Church in second life - A messianic passover.

I've just attended a church service in Second Life.

The presentation was a messianic Passover. Messianic Jews are Jewish Christians that preach that Jesus is the messiah of the Jews with a full exposition of the gospel in Hebrew (and English in this case). They show you how the passover and other religious services in Israel pointed to and prophesied Jesus Christ and his sacrifice. The service was in a dedicated sky-box at “You are loved ministries” at EC Beach Community. (in Second Life a sky-box is a building or platform that seems way up in the sky above the clouds or in them.) This was a big sky box at an amazing height. Eternal creations owns 6 sims in second life forming the EC island.


Rivkah and Judah Sorbet gave the sermon with assistance from others. Included was a special interactive tray where selecting items did things like filling or drinking wine. Consuming the symbolic foods and breaking the bread. All these parts of the ritual have teaching function that is often lost on people practicing them because they don't see the connection to the messiah-ship of Christ.

Here are some pictures.

86 people attended.

Thats a lot for any event in a computer MMO game.

Lag was bad but everyone was so interested it did not matter.

Its as very nice building. Everything was StoneAngle Ingelwood's handy work. Even the briliant tray.

The tray on the wall showed us what to do on our tray.

We all had a tray. I'm the one in the blue black solar cell spacesuit.

We then all wandered out to the red sea (white foam in the distance). Lag was bad but not enough to deter us.

 

We crossed the red sea and then went to watch a movie. Rivkah gave an appeal worthy of Billy Graham. An evangelical call to unbeleivers to come and ask Jesus to take their sins away and help run their life properly. Here was then music performances and a farwell.
 
Some stayed afterwards to talk and thank the organisers for the great church presentation.
As someone pointed out church is people not buildings. This is even truer in second life where buildings come and go with the touch of a button.  But still great art and great teaching go together.
 
Thank you  everyone who made it work.
 
[Click on the pictires for full screen views.]

Image holder post

I'll be sticking various images here from time to time.  

Gale crater roofed in. 

Another variation.  The purple is really red and blue warning stripes. 

Minecraft stuff . Treasure chest

galecrater garden

Illustration of a mod setup in minecraft. I'm helping debug the mod.
Sky resources http://minecraft.curseforge.com/projects/sky-resources
Crucible{brick], over lava for heat. Two fluid droppers only one needed if another heat source is used. Fluid metal in space below them with Alchemy block below. Heat sources torches, lava, furnace and obsidian.

A header image.

Green dragon boats

Sea steading is the idea of colonising the open ocean with homesteads and floating cities. The greatest challenge is waves that can swamp a sea stead and cause a constant rocking motion that some people find impossible to endure for long. The seasteads can be made smaller if we 'throw' the food production system overboard. I.e. Move any farming out to smaller structures that are built to float independent of our seasteads.
Plants don't get sea sick.
Though to much agitation can puree the garden there are systems that could work if we create sheltered waters with some kind of floating break wall. More on that at http://appliedimpossibilies.blogspot.com/2010/03/float-ponds-in-second-life.html and http://appliedimpossibilies.blogspot.com/2010/03/sea-steading-as-fleet-of-vessel-classes.html

However in more open waters a sea stead floating farm has to be more robust and complex. In looking at this I developed the fluke boat.

I have refinned these vessels a little to create a new craft the dragon boat.
I haven't done the engineering but believe they will be technologically possible in the near future. Here's a work up in second life. Space Destiny sim.

What we have here is dragon boat, a mock up of a sea fort sea stead [not mine but good] a sandy coloured wharf, and a floating algae oil farm (green & blue).

The dragon boat green house is a robot. The head is radar and ladar units in a decorative pod. Ladar is laser radar a system for detecting other vessels and mapping the waves at short range. It also has a sonar under the water line and GPS. The main bay is a greenhouse with soil, hydroponics or airponics. Water comes from reverse osmosis or forward osmosis with fertiliser drawing water through a membrane. Most of the water is fully recycled through a fish farming system (fresh water fish). The craft unmanned with automated systems. In good weather and low waves the farmer boards to plant, tend and harvest.

The boat has flukes: wave power systems that propel the vessel.  

The fluke is the blue wing. It hinges with the waves but is retarded. As the waves lift the boat the fluke resists and forces water backwards. As the water is heavier than the boat the boat moves forward. Fluke boats are not fast but they can sail for months limited only in the durability of the hinges and retarding springs. Such things can be built to last years but I'd still want to check them every few months.

The dragon boat has a high streamlined bow and stern for a reason, its not just decoration. These structures are hollow and buoyant.

When a big wave hits them the volume in the water increases and the centre of balance shifts. The bow or stern rides up the wave rather than digging into it. Since there is no deck for the water to catch on and fill it is harder to sink. In high seas the plants get a rough ride. They may be damaged but they aren't destroyed.

