March 12 - Knave of Swords

The knave of swords, interplanetary internet. The network is represented by nodes connecting to planets connecting to the sun in the middle. The nodes are labeled interplanetary gateways, and the lines connecting them are labeled stable backbone. connected to the nodes are clouds with information in them, labeled deployed internets, wired and tetherles. The system is surrounded by logos for NASA, DARPA, Jet Propulsion Lab and Vint Cerf

Energy, curiosity, new ideas and communication. Here represented by Interplanetary Internet.

This is funny, the whole justification for the space setting of the novella I just finished up writing was that Internet communication far out into the Solar System is too slow for AI drones to be faked in cube farms on Earth, so--

Thematically, something I also wanted to get at in it was how space exploration and space travel used to be this site of utopian optimism when I was a kid... We could show our best selves to the Star Trek style aliens. Now everyone has pretty much lost interest, assuming it'll just be crassly commercial, or that we have enough problems on Earth that it's not even worth thinking of...

Which is sad! The cosmists wanted to expand out into space as the solution to the contradiction between the finite resources on Earth and their ambition to resurrect all life that hadn't had the chance to experience utopia. Even though my own work is still mostly dystopian, there's something appealing about daydreaming of traveling out into space while still being connected to networks from home...