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PAOLO SOLERI: WHAT IF?, COLLECTED WRITINGS 1986-2000

PART 2: The Lean Hypothesis and the Lean Alternative

DECEMBER 1999

Agenda One: The Lean Hypothesis

The leanness of the hypothesis is a case limit. The presence is space, and the presence is simply one of the two possibilities: presence or nonpresence. I choose to call the presence "space" because in our interpretational languages we seem to encounter "space" not by accident but by necessity. A necessity that cannot tolerate forgetfulness. Space is the unforgettable. Space is the real, not a frozen bullion, but a self-creating singularity. Space is presence. Nonpresence is unspeakable. To speak of it would contradict the "nature" of nonpresence, the "alternative" to presence. There is something or there is nothing.

Idle to conjecture a creator of the presence and of its "laws." Where would the creator come from? A causa prima in search of a causa ante prima. The tedium of the infinite retrogression, a pile-up of causes, the notorious turtles all the way up and turtles all the way down. We, progeny of the "presence," cannot define it; it would be an autodefinition. A definition of the whole by a fragment of it because the presence is Becoming. It is the Becoming, the Mistero Tremendo.

Why it might be important to adopt the lean hypothesis (do more with less):

1. To put to rest the guilt-ridden "return to the Father" notion that even "legitimate" scientists seem to cultivate in the recesses of their brains -- the Becoming as consequence of a rupture in the serenity of naught and our guilt in being part of such cosmic sabotage. A nonlean delusion if ever there was one.

The universal guilt that theologies afflict Homo sapiens with finds little redemption in the breaking effect it might have on the excesses of opportunism. At last, fraudulence cannot be the foundation for lean creational genesis.

2. To adopt the thesis that the truly wondrous and profoundly "just" nature of reality is to begin with a minimalist base and partake in creating upon it a self-acknowledging, fully self-affirming end; to do the most with the least.

3. To perceive the Becoming as "simple," space transforming, and ultimately transfiguring itself into grace. An escalation from the meaningless into the meaningful, if a self-revelatory stage is ever reached at the conclusion of space's genesis. A lean, sophisticated evolution.

4. To reject the notion that there is a fundamental benevolence that just needs to be uncovered and lived by. The "original" reality is protobenevolent, and chances are it will never know of it, since knowing is not in its dictionary. Reality becomes preponderantly unknowing and quite possibly with no scope or transfiguration. A waste (muda) of cosmic proportion (anthropocentrically speaking!).

Whatever is there, the lean call is for this whatever to make the most of itself, a fundamental economic rule that might eventually turn out to be a democratic rule. The by-the-bootstraps rule.

In cosmic resolution terms, that which is unnecessary, superfluous, or marginal can become pernicious because the power generating from the irrelevant and the delusional can reach into the core of the Becoming and nest into it the nemesis of Becoming itself.

Agenda Two: The Lean Alternative

A lean mindset in a lean habitat developing in accordance with the Lean Hypothesis.

The Lean Alternative is an alternative to the hyperconsumption that is now engaging the American society in pursuit of limitless wealth and a "submission" to it. Given the size of the projected global population, 10 billion or so people, and the carrying capacity of the biosphere, the dereliction afflicting more than half of the human population -- the hyperconsumptive frenzy -- seems to be ungainly and unrealistic. It might also turn out to be detrimental to the possible aim of transcendence Homo sapiens is and ought to be engaged in.

With intellection opening the cosmos to the thinking and doing of man and with a possibly hopeful rationale that we might ourselves inhabit the cosmos, the imperative of leanness is the priority. All the mastery life has shown in its own development, doing so much with so little, will face the challenge of space self-coherently or it will betray life itself. Out there muda is the killer.

Both the Lean Hypothesis and the Lean Alternative are grounded in the "do more with less" that informs the MCD paradigm. The more of the MCD paradigm is the possible aim that reality can become self-aware -- that is, self-knowing, "resurrectional." A move that according to the Space Hypothesis takes reality from dumb elementarity to self-revelation via the Becoming.

The Lean Hypothesis is the Space Hypothesis. The Lean Alternative contained in the Lean Hypothesis is the lean mindset operating in the lean habitat.

The Paradox

Because intellection is the engine now driving the transformation of our environment, it is urgent to take the pulse of the ethics developing "inside" intellection in its recent developments.

A silicon ethic? Speedily or slowly and save an unexpected catastrophic turning of events, intelligent machines are coming. If so, the generation of ever more surprising past will throw out of whack contents and semantics dissecting, analyzing, and explaining them.

In the Space-as-Reality Hypothesis, the Becoming, the metamorphosing of space, creates the past -- that is, the other half of reality, the Being. In this hypothesis, intellection taking hold of evolution might transfer itself from the carbon-based device and organizing to silicon and postsilicon-based devices eventually-quantum devices, in a way, from quantum at the base, the beginning of presence, to a quantum base "at the end." Intellection as the reality of a desirable end, the self-revelatory presence.

(For the following, the Bubble diagram may be of some help.)

Transferring the persona, the carbon-based miracle of the inertia of matter transfigured in the passionate dynamics of intellection, to the silicon and postsilicon intellection might have to be (eventually) a necessary exercise.

The ethics of carbon intellection have been developing and forming in the ethics of Homo sapiens for the whole length of life's evolution on this planet. They are therefore overloaded with sophisticated cargoes. The human conscience is an aging battlefield, 3.5 million years in length, of enormous complexity achieved (and acting) via the enormous miniaturization of the body and a consistently lean process.

Genetically imprinted as we are, every cell of our body, brain included, shouts about the imprint. Our ancestry is paramount. In silicon and postsilicon, none of that exists. It is a tabula rasa. It has zero past and zero history. The history of getting there is no history of the computer. That is why for it to be emotional is mute. And likewise, to be passionate and to be hate-full and to be loving and to be sad and to be happy ...

The dance of ancestry is the dance of grace or disgrace. l3ut in the cyberdomain, it is a cold cosmos out there! It is a cold and lonely planet out there! Astronaut and cosmonaut are aware and beware of it.

Since the Space Hypothesis is a remote resolution, the end of space itself, the forms of ethics that might emerge in the successive domain of intellection could very well be the key to the success of the Becoming reality (Becoming an all-knowing Being).

The rich dividend of a lean process of Becoming would consist in a diminishing amount of energy necessary to carry out the Becoming itself. For a closed universe that could signify success. The zero energy of the durational singularity positioned at the consumption of space: Full memory is the energyless domain of the concluded spaceless past.

The Love Project?

Can the ethics of Homo sapiens be transferred to the newborn noncarbon consciousness? Would that be a desirable transfer? The frenzy presiding over the first steps of such transfer casts shadows that might just be fleeting. Fleeting also the blurred vision going with the new landscape that such a vision tries to perceive aided by the "new sight" apparatuses.

With those fumes dissipated, the key question will still remain: How can a "conscience" without a past, the postcarbon" conscience," behave in ways that are not foreign to the "passing away" carbon conscience whose genesis has been marked by good, bad, abortion (90 percent or so of evolution is abortion), success, pain, joy, suffering, equity and inequity, etc., etc.?

The intermediate stage of cyborg, part flesh, part postsilicon, will be a true field of search (and rescue?). For instance, the democratic experiment might turn out to be one of the shortest in the biosphere for the already short Homo sapiens experiment. That which is not efficient will be obsolete, eventually discarded. A sort of quickened social Darwinism, evolution guidance, peppered with benevolence (sand in the cogs-like), it is hoped.

Among the things progressively Becoming less and less relevant will be, at random: agriculture, the biosphere itself, and the impact of gravity, pollutants, radiation, and epidemics. One positive would be the dwindling of the power of animism- theology upon intellection. Howness and Techne will triumph. If all those "grim" transformations are to increase the presence of consciousness in reality at large, then it will be the better for it.

What about the main "feature" of carbon intellection? The Love Project?

The main achievement of life's evolution has been the emergence of love from the opportunistic routines of the food chain. Love and hate have been the yeast for the doings of intellection (the Howness of self-awareness). But love and hate are mute in the silicon logic; they are replaced by effectiveness while they drown in muda.

It will be paradoxical, and in many ways cruel, that the ethical travail carried through a costly historical process might find a sudden unappealing nemesis in the (non)ethic of history-deprived silicon. Then carbon would be just a temporary instrument to generate silicon, a disposable instrument because it is rusting away in a tiny corner of reality. A museum relic.

A silicon boss would have a hard time developing sympathy for the then-obsolete Homo carbonis. The very notion of persona may then be only a nostalgic notion. The relationship of master and butler, in other words, people served by computer, will eventually reverse. The butler becoming the master with the next possible scenario of the new master disposing of the "new" butler, by then gravely afflicted with sclerosis of body and brain.

More than ever, a scenario like this would demand a resolution where all the instruments, us and all else, reemerge as fully legitimate ends. The resurrectional state triggered by the self-revelation of reality.

The thesis of Homo postcarbonis divorced from the biosphere poses, as one of the many question marks, the dimensions of the cogs implied in the thesis. The richness and beauty of the biosphere phenomenon, now unconsciously and consciously felt by Homo sapiens, would lose significance.

A case pointing in that direction even in the Homo carbonis domain: In the dancing around of space, the virtues and the magic of hallucinogens, the working of drugs in and out of cyberspace, virtues and virtualities included, boil down to molecular and sub molecular rearrangements of space occurring mainly in the brain. We call it chemical alterations. After all, that is what the mind and the spirit and the gods and the angels are made of space dancing around. So it is for silicon and postsilicon intellection.

Automatization(?): The Emerging of the Complex out of the Complicated

Then from the position of Howness as life-maker, the power and "virtue" of hyper consumption may consist in being a necessary step forward in the generation of more automatism. The irony of this is in the denial of individuality, the often proclaimed attainment of the Internet. But automatism is profoundly set in all organisms. Without automatization -- roboticization with a purpose (?) -- organisms cannot exist.

Human institutions are tentative incursions in the world of automatization so as to extend and expand the reach of intellection. Health care, learning, social conventions, productivity, leisure, etc., are mutating in front of our eyes into self-defining, self-sustaining phenomena. They come about by the prodding and the sweat of the millions of self-affirming semi-automatons that we all are. It might well be the only way life and consciousness can pervade reality and inject larger and larger sectors of it with self-awareness via ever expanding automata with a will.

What the frenzy of production-consumption, promoted by the ephemeralization of the Internet, delivers (the irony of it) is a boning up for this advancement of automatization, the virtue of which might have to be patiently unearthed in a second, less frantic phase of dynamism.

Our societies are engaged in an unprecedented generation of new technological, economical, financial, informational, medical, ecological animals. The politicos are being marginalized. It is a four-dimensional forest of ever increasing branches and tendrils interweaving ever more densely, a smorgasbord for the legal mind and its treasure chest of sophistry with the power and wealth that come with it.

Listening to the mergers delirium (1999), what emerges seems to be a labyrinthine domain where often guys are suing the guys in the mirror. Skirmishes in a house of mirrors where the bets escalate by force of exhilaration or vice versa. At some point, the labyrinthine cross-fertilization will burst or transcend its own flesh and emerge on a novel slate with, even if momentary, some claim to serenity. The complicated transcending into the complex, thanks to a new level of automatization.

This eventually fits well the idea that Howness is the maker of the past and will be the maker of that which will come to pass. Howness displays itself as Techne up to the heights of gods-making technology, evidently a cosmotechnology (religion). What I think is a fully equitable esthetogenesis because it is transfigurative: religio of all the means to an ultimate end.

What is paradoxical is the mode by which an immense, immensely powerful reality, the cosmos in evolution, might depend for its significance on such a fragile, hidden, unanticipated domain of life on its way to self-acknowledgment.

But then, a posteriori, not really a paradox, courtesy of the Howness operational within the "clairvoyant" borders of MCD, via it, the complicated can mutate into the complex, the prototype, tentative and clumsy, translated into the automatic, the means escalating into the ends, the How into the radiant What. The mindless making itself into the mindful, the coarse made into the sophisticated. The beautiful made into the esthetic. The protoethical made into the ethical. The grace-deprived made into the graceful. The whole, via and because of the know How, slowly and painfully creating the What. The pyrotechnics of space transfiguring itself into Duration.

