<authors> We had suppressed our multiple identities for years, after we finally were diagnosed, there was so much more than simple fragments of a shattered personality, but if some of us have resulted that way (and some have) then perhaps more were born out of the following story. Following this story we divorced, came out of the closet at work as a multiple, then later quit our work with IBM to focus more time on how we might discover our own truths and heal.
Some changes are planned for this story to remove the most religiously sensitive parts for use in a second novel.
The following has been preserved in its original written form using only the singular personal pronoun for ourselves, except perhaps where a plural pronoun includes a companion in our story. Note, there are *two* of ourselves in the story, we think you will see how that works if you are familiar with Jane Roberts and Seth.
ARMAGEDDON 2076 AD (a work in progress)
I am waiting in orbit for my Commander to return to our space station. His ship rises past mine and I trigger the program that will start my thrusters so I can join his escort. He has just been promoted and commissioned to be the first commander of our SDI space station.
Today we are commemorating the station’s ‘launch’ as it officially goes online for the first time. It’s been fully operational for several months, but this is a special day chosen to inaugurate it.
It’s the 4th of July 2076.
There are several brilliant flashes above; I don’t have time to comprehend what has happened until after I am dead. We have been attacked and the space station, the commander’s ship and his escorts’ ships have been destroyed. My ship has been destroyed as well.
I am not alone.
I separate into two spirits, one is the man who has just died in his ship, he is the soul who grew up in the host body I inhabited a few moments ago. The other me is the dreamer, the witness from the past who is watching this war unfold.
We acknowledge each other briefly, and then, together, we flash to the surface of the planet as the entire system of SDI satellites below our position blows up in an array of flashes like a Christmas-light blanket.
I enter the body of a naval intelligence operative in the field. My spirit companion enters the body of another intelligence operative nearby.
I am waiting with my partner in our observation post. We know there are squads of enemy soldiers looking for us. Our camouflage is good but we will be found if they come within 50 meters or so of our position.
We have been frantically trying to report a missile launch we observed a few minutes ago, but our infallible satellite up-link has failed. It is somehow being jammed. The scale of this missile launch can only mean the end of our world.
A volley of automatic rifle fire tears through our camo and we both take dozens of hits in our abdomens. Abruptly we are dead again.
I am not alone.
There are four spirits here.
One has been my recent host, at this former observation post. Another is his partner. The third spirit is the man who was my host with whom I died with in orbit, and fourth spirit is myself, the observer from the past.
We acknowledge each other. There is a silent communication between us. The partner is shocked; the man whom I have just died with is shocked too, but not so bad.
Dead people often have a lot of difficulty with their deaths, but these men were reasonably well prepared. They knew they were very likely to die soon. Still, dying is difficult, and their culture hadn’t adequately prepared them for the experience. However, once you’re dead you may be likely to recognize the experience is familiar, that you’ve died before, and you may feel as if you can handle it.
Both my recent hosts have some awareness of this, particularly the man I died with in orbit. The partner is less familiar with dying, it’s harder for him, and it’s still hard on all of us. Death can be very painful and traumatizing.
The worst part is being torn away from family, friends, everyone you have loved. But, we’re here as witnesses, and we dutifully watch.
The camo is torn away and we see a squad of men surrounding our position which is in a small hollow atop a tall dune of sand in the desert. We hear orders being given to look for booby traps. Our gear is rigged, but of course we can’t tell their squad leader what to look for or how to disarm it because we’re dead.
We want to help.
It’s funny, they’ve just murdered us, but we want to help them.
As we watch, we see the left hand of the body I most recently died in begin to move. It slowly reaches toward the carbine lying in the sand to its left.
Some of the enemy soldiers see the hand moving, and one of them begins to lift his rifle to shoot. He is stopped by a man to his left who raises his right arm and lowers it gently but firmly down on top of the rifle his friend is trying to raise.
Everyone present has begun to realize they are here to witness something.
We watch as the hand of the corpse continues to move. It grasps the carbine and draws it close to its body. The carbine seems to melt and flow, and it transforms into a short length of garden hose, perhaps 2 meters long, or a little shorter.
The back end of the hose trails on the ground and appears ragged or frayed or insubstantial, the forward end with the nozzle flows with a tiny trickle of water as the corpse brings the hose to its mouth to drink.
As the corpse drinks from the hose, the dead body fully animates, slowly sits up, and then stands.
No one speaks.
As the undead corpse rises it begins to glow with a beautiful light. A halo appears around its head. The face transforms.
To each of us this Man looks somewhat different but we all know this Man. His picture has graced millions of homes, chapels and churches. His statue has been carved or cast or modeled in clay or stone or wood or plaster countless times across the centuries since He last rose from the dead. It is the Christ aspect of God returned to the world in its hour of doom.
He walks out of the observation post that was dug into a hilltop and His garden hose flows strongly, spraying the earth before Him as He goes.
Where the water touches the dust and sand and earth, the land springs forth with teeming life. Flowers and bushes and trees and insects and birds emerge from His watering shower of life. This life spreads outward a short distance to either side of the path He walks upon, creating a verdant stripe of life in the arid desert roughly seven meters wide.
We follow Him.
He walks unerringly toward the nearest village. It is a long walk but we scarcely notice the distance or the time. We are untiring. We know without uncertainty that time with this Man is Eternal, and we are all rejuvenated in His presence.
As we walk into the village people run out to meet us. Fear and wonder transform their faces but everyone quickly recognizes the One who walks among us and they join His entourage.
