Orion's Arm Universe Project
Our House is a Very, Very, Very Fine House
So, this spring we asked our members and fans the following question:
Imagine you are living in Y11K - the OA "Present Day". What is your home like? Do you live in a house? An apartment? A tent? Something else entirely?
Where is it located? You have anywhere in the Terragen Sphere to pick from.
What is it like? You have Y11K tech to play with, so how does that translate into a home situation? How many rooms does your house have? What are the Y11K versions of a kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, etc.? Are there rooms that don't exist in RL houses? Rooms that we use but Y11K people don't any longer? What does it all look like?
One minor rule: Your Y11K house should be able to accommodate the same number of people, pets, and houseplants (if applicable) that your RL one does.
Collected here for your consideration and enjoyment are their responses…
I live in a three bed flat with two other people. The first thing that springs to mind is that with OA tech we can get rid of most the rooms. The kitchen for example could be replaced by a simple bioforge, perhaps adjacent to some sort of futuristic fridge that utilizes cargo gel and a microwave (or tech equivalent) so that there is always food ready to eat. That set up could reduce the kitchen to the size of just a standard fridge freezer (bottom compartment forge, top storage and heating). The bedrooms, bathroom, hallway and living room could just become one space that can be reconfigured at will. Polymorphic tech could allow us to throw up partitions at will, most furniture too. In fact the majority of appliances could be designed to be somewhat polymorphic themselves, folding into tightly compact configurations and stored in hidden compartments in the walls/floor/ceiling/furniture until needed. A simple transport system in the walls with a network of utility connections could mean that when you need something (the shower for instance) the required components quickly move within the walls to wherever you desire then unpack themselves for use.
All of this combined with the fact that OA tech means a lot of RL products can be done away with (examples in this thread) would mean that my flat would be far more roomy on the inside (it could even appear far bigger on the inside if reality room technology was used to generate illusions of larger spaces, indoor safari anyone?). Now as for decor, that could change just as easily as well with fittings, furniture etc morphing at will from utility fog/sand. I'd like to be able to change the style of the flat depending on my mood, art generator software and environmental optimization protocols could easily achieve this. For chilling out the decor might change to warm colours, calming ornaments could form and the furniture could all be soft and reclining. For study or work they could change to something more formal. With utility fog and smart surfaces the flat decor could appear differently for me than for my housemates
I don't have any pets or house plants but I would love to have a dog and a lot more greenery. Both could be easily maintained by the house itself. Plants of all kinds could be kept, cared for by soil-bots and synsects. They could even go into storage in suitable compartments in the walls when not wanted anymore then rearranged to the optimum configuration when desired. Any live pet could be much more free than IRL, it could be allowed to roam free without fear of injury thanks to a local angelnet and on-board medical system. If it appears to get lost at any point the same angelnet could lead it back. Training of a pet would likely be much easier as well, they could have a DNI fitted that allows the owner to communicate in the best way possible (given their cognitive limitations) and cement in certain behaviours.
Regarding house maintenance I imagine most surfaces and fittings would be self cleaning, if wine is poured on the floor (as an example of something that happened yesterday!) the carpet could soak it up and transport it through micro-channels to the house recycler. A wooden surface could achieve the same affect by becoming porous. I wouldn't need to spend time tidying things back to their relevant places, the floor and other surfaces could act like flo-stone, transporting things as needed. Specialised housebots similar in size and shape to insects or small animals (mice maybe) could live in the walls and come out as required to clean. I doubt that the house will have any sort of android like servant because smaller specialised units would be better and take up less space. Rather than having a classic style robot walk to the bioforge, collect a drink and deliver it I think a more realistic image is for a table to form, walk over to the assembler and form an arm to collect the beverage. General wear and tear is likely to be invisible as the flat could utilise forge integrated technology. Appliances could have some form of self repair and if they are too damaged could be dropped into a recycler and have a replacement cooked up by an assembler. On a humorous note I've always thought that if I had an automated house I might turn off the cleaning and repair function, have a massive (messy!) party and the next morning get a huge sense of satisfaction by turning it back on and watching a mad scrabble to get the house right
It's a bit easier to speculate what *I* would do if I was dumped into OA. Presumably I'd be frozen in ice for a few millennia, like Cartman, then I'd be:
1) Thawed out by Children of Gaia,
2) Rapidly exiled from Earth for attempting to organize an underground industrial revolution and protesting "dark sky" laws,
3) Hiring a lawyer to retain intellectual property rights on my life story and memories, and hiring an agent to market those across the Known Net. Who doesn't want to know the real history of the 20th Century?
