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Anne Bonny seemed a good enough name for the starship, actually for the Ark. The Ark infact was going to carry out an exploratory function out in the universe but also sort of ambassadorial function too. Human, Animal, vegetable, mineral species from the planet earth would be collected and preserved in the ark. Surely for experimentation but also for purely historical reasons. This was who and what we were when we left in 2050 AD….

The rest is up to them, those who are still roaming the earth on transient floating villages, sailing over the oceans. Some people are still left to live on the solid land, but the erratic climate and overpopulation make it very hard to survive there and very hard to move around and escape weather driven disasters. On the other hand, the village rafts are swift to move and our weather prediction technologies pretty accurate. We can always manage to get the raft in a safe spot before the storm hits.

The rafts emerged from the slow decline of the cheap heavy oil transport systems. Oil became more expensive, the value of the minerals in the heavy oil became apparent, the destruction of the ocean environment with the byproducts of burning these oils became unacceptable: in short, it became uneconomic to be cheap. There was a flurry of solutions; solar powered vessels, sail assistance, wave power, even a few attempts to train whales as beasts of burden. As flight became, once again, the resort of the rich, people were able to travel on these vessels, often retrofitted as passenger vessels with container hotels and sanitary facilities installed. As travel became slower, the time on board went from weeks to months and some passengers did not disembark, but became part of the crew, the community, the floating village. Smaller boats were able to keep up with the slower larger boats, the villages became more than one single vessel and the raft nature of the assemblages led to communities surviving in the gyres of the various oceans as well in the smaller seas, Black, Red and Yellow.

Bonnie’s development of cold fusion came along in time. The oceans being filled with a small but not insignificant amount of deuterium and tritium, it became possible for vessels to accumulate these heavy hydrogens as fuel for the cold fusion reactors. The first efforts were remarkably inefficient, the waste helium was welcomed as a resource to be used for blimps and then Zeppelins. The larger vessels started to become maneuverable again and were able to navigate away from storms. Less time was spent surviving and following small cultural enterprises, instead more time was available for cultural and scientific exploration. The third culture became stronger.

Anyway, Dr. Annebonnie did amazing work, and she wrote about it too. But not in difficult terms, although she won the Nobel prize for it, everybody could follow her thinking process, the way she discovered the reproducibility of cold fusion. She was old, when she finally manage to reproduce cold fusion, she was in her late seventies already, but she got the ark built in five years and set sail into space just before getting hit by that terrible brain hemorrhage. We had some pretty advanced life support equipment on the ship and then we resorted to put her on life extension measures. She got frozen to – 200 celsius degrees with the hope of being defrosted once we had found a new compatible planet to build home again. Or restored our old home, on planet earth.

Anyway, every year, on the anniversary of the day the ship took off from the earth we celebrate the Annibonnie day. The 10 years old kids get their first plunge into space. They get to visit the pilot cabin and connect to earth via the worm link. It takes a lot of energy, but we get a few minutes of viewing once a year. The community thinks it is worth it. It’s amazing to see their faces when they see how earth looks like. When they see their potential relatives, looking like them and living on the villages rafts. I actually think they start to feel special about their condition on the bonny ark on that day. It is for the first time that they feel the importance of their mission. They feel they have a purpose.

On the ark, a special selection of people were chosen to set sail, almost 40 years ago. Most of the kids that live on the ark today, are born on the ark. Except those who were ill on earth or put on life extension and have been granted to come back to life on the ark hanks to the progresses of science here in this controlled environment. In fact together with food, also science and medicine experiments are progressing on the ark. Meditators, moderators, psychologist , entertainers all work together to make life possible and bearable on the ark. News are broadcasted, sometimes made up, hypnosis, films, stories molecular food cooking, are just some for the many means by which we keep alive on the ark but also happy to be alive and curious about continuing life in the universe. There are gardens of soil with carefully managed re-worked sewage gone through three cycles of growth to avoid poisonings and disease. There are gardens of hydroponics with carefully controlled nutrient supplies. There are vats of plankton and organic proteins. Gardening is vital on a raft as well as the ark, gardeners are aestheticians and technicians, balancing productivity and aesthetics, nutrition and flavour. The vegetable gardens are open as places to walk, to romance and ponder. a hut on a pole is a hermitage in the center of a spiral of garden plots. There are flower gardens, vegetable gardens, copses of bushes and trees, strange green parks and even a swampy moorland where waters collect as they ooze through the soil. In the ark everything is repurposed/ recycled nothing goes to waste, this was able to the evolution of recycling techniques, there are experts in the ark that are responsible for making sure that this happens.

There is a legend about Anne Bonny. Many legends. One says that she was born on a storm-wrecked boat leaving Vietnam in the early 1970s. Other legends said that she was conceived on a raft, either out of love or out of rape. She said it didn’t matter whether her father was her genetic father, her parents taught her calligraphy and engineering, cooking and sewage systems. Things they needed in refugee camps. She says that a well rounded person can write a sonnet as well as an instruction manual, can make love and make a machine and make dinner and make a sad child feel better.