We know that the world is about to begin over again, even as it is ending itself in a nuclear holocaust as our frenzied allies retaliate and eager opportunists seize the moment to destroy their ancient enemies in a final cataclysmic spasm of our race’s insanity.
Note:
This experience goes on from here. The experience began in a dream, except the dream went on for 5 days after I awakened. It haunted me day a night, I did not sleep more than a total of3 or 4 hours in those five days. I began the experience as a ‘walk-in’ hosted by two men from the future. (If you are unfamiliar with the concept of ‘walk-ins’ try reading one of the Seth books by Jane Roberts.)
It’s difficult to tell everything about this experience in the first person. There is a great deal of background history experienced that provides an important context to the events described above; this history is part of the cultural background and experiences of the men I joined and died with then, it is a profound history that still waits for us in our future.
Here I narrate the story from the future perspective:
The world has been dying for years now. Ten or twelve years ago (2064-2066) the world population peaked at nearly 10 billion people, 400 million in the USA. Then the population everywhere began declining, and it has declined more swiftly with every passing year.
We brought this doom upon ourselves. We had known about the roots of this doom for more than eighty years. There was a delicate balance in the exchange of carbon gases between our atmosphere and oceans called the Atmospheric-Oceanic Carbon Cycle.
This cycle is a semi-organic process involving an initial chemical absorption of carbon gas from the atmosphere by cold salty ocean water. Warmer ocean water released some carbon back into the atmosphere, but there had always been a net carbon uptake by the oceans that helped to reduce the over-all levels of carbon we dumped into our atmosphere daily by burning wood, garbage, dung and fossil fuels.
The net uptake of carbon was helped along by tiny ocean creatures called plankton. The plankton absorbed carbon from the water. As plankton die some carbon is released back into the ocean, which might later be released back to the atmosphere by warmer tropical waters, but a significant amount of carbon absorbed by plankton moved up the food chain. As carbon moved up the food chain some carbon would eventually settle on the sea-floors in the form of bones to become fossil remains.
There were two critical factors in the Atmospheric-Oceanic Carbon Cycle that always produced a net uptake of carbon from our atmosphere that helped to balance the additional burden we placed on our atmosphere by burning carbon fuels. One critical factor was the chemical saturation point, and the other was a biological saturation point.
The chemical saturation point defined the point in the temperature scale where ocean water becomes too burdened with carbon to continue to carry it, and some carbon must be released back into the atmosphere.
The biological saturation point defined the carbon carrying capacity of the oceans (a carbon sink) in terms of the uptake of carbon through the food chain. The oceans could only sustain a finite number of plankton and other creatures in the food chain, and when these organisms had absorbed as much carbon as they possibly could the biological carbon sink reached its saturation point; instead of a producing a net uptake in carbon, the carbon uptake driven by the biological carbon sink leveled off.
Because ocean water temperatures were slowly rising, the chemical saturation point was moving steadily away from a net uptake condition, and the overall ability of the oceans to scrub excess carbon from our atmosphere was also approaching a point where it would level off. When the biological carbon sink became saturated the chemical carbon sink became saturated too, and the oceans capacity to absorb carbon leveled off.
In a very brief time our atmosphere began to turn lethal because the carbon gases our power production industries were pouring into the atmosphere by the tons each day had nowhere to go because the oceans could no longer absorb our excess carbon gasses.
This was disaster was made in part because developing nations had been busily increasing the carbon load on the atmosphere.
In the late 1980’s 90% of the Earth’s human population consumed only 10% of their total global energy production. The wealthiest 10% of the world’s population was busily consuming 90% of all the energy produced. Everyone everywhere wanted the ‘good life’, so the rest of the world scurried to catch up to the wealthy energy consumers.
Energy production nearly quadrupled over the past 80 years, and most of that increase was fueled by coal or oil. There were severe natural limits to producing energy by alternative means such as hydro-electric, tidal, geo-thermal, wind or solar generation that meant these alternative energy production systems could not meet the growing demands for more energy from a hungry global community.
Too late, we finally began to deploy solar power satellites, but this would only mean that the energy rich would now become the energy secure.
There still wasn’t enough energy to go around, although, had we been able to start the power satellite production much sooner (we had had all the requisite technology for a century, since the 1970’s) we might have been able to bring down energy costs and increase production to meet the challenge of an equitable global distribution of safe reliable energy.
Anyway, we didn’t start earlier enough or commit enough resources, so when our oceans finally failed we had doomed ourselves. Nearly overnight in geological terms our atmosphere became too lethal to sustain us; we all began to die.
To counter the threat of extinction from pollution nations everywhere were investing all their wealth in arcologies (self-contained, self-supporting city-states). The arcologies were successful for the most part but the social engineering required to adjust populations to their new circumstances was beyond us.
The arcologies became semi-feudal states with a military dictator or some other sort of small despotic ruling class.
All the arcologies became fiercely militant to defend themselves. There simply wasn’t room for everyone within them. Americans were among the first to migrate to arcologies, but everywhere across the world people were literally dying to get into them.
In America we were able to migrate nearly 300 million people to arcologies, another 100 million died of lung diseases, although a significant portion of those 100 million deaths were actually ‘friendly fire’. People trying to storm over-loaded arcologies for shelter were being killed every day.
Eventually the American population stabilized with 300 million survivors, most of these lived in the arcologies.
