Tabula Rasa

Abstract

Intensely ideological, but also rather fun, Tabula Rasa was a glorious failure. Its demise warns that the real human future may fail as well. The name refers to the “clean slate” with which many early psychologists believed an infant enters the real world, and with which an avatar enters this outer space gameworld. Step by step, the avatar adds fundamental concepts to a tabula or tablet, which confer ever greater powers through gradual enlightenment. Tabula Rasa therefore offers fresh thinking about the future and in a sense requires a person to abandon preconceptions and strongly held values. Perhaps that is why it failed: Most people avoid any challenge to the basis on which they live their lives, and few game players are emotionally or intellectually prepared to clean their slates. Tabula Rasa advocated nothing less than escaping the world we currently inhabit.

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Intensely ideological, but also rather fun, Tabula Rasa was a glorious failure. Its demise warns that the real human future may fail as well. The name refers to the “clean slate” with which many early psychologists believed an infant enters the real world, and with which an avatar enters this outer space gameworld. Step by step, the avatar adds fundamental concepts to a tabula or tablet, which confer ever greater powers through gradual enlightenment. Tabula Rasa therefore offers fresh thinking about the future and in a sense requires a person to abandon preconceptions and strongly held values. Perhaps that is why it failed: Most people avoid any challenge to the basis on which they live their lives, and few game players are emotionally or intellectually prepared to clean their slates. Tabula Rasa advocated nothing less than escaping the world we currently inhabit.

Space travel is the chief way of escaping Earth yet remaining in the real world, as Clarke’s City and the Stars reminded us. Gamelike virtual worlds can be accused of being one of the most seductive ways of leaving the real world altogether. Thus the interplay between realities and unrealities is germane to Tabula Rasa, although the game presents its planets as fully real and minimizes explicitly magical elements. The central theme is the motivations that might inspire people to undertake the costly, dangerous, and possibly unrewarding flight into the cosmos. Thinking back over the four decades since the Apollo moon expeditions, it seems that humanity has not in fact found sufficient motivations for spaceflight. Tabula Rasa, thus, has some elements of a revival meeting, designed to rededicate players to achieving transcendence among the stars.

Exploring Two Worlds

William Bridgebain arrived on the planet Foreas on US Independence Day, 2008. He was a refugee from Earth, which had been invaded by the extraterrestrial Bane army, and a recruit to the Allied Free Sentients, an alliance of intelligent humans and humanoids that sought to liberate their worlds from this galactic scourge. A copy of the AFS Field Manual was pressed into his hands, and he was quickly instructed in the use of weapons, armor, and other technology adapted to this alien world, then sent on brief training missions. Some of the devices were quite humble, such as the ordinary-looking toilets that avoided the need for toilet paper by vigorously flushing upwards. Other devices were exotic in the extreme, such as the teleport waypoints used for quick medium-distance travel within a geographic zone, the dropships for long-distance travel on a planet, or the rare wormhole stations for interplanetary travel.

An early mission took him deep into Luna Caverns, in the Wilderness region of the Concordia continent, the first of many caves he would explore on the world. There he encountered his first Logos Shrine, where he acquired the Power pictogram which he placed in the tabula he carried in his backpack. A sepulchral voice told him that an advanced species called the Eloh had left shines like this across several solar systems, each Logos expressing a hidden truth they had discovered about nature, and bestowing a fresh ability to anyone who could master it. Bridgebain was gratified to learn that he was one of the receptives, who possessed the requisite innate spiritual or intellectual capacity. The AFS Field Manual explained, “Troops receptive to the Logos language can learn new symbols by visiting ancient Logos Shrines in remote locations on Foreas and other worlds. A soldier must master one or more specific Logos symbols in order to use Logos abilities. The Eloh left puzzles in certain areas, which cannot be passed without understanding Logos.” When he activated the shrine, a mysterious geometrical symbol rotated before his eyes, and in the darkness of the cave he thought he saw a shadowy form. Was that the ghost of an Eloh, or a hologram?

An alien voice explained, “Many years ago, our kind visited many worlds – among them, your own Earth – seeking to share our knowledge of the power of Logos.” At that moment, the Logos element representing power appeared in Bridgebain’s previously empty tabula. Searching the databases available to him online, he learned that the power Logos gave him the ability to use lightning as a weapon, and could in future help him gain bio-augmentation abilities as well.

That week he gained Logos abilities in three other Wilderness caverns: area, enhance, and target. At widely dispersed open-air shrines he also found: attack, damage, enemy, mind, projectile, self, and time. Another Logos, here, was locked behind a gate he could not open until he had acquired both mind and power. This was an important Logos, because it was needed to create bots and clones. Other elements were contained in instances, sub-areas he explored completely alone, although many other AFS warriors did so in groups. In the Caves of Donn he collected: feeling, heal and trap. In Crater Lake Research Facility, he gained: around, chaos, and movement. The extremely important future Logos was also locked away in Wilderness, inside the Chamber of Eternity within an archaeological instance of Eloh ruins called Guardian Prominence. He could not gain it until months later, when his powers had reached level 40 and he could brave its dangers.

Searching for Logos elements, and carrying out military missions to the frontline and two hotly disputed outposts, gave Bridgebain an appreciation for the really rather beautiful Foreas countryside, green with vegetation and sculpted with diverse terrain. Among his favorite places on the planet was Pinhole Falls. Water rushed into a medium-sized pond, where he loved to swim, despite the danger that one of the Bane’s minions might shoot at him from the bank. The water did not exit the pond by cascading over the edge of the cliff, but through a natural drain at the bottom. Although somewhat dangerous, letting the falling water flush him through the pinhole was an exciting experience he repeated many times. He tried not to think of the obvious toilet analogy.