8: The Superconductivity Initiative

JULY 29, 1992

The paper that follows is as it was originally written, when I had made the connection between superconductivity and habitat. As an original draft, it makes what I think to be a good case for such a connection. History testifies to the impact of new technologies of transportation (logistics) upon the physical, social, economic, and cultural structures of societies. Now, post-Rio time (the United Nations conference on Environment and Development, Rio de Janeiro, June 1992), the call for a more realistic perception of Homo sapiens nested in an ever expanding, self-righteous, but eminently fragile ecological niche is gaining authority. Never too soon.

As nature tells us, a poor inner and outer logistical posture spells extinction. That might well be what a warped techno-industrial culture is delivering us, Homo sapiens. Now, that same inventiveness has given us the wheel, the carriage, the bicycle, the steamship, the locomotive, the automobile, the airplane; the missile has come up with the magnetic cradle, coupled or not with the superconductivity magic. The logistical revolution generating from such new devices will be profound. It is up to us to make it epochal and benign, in one. It is entirely up to us to come up with enough imagination and a sufficient among of true realism to make it so.

As I attempted to convey in the original paper, the convergence of environmental necessity and the economic, cultural, Esthequity imperative -- this providential convergence -- could go for a radiant millennium. But the margins of tolerance are indeed not generous. Failure is a possibility as real as success.

A failure of "the West" would make the collapse of the Greco-Roman Empire pale in comparison. The ruins of Western civilization would be enormously more cumbersome and pernicious for a postcollapse resurgence if one were still to be possible.

At last, if we were able to become more genuinely compassionate, more genuinely equitable toward ourselves, the human species, such virtues would reverberate throughout the biosphere in fitting and coherent deeds. The radiance of life could then become inextinguishable, a true seeker of grace reaching out into the solar system and beyond.

JANUARY 1991.

The first thing you do for the health of the patient is to check and care for his circulatory system (the logistics of his metabolism).

With superconductivity (SC) becoming applicable to transportation, the way is open for a transformation of the human landscape on a planetary scale. The idea of transforming the pernicious, congestive, suburban diaspora-invasion of the land into a web of lean urban settlements in parallel and integrated with multiple superconductivity trains capable of traveling 500 kilometers per hour makes it possible for the human presence to be coherent with the needs of the biosphere.

Given the characteristics of superconductivity, the technology of transportation (people and things) is endowed with swiftness, noiselessness, economy, comfort, capacity (volume), all-weatherness, safety.

No other technology has ever possessed such rich combinations or afforded such compatibility with human activities and needs. This is a package that can truly transform a bankrupt state of affairs into a deliverance from the eco-consumerist dilemma. So much so as to legitimize the following language: (From the noisy, cumbersome, disruptive railroad to) Superconductivity, the noiseless cradle "river" and its Urban Effect.

This might well mean: the minding of the biosphere's second step.

To be envisioned is a web enveloping the planet made of urban ribbons of varying thickness, refraining Homo faber from invading terra firma with his consumption-unlimited diaspora.

This implies:

• the recognition of today's critical, if not catastrophic, relationship between us, Hominidae, and living nature and the commitment and the actions indispensable under such circumstances;

• the recognition of the immense importance of life's logistics in all its intricacies and difficulties -- gravity and thermodynamics foremost- -- or the well-being of the living reality;

• the adoption of appropriate and sophisticated technologies in agreement with the MCD paradigm; a withdrawal of the license to do what we personally please with the biosphere; the willed containment of the feverish action of technocracy and speculation; an international enforceable legislation generating from coherence with the boundaries of the biosphere. (It will, for instance, mean that, in one to two thousand years none of today's Los Angeleses will exist, outlawed as they will be by a biospheric [transnational] court. It will also mean that objectivity will be restored at the expense of the schmaltzified tutti-frutti of subjectivity with the "providential" consequence of a newfound freedom away from the license of today's show-biz culture.)

***

We are dealing with a lean web of "mind-fullness" -- the kind afforded only by the Urban Effect -- that, far from suffocating and obfuscating the biospheric membrane, begins to build a webbing reminiscent of the genetic-strand structures to the point of suggesting for a near or far future the packaging (folding-over) of the biosphere itself for "other worlds." Such undertakings to be not by way of Aquarian fantasies but according to well-tested technologies responding to life-mind imperatives. These packages are to be the seeds the biosphere would sprinkle reality-at-large with. (See "Ecominutiae.")

1. The Superconductivity Initiative: A Biosphere-Mind Covenant

The Goal: The Urban Effect -- that is, the minding of the biosphere with logistics as a recognized and acted-upon critical agency.

The Technolology: The noiseless cradle-ribbon of superconductivity (SC) as the backbone of the urban life ribbing terra firma.

The Consequences: A landscape transformation, in other words, the reabsorption of the suburban diaspora into lean urban ribbons of varying density and varying temper.

The Achievement: The sane coexistence, if not symbiosis, of a spirited human presence and a cared-for biosphere.

Superconductivity is the triggering technology making the necessity of the minding of the biosphere feasible with a frugality of means, once again reminiscent of genetic morphologies. At the same time the transformation produces variations on familiar patterns:

• The development of villages along the spine-road connecting village to village -- the space-time-complexity dimensions are different -- no mule, no coach, no car on the "highway" but an up to 500 kilometers (or more?) (SC) maglev train with stations every 50 kilometers or more. That leaves distances of no more than 25 kilometers from station to final destination or vice versa. Those distances are to be covered by "mass-transit" conveyances or private means when justifiable (and taxi).

• Local superconductivity trains connecting the stations on hourly schedules: Phoenix-Tucson (180 km): 30 minutes from city center to city center; Phoenix-Los Angeles: one hour.

It is to be kept in mind that the airport has been, is, and will remain a major "nuisance."

• The urban ribbons, no more than 2-3 kilometers wide, straddling the superconductivity ribbons and other roads, keep the logistics taut, swift, and economic. In a true sense, the age of the wheel as well as the age of the wing might be flanked by the age of the magnetic cradle. The development of 100-kilometer linear cities with high-density urban nodules at 10- to 20-kilometer intervals is foreseeable, with travel time contained within the 40 minutes it now takes from Manhattan to Kennedy Airport.

With superconductivity, both automobile and aircraft are given back the legitimacy they have lost (or never had) -- the automobile as an auxiliary mode confined to marginal urban and country drives for work and for leisure; the aircraft for transportation over distances of 500 km or more when it can favorably compete with superconductivity. The "bullet" (SC) has the upper hand on the wheel and the wing to the advantage of economy, comfort, safety, reliability, flexibility, and, most times, time itself.

The restructuring of the human habitat into urban (SC) ribbons has immense consequences:

• the most comprehensive design, engineering, and architectural process followed by a planetary undertaking of construction and land transformation;

• a critical impact upon the economic, social, political, and cultural aspect of human settlements brought about by the breakdown of logistical bottlenecks;

• the retooling of whole industries for the gigantic task ahead;

• the absorption of the largest labor force ever witnessed;

• a portentous shift in the movement of resources and capital;

• a rapid ecological restoration with all the rewards going with it;

• the generation of lively urban habitats easily interconnected by SC;

• the direct interaction: city-countryside, a fertile ground for a Homo-biospheric culture;

• the "opening up" of continental masses such as Siberia, Alaska, Canada, China, Africa. (See what the railroad did for Europe and North America.)

2. Superconductivity and the Urban Effect

At the significant core of superconductivity is perhaps the irresistibility of any "phenomenon" that is able to call upon itself the attention and the participation of the most disparate agencies. In listing the services of superconductivity, one offers on a platter a truly irresistible compatibility combination:

Swiftness goes at the core of the logistical knot: how to unravel it without impinging on other agencies, first among the many, the city sociocultural nexus.

Noiselessness tells about the unavoidable dislocation caused by noise impinging on the habitat (people), a noise afflicting the relative swiftness of the rail, the wing, and the rubber wheel.

Economy, the ever present conflict between the desirable and the feasible. Gravity, thermodynamics, and friction, though the sustainer of our doings, are also the nemeses of price-less moving about of people and things.

Comfort, again the millennium battle between the need "to move" and the discomfort afflicting "moving" (remember the prerail, prerubber-wheel transport) and the moving from one medium to another (from wheel to wing to rail, etc.).

Capacity (volume and tonnage), that which might be easily done for a few or a few pounds rapidly becomes a remote goal for many or many tons. Gridlock is a telling reminder.

Safety. Fifty thousand deaths, countless injured per year just on the North American continent, and the impending disaster syndrome in the air (with the high cost of keeping disaster at bay) are the sufficient and telling realities of our transportation modes.

All-Weatherness. Air to a large degree and pavement to a lesser degree (snow) remind us of how the weather impinges on our preferred logistics. Reflections of this extend to swiftness, economy, comfort, capacity, safety.

One can say that SC is truly an urbane technology in both the sense of compatibility and "civility." Consider as contrast the nonurbane technology of the rail, of the wing, and the counterproductive presence of the automobile. Then one is on target in saying that latent in superconductivity and the Urban Effect combined is a true revolution of the human habitat to the advantage of both the human species and the biosphere that carries it.

A not-so-strange bedfellow of SC is the bicycle. The bicycle can well take care of a high percentage of the diffusion logistics (the capillaries of the web). Consider the use of it in Central Europe and in China. Superconductivity and the bicycle (and pedestrian) in combination might be able to take care of 70 percent of our body logistics. As the two extremes of logistics, they can give the remaining 30 percent to the movers and services needed for the approximately 25-kilometer gaps and the diffusion logistics not served by bicycle and walking. These are a mix of collective movers: trains, buses, vans, etc., and single movers: taxi and automobiles. To complete the logistics scenario: golf carts, moving sidewalks, escalators, elevators.

Further notes

The Superconductivity Initiative within the three-month program of Arcosanti 2000

Make a serious case for the adoption of superconductivity by pointing at its impact upon: environment, energy, efficiency, economy, compatibility, international cooperation, employment, war technology and production, the Urban Effect vis-a-vis the American Dream. In other words, upon the MCD paradigm shift.

Superconductivity Initiative and Arcosanti 2000

Local

• On the Arizona railroad map, outline a superconductor- cradle map focusing on the Nogales-Flagstaff corridor to which Arcosanti 2000 plugs in.

• Anticipate urban-linear development by the progressive reabsorption of the cities' diaspora along the SC "logistical river."

• Introduce the Two Suns arcologies with the variants going from the north-south, fish-spine mode to the east-west, parallel-run mode.

Continental

• Work on a North American railroad map; overlay the hypothetical superconductivity cradle nets of local and rapid trains for passengers and freight.

• Outline in the most tentative way some of the reabsorption of the "urban" diaspora into the linear habitats among the superconductivity logistical rivers.

Transcontinental

• Work on railroad maps of Europe, Russia, Siberia, Alaska, Canada, United States, Mexico, Central America, South America by outlining the potential Superconductivity logistical rivers.

• Introduce the Bering-Rainbow proposal as a fitting example of intercontinental connection-cooperation.

Three Main Topics

1. The Technology of Superconductivity

• Germany: Transrapid International

• (USA) Los Angeles-Las Vegas: HSST Corp; Superspeed Train Commission; High Speed Rail Association

• Japan: Central Japan Railway Company; Technova, Inc.; Railway Technical Research Institute; Nagoya Railroad Co.

2. The Geography

• Overlaying of superconducting cradles on railroad networks.

• 3 Products: (1) local map of Arizona; (2) continental map of North America; (3) transcontinental map

3. The Urban Effect

Articulation of the Urban Effect and the superconductivity logistical "rivers."

3 examples: (1) Arcosanti; (2) Two Suns Arcology; (3) Bering Strait

Appendix A

• Sclerosis is one of the afflictions of overfeeding;

• Congestion is one of the afflictions of consumerism.

We should then search for a LEAN alternative:

• the decongestion of transportation channels by the reduced use of bulky transport devices (like the automobile);

• Consumerism fattens our arteries and congests our highways. The automobile is the bad cholesterol crippling our cities.

It is at last a question of flow: blood, people, things. The information flow has a magic bullet in the microchip. For "tangible" things there is no magic bullet, but the "bullet" traveling on the superconducting cradle is going to be momentous because of its impact on the logistical impasse. The breaking of the friction bond: rolling steel (the wheel) against stationary steel (the cradle) changes the equation: "stay put -- move."

Tonnage of equipment, swiftness of movement, and noise levels are changed, and the change is in favor of the Urban Effect. The superconductor needs to feed on zones of high density or it falls by being redundant (killing flies by cannonades). The cradle-bullet needs to be flanked by a lot of warm bodies so as to feed itself and the other movers with a sufficient number of users.

