Spirit Rise to Meet the Stars

~ image ~ Sedja at the Greenman's Tavern at Sprite

It is with a little sadness that I must depart this shore, for a little while, to follow the journey of the Space Pioneers who began at the ABC Island in Second Life, founded a project on the island of Nautilus and then struck out across the void to launch the island of Sprite in InWorldz.

This story will include their development of a virtual space program and the key instrument for this, with the VOSS (virtual orbital space settlement), in which any number of people can become directly involved ~ as if in space.

They are very ambitious, aiming to build the first orbital space settlement in the Solar System, a city among the stars and a style of construction that may prove to be the basis of the first human migration to another star system.

Will they succeed?

If they do, it will have begun with a simple vision ~ to develop a working model of an orbital space settlement in the virtual world. 

I have lodged a note in the InWorldz Forums about this journey through the virtual worlds ~

http://inworldz.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=71&t=13285

Do you see the painting behind me?

This is a work by Stjarna, the co-owner of Sprite with Hulda.

The work is simply called ~ 'Clydes Island' ~ and is of a tiny rocky islet on the coast of the Forestier Peninsula in Tasmania, the southern island State of Australia.

The waters in front are called Pirates Bay, which is where Eaglehawk Neck is found ~ a sandy connection to the Tasman Peninsula, once guarded by fierce dogs. 

This area was once a rather big British Prison in old Van Deimen's Land.

Stjarna says the harbour at Sprite is a bit like Pirates Bay.

Now tourism is a bubbly affair for the peninsula, including at the iconic Port Arthur, which was once the main prison town on the Tasman Peninsula.

Ruins attract visitors and people have ever found the ruins at Port Arthur strangely appealing.

It was on one tragic Sunday in 1996, when Stjarna was completing this painting, that news came over the radio of events at Port Arthur.

It turned out that a mad gunman had killed 35 people and wounded 23 more.

Stjarna ever wondered about the connection of this painting with the Port Arthur massacre and how the rainbow was like the Viking bridge to the heavens, called Bifrost.

Why the vortex with those clouds?

Stjarna felt it just seemed right that it should be like that ~ and then events rolled out around a brooding land of pain and memories.

This is why Stjarna offered this painting to the people of East Timor, when they gained their independence from Indonesia in 1999 and it was accepted by their first president, Xanana Gusmao.

The people of East Timor had suffered the massacre of a couple of hundred thousand of their citizens, as a mad regime in Jakarta tried to hammer them into the Indonesian empire.

They refused to be hammered.

Now we see the tragedy in West Papua, which is a territory the size of France, the western half of the island of New Guinea, suffering a similar story to East Timor and for much longer, since the United Nations allowed Jakarta to move in as the new colonial power in 1962.

The story of West Papua will rise in this journey with the Space Pioneers, because it merges with many of the main events of space development, such as the launch of the Moon Race and the 1969 Moon landing.

This is the human story of tragedy and achievement.

Some events cannot be avoided, as we are tumbled through the vicissitudes of life, but at other times, we do have choice.

Space Pioneers wonder if we now have an option with expansion beyond Earth, that we have had that choice since 1969, but it may only happen when a large enough number of people rise to seek it.

Will the human spirit rise to meet the stars?

Will the World allow the West Papuan people to find freedom beneath their stars.

Maybe those two events are connected, in a strange kind of way, as with the rising of East Timor from tragedy, the freedom we come to win is not always the life that the powerful would have us live.