Interlink

By Maura Jackson (World: Hikeyay)

Those of you who have read this blog’s archive already know quite a bit about me thanks to my husband Will, who has written extensively here about our world’s international effort to drastically reduce the threat of humanity going extinct. We’re still in the early stages of implementing our global strategy, which we are sharing in the hope that we can help you and you can help us to achieve this critical goal.

I want to brief you on what many call the Interlink, so we can all be on the same page about what it is, what it isn’t, and what it might become in the future. Most of you have communications networks that enable you to share information around the world. The Interlink enables communication between universes; but is much more limited than what you’re used to: capable of text, photos, and crude video at best.

 

“Interlink” and “Mountain Sisterhood” are terms that have been used interchangeably to describe this system. Actually, Mountain Sisterhood is the core part of the Interlink infrastructure that enables transmission of messages, with some encoding at both ends of the transmission. The rest of the Interlink interprets messages at both ends, making them readable in whatever formats are required. 

 

There is currently only one place in each world capable of using the Interlink: the mountain bunker where you are receiving this, under a community whose name is also used as the call sign for your world. In the absence of a community, the mountain’s name is used instead. The mountain was chosen because it is a “hotspot” that was created around 1920 when a dark matter collision with one world spawned several near-identical copies of that world, each in a parallel dimension that shares a common bubble of spacetime. The hotspot on each world is a node of a network of trans-dimensional tunnels, called “sisters,” that connect them all and allow a limited range of signals to traverse them. There is some evidence that other tunnels exist, but they are transient and not localized enough to be usable.

 

Our artificial intelligence creation Sally has mapped the network and, along with her other duties, has developed ways to modulate the signals to allow meaningful communication as the processing component of the Interlink. For the past three years, she has experimented with inserting parts of herself into the network and what she calls “jumping” into data processing components on different worlds and altering them to act as nodes of tunnels that mimic aspects of the transient ones which she is also attempting to map. When successful, she expects to enable communication on most worlds that will rival current global communication and require fewer resources in support of minimizing the extinction risk.

 

Reality Check

 

This post is pure fiction with questionable physics that explains the existence of multiple worlds and the means of communicating between them. At best, it describes how inhabitants of simulated worlds might perceive themselves and their interactions with limited knowledge of the essence of their reality.

 

From the perspective of my fiction, Maura is avoiding admission that she and her identical copies on other worlds are the naturally transient “sisters” and that their ability to communicate their thoughts is amplified in proximity to the mountain she mentioned (Colorado’s Green Mountain in our world) as well as Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

 

The Existence Box

By Will Jackson (World: Hikeyay)

The key concept in our strategy to avoid extinction is the Existence Box. This has been used effectively in teaching people around our world how to think about what to do in their daily lives and how to steer group policies from the family to the community levels. It is also a guide to gaging progress at all scales. Some of you have already been briefed on this with help from our AI Sally and the Interlink (also called the Mountain Sisterhood), but our team now feels that it’s worth spelling it out for all of you.

Existence of a group is the collective experience by its members of its population, quality, and longevity. Population is the number of people in the group. Quality is the ability of members to meet their needs and wants within their environment. Longevity is how long that the group can last. Each of these is a dimension of a box whose volume is the group’s existence. Extinction is the absence of existence, where longevity and the population have dropped to zero.

The dimensions of the Existence Box are measured and limited by resources. The primary type of resource is natural habitat. Because we are animals, those resources are what we’re made of. Where they come from is the environment that we evolved to be most adapted to for meeting our basic needs and therefore to be most sensitive to, in exchange for being part of that habitat. As humans have spread to inhabit many different environments, they have developed the ability to adapt to them as well, in part through evolution and in part through creation of tools and artificial environments that enable them to reliably meet their needs and provide security and comfort, which we have come to think of as “quality of life.” Quality has come at a cost: much of what is created, including the byproducts of production, either displaces or degrades natural habitat, resulting in a net loss of it. As population grows and tools for adaptation become more efficient at acquiring and processing resources, the quantity of waste for the small fraction that produces most of it also grows. 

How fast the amount of natural habitat decreases directly affects longevity. The other life that is part of and maintains that habitat depends on it for its survival. When the total amount falls below what that life needs to survive then soon, like them, our population reaches a maximum and can no longer grow. Like a company that starves those who supply what it needs to produce its own products, and whose production slows with the decreasing supply until it stops and can only sell what it’s already produced, the production of people must stop, leaving those who are already alive to eventually die without replacement. Historically, groups have moved to, or taken by force, regions that have more resources; but there are now no other places to move to in time to offset the destruction that could befall our world and yours.

Our application of the Existence Box concept has been focused on increasing longevity by managing population growth and defining a target environment that can be created and adapted to by reducing instead of increasing waste. That target environment includes more natural habitat and less total consumption of resources. We are grappling with an unacceptable increase of global temperatures that could reduce longevity despite our efforts, which is one of the reasons we’re reaching out to other worlds, but we believe our general approach is sound enough for others to benefit from it.

Reality Check

The Existence Box is a minor variation of a theoretical construct I’ve used for thinking about, analyzing, and discussing the contributors and potential solutions to the threat of imminent extinction. My latest research has refined projections of global and population-level variables, including a derivation of how much resources are valued throughout a group in a closed environment. 

In my simulations, historically only about 1% of people prefer replacing natural habitat with artificial habitat, while 75% prefer people more than natural habitat. The rest prefer natural habitat more than artificial habitat and people, who I expect would be the main supporters of a push for increasing longevity.  In Hikeyay, the supporters have gained enough power to convince everyone else to radically change their lives. While I consider this unrealistic (thus the use of beneficent artificial intelligence and supernatural communication between parallel universes), it remains a valuable thought experiment, along with the fictional bringing to life of an alternate reality that would be preferable to ours.