2013 100YSS Public Symposium PATHWAY TO THE STARS, FOOTPRINTS ON EARTH September 19 - 22, 2013 | Houston, TX A Pathway for

Global Communications as an Inclusive Means of Participation David Orban Presented at the Becoming An Interstellar Civilization: Governance, Culture & Ethics and Design: Space tracks. Global communications are evolving rapidly, allowing for effective, interactive messages to reinforce the support that a complex project can receive, beyond the limits of traditional broadcast models. It is unlikely that a starship project could be directly nanced via crowd funding, but it is necessary to increase and to sustain the understanding and sharing of its value in the larger public, with carefully designed and wide-ranging, inclusive communications. This talk will concentrate on what is can be done now with ubiquitous online video that goes beyond the barriers of language to establish a new global conversation, as well as forecast what new tools can be designed and deployed as new technologies become available. The project of designing, building, and launching a starship is as much an engineering effort as one of public relations, of willpower, which must be sustained, together with the political and nancial resources necessary. Emotional intelligence is an important component in human endeavors, on par with analytical and logical skills: being able to powerfully communicate goals that can be not only understood, but with which people all around the world can identify with.

Online video today is the medium of broadest emotional bandwidth, and its use is key for a broad public understanding and participation in the starship project. Among other developments, it is going to be possible to generate, disseminate, analyze, and aggregate videos not only produced by the project itself, but those that are created by the global conversation around it. These components are going to be an essential part of the project, sustaining its ambitious dream. The adoption of a distributed communication model is the basis for taking advantage of innovative ideation and design components, which can concretely involve groups of passionate followers of the project, complementing the professional team dedicated to it.