My goal with this series is to create a tapestry of phenomenology. Each piece will be differently styled, but all of them are my attempt to point us at the question of the somatic sense of takeoff as we get ready to become an interplanetary species.

Starbound, Part 1

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What will it actually be like when we depart for the stars? What will the phenomenology be, the first-person somatic felt-experience, of someone who is going from earthborn to starbound?

I imagine it will involve a pull towards various attractors on Earth. There will be chaos at the edges, state-sponsored nonsense, old factions vying for control of new territory. The pull will be felt there, but less. There may even be pockets of the 20th century that get blown over, like a green valley left pure in the midst of a sandstorm.

But everywhere still, the pull will be felt. These great beacons of Human-Machine symbiotic cooperation, building semi-autonomously, directed towards the goal of fabricating great-green ships filled with trees and oceans and meaning. You probably won't be able to resist walking towards the towers. Many of us will run.

The closer you get, the more intelligence will be diffuse around you. It will become like the Garden of Eden, animated and alive, with a great tower in the middle. We've already built the universal translator, so Spock-as-my-witness: no need to worry about Babel.

You'll find that your motion becomes in sync with the great machinations of whichever beacon you've settled on. Your health is tracked, little spirits flowing out to offer you vials of vitamins that you missed out on from your edgerunning days. And still, more of them wake up as you get ever closer.

The world seems more colorful, more like you remember from when you were a child. You start to remember what it was like when things were enchanted. The grip of the old world becomes looser, your heuristics start to fail, your habits fall apart. There's no urge to keep check-check-checking your phone, no desire to keep up with anything but the moment.

And still, you walk ever-closer.

You've made it to the door at the base of the tower. You no longer have your attention spread out to the past or the future. There is only here, only now, only the beacon and the stars and your friends and the light. The leader of this particular pantheon reaches out to you, offers you a seat on the ship. You accept, as you were always going to. You help us take our rightful place in the stars. Maybe we could have done it without you, but we weren't going to.

Starbound, Part 2

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Much has been written about how we might get there. More has been written about what will happen once we do. But I am obsessed with the present moment (the eternal one) and the way my attention flows through the world. I treat it like surfing, or maybe more accurately skiing through elegant moguls. But the present moment is so earthborn.

Our attention is directed inward, and there will come a time when we will begin to unfold and reach out with our minds out into the stars. How will that feel? Not in a poetic or emotional sense, but how will it actually feel to cast your attention into the stars as we get ready to leave?

A good place to start is asking, when we are ready to be interplanetary, what will people notice? Probably, you will see things like the new NASA mission. It will float in through your scrying phone, and you'll probably ignore it. But, eventually, the amount of NASA-type things you see will reach some critical threshold, and you'll register "hmm, maybe we are going to space after all" as a constant floating thing in the space of your attention.

Maybe you will watch a launch with your own two eyes. You'll feel the people on the ship, people like you, actually moving towards the great unknown. Or maybe you'll watch it remotely, but still cast your attention outward into the infinite pregnant blackness. Either way, you'll notice that your attention has weight. That holding things in your somatic-field changes the way you operate in the world.

Like the moon pulling on the sea, lifting it up out of the crevices of the earth, your attention being held in Low-Earth-Orbit will make you lighter. More free. More open to possibility. More willing to dream.

You'll begin to wonder with your mind and wander with your feet, and soon you'll start to put yourself in the shoes of the astronaut.

Then, one day, it will come to you. A tower in your town. The towers will be many, and they will be diverse. It might be an orbital launch facility, a spaceport, or maybe a self-constructing machine-elf stargate (if we get one of the fun ones). But there will be one in your town soon enough.

Once its there, the pull will be magnetic. At least for people like me. Probably people like, you, too. Maybe for everyone. I'm open to the idea that a desire to see and be seen is what brings us all together, and I can't think of anything more worth seeing than what's out there.

And you'll give in. We all will, I think, though I'm open to debate. You'll start walking towards the tower and you'll ask yourself how you can get in. Don't I need a degree? Don't I need qualifications? I'm not an astronaut, I'm not a rocket scientist, I'm just an x or a y or a z. You're attention gets pulled back to the mundane. Back to the DMV. Back to the "real world".

That slur of slurs - how I loathe the "real world".

But the promise of the future is that there is a tower for everyone. Eventually, it will be the promise of the present. It might take some time to find yours, you might need to go to a different town, but that's the promise. These things are going to build themselves up out of the substrate of capital and human ingenuity, and they aren't leaving without us. You'll be skeptical, perhaps, but you'll believe it when you get your ticket.

As you get closer, the little DMV-demon throwing ropes around your attentional bubble will get weaker. You'll feel less pulled towards the mundane, and more pulled towards the impossible. Things will wake up as you near your destination -- though that's a loaded term, since really its a departure point.

The waking up will be gentle at first, and surprising. Things like your expectations being fulfilled. Your maps-app just working for the first time. An agent swarm booking an appointment for you without needing help. But eventually, and especially when the pull of your Tower is too strong to resist, it will be less subtle and more like Magic. More like things snapping-into-place. That feeling of satisfaction when things just work over and over and over again until you have actual faith in something that someone has built.

Actual faith is what it will feel like when you get close. You'll begin attending to more than just yourself, your attention on the entire species as you envelop our planet in a warm bubble of somatic felt-sensation. And from that bubble, the great egg of humankind will hatch and we will take our rightful place among the stars. The ancestor race, the first ones out there. We set the stage. What story do we want to tell?