4) Using the profits to rapidly upgrade my brain, and get "ultimate muscle" pectoral implants more awesome than Ren ever had,
5) Going crazy trying to figure out where I'd visit and what I'd see, and end up planning several dozen homes in exotic locations,
6) Calming down as my brain implants took hold and listed options. Virch worlds, forks, and rental bodies would allow me to eliminate a lot of homes and travel.
7) Settling into a modest McKendree Cylinder (with a Dyson tree summer home) and entertaining guests curious about ancient history. The ones who annoyed me would get slightly incorrect versions of history. "Mmm, yes, quite. 'Raygun Ronnie' earned his nickname when he personally led the liberation of the Tehran hostages with some of the first personal laser weapons..."
Living quarters in the McKendree Cylinder (Tar Vara-style) would start off roomy so I could have the big library of hardcopy books I always wanted, and to address shortcomings in living volume I encountered in the first Century AT. Eventually, my intelligence augmentations would help me realize homes were reconfigurable and I didn't need to keep so much volume reserved for (say) a center-island kitchen. This home would retain a lot of volume for reconfiguration as I worked through every sci-fi home theme that ever struck my fancy.
I think I'd start with the Tron: Legacy hideout, then try the Wayne Manor, and keep elements of both (the library would have to stay dark stained nano-wood, brass, and cast iron) that clashed badly. But I could get away with it because of the shortage of records about 1st Century BT and 1st Century AT architecture and always finish explanations with, "and we were all baselines back then, so we couldn't balance form and function."
I'd also have a variety of outlying cottages in the habitat built around different themes: a tropical pavillion, mountain-forest lake cottage, tropical underwater home (note to self: get nitrogen scavenging bionano upgrade), desert home, and so forth. Bot maintenance crews would keep them in good shape so I could vacation at them on demand. (My parents had a lake cottage that always took a couple of days out of a vacation to prepare and then mothball. The idea of intelligent, dedicated maintenance crews keeping them in turn key condition is much cooler.)
I don't think I'd have a very productive life in OA or very tasteful homes, but the possibilities are fun to think about.
Option 1: An Omnicraft on Kiyoshi -
I live in a small (1200ft square feet) house with my partner, two dogs, and a parrot.
My omnicraft house would be about the same size but would use its internal angelnet to reconfigure the interior as needed, from a single large social space, to multiple smaller rooms designed for different functions or privacy. Furniture is also angelnet created, although a nanoforge, mattercache, and robotic resource extraction systems 'living off the land' work together to create and consumables we may desire. The angelnet would also allow my pets to enjoy the great outdoors even when our home was on the move. Being on Kiyoshi, the local network, including the local Cybercosm would be instantly available everywhere. The Known Net would be equally accessible, of course.
When we wanted to change locations, the omnicraft would reconfigure its shape and extrude the necessary devices for the method chosen (vacuum balloons and fancloth for flight, legs or omniwheels for ground, fins and pontoons or hydrofoils and propellers for water). For longer range trips, the omnicraft configures and compactifies itself for travel on the Kiyoshin Transport Net - fitting into a specialized cargo cradle on the vast maglev transport system for a quick trip to the other side of an element (only millions of km away), or a rather longer trip to a whole different element of the Pentad. During the longer trips, our onboard medical systems put us into stasis if we get bored. If we're really feeling ambitious we attach a small conversion drive and some fuel tanks and just portage our way across - or head out to one of the wormhole stations to take a trip to one of the nearby star systems.
Traveling across a given element of the Kiyoshi Pentad would mean around 1.5 billion Earths worth of spectacular scenery created by the finest modo and transapient landscape architects the MPA can muster. We could spend millions of years on the project and still never see everything the Pentad has to offer.