In Wilderness, Bridgebain quickly made friends with humanity’s Forean allies, tall humanoids with leathery reptilian skin, soulful eyes, and a spiritual demeanor. Council Elder Solis helped him understand more about the fundamental nature of reality, “You know of the Benefactors, the race also called Eloh? It was they who discovered the power of Logos. Their sacred artifacts are scattered on planets across the galaxy, including this one. I understand that your people found some on your homeworld as well, and used them to create the wormhole that brought you to Foreas.” Thus, the Logos, which are mere ideas, have the power to control matter. But when he visited many Forean villages, he found that they understood more technology than they used, and sought to live in harmony with nature rather than to dominate it.

In the southwest corner of Wilderness, he encountered the Cormans, pacifist refugees from Earth who had left their planet even before the invasion, conducting research along Ranja Gorge. Ordinary AFS soldiers tended to despise the Cormans as “treehuggers,” yet the military also protected them and drew on their greater knowledge of the planet. As Sergeant Conway once commented, “They may be damned hippies, but they don’t deserve to die out here.” Bridgebain also saw Cormans at Cumbria Research Facility in the Palisades region of Concordia, and a rebel offshoot group called the Retreads in the Marshes and Pools regions of the other Forean continent, Valverde. The Retreads had rejected pacifism in favor of waging their own guerilla war against the Bane, but like the orthodox Cormans they refused to join any alliance. Corman architecture was distinctive, despite their terrestrial origins, often in the form of glass-walled geodesic domes.

Despite many skirmishes against the Bane, Bridgebain never really got a good sense of what their core society was like. He understood that the Bane were led by Neph, a faction of Eloh that had long ago turned toward evil. Undoubtedly, the names Eloh and Neph are drawn from the Bible, where Elohim refers to God or gods, and Nephilim are somewhat ambiguous beings who may be fallen angels, Titans, or other wicked entities opposed to the Elohim. What Bridgebain did encounter were the minions of the Bane. Most notable were the Thrax who served as infantry initiates, common soldiers, grenadiers, and technicians. The humans tended to think of Thrax as insects, calling them cockroaches or “Crusty.” However, their form was that of sturdy humanoids with the same number of limbs as humans. The Bane used technology to transform captured Foreans into machina who would serve in their ranks, and they brought to Foreas wasp-like animals called fithiks to harass their enemies. Especially lethal were two kinds of huge machines, 20 ft-tall stalkers that strode across the battlefield, and predator aircraft that attacked from above.

Blending into the natural environment, but also potentially dangerous, were six kinds of indigenous Forean animals. Bridgebain first encountered pig-like boargar who could be tough but would not attack unless aroused. Eyeless, they navigated by means of a natural sonar like that of bats, emitted from an organ between their horns, so they were especially sensitive to sonic weapons. In contrast, tree lurkers were aggressive but vulnerable to fire, while slow-moving treebacks were so huge that vegetation grew on them. Miasmas looked like flying squids, dwelled in caves where it was impossible to avoid them, and were best handled with incendiary weapons. Warnets were wasplike, spawned in hives, and used electric discharges to shock their victims. Filchers were scavenger birds, not really dangerous but often stealing valuable loot from the battlefield.

Most of all, Bridgebain loved the land. Ranja Gorge was beautiful but completely overshadowed by the magnificent chasm that cut the Plateau region of Valverde, running east and west. Crossing its center was the beautiful Trinity Bridge, built according to Eloh designs and containing many secrets. The Descent region of Valverde is dominated by Dante’s Pit, an absolutely immense sinkhole reminiscent of Tycho crater on Earth’s moon. Among other notable environmental features were the volcano in Howling Maw, the eponymous marshes of Marshes, and the nearly ubiquitous caverns, some of which connected the zones.

Half way through his service with the AFS, Bridgebain was temporarily posted to the other planet, Arieki. Travel between planets was accomplished through wormhole portals, which were much rarer than local teleport sites and even than dropship landing platforms. Figure 3.1 shows the wormhole at Foreas Base in the low-level Divide region. Presumably, the funnel-shaped force field at the top center of the installation warps space, under control of the equipment in the structure, and transmits a person across vast distances to another similar installation that acts as the receiver. To use the wormhole, a person needs only to mount the stairs and stand under the force field, at which point a menu of available destinations appears.

Fig. 3.1

A wormhole for travel between Foreas and Arieki

If Foreas was green, then Arieki was red, and most of its seven regions glowed from the molten lava flowing in what passed for rivers on this arid world. I say seven regions, although the maps provided with Tabula Rasa show six. The seventh region, Abyss, was apparently discovered after the others. Situated on the continent Torden, it is a practically subterranean realm connected to the Abyssal Zone on the south edge of Torden’s Plains region. With the exception of Ashen Desert on the Ligo continent, lava flows obstruct free movement across all the zones, and the Bane are extremely well entrenched at many bases.

At Irendas Colony in the Plains region, Bridgebain met another race of intelligence extraterrestrials, the Brann, who were now nominal allies of humanity but did not seem to be of nearly so much value as the Foreans. Criminals and the descendents of convicts, at first they seemed merely like annoying beggars. Then he reached the Crucible region on Ligo, and was ordered by AFS Captain DeLisi to spy on the Brann at Staal. As DeLisi explained, “Staal Detention Center was one of the biggest Brann prisons on Arieki. After the Bane invaded, the prisoners rioted and overwhelmed the Warden Bots. Now the Brann are using it as their city. Intel says there are four crime syndicates calling the shots at Staal. They run guns and sell black market goods, but they’re also damn good fighters and they don’t have any love for the Bane.”