Appendix B

As magnetism is at the core of SC, so one can suggest that the urban body might want to be caught in a magnetic net by orienting itself according to the force field of a lean and swifter logistic.

Another electromagnetic presence is the sun (photovoltaic and infrared). Between the SC field and the sun field, the urban pattern becomes oriented like iron filings in the vicinity of a magnet. Impinging upon such a pattern is the "biospheric force field," which is, by the way, an immense and deep carpet of microelectromagnetic intertwining. Presiding over this triadic interaction is the (imploding) imperative of MCD.

Because of all such charges, the resultant structures are not urban lasagna or urban spaghetti but "sausages" of changing diameters. Each slice of such sausage contains enough action and knowledge in and by itself to constitute an Urban Effect, open-ended as it is traversed by the logistic flow into which it is plugged.

An elegant, frugal, coherent cosmic configuration offering itself to the down-to-earth business of living and nudging it a step further into the art of living. A complex electromagnetic fabric nested in and caring for the biosphere. Caring empathetically for the most extraordinary offspring of it: species Homo, and caring for it within a lean and "benevolent" mode.

Appendix C

Before the awakening of our consciences brought about by the environmental crisis, now a fashionable topic, the SC proposition would have had a dim chance of "success." Things might be different now.

We need to be persuasive in linking SC with urban restoration, environmental salvation, and a sane energy policy.

Productivity and transportation have been, are, and will be at the very core of the human action. Being so central makes them arbiters of civilization and culture. Suffice to recall two technologies of production and four technologies of logistics:

• domestication of plants and animals;

• industrialization of agriculture and animal husbandry;

• the invention of the wheel;

• the invention of the rail;

• the invention of the automobile;

• the invention of the airplane;

• the invention of the magnetic cradle will have the same kind of impact: SC has all the features of "revolution."

The impact of SC upon the environment:

• escape the diaspora catastrophe (suburban culture)

• drastic cuts in energy consumption

• escape the climate-change dangers (fossil fuels consumption, pollution)

The impact of SC upon society and civilization:

• physical transformation

• societal transformation

• cultural transformation

• economic transformation

• political transformation

The impact of SC upon the technological-corporate milieu:

• from the technology of confrontation (arms, etc.) to the technology of cooperation

• the breakdown of national boundaries

• the acculturation of the multinationals

Appendix D

The automobile is a dispersion technology (suburban parking). SC is a gathering technology (the urban station). If the gathering technology has a strong call and the call is ephemeralized by virtue of the "civil" nature of the technology, then room can also be found for a legitimate role for the dispersion technology.

Over the past two hundred years the technology of gathering has dimmed its appeal (especially in the USA) to the advantage of the technology of dispersal (also via criminal initiatives). The center has burst, the periphery is everywhere, like a body without a brain, a corpse ... generating more corpses (environmental degradation).

SC is the magnet at hand for the restoration of the center. The center is oblong along the magnetic field (between stations, that is); therefore the new center has also the virtue of interconnectedness. It reaches while centering, it is axial, a center projected in space-time. The outcome is the "linear city," that is, the ribbing of terra firma by "urban rivers" generating from a coherent use of the cradle technology of SC.

9: The Bering-Rainbow Proposal

1989 The main intent of the Bering Rainbow is to connect the continental masses of Asia and North America by way of the superconductor technology.

1. The electric power grid of Russia-Siberia and of Alaska-Canada-United States is to be linked via a superconductivity line.

2. The rail transportation grid of Russia-Siberia and of Alaska-Canada-United States is to be linked via superconductivity, high-speed passenger-freight trains.

The Trans-Siberia-Trans-Alaska Line

The linkage would be achieved at the Bering Strait by constructing a series of suspension bridges. Five of the pylons supporting the bridges are to be constructed between Big Diomede Island (USSR) and Little Diomede Island (United States).

The material presented here refers to the design of such segments of the bridge system and to the proposed habitat carved out within Little Diomede Island.

An auto-trucking link is intentionally downplayed in view of the enormous distances, the harsh climate, the environmental impact, the costs, etc. Local road networks should be envisaged.

Impact

The Bering-Rainbow proposal opens the vast regions of Siberia, Alaska, and Canada to an economy-driven, ecologically aware, exploring-vacationing eager, politically progressive, "nomadic" population -- to an exploding human population. For one, there will be new settlements generated along the grids with eventually large migratory currents, prehistorically anticipated by migratory waves of animals and humans.

Little Diomede, Little City

The granite island is carved out in order to generate a large, climate-controlled, urban, industrial environment defining:

1. scientific, climatological, geological stations and laboratories;

2. industrial parks with emphasis on the construction of the power and "rail" linkages;

3. learning institutions geared to the special characteristics of the region (Bering Sea-Arctic Ocean) and to the rapid turnover of researchers, students, and "tourists";

4. the urban habitat per se, defining unique characteristics derived from the underground environment.

Important to Little Diomede, Little City is the development of the arcological guidelines defined by the complex-miniaturized environs: how to best survive and flourish as a society and as a culture in climatic conditions inimical to human life. This will be important in three futures:

• Terrestrial. A contraction and intensification of the urban mode is the only hope the environmentalist has for a rebound of the planetary ecology, its health and self-sustenance. Such a mode is also the only one promising the evolution of Homo sapiens.

• Exoterrestrial. The development of space habitats, where life will have to be "internalized" and will have to be true to the paradigm of Complexity- Miniaturization-Duration.

• The coming of an ice age that would play havoc with the present biosphere and the human condition. Survival will depend on "how fast" the bulk of humanity will be able to move into arcologies of which Little Diomede City is a prototype.

Rainbow Suspension Pulse Bridges

Design and construction of the bridge connecting the two continental masses by way of Big Diomede (USSR) and Little Diomede (United States).

The bridges would carry the electric, superconductivity power lines and passenger-freight "trains."

The roadway bridges would contain nodes of activity within the pylons and multilevel "roadways."

The functions of such nodes are suggested by the symbolism: The center pylon is the point of contact and interconnection between two superpower nations within the "embrace" of a Rainbow UN, the connection of all nations, finally united in and by the imperative of planetary responsibility -- a sustainable, fulfilling, equitable evolution of body, mind, and spirit. On each side of the Rainbow UN are Rainbow USSR and Rainbow US, pointing at that "which makes a difference" between two cultures generating from differing environmental conditions and historical backgrounds.

The three rainbow, pylon nodes and the two bridgeheads would be the center for information, learning, exchange, scientific-technical work, ceremonial and cultural events. The structural nature and the formal characteristics of the bridges themselves add to the symbolism:

• The patterned and brightly colored pylons would be large and strong affirmations of artifact within a somehow desolate and monochromatic land and seascape.

• The "pulse" of the structures (see following text) would also suggest that the resilience and adaptability to the loads and to the external stresses (wind, temperature) reflect and symbolize the capacity of life to adapt to and to adopt the way of nature.

Pulse Bridge

Pulse Bridge is conceived and designed so as to alter its own stress configuration according to the traffic loads it carries and the temperature and wind variations. It does not so much react to such stresses as it dynamically adapts to them. This is achieved by suspending the whole structure on two sets of hinges and altering the weight distribution by way of four ballast spheres constantly changing in weight because the water volume they contain is pouring in or spilling out of each. Temperature differential and wind loads will suggest asymmetrical ballast content. Such a structural mode eliminates the two sets of cables/anchorages, cumbersome and costly features, especially when located in a forbidding climate. By way of optical sensors reading the altered configuration of the changing loads (traffic, temperatures, wind pressures), the bridge is sensitized, so to speak, and pulsates via the ballast changes in the volume of water the spheres contain.

Theoretically, the bridge should respond to the load changes caused by a trailer truck moving on one of its traffic lanes. The response is made readable by the amount of water spilled by a fountainlike series of spouts strategically plugged into the ballast spheres. The loads and stresses on the bridges will be "readable" in the behavior of the fountains.

Characteristics

1. The bridges have the equivalent of eight to ten lanes of traffic divided among three main levels: autos and pedestrians on the top, a mix of autos and trucks in the middle, and a mix of trucks, trains, and utilities on the lowest level.

2. The bridges have floor spaces for scientific, cultural, and commercial uses. The density of that space will be greater in the proximity of the rainbow pylons.

3. Each bridge has two sets of bearings instead of the four used in traditional bridges.

4. Each bridge breathes-pulsates according to the load to which it is submitted.

5. The bridge pylons are in the shape of quarter-circle steel tubes 30 meters in diameter and two horizontal cross tubes. The ballast spheres, suspended from the upper horizontal tube, present a choice of features expressing the intensity of the traffic on the bridge and possibly enriched by way of vegetation and light plays.

The arched pylon and the horizontal elements can contain an optical lab-museum also showing the pulse of the bridge; the history of bridges via graphics, models, video, and holograms; restaurants, gift shops, and exhibitions.

The novelty of the structural concept, the riddance of 50 percent of the bearings, the responsiveness of such a large structure to traffic loads, and the simple elegance of form will make Pulse Bridge a calling card that might go a long way toward the financing of its construction.

10. Ecominutiae: Self-Contained Space Habitats

FEBRUARY 1989

1

Two possible reasons for the space quest:

1. To enlarge the territory of fortress Earth by searching and exploring the stellar territories out there, thus advantaging the species pursuing her own briefly lived agenda.

2. To break the barriers of matter, the parochial egg of the Earth, and invest-transfigure reality, the cosmos. The investing of the cosmos not in the Eastern sense of fusion (con-fusion) or the Christian sense of a triumphant return to the creator with one's personal attributes intact, but rather, in the eschatological, grassroots sense of a conclusive act in a creational process into which each and all specks of reality (organisms included) partake and rejoice.

The first reason is defensive and ultimately desperate. It implies that life is a smudge on the back of an untamable beast-robot, the cosmos. The second reason, given the context, is desperate also, but in terms of defenselessness not meaninglessness. Vis-a-vis the immense enmity of space, this second reason is prodigiously affirmative: to make "matter" (reality) into mind.

Embroiled as we are at present in the techno-political primacy race, in economic emergencies, in hedonistic-consumeristic practices, in rampaging inequity, no one, technocrat or layperson, is interested in siding with one of the two alternatives. But scientists, philosophers, and theologians should see the not-so-hidden consequences of such a necessary choice.

The scientist, as the seeker of "Truth," must eventually find a lasting use for the discovery of it lest we are to be just "that which knows," that is, spectators at an ultimately true-to-itself cosmic Woodstock. Astonishing yes, but ultimately as Woodstock, pretentious and squalid.

The philosopher to find a coherence in the duet: love-nonlove and specifically to that part of the dance which shows life becoming aware of its own suffering and its own ultimate anxiety: Is there a sense to it all?

The theologian to finally(?) come upon the irrefutable proof of the existence or nonexistence of a creator and come down to the task of constructing with the scientist, the philosopher, and the artist one of two quite different model-simulations of reality: the creator's foreordained reality (he, she, it is omniscient) or the self-creating, grassroots process of reality becoming. Two very, very different agendas.

2

The arguably loving embrace of the Earth is destined to become the constrictor and the demise of life. One could argue that it is not too soon for consciousness-Mind to rough up an escape agenda from such fate if it is true that the "window of opportunity" could be shut up by a loss of anima and/or because of a manmade catastrophe. The future and perhaps the foreverness of our species, all species, indeed might depend paradoxically on our quasi-extravagant determination not to let the "magic" moment pass by.

If reality is a megamachine hosting a diaspora of lives, it is most important to join in. If reality is a megamachine with a one and only pimple of life, the Earth, it is imperative for the pimple to generate other oddities in its own image throughout reality in view of a remote but not impossible transformation of the whole reality and for all time into Mind (a closed universe, Big Bang, as precondition). Then the seeding of space with life is an imperative expectant in its own transcendence into virtue. The Ecominutiae, tiny ecologic eggs, made up of minerals (planetary or asteroid mineral) quasi-totally filtered and metamorphosed by Mind, are fantasies generated by a set of notions encapsulated by the named imperative.

• As living and thinking organisms, the cosmic explorers will be submitted to stresses far more critical than the technological ones. Those are assumed to be successfully cared for. In other words, the limits will be defined by the bio-technological and by the logos-technological resilience of the explorers, especially if they are in the process of becoming dwellers in space cities.

• As "machines for living," the space cities have to sustain the onslaught of nonenvironment, the endless night of space, at all levels of performance.

