HUPOMNEMATA

source:Washington Business Forward
http://www.bizforward.com/wdc/issues/2001-10/firstforward/

Arlington, VA-based space-tourism company Space Adventures (SA), instrumental in Tito’s highly publicized docking at the International Space Station, is banking on the survival of these travel titans. Founded in 1997 by 27-year-old astropreneur Eric Anderson, Space Adventures has raised $22 million in equity investment and bond financing. Geologist Harrison Schmitt, a former U.S. senator and astronaut, will lead the Antarctica expedition early next year.

“People are still looking for excitement and adventure in their lives,” says Anderson, who’s taken seven zero-gravity flights himself. Anderson, a University of Virginia alum, charges between $2,000 and $200,000 for a variety of aerial and terrestrial tours – including orbital flight-qualification packages, supersonic jet flights and centrifuge training, which simulates the high-gravity re-entry environment.

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CALL FOR PAPERS – DEADLINE FEBRUARY 29TH 2004

“SPACE: SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND THE ARTS”
The “7th Workshop On Space And The Arts”

18-21 May 2004, Noordwijk, The Netherlands
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From a Bruce Sterling interview on reason.com :
” I think we are on the verge of post-humanity, but I don’t think it’s going to look like what any Extropian thinks it’s going to look like. At the end of my novel Holy Fire [Bantam, 1997], two post-humans meet. The woman is assessing her former husband and says he’s a god. But he’s not a god. He’s a tommyknocker or a garden gnome. He’s this thing which is no longer human and doesn’t have human concerns.

There are methods of speculating about how this will play out, and some will have some traction, and some will be ideological or otherwise mistaken. The Extropian problem is thinking you can upload yourself into a computer and have this rapture of the nerds. It was a powerful fantasy of escaping the unbearable pressures of being human. And there are many unbearable pressures of being human. But you find that when you escape one of these things you generally bring all your baggage with you. We will escape some of the limits, but we will not escape into some pure electro-Platonic world any more than the Internet will turn out to be this pure electro-Platonic philosophers’ realm.”