Two or more dragon boats could be integrated into a multi hulled vessel.
However I favour the idea of retractable linkages(not shown). That allow you to switch and swap units in the double or triple hull form. This also allows them to break the linkages and stand clear of each other in a heavy storm. Since in the tropical oceans the sea is calm in the morning and stormy in the afternoon and early night this means most would be linked in the morning and delink and scatter by 3 pm.

In reality the vessels hull may be wider and sit lower in the water. With extra volume below the water line but second life has its limits.

Float ponds in Second life

I have created a little display of sea farming, sea steading and fish farming in Second Life. Its at the EDAKent at Scilands. Look up Wesley Farspire in game I'll show you around.

SLURL  http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/EDAKent/38/199/25

What's a float pond? I hear you ask.
A liferaft with plants in it. The design is my own but some work was done on this in the 1970's. Today we have the plastics and the plants so we can begin.

These SL float ponds are about 10 m across in reality they would be 20 to 50 m in diameter. The key is flexibility to roll with the waves, design for recycling and mass production. (life rafts are still often hand made)

  Most are swamp or aquatic plants. Some are salt tolerant shore plants. A covered pond with a sturdy deck could grow vegetables.

See more at:
http://vacoyecology.com/Bubble_ponds_fluke_boats.html
More pictures below.

This is an open ocean sea stead fish farm.
The floating algae farm, green, feeds small fish in one of the spherical cages. The little fish feed the big fish in the other cage. At the back is a solar powered upwelling pump bringing rich deep water up from 300 meters or more down. The surface of the ocean is relatively starved of fertility but rich in light. The upwelling pump fixes that. The result is an increase in the abundance of fish and more food for humanity.

Look, a tree?
In theory a float pond could even grow wood. Mangroves anchoured into a floating mesh with extra buoyancy and a membrane to prevent mud from falling out the bottom or washing over the edge. It could be fertilized with plant matter and algae.
It would however be of little economic value. We need to restore the mangroves to our shore lines. I'll post on that later.

Why have a sea steading display in a space related sim in SL?
Because to feed the next 30 billion we need to colonize the seas and the stars and every where else. If you can master the sea then space is easy. There's more of it and there are no storms. Key resources can be found on the sea bed, the ocean surface, as well as other planets and asteroids.
One of the criticisms of space colonisation is that 'we should fix the earth before going off world.' This is just plain wrong! Some of us believe that we can do both at once and we will never 'fix' the world to everyone's satisfaction. The real challenge is to reduce the impacts on species. Preventing extinctions. We have solutions for this to.

Sea steading as a fleet of vessel classes.

Most think of sea steading  in terms of cities on the sea with a single design and structure. I.e.
Oceania.

Or one of the more modern TSI sea stead designs.

or a spar or flip ship design.

However, it is highy likely that a sea stead complex would be a mix of such systems intergrated into a city.

Something like this.

Here we have a large variety of vessels and structures.

• 
  
  Dark Green are ship based seasteads and unmanned floating farm units. These are powered to tow the other structures as required.
• 
  
  Gray are wave damping floating break-walls or "wave-steads". Most of these would be light industrial, chemical plants or farm decks. These rest on wave-damping structures that create calm water in the areas behind them. They need not be continuous as long as the wave damped areas they create overlap. They are not to scale width wise; they would be much thinner.
• 
  
  Light Green is a large floating mat based sea stead/ farm system. A Continuous mat of float ponds and inflatable decks with switchable rigidity. (Floating digital matter.)
• 
  
  Orange are large clusters of interlocked seasteads forming the business center. Note one is also a ship bases sea stead for trade further afield.
• 
  
  Yellow is algae oil farms: very big but modular arrays of floating bladders of fuel producing organisms.
• 
  
  Blue are small spars, flip ship like spars and other smaller units.  

The area enclosed by the gray wave damping units is calmer with wave heights ~1% of the normal height. Since most seasteaders are hoping to pick an area where average wave heights are 3 -5 meters (9-17 feet) this would reduce them to 3 - 5 cm (1-3 inches) 10% of the energy of those waves could be tapped for energy by the wave-steads.

Everything would be held in place by a array of large deep sea anchors.

 

A wave stead rests on truck like axles connected to non circular buoyant tubes. These Salters duck tubes, cream in the picture, rotate in response to the action of the waves. Because the wave forces are converted to rotating oscillation we can tap off that force as usable energy and the bulk of the wave energy does not convert into heave or rocking on the sea stead on top. Energy only units would have a skeletal deck and no super structure. The first duck, visible, Damp the waves 90% The second, hidden, damps the residual 10% down by 90%.

The ship based sea stead would look like this. There's a man standing on the bow for scale.

Float ponds and algae bladders. With some robot boats and a small spar based sea stead. See http://vacoyecology.com/Bubble_ponds_fluke_boats.html

The top three structures could all be used to some extent in the sheltered area of the center.

Modern cities are not built with one architecture dominating the landscape. Why should we try that at sea?