B. U. G. S.

As I talked about before, the end of those SST flights at 2.2 times the speed of sound across the ocean marked the first time in aviation history that a faster mode of transportation was abandoned. For emergency communication, the SST is not necessary. We have speed of light communication.

Certainly computer speed will multiply thousands of times in this century. Already successful experiments in wiring computers directly into brains have succeeded on men and monkeys. In fact, there is no good reason why many paraplegics shouldn’t be walking with these direct connections now.

In a few decades, we will be able to transmit not only sound, but taste and feel, at light speed. We will be able to reproduce it. Taste and feel are a combination of a finite number of different sensations. In other words, about everything we LIKE can be reproduced and transmitted in cyberspace straight to our taste centers.

Taste and feeling are broken down into a finite number of parts, like pictures. We have nothing like the computer speed to transmit them now. But will we decide to fulfill our desires by living in space and doing large things, or by satisfying ourselves within the area of our brains?

Both methods would “save the environment” in a way no army of Kyoto-style bureaucrats could do by assigning allowed growth to each country and each industry.

The only real way to save the environment would be to leave it, either for outer space or for cyberspace or a combination. Now we come up against the REAL objectives of the group that yells environmentalism. The day the USSR collapsed, every socialist I knew suddenly became an environmentalist. Mommy Professor and all his kiddies dream of a world ruled by Mommy Professor.

They don’t care whether Mommy Professor rules as Commissar or a Kyoto-style bureaucrat, the idea is as natural as it is absurd. And Mommy Professor does not care a whit more for the deer than he did for the Welfare of the Proletariat. They dream of a world ruled by Marxist Intellectuals or bureaucratic tree-huggers as naturally as an industrialist naturally tends toward price-fixing.

It is just that nobody ever mentions that Mommy Professor, like any other occupation, has a natural bias.

One who balances outer space and cyberspace in real calculations of the future must CARE about the results. Mommy Professor has no interest in any of it. He is against all technology in a fundamental way. He does not want any technological solution to get in the way of a Moscow-based or Kyoto Treaty based dictation by Intellectuals who will provide quotas and philosophical discussions in place of bread and butter.

The one example we have is atomic power, but, like the SST, there will a lot more things happening in this mix. Industrialists always found something wrong with laws against price-fixing, and the Intellectuals will always find reasons why obvious technical solutions are dangerous or immoral.