Bridgebain completed missions for all four Brann syndicates, and formed his own impression of them. They seemed more enthusiastic about technology than the Foreans, and often used it in attempts to improve themselves. A Brann scientist named Eugin told Bridgebain, “We cannot be setting limits to the potential of our races. All that is best in us can be made better. On my homeworld, our government believed that no environment could be too good for our people, but as scientist of genetics, I say that our people can never be too good for their environment.” Ordinary Brann tend to be in the salvage business, making commercial use of wrecked and abandoned machines. This is a more humble form of technology-based redemption than the science-based redemption offered by the Eloh.

Another species on Arieki may have been intelligent natives of the planet, the gigantic, arachnoids called Atta. Living in hives and dominated by queens, it was easy to imagine they were stupid animals, like gigantic ants. Yet when fighting they threw rocks with great accuracy, and they had constructed networks of ramps and bridges, rather like Earth’s superhighway overpasses, around their city-sized hives. The official AFS guide says the intelligence of Atta is disputed, but the now-unavailable Tabula Rasa website reported, “Exobiologists have discerned that the Atta are probably solely responsible for maintaining Arieki’s ecosystems and maintaining the habitability of the planet.” Their main colonies were Kardash in Plains, Ojasa in Incline, and Rivasa in Thunderhead, but they also had four smaller outposts in Ashen Desert. Apparently indigenous to Arieki, and equally distributed across both continents, they did not seem to be involved in the great cosmic war against the Bane, and would have been the dominant species on the planet had not the Brann, Bane and Humans arrived.

Arieki had its own menagerie of creatures, four of which were constant annoyances. According to the Tabula Rasa website, barb ticks and beam mantas have a symbiotic relationship. The ticks are “small, colony-based creatures [that] live on and beneath the blasted sands of Arieki. They grind food for nutrition and sustenance, and the high mineral content of Arieki’s soil collects in their bodies over time, allowing the Barb Tick to spit out these chunks at high velocity.” Beam mantas fly slowly in the air over the ticks, providing protective cover while consuming food which the ticks have broken into pieces small enough for the mantas to eat. “Beam Mantas gather electrical energy with their long, slender tails and store this energy in muscle tissue arranged across their back. When the Beam Manta attacks, it bridges a connection between its forward appendages, allowing it to direct a strong electrical pulse at its target.” Geyser hoppers feed on bacteria associated with the planet’s sulfur geysers, producing oxygen on which the ecosystem depends, and magmonix are huge and slow moving defenders of the territory around geologically active areas. Notice that these four species have evolved co-dependently, and the Atta also were shaped by evolution to cooperate in maintaining life on an otherwise inhospitable world.

Had the war not ended unexpectedly, wormholes to a third planet, Mycon, might have been opened. But the “real world” intruded upon Foreas and Arieki when the NCsoft corporation decided to shut Tabula Rasa down, and on December 9, 2008, urged its subscribers to move over to a new fantasy virtual world it was preparing to launch, Aion. For its final months, until its closure at the end of February 2009, Tabula Rasa became cost-free for established players, and their enthusiasm was sustained by the addition of one final instance. Bridgebain received his last Logos element, Earth, back in the Wilderness zone of Foreas, inside Enigma Caverns, past a gate that could be unlocked only by a level 50 receptive who possessed these three Logos elements: defend, planet, yours.

The Earth symbol is a diagram of the inner solar system, with the sun at center, and the Earth in the third orbit. There are, of course, may ways to conceptualize Earth, but calling it a planet and describing it in terms of its orbit place it in an astronomical context. One could argue that the Earth is not a planet at all, but a biosphere unlike any other place in the solar system. Planets, historically, are wandering stars given astrological significance, that in the centuries after Galileo came to be seen as physical worlds comparable to Earth, but initially without full awareness that they are crucially different in that they cannot naturally sustain life. Realization that the concept of planet is dubious came when astronomers debated removing Pluto from the list of planets, rather than adding some dozens of other moon-sized non-­satellites to the roster of planets, from Ceres to Sedna. The word planet, therefore, is an anachronism, originating in ancient astrology and only temporarily having real ­scientific meaning during the period of perhaps four centuries. However, conceptualizing Earth in astronomical terms as a planet sets the stage for leaving Earth to inhabit other worlds.

The Earth Logos allowed Bridgebain to enter a previously hidden wormhole in Wilderness and return to his home planet. Thoroughly disoriented, he emerged in the 23rd Street subway station in New York City, on the south edge of Madison Square Park. Occupied by Bane stalkers, predators, and Thrax soldiers, the park had been blasted into a wasteland of devastation. An AFS captain named Pauly instructed Bridgebain to report to General Murphy at an outpost on Lexington Avenue, but that would mean crossing the park through the enemy forces. Pauly admitted, “Getting there isn’t going to be easy. Unless you’ve got a proven squad together, I’d strongly suggest you turn around right now and get your **** back through that Wormhole.” Unfortunately, Bridgebain was alone, and several attempts to sneak past the Bane failed. He returned to Foreas and spent his remaining days deciphering ancient Eloh inscriptions.

We cannot be sure what happen afterward to humanity, but we have some hint when these events all occurred. The flash screen that appeared upon entering Tabula Rasa showed a view of the city of New York, devastated and marked by several teleport waypoints, implying a lengthy struggle would be required to save Earth from the Bane. In the distance, where the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center had stood, rose a new building, which, as I write these words, does not yet exist.

