Economic
recovery will not only be deeper and more prolonged than expected.
It will very likely be toward economic patterns and forms that have
never existed before anywhere on Earth.
This
is what I believe. I believe human civilization has never
experienced, in its entire existence, the kind of economy that
would have developed had Earth never been engrossed in the thousands
of years of inexperienced, primitive, virgin constructions and warring struggle
to get to the Moon. All bets have to be off for a time.
Life
on Earth was evolving toward the Moon since six hundred million years
ago when swimming and crawling living creatures were pulled back and
forth in the tides by the Moon's gravity. Now, even gravity is
understood in an entirely new light. Now, silicon is becoming sentient.
Siliiceous hexactinellid sponges build themselves cross-linked silicate girders, like the steel girder skeletons of tall modern buildings. How did they know? What else was known? Who designed that?
Secularist creationist would say, their simpler ancestor sponges did, after the ancestors of those sponges designed them. Theologians will say, the union of that which causes diversification in life's forms is God. What please, is the difference?
I
believe that we will pick up where Neanderthal and other prehistoric
human groups left off, before evolution toward the Moon understood, that their
own emerging descendants would have the stuff to get to that
satellite of Earth. That is why so many young people are said to be acting like savages, primitives, or barbarians-all totally unjust. Society is devolving. As the Whole Earth Catalog says, "We are as gods and might as well get good at it."
Refusal
or failure to comprehend the time scale will likely doom us to more
unnecessary wars. The only real question remaining is, what will the
World be conceived as, after both men and women have been on the
Moon. Those journeys will be an honorable project for international
cooperation between all of the space-faring nations and for many
others who will be very happy to participate – and, by the way,
avoid more war.
The
international project need not be rushed, yet it should be announced,
openly discussed, and its earliest stages presumed to be a part of
current ongoing projects. The time line can evolve as it is
opportune and necessary.
Timelines now span what were once called aeons, long ago when the weather could neither be predicted nor remembered. Now, estimates of some weather conditions extend out decades, even centuries. Planetary ephemeris are calculated accurately tens of thousands of years, and can be calculated for the past with equivalent certainty.
Accurate contrast between prediction of events long after we ourselves live, and recollection of events long before we existed, it a not yet fully developed amusement, and invokes galactic rotation as an extension of the anciently familiar equatorial and ecliptic motions.
It
may be that Earth will be engaged in the assessment of the World
(meaning the Earth, Sun, Moon and planets) for the entire millennium,
making it probably the most exciting and anticipated thousand years
in history. An entire planet of values would be jeopardized by
failure to immediately quell war and aggression. Consider Poland, so ravaged that its national capital, Warsaw, is known as War-Sore.
Those
who work for peace, if they fully understand their world in a scale
equivalent in scope to this picture, can be assured that vast
resources are available to support their cause. Yet those resources consist
partly of informing military interests, in the responsible
nations, of what they find.
People throughout the world are turning
toward long-term peaceful domestic activity. In doing so, some are
actually experiencing the need to be daring in venturing to enjoy
their activities and accomplishments. The joy they express is timid,
lest war invade and destroy them. It is as if they dare not hope too
much, because hope in the past was always dashed and ruined by
destruction.
That very hope, though, is now based on the sound
premises discovered in space flight by hundreds of people, living
witnesses to the Earth from space, and in everyday communications
throughout the world. It has the strength of reality to it-a new
kind of reality, communicated through television and other media
that, themselves, never existed.
Must
the whole world's people be relegated to trusting new and strange
technological miracles, peaceful in their nature, to abandon the
idiotically tried and proven ruination and damnable destructiveness
of war? This might be a big jump. Psychologists will have to
determine likely outcomes of certain scenarios.
For instance, if a
person is watching news reports of the day, and they contain a normal
assortment of good and somewhat distressing news, and some hothead
aggressor ho type comes in and says the neighboring village is
invading, and he cannot go immediately to witness the source of the
neighbor's determination to fight, who is he to believe? This is
similar to the way in which military hackles to up at every seemingly
strange move by another country.
As an example, it was disconcerting,
although even the military found it eventually amusing, to find that
the Chinese interest in war in the Pacific again is less than
adamant. So much so that, indeed, the Pentagon has allowed the
United States has been forward enough in its wartime insistence on
United States supremacy.
This
is not to fault anybody; it simply means everybody came from a more
difficult, preternatural, and awkward history into a new era in which
the World is much different than it has been expected to be. During
the past several thousand years, myth, superstition, and religion had
all been distorted,
strained
and distressed by speculation that the Moon, Sun and planets might
have any or all kinds of strange, wonderful and dangerous things in
or on them.
The path of religion was always distorted by primitive assumptions and
pagan regimes. Now, the secular image of the World is one of the more
reliable ideas of what the World actually is, and religion itself is banking on it.
Clarity is almost supreme, throughout the Solar System. It's fine
with many scientists, including this one, if God exists.
Sometimes, even within living memory an otherwise respected professor would insist that
all mention of religion was impermissible in the sciences. Scientists have a moral obligation at least to be
willing to speak through translators to the ministry, if they will
not learn any graceful languages themselves.
Creation is not an ism. Even according to the driest and most austerely oppressive atheism, the emergence of life on Earth was driven by at least meteorological and hydrological processes in mineral laden waters,
which are thus prolonged and repeated causative principles that serve
to strain chemical activity into narrower and increasingly ordered
patterns of action. Thus, if the absolutist scientist cannot grant me even the right
to believe that a fresh wind feels good, what good is he? Now
he will urgently claim that this which I have said is a prolonged, endless
harangue, as if it is much longer than the time it took life to
emerge on Earth no matter who or what moved and guided it.
So
to the point. The secular picture of the world – that which is
obtained by actual persons as witnesses in space and on the Moon, and
by human engineered robots on Mars and at other planets, by
weather, mapping, and survey satellites – is so beyond any of the
primitive conceptions held of the World, ever. Gone are all the
demons, monsters, space aliens, fabulous gardens, man-eating plants
and strange life forms; they are all nonsense. They never existed,
and their only traces are the ghosts of dreams.
Gone
too, are the big Mommy and Daddy extraterrestrial civilizations that
were to come to Earth and save mankind from itself and its so often
stupidly treasured penchant for destruction. No magical spaceships
with super-intelligent divinely superior human beings come to Earth,
not even from London, to instruct man How to Live. We are grateful
and thankful and happy that the Chinese are successful in also
orbiting spacecraft in which human beings can witness the Earth's
realities. People from many nations will join them too, just as they
traveled in Russian and American spacecraft.
With
the growing population of space-witnesses to Earth, the truth is
gaining in strength, popularity, familiarity and acceptability not
only in families who have never been to space, but believe it or not,
with the pets such as horses, goats, sheep, dogs and cats. The new
secular concept of the Earth is pure and clean, with well ordered
rules of flow, gravity, light and warmth. It does not conceal
inestimable or incomprehensible dangers. Now, no people anywhere are
monsters, and no persons are monsters. Gone forever are the days
when those beyond the nearby mountains might have been trolls or
dragons to be feared and killed.
These
are extraordinarily big changes in concept. They are an extension of
the concept far beyond root instincts. The depth of new concepts
must be taken into account when old national differences begin to
strain senses and tempers. Nothing like these times ever happened
before.
June 2012