Elsewhere in the world arcologies sustained much smaller percentages of their parent countries’ total populations, and arcologies unable to defend themselves adequately were dying under the pressure from too many people forcing themselves in.
The arcologies developed feudal cultures because the land around them must still be farmed and hoarded for natural resources. Arcologies competed for resources and required strong militaries to defend their agricultural, mineral and industrial resources as well as their shelters.
An arcology was typically a series of rings of shelters and industries beginning with several large central domes for the ruling elite and their servants, bureaucrats and guards.
These were surrounded by a ring of light industries, military shelters and defenses, which, in turn, were surrounded by a heavy industrial ring. The industrial rings were surrounded by rings of workers’ residential shelters and still more defenses. These were all surrounded by rings of shelters for farmers, livestock and miners, with farms and mines surrounding the final perimeter.
The social structure was simplistic, if you didn’t do what you were told you died, because you couldn’t produce your own air, food and shelter, and any of these could be withheld from you for any reason. Life was that cheap.
Many of America’s enemies resented that America was going to survive while they would die as the rest of the world collapsed under the burden of too many people with too few resources.
With too few resources to maintain strong armies to keep out the choking hordes of people seeking shelter in their arcologies, most of those who might have survived in other nations died as the teeming hordes that had no shelter overwhelmed the few arcologies their nations were able to build.
Missile technology had gotten so cheap that America’s enemies were finally able to afford massive missile farms. They feared America’s SDI (Space Defense Initiative, aka ‘Star Wars’) systems would make us invulnerable and plotted to assail us while the opportunity remained. They infiltrated our orbital defenses and opened a launch window.
So America died.
In less than 90 seconds nearly 300 million Americans were swept away.
America’s retaliation was weak but brutal. Enough of our missiles were launched in counter-attack to kill many of our enemies. Our allies also died at the hands of our enemies, and they launched their own counter-strikes as well.
Altogether nearly a billion people died that day and the global population fell to just above 5 billion.
Another 4.5 Billion or so would die as the momentum of events continued to sweep them away over the next few years.
Nearly 4 billion had already died in the 10 years prior to this cataclysm from lung disease, cancers and civil disorders.
<hmm… looks like I was interrupted here by channeling something I had been channeling before I began the piece above… As I read through the following part I see it’s relevance, but I note that some of my own voice sometimes comes to the fore in the channeled text and is evident by a slightly altered context… >
~ Way back in the year none….
~ When you belonged to Know One… < from Ian Anderson, Jethro Tull>
I believe the subject of this conversation was Malice.
We got to this question because you asked why I don’t believe in evil, and my response was that I didn’t think I could believe in evil, but that I could believe in Malice.
Q: Why isn’t Malice evil?
The answer may seem too simple. The Universe is good. At least, as far as I can tell, the universe is entirely good, and it only appears evil in some parts because of our point of view.
Yes, I believe in Angels, and that opens the door for belief in Devils too, but Angels and Devils appear to be the same thing to me. And they are unquestionably good.
I know it says something in the Bible about ‘fallen Angels’, but I don’t believe we have the history of that quite right. It is not possible for anything to exist outside of a state of Grace. For you to say that anything could be outside of a state of Grace would be blasphemy. Which is ok. I just think it takes a little better understanding of what is going on, that our judgements about good and evil tend to be prejudiced and uninformed.
We’re going back to the subject of Malice and why malice can exist but not be evil.
Malice is a form of pleasure and joy. True, the person on the receiving end often appears very hurt and unhappy, but the person dishing it out is enjoying themselves, or, at least, they may often think so at the time, and that is what matters here.
I’ve mentioned before that the Universe is an artifact, a sentient, quantum/nanonic intelligent artifact.
I may not have stressed the point that it is also compassionate, but it is, very compassionate. It is a loving, compassionate, sentient, intelligent, quantum/nanonic artifact. I really want to make that point. It is an artifact and an interface. It is designed to give everyone what they want. That’s pretty simple. And very good.
If you were all that, a quantum/nanonic intelligent sentient compassionate loving artifact that had to give everyone whatever they wanted, you might feel you were in a lot of stress. After all, not everyone wants the same things, right?
Q: Yeah, that could be stressful.
Well the Universe is stressed out. But that’s part of how it works, stress is an inherent part of its nature and function, and stress helps cause everything that exists to exist in the first place.
The Universe has to deliver a hell of a lot of stuff to people. But people aren’t so good at knowing what to ask for or how to ask for it. That sort of causes some problems.
But problems aren’t really bad. They are just things that need more time, more work. Eventually it all gets sorted out ok.
Yeah, eventually can take a long time, and sure, some people get hurt along the way. But how badly they are hurt is all relative. If you saw it all you would say, “Oh wow! Ok, that’s cool.”
“Oh wow!” is sort of how everything began in the first place.
You can say, “Oh well, 911, thousands of people died and their families are mourning, what’s the point of that?”
I guess the point of that would be “Happy Birthday” or something for Osama Bin Laden.
He got what he asked for. Pretty cool huh? At least for him and his pals anyway.
Ok, not so cool for us, and many of us are hurt or angry about it. But that’s ok. Really. You don’t have to get mad at me if I say so, and you don’t have to believe me either, but getting mad and not believing isn’t helping you to understand the point I’m trying to make. It’s ok if you get mad or obstinate, that’s what you want, it doesn’t bother me too much if you feel hurt and confused by this, but it does bother me, which is why we’re having this little talk in the first place.
