s not ok! I wish there was more expanded science-fiction in pop culture. I want to see studios or even independent filmmakers act with more courage with the Science Fiction they bring to the screen. They won’t, of course. This is a shame because if we can unleash more hardcore SF, it will inspire more people to pursue science and technology.

So, here’s my next Skatepark on Mars: I want to take David Brin’s Uplift Books and turn them into an eternal franchise just like Star Trek. Why David Brin out of all the brilliant SF writers around? Well, because the Uplift books are literally the antidote to Star Trek. Star Trek upholds a prime directive of non-interference. Contact is not made with a sapient species until it has reached Warp Drive, (faster than light travel, or FTL) what Star Trek considers to be technological adulthood. The Warp Drive signature alerts older cultures that a planet is ready for “contact,” or that contact is now permissible.

In the uplift books, the wider Galactic Culture is the opposite, it is very much about interference, to the point of pushing intelligence to the required level. Elder civilisations discover pre-sapient species and technologically elevate them to full sapience. The now uplifted client species is indentured to the patron culture for a period of about a hundred thousand years as payment for its uplift, galactic membership, and technological entitlements. The client species will, in time, also become a patron species when it finds ideal candidate species. It’s patrons all the way down!

The screenwriters are NEVER going to run out of material - ever! 

The Uplift universe is full of disparate alien species spinning complicated intrigues. The books follow oxygen breathing cultures. There are also a parallel hydrogen breathing cultures that are built along similar lines, but the two do not generally interact. There are also other cultures mentioned that include transcendent mechanical, memetic, and quantum civilisations – again, with mutually exclusive histories just like the hydrogen and oxygen breathers. 

But what about us humans? Well, we occupy a very special place in the Galactic oxygen breathing culture of the Uplift Universe. We are an enigma, because it might be that we are sapient naturally, but that is preposterous to some. “Humans must have had a patron race,” they insist. Being sapient orphans is kind of a blasphemy. As Brin puts it, we are “les enfants terrible!” We either lost our patrons or we never had them. It is our orphan status that makes us the centre of various intrigues. And we have badly brought up clients, ourselves, chimps and dolphins mainly, as you would expect. In Brin’s universe, we go into the future with dolphins. It seems that dolphins and humans are a thing. It is appropriate to go into Space with them. It is as if we badly need dolphins to be as smart as us, as if Dolphin brotherhood or sisterhood is a natural cure for our cosmic loneliness. In Brin’s universe, dolphins, chimps and humans crew ships together. Again, scope for endless writing.

The Uplift books are HUGE in scope but very accessible conceptually, and Brin’s language is at ease in a plot that never drags. I love Dune, but I prefer the Uplift stories for pacing, ideas, expanse, and mysteries that invite the reader to speculate and debate forever.

A civilisation is only as good as its widely available science fiction. We need to uplift our game in that regard. I jealously want to preside over the making of the Uplift universe as a decades-long TV franchise, or whatever technology takes TV’s place, but I’m not really qualified, of course. I dream that HBO collaborate with the BBC on this. 

Inner Space - the cranial frontier!

These are the voyages of Tania down at the chip shop. Her 45 minute mission to explore strange new ideas; to seek out weird, imagined entities and solutions to personal ontological and global problems; to oneironautically go where no being has gone before!

Sorry about that. I got carried away. Here are some ideas for new and veteran lucid dreamers to check out.

Ten Experiments/Missions for a Lucid Dream

(11 Minutes)

This is a list of experiments you might like to consider performing, building upon, or adapting to your own ends. They range from the frivolous and hedonistic to the evolutionary and profound. You can either read the whole article or just flyover the headings and pick the ones that appeal. That said, a seemingly failed experiment or one that appears boring to you will still yield unexpected and unique results. Everything your mind throws at you will be fascinating.

I am not an authority on Lucid Dreaming. My entire logged flight time probably only equates to about fifteen minutes for my entire 59 years. If Lucid Dreaming was a martial art, I’d be a white belt going for my yellow belt. But I’ve learned enough to set me apart from someone who has never had a lucid dream. One of the advantages of the ‘beginner’s mind,’ is that it doesn’t know what it can’t do, so the beginner can, occasionally, and only occasionally, break ground and push the envelope that a jaded myopic expert would have dismissed as absurd. 