For those times and places where we need more room than just the omnicraft can provide, a couple of suitcase size packages expand into large tents, each as big as the omnicraft itself. And, being linked to the Kiyoshin Net, if we want something especially large or complex, we can order it for nanofabrication at a dedicated facility and shipment to our current location.
Option 2: An Island Home on Djed -
My second option is an element of the Thousand Isle Archipelago on Djed. It's a small island that (like everything else on Djed) is totally angelnetted. The island itself is a sculpted constructed designed for maximum spectacular natural scenery. It's only a few km across, maybe no more than 5 - but that's large enough.
The angelnet covers the island (actually the entire planet) completely. It manifests any and all items we may need, including clothing, furniture, and household items. Consumables are produced by hidden nanoforges scattered around the island and then transported to where they are wanted by the angelnet. There's also a good selection of 'natural' plants and animals available if we feel the urge to pick, fish, or hunt for our meals.
Using the angelnet our bedroom can be on a cliff overlooking the ocean, while the breakfast room is on the beach. Of course, any room can actually be anywhere if we don't feel like making the walk. Or we can have the net just transport us to where we want to go. We can also 'transform' ourselves, having the net make it seem like we are actually a sea gull or a dolphin, feeding our senses a virtual simulation of what it would be like to be such a creature (but with full human intelligence). This could be either a purely virtual experience or we could be linked into the sensorium of a drone unit (or biobot) that is operating as the creature we wish to be. Going through the motions of that particular creature, perceiving with its senses, but controlled by us to some degree and feeding all it experiences right int our brains - so we can know what it is like to soar over the waves or swim beneath using sonar or whatever.
At night the light of the Tri-Arc illuminates everything like a full moon on steroids.
After some measure of searching for suitable real estate, a home on Niuearth ( http://orionsarm.com/xcms.php?r=oaeg-vie...993102478a ) seems appropriate. On Niuearth, one can access the Terragen Sphere without being totally immersed in it. With my preference for "middle tech" (but only those bits I find personally useful), this means that those technologies I want for daily living are readily available, while other bits I might need to solve a particular problem can be accessed, used, and then dispatched to wherever they came from when I'm finished with them. As for the structure itself, a two-story, two bedroom townhouse (like where I live in RL) would be good. In terms of "OA-ish" modifications, I suppose an autofab ( http://orionsarm.com/xcms.php?r=oaeg-vie...afe5718a34 ) in the kitchen would be a nice way to cut down on the time spent wandering the aisles of the local supermarket, not to mention the time spent preparing and cooking the food (if plates and utensils could also be fabricated and then recycled after being used, so much the better...no more washing dishes ). One possible downside to living on Niuearth could be my sympathies toward the Kassian ideology (http://orionsarm.com/eg-article/484dd2d743c04 ), which might still be considered somewhat suspicious and thus bring some degree of unwanted attention. A walled-in yard (for the enjoyment and safety of my dogs and cats) as well as an enclosed aviary attached to the dwelling for my birds, would be welcome additions to my RL domicile. A small, isolated plot of land in the temperate zone with a nice view would be ideal.
It'd be pretty cool to live on one of those ecotopia labworlds for experimenting with and creating new ecosystems... with a spaceport a few kilometers away to visit other parts of the zoerific biopolity's capital.
I've recently imagined a new kind of house that might be entertaining to live in - a landrunner house. These are a smalller, faster version of the walking cities described here
http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/53064d2ec0c09
but they are individual homes, or at the most accomodation for a small number of housemates. Imagine a futuristic trailer/caravan with long, road-runner legs. These houserunners often engage in races, both long-distance and sprints; and sometimes cluster together at night for a house party. They are common on the twin planets Laurel and Hardy, but are also found on large megastructures, often attempting to run around a ringworld, orbital or topoolis the long way. At 50km an hour a houserrunner would take nearly thirty years to run around a Banks Orbital, but more than thirty thousand years to run round Spaghetti, the innermost Topolis of Cableville.