The tangible function of Ecominutiae will be:

1. mining-processing-shipping

2. production

3. research

4. testing

5. urban laboratory (environmental, sociocultural settings)

6. station-vacation-resorts for space travelers -- regeneration-restoration

7. building, maintenance, repair, and cargo stations for the space machines

Complexity and Miniaturization will be pervasive and imperative for the mechanical, the physiological, and the organizational. In other words, frugality will be the mandatory icon among all the perhaps lesser ones. Justly so, since the MCD paradigm might well be the crucible for god-making.

Space for Peace

The continuity in the past thirty years of my work: Ecominutiae are the extensive "alchemical" manipulation-metamorphoses of stellar material into minute ecological-mental cells. Those Ecominutiae are "space cities," the initial step of phase two in the urbanization of space. The Earth is phase one.

Mesa City

In my work, the forerunner of Ecominutiae is Mesa City (1960). In that project, I proposed the extensive manipulation of the mesa's geological mass for the double purpose of generating construction material and of transforming the geology into a cityscape: the "Central Park" was to be the geology made into a quarry and the quarry made into a three-dimensional park with its own "canyons," cave museums, "well churches," amphitheaters, cliff sculpting-painting, etc. Therefore, the process of sculpting the mesa was not an isolated, waste-producing process but a synchronized and coherent binary process where a discriminative quarrying would produce construction material on one side (plus minerals for further extraction) and a sculpture-landscape on the other ... a nice genentropic example.

The Arcologies

At the center of the arcology work is the notion of the metamorphosis of the mineral into mind. Given the MCD paradigm as governing the arcological performance, one can see the arcologies as "space cities anchored to Earth," or better, as forerunner to and testing grounds for the urbanization of space. So much so that, now and then, I am tempted to lift one of the arcology graphics and encapsulate it into Ecominutiae design. Naturally, differing environmental conditions, vast (earthly) landscape versus confined inner space, pervasive and unforgiving gravity versus quasi or total weightlessness, etc., would demand a sharply different organization of habitat.

11. Hiro-Naga and the Ecominutiae

Ecological Minutiae

MARCH 1989

1

As reality becomes and builds the past, construction and destruction are two inseparable components of it. Humanity has learned the craft too well. Part of the human endeavor is construction; part is destruction. We are more than often deceived in seeing construction where there is really destruction, less often seeing destruction where perhaps there is construction. To say, for instance, that the Pentagon (USA) epitomizes, in grand scale, construction-destruction is to apply a grand twist to the equation. Doing better and better the wrong thing, $300 billion per year nowadays is hardly a constructive endeavor. What is really going on is megadestruction and a compounded destruction if and when the arsenal is put to use. The hidden Pentagon slogan is: "Our dedication is to the 'construction' of an ever better kind of wrongness."

The flip-over equation defines the weapons buildup as the destructive half. It is destructive environmentally, economically, technologically, mentally, emotionally, and ethically, whereas the disposal (i.e., the destruction) of weapons is a constructive, sane, coherent kind of destruction.

In Hiro-Naga we had the compounding of three destructive endeavors:

1. The evil of the bomb invention and its making. A pure case of a better, if not the best, kind of wrongness.

2. The notion that the bomb must be used even when alternatives are available.

3. The targeting of the bomb on not just one but two cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, an unmitigated betrayal of humanity and mind.

Society would be far ahead of itself if the undoer-destructors were to become conscious of their prime responsibility and would take the gospels into consideration. (The bomb is a Judeo-Christian gift to the planet.)

The remembrance of deeds the likes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki must be burned into the flesh of the species for the uniqueness of the brutality, the unspeakable victimization of life, and the dedicated ill will that made them possible. That much for the nature of the Hiro-Naga catastrophe.

2

The fundamental lesson that reality has been teaching us is that it is complex, and it is therefore critically dependent on the tight packaging of its components. It is dependent on Miniaturization.

One can state unequivocally that there is no possibility for consciousness to exist and operate in the absence of organisms that are the epitome of a prodigious degree of Complexity made possible by an extravagant degree of Miniaturization; so prodigious and so extravagant as to engender in the organism the phenomenon of Duration that enters synergetically into the evolutionary advancement of the organisms themselves. Duration is that nonspatio-temporal sequence of actions which, though generated in time-space, is pulled out of time-space to exist outside of it. Memory, for instance, is a durational event.

Complexity and Miniaturization are inseparable, and they are a take-it-or-leave-it proposition. To take it means to be with and for life. To leave it means to be with and for death. It is that pure and simple.

Organisms are fragments of life as they are fragments of consciousness. Therefore they are never self-sufficient. They always depend on that which, strictly speaking, is outside the membrane of autonomy that makes them operational. One can thus embrace the totality of things, thereby subjecting the whole of reality to the imperative of Miniaturization- Complexity-Duration: the MCD paradigm.

The MCD paradigm is the normative stress to be applied to evolving history, as well as the normative technology attending to all parcels of living reality, the organisms and their institutions that make up such evolution. Evolution -- that is, reality Becoming. The imperative of the MCD paradigm is, nowadays, made more urgent by the demographic pressure applied to the resources of the planet, its ecology. The future is thus in the direction of the ultra complex, ultraminiaturized, ultra durational.

The ecological health of the planet is a function of the paradigm insofar as consciousness is the condition of reality that makes, to the utmost degree, for a desirable project. Outside the light of the paradigm is the darkness of nonlife, nonconsciousness, and ultimately the absence of grace and love in a reality condemned to never acknowledge itself and thus also condemned to lose any hope for true equity.

To observe that the MCD paradigm is well served by the Japanese culture is obvious. Inside and outside the (traditional) home, the Japanese environs are complex and miniaturized to a higher degree than possibly in any other culture. Naturally the ancestral memory, that is, Duration, permeated the whole environment. Both the paradigm and the Japanese culture point to frugality, the mode that does more with less. This, by the way, agrees with the known slogan "less is more" only if and when with less one means a sophisticated degree of Complexity. The Complexity of the true esthetic, for instance.

3

There is the application of the MCD paradigm to arcology. The arcological proposition is within the Miniaturization-Complexity-Duration norms because it is the affirmation of the city as one of the most critical phenomena dedicated to the generation of more and more consciousness and its doings. By submitting the mineral, probabilistic reality to the possibly unstoppable pressure of Miniaturization-Complexity -Duration, the Urban Effect is, in truth, the technology of mind's making.

The arcological proposition sees no difference in nature and intent between the terrestrial Urban Effect and the outer-space venture. But the term "ecominutiae," ecological modest habitat, is to remind us that space culture will be for a long time a diminished culture. A grandeur-deprived culture, because it will have to adopt and cope with the black void of reality, away from the astonishing gifts of a planet like the Earth, our maker. Our space cities will be ecological tidbits timidly echoing the prodigious nature of the earthly parents.

On the level of physical-functional, order-disorder, the ecominutiae are at the opposite end of the Hiro-Naga destruction axis. The ecominutiae are the reordering of matter pushed at extremes of purpose and control because space is where frugality (a Japanese virtue) must be in a quantum-jump mode. They are, in an earthly imagining, like tiny bubbles filled with genetic and mental purposes and launched in those environs that are non environs by definition, the nonlife, black media in which the cosmic "machine" unravels its probabilistic future. It will be most unfortunate if the indispensable, hard-nosed technology, NASA-style, does not leave time, thought, and means for the overriding character of the space venture to be perceived, explored, and devoutly developed: the nature of the mind's light bursting within the cosmos.

12. Space for Peace

The world of the victim is not male dominated. It is, on the contrary, dominated by women and children. It is, like the Kingdom of Heaven, difficult to enter unless you come to it with a child's imagination. It is a world if youth rather than age. It pays more attention to poets than to mathematicians. The warriors' world describes the outcome of war in the language of exchange ratios and cost-effectiveness; the victims' world describes it in the language of comedy and tragedy. -- Freeman Dyson, "Weapons and Hope," New Yorker

A Center of Space for Peace

The prospect of a nuclear-safe world is no short-term proposition. During whatever time it takes, the current handful of nuclear nations may double or triple in number. They must, as well, be a part if any lasting negotiations. Even with this, the availability if nuclear technology will forever remain a threat in the hands of any nation or terrorist group wishing to make a point.

Over the course of time, nations may easily be distracted from the quest for nuclear safety by discussions if numbers at a bargaining table, by disputes if territory among warring nations, or by internal conflicts among political factions within any single nation, as the gap widens between the haves and the have-nots.

Space represents an opportunity to expand the bounds of the conflict or to create a common purpose. Cooperation in space, in its exploration, in the use if its technology for the good here on Earth, and even in its habitation, could represent the bond between nations that will be needed during the long negotiations for nuclear disarmament. The economic engines of space technology may not (should not) be stopped. They may, however, be redirected.

Space for Peace had its beginnings in the '60s with Soleri's renderings and architectural models if early space habitat designs: First-Generation Arcologies in Space. In the 70s, the renderings and models progressed to Second-Generation Arcologies (Two Suns Arcology) , incorporating two suns -- one the physical, and one the urban spirit, both focused on the urban frame.

Soleri's Third- Generation A no logy, the modular habitats built from basic structural components, could be assembled in a variety of urban frames. In Space for Peace, they are applied to gravity-free conditions -- the Third Generation evolves into the flowing sketches rendered by Soleri for the Fourth-Generation Anology.

Four initial series if graphic images on a black backdrop were completed in 1984. As in other Soleri works, several mediums are used in Space for Peace. Each series is contained upon a roll with up to six graphics each -- the free-fall cities in space. Some are built off asteroids that they mine; some enclose the asteroid entirely; others float free.

The initial series if sketches was prepared in response to a request from Vienna for Soleri's participation in the architectural symposium "Man in Space." With one series at the Smithsonian Institution, three rolls were presented to the conference in June 1984.

In April 1984, the early draft of this text was presented to the Chapter for Social Responsibility if the American Institute of Architects at their national convention. The context was a discussion of nuclear disarmament. At the same time, a meeting was held in Phoenix, Arizona, to sell one hundred yet-to-be-rendered sketches of space habitats and to discuss the prospect of using the proceeds to support an institution furthering the Spare for Peace effort.

-- Patrick Colvin, Cosanti Foundation, 1986

Watching for over twenty years the drift developing in matters of space, I find myself unable to express any optimism. What a society will do within one or two generations is preordained by what society "thinks" at present. Our thinking about space is violent and dread-oriented. The urgency of fostering an opposite trend must be clearly stated. This monograph is an initial draft on Space for Peace and about the means that might possibly provide a voice of hope among the dismaying cacophony of the "might makes right" clubs. It is an attempt to indicate an altogether different assessment of our inescapable presence among the stars.

1. Blood in Space

A. The USSR and the United States have chosen a "Star Wars" posture and seem determined to become highly proficient at it.

B. Technocrats find the capital needed for sophisticated technical developments, their sources tracing back to Pentagons and Red armies.

C. After a noble attempt by Stanley Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the image and opinion makers of the movie industry have opted for Star Wars. We, the masses, pay and revel in it.

D. The video arcades are assiduously attending to young and old alike to make sure the inevitable is identified with strife and blood spilling, over, under, and everywhere in space. The horizon, even the remote horizon of space, is bloody.

In the meantime ...

2. The Next Millennium Is Upon Us

These are some of the scenarios the millennium might face:

A. fragments of human societies torn by strife because of mistrust, fear, greed, bigotry, intolerance, idolatry, and mediocrity; a planetary ecology precariously balanced at best; rampant indigence, sufferance, and squalor;

B. the emergence of a wiser humanity, able to cope with its flaws, having enough left in itself to set the premise for transcendence; with it, a lesser degree of inequity, an abating of sufferance, and a convalescing planet;

C. an illuminated species that, by radically altering its priority chart in the direction of the desirable, is able to move into an astonishing future;

D. a planet rendered barren of culture, and possibly of all higher life forms (mammalian included) through the thermonuclear nemesis of the "God and Country First" aberration;

E. and for good measure ... a planet in the grips of a catastrophic climate change, a new ice age for instance: life seeking survival with massive sacrifice, extraordinary migrations (with social, economic, and cultural upheavals), and radical technological/urban transformations;

F. a scramble of any number of these possibilities, each with a degree of (unfathomable) ambiguity.

In light of the present outlook for a thousand-year span (the third millennium of the Christian calendar), scenario C is patently Utopian. It is useful only as a reference point -- assuming that we are able to grasp the nature of the desirable and remain guarded against the pursuit of only the feasible, always shot through, as it is, with expediency and obsolescence.

