I'm on a spaceship
I have a mountain of notes, physical and digital. They exist on my paper and in my machines. I’ve had an urge to share all of these, at many times. So many of them are rough or incomplete, but they’re still things I thought about and put effort into. But, nobody sees them because they are shown to nobody. I don’t share them, and so they are not shared. That makes total sense, but also feels tragic. I am constantly trying to lower the barrier to create things and also to share them. I think my create barrier is pretty low now. Sharing is an entirely different beast. I automatically feel that I need to meet some standard before putting something out. This of course isn’t necessarily true, but the perception is enough to keep me from putting things out. And the result is this mountain I speak of. This private mountain I wish to be public, or at least have a chance of being seen by others. I'd rather have imperfect things seen than let the desire for perfection ensure they go unseen.
This current isolation, I realized, is functionally equivalent to being on a spaceship. This spaceship contains all my notes, drawings, ideas. Some are physical and some digital. But they are all here, in this ship. They cannot escape unless I transmit them. I could vent them through the airlock but that’s orders of magnitude worse than the traditional message in a bottle. It just won’t be seen. I may be selfish, but I’d rather communicate with the current living generation if I can, because I want to hear their responses.
That leaves me with one option: electromagnetic waves. These have no trouble traveling through the vacuum of space, and they go pretty fast (as fast as possible in fact). I can encode information onto these waves in a multitude of ways. I know Earth has many networks of different sizes, but by far the largest and most popular is the “internet”. Access to it varies by region, and usually costs some money, but despite that, it has reached most of the population. Transmitting there would be my best shot.
That’s the biggest asterisk in this concept. I need to reach the internet from space. I know there are some satellites connected to ground stations that transmit internet directly to people’s homes. I’m not going to assume I can directly communicate with these. It’s unclear how I’d even pay for the service from out here, and I don’t know of any open receiving station. I know there are some ground stations trying to receive extraterrestrial communication but I don’t think I have the transmit power for that. Even if I did, it wouldn’t directly connect to the internet.
I’m just going to assume I’ve managed to find a way to directly transmit to the internet. That’s how I’ll do it. That’s how I’ll get my messages out of this spaceship and onto Earth.
If nobody sees them, so be it. I just want to at least send some things.
If you are on the receiving end, hello there! I’m so glad this message reached you. I hope it will be the first of many. Stay tuned.
🌎 📡 🛰️
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