Here is another excerpt from my upcoming book: "An Autistic Life - Visions of Past Lifetimes' Futures". It is a sequel to my previous novel, "Old Zino".
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Chapter 14 — Too Little Time
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The Bottom Line Is This: if we are not building colonies on at least one planet outside the Solar system within a couple of decades, the human species is lost. Period.
The first colonists will feel homeless. That is a necessary reality of migrating away from our home planet. Steve's many years of experiencing homelessness prepared her for the normal and healthy feelings of homesickness in the first years of colonization of a new planet. Of course, her intense memories of living on other planets in previous lifetimes was an even bigger help. Did she miss the occasional meal out of a garbage can that she ate on Earth? Sadly, the answer was 'yes'.
First colonists will feel, at some level, that they have made a terrible choice in leaving the visceral familiarity of life on Earth. These are some of the same feelings Steve felt as a homeless person.
Our forefathers in the United States part of the Americas, moving west to build a new country, definitely felt quite homeless. Some gave up and returned to "civilization", broke and broken. The settlers who did not give up gained new freedoms, skills, and insights. Their descendants greatly benefited from their sacrifices made.
Steve was very clear on this point: colonists must not expect to ever return to Earth. Say goodbye and make no plans to ever see any place, person, or thing here... ever again. As for other people following you from Earth, do not expect anyone. There may never be a supply ship coming. You might well be completely on your own.
Wherever colonists end up, homesickness will have to take a back seat in priorities. We will be quite busy adapting to the new. We will all be adapting to a new environment. Do not expect 24 hour days, any moonlight, the same 1g gravity, or a prepared place to live. Adapting to new foods will be required. Oh, and that pesky human need for a surface dwelling? Be ready to adapt to new or at least limited building materials. We will be building everything from scratch. A nomadic life in traveling tents is probably the typical reality for first arrivals.
Hopefully, many of us will take the precious time and effort to explore, enough. We definitely need to search for any current or previous inhabitants, and any obvious artifacts of same. Finding such beings and relics may predicate continued existence on that new planet. As will the important process of discovering which plants there are safe and useful. We will need to explore as far and wide as possible, discovering any animals and whether they are safe to be around humans. Fur and hides from animals may provide the best available materials from which to make clothing. Many of Steve's clothes were found discarded on the ground and in garbage cans. We must use whatever we can find.
First colonists will all be sleeping on the ground, at some point, for at least some months after arrival. Do not assume there will still exist a functioning and livable starship, parked on the ground. For obvious reasons, there may not be. It is most likely left in orbit. Sleeping on sidewalks, in parks, on traffic medians, and in heavy undergrowth in the woods of suburbs, prepared Steve for this eventuality. As each year passes, on one planet — 7.3 Earth years in length, on another perhaps 92 Earth days in length — we must slowly let go of our former ways, means, and motivations. Developing a first settlement will entail all these areas and more. Pining for the fjords of Earth will be seen as normal sentimentality, but generally discouraged as not helpful.
And realize this truth. Everybody must become a farmer, maybe for several decades. There will be no "privilege" that excuses anyone from the fields, at least during harvest time in the start-up years. Do not be surprised if all the work is done completely by manual labor; your own. We must plan a future very different than at all possible on the Earth. We may be sometimes learning to live alongside of other intelligent species, alien to us. Do not expect automatic respect, just because you ventured a little ways through outer space. While hopefully friendly, they may still be laughing at your freshman view behind their tentacles.
All this forces the successful colonist to become completely open to new experiences. Do expect to become a new person, somebody you never planned or envisioned becoming, with a new outlook, new motivations, and an entirely new way of life. Steve first embraced homelessness without any of this in her mind. Her only motivation was to turn her back on the materialist she had become. The unexpected silver lining was learning to live with next to nothing and learning to make her peace with having just enough to survive. For our species to survive, many people will be embracing a lot of nothing, except for raw perseverance, on far-flung alien planets. Steve could not wait to do it all again.
Steve often became a sort of historian, whenever she lived a particularly long life. Our descendants on other planets will have very little knowledge of old Earth history. There will not be much interest in it, and almost no one to explain it to them — and why to study it. Which is to work on not repeating major mistakes. Part of that work is a an understanding of what truly has come before. Steve could not grok it any more than most humans on Earth now understand, that the great science fiction and some fantasy stories, are actually retellings of very ancient historical truth in this universe. Therefore, Steve felt honored to not only have the actual gift of prophesy, but also of discernment; enough to teach further generations of these days on the old Earth.
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One of the analogies Steve received from God, to explain the way all beings exisit in our shared matrix simulation, was a favorite in her teachings on the New Earth. At it's core it is the following:
Our body's are composed of cells that exist to serve us, not themselves. The cells in our body operate independently within themselves, and interdependently with all adjoining cells. All these cells, in aggregate, form our bodies. The purpose of each cell is to maintain itself and at times replicate, in service to the whole body. Whenever cells operate outside their normal parameters, they replicate in a chaotic way, becoming randomly growing tissue. We call this cancer. If the cancer is not cured or removed, our whole body metastasizes the biological anarchy and we eventually die.
In the same way, we exist to serve God. If we do our own thing, erroneously, and in opposition to God's plans for us, we have become a cancer that must be cured. If we as a cancer cannot be cured, we are cut out, removed from God's realm, and burned as dead wood.