I suppose the ideal Y11K home for me would be mass of ufog, usand, and other modubot elements so it could reconfigure endlessly. It wouldn't really need to be as big as my current apartment - I'm not currently using my bathroom, bedroom or kitchen but they exist because I need somewhere to hold my shower, sink, toilet, bed, clothes, fridge, cooker, washing machine etc, but if the house can spontaneously generate those as needed then it doesn't need to have space for them... unless I fancy being a bit retro. Would it need to be bigger perhaps than even a largish single room, given that it can become any room I want or need at will? And if it is freely able to move around and reconfigure itself at will, tucking away anything and everything until it was needed, then would my ideal home in fact be the Y11K equivalent of a Volkswagen camper van than a house as we understand it today?
A nice reconfigurable home running across a bed of utility sand pulling power ever possible way and a good place for storing auxillary bodies.
Being that it's 9 thousand years in the future, the most important thing is that you can bring your home to wherever you want> so...a home/spaceship made out of materials that can modify their translucidity.
what can be more fun than riding in your space luxury home, and waking in the upper atmosphere of a gas giant, just when the big storm's approaching, or travelling in style through space, with nothing but the vast darkness enshrouding, giving you time to meditate, and perhaps use those implants that you just bartered for, to reach singularity.
the engines would need to be taken out of the picture, so that they don't interfere with your vista. that's a piece of cake for the ufog to take care of.
you don't need many rooms when you've got...yes ufog, that can transform into whatever shape or size you desire: you can watch the newest media updates on those disappearings in the Periphey on your vintage holoprojector.
cooking? who needs that when you're digestive system can't handle chunks of food. just plug into the ships power source and recharge whenever you feel lonely and 'cold' from the darkness between the stars.
a home/ship of about 300 m in length should do the trick, your reactioness drive being controlled by a slaved hyperturing, that also keeps you entertained by arranging a beautiful itinerary to help you get in touch with your inner self.
this home of yours, need not carry any weaponry, because, that would make it unsafe for when you neighbours bring their children, clones, copies, plus you have to pay a handsome extra tax for carrying those mag missiles, so it's equipped with a state of the art 'get me out of here' strictly defense system.
so there you go. flying trough space in a luxury home/spaceship feels like you're actually flying with no restraints. Just you and the universe. One and the same, just as your spirit cyborg guide prophesied.
I figure it'd be more interesting to just be adapted to co-exist with the great outdoors. Think how much money you could save on rent!
Table of Contents
Imagine you are living in Y11K - the OA "Present Day". What is your home like? Do you live in a house? An apartment? A tent? Something else entirely?
Where is it located? You have anywhere in the Terragen Sphere to pick from.
What is it like? You have Y11K tech to play with, so how does that translate into a home situation? How many rooms does your house have? What are the Y11K versions of a kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, etc.? Are there rooms that don't exist in RL houses? Rooms that we use but Y11K people don't any longer? What does it all look like?
One minor rule: Your Y11K house should be able to accommodate the same number of people, pets, and houseplants (if applicable) that your RL one does.
Collected here for your consideration and enjoyment are their responses…
I live in a three bed flat with two other people. The first thing that springs to mind is that with OA tech we can get rid of most the rooms. The kitchen for example could be replaced by a simple bioforge, perhaps adjacent to some sort of futuristic fridge that utilizes cargo gel and a microwave (or tech equivalent) so that there is always food ready to eat. That set up could reduce the kitchen to the size of just a standard fridge freezer (bottom compartment forge, top storage and heating). The bedrooms, bathroom, hallway and living room could just become one space that can be reconfigured at will. Polymorphic tech could allow us to throw up partitions at will, most furniture too. In fact the majority of appliances could be designed to be somewhat polymorphic themselves, folding into tightly compact configurations and stored in hidden compartments in the walls/floor/ceiling/furniture until needed. A simple transport system in the walls with a network of utility connections could mean that when you need something (the shower for instance) the required components quickly move within the walls to wherever you desire then unpack themselves for use.
