Building Up - jedcline's 2006 NanoWriMo

Day 14 of 30 2006 Building Up JEDCline

Day 14 of 30 2006 jedc "Building Up"

Realizing that the 1,200 people living in the new wheel section had been living in the passive non-self-sufficient mode of prison cell inmates for a long time, and did not know any tasks for their own survival up there except tending the agricultural areas and associated restaurant areas, Catalie suggested that it was up to the people here in the original wheel to teach the former prisoners how to cope with life up there in the fullest terms. Eventually those 1,200 people could become helpful instead of a liability to them, she hoped.

All of them also needed to deal with their new status of being cut off from the Earth surface resources, even communication, except receive-only internet. While "playing dead" they also had to struggle mightily and creatively to live long term, if possible. From the former prisoners, they learned that after the epidemic subsided, only the mega-corporations including Ownma remained fully strong and functional, and corporate leadership power cravings had resulted in their now owning the governments of the world. Ownma had been getting money from the government to pay for the operation of prisons, but now that Ownma was government too, there was no profit to be gained by paying themselves to operate the prisons.

That was why they had been cut off from Earth, they were no longer a profitable enterprise for Ownma Corporation. For Ownma's ilk, it was mandatory to get rid of anything that was not maximally profitable. To them, declaring the wheel space station a loss was like taking a now useless domesticated animal out into the woods, leaving some food and water for it, and abandoning it there, forgotten thereafter. They really were on their own now.

Pep talks were in order. Improy set up a table over on the shady side wheel's rim near one of the cafeterias, with signs saying that their home here was now called "Leo Island", and to sign up at the table for duty, when they were ready. It was an instant success, everybody eventually filling out an electronic form at the table, providing name (without their previous prisoner number designation), their skill sets both basic and experiential, and a list of what they would like to usefull do at first.

Only a third of them were women, so except for the few couples among them, each of the women were randomly assigned multiple "husbands", and a beginning set of relationship rules were created for such marriages, including procedures for trading husbands, and for some husbands to be part-time husbands to more than one woman. And procedures for that group of people to change those rules by mutual agreements, based on how it worked out in reality. This way, no one would be left out completely, resulting in greater comfort and thus better productivity of everyone, and less strife potential, so long as all the members of a group relationship honored the needs of the other members.

Besides maintaining the agricultural, food preparation and housing functions, their abilities would need to become greatly diversified. Aiming at being able to establish a Leo Island capability to build and program computers to link everything in a coordinated way, each person was assigned time slots to use the computer terminal to input a description of how to do things that they already knew how to do, building a mutual knowledge base. The shady side wheel was re-arranged to nearly match that of the original wheel, establishing join-able living sections and setting up light industry sections. The industrial area was streamlined to head quickly for a semiconductor processing capability in integrated circuit form. A basic research into hard vacuum environment materials processing facility was also established there, initially aiming for total extraction of purified elements from waste materials not directly recyclable in the existing operation of Leo Island. All material was precious, for it was all they could expect to have for a long time; they had to overall have a Pack Rat attitude. A 14-hour workday was established for the time being, partly to maximize accomplishments and partly because there was no recreation facility as yet, except for the gym. The work was set up to be easygoing, and have frequent breaktimes and changes in the kind of work done, throughout each workday. Each person's areas of activity were based as much as convenient upon the person's psyche, their Temperament.

Back in their own half of the dual space wheel settlement, Catalie and Improy's staff focused again on making usable space worksuits. Their one fabric and extrusion casting machine was pressed into service using discarded food containers into bolts of clothing fabric. Materials derived from cockroach exoskeletal material were used for the semi-rigid parts of a working spacesuit, although not of the augmented strength type, a function beyond their capability yet.

A couple dozen of the multiple-person family units were moved into their wheel, so as to make room for light industry sections in the shady side wheel, bringing the population of the shady side wheel down to 970 people, and bringing their own population up to 185. The two populations would even out more eventually, as arrangements best suited for optimum productivity and comfort of lifestyle were found. It would be a couple of decades before room would be needed for children reaching adulthood, needing their own separate quarters. Lots of room for everybody at present, however.

Agriculture was the basic recycling system for nutritional hydrocarbon material, as in ancient times. But their species diversity was extremely limited. The agricultural species originally supplied to the prison wheel were different than those of the first wheel, so overall now included several new vegetables, peanuts, fruit-bearing bushes, turkeys and goats. An agricultural biology research station was created, first to document the knowledge they had amongst themselves to create a knowledge and skill base, then to fabricate microscopes and other tools for that area, headed toward a DNA analysis and synthesis capability as soon as possible.

The original prison staff area had been supplied with a telescope, for unknown reasons, probably related to their psychological makeup that hungered to monitor everything going on; even in space around them beyond the space station, apparently. Mounted on the sidewall of the wheel station, it had a nice de-spin mechanism and vibration de-coupling mount, and sent its pictures in digitally. Several people volunteered to take charge of it, make it useful besides peering at what people were doing on the ground. One of the early concerns was to compare their trajectory with the position of the anchored tether space elevator that Improy and Catalie had helped create several years before. They had known that the path would not cause collision with the tether for several years, back at the start; and it had been originally intended to occasionally use reaction motors to shift orbit slightly so as to pass by even if originally headed toward collision. All that had been lost now, however, and needed re-discovery. What to do with the information, however, was yet to be determined. They had no fuel for reaction motor driven position shifting anymore.