There are eight billion of us jumped-up monkeys on this blue-green world and all of us dream - pretty much. Out of the eight billion dreamers, there will be hundreds of thousands of clumsy amateur yellow belts, who will uncover something extraordinary, purely as a statistical inevitability. It’s true for amateur astronomy and amateur entomology, it’s also going to be true for conscious dream exploration. So why not you or me? This is a realm where neuro-diversity has real value. Who knows what planet changing gems lay undiscovered in our eccentric little shadows.

Here are ten experiments/missions to to pursue in a lucid dream:

 1. Stabilise and Let Render: I have said that Lucid dreaming is hard to learn, and it is, but there’s some ground to be gained as an absolute newbie. It’s entirely possible you can have a lucid dream quite quickly. There is a tendency to wake up straight away, however, because of the excitement that the realisation one is dreaming brings. Alternatively you might just sometimes just to fade back into normal dim-as-a-dog dreaming. Stupid dogs! If you find yourself lucid, sit down, grab something, and stay measured if you can, and let this world unfold. You’re new here, (kind of) don’t be in a hurry to demand stuff, instead, see what vistas appear or what visitors turn up to check you out. I don’t know about you, but I prefer gifts to retail therapy. While you’re new, maybe just defer to the dreams natural plot development. Let it do its thing. Maybe take an imaginary dream-stabilising pill. Techniques for greater dream stability are many. I recommend Daniel Love as an excellent guide and your go-to for anything lucid dreaming. https://www.youtube.com/@LucidDreamPortal  

2. Make Amends with a Dead Person: So much of the success of lucid dreaming experiments is contingent upon there being a genuine inception element where suggestions, mantras, determinations, or prayers are more effective because the lucid dream psyche is somehow allegedly more powerful an interface than an ordinary dream, or a waking world hypnotic state. As a novice, I can speak with authority only on this one experiment. My relationship with my stepfather was hateful. I would enter a rage regarding him on a daily basis long after he died. A couple of years after he died, he appeared in a dream. I realised I was dreaming as he wasn’t just merely dead, he was really most sincerely dead, so his presence caused me to become fully conscious - lucid. I was not a veteran oneironaut, I knew I had only seconds before I lost lucidity, so I took those few seconds to really assert that all was ok between us. In the dream he was broken, and I did not want to leave him like that. Yeah, I am atheist, and I consider the man I encountered only to be a mental model of him, but it was not a risk I was prepared to take. I forgave him. I hate that expression, it sounds so pompous, but there is no other word for it. The hatred that had rounded my shoulders every day for years was gone – there and then, and it continues to be gone. Speaking to Daniel Love, who has been a lucid dreamer for forty years, he could not say for sure whether this was an inception aspect to the dream, or whether there was a self-fulfilling component in that it was the subconscious/unconscious mind that had presented my stepfather in the first place, so the directive and healing was very possibly already underway.  I don’t know. That’s why you and everyone should make amends with a dead person in dreams, not just when they are prompted by the dream, but for the hell of it.

3. Simply Ask Your Mind to Show You Something Amazing: This was a suggestion from another person, I couldn’t tell its origin. But it seems that there is a tradition within the lucid dream to simply call out to it. “It,” is the omniscient intelligence which is all you. This is one of the things you can do in the early days when lucid dreams are few and far between as well as short and unstable. You get triggered, you know you’re going to lose it, so just call out, “Show me something amazing!” I achieved this once. In my dream I was standing on the shore of a choppy sea, in Dawlish, Devon in England. The water was so emerald that I got triggered into lucidity. The waves started twisting into a waterspout and started forming into the Tower of Babel. It then zoomed out and the whole spinning tower was now part the album cover of Jethro Tull’s Broadsword and the Beast. How the hell does something that is part of us yet not under our conscious direction, or even inclination to consider, come up with this stuff? I don’t know, maybe that’s why we need to look at ourselves, not just in the mirror but from the deep inside, the part that has no mass or particles yet interacts with us and therefore has an impact on physical reality.