Scientific and Philosophical Basis

First and foremost, Tabula Rasa was an expression of the spaceflight social movement that seeks to propel humanity out into the universe. The key person in the development of this game was Richard Garriott, son of Skylab astronaut, Owen Garriott. As of June 2009, his Wikipedia article began:

Richard Allen Garriott (born July 4, 1961), also known as Lord British in Ultima and General British in Tabula Rasa, is a significant figure in the video game industry. He was originally a game designer and programmer, but now engages in various aspects of computer game development. On October 12, 2008, Garriott launched aboard Soyuz TMA-13 to the International Space Station as a self-funded tourist, returning safely 12 days later aboard Soyuz TMA-12 [1].

Soon after launch, during a broadcast back to Earth, Garriott held up a piece of paper on which he had written some Logos pictographs. The first one was the Earth pictograph, and I immediately understood what they said: “Earth is the cradle of humanity, but a person cannot stay in a cradle forever.” This is one of many versions of the English translation of a famous proverb by the Russian spaceflight pioneer, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. Googling “earth cradle humanity Tsiolkovsky” gives 40,700 hits, some sign of the influence of these words. Tsiolkovsky was one of three intellectuals in the early twentieth century who identified the correct principles for initial spaceflight, based on multi-stage liquid-fuel rockets. The other two were the American, Robert Goddard, and the German, Hermann Oberth. Out of their writings, and the practical technical and organization work of many men they inspired, grew the spaceflight social movement [2].

It began almost simultaneously in four great nations: Germany, the Soviet Union, Britain, and the United States. First, individual theorists like Tsiolkovsky, Goddard, and Oberth developed the principles of space travel. This was the phase of maturation of a social movement I call parallel behavior – individuals doing essentially the same thing but without any communication among them. Then a cascade of books, articles, and lectures established networks of communication and a shared space culture. This was the phase of collective behavior – individuals influencing one another but without formal planning and organization. Soon the moderate level of organization that defines a social movement was achieved in the founding of amateur space travel clubs in Germany (1927), the United States (1930), the Soviet Union (1931), and Great Britain (1933). Once the great government rocket programs had been established, first the V-2 project in Germany, then the intercontinental ballistic missile programs of the USSR and US, primitive spaceflight was assured but the movement had been transformed into a societal institution. Now it is a minor appendage of the military-industrial complex, and it has lost the capacity to innovate.

In the 1960s, an ideology consolidated and was shared widely throughout ­society, asserting what humanity should accomplish through spaceflight in the following decades. Questionnaire research I carried out in the wake of the Challenger shuttle disaster in 1986 indicated that a great diversity of specific goals could be grouped into a small number of major themes [3]. In 2009 I assessed the progress that had been achieved by then in each theme [4]. Among the more technically oriented goals, some have largely been achieved already and can be enhanced without new rocket technology: communications satellites, earth observation, navigation ­systems like GPS, and fundamental research in physics, astronomy, and general science. Today, exploitation of low earth orbit space does have commercial applications and contributes to employment in technical fields, but there are questions about whether it will be economically feasible to exploit extraterrestrial resources, for example by beaming solar power down to earth from satellites, mining the moon and asteroids, or manufacturing high-tech materials in weightless conditions. Full-fledged colonization of the Moon or Mars seems very far off, and today there exists neither the will nor the way to accomplish this tremendously challenging goal. With the possible exception of space tourism, there seems to be little activity today exploring new commercial applications.

Similarly, most military applications of space appear to have stabilized – using satellites for reconnaissance, navigation, and communications – leaving still unresolved the question of whether a defense against intercontinental ballistic missiles will be technically possible. Short of the invasion of Earth by aliens which Tabula Rasa imagined, there may be no need to develop the weapons or the launch vehicles required for war in outer space.

However, many traditional justifications for space exploration were emotional and idealistic, rather than scientific, economic, or military. On the basis of the questionnaire research, here are ten subcategories of idealistic motivations, each illustrated by two typical statements:

Human spirit. “Space exploration is a human struggle, expressing the unconquerable human spirit.” “Space offers new challenges, and civilization would stagnate without challenges.”

Personal inspiration. “The space program encourages people to make achievements and solve problems.” “The space program inspires young people to study the sciences.”

Noble endeavor. “Spaceflight is a noble endeavor, expressing the hopes and aspirations of humankind.” “The space program allows people to think beyond the triviality of Earthbound conflicts and concerns.”

Curiosity. “Investigation of outer space satisfies human curiosity.” “Humans have an innate need to search and discover.”

Exploration. “We should explore the unknown.” “We should boldly go where no man or woman has gone before.”

Frontier. “We must broaden our horizons.” “Space is the new frontier.”

Adventure. “Space exploration fulfills the human need for adventure.” “Space stimulates the creative, human imagination.”

Aesthetics. “The beauty of space creates a sense of wonder.” “New experiences and perspectives gained in space inspire art, music, and literature.”

Insight. “We could gain greater understanding of the world we live in.” “We could gain knowledge about ourselves.”

Responsibility. “Space travel makes us realize that Earth is a fragile, unique, unified world that deserves more respect and better care.” “In space, we see how small our world is and thus learn humility.”