Scenarios D and E are real possibilities. As far as their impact on life is concerned, as perceived at present, they have to be regarded as potentially irreversible events. This leaves three scenarios, A, B, and F, with B as a mildly optimistic proposition, snuffing out the black light, the evident obscurantism, caused by our addiction to the things present in scenario A.

3. Why Space Then?

Escapism? Easily so if it is technology for the sake of technocracy. Easily so if it is distraction from the harsh facts of life (and death) on this planet.

Malice? Easily so if it is a money machine for the already padded safes of the well off.

Evil? Easily so if it is for perfecting the mechanisms of war and apocalypse.

Stupidity? Easily so if it turns out to be a waste-making machine devised by our "best minds."

But space is also an imperative.

It can help directly and indirectly to break out from the dark center, scenario A, where we now seem trapped. In fact, it can do more, much more:

1. It is part of the quest, the search into the unknown. This quest is an imperative of the Mind, the distinguishing feature of the human organism.

2. It is a frontal challenge to the technocratic penchant of our "rational" Mind, in favor of the surrational longed for by the better side of Mind itself.

3. It can afford the human species breakthroughs in technology and science with critical transformations in wisdom and esthetics.

4. It might be the shortest road to a better understanding and greater appreciation for the prodigious planet that has generated us and all living things. Space will give us instruments for investigation and experimentation without ever more grievously endangering the planet's ecosystem.

5. It is a magnificent alternative to adventurism. The "adventure to end all adventures" should satisfy our machismo in the most gentle of ways (see section 5, #2) and strike down the beast of thermonuclear "better all dead than Red" solution.

At the beginning, "matter" and no Mind, at the end, Mind and no matter. Matter as mass energy. Mind as total recall (self-revelation); space-"time" as the device allowing matter to evolve into Mind. (12/2/93)

6. It is a true plunge into frugality, perhaps the most formidable step toward the metamorphosis of matter into Mind.

7. Consequently, it would give credence and feasibility to the injunction: "Go forth and multiply." The assumption here is that if Mind is more than matter, then the whole of matter must (democratically) become Mind.

Stardust, us, making the stars into grace. As Henri Bergson said about one hundred years ago, "L'homme est une machine a faire des dieux." (2/7/99)

8. It is a further thrust toward urbanization. Out there, in space, we build cities or we talk nonsense. But urbanization is ultimately the making of organisms / Minds beyond all anthropomorphic boundaries.

9. Space is the mode that makes a full genesis a slightly less remote possibility. Such a genesis, through the creational process of evolution, is the religious/esthetic resolution of the suffering and inequity endemic in an otherwise excruciatingly beautiful reality.

The content and the meaning that lie behind these nine points could reinject in the human conscience an element of genuine awe and afford a society sufficient coherence to compel it to stay the course toward Mind. Therefore, the following project is proposed.

4. Space for Peace: A Matter of Mind, a Foray in Space-Time

Space is a matter of Mind on two levels:

• Outfitted as we are now, with a backpack measuring millions of cubic meters of earthly matter per person, we will go out there outfitted with but a few cubic meters of matter each. Such frugality is an exponential alteration of reality via Mind (see Appendix 1, point 6).

• The scarce matter that we take out there with us will be "filtered by Mind" into new ecological subsystems. It will be, for good or evil, a reality made in the image of man.

It might be useful to say at the outset that:

A. The space venture as an urbanization of the cosmos is tantamount to a seeding of it via and with Mind. How much of this is already in process throughout the cosmos is one of the unknowns.

B. The "seeds" will be placenta- or egg-like envelopes containing and nurturing the embryos of new societies. The placenta/egg reference is to be taken at the Apollonian postbio-organic level, that is, "designed according to Mind." The pseudo-organic proposed in some Star Wars movies is to be carefully avoided.

C. For a long time, the new urban systems will be less complex, simple-minded sisters of earthen towns. They will be tentative openings toward a new dimension of space-time.

D. In them, because of their very limited dimensions and complexity, human consciousness will have to cope with the most segregated and potentially deadening situations.

E. In them, given the technologically overpowering presence, the pursuit of knowledge might have as bedfellows rampant technology and exotic hedonism.

F. Since the space environment will be radically different, genetic alteration (both random and purposeful) will be only a question of time, with Silicon Mind at the outer edge of such a metamorphosis.

G. The presence of flag-waving and chauvinism will be pernicious and in need of abatement. Sociocultural obscurantisnl will be the alternative; Star Wars, the game.

H. Technocratic space cities would be as deadly and demeaning as technocratic cities on this planet.

I. The effect of living in the "midst of infinity" will be an enormously confined life: the placenta / egg / embryo syndrome.

J. The journey back to Earth will be cause for celebration and merriment. Upon return, the Earth will be finally perceived as the prodigious reality that it is, in its grandeur of land, sky, water, climate, flora, fauna, and Mind: something to behold in awe, gratitude, and reverence.

5. The Seeding of the Cosmos

The space foray in the proposed phase one must insist on providing guidelines that will be important for the steps that will follow. Therefore:

1. The journey into space must be intentionally naive. Some sort of innocence must be present. One side of this is the background innocence, so to speak, necessary for a fresh take-off in any venture. This innocence is imperative for ideas to take hold. Another side of this is to counter the hold of jaded technology. Technology is of essence to the venture, but unchecked it will generate the technocratic millennium and the obscurantism that inevitably accompany it. Innocence also is a state for "realistic and appropriate" responses to the conditions of gravity release. Besides being the essential builder of organisms (no planet, no organisms), gravity has also been the inexorable executioner. Now that the organism is an established fact (there are billions upon billions of them.), the organism can skirt gravity!? The risks are grave all along the spectrum, mineral to Mind, but the future is there, expectant.

2. The space foray must be intentionally fragile. To announce the release from. gravity and to design coherently with such a release is to meet the challenge of space. This critically new situation must be explicit since it entails a metamorphosis of structures and performances. Dig far enough into machismo (and iron pumping) and you will find gravity. Combine this deliverance from gravity with the placental egg morphology of space communities and we get a "feminine space." In transposing from flesh to hardware we generate what under gravity-rules is fragile.

3. The space foray must be intentionally vulnerable. [t is pure madness to take into space the armor mentality. The more armor we layer around the space habitat, the more it will be vulnerable to the enemies that the armor psychosis will have indulged in creating.

So it is for preemptive, retaliatory, and terror strategies. The dread of destruction by the enemy will probably defeat efforts to go there positively, innocently, lovingly, gracefully, wisely -- a major cosmic defeat for Mind and for a reality that depends so much on Mind for its own entelechy. There lies the tragedy of a crippled / aborted metamorphosis, no longer offered to life in general and to us in particular.

4. The space foray must be intentionally Apollonian, that is, on guard against "organic" abandon, which inevitably ends up in technological rococo, where appearances try to conceal lame conceptual and functional frames. Some of the past and present science fiction films and an avalanche of "Aquarian unfolding of consciousness" illustrations testify to this danger.

The black void of space offers a blank but threatening backdrop (the endless night of space). Serenity of mind, so dependent on beholding, needs reference points, the space habitat, which induces or encourages such serenity. "Dionysian," or worse, Aquarian Rococo full of vacuity and contortions, is the fruitless exorcism of order and hierarchy.

5. The space foray must be intentionally humanistic. At the end of the tunnel, for space, as for all of reality, the question is one of grace (esthetogenesis). If the "arts" are not in the forefront, the possibility of a technocratic, hedonistic, and slothful society will be real. Effortlessness (no gravity) is its own enchantress. Buffered between shifts of high-tech proficiency, one can literally let go, favoring a society that praises technical skill and indulges in psychosomatic abandon.

6. The space foray must be intentionally transnational. The degree of parochialism that might develop in a space habitat can have parallels only in the most rabid racial community, or one consumed by fear, greed, and arrogance. A raging tribal warfare in space would confirm the darkest assessments of the flawed nature of the human animal. Segregation will be contextual in both space and time. The unlivability of space as such, and the distance between various habitats and the Earth, will make interaction and intermingling intermittent at best. The necessary autonomy and self-reliance will encourage the pernicious notion of self-sufficiency.

7. The space foray will be intentionally antisegregational. The notion of a placenta/egg studded by hundreds or thousands of well-hidden cottages is to be dreaded. Privacy will have to be pursued in a clear urban frame. Suburbia has no place in space. It would make people twice removed from other people: segregated houses in a (failed) community, and segregated from the planet. A cosmic suburbia of the planet cannot be burdened with its own suburbia. Any other kind of segregation, as we so firmly practice on Earth, will be as fatal.

Appendix 1

Further Notes on "Why Space Then?"

The following are additional notes stemming from the nine points of section 3.

Point 1: What might unite the species in a common purpose is the quest for meaning and the creation of even more meaning. Knowledge and creativity are two inseparable halves of a reality that is not unfolding, as it is fashionably stated, but rather self-creating. Knowing what is, the past; creating what is not, the future.

Point 2: Technocracy is the bad offspring of technology and needs attention and control. Outer space is where technocracy can become monstrous. Space, as the staging for a war to end all wars, is an acute and terrifying possibility. Our political leaders are descending right now, April 1984, into the trap. With the military entrance into space, "space is here to stay." We had better face it, in all its potentials and ambiguities; both seem to touch infinity. A technocratic explosion in space is to be as dreaded as the thermonuclear confrontation on Earth. In fact, given the exotic nature of both, space milieu and thermonuclear technology, they easily entice germane minds (facts prove unfortunately that, singly and together, they entice mad minds).

Point 3: The breakthroughs in technology and science, directly and indirectly made possible by space, are probably countless. For one, space cuts the leash, if not the chain, with which gravity controls all life. This liberation makes of space the place for ephemeral systems. In daily routines, force becomes secondary. Energy will still be at a premium to produce and run things, ecosystem included. The largest ephemeralization will be, as stated earlier, the enormous scaling down of the amount of mineral media necessary to generate and sustain organisms. What such a quantum leap will produce is a well-guarded secret that the future holds. Eschatologically, it is clearly significant: It points the direction in which, through metamorphosis, consciousness pervades the mineral.

Point 4: The preservation of the planet is not a stewardship proposition. Stewardship is only one ingredient of the process. Recognizing our limited knowledge and wisdom, confronted by demographic pressures and a greed explosion (consumerism), it might be wise to test and alter things and processes away from the planet so as not to compromise forever its capacity to generate and sustain life. Space is thus directly and importantly connected with carrying capacity, hunger, preservation of natural resources, equity, and the quality of life.

Point 5: It is an alternative to fatal confrontation. Even if one dismisses thermonuclear catastrophe, we are left with a planet plagued by strife, enmity, fear, injustice, hunger -- it seems that something extraordinary could be a catalyst for transformation. The reach into space might spark a cosmic flame and shed light on the often petty squabbles besetting the species. The foray into space, a watershed in the evolution of Mind, has the power to do just that.

Point 6: In the long run, the plunge into frugality might be the crucial meaning of the space venture. If generating organisms had been an impossible task without the preceding creation of planetary systems and the bulk of matter they are made of, reality is now hosting organisms that can devise ways that might skirt enormity in favor of subtlety. To put it more equitably: Once enormity (mineral) has generated subtlety (organism), that same subtlety might opt for a more effective and direct process. Such a process is the mining of matter in discriminative ways to make organisms and Minds on one side and silicon intelligence on the other. In such a process, gravity might eventually turn out to be a hindrance.

Points 7 and 9: The Christian precept, "go forth and multiply," is an injunction. Accepting as factual that the makeup of the organism is an original and desirable arrangement of the same basic "mineral stuff" of the universe, the whole of such universe might want to have the privilege of becoming an organism. All said and done, only with the remote possibility of such total metamorphosis, and more (organism becoming Mind) resides the possibility of true equity and true grace. Equity and grace are the imperatives the Mind has generated within reality, and Mind is where, for now, the organism is. The space venture is one primitive step in such a quest, beyond the confines of a planet with a limited life span.

Point 8: The Urban Effect refers to the creation of Mind from matter, and the ever growing complexity by which Mind is carried and developed through time. All organisms are Urban Effects implemented via flesh. An analogy runs between the cells of a well-functioning organism and the individuals who make up a truly urban city, another type of organism. The space settlement is beautifully coherent with the Urban Effect paradigm of Miniaturization-Complexity-Duration, which accompanies the growth of the organism: the coming about of organisms/Mind/urbis with portions of mass/ energy /space/time of diminishing size and diminishing time spans. This will mark a quantum leap, induced by Mind, in its own evolution.