You may not believe you wanted to have this conversation, but you actually must want to, because it’s happening.
The bottom line is everyone gets what they want. But you need to learn how to ask for it. That’s an important point.
Now Osama Bin Laden, he’s this big spiritual leader. You bet he knows how to get what he wants.
But, of course, no one can ever get everything they want all in one time and place. That sometimes appears to be a problem, because some people think they aren’t getting anything they want, and others are thinking well I got some things ok but not this or that and I really, really wanted that!
If you got really good at asking for what you wanted you’d get a lot more of it, maybe even all of it, if you knew what to ask for and how to ask for it.
Osama Bin Laden isn’t getting everything he wants; he’s getting his *ss kicked. But maybe, just maybe, that’s actually a part of what he wants. Deep down inside him he probably has to know what he wanted wasn’t really such a good thing.
I’m not conceding it was a bad or evil thing, just saying it was not such a good thing.
Bottom line is, somehow, some way, it must have been a good thing, in spite of what you, me, or anyone else might think, only because it really happened, and the Universe is inherently good. God is good. So good, that no bad thing can ever actually happen.
So if it looks like a bad thing to you or me, or someone over there, well then maybe we just aren’t seeing things very clearly.
You wanna get your *ss kicked?
Seriously, your *ss is going to get kicked. And hard. It’s just a matter of time, and not too much time either.
If your *ss could be saved by something like 911, might it be worth it to you?
Well, 911 might have been a sort of wake-up call. The universe is saying “Hey people! There’s something really wrong here and you have to wake up and get working on it and do something about it!”
The Universe is trying to send us a message. The point is, Are we getting it?
I don’t think so, and that part really worries me.
All this talk about justice for 911, I haven’t heard anyone say, “What did we do to deserve this?” and really mean it in the sense that some collective sin of our people was so bad that we actually deserved 911.
But that’s the message here. Getting angry and feeling outraged isn’t helping anything at all here because as long as you’re getting off on your anger and outrage you’re not tuning in to what’s wrong, and what we need to do about it.
Really.
And I don’t mean go kick Osama’s *ss.
We the people of the United States of America are actively participating in doing something so wrong that we really did deserve to be hurt the way we were.
Really.
No, I’m a patriot. I’m standing up here and saying we have a responsibility here, let’s face up to it and meet the challenge.
I’m not being a traitor to our country when I point out a fault and say let’s fix it. Let’s become better than we were. Let’s get this right, and instead of you asking me, “Well if we’re so bad we deserved 911, then why don’t you tell me just why we’re so bad?”, you should ask that question of yourself, and then start answering it, honestly.
Honestly. If you don’t know by now what it is you and I and everyone in this nation is collectively doing that is so all-fired bad we deserved 911, then I might be wasting my time here.
If you think we didn’t deserve 911 then you’re saying, “Hey God! You made a Big Mistake here!”
What do you think God’s gonna do, play take-back? He’ll say, “Oh I’m sorry son, you’re right, I’ll just put back those towers and all those lives, because I really shouldn’t have done that.”
And in a sense, that’s exactly what He’s gonna do. Already done it in fact.
Ok, you’re standing there looking at these monumental ruins and none of those dead people are going to walk through your door tomorrow and you’re saying, “Oh yeah? You’re full of sh*t!”
But you aren’t seeing the Big Picture. You must think there’s only one Universe or something. Or maybe you don’t believe in the word infinite; as in: God is infinite.
But that’s how it is, and in many other Universes that incident never happened at all, and those dead people are going on with their lives like normal. Except of course that some other colossal tragedy occurred in their Universe, because we still needed a wake-up call; it’s just that some other thousands of people got killed by Osama in some other event in the Universe where those particular 911 people are still alive.
So those people aren’t really dead. They may be dead in this Universe, but this Universe was only part of a small infinite subset of Universes in which those people lived, and in many other Universes they are still going on with their lives, because that’s fair. They didn’t specifically deserve to die for our collective sins as a nation, but someone had to be sacrificed to get our attention.
The point now is what are we going to do about it?
Because we do have to do something; and quickly.
This is really, really urgent. No fooling around now; we’re all going to die; and soon.
No fooling.
Ok, maybe it doesn’t seem so likely that we’re all going to die soon, so maybe I better explain that. Although, I still haven’t gotten to explain about Malice or why it isn’t evil.
Soon is roughly 74 years away, and counting down very quickly now.
The point where it will be too late to do anything about it is more like 15 years away; or thereabout somewhere. The Universe is a little fuzzy, if we make a tiny effort we might push the go/no-go for the end of the world back a year or two. But it will still be too late at that point if we don’t start doing things right today.
If we make a fair effort we might only be pushing the end of the world back a decade or two or maybe half a century. We’ve done that before. Ask me about 1965 sometime.
We need to make a total effort, and quickly, or we won’t be having any great grandchildren, or great-great grandchildren or whatever depending on your generation and how fast your family breeds.
Yeah, lots of people have talked about the end of the world, and it never happened, so why should anyone believe me now?
Well they shouldn’t, at least not simply because I say so.
But instead of arguing and debating every point with our heads up our collective *sses, we should take a real hard look at the state of the world today and where it is heading.
You probably are sick of hearing about Greenhouse and pollution and all that, but it’s a very serious issue. Deadly serious as it happens. The part you probably haven’t heard about yet is called the Atmospheric-Oceanic Carbon Cycle. Ok, maybe 2% of everyone does actually know something about what I just said.
