Creating Space

We spent our recent vacation in Arizona. First, we attended Leprecon, where I was on two panels with Guest of Honor Karen Traviss and learned a lot about Mandalorians. Then, we relaxed at a resort near Tucson.

Biosphere II was within 20 miles of our resort. It was our top sightseeing choice in the area. Yes, there is a good air museum. We’ve seen those before. This is the only attempt to build a sealed ecosystem for human habitation on Earth.

It’s an amazing piece of engineering.

The building itself is impressive. It’s large, and rises high, with glass panels joined in a semi-geodesic fashion. The girders are white, and the building shines and sparkles.

The interior is even more amazing. Jungle, desert, and ocean, all enclosed and alive. Fish swim in and out of the living coral reef. And the mechanics! The air recirculation in the basement creates a strong wind. The ‘lung’ raises a steel plate weighing fifty tons to allow the air inside the building to expand when it heats.

Our guide, Bob, liked to point out that the air circulation, cooling systems, water and waste recycling systems all worked ’super well’.

Not everything worked so well. Within six months of originally sealing the building, microbes in the soil took up too much oxygen. For the safety of the crew, they pumped extra oxygen into Biosphere II. It therefore failed as a sealed habitat.

And the crew were constantly hungry. Looking at the diet they ate, I wasn’t surprised. It consisted only of grains, beans, and vegetables. In addition to having less food than ideal, they had no hearty protein and no fats. I wondered why there were no nut trees, no olives, not even peanuts. More to learn about that.

In some ways, I felt I had failed at the con, too. I did well on panels. I had hoped to talk to more people. I found myself tired and retiring when I would have been well-served by being rested and outgoing.

But here’s the point. Both the builders of Biosphere II and I learned something by trying and failing. We learned lessons that we could not have known before we tried. That means that our failures were really successes.

I’ll be back to try again at Coppercon and Bubonicon and DenVention and more. And now we know some things that work and don’t work for sealed habitats. We’ll try that again, too.

Have you had experiences you counted as failures? What can you learn from them, to make them part of your success?

And would you like to talk to me about it? Email me, and we’ll schedule a session.

“You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn
how to write the novel that you’re writing.” — Gene Wolfe

Some creations are a mystery. The mystery of writing is one of my favorites. With other arts, too, the artist may have an idea of the final piece, and yet, as she or he begins to bring it to life, there are details to fill in, and sudden surprises, and the final work may be remarkably distant from the original idea.

Research, by definition, moves into the unknown. If we already knew all the steps to the final outcome, it would not be research. So, again, there is a mystery between beginning and end.

In fact, many projects may have unknowns between beginning and end. Such as, how do we gather the funding for a mission to Mars? Or, how do we design the spacecraft for that mission? What do you do then?

Last issue, I walked through the backwards planning process. If you missed it, or would like to see it again, please check the archive at www.annaparadox.com/newsletter.

Often, there is a flow between what you can know in advance, and what you need to discover as you move along. So, you try the backwards planning process and discover it has gaps. Or maybe you cannot grasp your particular project through the backward planner at all.

For those cases, you need a different tool. Here is the six step method to create something new, adapted from Bill Harris.

Step 1. Keep your eyes on the prize. Have a vision of your final result. Remind yourself of it daily.

Step 2. Ask questions. Questions that start with “how” are especially good. In fact, “How can I (create my vision)?” by itself may get you all the way there. Other questions, like “Has anyone else ever done this? Or anything like it? How did they do it?” can also help.

Step 3. Try something. Yup, make your best effort, and actually do something. Maybe you have a pretty good idea that isn’t quite there. Try that. Maybe the best you can think of seems utterly lame. Try it anyway. If the best you can manage is to ask your buddy if he knows anyone who ever built a rocket, go ahead. Give it a try.

Step 4. See what happens. When you try something, something will happen. Did it move you closer to your vision? Aha! Did it fail? Good, now you know something that doesn’t work. Did it give you another idea of something to try? Excellent! Anything that happens after you try is useful. Evaluate your results, and be glad of them.

Step 5. Take what you learned in step 4, and revise your plan.

Step 6. Repeat steps 3-5 until you reach your target.

Two points are critical here. Know what you want — have your vision — so that you recognize when you are moving in the right direction and when you have arrived. And, keep taking action. Put in the time to try something — anything! Persist. Only moving into it can illuminate the unknown.

As it happens, some people love to have a complete plan before they start, and some people love to explore the unknown. Good thing we have both.

May all your visions reach fruition.

Anna Paradox

Let’s say you now have a spectacular vision. In glorious detail, you know what inspiring outcome you want to create in the universe. Your glowing destination is shining on a peak. You know where you want to go. You’re eager to get there, you can’t wait to start your journey, and you look down to take your first steps and there’s a huge gap in front of your feet. You don’t know what to do next.

Here’s one way to bridge the gap, adapted from Mark Joyner’s explanation in his Simpleology course. He calls it the Backwards Planner. The idea is that you start from your ending point, and think, in order, of the action that must happen just before the end, and then just before that.

You may have used a similar process to serve Thanksgiving dinner. Everything needs to be ready at 2 pm, so you plan backwards, calculating that the table must be set by 1:30, the rolls must come out of the oven at 1:45, so they must go in at 1:20, the turkey needs to come out at 1:35, to allow for cooling and carving, so it must go in at 7:35 and so on.

Here’s where it pays to have a detailed version of your outcome. If you know how many people you want to serve, you can easily choose the size of your turkey. If you’ve already chosen all your side-dishes, you can gather recipes and ingredients for all of them, and determine how long each will take. If, on the other hand, you have no idea how many people will show up, and you want some side dishes, but you don’t know what exactly, every step you try to plan will be complicated by contingencies and slowed by the need to make extra decisions. Get the vision first.

Let’s imagine something on a grander scale. Suppose your vision is to safely land three men and three women on Mars. I’m going to stick to the outline, to keep this message reasonable.

The last action before they land on Mars is to brake through the atmosphere to slow their descent. So we need to equip their lander with a braking system. We’d like it to be a powered descent that the pilot can control from within, so we choose a rocket engine for vertical landing.

The last thing before that is to cover the distance between Earth and Mars. We decide to use similar rockets to lift off from Earth, accelerate and decelerate along the way, and for attitude adjustment as needed. The crew will need to breathe, eat, drink, sleep, and have mental relief for journey. So we calculate the requirements for life support and activities along the way. How many calories? How much oxygen? How much water? What entertainments? What can be recycled? How will we control temperature? How much will all this weigh, and therefore, how much fuel will we need?

Before that, we need to launch the vehicle. Before that, we need to train the crew. Before that, we need to build the starcraft. Before that, we need to design it. Before that, we need to fund it. Before that, we need the vision for the project.

Carry out the backwards planning in enough detail, and you create an easy to follow roadmap. It works for any project for which we know everything we need to get from here to there. If someone has already done it, or something sufficiently like it, the backwards planner will work to do it again.

And if you are breaking new ground? Next issue, I’ll discuss a tool for that.