Here is one of the final excerpts from "An Autistic Life - Visions of Past Lifetimes' Futures". I will be publishing it by this summer.
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Over 500 years ago, Leonardo Da Vinci woke up, all alone. He was not politically "woke", but he did physiologically wake up. He was an autistic sleepwalker who could clearly see the world in disarray around him.
He said in dismay, “I awoke only to find that the rest of the world was still asleep.”
Steve understood him quite well. She woke up from her sleepwalking early in the 21st century. Fortunately for Steve, she saw that many others are also now awakened. She did not feel as forlorn as Da Vinci must have felt. This is a physiological waking up, it has nothing to do with the politics of 'woke culture'. These are two different, and yet, possibly connected phenomena.
Bill & Melinda Gates, Barack Obama, Elon Musk, the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and other First Nations leaders, Leonardo DiCaprio, and many climate scientists have been sounding the alarm for decades now.
We have invested in the reality that high technology is a tool that can be used for great good. And those like Steve, seers of hidden things, can also see technology has the potential for dismal ruin. The computer chip can do more damage than the hydrogen bomb.
Previous generations had to deal with the horrors and potential total suicide of our species by Mutually Assured Destruction; the threat of nuclear weapons. Steve grew up in this MAD, MAD world and always objected to this hopeless insanity.
In order to seek a better world, like many people, Steve turned inward to virtual reality fantasies and escapes of the mind. In a time when we have a desperate need to turn all our attention to major challenges, instead we seek the escape of drugs, escaping into physical pleasure, and turning to the soft sad isolation of remote connectedness through our devices. We also have invested in the false hope of security that has resulted in the multiple, oppressive, regimented police-states growing in power all around us.
All these pursuits are vanity, full to the brim with futility. Avoidance of thinking about such serious problems promotes a useless, fatalistic, dystopian future. We must stop business as usual and work together to build solutions to the giant problems affecting everyone in the world. These problems actually threaten the continuance of our species.
We can choose to be infantile, xenophobic animals, fatalistic, unwilling to undertake anything difficult, and demand that the silly expectations we have been spoon-fed be made real. Or we can choose to become at least a little bit less about ourselves, less demanding of pleasure and excessive comfort, and more focused on finding real solutions for every citizen's benefit. We are all connected, so Steve found, which means when she helps another, it will at some time come around to be a benefit for her, although she may not immediately see the connections that lead back to her.
She could finally see one unifying solid truth. We cannot continue, anywhere on Mother Earth, consuming the resources of this little planet at the same rate we have been doing. We cannot, as a fragile species on a fragile planet, continue to generate all the many forms of poisonous pollution that our ancestors thought was innocuous. This is not debatable. It is a numerically computable reality, as real as 8 billion times the number of basic life-sustaining elements left to us.
If we continue to consume at our current rate — never mind the recent huge increase in consumption by the most-developed countries — the Earth will quickly become derelict, unable to continue sustaining human life. Steve would not debate this fact. It seemed obvious to the meanest intelligence.
The solution cannot be a fascist agenda to simply reduce the total population of the planet. All life is sacred. The solution must involve making a radical transition from over-consuming, unsustainable, separate, "US vs. THEM" societies, to one unified, deliberately, carefully managed, and a sustainable society. Part of this transformation must also involve a devotion of significant resources to off-world colonization. We must all embrace a complete shift to our core people groups, with infinite diversity. One planet after another, as we colonize the cosmos, will gain the benefits of our human diversity.
The solution will clearly not be a simple plan of Socialism vs. Capitalism, anarchy vs. theocratic rule, or any type of controlling totalitarianism. The only way to do this is when everyone rises together, and with an equal voice. The solution must start with the agreement of the many against the self-interests of the few. Steve believed at least the following elements must be present:
• All human life is valuable and must be preserved
• The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few
• No one person or group is allowed to gain power through the simple accumulation of tokens of wealth
• The only currency does not have to be a merit rating based on each person's service
• All citizens must receive enough clean water, food, and basic healthcare
• Education of every person must become a prime priority
• A united Earth composed of all agreeing governments, represented by every people group, must manage all the above — without an overbearing single central government. A United Nations that works better.
• All religions must be tolerated, and at the same time not allowed to impinge on the rights of anyone. Violence perpetrated against anyone, based upon religious belief must not be tolerated.
Technology can be used with integrity, and much human oversight, to implement all the above. This actual agreement between governments must be carefully managed by people of merit, who are selected by the vote of the majority of the population of Earth. Every person's vote must count and be counted without corruptible processes. Every people group must have representatives who represent their governments together.
The result of a united Earth is manyfold. All the tremendous resources devoted by each of the hundreds of individuated governments can be reduced to single units. For instance, instead of hundreds of militaries, hundreds of law-making bodies, hundreds of judiciaries, hundreds of infrastructure departments, and hundreds of separate, often opposing bureaucracies, we can have just one of each. This frees up many trillions of dollars’ worth of resources and streamlines the intelligent management of all the Earth's dwindling resources.
It is imperative that dissent be tolerated, so long as it never emerges as violent opposition to the majority. People must be allowed to 'opt out' of anything they cannot accept. We have the technology to accomplish this significant transformation to benefit all the peoples of Earth.
Do we have the will, agreeing together, to get into action to perform a transformation that will preserve our species? The answer to this question requires each of us to consider and choose for ourselves, first, and then to each get into action to make it happen. Steve preached the following unifying concepts:
• Life is sacred. And not just human life
• The old ways no longer work, if they ever did
• We cannot survive on Earth in the same over-consuming manner that we have been doing, increasingly, for hundreds of years.
• Racism, classism, and the whole chasm of "isms" that separate us is all based on hate, which comes from fear, which comes from simple animal xenophobia.
• None of us is more important than any other. Individually, and even as a species, we are completely expendable.
• Even as we are starting to detect signals from other forms of intelligent life in this sector of our galaxy, we are both surrounded and mingle with ETs. They are committed to helping us, so we can benefit from a vast interstellar union that regards Earth basically as a backwards, remote, insane asylum and prison planet
• The ET angels practice a firm policy of 'non-interference' even as they assist us in the major transition, we all face soon (when the Galactic Pulse arrives)
• Technology can become a trap as well as a helper.
• We are all connected, as is everything in the multi-verse
• Start to think of yourselves as colonizers, because the survival of our species requires a significant number of strong, flexible, overcoming people who can take on the challenge of living on other worlds in this galaxy.
• Our technology for mass destruction is only surpassed by our desire at times to use it against our fellow humans.
Chapter 15 — The Bottom Line
If we do not build 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 on a new planet. Of course, her intense memories of living on other planets in previous lifetimes were an even bigger help. Did she miss the occasional meal out of a garbage can back 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, probably 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 the 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, while homeless, 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. Even if it is functioning, it might not be parked on the ground. It will most likely be 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 way through outer space. While hopefully friendly, they may still be laughing at your freshman view behind their tentacles.
All this requires 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 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 prophecy, but also of discernment; enough to teach further generations of these days on the old Earth.
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