The Future

we choose

Who can say what the future may bring,
Will it cause us to weep or cause us to sing?
I don't believe in predestined fate,
The future will be what we choose to create.
~ Anthem for the Ama-gi

It’s not enough to tell people that we don’t want a dystopia of authoritarianism and obedience. It is essential to show people the future we do want, the open skies, the bright stars, the distant planets, the freedom of prosperity, the prosperity of freedom, the cathedrals to possibility, the flying cars, personal sovereignty, joy, hope, decency, Godliness, purity, salvation, good tidings, great blessings. God sent His son to purchase for us the rewards of eternal salvation and we built a civilisation on that solid foundation of rock: hearing the words of Jesus and doing them. We do all that is possible because we can do all things through Jesus Christ who strengthens us.

Many times in this Substack and in others I have, and I have read from others who have, dwelt upon the difficulties we face because of the long train of abuses and usurpations to which we have been subjected. I can point you at those posts if you wish, in the comments. But this post is about the future, not about the past. And while the present must reflect the past, it does not have to be about the past. For if we were to say that the future is to be more about the things we liked in the past, and less about the things we didn’t like, then we would have a future that was more or less the same as the past.

Instead, today I invite you to stand in a place of your imagination, an empty space, disconnected and untethered, open and filled only with the light of possibility. A blank slate, a clean white board, on which you can draw anything, in any colours, where you can have all your dreams, all your hopes, all your love, and all your wishes. You can do all things because God is with you. So what would you?

Longevity

Jesus Christ, by his life, death, and resurrection has purchased for us the rewards of eternal salvation. Jesus has defeated death. That is the good news of the angel of the nativity. Sin entered into the world, and through it, death, because the wages of sin is death. But God sent His Love, Mother Mary who was immaculate. Mary conceived of the Holy Ghost as a virgin and bore the Word of God, Jesus. So your soul has, through God’s grace, the prospect of eternal salvation, if you believe and choose to be baptised. But there is more.

Methuselah lived to be 969 years old. In 2005, Aubrey de Grey spoke at the Eris Society convention of the founder of

Doug Casey's Take

and told us that the first person to live to be a thousand years old was alive that day. I believe Aubrey knows a great deal more about senescence than almost any other man on Earth. Which, if we are to believe the numerical prevarication of the cadgers in government, is quite a few billions of living souls. Do you want to live forever?

Forever is a very long time, and your soul has many great purposes about which I know only a small amount. But I do believe that we are in an era when it would be useful to live 240 years and spend 40 of those years travelling at ten percent of the speed of light to Proxima Centauri, where there is a quite Earth-like exoplanet. (Almost, it seems, as if we have done this all before….)

There are other reasons to live for many centuries. Things change, People grow. Technologies advance and recede. We have “corporations” which are meant to last as long as they are needed, as long as they serve the interests of their shareholders. We have “The Church” founded by Jesus Christ, which is all of the believers in Jesus. We also have various human organisations that have lasted much of the last two thousand years, calling themselves Orthodox, Catholic, and by other names. Universities, as well, have great longevity, having been founded to teach people in the cities of Christendom what it means to profess the faith, and over time, what else professors know. Since we have organisations that benefit from hundreds of years of compound interest, why shouldn’t we?

For further discussion on this topic, I can recommend a few books that I’ve enjoyed, notably Robert Heinlein’s Time Enough for Love. For how many people would you be able to love if you lived 2,300 years? And what might the future bring?

Freedom

We also want freedom, even if having it means there is trouble in our day. We want the blessings of liberty, for which our ancestors fought.

My own particular ancestors fought against the depredations of the Hanoverian usurpation. As punishment we were cleared off our lands in the Highlands of Scotland. We were punished further with transportation for life as cargo to Virginia colony where the evil mass murdering government of Britain sought to have us worked to death on a plantation. By God’s grace there was a storm at sea and the ship made landfall at New York harbour.

As the story has come down to me, after the storm had passed, the ship’s captain wanted to offload his cargo and take on a new cargo for another voyage. The harbour master wanted the duty to be paid. The owner of the indentures was in Virginia, quite a long ways away, and the ship was going nowhere until the duty was paid. Sending word and awaiting the arrival of the cargo’s owner did not set well with the captain who loved not the stench of port cities. So he asked, “And how if they are passengers?”

The answer came, “Then they are free to go, and so are you.”