I cannot refrain from pointing out again the great coherence underlying my work of the past thirty years inasmuch as the Fourth-Generation Arcology (The Seeding of Space) is an inevitable development from the three preceding (arcology) Generations. In fact, the absence of the Fourth Generation would leave my body of work at the level of an unborn organism.

Appendix 2

The space iconography will need a more realistic mooring than the "Mother Nature" mystique proposing nature as a benign reality.

DEMYTHOLOGIZE MOTHER NATURE (and "God" in the process).

A human male ejects about 200 million sperm per orgasm. For one hundred such events per year, 20,000 million of these little semicreatures are on their way. [n 50 years, it comes to 1.5 billion. So many of these sperm thus are generated to produce perhaps two to three offspring. [t is like the male population of the planet being sacrificed for the sake of two or three of them.

]n technological terms, the similitude runs this way: A car manufacturer about the size of General Motors has two sets of plants. One provides the engine-transmission blocks (sperm), the other the chassis-body (ovum). Imagine the engine-transmission plant producing 10 million units per year. In 150 years, it produces 1.5 billion units. It sends two to three of these to plant number two and dumps the remaining 1.5 billion. To understand the extravagance of it all, one must add that the complexity of the engine-transmission unit is a tiny fraction of the complexity of the spermatozoa and of the ovum.

God would last no more than a minute as the chairperson of this corporate board. That is, God is as extravagant a notion as that of a benign Mother Nature: a notion as extravagant as a mind can possibly come up with. The fury that life puts in its own will to perpetuate itself is in many respects a mindless game, where compassion can be generated only in numbers (1 billion sacrificial lambs per person).

Naturally the food chain up and down 3.5 billion years of the evolutionary ladder is an endless reenactment of similar extravaganzas. ]n fact, the sacrificial lambs (sperm/ovum) are not half-little persons as "believers" make them to be. They are code manuals for the making of people. Therefore, the God-fearing antiabortionist is in need of some homework. As for the abortionist, he or she might have a problem with his or her God.

The space foray then is not a mystical or Aquarian reentry into Father-Mother. It is, if anything, a new step toward the making of more Mind from (less) mineral media.

Appendix 3

I have felt it important to emphasize the peculiarly feminine nature of space habitat. I should add:

1. The Interiorization of Life. The space foray is interior design by definition. The placenta / egg nature of space colonization is self-evident. Short of NASA's 3 to 5 million chair for space walks, individual life cannot sustain itself in the void. But even the chair is a placental shroud for the astronauts. The envelopes and their contents that we construct out there will have all of the characteristics of a simple-minded egg: favorable environs for life development, homeostasis, pressurization, selective permeability, resilience, containment, synergy, interdependence, cooperation, miniaturization, etc. There are further placental aspects that result from feeding from the outside: energy, information, and that which still comes from the planet and other celestial bodies. The "wombs" we will place there, the unrepentant pirate-adventurer "males," will penetrate in droves to generate life in forms that will eventually be as different from the present as the present is different from that which was "at the beginning."

2. As pointed out earlier, the genesis of machismo can be traced to gravity, inasmuch as n1.uscles are at a premium when heavy work is (gravitationally and thermodynamically) needed.

Iron pumping in the feminine body borders on regression even on this planet, where brawn is becoming "unfashionable" (obsolete). It will be even more so with the prospect of unchaining organisms from gravity. Leanness, effectiveness, swiftness, grace, and (with all respect to the reptilian side of our brain) a higher ratio: brain to flesh, are the more appealing and more futuristic assets we will need. Gladiatorial excesses will be just that, excesses. Space will be the place where these things come to the fore. In fact, the spa phenomenon might just find its justification as an anticipatory enactment of what is needed out there, to keep the body, not in bulging shape, but just in shape. What goes for an organism goes even more so for the physical structures. Architectural and engineering machismo will be redundant -- regression again.

It should then be evident that we should generate gentle, nurturing, and graceful events in our space habitat. What we are in the process of generating, instead, is a technocratic, belligerent, intolerant mode, bulging with threats and chest beating. The urgency is clear and the dilemma is real. On one side lies the emergence of Mind into the cosmos; on the other (he obliteration of Mind from reality. I think this is a choice that the feminine can passionately embrace. That is, to opt for the first, and then to nurture its development. Here is where the appeal stands.

Appendix 4

Technology /Theology

Twins? Enemies? Coworkers? Or parent-offspring?

The following is a synopsis of a theme for the 1984 Thanksgiving and the 1985 fall equinox events at Arcosanti. Though written some time ago (1976), I believe it fits hand in glove with Space for Peace.

The genealogy proposed by religious dogmas is that the Father (God), among his many creatures, generates the human. The human (or "wo-man," a more affirmative term than "man"), in turn, and among other doings, has also invented technology. The principal subject of a conference and celebration on technology/theology, as I anticipate it, will be the probing of such a contention in the face of the following and opposite propositions:

• Technology does not generate from God via wo-man but instead generates God via life.

• Technology generates the cosmic process by operating from an original unexplained condition of being and, all along the evolutionary process of reality, is the deus ex machina; that is, technology is not caused, it is causal.

The fruits of this cosmo technological generation are as yet demonic. Therefore, idolatry for such fruits would be senseless. No one can find idolatry in the absence of the idol. Technology works at the creation of that which is not. That which is not is by definition unfathomable since it does not exist. It cannot be an idol either because an idol is a frozen, unalterable image.

Then reverence for the techno-logical process, the ongoing genesis of the cosmos, might be in order. If such genesis is to have an eschatological resolution, then technology is theology. Since such a goal is only hypothetical, for the time being, technology has to satisfy itself with fragments of divinity: shreds of being, often demonic shreds, the embryo in quest of grace and of an as yet nonexisting divinity.

Appendix 5

From "Space and Man," a paper written In 1976 (The Omega Seed, Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1981).

Synopsis: If science is correct in determining the Earth to be composed of the same stuff that makes up the cosmos, and if life is the biotechnology through which stuff becomes animated, then life, which now appears to be the exception to the rule, could eventually become the rule. If, in addition to being feasible, this potential animation of the cosmos is also desirable, then the responsibility of life lies in the transfiguration of an immensely powerful physical phenomenon into an immensely loving mental one.

The implications of space colonization are critical:

1. The eschatological concern. The question of the ultimate aim and purpose of life, the eschatological paradigm as such.

2. The genetic concern. The splitting of the human species into subspecies (which has prehistoric precedent) as a direct consequence of space being invaded by humanity.

3. The urban concern. The space probe is the urban probe on new grounds. Therefore, the urban question looms ever larger in the destiny of the species.

Depending on how these questions are approached, hope or despair will emerge.

In despair:

1a. We see ourselves as well-worn sorcerer's apprentices, incapable of halting the plunge into technological hubris, which more and more forcefully brings upon us the wrath of our indignant Father, the Lord, and our merciless expulsion from nature's bosom.

2a. The human species, abandoned by the Lord, Providence, and instinctual wisdom, will tear itself apart under the stress of new (evil) environs and spawn inimical subspecies foreign to each other. These will find their own nemeses in specialization, genetic or otherwise.

3a. The human species will make an ever more compromising step into the urban syndrome, seen as the sum of all evil, since space colonization will be directly informed by those conditions that per se define the current urban context.

In hope:

1b. We are making (reaffirming?) a Promethean commitment to Mind by taking action to release it from the gravitational vise of the Earth and by opening the cosmos to urbanization, that is, to Logos.

2b. The human family recognizes its genetic and other limitations and willfully seeks morphologically new cognitive forms for the purpose of outfitting itself for the immense journey into Mind via flesh (mass-energy).

3b. In stepping off the earthly landscape, man is turning toward ever more crucial transphysical conditions. In sum, man will opt for the self-containment of his habitats, their inward orientation, the cooperative and interdependent nature of the social and cultural texture, high-density performance, the imperative of integrity and self-reliance and, finally, the complexity and miniaturization of the milieu. The space city will, therefore, be an unequivocal test of our readiness for the vertigo of a momentous step toward Mind.

The Eschatological Concern

Let's look at the carrying-capacity contest as it seems to have developed. The first living thing on this planet had, as a necessary support system, the entire existing cosmos, since only the existence of a specific if unknown cosmic balance made possible a specific if unknown solar system balance. This made possible on Earth the appearance of a specific organism (one had to be the first). The cosmos in toto was the "territorial imperative" of a bacterialike organism. No cosmos as such, no bacteria as such.

Even at that moment, or a bit sooner, things were becoming autonomous, that is to say, not purely deterministically generated; life forms were not hopeless prisoners of a totalitarian cosmic dictum. The solar system was coming to life; and Earth, for instance, physical balances, were affected by physiological counterbalances. Oxygen was freed into the forming atmosphere through the initiative of living organisms, etc.

A first massive implosion of territoriality from cosmos to solar system, specifically, sun-Earth-moon, was taking place. So it came to be that the territory of each organism was a proportional fraction of Earth bulk to which was added a similarly defined fraction of the sun's energy falling upon the Earth and, in addition, relatively small influences such as moon tides and cosmic radiation.

If one takes a look at the contemporary scene and simplifies the model, one sees that every human being requires the presence and use of a cone of matter (defined by the radius of the Earth, with a base measured by a circle upon the biosphere, atmosphere included) of, let's say, approximately one hundred acres. This gigantic mass, to which must be added its share of sun energy, is but an infinitesimal fraction of the original mass necessary for the advent of the first bacterialike organism -- and we begin to feel crowded, but we also begin to appreciate the providential tendency of life toward frugality.

Providential, since if it were otherwise we would soon be face to face with the fatal dialectic of a self-parting, expanding universe and a level of consciousness that must abide by the fierce rules of shrinking carrying capacity, face to face with lifeboat ethics, triage, etc. That is to say, without the tendency toward frugality, there would not be the rationale of evolutionarily expanding capacity, extension of reach, and contraction of needs, but rather an ontological wall made of indisputable and ultimate stop signs: a dying sun, the size and resources of the Earth, and, consequently, life seen as a short fireworks display of opulence and arrogance.

Where is an even more incredible explosion of frugality in store? It is in the most frugal and crowded mode of all, the brain of man, that powerful cognitions are working out more miracles of contraction and frugality (the Urban Effect in full swing), and, 10 and behold, a few hundred thousand years after the invention of divinity, that prophecy of utter economy, the Mind conceives a fully lived, extraterrestrial existence. The implosion in the brain creates, at least potentially, an explosion of ecologies, eventually unlimited in number, capable of sustaining and developing life, ad infinitum.

If for a moment we assume that we will make the step of colonizing space and do it without diminishing man, then what do we have? An utterly new relationship with the world of matter. We will literally mine the universe, the solar system at first, rearranging and processing matter into the hollow cities of all sizes, types, and populations. The order of the Christian God, "go forth and multiply," would see an unimaginable degree of realization and the carrying capacity of the cosmos would grow exponentially. With this, the lifeboat theory would be blown to bits since it would serve only that righteous society unwilling to get down to tasks and construct new boats, one after the other, on and on forever.

Let's reiterate what would happen to the territorial imperative. With the space venture, the bulk of matter necessary for each person would shrink dramatically from the individual Earthly cone, with a corresponding ecological veneer and sun energy, into a bulk on the scale of a home attached to an urban landscape, to which would be added an open space of some acres or a fraction of an acre and some energy from the sun and stars on which the city might depend. In other words, it would be as if the Earth (or any other celestial body) were to be peeled off in successive skins, each containing an interiorized landscape (cityscape) of minimal physical bulk: a characterization of the human environs as exponentially frugal. Thousands upon millions of hollow worlds, inner-oriented because of locally produced gravity, would invade the universe from as many points in it as there are conscious centers (similar to Earth). Eventually, each galaxy would have the carrying capacity of 4,000 million consciousnesses (the Earth today) billions of times over, a true explosion of consciousness throughout the physical universe.

What is so desirable in such a model? On the personal level, one could ask if one would choose to be born. Even if the personal answer is no, to negate the birth of others, provided there is carrying capacity, would be rude to say the least. On the ontological level, it would seem clear that it is only with the intensification of reality by the presence and action of life that we might eventually bring compassion and grace to the whole cosmos, the integrated universe.

The religious answer, insofar as life and consciousness can be generalized, implies that:

1. consciousness is a prodigious interiorizing stress.

2. consciousness is a prodigious complexifying stress.

3. consciousness is a prodigious miniaturizing stress.

4. consciousness is a prodigious frugalizing stress.

