Most people who know of me think of me as an information-technology expert, someone who probably lives in California and invests in edgy Internet startups. In fact, my formal residence is in New York City, but I am about to spend most of the next five months in Russia, training to be a cosmonaut in Star City, just outside Moscow.
It all came about in a number of ways. First of all, as a kid, I just assumed that I would go to the moon, without having to do much in particular to make it happen. I just took it for granted that, by the time I was 40, space travel would be a common thing. My father was involved with the US space program and we had some moon rocks at home, so I thought it was no big deal.
Then I got distracted for about 40 years. A few years ago, however, I started paying attention to space again. A lot of people I knew in the IT industry were doing the same: Elon Musk, a cofounder of PayPal, founded Space-X; Jeff Bezos of Amazon started a spacecraft company called Blue Origin; Jeff Greason, a senior manager at Intel, started XCOR Aerospace (in which I’m an investor). In 2005, the last year I held my PC Forum conference for IT entrepreneurs, I started a conference called Flight School for entrepreneurs in space and private aviation.
Meanwhile, in about 2005, I was in South Africa with a small group advising former South African president Thabo Mbeki and his government about its IT policy. One of the group was Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Thawte (sold to VeriSign), who had recently come back from a trip to the space station as the second “space tourist.”
One evening, the group sat around a campfire as the sun set and around 50 African schoolchildren were bussed in. Altogether, there were about 100 of us, Mbeki included, around a roaring fire. Once it was dark, a screen was set up and Mark showed home videos from space. He gave a fascinating talk about his adventures, complete with clips of him floating around, catching bubbles in his mouth, and so on. The kids loved it and I’m sure some of them decided then and there to study math and science.
Eventually, I invested in Space Adventures, the company that organized Shuttleworth’s trip into space. Later, I went on a tour that they organized to watch the launch of Charles Simonyi, the fifth (and soon seventh) space tourist, from Baikonur in Kazakhstan. (Simonyi wrote the Microsoft Word program, and now has another startup, Intentional Software, and a foundation, as well as a Web site, CharlesinSpace.org.)
Soon after, I started casually discussing the notion of becoming a backup cosmonaut with the Space Adventures team. Yes, I would love to actually go, but the trip to space costs US$35 million to US$40 million, whereas backup training costs “only” US$3 million.
So I had vague thoughts that I might go into space sometime in 2011 — the year that Google cofounder Sergey Brin is (very) tentatively slated to go. Space Adventures was pushing for last year, but I was pretty busy.
Then something happened last spring: My sister Emily discovered that she had cancer and had a double mastectomy — she is doing well now and, in fact, just won a mini-marathon. A couple of weeks later, I was faced with one of those conflicts: a board meeting here, a conference there, another opportunity at the same time somewhere else. “Aaagh,” I thought, “if only I had a double mastectomy: I could cancel all these things and no one would complain!”
Good grief! I realized my priorities were all out of whack. So in some odd way, this sabbatical in Russia is my alternative to a double mastectomy — a positive one, to be sure, but the same kind of reset-button experience.
It is also the answer to another question I hear a lot because of my work on human genetics through 23andMe (www.23andme.com) and the Personal Genome Project (www.personalgenome.org): If you learned you had a high chance of developing Alzheimer’s in a few years, what would you do? Why, I’d go train to be a cosmonaut, of course. And why wait to find out I may get Alzheimer’s? Next month, I will write about what training to go into space actually involves.
Esther Dyson, chairman of EDventure Holdings, is an active investor in a variety of start-ups around the world. Her interests include information technology, healthcare, private aviation and space travel.
COPYRIGHT: PROJECT SYNDICATE
I came to Taiwan to pursue my degree thinking that Taiwanese are “friendly,” but I was welcomed by Taiwanese classmates laughing at my friend’s name, Maria (瑪莉亞). At the time, I could not understand why they were mocking the name of Jesus’ mother. Later, I learned that “Maria” had become a stereotype — a shorthand for Filipino migrant workers. That was because many Filipino women in Taiwan, especially those who became house helpers, happen to have that name. With the rapidly increasing number of foreigners coming to Taiwan to work or study, more Taiwanese are interacting, socializing and forming relationships with
Earlier signs suggest that US President Donald Trump’s policy on Taiwan is set to move in a more resolute direction, as his administration begins to take a tougher approach toward America’s main challenger at the global level, China. Despite its deepening economic woes, China continues to flex its muscles, including conducting provocative military drills off Taiwan, Australia and Vietnam recently. A recent Trump-signed memorandum on America’s investment policy was more about the China threat than about anything else. Singling out the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as a foreign adversary directing investments in American companies to obtain cutting-edge technologies, it said
The recent termination of Tibetan-language broadcasts by Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Asia (RFA) is a significant setback for Tibetans both in Tibet and across the global diaspora. The broadcasts have long served as a vital lifeline, providing uncensored news, cultural preservation and a sense of connection for a community often isolated by geopolitical realities. For Tibetans living under Chinese rule, access to independent information is severely restricted. The Chinese government tightly controls media and censors content that challenges its narrative. VOA and RFA broadcasts have been among the few sources of uncensored news available to Tibetans, offering insights
Two weeks ago, Malaysian actress Michelle Yeoh (楊紫瓊) raised hackles in Taiwan by posting to her 2.6 million Instagram followers that she was visiting “Taipei, China.” Yeoh’s post continues a long-standing trend of Chinese propaganda that spreads disinformation about Taiwan’s political status and geography, aimed at deceiving the world into supporting its illegitimate claims to Taiwan, which is not and has never been part of China. Taiwan must respond to this blatant act of cognitive warfare. Failure to respond merely cedes ground to China to continue its efforts to conquer Taiwan in the global consciousness to justify an invasion. Taiwan’s government
RSS