So the captain went into his cabin and burnt the indentures. Then he ordered his men to evict my family from the hold. There we were, on the wharfs of New York, poor, but free. And within a few generations in Ohio, then California, and many other places.

Below are some words with which I agree, since I’ve edited them into a resplendent shape. Read them over, please, and see if you agree, and meet me in the comments either way.

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for various people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the individually sovereign, separate, and equal station for which God designed them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind suggests they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all individuals are created equal, that they are endowed by God with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. In the past, in an attempt to secure these rights, governments were instituted among men. Such governments would have just powers if they had the unanimous consent of the governed. None did. So various forms of government have become destructive of these ends, from which it emerges that individuals have the right to alter or to abolish government, as it is theirs to do with as they choose. People are free to establish new systems, laying their foundation on such principles and organising their powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that systems long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such tyranny and to provide new guards for their future security.

I submit that the long train of abuses and usurpations is all around you. So please join me in the comments to discuss what individual sovereigns like you and me might choose to do about it. I suggest that we establish “guards” in the very literal meaning of guardians, trained to be peaceful and armed in the defence of liberty.

Which leads to the old Latin inquiry: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who shall guard us from the guards themselves? My answer is: we shall each be guardians of freedom, and we shall guard ourselves from one another as needed.

If you want monuments to the difficulties inherent in delegating power to other people, look around you. You will see suffering and decay everywhere. You can choose, if you wish, to blame certain people and trust others. Blame Obama. I know quite a lot about him from personal experience, and I can trace a great deal of damage done to his terms in office 2009-2017. But I don’t trust any politician, for abundant and obvious reasons, and I don’t think you should, either. You aren’t going to get out of this mess by voting.

How then? Quite simply. By “being ungovernable,” or, to put it another and better way, by governing yourself. You are sovereign. You are as much a child of God as anyone. So why should you pay 62% of your income in local, regional, state, and national taxes? Why should you be regulated, inspected, cavity searched, arrested, jailed, tried, and executed? Who, exactly, do they think they are? And why don’t you think you are all that, too?

The Planets

A very long time ago there was a film in the cinema. My parents took me and my brothers. I was a little boy, but I loved this film. Well, the first part didn’t seem much fun, monkees living in a desert with pigs, smashing each other with bones. But then a bone flew into the sky and became a spaceship and the fun part began. Okay, the end didn’t make much sense, either, because none of us were tripping acid. In between there was a trip into space, a long distance call to a child back on Earth, a hotel in a space station, a discussion about strange happenings, a trip to the Moon, and a walk to see a big flat black book just like we saw with the bone smashing monkees.

I think that film changed some things. My dad had never allowed television in the house. He didn’t want his sons to watch telly, he wanted them to read books. So we had thousands of books and a radio and a record player. Mostly we read. But in the Summer of 1968 my dad brought home a television. A very inexpensive black and white 14 inch diagonal set. No remote. No picture in picture. For years shows broadcast “in living colour” meant nothing to me. Dad said he wanted to watch the political conventions.

So we did. We watched the coverage of the police riots in Chicago. Later, in college, I went to a speech in which Abby Hoffman explained that it is not wise to throw baggies of human excrement at armed men. :-) I didn’t understand the conventions nor the riots. I had a sense of the police brutality as terribly unjust. But at Christmas, something marvelous happened.

Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders orbited the Moon. Frank read the first chapter of the book of Genesis while orbiting the Moon, on Christmas day. It was awe inspiring.

The following year, our family were in Taiwan. Dad was teaching nuclear physics to very enthusiastic students. We were invited to visit the community centre where a big black and white television was located, plenty of seating. I sat by mom. The astronauts were talking but a very serious looking Chinese gentleman was translating their words. At one point I asked mom if we could call the station and ask them if he would please be quiet so we could hear the astronauts. Mom said that wasn’t possible. Such much childhood disappointment. But there were men, walking on the Moon.

So I always wanted, my whole life, to go dancing on the Moon. Later I would understand that I would need to build a hotel under the lunar surface to protect it from solar and cosmic radiation since there is a scarcity of atmosphere and nearly no magnetic field on the Moon. I was okay with that. And thus began my determination to be a part of “all that stuff going on in space,” which I have done, in Houston for twenty years and in other ways. I worked for Mercury 7 astronaut Deke Slayton, the pilot of the Apollo command module during the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, who managed to be qualified after the retirement of a certain flight surgeon who had prevented him from flying Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, or Skylab missions. See, longevity is useful!