Arguably, experiencing the challenge of gamelike virtual worlds could accomplish many of the same things. I have certainly seen young people turn toward computer science and cognitive science after playing computer games, and I am convinced these environments trigger valid insights about the real world and about human beings. Their aesthetic qualities are undeniable. It is more debatable whether battling the Bane across Foreas and Arieki is a noble endeavor, involving real exploration and adventure, but subjectively that may be at least somewhat true. One certainly expands one’s horizons interacting with diverse other people, because the gamelike worlds described in this book all attract international participants. Tabula Rasa, for example, functioned simultaneously in English, French, German, and Korean. Despite sometimes being called aliens, foreigners do not meet the traditional definition of extraterrestrial life, but one of the other items from the 1986 research asserted: “We could learn much from contact and communication with intelligent, extraterrestrial beings.”

Some ancient religions located the gods in the heavens, and in the European Enlightenment speculation intensified about the inhabitants of other worlds [5]. This took two tracks, one mystical and the other more scientific. A major influence for the mystical track was Emanuel Swedenborg’s remarkable 1758 book, The Earths in Our Solar System, which are Called Planets and the Earths in the Starry Heavens, their Inhabitants and Spirits and Angels thence from Things Seen and Heard [6]. Incorporating ideas from Theosophy and other quasi-religious movements, 200 years after Swedenborg a belief system has emerged in which ancient extraterrestrials were responsible for the birth of human civilization and might even be available today to guide us to higher levels. This hope is part of the New Age subculture, and people who favor it also tend to see merit in astrology, biorhythms, and extrasensory perception as well [7]. One influential “flying saucer cult,” the Raëlians, even call the ascended space aliens Elohim, suggesting the biblical origins of Tabula Rasa’s Eloh [8].

A century ago, some professional astronomers thought that Mars could harbor life, and its supposed (but illusory) canals really might be technological infrastructure built by Martians [9]. That theory was demoted to fantasy over the following decades, especially after space probes actually visited the red planet [10]. However, it soon became apparent that radio technology might be developed to the point at which interstellar communication would be possible, whether or not physical travel to the stars ever could be, and many reputable scientists wrote encouraging essays on this “far-out” topic [11]. After a few decades of false starts, astronomers began amassing solid evidence that planets exist outside our solar system, and by March 2010 the online Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia listed fully 429 of them [12].

One critical fact to consider when examining the meaning of Tabula Rasa and the real prospects for interstellar flight is that we are not currently in contact with an extraterrestrial civilization. Even if only one star in a million produces intelligent life, a hundred thousand civilizations would appear in our galaxy. Simple calculations suggest that a single colonizing species could fill the galaxy in a few million years, far less than the time since civilization probably began to appear [13]. Thus, either these calculations are wrong or interstellar colonization must be exceedingly difficult and unlikely. Yet technology capable of achieving it can already be sketched – not using the mythical wormholes but 1,000 year-duration travel either in city-sized ships or in some form of cryonic, DNA, or computerized storage. Therefore, the apparent lack of colonization may be due to social rather than technological considerations.

As technology advances, we can better fulfill our needs by reengineering not only our environment but also our species itself. Birth control seems to solve population pressures better than does interplanetary colonization. A static, information-centered industrial base might be more satisfactory than the heroic mining of the asteroids. Direct intervention in human genetics and brain physiology might end crime and deviance, even to the point of reducing mankind to automatons. Bread can be manufactured from sewage, and circuses can be simulated with computer graphics. Once a species has the power to transform itself, it has no utilitarian need to explore and conquer the universe. The threat of self-annihilation, whether through nuclear war or some other miss-application of science, must be overcome. A species might establish an absolute cultural and political freeze in the service of its own preservation. Perhaps only highly unlikely and risky accidents, occurring just before a species arrives at such a stasis, can propel it out across the gulf of space to the stars [14].

If interstellar colonization, therefore, is ever to be possible, it must be begun very rapidly, within a few short decades of the development of nuclear physics and biological engineering. Ordinary socioeconomic forces will be insufficient to launch galactic exploration this rapidly, and only transcendent social movements could possibly channel enough of a society’s resources into the project to succeed before either stasis or annihilation. Whatever else it may be, Tabula Rasa was an attempt by Richard Garriott to restart the spaceflight movement by inspiring players to imagine distant worlds and bring to real life the motivations to explore them [15].

In the mythos of Tabula Rasa, Garriott flew a second time into space, but his Vostok was thrown off course by an encounter with a Bane reconnaissance vessel, and hurled to the planet Foreas. Bridgebain was able to find the craft, long after Garriott escaped from it. Represented by his avatar, General British, Garriott became the commander of the Allied Free Sentients. The first flight also connected the real and virtual worlds, because Garriott carried with him a memory unit containing data representing Bridgebain and all the other Tabula Rasa avatars.

This was part of a larger effort called Operation Immortality. As announced August 15, 2008 on websites that now have been taken down, this project “intended to collect and archive the very best of what humanity has accomplished, is creating a digital time capsule of the human race, including messages from people around the world and DNA samples from some of our brightest minds and most accomplished athletes.” DNA samples were donated by a score of people, including comedian Stephen Colbert, physicist Stephen Hawking, singer Joe Ely, athlete Matt Morgan, Playboy magazine’s cybergirl Jo Garcia, and Heather Ash who wrote scripts for the Stargate SG-1 sci-fi TV program.

Although I did not contribute my DNA, I did register for the other parts of the project, and on October 23 received this email: “Thank you for participating in Operation Immortality! Through your dedicated effort to save humanity we have secured the Bridgebain Tabula Rasa characters aboard the Immortality Drive, which is now safely stored on the International Space Station.” I also took the opportunity to add what amounted to a Twitter tweet to the database taken to the space station, using an easily decoded compression algorithm to fit my 200 responses to the questions about the value of space exploration from some personality capture software I had programmed [16].

