my calling?
“The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” (Buechner, 1973)
I have struggled with the absurdity of my passion for a long time.
My natural mode of communication is to describe a technical building block, and then assume my audience can immediately deduce how it combines with all the others and what effects that has on the path from here to the future. My other natural mode of communication is to describe a sci-fi future as a means to convey the gap of the building block we’re missing that would get us there. Neither of these work for communication.
But those are my passions: learning technical building blocks and assembling them toward a sci-fi future. I am consistently drawn toward the most complex technical problem I can find, and I’m always thinking at least half a century out. The absurdity: How does that help the homeless guy on the street corner?
current most complex technical problem
What is life? If you wanted to build one, how would you? That problem gnaws at me – how do you represent the information that is me? I don’t know; here’s an easier problem: self-learning, autonomous but networked, embodied AI. How do you build a swarm of robots that acts as a unified and diverse community of individuals?
sci-fi future
I think it would be really great if there were several quadrillion thriving, happy humans living across our star system. And sometime around when Jupiter’s orbit is full of orbital habs running on fusion power, it would be really cool for some of them to head out to the stars. In that future world, I imagine humans, robots, really big AIs, really small AIs, and everything in between, partnering to make space habitable. In particular, entities that enjoy hard vacuum ought to be the ones building and maintaining the station. The space station should be built before the first human arrives.
It’s several orders of magnitude less technically complicated to make life possible in Antarctica, the Sahara desert, a coastal city that finds itself suddenly under sea level, or a densely populated city that just started experiencing wet bulb events. And the last two are catastrophes that will become increasingly common during the lifetime of the median human born today.
the world’s great need
I am deeply troubled and profoundly concerned about the plight of the median human born today, due to climate change and the resulting social upheaval. This archetypical median human probably lives in India. They’re thoroughly average – not a charity case – but ‘average’ means ‘poor’, seen from the western world. They’re at the deep center of the bell curve, and a lot of people are right there with them. People who matter.
I’ve been influenced by a couple of fictional stories, though my feelings on this subject have been present for a very long time. I felt the stories in The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson viscerally, and found the in-universe solutions largely regrettable – a realistic forecast of several ways we, humanity, will probably respond poorly to the crisis, if we even respond at all. (The wet bulb event in this book took place in India.)
On the other hand, Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir is a deeply satisfying novel about almost the exact opposite situation as we are in, that really galvanized me in ways I find difficult to describe – my answer to that party game question “if you could spend half an hour with any fictional character..” is Strat. (Strat was appointed by the UN to save humanity at all costs.)
The best solution to climate change is not to build the infrastructure that helps humans thrive despite vast swaths of the earth dying. We should do better.
However, I have a deep sense of foreboding that the median human born today is going to have a very bad time, as a direct result of the collective actions of the civilization. Specifically, I don’t see a single entity in the world (person, corporation, organization, or government) that both is taking responsibility for, and has the power to do anything about, this problem. My giftings are not in influencing people, or at least aren’t currently. (I’m the type of person who struggles to remember names and faces, but can remember details about projects people describe to me, even in different fields of study.) I cannot see a path I can contribute to, to solve this problem via existing channels. However, I can see a path toward developing capabilities which would be useful during the crisis.
There is a sci-fi picture in my head of a swarm of robots off industrializing the moon or something, when suddenly the camera snaps back in on earth. The robots change with the picture; now they have legs instead of maneuvering thrusters. The wet bulb event from The Ministry for the Future is about to happen. The robots show up – some sort of disaster response team. We only need a couple degrees of thermal relief. The robots have concocted some solution, which they promptly enact. They aren’t slowed down by the heat and they have the same capacity to build out infrastructure as they did in space. Relief. Enough to make it to evening.
For me this scene is quite emotional. When this thought first occurred to me, I was sitting on my couch contemplating the homelessness crisis and feeling impostor syndrome. “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” How absurd I am, to want to industrialize the moon, when there are people who are homeless. All at once, the picture of that wet-bulb event entered my head – people whose homes become uninhabitable count as homeless.
my calling
Etymologically, action is what you do and passion is what is done to you. Bridging that halfway to modern definitions, passion is the uncontrollable force in your heart that causes your actions. It still feels absurd to say that any of this is a calling. It’s way too big; to own it is hubris.
What I do know is that the too-big is a passion of mine and I see a path from here to the sci-fi picture. The sci-fi picture has innumerable applications here on earth along the way. To be able to save a billion lives in 50 years, and to not do it, would be unconscionable.