They chose to define their location as being in line with some place on the planet, as if a line between the wheel station and the center of the Earth, and where it intersected the planetary surface, was its location. They created a map, showing where they were, that way; and compared it with the known location of the old space elevator, which was anchored to a floating island on the Equator in the Pacific Ocean. To define where they were at any time, they centered the image of the planet, and that was where they were above then, what appeared center of the planet’s disk image. The couple who had chosen to volunteer for the astronomy task plotted this position as a function of time, using the time together in the observatory as a chance to get away from the teeming busy wheel station in general. Volunteer tasks were set up to provide little benefits like that to those who did the volunteering.

Most of the former prisoners eagerly chose volunteer tasks to do. It was a relief from the caged boredom of before; gave them a sense of doing something worthwhile and thus improved their self esteem; and the tasks often had a special little benefit to those who did them. At this point, everything that done was by volunteers. No formal employment status system had been created yet. That was partly because they had to first establish a monetary system.

Catalie started the subject with Improy one morning during breakfast. "Ought we pay the cockroaches for their contribution to the protein balance of our breakfast?" she began. Improy was silent while he munched more of his breakfast, at first trying to make some sense of the question that had come out of the blue from his beloved mate; then exploring the implications of the question. It took several more spoons full of breakfast cereal, and a couple sips of tea, buying time to make some rational reply. "They certainly made a beneficial contribution to breakfast nutrition, yes." he began, not sure where this was going. "What kind of currency would cockroaches be paid in?"

"Consider money as the ability to do work." she replied. "After all, money pays salaries to have people do some activity; and buying some product pays for the work in making it, including the work of obtaining its materials." She paused thoughtfully a moment, then "in Physics, energy is also defined as the ability to do work. So maybe the cockroaches could be paid in killowatt-hours, to be spent in making their environment more suitable for them and to provide better food." His reply was "Yet we get kilowatt-hours of energy from the Sun as converted by our solar panels outside, into electrical energy that runs our machines. How does this figure in?"

"All energy comes from solar sources. The fossil fuels that powered civilizations' rise to a technological system, derived their energy from solar energy received by vegetation hundreds of millions of years ago. And nuclear energy comes from energy forged in solar furnaces, fission from such furnaces very long ago. So energy is a flow. Just how much one's sails get a push form that flow is determined by how much energy is intercepted. That "intercepted energy flow" is the amount of work that has been utilized to modify your environment, whether it is to make the air warmer or to make a product for sale to someone else," she continued.

He began to feel that he was losing his grasp on this conversation. "Does this boil down to the situation that if the cockroaches no longer are used to improve our food and to make spacesuit and shoe raw materials, they get the boot into space?" he replied, "Like we were given the boot by Ownma Corp., when we no longer were profitable to them?"

"When one stretches out in the sunshine, the Sun gives them warmth, energy for making vitamin D and to tan the skin", no charge." she replied after a moment. "The source of all energy does not give anyone the boot." He responded "Yeah, but when one's paycheck gets terminated, so does the ability to buy groceries and pay rent, essentially getting the boot. So where does all this get us?"

"Why do we have a monetary system?" she asked. "If it is used to establish the value of something, what is the meaning of that term 'value'? Maybe that is what we ought to base the monetary system on, is 'value', not the ability to do work."

"Value is set by a bidding system, a bargaining thing. A game function. Do we want a monetary system based on such a capricious thing? A drink of cool clear water to a man dying of thirst in the desert has far more value than the same amount of water in a lake."

"What is the amount of work that has to be done to provide that drink of cool, clear water, to the person in the desert at that critical time, as compared to providing the same drink of cool, clear water at the lake source itself?" she pointed out."True, the provider of the water may hold out for hugs sums of money before giving the desperately needed water. So it is not just the work done to get the water to the one in need of it, but also the desperation of need for it, and the intent of the provider to extract as much value away from the person in need as possible, regardless of the amount of investment in the work of bringing it to the desperate person." "And perhaps there is a risk factor involved. For example, if two people do the work of bringing the drink of water to the point of need, but only one glass of water is needed; one provider gets paid, while the other provider has lost all reward for the effort done, it is wasted effort.'

"If reward is based on the amount of time someone has spent doing something, there is no equality between someone who lazily does a little bit of work during the same time another person does their work in a frenzy, doing many times as much product in that same time."

"At one time, the concept of 'Value Added' was thought to be a fair measure of increase in price. But in that concept, the buying up of all of a limited commodity, then forcing the normal users to pay more for it even though it was no more useful to them than before, would have added no value to it other than through artifically created scarcity, holding the material hostage, in a sense. No utilitarian value was added, but the cost went up anyway; someone made profit but did not increase the usefulness of the product handled."

"Well, how about making the unit of money to be equal to a certain fraction of the total worth of the system in which one lives? Then it ought to be possible somehow to derive a percentage value for any particular thing. Although actually I can't think of how, right now." So they finished their breakfast philosophizing with volunteering still as the basis for getting anything done, at this point.

posted by Unknown @ 1:03 PM