One intended function of Garriott’s space voyage was to boost the fortunes of Tabula Rasa through positive publicity for the vision that motivated it. This tactic was not apparently successful, and the subscriber base remained low compared with World of Warcraft or even NCsoft’s flagship virtual worlds Lineage and City of Heroes. A series of ambiguous messages informed the public that Garriott and NCsoft had parted company, and the fate of Tabula Rasa was sealed. Tabula Rasa was not a commercial success, but Garriott is a legitimate member of the spaceflight movement, and the gameworld incorporated a remarkable collection of ideas that could promote the movement, if only the players would pay attention. Central to the ideology is the tabula of Logos elements.

The Logos Language

In addition to its advocacy of space exploration, Tabula Rasa is rich in science-related metaphors of transcendence. This is especially true in the Logos language. Although directly inspired by the Bliss system of pictograph communication [17], more abstractly it is based on the hypothesis of Platonic Idealism that physical ­reality is a reflection of a higher conceptual truth. Long before Plato developed this perspective, the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus employed the term logos to refer to the fundamental order of the universe, which he considered to be a set of concepts that could be discerned by an enlightened human mind. Classical Greek thinking in this area blended scientific with mystical motivations, but we can see the beginnings of modern science in the view of Pythagoreanism that the ideas on which the universe was based are largely mathematical in nature. Thus it is revealing that whenever a character in Tabula Rasa gains a new Logos, the rotating image that traditionally represents the concept phi appears.

Phi is a mathematical concept, also called the Golden Ratio, expressed as an irrational number, approximately 1.6180339887… but extending to an infinite number of decimal places. In some respects, therefore, it is comparable to the much better known irrational number, pi (3.14159265358979…). Phi can be generated mathematically in a number of ways, but among the most often cited is the ratio of two adjacent integers in a Fibonacci series, such as 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21… in which each later integer is the sum of its two predecessors. As the integers get larger, the ratio approaches ever closer to phi, but can only equal phi at infinity. Phi has been used extensively in both the arts and in mystical speculations for more than 2,000 years. For example, in the StarCraft mythos, the discovery of phi opened the door to profound mental abilities for the Protoss, marking the dawn of their high-technology civilization [18]. As a metaphor, the Golden Ratio suggests that the universe may contain hidden meaning that harmonizes with human hopes and perceptions.

Figure 3.2 shows eight separate Logos that are philosophically significant, plus three inscriptions that illustrate how they can be concatenated into sentences. While interpreting the philosophy behind these symbols, it is impossible to avoid a certain amount of speculation, but there are good reasons for suggesting much of what follows. The symbol Logos itself is a triskelion sign, employed as an emblem for Tabula Rasa, and identifying each friendly character in the game. Its first appearance may have been on the Triskelion Disk or Benefactor Stone that was released to promote the future game in 2004. Both sides of this disk had a large triskelion in the center, with a set of Logos symbols around the edge.

Fig. 3.2

Logos elements and Eloh inscriptions

The second symbol is phi, in a traditional geometrical representation of a series of ever smaller squares arranged in a spiral pattern. Shortly before public release of Tabula Rasa, a long Logos inscription was distributed, including this sentence: “Phi combines all forces of the cosmos.” Interestingly, the symbol for cosmos consists of three stars, and the Logos symbols for star and spirit are both almost identical to the symbol for force. The next two symbols in the left column of Fig. 3.2 represent the two factions of the most advanced galactic species: Eloh and Neph. Note that the Eloh symbol looks like an angel, and the Neph symbol could represent a fallen angel with horns rather than a halo. The pictograms for good and evil are similar, but depicting ordinary people without angelic wings. The next element in the left column expresses function in the form of two gears meshing, a very mechanical way of representing a mathematical relationship between two variables, but also hinting at the idea of intended purpose. The final symbol, for immortality, shows a traditional symbol for infinity over the symbol for life, which is two living cells undergoing division.

The first Tabula Rasa mission that requires a player to understand the meaning of Logos elements, Eloh Translations, combines the biosphere and astronomical conceptions of Earth. An NPC named Corporal Orton sends the player to an ancient ruin to decipher six symbols displayed in light on an obelisk, shown here in the second column of Fig. 3.2. Orton said, “I feel like it’s something important or something [sic] like how to stop the Bane. Or maybe it’s like a clue as to how to find some Eloh treasure.” I already possessed half of the Logos, so I looked the others up in an online database called Logos Atlas [19]. Then, I merely needed to read the concepts off the obelisk from top to bottom to translate the six-word sentence: Honor planet today, have power tomorrow. Corporal Orton was very disappointed in the result, saying, “I thought for sure it would be something cool like how to blow up mountains or something. This makes no sense to me. So much for getting rich. At least I don’t have to be thinking about that stupid thing again.” Clearly, the message proclaimed that power comes not from destroying nature but from honoring it, and Orton was unable to comprehend this environmentalist principle because he was stupidly obsessed with violence and quick profit.

Orton reflects the narrow thinking of people who are not receptive to the enlightenment offered by the Logos. This is common among AFS personnel who are not avatars of players but non-player characters operated by simple programming routines or artificial intelligence. Perhaps their defect is that they lack souls. They tend to see science and technology as means by which to achieve military goals or comparable unenlightened purposes. For example, Engineer Salter says, “I’m a mechanical engineer. You know the difference between a mechanical engineer and a civil engineer? Mechanical engineers build weapons, civil engineers build targets.”