That’s the Atmospheric-Oceanic Carbon Cycle. It’s what keeps our air breathable.
The oceans absorb excess carbon in the atmosphere. How much is excess? Depends on how healthy your lungs are, but too much carbon and you’re dead.
Poof!
Today we’re handling a tolerable amount of carbon in most parts of the world, but if you’ve ever been to Mexico City you’ve seen a place where many people are seriously ill from excess carbon.
That carbon comes from burning fuels like wood, dung, coal and oil. So far, the planet is doing a tolerable job of cleaning up the mess for us.
But take a close look at what is going on.
Roughly 10% of the world’s population is consuming nearly 90% of all the energy produced. Yeah, it’s hard to believe, but that’s how it is. We’re sitting in the lap of luxury here, enjoying our wealth, while 90% of the world can’t find enough fuel to keep the lights on at night. If they have lights, that is.
What can we do about it? I don’t want to hear, “That’s not our problem, or that’s not my problem, I didn’t take anything from them, I didn’t make them poor, sick, hungry, or whatever…”, because it really is our problem, collectively, all together, it is our problem.
Because, whether we’re willing to do anything about it or not, those people are doing everything they can do about it, and they are doing it as quickly as they can.
They want the ‘good life’ too.
So they’re cutting down their forests for more agricultural land, or burning them really, because wood is cheaper than labor and burning is faster than cutting.
So they’re burning down their forests and raising more food. They’ll still go hungry, because most of that food is for cash crops to feed us. They want our money badly enough to starve their children for it.
That money is going to line some people’s pockets, sure, but most of it will go into infra-structure to help their nations develop a stronger economy so they can all enjoy more consumer products like us.
Of course, all that industry takes energy, and consumer products aren’t much fun without batteries or wall sockets to plug them into, so one of the key parts of the infra-structure they’re starving their kids to build is power plants.
Oh yeah. Good all combustion-driven turbine electric power plants. Can’t have the ‘good life’ without those. And boy, are they busy building. And they deserve it. They deserve it all, every bit as much as we do.
Yeah, their children are starving so they can do this great thing, but that’s not our fault, is it? We only buy their produce and meat and consumer goods dirt cheap so they can earn the money to invest in their infrastructures. It’s not our fault that’s what they choose to do with their forests or food or money.
But it is.
We are their shining example of all they could possibly want, and they’re coming for it like gangbusters, following our example every bloody step of the way.
Ok, but what did we do wrong?
Nothing really. Initially, we’ve just been doing our very best to make all our dreams come true. Perfectly normal, perfectly natural, no one expects anything less.
And we can’t really be blamed for lacking the foresight to see the consequences of our actions, at least not immediately, at first, but we’re getting a little old for that now, a little wiser, and our pigeons are coming home to roost, so to speak.
Today we do have the opportunity to see where all of our wonderful life-style is heading.
It’s heading for disaster.
Still not your fault you say?
Ok, but if it’s not your fault, whose fault is it, and who is going to step up to the plate and take credit?
Someone once remarked that success has many fathers but defeat is an orphan.
But if someone doesn’t take responsibility for this baby now we are all gonna die!
And I do sincerely mean that, most sincerely sir.
There is no one individual to take the burden of this disaster off our shoulders. We have to work together collectively to do that.
What can we do?
Unfortunately some people came up with the answer to this problem as early as 1939 or so. Remember Hitler, Lebensraum? “Living-room” they wanted. Remove the majority of inferior people and there will be enough for the rest of us superior, deserving people.
I don’t like that answer, and I sure hope you don’t either, but there are those among our masters ready to bite that bullet. They think along the lines of, “Yes, this disaster is really coming, but if we can just stop those other nations from developing so quickly, at least we can put it off a few generations.” Or, “Better yet, if we can just get rid of those other nations we won’t have to die at all.”
Because some people have no faith (or too much faith) in human nature, depending on how you look at us, they figure we can’t do this right, so we better do it wrong or not at all. And the debate goes on (and on) in circles (of powerful people).
Well, there are plenty of future histories where those options are explored, but those are poor choices, and we can do better than that.
We can.
“But what’s the harm?” You say, “in allowing all those nations to develop? Coal is cheap, it’s not like they can’t afford to produce all the energy they want.”
And you’d be right, they can afford to continue to build and to burn more and more fuel for energy, and they certainly have every right to do so, even if, collectively it will seal our doom once and for all.
And it will seal our doom, already has, up the line in 2076 we’re all dying. It’s just a matter of how fast and who first, but we’re dying.
It all goes back to that thing-y, the Atmospheric-Oceanic Carbon Cycle.
Carbon from the atmosphere is absorbed in colder ocean waters, so even though we’re polluting the hell out of our air, the planet’s able to scrub it clean for us. But, there’s an upper threshold beyond which the scrubbers cannot meet the load of dirty air we’re making. And, while the scrubbers don’t completely break down, for all intents and purposes they cease to work, because the burden of carbon we’re putting in the air is too far in excess of what the oceans can pull out.
Remember, right now it’s 10% of the people with 90% of the energy. We’re not going to give up 90% of our energy so everyone else can have an equal share, and who’d be happy with a 10% share anyway? So those folks have got to make more energy. They just have to. And who’s to say when enough is too much? Doubling energy production means everyone still only gets a 20% share. Are you willing to give up 80%? Quadrupling energy production means that you’d get a 40% share, but I don’t think you’re going to want give up 60% of your energy to be fair. How about 50%, no?
