Kim Stanley Robinson

Science fiction legend Kim Stanely Robinson will be our guest for a special Saturday Salon on January 17.

Please join us in the Salon Room, Extropia Core at noon Second Life Time (PST)  for Stan’s first visit to Second Life, and an hour and a half of discussion.

Stan is the Hugo- and Nebula-award winning author of the Mars Trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars), the “Science in the Capital” trilogy, and many more landmark novels.

Stan will be present as his avatar, Stan Shackleton, a coyote, in honor of the Native American legend which plays a prominent role in his Mars novels.

In addition to discussing his past and future work, we’ll also venture into the politics of science and techology, social justice and the environment, and many more fascinating and controversial issues.

Special thanks to Boc Cryotank (Stephen Euin Cobb) for arranging Stan’s visit. Please listen to Stan’s interview on The Future and You!

(Please also join us for our first Salon of the year- Thor Olof, of Avatars United, Saturday January 3 at noon!)

Stellar Solstice Celebration!

Extropia Citizens and friends, old and new, rocked Technohenge for more than twelve hours on the Solstice, for our second annual solstice party.

Thanks to our terrific DJ lineup for some of the best sets they’ve ever done: GoSpeed Racer, Nicki Petrichor, Vannesh Cannoli, Seven Shikami – and a very special thanks to Alex Burgess, DJ keTchUp, for covering a no-show with a double length set to end one of our best nights ever.

Thanks to our Citizens, who’ve built the very best community on the grid, and thanks to our new friends who came, liked what they saw, and will come again!
We’ve got a full lineup of events for the next few months, including some amazing celebrity Salon guests, so watch this space for details!

The full batch of party photos is available on our Facebook page, on Soph’s flickr site, and on the Extropia flickr site. Please add your own!

Solstice Party in New Extropia Region

Please join us this Sunday, December 21 for our second annual Solstice Party!  It may be the shortest day of the year, but it’s the longest party of the year!

We’ll be in the latest addition to the Extropia community, the Rising In Light facilities in Extropia Odyssey (SLURL).

Here’s the live DJ lineup for the day:

10 am – 12 noon: GoSpeed Racer (classic rock)

12 noon – 2 pm:  Nicki Petrichor (ebm, electronica)

2 pm – 4 pm:  Vannesh Cannoli (classic rock)

4 pm  – 6 pm:  Seven Shikami (downtempo, the fun and strange)

6 pm – 8 pm: DJ keTchUp (indie new releases and old)

8 pm – 10 pm: DJColdFront Revolution (electronica)

Please join us to break in the new sim in Extropia style!

Rising In Light is a production of Orion’s Arm, a tenant in Extropia:

“… Orion’s Arm is a work in progress, a space opera setting like no other. It spans the next ten thousand years of galactic history, from the near future of interplanetary colonization to the far future where the galaxy is ruled by vast ascended intelligences. It incorporates hard science, and the “soft” or social sciences, as well as mythological and archetypal themes, as the gods of the collective psyche incarnate in unforeseen new forms. “

The Orion’s Arm Universe Project is a shared-universe, collaborative effort to imagine what life will be like in the far future. We share ideas for entities, technologies, ways in which humanity will evolve, ways in which our mind children will evolve. we vet them against the best scientific knowledge to be had today. Then we post them to our website’s Encuclopedia Galactica (http://www.orionsarm.com/eg/index.html ), we write stories set in the universe and share them, at places like Voices/Future Tense (http://www.voicesoa.net/ )…

and now we’re sharing here, at Extropia Odyssey , in a spacious orbital habitat.

Diverse.

Exuberant.

Expansive.

Amazing.

Welcome to a vision of what might be our future… just a little past the “possible”.

Welcome to Orion’s Arm.

Sophrosyne’s Saturday Salon: Mitch Wagner

Our second year of Salons in Extropia launched this past Saturday with a special guest, Mitch Wagner of InformationWeek. Drawing a peak concurrency of 38, Mitch kept us enthralled well before and after Salon hours with a fascinating, and often hilarious, discussion of new media, politics, the future of Second Life, and much more.

“Part of Obama’s political genius is that he saw people were spending less time on traditioanl media and followed them to the new media.”

“When we think about [augmented reality], we get hung up on the visual – reality overlay, like in Charlie Stross’s novel “Halting State” or “Snow Crash” or the Vinge novel. But reallyit’s all about using the Internet to deliver information about your surroundings whereever you are – and smartphones can do that.”

“Social media appeals to introverts who like people.”

“in the history of the Internet, when the kids go up against the grownups, the kids win.”

A full chatlog is available here.