4. Take the drug, NZT-48 IN Your Dream: If you have seen the movie, “Limitless,” you will know that the protagonist, Eddie Morra, takes a drug, NZT-48 which causes the him to experience augmented flow and high function in all environments to the point of optimum capacity. |If you haven’t seen it, please do, then you will greatly appreciate the value of this experiment, along with any tweaks of your own. There are powerfully negative side effects, but Morra develops a strategy for prolonged and relatively safe use the drug. Sadly, there is no such thing in real life, unless, of course, there’s some Transhumanist Grinder making it in her basement. Is it possible to convince the mind to reach for optimum flow and high function on demand by taking a symbolic version of NZT-48 in your fertile lucid dreaming mind? Perhaps not. Perhaps only for the dream version of yourself. Hell, you can already fly, so why would you need an augmentation drug? Perhaps in some post-suggestive sense, you take a little of the dream version NZT-48 away with you into your waking life. You could give it a cue expression like, “Engage NZT!” I know, I know, I am a nerd. But who knows?

5. Become Polydactyl: Polydactyl means having extra fingers or toes. This apparently occurs naturally in dreams anyway. But just seeing extra fingers and having any kind of control over them is quite different. If you are any kind of musician, you will most definitely appreciate the feedback to your mind if you are trying to play an instrument that requires complex finger movement. Can you actually experience a phantom finger that has never existed? And what does it do to your mind to operate it?

6. Sun Dive: Look at the star that we have known all our lives, our own sun. Regardless of your knowledge of the Sun, when you become lucid and stable, fly into the Sun. If you know very little about the structure of our star, then repeat the experiment after you have spent some time, maybe over a few days, studying books or posters that have cross sections of the Sun. Learn about its layers, physics, temperature and noise levels. Oh yes, the Sun is a noisy place. That’s it, fly into the Sun. It killed Icarus, but you should survive. It will be interesting to see how your mind rationalises such an event.

7. Increase Agency or Examine the Mechanics of Free Will: You don’t have free will, right? The narratives of dreams, however, appear…appear, to be outside the laws of causality. Also, decisions that you make in the waking world are as a result of a chain of unconscious processes, therefore you can’t have free will.  Are the decisions you make in a dream caused by biological/neurological unconscious processes or are they popping into existence spontaneously? Do you have greater agency in the dream realm, especially as you are sovereign and everything in that dream is YOU! Do you have chains of thought, or are they all popping into existence like strange particles? Ask your dreaming mind to give you the actual sense of free will. I don’t want to preload what might happen, but I suspect that the dream will worm its way out with some beautiful rationale or meaningless nonsensical statement. In which case, demand to be taken, or fashion a portal to a universe where the physics actually permits free will. The human desire for free will is strange, the very idea comes to us from within a universe that doesn’t permit free will. How the hell did we ever conceive of such a thing? Gotta love the human mind!

8. Grokk and Unlock Learning Blocks and Prejudices: Grokk is a Martian word (Robert A. Heinlein, “Stranger in a Strangle Land”) meaning to comprehend something truly conceptually deeply. It is accomplished by having a combined sense of super empathy and intuition so detailed that it becomes near total comprehension. Go Google “Grokk,” see where it sits in your neurology, and start to play with it when you encounter entities and phenomena in your dreams. Is Grokking something you can switch on in your lucid dreams, and can you bring it back with you to the waking world?

You could try to self-incept and ask your inner oracle to allocate a larger amount of your personal RAM space, expressly for the purpose of expanding the skill of grokking Grokking would also be a useful skill/superpower to take back with you to the waking world where you can apply it to social situations, foreign cultures, nature, and any kind of learning. I don’t just like the idea of grokking for personal development, but as a kind of solvent for mutual xenophobia. As an anarchist/atheist, I find myself very much at odds with most people and politics. To Grok is to empathise so deeply and super intuitively with a concept or a culture, that while grokking, personal identity borders are down, even if it is for just a reconnaissance moment. I’m a twitchy cantankerous and volatile old soul, but if I could Grokk like a Heinlein Martian, I know that eventually antipathy will no longer have a home in my psyche, and the whole world will be just a tiny bit better for it. The fictitious or symbolic version of NZT-48 in Experiment 4 is not so likely to translate outside of a dream. But maybe grokking is something we pre-Martian humans could master.

