Category: Document

I remember when I was taking my first college physics course and we were confronted with the standard “cow in the sun” problem that, for ease of solving, directed us to assume a perfectly spherical cow of uniform density in a frictionless environment. I could tell it was intended to be a practical application of the principles we were learning — except it was so unrealistic that it effectively undid any nod to practicality.

I already had enough background in computers to know we had the necessary programs to model the actual processes. In fact, I had been using them at a summer job, and was familiar enough with them to feel comfortable looking for a computer lab where I could access one of them and do the modeling for real.

I’d expected my professor to be pleased with my cleverness when I delivered my printout. Instead he frowned and handed it back to me, telling me it was unacceptable. I was to do the problem as directed, and because I would be handing it in a day late, I would lose one letter grade.

I was a bit of a smart alec, and I just couldn’t resist arguing my case. Looking back, I realize just how lucky I was that Professor Rockwell was a man secure in his abilities, who did not see argument as affront. Instead he very patiently explained to me that he wanted us to do the problem with the mathematical skills we had already mastered, at most using a scientific calculator to speed the calculations. Without a firm understanding of the mathematics involved, using modeling software would be altogether too much like magic, and would not teach us the physical principles, only how to push the buttons marked push and pull the levers marked pull.

Some years later I was taking an ethics of engineering course, and we had to discuss the usual problems of levers that could either kill a beloved family member or a thousand strangers and runaway trolleys that could either kill a crowd of children or one portly businessman. As the class progressed, I grew increasingly frustrated with how artificial and contrived so many of them were, to the point I found it difficult to take them seriously, even as hypotheticals.

Perhaps if this had been an undergraduate course, I might have become the subject of a how-dare-you pile-on. But this was a graduate-level course for doctoral candidates, and instead of everyone trying to humiliate me into silence, the class actually engaged my objection. Although I’d managed to derail the professor’s intended discussion, we ended up reaching a conclusion not dissimilar from Professor Rockwell’s explanation to me back in freshman physics — that using modeling software to create realistic situations full of degrees of risk, of known and unknown unknowns, would make the process altogether too much like magic, an answer box that you put questions in one and and get answers out the other.

—- Ursula Doorne, PhD, Leland Professor of Astronomy, Kennedy University Tycho, oral history interview, October 18, 2067.

Much as the air became militarily important in the World Wars and space became militarily important in the Energy Wars, cyberspace truly came into its own for the military during the Sharp Wars. Given that we are discussing an insurgency in one of the most developed nations of the time, which began in a region noted for its heavy concentration of tech companies and ultimately moved to one of its lunar colonies, the role of cyberspace should not come as a surprise.

Throughout the conflict, the control of information would be paramount, particularly because of the need by both sides to pull in the “silent majority” of people who were primarily interested in living their ordinary lives. However, as the conflict progressed and particularly when it extended to the Moon, cyberspace became a way to reach across the vast distances of space without risking one’s personnel to that unforgiving environment.

The most famous cyber-attack of the Sharp Wars is of course the malware attack on a number of landers at Slayton Field. However, there has been some ongoing debate on whether it was actually an operation of the Flannigan Admininstration, given that Grissom City was lunar tourism’s primary hub, and the settlement was under the command of a man in good favor with the Administration.

However, much more important if less spectacular was the continual effort to cut Shepardsport off from the Internet, generally by various kinds of Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks. By flooding the system with requests and overflowing the bandwidth of the connections between Shepardsport and the rest of the Internet, they hoped to prevent certain information from getting out.

For the Administration, this strategy was critical because Captain Waite had made the Constitutionality of Flannigan’s actions a central question from the time of the Kitty Hawk Massacre…

—- J Winthrop, “The Sharp Wars as an Information Age Insurgency.” Information Technology and History, Fall 2052.

Over the decades and centuries, certain songs have become inextricably associated with certain events in history. Obviously, some of those songs were written specifically in response to those events: “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition” for the attack on Pearl Harbor, or “The Men Behind the Wire” for the Troubles. But many songs bring back the memory of events for those of us who lived through them not because the song is about the event, but because it received so much airplay during that period that it became associated in our minds with those events.

Often it’s a song that happened to come out during that period, so it got a lot of airplay at that time. To this day, Diesel’s “Sausalito Summer Nights” brings back the summer of 1981: the food, the fashions, the stores where we hung out. To this day, I can close my eyes and see the house we were living in then. But there are also oldies that suddenly become topical as a result of events. Just a few years later, events in the Soviet Union would bring the Beatles’ “Back in the USSR” to the top of the charts, almost two decades after the White Album came out.

Nobody can say exactly how the Trammps’ “The Night the Lights Went Out in New York City” became the anthem of the Great Outbreak, especially considering it was a disco song from the previous century. Was it Tony Mahoney at WOWO who started playing it, or Mark Boone at WLS-FM in Chicago? Or was it one of the Internet-only stations? A lot of people point to Spencer Dawes, DJ of the Disco Ball at Shepardsport Pirate Radio, although by that time the Flannigan Administration was trying to block the Lunar Resistance’s primary media organ by interfering with the ability of DNS servers to resolve their domain names (which was why their DJ’s and news personnel always read out the IP octets as well as the regular domain names when doing station identifications).

But whoever started it, by the time we knew something major was going on, “The Night the Lights Went Out in New York City” was everywhere. The New York Philharmonic even played a symphonic arrangement to close their final concert, the night public gatherings were closed For The Duration.

—- Rachel Bailey, The Cultural Scene of the Great Outbreak. Grissom City: St. Selene Digital Press, 2033.

Looking back, it seems obvious that something very bad was going on. Map the incidents and it looks like the footprints of an invisible giant making his way across the face of the Earth.

But at the time, most of us were far more concerned with our ongoing conflict with the Flannigan Administration over the policies that had enabled the Expulsions and the horrors they had created. We still had not been able to secure any form of accountability from NASA for the Kitty Hawk Massacre, and the cyber-attack on Slayton Field was still fresh in everybody’s minds.

And it didn’t help that someone at pretty high levels must’ve been keeping a lot of significant information from reaching the national news. Sure, the local news stations were covering the sudden outbreaks of sickness at various institutions, the illnesses sweeping through homeless encampments and the over-crowded housing of the working poor. It wasn’t like the government was censoring it — more like they were just keeping people from putting the pieces of the puzzle together and being able to see the elephant in the middle of the living room.

Once the Shepardsport Pirate Radio newsroom realized how bad things were getting, it was rather embarrassing. We’d prided ourselves on getting the news out when the Flannigan Administration wanted to soft-pedal it or outright descend a cone of silence over it — and we’d completely fumbled the ball. Worse, it was our own decision to exercise caution and not break the news until we were confident of what we were seeing — and we’d made it because we wanted to make sure we weren’t repeating groundless rumors and diminishing the reputation we depended upon.

By that point, everyone both here and on Earth were scrambling to catch up.

Autumn Belfontaine, “Shepardsport Pirate Radio’s Coverage of the Diablovirus Outbreak.” from The Lunar Resistance; An Oral History. Kennedy University Press: Carpenter Point, Tycho Crater, 2059