The six symbols are pictographs, representing abstract concepts in the form of simple drawings. The pictograph for honor, for example, is the cartoon of a person’s head and arms, with one hand over the heart. Similarly, have shows a person holding something, namely the thing that he has. Power is a small lightning bolt. The symbol for planet is very interesting from an environmentalist standpoint. It is the astrological and astronomical symbol for Earth. Thus, a batter translation than “planet” might be “the planet” or “home planet.”

Today and tomorrow both show an image of the sun in the center. Today frames the sun between two vertical lines, and tomorrow has only one vertical line at the left. This reflects a conception of time moving from left to right, with today being inside the frame of our perception, and tomorrow just beyond it. We would predict that the logo for yesterday would show a sun with a single vertical line at the right. Unfortunately, Tabula Rasa does not apparently incorporate a symbol for yesterday, so we cannot confirm this guess. However, we do have confirmation that the Eloh, like our own civilization, conceptualized time as moving from left to right. The pictograph for past shows a dot to the left of an hourglass, whereas future is an hourglass with a dot on the right. Time is simply an hourglass with no dot, and now is an hourglass framed by lines on left and right, like today.

The second inscription in Fig. 3.2 is a slogan found in the Tabula Rasa publicity, and the third is the solution to a puzzle. At level 50, Bridgebain entered Sanctus Grotto to cross a heavily defended bridge and reach a Forean temple to gain the function Logos. On each side of the span were three mysterious Eloh objects marked by Logos symbols and beaming pillars of light skyward. Forean holograms would attack him, unless he activated the six objects in the right order. For a long time he thought the correct order was Eloh function through choice not control, wrongly imaging that the ancient Benefactors respected the free will of their disciples. But then he was forced to realize, however painfully, that freedom was not part of their system: Eloh function through control not choice. He should have remembered what an Eloh hologram named Jumna told him back at level 38: “The stones that form your path were set in place many millennia ago, friend. Let their strength be your strength as they guide you along.”

Twenty of the Logos shrines are locked in caverns behind doors that can be unlocked only by someone who already possesses a specific set of other Logos elements. As we have already seen, mind and power are required to unlock here. Possessing north, south, east, and west gives one access to few, although what this means is not clear to me. Rather more intelligible are two military concepts. Enhance, power, transform, attack, and enemy unlock victory. Increase, area, attack, damage, and here unleash war. In order to obtain bomb, one must already have: You hold the planet together. Although this particular set is especially obscure, it may imply that the consciousness of a sensitive person holds the fabric of reality together, and the ultimate bomb is not nuclear or thermonuclear, but intellectual. At the extreme, if one were fully aware that the universe is entirely chaotic, then reality would explode into its constituent elements.

Two of the Logos elements are found in the same cavern, clarity and death. Apparently, they are connected in some deep manner, especially if clarity is interpreted as enlightenment. Life is a mystery, and full clarity can come only at death. Or, full clarity would bring life to a conclusion, because the dynamic interplay of passions and forces that generates life is incompatible with perfect clarity. The four Logos elements required to obtain both clarity and death are: It is not time. This suggests that a person in the midst of life, or in the middle of exploring the Tabula Rasa universe, cannot expect finality, whether in understanding or in living.

Some of the keys to unlock shrines are insights. The growth element can be obtained only by a leap of faith, from a cliff overlooking Torden Abyss. One must first have the believe and jump elements, then step into thin air at a certain point. Perhaps this also explains why the key to lightness is: Many will not question the past. If free will does not exist, then we have no need to feel shame or cast blame over past misdeeds. The key to empower echos the parable of the Forean bridge: The choice not yours. However, the key to knowledge is transform man life, implying that awareness not desire can change a person’s fate. Later, one must unlock the shrine containing question with: Knowledge will be yours.

A different perspective on free will comes from the fact that the man element is unlocked by life, power, and control. And permit is gained, If you give choice. The summon element, needed for creating clone assistants and bringing back dead enemies as allies, requires five elements: friend, star, life, enlighten, and here. These all suggest that fate can be transcended, not by individual free will, but some kind of magical communication between beings. The paradox of personal property, that only society can define the laws of ownership, is suggested by the fact that the key to everyone’s is: Take that which is yours. In the place of freedom, the Logos language seems to place vortex, the element unlocked by: Eloh empower only the strong. Strong, yet not willful, because the element submit is unlocked by: Everyone plant seeds of evil; Logos is how transform. The key to evil is: Fear the Neph in you. And the key to love is: Good is asleep in Neph. If the Neph is within ourselves, we may be cleansed through love. Within any evil person, love exists but slumbers. A logical conclusion is that we should love our enemies, and seek to awaken the love within them.

The Cultures of Spaceflight

In his exploration of the planets Foreas and Arieki, spaceman William Bridgebain encountered six groups that had voyaged across space, each for its own reason. The first, of course, was his own army of humans, and Fig. 3.3 shows him standing in one of the AFS bases, as three comrades run past, in front of one of the dropships used for medium-distance travel which is sending down the transporter beam by which it picks up passengers. His army left Earth because it was exiled by the alien invasion, thus representing involuntary exploration of space.

Fig. 3.3

Bridgebain watching three comrades run past a dropship

The second group was the Cormans. In a geodesic dome at the Cumbria Research Facility, Derac Bensen Corman explained that the group was formed by an engineer and scientist named Alan Corman who established an institute to study alien artifacts found on Earth. When he learned the government was keeping secret a crashed spacecraft it had found in Nevada, he planned to steal it so the entire world could learn from it. Later, Kaven Corman revealed the ignoble part of the story, admitting that two government agents were killed in the encounter, and the stolen ship was pre-programmed to go to Foreas, rather than intentionally flown there by the Cormans. Thus a mixture of utopianism and opposition to the suppression of scientific truth motivated the Cormans, perhaps augmented by cultic zeal and pure luck. Thirty-five years later, there was no sign of Alan Corman, but guided by his own zeal and luck, Bridgebain found him living as a hermit, at a remote location on Fractured Butte in the Pools region of Valverde continent.