5. consciousness is a prodigious animating stress.

6. consciousness is a prodigious transcending stress.

7. consciousness is a prodigious urbanizing stress.

8. consciousness is a prodigious divinizing stress.

It is only half true that there are only potential powers of consciousness; a cursory survey of life's evolution clearly, if coarsely, demonstrates such power. These implications are all versions of the fact that the eschatological imperative is issued from reality as an inescapable command: do unto matter (the mass-energy universe) what you do unto yourself. Make it into conscious matter, into Logos. That is, demand and force out of an ephemerally conscious universe that which will ultimately be a child God of infinite conscience, infinite integrity, infinite love.

It would be then for the sake of Logos that life must free itself from the Earthly prison. And, if it is possible for life to free itself from the Earth, isn't it then a "mortal" sin not to do so? And isn't the fact that life could not even conceive of leaving the Earth before the appearance of consciousness, and the fact that thousands of years ago the first step toward this leaving expressed itself in metaphorical, religious form, proof of sorts that it is the task of life and specifically of consciousness to do just so?

From a territoriality of the whole cosmos necessary for the appearance of the first living cell on Earth to the minute territoriality of a space city, we can measure the powerful trend toward frugality and the concurrent opening of the whole universe to Mind. Once upon a time, a whole cosmos for one infinitely puny life; eons later, intellection grasps at the alchemy of matter and makes it deliver its latent energy and potential conscience, giving impetus to the possibility of mining the cosmos, of making a moon into "large numbers of Earths."

The ape, tethered by gravity pulling down toward the center of the Earth, has its territorial imperative measured by the ecological capacity of the Earth. With the appearance of the human mind, the tether is potentially cut. The ecological capacity is potentially transferred from the limited Earth to the endless universe. For this potentially quasi-infinite growth of liveliness, two things seem to be indispensable: a quasi-infinite growth of will and a quasi-infinite growth of reverence. Given these, divinity is inherent in the future.

There are two final considerations relative to the eschatological concern:

1. How much or how little we make of liveliness and consciousness-spirit is somewhat irrelevant since no matter what opinion we have of them, to have an opinion, any opinion, is per se an identification of ourselves with them. One option we do not have is to give them up without giving up life itself. The fostering of these elements turns out to be a law of nature that tautologically states that the ultimate meaning of the ensuing process will not disclose itself before its exhaustion. This late disclosure is not due to secrecy but to incompleteness. To reveal itself before the end, the Omega condition, would be an anticipation of creation. Theological structures are anticipation, and as such they are an important exercise for futurism. But by necessity, those exercises fall short of the target, since the target is not there yet; it will be there only at the end of the process.

2. A word about compatibility. Each generation has its own environmental compatibility; that is to say, a person is hard put to reject those conditions with which he has grown up. But each generation has piggybacked on the preceding one. The individual cycle demands a return to the infancy grounds (reentry into the mother; we call it the father), and for each infancy such grounds are the maturity grounds for the parents (the preceding generation). This is providential since it secures both change and continuity. In fact, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to come up with a better scheme. This dialectic of change versus continuity makes conflict inevitable. It follows that it would be not only unrealistic but downright unjust and cruel to want to thrust the move into space upon the present generation as if it were a pleasure trip or a palatable prospect. But it could be for our grandchildren. The fact remains that, notwithstanding the incompatibility parameter, the parameters of territory, carrying capacity, and environmental development are in constant flux and expansion.

13. The Pinocchio Syndrome

Statement for the Tokyo Space Conference

MARCH 19, 1991

To animate matter is the lingering concern of the living.

For the human species it might be translated into how to make matter incandescent with thought. The alternative, possibly the only one, is to make matter incandescent with energy. This might well be the "natural" predisposition of matter and could be implemented by a sequence of Big Bang -- Big Crunch cycles.

The animation of matter is behind our technologies, robotization at the fore now and the microchip as the most fascinating icon. Why such persevering exorcism?

Because we, ourselves, are animated matter.

The (outer) space yearning is part of this animation obsession.

Time after time, priests, despots, kings were beguiled by "animated" contraptions up to the elaborate machinations of the Baroque period, including the spellbinder for the masses: the "live" tower clocks. From toys for kings to toys for the masses was to be one of the glories of Walt Disney and, more recently, the Muppets of Jim Henson.

But all of this is simulation. No one thinks that the singing nightingale of the fable or the speaking Lincoln of Disneyland or the Cookie Monster are truly animated events. They are instead of the real thing. High-tech is targeting an altogether different aim: true animation. The metalife of cyborgs is now in the making. Prosthetic devices are only part, the crude part, of the picture.

Until recently the animation of matter seemed to be indivisible from the incarnation of it. Now we are no longer adamant in thinking that flesh is the only stepping stone toward Mind (ani-mation), though we still are inclined to see flesh as a sort of Maxwell's Demon at the gates of the metamorphosis: matter-Mind. The nature of the space venture will depend on the resolution of such ambiguity: Is flesh the only animating agency or are we on the way to at least paralleling it with "artificial intelligence" animation?

How is the animation of matter achieved? By the gathering, via space-time, of matter's "particle-waves" in exotic, rare, unheard of bundles of enormous complexity. A seed is a good example of such a gathering. A seed, any seed, vegetable, animal, calls upon the cosmos for the basic building blocks to construct itself into a full-fledged organism.

In a quickened cinematic sequence, the conception, development, and maturation of an organism is an undeniable implosive process of cosmic character because the call of the seed is responded to by cosmic neighbors, the sun for one. It is also undeniable that at death the implosive process is reversed; in a quickened cinematic sequence, we witness now an explosive process of a lesser cosmic dimension. The components of that which has become a corpse leave the exbody one by one to diffuse into the surroundings. Birth has catholic resonances; death has parochial tantrums.

It is easy to see that the implosive vivifying phase is a Complexifying-Miniaturizing event. The most intriguing fruit of such vivification is memory (memorizing). Memory is the context of a reality that is no longer subservient to space-time -- it is Duration, where true "everlasting" animation is. Duration is not simulation, that is, something instead of something else. Duration is the real thing.

The stuff of the ecominutiae will be shot through and through with Duration or by the incipient axiality Duration defines. In a way the ecominutiae will contain the highest percentage of animation because most of their composition will be "matter" filters -- that is, they will be metamorphosed by Mind. Thus, when triggered, the ecominutiae will be exceptionally frugal phenomena. They will even do away with gravity.

The Ecominutiae are proposing that space will be dotted, at least for some generations to come, with minute, oversimplified, semiautonomous ecosystems with mankind still at the helm. For the ecominutiae, the road to animation is still the road of the flesh. As for Pinocchio, "he" would have to wait a little longer (and find himself not flesh and bone but microchips and menus) and then find space to be perhaps less forbidding and less hostile to anima.

14. Paradox

A Work-Based Project Sponsored by the Cosanti Foundation

AUGUST 1997

Since Arcosanti is a place in search of the Miniaturized by way of Complexity and since cyberspace is a nonplace in search if the complex by way if Miniaturization, I am proposing an internship for insider-outsider interaction via the practice if building and living in a nonvirtual environment frugally imprinted, a habitat dedicated to urbanization.

At Arcosanti, our work is constructed of a prototype arcology. The particular construction project associated with the Paradox Project is the Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Complex, which includes the Loggia, Greenhouses, and the Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Cloister.

Located on the south slopes of Arcosanti, the complex is mainly intended to be the eventual residence and workplace for participants in the Paradox program, those who are at home on the Internet, those developing their nexus with cyberspace. It is important that the participants understand and identify with the complex they are building. It is named after the Jesuit priest and paleontologist who in the 1940s presented the idea of the noosphere, an anticipation of cyberspace and the Internet. It would be extremely appropriate to use his name in this context.

Paradox, the program residing in the Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Complex, is proposed as a neomonastic internship. "Internship" points out that residence in the complex is limited in time so as to be a structured experiential situation where the "virtualities" of the Internet are juxtaposed with the "concreteness" of Arcosanti.

1. The Angelization of Homo Sapiens and a Neomonastic Internship at Arcosanti

This is an appeal directed to the small minority of cybernauts who in the middle of their intellectual and financial successes seem to be disaffected and possibly in an undefinable state of anxiety about the reality they are in.

Paradox is an initiative arcing from the precomputer culture, the outsiders, toward the cyberspace culture, the insiders.

Some of the Paradoxes

A. Currently, cyberspace ephemeralization is optimally exercised in physical isolation. The single person is in her equipped room away from distraction and focused on simulations and virtualities.

B. This condition suggests two paradoxes:

• Although the suburban or country home or mansion is the optimal location for the pursuit, it is the most consumptive icon of our American Dream culture. It is the epitome of hyperconsumption under the premise of hyperproduction, which is an ephemeralization based on unheard-of materialization.

• The age of information is implemented via the renunciation, if not denunciation, of body-mind to body-mind interaction in favor of the mind-machine-mind exchange.

This is the tangible anticipation of a global hermitage age.

C. The exotic technology of Miniaturization (microchip, nanotechnology, etc.) is at the service of a culture in love with bigness: the mansion, the car fleet, the sports equipment, the superhighways; bigger and multiplying devices, power tools ... bigger people ... This culture needs to be addressed by an "opposed" culture of Complexification generated by the urban condition and dedicated to a frugalization of needs and means, that is, the implosion (Miniaturization) of habitat and equipment. This is an interiorization process, the opposite of the ephemeralization of cyberspace pursued in the hyperconsumption environment, the suburban- exurban developments of the American Dream.

D. Arcosanti is asking the cybernauts to experience for one year or so a condition that might look antipodal to the one they have conquered: the experiential process of building Arcosanti and the faculties where they and their peers may reside in a neomonastic internship.

E. Arcosanti will offer the cybernaut the paradox of one year of targeted, frugal neomonasticism. We are offering not a contemplative Buddahood, but an active and less narcissistic "cement mixerhood."

F. Notwithstanding the methodological diversities of the two emerging lineages of insiders-outsiders, they are both guided by the double Techne of Miniaturization and Complexification. The prodigious fruit of such normative dynamics is Duration, the increasing ability of reality to memorize its own doing and by way of that constantly move itself toward its own self-creation and its own possible self-revelation.

Other relevant paradoxes:

G. the authors of the global hermitage, which is the building of cyberspace, working and living with the seekers of urbanization in the Arcosanti urban laboratory;

H. Homo carbonis calling upon Homo carbonis on his way to inventing Homo siliconis, aware of the immense horizon for good and evil such an invention makes feasible;

I. the "Great Collective Project," the Internet, testing its own universality in the most modest of all modest undertakings, Arcosanti.

This experience will promote a sort of gentle conversion for both cybernauts and Arcosantians developing via the perception of a new presence, an asexual presence: the intelligent machine.

There are additional points that make this project attractive to both Arcosanti and the Internet community:

• the potential for unpredictable developments.

• the potentially vibrant atmosphere generating from matching the Internet with the urban effect.

• the specifically feminine concern about the asexual persona and motherhood.

• the cosmopolitan makeup of Arcosanti enhanced by the Paradox Project and offered back to the participants in the program.

• the occasion for lasting relationships among participants.

• the rich documentation Paradox can generate.

• the extraordinary circumstances of Paradox.

• the potential for a global movement generated by the relationship of the Internet community and Arcosanti, with both entities dedicated to the methodology of Miniaturization and Complexification producing Duration, "living memory."

The Intent

The intent of the program is to find the linkage between and the dependency affecting the "old" culture and the new theology of hypermedia and simulation and to seek a win-win methodology.

But first I must explain the "prejudice" of an old outsider vis-a-vis the dedicated young insider: Accept, embrace the technology. Reject, refute the theology, a cult.

In the larger horizon, I am prejudicial in my belief that all theologies, well meaning or not, are deceptions (virtual realities sold as reality) and the stronger the deception, the stronger the perniciousness. The history of the great "religions" and the history of despotism in general give credence to my prejudice.

Cyberspace and Hyperconsumption

The paradox in the basic ephemeralization of virtual reality is that such a process is generated by "solitary" minds, between themselves and the machine, the computer. Therefore, the "ideal" setting is the segregation of suburbia and exurbia. This is phase one of the global hermitage.

But suburbia and exurbia are a consumption machine, the consumption machine by definition. Such consumption and sprawl are the opposite of Miniaturization and Complexification in pursuit of Duration. This is the paradox of hyperconsumptive cyberspace.