All of this combined with the fact that OA tech means a lot of RL products can be done away with (examples in this thread) would mean that my flat would be far more roomy on the inside (it could even appear far bigger on the inside if reality room technology was used to generate illusions of larger spaces, indoor safari anyone?). Now as for decor, that could change just as easily as well with fittings, furniture etc morphing at will from utility fog/sand. I'd like to be able to change the style of the flat depending on my mood, art generator software and environmental optimization protocols could easily achieve this. For chilling out the decor might change to warm colours, calming ornaments could form and the furniture could all be soft and reclining. For study or work they could change to something more formal. With utility fog and smart surfaces the flat decor could appear differently for me than for my housemates
I don't have any pets or house plants but I would love to have a dog and a lot more greenery. Both could be easily maintained by the house itself. Plants of all kinds could be kept, cared for by soil-bots and synsects. They could even go into storage in suitable compartments in the walls when not wanted anymore then rearranged to the optimum configuration when desired. Any live pet could be much more free than IRL, it could be allowed to roam free without fear of injury thanks to a local angelnet and on-board medical system. If it appears to get lost at any point the same angelnet could lead it back. Training of a pet would likely be much easier as well, they could have a DNI fitted that allows the owner to communicate in the best way possible (given their cognitive limitations) and cement in certain behaviours.
Regarding house maintenance I imagine most surfaces and fittings would be self cleaning, if wine is poured on the floor (as an example of something that happened yesterday!) the carpet could soak it up and transport it through micro-channels to the house recycler. A wooden surface could achieve the same affect by becoming porous. I wouldn't need to spend time tidying things back to their relevant places, the floor and other surfaces could act like flo-stone, transporting things as needed. Specialised housebots similar in size and shape to insects or small animals (mice maybe) could live in the walls and come out as required to clean. I doubt that the house will have any sort of android like servant because smaller specialised units would be better and take up less space. Rather than having a classic style robot walk to the bioforge, collect a drink and deliver it I think a more realistic image is for a table to form, walk over to the assembler and form an arm to collect the beverage. General wear and tear is likely to be invisible as the flat could utilise forge integrated technology. Appliances could have some form of self repair and if they are too damaged could be dropped into a recycler and have a replacement cooked up by an assembler. On a humorous note I've always thought that if I had an automated house I might turn off the cleaning and repair function, have a massive (messy!) party and the next morning get a huge sense of satisfaction by turning it back on and watching a mad scrabble to get the house right
It's a bit easier to speculate what *I* would do if I was dumped into OA. Presumably I'd be frozen in ice for a few millennia, like Cartman, then I'd be:
1) Thawed out by Children of Gaia,
2) Rapidly exiled from Earth for attempting to organize an underground industrial revolution and protesting "dark sky" laws,
3) Hiring a lawyer to retain intellectual property rights on my life story and memories, and hiring an agent to market those across the Known Net. Who doesn't want to know the real history of the 20th Century?
4) Using the profits to rapidly upgrade my brain, and get "ultimate muscle" pectoral implants more awesome than Ren ever had,
5) Going crazy trying to figure out where I'd visit and what I'd see, and end up planning several dozen homes in exotic locations,
6) Calming down as my brain implants took hold and listed options. Virch worlds, forks, and rental bodies would allow me to eliminate a lot of homes and travel.
7) Settling into a modest McKendree Cylinder (with a Dyson tree summer home) and entertaining guests curious about ancient history. The ones who annoyed me would get slightly incorrect versions of history. "Mmm, yes, quite. 'Raygun Ronnie' earned his nickname when he personally led the liberation of the Tehran hostages with some of the first personal laser weapons..."
Living quarters in the McKendree Cylinder (Tar Vara-style) would start off roomy so I could have the big library of hardcopy books I always wanted, and to address shortcomings in living volume I encountered in the first Century AT. Eventually, my intelligence augmentations would help me realize homes were reconfigurable and I didn't need to keep so much volume reserved for (say) a center-island kitchen. This home would retain a lot of volume for reconfiguration as I worked through every sci-fi home theme that ever struck my fancy.
I think I'd start with the Tron: Legacy hideout, then try the Wayne Manor, and keep elements of both (the library would have to stay dark stained nano-wood, brass, and cast iron) that clashed badly. But I could get away with it because of the shortage of records about 1st Century BT and 1st Century AT architecture and always finish explanations with, "and we were all baselines back then, so we couldn't balance form and function."
I'd also have a variety of outlying cottages in the habitat built around different themes: a tropical pavillion, mountain-forest lake cottage, tropical underwater home (note to self: get nitrogen scavenging bionano upgrade), desert home, and so forth. Bot maintenance crews would keep them in good shape so I could vacation at them on demand. (My parents had a lake cottage that always took a couple of days out of a vacation to prepare and then mothball. The idea of intelligent, dedicated maintenance crews keeping them in turn key condition is much cooler.)