In my studies in astrophysics at Columbia and in my reading of the previous incarnation of L5 news 1977 to 1988 (and back issues to 1975 my brother owned), and in reading many other books, I know that there are many planets and asteroids and comets all around the star which God put in our sky so we would have light and energy. And those planets can be our homes, too, in many instances.

The top graphic and the one just above link to a very interesting essay on ringworlds and other possibilities. Here we see a building project at one end of an asteroid, using the materials of what seems to be a nickel-iron microplanet for the purpose of building all kinds of things. Jerry Pournelle once wrote that it is raining soup out there, go grab a bucket.

Elsewhere in this ‘stack I have talked about some of the more interesting places we know about, from radar and spectroscopic studies from Earth, as well as from telescopic and spacecraft examinations. There is a single asteroid with quintillions of dollars worth of gold and another with more platinum group metals than have been mined since mankind began mining here on Earth. Wealth enough for all.

The Stars

If you go out in the wilderness, far from cities, over a mountain range from the city lights, and get off the road a ways, you can turn out the lights of your vehicle and stare at the sky. Before long you’ll see stars, on a clear night. On a clear night you can see “forever” up there.

With longevity, and suspended animation, and ambition, and the technologies we already understand, we can reach the stars. Where, as I’ve mentioned, there are tens of thousands of exoplanets within a few hundred light years.

All of which is not to mention that Gerard K. O’Neill suggested, way back in 1968 or so, that the surface of a planet isn’t really the best place for a human technological civilisation to develop.

“Now, Jim,” I pretend to hear you say, “how do we get up to ten percent of the speed of light?” Well, I think it might require the nuclear reaction vehicle technology that was under development before the bureau-rats at NASA decided to attack and destroy all other transportation technology research other than the space shuttle. Eight hundred seconds and more of specific impulse is better than any chemical rocket will provide. And these need not be dirty systems. I know. My dad developed one in graduate school.

Gravitational slingshot around the planet Jupiter will bring considerable increased velocity. Gravitational slingshot around the Sun will, too. So just going in a crazy eight around those two bodies again and again, with an adequate fuel supply and powerful enough engines, it should be possible to accelerate to several percent of the speed of light.

Where do we get the fuel? Some of it from the atmosphere of Saturn perhaps. Some of it from comets out in the Kuiper belt. But there is a lot of mass in the form of charged particles from the sun and cosmic radiation all through the Solar system. Robert Bussard developed a concept for a cone shaped magnetic field thousands or even tens of thousands of miles in diameter, gathering all that matter and using it to power a fission or fusion engine. And that material is also out between the stars. So we can potentially use in situ resources to go anywhere in the galaxy.

At ten percent of the speed of light, as H. Keith Henson proposed in the green room of the North American science fiction convention in Phoenix, Arizona in 1987, we can be on the other side of the galaxy (100,000 light years away) in a million years. And what a party we’ll have. He invited a bunch of us to “the party at the other side of the galaxy,” and you’re invited too. (We’re all allowed to bring our friends.)

Flying Cars

All the way back in the early 1960s, a guy named Paul Moller designed a ducted fan air car system. You can look it up. Moller International achieved its first tethered flight in 2003. Of course, the bureau rats of the feral aviation administration hate the idea. So a flight worthiness certificate has been hard to come by.

You can see how many oxen it gores. The airlines hate the idea of you having a personal car that flies. The car companies would have to innovate, and they prefer to have an oligopoly. Most of your car is “designed” at the environmental protection agency and at the department of transportation. Many of those design elements are meant to prevent you from having good gas mileage.

You should probably reflect on the fact that the diesel Rabbit by Volkswagen in 1979, during the Iran phase of the oil crisis, got 60 miles per gallon. I know a guy that I met in Huntington Beach who showed me the code from that onboard computer you have in your car? Yeah, it kills your gas mileage, deliberately. I know a company that was developing a hybrid engine that got 300 miles per gallon. It is insane.

Then you have the people who build roads and bridges. They hate air cars. Well, surface transportation would be very useful for cargo for a very long time. Trains and trucks aren’t going to disappear. Even the most advanced airships have issues in high winds, and our country is full of high winds. Go to congress if you doubt me.

Then you have the evil mass murdering military industrial contractors. It took Boeing a long time to consolidate the airline industry until they were the only American airline manufacturer. They don’t want to play. Even some of the private business jet people seem to think that the air car would lack exclusivity.

