Steps to Futurity

After reading Fuller's "Operating Manual for Sapceship Earth," I began thinking of what we need to do now as a species in order to survive in the long run, starting from the premise that we are fucked now but that we can survive, if we allow that the narratives and perspectives we have on what is possible actually do determine reality.

In the long run, the sun, which is our primary fuel source, will die out, so by that point we will have needed to develop the technology to find and inhabit other Earth-like, life-sustaining planets. Previously the challenge to this has been inventing faster than light travel, but, as the rate of expansion of the Universe is increasing due to the heretofore unknown dark energy, we should instead focus on FTD (faster than dark) technology, or methods of alternate universe travel.

In order to create technologies on this level, and even to develop the scientific perspectives on which this technology might be based, we must first resolve local problems of time, resources, and education. The sun is our main energy source. We must develop technologies to harness this continually radiant and free energy source in order to stop using our non-renewable resources at all costs. This in turn requires a new model of wealth, not as debt, scarcity, or "not enough to go around" which rules the current economic markets, but as Fuller suggests as a measure of futurity: the number of forward-projected days per person that we as a species can live. Secondly we need to curb global consumption, in particularly North American culture's rampant production and consumption of readily-disposable, non-biodegradable, resource-wasting doohickeys. Perhaps new plastic-like materials can be invented from renewable resources.

But for either wealth or consumption to change we need a global, cultural paradigm shift towards sustainability, equality, conservation, etc, in short a shift towards looking at humanity as something with a future. This requires mass education and conscientious media engagement to raise awareness of the issues at hand, offer alternatives, and stop promoting the reckless, passive lifestyles and worldviews that currently infest our world. After this, resources need to be redistributed evenly to all peoples, as well as free access to health care, education, and technologies, in order that the largest number of people are freed of time and mind to be able to address the large social and technological problems of energy transformations, space travel, universal acceptance, etc.

The primary challenge to all of this utopian idealism is the mythologies of nationality and spiritual scarcity that promote global warfare. Wars may be fought over ideologies, money, resources, land, etc, but they result from the misguided notion of us vs. them, that there are only limited resources and that superficial differences between people determine who should acquire what goods and who should be obliterated. The new paradigm must be that we are all in this together. The more subtle and dangerous myth currently creating global hostilities, especially in the Middle East, is the religious myths of the Armageddon - that is, over who will control the end of their world by wiping out their cultural enemies and thus insuring the victors a place in Heaven, because clearly there is an age old belief that there is also not enough heaven or salvation to go around. This is the greatest fallacy being fought over between East and West. Any attempt to win, with any one side over the others, will inevitably result in the greatest expenditure of non-renewable resources and wealth as futurity, the loss of multicultural perspectives, and eventually or immediately the destruction of the human race. This was the threat of the Cold War and is has not gone away. Any total war will mean total destruction.

The only way to win will be by getting along and getting out of this mess, which is in creating Heaven on Earth, prior to exploring out into the very real heavens which are all around us. To this end education/ media narratives must encourage global, multicultural perspectives converging on the essential humanity of all of us in the face of the totality of Universal experience we as a species have so far attained or imagined, as well as a focus on grassroots community organizing via the internets, and the encouragement and sharing of ideas, instructions, perspectives, etc for people to once again take control of their own lives and futures.