Orion Digest №35 — The Purpose of Museion
As we discussed last issue, the Orion Manifest only briefly touched on the other two branches of Orion, and it is appropriate that in lieu of a full and official guide, we should touch on the purpose and aims of the sister branches to the Sword of Orion. We have covered Liberius, and now we move onto the Museion Institute, or Museion.
As stated in the Manifest, Museion is the research branch of Orion, but just because it does not interact directly with the public as Liberius and the Sword do, it is no less important to the cause, and fulfills a vital need in our goals — information and strategy. We have the ideas, but how we communicate them to the public, what facts we use to back them up, how we formulate plans for recovery and reform after we establish federation — these will all require effort that will make Museion invaluable.
As a think tank, the structure of Museion will be looser, largely based on the discretion of whoever is assigned to head the branch, but it will similarly be split into divisions for specific areas of research. However, to adapt for new needs and concerns, these divisions can be collapsed and created, instead of static categories like in Liberius. Within divisions, individual researchers can either propose projects, or have the heads of divisions create projects that they sign on to, with assistant staff able to choose projects to sign up for.
There would be three tiers of Museion membership — division heads, researchers, and assistant staff (not counting the branch head). New members would serve as assistants to current researchers to gain experience before they graduate to a research position. To do so, they would need at least two years of experience serving as assistant staff as well as a thesis project submitted to a board of researchers, excluding those they had previously worked with. Their thesis project would be judged based on quality of presentation and evidence, and then their hypothesis and results discussed with the board as a whole, before a vote on whether they are ready to graduate to the rank of researcher.
After some time as a researcher, members of Museion would get a chance to be appointed by the branch head to serve as heads of divisions, whether to replace a pre-existing division head or to head a new division. Division heads would serve tenures for either four years, until they decided to resign from their position, or until removed by a branch head for special circumstances. After their tenure ended, they would return to being a researcher as before. Of note is that to head a division, a researcher does not need to be a part of it prior to appointment — it is the branch head’s discretion on who to place where.
Research projects would aim for low cost inquiry’s into how other branches could better strategize and what we could do to accomplish our goals once federation is established, but higher level projects could be taken on with funding, including the actual development and creation of technology and equipment for Orion and public use. The matter of funding for Orion is an optional point in the grand scheme of things — while there are various expenses that will require paying in the course of our plans, writing, volunteering, and research do not inherently incur costs, save for the cost in time to members. Our goal is not to make money nor become an establishment that employs — to reflect the spirit of service, Orion is something one must enter without promise of material gain, but with the interest of benefitting humankind.
However, in addition to donations, profits from paper copies of books and technologies created by Museion through grants could be used for funding as needed for Orion, most specifically for further research by the Institute. With greater resources, we could learn more about our environmental situation and how best to combat climate change; we could work to advance technology in sustainable ways, and get us closer to interstellar space travel. We wouldn’t have to simply do this all on our own — we could work with other institutions, pool our resources and knowledge, and in the spirit of unity, work together on our technological goals.
Environmental sustainability and interstellar travel are perhaps the most important tasks that the Museion Institute will take on. To survive the extinction we have created for ourselves, we must learn how to live more in harmony with nature, and to do that now will take more than just stopping the source of the damage — we must use our resources to help fix it as well. However, if we are to expand and learn more about the vast cosmos surrounding us, we must also crack the secret on how to travel past the boundaries of our solar system, and to new habitable worlds, where pioneers can start anew with knowledge on how to do it right.
If the Sword is the means by which we become politically able to accomplish our mission, then Museion is the means by which we become physically able to accomplish our mission, though its use is not just relegated to the steps we take after we establish federation. Knowing more about the communities we are trying to convince, and having credible evidence to back up our claims about the world will strengthen our stances, and allow us to take a more secure step forward. The Museion Institute’s greater purpose is to support its sister branches, and in its own way, represents a greater calling than the simple protection of humanity — the partaking in that great quest for discovery and knowledge, that timeless journey into the unknown.
- DKTC FL