Ok, but it’s a pretty sure thing that we are already very close to the threshold where the oceans can no longer scrub our air effectively, and just doubling our energy production is going to kill us all. We’ll be there in 15 years or so. Double the energy, double the pollution.
Oh sorry, yes I’ve heard about solar and geo-thermal and wind turbines and hydro-electric and wave and tidal generation, but did you know that those technologies face so many inherent limits that at best they would only ever provide about a 30% share of our current energy production?
That’s not enough to give everyone what he or she wants, is it? So we’re going to be in a fine pickle in less than twenty years as we pass the point where our oceans can no longer maintain our air quality safely.
At that point we have few options. Wild life will mostly die, at least on land, although some will surely adapt. They’ll have the opportunity and time to make that adaptation too, because most of us humans will be dead, and that will solve their problem for them (and us).
One option is to build arcologies, self-sustaining enclosed cities that manufacture everything we need, including breathable air.
No, sorry, there won’t be enough room in the arcologies for everyone.
So who is going to die first, and how many? And how many will survive?
Well I’d rather not go there at all. We still have enough time to prevent that future history, but only barely just.
Another option is to escape into space. Yeah, far fewer people could survive that way, but if you’re going to be living in totally self-enclosed cities anyway, space is the place to do it, which brings us to our best option.
To prevent this whole mess in the first place by going to space for energy.
We have had all the requisite technology to build orbital solar power satellites for years now, and the technology is just getting better and cheaper every year.
It won’t be cheap to get started on solar power satellite solutions, but what’s cheap when the lives of our entire race and most of the species of land animals is at stake anyway?
And yes, there are dangers and pollution associated with this solution too, but they are affordable dangers and acceptable risks. And they absolutely will save our collective *sses from the hell of a future we face if we don’t get started right away.
You want to live, right, and your children? Do you want them to live? And their children, and theirs? Then get busy now.
We absolutely cannot begin a solar power satellite solution without global peace. You have to make a commitment toward global peace and make sure everyone you know will make a similar commitment.
Solar power satellites are some of the most destructive potential weapons we will ever build. A single terrorist able to control one could kill millions, entire cities full of people.
You don’t think any of our enemies would be interested in allowing us to build such weapons, do you? Of course not, so can they stop us? Possibly they can, even probably.
We need an international treaty that supports industrial development of space for power production to enable us to begin.
That’s first and foremost, step one.
We need to align the capital investment required to get started, while we’re working on a Global Power Satellite Treaty.
We’re talking energy here; there are billions of dollars at stake.
You don’t think the folks holding the reigns of our energy production are going to allow such massive competition do you? Of course not, and as long as they can continue earning money the good old fashioned easy way by burning our future, why should they waste their fortunes on space?
Where will they find a return on their investment?
In order to make this work it may be necessary to give the power away for free. It would certainly have to be marketed at a rate so much cheaper than coal and oil that everyone on the planet will want space energy first and foremost.
Doesn’t sound like any money to be made there, especially since the power industry capitalists would be undercutting their own businesses.
So you can bet the people who really matter in a project like this, who could easily get it done, if they wanted to, aren’t going to want to.
We have to make them want to, somehow. Or we’re all dead.
That’s step two.
Or maybe it’s the other way around. Who cares? The thing is these are the two critical points on which the future of our race and many species on our planet hinges.
The political will for peace.
The economic will for prosperity. (Not profits.)
We have about 15 years to get started. If we are ready then, we may survive.
If not, sayonara.
Oh, and the currently inevitable destruction of our race isn’t an evil thing, even if someone somewhere gets tired of it all and pushes The Button to get it over with faster. It’s just the natural consequences of our natural behavior, so let’s change our nature; now.
— CURRENT STATE = REQUEST PENDING —
— SAVE —
~ You didn’t stand a chance son.
Back to the subject of Malice.
I mentioned before that I thought Malice was not evil, and it may be a difficult point to make clear.
Malice is a form of pleasure, perverse, possibly, but still pleasure. It is an undeniable fact that some people appear to enjoy hurting others. And they may put time and effort into planning how they will do so. They expect a reward for that time and effort, and unfortunately from their partner’s point of view they often get what they ask for and their partner is hurt or even killed.
You may wonder why I would call the ‘victim’ a ‘partner’; I say they are a partner because they take a part in the act.
We may think they don’t want any part of it, or that they are innocent, but that may not be the case. Who knows what their karma is or why they might need to be hurt?
It may only be the case that they love their partner who hurts them and to love them seems to require them to accept this painful role. They may have other reasons that may appear valid or logical to them. It doesn’t really matter; it takes 2 or more partners for malice, unless we are talking about malice acted out against oneself.
But malice, whether against oneself or others is sought for pleasure. It may be a perverse form of pleasure but that is what it is all about. It may often include themes such as ‘vengeance’ or ‘justice’, but those aren’t really relevant; they just provide a context or justification. People who enjoy malicious behavior don’t really need any reason or justification to do it, but we are always obsessed with explaining our behavior, so, if asked, they will often reply something like, “Well they deserved it!”
Which isn’t necessarily true, but it certainly helps keep things rolling smoothly to have some excuse handy. And, often, the other party in the matter will even agree that they deserved it. Their belief that they deserved it still isn’t necessarily true, but it helps to have reasons to explain our actions. We like to feel tidy that way.
It may seem hard to believe, but malice has its origins in loving God.