So the bureau rats at the feral aviation administration have been against air cars for generations. They actively personally hate your individual sovereignty. They don’t want you to fly. You know what I say? Let’s fly any way.

Peace

You know who starts wars? Governments. Some dictatorships, some “democracies,” and quite a few republics have started all kinds of wars. The wars to destroy Carthage? Roman republic. The war to sack Jerusalem? Roman empire. I could go on, I did my studies in history, too.

You know who doesn’t start wars? People who want to be left alone. Sovereign individuals who have withdrawn from the big cities. Anarchonal capitalists. Anarchists, for the most part, except the live action role play sorts who aren’t actually anarchists but are (in Seattle) feral agents and (in other places) black bloc fascists posing as anti-fascists. Anarchy means “without a ruler.”

You know who conscripts people in a military draft to go fight in a war? Right now, the government of Ukraine. Historically, many other national governments. The people of America were very angry about Vietnam, the waste, the deaths, and the abuse of power. So we made the military draft go away. Not that we got rid of draft registration, so there is a spectre of a future conscription. But we said we wouldn’t put up with it, and we made congress listen. Neocons and neoliberals and republicans in name only and dirty demonrats are unhappy, but they have not yet touched that third rail again. I suspect someone populist might try it, which is another reason not to vote. (No, friends, I am not going to vote for Donald Trump. Ain’t gonna happen.)

I think most people on Earth want peace. Peace on Earth, good will toward all men.

The people who profit from war are the ones who bring about war. Smedley Butler wrote about it. You can look it up.

Then go outside at night and look up. See all that real estate in the sky? What if people were free to go build a New Jerusalem on Mars or a Caliphate in the Pleiades? Why are you fighting over scraps down here when you can have planets up there?

Prosperity

Yes, I had three concentrations in my undergrad years. Economics was the third. And I took to it like a foal takes to galloping. So I also have a master of brutality administration (just kidding) from Rice University. Marketing and entrepreneurship. Probably the marketing courses made me immune to most forms of propaganda. You might try it. Or just turn off the television and leave it off. (I had mine off for a full year and gave it away.)

You are a human being. Human beings are market seeking. We thrive in free markets. Where there are no markets allowed, we hide them. We call it underground, black market, grey market, tax free market. But it is all about barter and trade. We love it. It is a part of what causes us to thrive. Prosperity arises where markets are free.

So part of the future we choose is a future free from parasitic bureau rats and infestations of tax authorities. It’s our money and we don’t want politicians and bureau rats to waste trillions of it. Never again.

Humanity

We love our children. We love our families. We love our neighbours. We love God. With love we are able to bring out the best in humanity. We have built buildings for worship, for commerce, for taking meals together, for exercise, to care for the sick and the elderly, to teach one another, and for other purposes.

Some of the most extraordinary art and architecture celebrates these things. We choose to be free, to love one another, and to give the gifts of freedom, prosperity, and the galaxy to our posterity.

Decency

Decency is not merely being kind hearted and saying things without being rude. Decency is found where children are able to play in their community and come home “when the street lights go on,” without being stolen, without being raped, and without being murdered. Decency is a society that works, that recognises the other people around you, and that is filled with the love of mankind Jesus has asked us to express. Love one another.

There is more. Jesus was denied three times by Peter. Since Peter was the rock upon which Jesus would build his church, after the resurrection, Jesus asked Peter three times, “Do you love me”? Each time Peter said yes, and each time, Jesus instructed Peter to feed his lambs and feed his sheep, to feed the children of God.

In their epic and wonderful book Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century, Alvin and Heidi Toffler talk about what is possible, what is practical, and what we can achieve. I think it is a good choice. If you want a better future, understanding trends and technologies from a futurist perspective is a good choice. I’ve found the Tofflers to be among the best writers about the future.

Before I go, I wanted to show you another vision of the future of mankind. It’s from a gentleman I met in 2006 and again in 2016 at world science fiction conventions. His name is Larry Niven, and below is a picture of Ringworld.

His books on the Ringworld, including with other co-authors, are quite numerous. I strongly recommend you find them and read them. If you have questions about the picture and what it means, ask them in the comments.

Final thought. I was going to have the title of this piece be “the future we want” but the Untied Nations (yes, quite untied, as it happens) are using that to describe their favourite grifts and dystopia, so I prayed about it. “The Future we choose” came to me. God loves you and wants you to be happy. God provides. Praise God. Amen.

That’s all I’ve got for today. Come back tomorrow when I’ll have something new. Or old.