I don't think I'd have a very productive life in OA or very tasteful homes, but the possibilities are fun to think about.
Option 1: An Omnicraft on Kiyoshi -
I live in a small (1200ft square feet) house with my partner, two dogs, and a parrot.
My omnicraft house would be about the same size but would use its internal angelnet to reconfigure the interior as needed, from a single large social space, to multiple smaller rooms designed for different functions or privacy. Furniture is also angelnet created, although a nanoforge, mattercache, and robotic resource extraction systems 'living off the land' work together to create and consumables we may desire. The angelnet would also allow my pets to enjoy the great outdoors even when our home was on the move. Being on Kiyoshi, the local network, including the local Cybercosm would be instantly available everywhere. The Known Net would be equally accessible, of course.
When we wanted to change locations, the omnicraft would reconfigure its shape and extrude the necessary devices for the method chosen (vacuum balloons and fancloth for flight, legs or omniwheels for ground, fins and pontoons or hydrofoils and propellers for water). For longer range trips, the omnicraft configures and compactifies itself for travel on the Kiyoshin Transport Net - fitting into a specialized cargo cradle on the vast maglev transport system for a quick trip to the other side of an element (only millions of km away), or a rather longer trip to a whole different element of the Pentad. During the longer trips, our onboard medical systems put us into stasis if we get bored. If we're really feeling ambitious we attach a small conversion drive and some fuel tanks and just portage our way across - or head out to one of the wormhole stations to take a trip to one of the nearby star systems.
Traveling across a given element of the Kiyoshi Pentad would mean around 1.5 billion Earths worth of spectacular scenery created by the finest modo and transapient landscape architects the MPA can muster. We could spend millions of years on the project and still never see everything the Pentad has to offer.
For those times and places where we need more room than just the omnicraft can provide, a couple of suitcase size packages expand into large tents, each as big as the omnicraft itself. And, being linked to the Kiyoshin Net, if we want something especially large or complex, we can order it for nanofabrication at a dedicated facility and shipment to our current location.
Option 2: An Island Home on Djed -
My second option is an element of the Thousand Isle Archipelago on Djed. It's a small island that (like everything else on Djed) is totally angelnetted. The island itself is a sculpted constructed designed for maximum spectacular natural scenery. It's only a few km across, maybe no more than 5 - but that's large enough.
The angelnet covers the island (actually the entire planet) completely. It manifests any and all items we may need, including clothing, furniture, and household items. Consumables are produced by hidden nanoforges scattered around the island and then transported to where they are wanted by the angelnet. There's also a good selection of 'natural' plants and animals available if we feel the urge to pick, fish, or hunt for our meals.
Using the angelnet our bedroom can be on a cliff overlooking the ocean, while the breakfast room is on the beach. Of course, any room can actually be anywhere if we don't feel like making the walk. Or we can have the net just transport us to where we want to go. We can also 'transform' ourselves, having the net make it seem like we are actually a sea gull or a dolphin, feeding our senses a virtual simulation of what it would be like to be such a creature (but with full human intelligence). This could be either a purely virtual experience or we could be linked into the sensorium of a drone unit (or biobot) that is operating as the creature we wish to be. Going through the motions of that particular creature, perceiving with its senses, but controlled by us to some degree and feeding all it experiences right int our brains - so we can know what it is like to soar over the waves or swim beneath using sonar or whatever.
At night the light of the Tri-Arc illuminates everything like a full moon on steroids.