The third spacefaring group, Foreans, were not native to Foreas, but went willingly when the Eloh offered them this planet as a second chance to gain wisdom. Warden Kahlee of the forbidden Forean temples, reported shamefully, “Long ago, before the Eloh found us, we abused and ravaged our homeworld through war and competition. My ancestors were oblivious as countless beasts fell extinct around them.” Inscribed on the Memory Tree in the very center of Wilderness are these words: “Our ancestors’ ignorant choices destroyed our home world. The Eloh gave us this planet to release us from past failings. Now to defend this planet is our eternal duty. Our spirit is intertwined with this world.” A Forean savant named Mentor Ensine told Bridgebain, “To learn the gifts of Logos is to learn awareness and, thus, being.” A Forean blessing says, “May the Benefactors guide you and watch over you.” And one of their prayers to the spirits of the Benefactors says, “Let me learn the lessons you have hidden in every leaf and rock of this world.”

On Arieki, Bridgebain met the last survivors of the Brann species of intelligent humanoids, the fourth group of interstellar travelers. Natives of the planet Erdas, they had developed a high civilization with a strong sense of justice. Unable to reform the small criminal element within their society, they were too humane to destroy them, so they turned to space technology for a solution. As the now defunct Tabula Rasa website explained, “In order to maintain the purity of their society, the Brann apprehended and relocated criminal offenders to off-world reeducation colonies on the neighboring planet of Arieki. These penal colonies were designed to force inmates to create self-sustaining societies on a planet where survival hinged on working for the common good.” Sadly, the Bane destroyed Erdas with all its people. At the Old Brann Landing Zone, Jhulyus commented, “The Bane invasion is our way of paying for the sins of our past. Those of us who were brought here were criminals. Sometime we get what we deserve.”

The fifth group is the Bane army whose goal in crossing space is conquest. They have many methods for enslaving the other intelligent species, including operating upon their bodies to insert control devices. However, one of the more subtle methods was placing a toxin in the water that drove Foreans mad with a form of false spirituality. Like zombies they lurked in the Shrine of the Penitent, chanting in unison: “This flesh is only a vessel. The pain is an illusion. My spirit is my strength. The shadows cannot touch me.” A computer database at the Eastern AFS Listening Post in Valverde Pools describes the Thrax minions of the Bane as born killers. In passing, the database says that the species most similar to the Thrax are the humans.

The sixth group of space voyagers, actually the first historically, is the Eloh who crossed interstellar space in order to spread wisdom. A hologram in the Eloh Temporal Chambers, who teaches self-sacrifice and protection of the weak, proclaims they were the bringers of enlightenment. A hologram in Vogren’s Tomb speaks several proverbs connected to the Logos elements of Trinity Bridge, including: “The essence of Logos is the simple. It is we who insist on making it complex.” This hologram is actually not an Eloh but Vogren himself, a Forean who studied Eloh wisdom closely and may understand it better than anyone. In the Eloh Sanctuary, Bridgebain met an actual Eloh, named Gabriel like the archangel, who explained that Neph were once Eloh, and said, “We fight them with all our being because they would destroy and not create.”

Conclusion

On March 20, 2010, the New York Times reported a new development in one of Richard Garriott’s other space-oriented visionary projects: “Photographs by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter captured the tracks and final resting place of Lunokhod 2, a Soviet lunar rover that landed in January 1973 and covered 23 miles in 5 months.” In 1993, Garriott paid $68,500 to buy the rover from Sotheby’s auction house, but he has never been able to take possession of it. In the new photograph, the rover appears only as a tiny dot, but its owner remains optimistic: “‘The next thing is I hope to find my own way to the moon,’ Mr. Garriott said” [20].

At the end of February, 2009, Tabula Rasa was destroyed, apparently having failed in its twin task of earning sufficient money from subscribers, and inspiring them to join the spaceflight movement. Left unexplained was how enthusiasts could actually voyage to other planets, short of stumbling across an abandoned Eloh vehicle. Although the Vostok spacecraft could take Richard Garriott to and from the International Space Station it is incapable of going any higher. The space travelers in Tabula Rasa had ready access to wormholes, although truth to tell real science offers no hope for this mode of travel, because the mythical wormholes are supposed to be a variety of black hole, and real black holes rip apart any matter that nears them. The dropships and zone-limited waypoints employ a milder but equally mysterious form of teleportation; some towers and bases used them prosaically as elevators, and it was even possible to purchase portable waypoints, one small kind for use by a single individual, and a larger one for teams. Thus Tabula Rasa did not offer a reliable blueprint for technology that could transport people to the stars.

However, the quests for the Logos shrines offer a metaphor that may take on new meanings as the centuries pass. Tabula Rasa asserts that the universe ultimately is meaningful, and that by increasing human scientific knowledge we gain enlightenment that is beneficial for life. Whether it really is necessary to voyage personally to other planets to achieve enlightenment is doubtful. However, surely some of the answers to our questions can be found only very far from home, so some people must travel there, or we must send smart machines to act as our avatars. Virtual worlds like Tabula Rasa can share the experience of cosmic discovery with the mass of humanity, although we may well wonder whether enough people are interested in this form of enlightenment to support them commercially.