In her rooms, she had the image of the raft as a panel on her wall, to remind herself how simple we all can be. And must be.

She says that when we are born, our greatest pleasure is shitting and seeing our family. Then we discover play. Then sex. Then food replaces sex as we get older, and at the end, the greatest pleasures are shitting and seeing your family. That’s why she says that toilets and sewers are the most important inventions, we need them from the beginning to the end. As we need our friends and family.

The introduction of the “Basic Outcome” was perhaps one of the more interesting financial and economic developments. Initiated in Australia as a way of redistributing mineral wealth and allowing democratic choice on carbon pricing after years of almost religious conflict about the environment and resources. Each citizen was granted an equal share of the nation’s carbon emissions. Most sold them on, at the market rate, to energy providers as a form of basic income. Others kept them for themselves. Others purchased blocks in order to let them lie fallow, absorbing carbon by not allowing it to be emitted. Others speculated by buying blocks, or options for blocks of emissions. A number of economics treatises emerged and there were at least three Nobel prizes that emerged from the analysis of the markets and their effects. This system was developed further on some of the rafts and Seasteads, with each citizen having a certain amount of outcome to share around. Kickstarter version 3.0, so to speak: people collected enough support, sent their proposals for projects through committees and groups until they collected enough support for them to embark on their research, their novel, their development, their opera. This Basic Outcome gave each citizen (or raftizen, as some called themselves) a direct voice in cultural, technological and scientific developments.

Some say there is a strong distinction between the emergent third culture rafts of shared responsibility and generalisation / multispecialisation, compared to the seasteads of organised specialisations and structuralism, central governments and completely structured ownerships and litigational law. As with most such discussions, these distinctions are abstractions and nonsense. The rafts gave rise to the ark, the most well organised and least emergent structures seen by humanity.

Where do we see ourselves in this scenario? Either on a raft or in the ark.

Tim: as the oldest, a role as meditator and mediator. I take regular periods as a hermit, whether in seabubbles below the surface, on top of masts or towed behind the raft, or on the gardens, on the exterior or towed behind on the ark. But how did I get here? Possible tangential reference:

“This is not my beatiful house,..”
And you may ask yourself-Well…How did I get here?
Letting the days go by/let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by/water flowing underground
Into the blue again/after the money's gone
Once in a lifetime/water flowing underground.”

A series of events from the simple start in the technologies and systems we have for the work we do (here and now, Times Up and all that), then visiting friends and family between Europe and Australia gets slower until I end up on one of these slow boats. As issues arise, I change boats to get to different places, but never in time, so I realise that most “urgent issues” are not really that urgent and we wind up on the first big raft, making stuff up as we go along, maintaining a mixture of engineering and entertainment, stories and structures.

Tina: I learn to cook - even learnt to enjoy doing it, much to my surprise, as well as I occasionally join the film-crew on the ark, either documenting what is happening on the “madeira-seized” ark or re-interpreting and visualizing the fake news from the journalist team. But, mainly I’ll be occupied by strolling through the ark, observing and enjoying what I see and get carried away with my thoughts.

Valentina: i was a psychologist by training when i embarked

Alkan: gonzo journalist (with an alcohol problem)

Istvan: role-shifting stowaway with links to the hobo signing network

Julian: Spontaneous translation maintenance man, joined the Ark for the love of his girlfriend; Based on his reluctant joining, he is recruiting unlikely recruits and wallflowers, telling them about his old friend Ann Bonny…

Nik: Oscillating fluid dynamics wrangler: from physics and plumbing, to streams of consciousness and inebriety. Sometimes functioning as a barman.

Maja: Rafters ambassador and first-contact person for non-human sentiences, as well as travellers from other times. Currently xCoAx liaison. In 2014 I was facilitating a futures workshop at xCoAx as a member of FoAM, that back then was a network with studios in different countries. When it was time to set-off and live on water, we floated towards each other and actually spent more time together than while living on land (with thanks to our dear anonymous ship magnate @traintoextinctification. We continued our work with prototyping possible futures in the present, and one of the possible futures was in fact Annbonny's Ark. The story started as a scenario in xCoAX 2014, and we developed it into a 10 year pre-enactment in 203Os - way before cold fusion was possible. I loved the idea of a living lab for Third Culture, and I worked with the team on its detailed designs, especially when it came to designing spaces and situations where people from all walks of life would gather, live and work. The pre-enactment was a success, and gave rise to many floating villages. When cold fusion became possible, the Ark was built for space travel and about to embark on its first journey, I became skeptical. I experienced the damage that humans can do to our living environment and each other, so I didn't believe we should leave the planet until our culture evolves beyond conflict and unhealthy competition (we're on our way, but far from there yet) and has developed our vegetal mind to be at least as prominent as our bestial. It was Ann Bonny who convinced me that I should join the crew as an ambassador of Earth-bound Third Culture, a living example of intertwingularity and an early warning sign in unproductive (or dangerous) conflict situations. Since then I have been training in connecting everything (and everyone) with everything (and everyone) else, specialising in Thalience, trans-species communication and first contact with sentient beings.