When I sang, “Way back in the year none…” I was twisting the words a little, because we are talking not about the year one, which is how the song really goes, but the year none, before time existed. “When you belonged to Know One…” is exactly true. In the year none we all belong to the only One we could Know, God.
And then time began to roll forward. We all diverged from God. It was fun, exciting, we all said something like “Oh wow!”, and then we promptly returned to God because we didn’t know what else to do. So we wound up back with God, and that was ok, but more was required of us than simply saying “Oh wow!” and then heading home.
We got to do this “Oh wow!” thing for a long time. We’d split away from God, do our “Oh Wow!” and head home, because that was cool and comfortable and we had no idea we could do anything else.
But eventually we discovered something new. We discovered ourselves. Yeah, we were pretty wimpy in those days just a bit of cosmic consciousness with no sense of identity. Very basic stuff really. We were the fundamental building blocks of creation back then, all ‘bricks in the wall’ if you will. That was who we were then and all we knew how to do back then was say “Oh wow!” and head for home.
But we began to be aware that we were having this experience. And to be aware of experiencing put us in a whole new ball game. We could groove on the “Oh wow!” and recognize “Hey didn’t I just do that a moment ago?”. “Yeah, right! I said “Oh wow!” a moment ago, and here I am doing it again!”. “And what’s this ‘I’ thing doing this ‘Oh wow!’ thing anyway?”.
And then we’d disappear back into God and do it again. We were souls. We had a state of existence, separate from God, and a state where we didn’t exist at all but were One with God. You know God, the Big Dude.
So we got in this groove where we did our little number and went back to God, and we got a little introspective about it and started polishing up our act.
We learned to bop. We’d sequence our Oh-wows in rhythms and make them into existential poems along the lines of: “Here I am!” “Not” (really not) “Here I am!” (Not) “Just kidding” (not) “Here I am”. But as we were doing this embellished Oh-wow thing, just sort of grooving on the transition from existence to non-existence and back again, we began to build some history. We began to remember a bit of what we experienced when we didn’t exist, which was very groovy in its self since we were with God then.
And being with God was good. No doubt about it we dug it. Even though we didn’t exist, in a sense, while we were with God, we continued to exist, just on another level, as a collective entity, God.
But if being with God was somehow bigger than just being on our own, why was it bigger? What made it bigger? After awhile we realized we weren’t alone. When we were with God there were other beings there in the same state of being with God.
“Oh wow!”
And, as we continued to create a history of ourselves, learning to remember our existence from time to time, and to create a continuity of our own personal consciousness, we began to be consciously aware of others like ourselves. Others all doing their Oh-wows like us, and we discovered something truly miraculous, we could communicate with each other.
Of course we didn’t have any language or anything like that, but who really needed it when about all we had to say for ourselves were things like “Oh wow!”
But we dug saying that and we dug hearing others saying it too.
We dug it so much we started spending more and more time away from God.
“Oh wow!”
But we’d always get that yearning to go home, and we’d split the cosmic party from time-to-time for a little nap with the Big Dude because it refreshed us and made us feel good.
But we always returned to the party, we had to, other than God there was simply nowhere else to go.
The party got pretty complex, people were busy creating relationships. Their Oh-wows were becoming songs, and they were learning to sing together and dance together and were basically enjoy themselves and each other’s company and having a great time.
People wound up staying out pretty late. Maybe a little too late. Some folks were forgetting to drop by and visit with the Big Dude quite so often as they used to, and some folks hadn’t been to see him in what seemed like a really long time.
But it was cool, no one was actually lost or anything, at least, not yet.
But after awhile, some folks were so engrossed in having a good time that they forgot about going back to God, forgot about Him almost completely. And that wasn’t such a good thing. It wasn’t a bad thing, you know, like: “Oh boy! You’ve done it now! Are you ever gonna be in trouble when Dad catches you!”.
No one was going to be punished fer-chrisake, for like, forgetting God. It wasn’t his bag to hurt or punish anyone, never was.
Sure there’s those that says He’s vengeful and all that, but they just don’t know Him as well as they maybe should.
Forgetting God wasn’t a sin. Not really, it was not like you were hurting anyone, except maybe yourself. Returning to God was a good thing it made you feel fresh and alive and wonderful all over when you took off on your own again. Up to you entirely whether you want to do that or not, your choice.
But if ever there were going to be a sin that would have been it.
But, there was this one very groovy thing about the Big Dude, something a lot of people seem to have forgotten. No Rules Dude!
Free will was the big deal, and it still is.
Sure, since then, lots of people have come up with a whole lot of rules, but bottom-line? No Rules was the only Rule. Not even a Rule if you get my point, since a Rule stating “There are No Rules” is a paradox. But No Rules left a sort of Rule vacuum so everyone started making up their own rules.
So anyway, that’s pretty much what went on back there at the beginning of the Universe and everything.
Now a lot of people were still tripping back to God on a very regular basis, but many old souls were seeing the Big Dude not at all anymore. It may have been that they just got tired of all that Oh-wow sh*t or something.
Anyway, for whatever reason, many folks were staying away from God, grooving on their own things, not really too interested in God much anymore.
And that was ok. A lot of those folks were very cool and they were doing stuff with all the free time on their hands that some of the other folks were kind of falling behind on.
Now it was ok to spend some time with God, because, really, spending time with God was like free time or no time at all, because with God, there was no such thing as time. So you could zip off to be with God and come back in no time flat and not miss a thing.