9. Find Aliens: This is something I have become very good at during Hypnogogia. (the transition space between wakefulness and sleep) Owing to my lack of proficiency as a lucid dreamer, however, I have not mastered finding them in the thirty or so very short lucid dreams I have had. The flora, fauna, and occasionally technological entity that present themselves in my Hypnogogic state are beautifully plausible though. It remains for me to seek them out in a protracted lucid dream to get to know them more deeply. They’re inside my head, are they out there? Do big numbers allow for statistically inevitable convergences of the imagined and the real? I do hope so. If you’re a scientist; biology chemistry, geology, physics, or astronomy, then you’ve a cauldron inside your head ready made for this. Your inner laboratory is better kitted out than mine. What models will your mind make?

10. Get Drunk with Bigfoot: Ah, go on. Sink a few beers with old Sasquatch. Teach each other some basic phrases in in your native tongues. Play Pool, checkout the antique juke box. Get into a fight with some rednecks. Pluck up the courage to ask Bigfoot if the one-for-each-day gingham dresses hanging on his washing line are his or Mrs Bigfoots’? Explain non-binary to him. As you both get more drunk and more maudlin, see who is the last primate standing? Ride pillion on his Harley while he still drunk as a skunk! Ask for his daughter’s hand in marriage or break it to him that his son got you pregnant (the last two regardless of your gender of orientation) Getting drunk with Bigfoot was not my idea, and I don’t know who came up with it, but I love it and for some inexplicable reason, it seems like common sense.

 Afterthoughts, I think I would like to ride up front in the Sleigh with Father Christmas on Christmas Eve – why not? Let me know how you get on.

Another afterthought; why not join the Titanic on its maiden voyage?There’s something about that story that haunts us all. WHY? I bet every civilisation on every planet has something in its early technological history that equates to this tale. It’s as if it is a civilisation archetype.

 Finally! Just not as finally as you might think!

The Death of Death…

Released just weeks ago, “The Death of Death,” is a joint work co-written by José Cordeiro and David Wood. It’s time to put this Death business to bed now. We’ve put up with it long enough. This book is a sensible yet far-reaching discussion on technological immortality. I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone not interested in dying. 

 Latest Shows on Radio Hydrogen

www.radiohydrogen.space

 Electric Zombie Breakout - Way of the Oneironaut

 Philosovox - Phil Johnson

Humanity Unshackled – OmniFuturists

Shows coming up on Radio Hydrogen (2 Minutes)

www.radiohydrogen.space

My co-host on Humanity Unshackled, David Wood, is off making the world a better place in a more hands-on way for the foreseeable future. SpaceX and Boeing aero engineer, rocket scientist and former guest, Mike DiVerde will be taking his place as we explore whether Space Travel is a truly liberating force for humans.  Keep an eye out for Humanity Unshackled as we get lost in Space Futurism and Space History If you’re new to Radio Hydrogen or just need to catch up on previous episodes, then go explore at www.radiohydrogen.space 

Also Up and coming

Cynthia Leonard aka Cynthesizer, will be talking with Nathaniel Whitestone on the subject of Neighborocracy, one in an increasing number of social innovations that will pull us out of this top-down-ocracy that most of us have endured these last centuries. Her show, Love-Archy – the rule of love, will be coming up. For Cynth’s previous episodes go to www.radiohydrogen.space Also, check out her show, Philosovox.

 Sapient Evolution – Music on Radio Hydrogen

If you’re into exploring music from all times, all places, all genres, all races, then go to www.radiohydrogen.space and hit the “Sapient Evolution,” tab. We have a 3-month long random shuffle playlist including some amazing unsigned gems. We even play some mainstream just to give your neurons a rest. We make the following guarantee: Two hours of listening to Sapient Evolution will acquaint anyone of any age or backdrop with music they have never heard before that they will love for life. That is our guarantee. Why two hours? Well, that’s because there are lots of pieces of classical/modern orchestral, prog rock and soundscapes that go beyond the normal 3 minutes.  That’s not to say it’s all uphill-stroke-your-chin-thoughtfully, music, it gets light also.

Thanks for being with us. Feel free to communicate, collaborate or brainstorm. I personally have a million skateparks on Mars of my own, but I’m always interested in other peoples’. You can contact us via the related email or by the email address on the Radio Hydrogen website: www.radiohydrogen.space