After some measure of searching for suitable real estate, a home on Niuearth ( http://orionsarm.com/xcms.php?r=oaeg-vie...993102478a ) seems appropriate. On Niuearth, one can access the Terragen Sphere without being totally immersed in it. With my preference for "middle tech" (but only those bits I find personally useful), this means that those technologies I want for daily living are readily available, while other bits I might need to solve a particular problem can be accessed, used, and then dispatched to wherever they came from when I'm finished with them. As for the structure itself, a two-story, two bedroom townhouse (like where I live in RL) would be good. In terms of "OA-ish" modifications, I suppose an autofab ( http://orionsarm.com/xcms.php?r=oaeg-vie...afe5718a34 ) in the kitchen would be a nice way to cut down on the time spent wandering the aisles of the local supermarket, not to mention the time spent preparing and cooking the food (if plates and utensils could also be fabricated and then recycled after being used, so much the better...no more washing dishes ). One possible downside to living on Niuearth could be my sympathies toward the Kassian ideology (http://orionsarm.com/eg-article/484dd2d743c04 ), which might still be considered somewhat suspicious and thus bring some degree of unwanted attention. A walled-in yard (for the enjoyment and safety of my dogs and cats) as well as an enclosed aviary attached to the dwelling for my birds, would be welcome additions to my RL domicile. A small, isolated plot of land in the temperate zone with a nice view would be ideal.
It'd be pretty cool to live on one of those ecotopia labworlds for experimenting with and creating new ecosystems... with a spaceport a few kilometers away to visit other parts of the zoerific biopolity's capital.
I've recently imagined a new kind of house that might be entertaining to live in - a landrunner house. These are a smalller, faster version of the walking cities described here
http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/53064d2ec0c09
but they are individual homes, or at the most accomodation for a small number of housemates. Imagine a futuristic trailer/caravan with long, road-runner legs. These houserunners often engage in races, both long-distance and sprints; and sometimes cluster together at night for a house party. They are common on the twin planets Laurel and Hardy, but are also found on large megastructures, often attempting to run around a ringworld, orbital or topoolis the long way. At 50km an hour a houserrunner would take nearly thirty years to run around a Banks Orbital, but more than thirty thousand years to run round Spaghetti, the innermost Topolis of Cableville.
I suppose the ideal Y11K home for me would be mass of ufog, usand, and other modubot elements so it could reconfigure endlessly. It wouldn't really need to be as big as my current apartment - I'm not currently using my bathroom, bedroom or kitchen but they exist because I need somewhere to hold my shower, sink, toilet, bed, clothes, fridge, cooker, washing machine etc, but if the house can spontaneously generate those as needed then it doesn't need to have space for them... unless I fancy being a bit retro. Would it need to be bigger perhaps than even a largish single room, given that it can become any room I want or need at will? And if it is freely able to move around and reconfigure itself at will, tucking away anything and everything until it was needed, then would my ideal home in fact be the Y11K equivalent of a Volkswagen camper van than a house as we understand it today?
A nice reconfigurable home running across a bed of utility sand pulling power ever possible way and a good place for storing auxillary bodies.
Being that it's 9 thousand years in the future, the most important thing is that you can bring your home to wherever you want> so...a home/spaceship made out of materials that can modify their translucidity.
what can be more fun than riding in your space luxury home, and waking in the upper atmosphere of a gas giant, just when the big storm's approaching, or travelling in style through space, with nothing but the vast darkness enshrouding, giving you time to meditate, and perhaps use those implants that you just bartered for, to reach singularity.
the engines would need to be taken out of the picture, so that they don't interfere with your vista. that's a piece of cake for the ufog to take care of.
you don't need many rooms when you've got...yes ufog, that can transform into whatever shape or size you desire: you can watch the newest media updates on those disappearings in the Periphey on your vintage holoprojector.
cooking? who needs that when you're digestive system can't handle chunks of food. just plug into the ships power source and recharge whenever you feel lonely and 'cold' from the darkness between the stars.
a home/ship of about 300 m in length should do the trick, your reactioness drive being controlled by a slaved hyperturing, that also keeps you entertained by arranging a beautiful itinerary to help you get in touch with your inner self.
this home of yours, need not carry any weaponry, because, that would make it unsafe for when you neighbours bring their children, clones, copies, plus you have to pay a handsome extra tax for carrying those mag missiles, so it's equipped with a state of the art 'get me out of here' strictly defense system.
so there you go. flying trough space in a luxury home/spaceship feels like you're actually flying with no restraints. Just you and the universe. One and the same, just as your spirit cyborg guide prophesied.
I figure it'd be more interesting to just be adapted to co-exist with the great outdoors. Think how much money you could save on rent!
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