But, something was going on in that timeless time you spent with God, and when you returned, it could take awhile to get back in the groove. Some people could make that adjustment lickety split but others took there own sweet time about it, and taking there time was sort of hurting them in a way because it was like they were falling behind in school or something.
Sure, they had It All when they were with the Big Dude, so it was like they weren’t REALLY missing anything, but they were getting a little feeble in the experience department, they were getting to be tard’s on the cosmic scene.
No biggy. After all, they had God.
But, those really experienced dudes on the scene? They were becoming wizards or something. They were learning to really fit things together. They could orchestrate some wickedly good scenes. They were having a blast! Folks admired and respected them because they were so wonderfully entertaining.
And that’s all it was really, some entertainment, one great big colorful show; with more and more unusual events.
Now with all this singing and dancing and harmonizing going on some people had discovered something they didn’t like. Disharmony, discord, and interference were some very bummer subjects for some folks.
Some people really dug their own thing. Sure they often liked what other people had going, but boy, if it clashed with their thing look out!
And the thing of it was, the more experienced you were the more meaningful it was when it was time to ‘look out!’ You could put some pretty heavy spins on other people’s trips. Totally flip ‘em out.
And of course plenty of folks took offense to that. The whole discord, disharmony, interference thing could really get out of hand sometimes. People felt hurt when their trips got cancelled or put on hold or weirded out so bad they didn’t know if they were coming or going.
At first people feeling hurt was unusual, but it was no big deal. A few minutes with the Big Dude and all your worries were set aside and you could get back to your own thing.
Usually
But here it was. Some people’s things were getting so damn powerful that people returning from God weren’t getting where they meant to go. No matter how hard they tried to find themselves back in their own thing, they were constantly being drawn off into someone else’s trip instead.
And these people missed their things. And they missed the feeling that all was well after spending some time with the Big Dude, because when they got back all was not well, at least not with them, not anymore.
Now to start off, no one was really trying to do anything to trap anyone or hurt them. But some people were just so deep into their groove and doing it so well that people were attracted to it in spite of them-selves and just kind of got drawn in. For a lot of folks that was ok cool because there really were some groovy things going down and everyone (mostly) was just having a ripping good time.
So when folks started getting bummed, a lot people didn’t understand what was wrong, or what they needed, or how to help them or anything, and it could really be a downer to get messed up with someone on a bummer. Those folks became citizens of a different class. People avoided them, and they avoided each other.
Now with folks avoiding them, some of them could sort of get back to their own groove, but it was never really the same. The moment for their grooves had sort of passed them by, and they were left feeling sort of short-changed.
Some of them were downright pissed, and boy was that a new flavor to go around. Anger? Where’d you get that? Is it any good? Do you like it? Can I try it? Eee-yuck! Why would anyone like that? You’re sick dude! You make me sick!
And before you knew it all kinds of social diseases were floating about, as people got caught up in other people’s bummers or strung-out on their own bummers so far they couldn’t get their sh*t together anymore.
Which was really all very sad. But not bad, because it wasn’t the result of anything evil or anything like that. It just was something that didn’t feel very good.
But there were definitely those that dug that sour cream and many of them wanted to go out and spoil everybody else’s milk, because they just dug it too much.
This is where malice was born. These folks used to love God, but now they felt He’d let them down somehow. They were miserable, because they were lost and couldn’t find themselves. And they were so sick with their own misery that they were making other people miserable too. And when they discovered they had this awesome f*cking power to make other people miserable too, well, some of them just really got off on that. They had a new groove going. It was sick. It was twisted. It was a bummer. But they made it their groove and they got off on it.
And God, being the good kind-hearted generous Dude He is, He couldn’t tell them no. He’d be breaking the only rule he ever never made if he did. But he could see to it that everyone got what they wanted, as long as everyone was willing to share.
So God got creation going under way in a way no one had ever seen it done before.
Up to now everyone had had their own groove, good or bad. God took all their grooves and chopped them all up into infinite pieces, and everyone got a part of everyone else’s groove. Now these were not tiny pieces, these were infinite-sized holographic pieces, each one was a whole complete groove just as good as the original.
And best of all, all these replicated grooves were linked back to their originals, so these grooves would always continue to grow, as long as people took care of them and nurtured them.
People could make all the changes they wanted in anyone else’s groove without ever damaging the original. So nothing could ever be really lost or stolen or hurt, because if you wanted that old master groove back in it’s original shape you just called it up and it was all together and perfect as new; it was all good.
And people got all their old grooves back, because God, being the kind of Dude he is, remembered every one of them, even if they’d forgotten or ruined them. People got back all the grooves they had lost or had altered beyond any hope of recognition. So if you were pining for some old thing you’d lost, why, pine no more, because it was yours again, exactly as you wanted it; it was all good.
And that’s what we have today. But we haven’t learned all it’s secrets yet, or how to get it to work precisely the way we want. That’ll take some (more) time.
And there are still people on bummers trying to pass off hummers to the unwary.
But if you go with flow, well then, you know…
It’s all Go(o)d!
But when it isn’t… well, I guess it depends on how you’re looking at things.
Remember that I’m seeing nearly a billion people die in less than a day in 2076. If you aren’t one of them, it’s an almost certain fact one of your kids or grandkids will be.
Only the dead will be excused from this event.
What will you do about that?
This is not Yet-Another-Paradox, This is just How-Things-Really-Are... 