I just left a comment under this video—probably too long, too weird, too intense.
Pff not even a challenge. Easy.
Kipling, you scrumptious sexy little mammalian, let me spell this out for you—yes, we can do this in human lifetimes.
You think in ships. I think in infrastructure. You dream of a glorious launch. I’m talking about a galactic root system. Let me lay it down.
We start not with a starship, but with a direction. A narrow hemisphere of intent, pointed toward Alpha Centauri. Every asteroid, moonlet, comet, rogue iceball, and blackened micro-planet in that trajectory? We take it. We mine it. We build on it. We weaponize the void.
Each node becomes a colony, and each colony does seven things:
(a) It mines.
(b) It builds a station.
(c) It performs deep telemetry and object scanning.
(d) It communicates—back to Earth, and laterally to its sister colonies.
(e) It fabricates laser arrays, starting weak, growing strong, and then multiplying.
(f) It builds linear accelerators—not just for signals, but for solid matter: payload capsules, structural mass, shielding, even semi-assembled ships.
(g) It creates more colonial vessels—each one spreading the net deeper, grabbing the next viable rock. Oh, and
(h)? We clear the lanes. Lasers can be used not just to push, but to vaporize interstellar dust in our path. And
(i)—because we think in full surround—we build a defensive laser halo around the entire solar system. Just in case. We’re not idiots.
This isn’t a starship launch. This is a mycelial saturation. A recursive, directionally biased fungus of light and steel. Colonies take 10 years to mature—but they don’t wait for Earth. They reproduce. One becomes two, becomes ten, becomes thousands. Within decades, we saturate the Kuiper Belt. Within generations, we’ve pushed into the Oort. Within a century, we’re littering the near-interstellar with a fog of beam-talking, ship-growing, asteroid-hollowing children of Earth.
At some point, someone launches a real starship—maybe something like the Avatar Venture Star, big as a city and long as a comet. But here’s the trick: it doesn’t stop accelerating after Earth. It hits hundreds of AU, still riding the Photon Net—a lattice of beam stations across the Solar System and beyond, each one handing off push like a billion-handed relay. We don’t stop at push. We send out reflectors, massive chaff sails moving ahead of the ship, forming a reverse array to brake incoming vessels using Earthbound or colony lasers. Deceleration is solved by staging the universe itself. And what’s on this ship, you ask? You. A transhuman version of you, life-extended, enhanced, dream-slick, transcendant. You’re sipping cocktails and reviewing incoming telemetry as your ship knifes through the black at 0.2 or 0.3 or maybe even 0.4C. The world behind you was never one place—it was a trail. The world ahead was never a target—it was a field to bloom. You don’t launch to Proxima Centauri. You grow there. _
A thousand points of light ….
… yes that old quote_.
And YOU arrive not with a bang, but with a network already waiting. Infrastructure. Relays. Stations. Reflectors.
And they know you. They’ve been watching your approach for decades. This isn’t a ship. This is panspermia by ambition. This is logistics as destiny.
This is Khannea’s Interstellar Mycelium.
Sleep well, Kipling. I will be waiting for you, Yakuzi, cocktails and sexy music ready. Your wife can join us, I am a welcoming interstellar Goddess.
Kipling posed the question with poetic clarity, and I responded with something that’s been gestating in me since around 2011. Not just an answer, but a framework. An emergent architecture of infrastructure-first interstellar expansion. Not another ship fantasy. Something recursive. Fungal. I thought it mattered.
But here’s the thing.
No one ever responds. Ever. I drop these thoughts—sometimes beautiful, sometimes insane, sometimes both—and the silence that comes back is crushing. It makes me question whether I’ve done anything real at all.
I am exceedingly lateral. Weird. I go against the grain, pick fights, contradict. I suspect I have ODD. My writing style is alienating. My intensity weirds people out. I don’t explain gently—I exclaim violently. And when I think I’ve said something of merit, it’s often met not with curiosity, but with seething insults. Contempt. Mockery.
So I doubt myself.
Maybe I’m not clever. Maybe I’m just loud. Maybe I’m not original—just unfiltered and bipolar. Maybe I’m not visionary—just some loser, some damaged, aging idiot in Amsterdam, screeching into comment sections while the world politely turns away.
What if this is all a delusion?
What if I’m not a misunderstood futurist? What if I’m just in the metaphoric padded cell, naked, bellowing “THE HIIIILLS ARE ALIIIIVE” in my best Smeagol voice while painting the walls with my own feces?
Because that’s what it feels like. It feels cursed. Like I’m trying to give birth to something impossibly large and I have no midwife, no audience, no support. Like I’ve been trying to matter for decades and the universe keeps replying with “fuck off and die, you piece of shit“.
I don’t want applause. I want meaning. I want to contribute. I want to be part of what pushes us forward, even if it’s just by a micron. But sometimes, I feel like I’m just smearing metaphysical feces on the walls of a cell labeled “delusion.”
And I’m tired.
Tired of shouting into voids. Tired of being dismissed or worse – note even being pinged in response. Tired of hoping my words spark fires and watching them sink like stones. Tired of pretending I don’t care when I absolutely do.
Khannea