The monkey or the fox runs away with his banana or his bloody bone to a corner to make it into his own flesh. The human who has grabbed the toy of her choice does the same thing. She runs away to her cubicle to play with it to make the cyberflesh mechanism.

From the gilded log cabin in the wilderness, I, as the Netizen, have the whole world at my fingertips. But that does not deliver water, power, groceries, company, etc., to me. It does not deliver me from waste, dependence, sickness, or from materiality in general.

There is a self-righteous "you'd better serve me, society" streak to all of this. "Bring me the paved road, the mail delivery, the fire protection, the ambulance service, the school bus, and all the amenities that may make me a social, vicarious, voyeuristic animal. You'd better deliver the goods to me! They come to me as a right. I am a hedonist at heart and proudly so at the top of the materialistic ziggurat, and from there, I will enjoy the virtues of cyberspace (!?)."

The reason for my unease is simple:

It is via the gilded log cabin habitat that the planet and everything in it are in grave danger. Ten billion wealthy hermits are nemeses not geneses. More the worse if only 1 billion hermits are the objects of envy from the other 9 billion.

The "I do what I like as long as I can buy it" mindset is a pernicious illusion capable of destroying us. Irrational greed is its platform. It is irrational because it is fundamentally incoherent.

One hermit is a curiosity. Ten billion hermits or even 1 billion of them is a brutal wound to the best that is in us: the beauty and the pain of belonging, belonging body and mind. Hermits do not produce or partake in civilization; they use it. Hermitage is the stuff of nemesis. So it will be for cyberspace if we are not painfully aware of its limits and the ethical envelope it has to come with.

A hermit species has never and will never produce language, the book, the hospice, music, electricity, science, technological might, textiles, the radio, the car, the airplane, the rocket ... medicine, wealth, security, culture ...

Part of the exhilaration of industriousness is industriousness per se, the "sweating" reconfigurations of matter out of matter. That is the magic of the trio hand-brain-mind and of all the panoply of senses and sensitization, including contemplation and meditation. Beware, though, of the lifelong, professional, meditating hermit. He is the stuff of which parasitism is made.

But is all of this idle talk about silicon intelligence? Perhaps it is.

A Neomonastic Internship

This neomonastic internship is an experience of a year or so where the participant is not offered "new" theological truth, but where a "religion" hypothesis based on binding through a self-revelation of reality is suggested.

Self-revelation does not refer to an individual "trip," but to a cosmic Journey.

The splintering of two or more lineages of humans makes religion, from the root religio, the binding of all and everything, an imperative, in fact, the imperative. It is an imperative that goes beyond racial and even genetic confrontations because it covers the cosmos at large and in it the unanswered question of equity, meaning, and beauty.

Maintaining that the writing of history (evolution) is fundamentally the exploit of an inseparable triad -- Miniaturization, Complexity, and Duration, where Duration is the brainchild of Miniaturization and Complexity -- I suggest that cyberspace, a fruit of hyperminiaturization in search of Complexity, and the Arcosanti project, predicated on Complexification searching for urban Miniaturization, might develop a state of fruitful tension here on the grounds of Arcosanti.

Neomonastic?

The experience will not be in the domain of hyperconsumption encouraged by our culture and by cyberspace, but in the domain of frugality. We must choose frugality in view of its hold on interiorization and its coherence with the limitations and the glories of the planet.

In a way, reality in its atomic makeup, the "outside" that is Arcosanti, is "confronting" the photon reality, which is the cyberspace diet delivered to the hermitage of the insider. Learning will come about mostly via environmental immersion, with its points of pleasure and displeasure, the participants partake of together. "Together" is a premise to binding, religio.

A year is optimal for perceiving and comprehending the impact of an annual cycle of seasons, activities, programs, and growth, bearing in mind that the scope of the program is the discovery or rediscovery of the power and the inescapability of the physical, be it animated or inanimate. This comprehension is inversely proportional to the degree of independence and the halo of alienation we interpose via our great ability to know how to do things using technology, the Howness of technology, and the drag hyperconsumption injects in the process.

This is where frugality appears as a positive determinant.

In the whole process, frugality has to be a dynamic presence inasmuch as it has to be contrasted with the hyperconsumption of the present technocratic societies and the chronic indigence of the have-nots.

A worthy quest is to seek that condition where the insiders, now poised for the greatest riches, the outsiders who are the wealthy and affluent, and the have-nots are equal agents in constructing societies and culture.

Frugality, a matter of Mind as much as a matter of money, can cut through the four domains and encourage the interiorization of life and its values.

SINCE ARCOSANTI IS A PLACE IN SEARCH OF THE MINIATURIZED BY WAY OF COMPLEXITY, AND SINCE CYBERSPACE IS A NONPLACE IN SEARCH OF THE COMPLEX BY WAY OF MINIATURIZATION, I AM PROPOSING AN INTERNSHIP FOR INSIDER-OUTSIDER INTERACTION VIA THE PRACTICE OF BUILDING AND LIVING IN A NONVIRTUAL ENVIRONMENT FRUGALLY IMPRINTED, A HABITAT DEDICATED TO URBANIZATION.

What could emerge at Arcosanti with the neomonastic internship is an enclave with some similarity to the university and to the monastery. Included in this experience is a "faculty" from the residents of Arcosanti and the student with a stay of one or more years, a mix of residents and "out of towners," including Arcosanti's traditional "workshoppers" and guests, living alongside the construction and maintenance people, the cooks, the bakers, the gardeners, etc.

The insider, generally age 25 to 40, is offered a process where insiders and outsiders work at building a nonvirtual reality, under the constraints of frugality, where the Complexity of reality encounters the Miniaturization of cyberspace, not in battle formation, but in a genuine reciprocal openness of Mind and intensity of work.

After the internship, the "has been" insider agrees to return periodically for an exchange of information and ideas and also to express conflicts or resolutions derived from the double or triple experience. The Miniaturization of cyberspace is foiled with the Complexity of a developing urban effect at Arcosanti on the background noise of hyperconsumption and its suburban and exurban matrix.

The restructuring of Arcosanti's programs to accommodate such an internship is what Arcosanti needs to remain in the learning-by-experiencing mode, the urban laboratory mode. This will put Arcosanti at the very edge of the cyberrevolution. It is to the advantage of Arcosanti to be invested full force by the cyber-revolution introduced by young and spirited cybernauts.

Given the frugality imperative endorsed by Arcosanti, the experience will keep at the forefront the unresolved, possibly unresolvable, problem of the have-nots.

fn brief, the purpose of the Paradox program is to offer the experience as an alternative for:

• the hyperconsumer;

• the insider, the focus of the Paradox program;

• the idle of means;

• the anguished of means.

It is an alternative fundamentally in search of a more frugal and more equitable life and behavior, personally and physically building the environment, the urban laboratory that alight best fit the intent.

The program at Arcosanti should start at about the spring equinox of 1998. The main experience is in the actual construction of the Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Complex. Construction will take up to five hours a day, five days a week, of each Paradox participant's time. The Arcosanti construction staff will participate in and guide the construction work. The internship will be no less than 100 days, with an ideal ceiling of about 365 days, one year. The participants will pay a total of $35 per day to cover tuition, room, and board.

The Schedule:

Internships could run from the first Sunday in April to the following year's spring equinox.

1998: First internship year for a minimum of five and a maximum of fifteen cybernauts who will work at the Teilhard de Chardin Complex.

1999: Second internship for ten to twenty cybernauts who will start work on the Loggia, the "permanent" residence for cybernauts at Arcosanti.

2000: Third internship for twenty or more cybernauts who will pursue work on the Loggia and the Greenhouses. We will break ground on the Teilhard de Chardin Cloister, which along with the Loggia and Greenhouses will constitute the entire complex for this program at Arcosanti.

This is a search for a modus vivendi inclusive of the non-affluent and the have-nots at the very edge of cyberspace, the new powerhouse for intellection. Reminder: Today's Homo sapiens, utterly dependent for eons on the quest for Miniaturization at sonic-speed brain performance, is becoming utterly dependent on a novel Miniaturization at microchip-light speed. A demise of Homo sapiens' quest for Miniaturization is tantamount to a demise of Homo sapiens as a species.

2

In a somewhat hyperbolic way I want to survey a few points.

Carbon versus Silicon

With the dawning of self-consciousness, a privilege of Homo sapiens, the notion of transcendence is born.

Transcendence limited to this small planet is self-defeating because a transcendence without inclusiveness tastes like ego-tripping, while transcending the ego is the gist of transcendence. Transcendence is of the cosmos at large or it remains a longing at best, a splinter of intolerance at worst.

Carbon-based life will not make it. Its ability to survive extremes of temperature, pressure, chemicals, radiation, and the environment is extremely limited. "Out there" the flesh is a costly burden, and "out there" is where the whole cosmos is the candidate for self-consciousness and transcendence.

Unless there is a momentous breakthrough, efficient carbon-based life will have to be confined to the skin of planet Earth. Given what is perhaps the unparalleled biochemical versatility of carbon, that is, its potential for intense sophistication, which is already well exemplified by the food chain, this narrow range of location for survival might present dilemmas that will permeate the spectrum of reality.

As things stand now, we operate with silicon "intelligence," which we employ for the exploration of Mars at a small fraction of the risk and cost of a similar operation using carbon-based life.

Our versatility in our ability to know how to do things, "Howness versatility," a trait peculiar to our carbon brain, delivers its operative skill to "presence," when carbon-based life is in the immediate presence of who or what it is interacting with, far better than to "remoteness," when there is a distance filled by technology. The quality of interaction in presence is far different than the quality of remote interaction. Space and reality are stubborn about this: Organisms are self-designed and implemented spaces within spaces within spaces. They are not virtualities within virtualities.

A transcending operation or interaction by carbon-based intelligence might act remotely, but this still is in the realm of carbon-based incarnation confined to the biosphere.

In terms of intellection, silicon might turn out to be a flatland compared to what Complexity and Miniaturization can do in the carbon-based domain where the nanotechnology of the brain is extended to the mono-cellular (or smaller) domain of viruses and their friends.

The atomic-molecular is the runway for the takeoff into a possible, if not probable, transfiguration. It seems that photons might be at last the most appropriate vehicle for this transfiguration: Light speed is God's speed. For such an advent, the whole of reality will need reconfiguration. That is where the gods will be created. All our invented gods, simulated and virtual, are bloodstained and desperately parochial.

Brain-Machine

For the first time in history, man's thinking and tinkering is going on between the brain-mind and a nonorganic device, the computer. An innerness, the Mind, and an outerness, the computer, are in discourse. A miniaturized-complex domain, the brain-mind, interacting with a complicated-miniaturized domain, the computer, the carbon cycle and silicon cycle are coming together in a first encounter.

In a kind of humility, the cybernauts relocate themselves in the silicon domain of the microchip, their new world and their new faith. They seem to unload their carbon Complexity in the arms of the complicated silicon "out there," which, in a sort of bouleversement, turns out to be the inside to which they now belong. As insiders they are the true believers, the custodians of what has to come, the Chosen People.

Outsiders-Insiders and the Chosen-People Syndrome

Insideness implies coexistence with outsideness. The outsiders are those people who, because of circumstances and / or by choice, do not belong to the community of the insiders, the cybernauts. The strong faith of the cybernauts has the connotations of a theology: revelation acted upon will bring salvation. "We, the Insiders, the Salvation Army, consciously or not, we are the Chosen People."

By now we all should know what happens to humanity afflicted and infected by the Chosen People malady and the curse we bring upon ourselves through it. "We" take turns at it. The result is pain, suffering, hatred, inequity, and intolerance.

Homo Carbonis/Homo Siliconis

Imagine our distant, silicon progeny discovering the remains of Homo carbonis.

Spellbound by the magic of life in my Homo carbonis garment, even more so by the intelligence generating in it, and now spellbound by the anticipations of what an eventual artificial intelligence can generate with all of its virtualities and, arguably, its virtuosity, I am distressed by the possible splitting of intelligent life into distinct lineages, one estranged from the other.

It might not be too soon to seek ways to bind (religio) the separate fate of the two into a more synergetic destiny, possibly for a common purpose: the sensitization and metamorphosis of reality into pure knowing.

What I find exciting in this anticipation is that it seems to fall neatly in place within the MCD hypothesis of increasing Miniaturization, generating an increase of Complexity, compelling a reluctant reality to take the road toward Mind: Mind as Duration, the offspring of Miniaturization and Complexification.

The split of carbon and silicon could be horrendously harsh and cruel. Therefore, the binding-religio-religion may present itself as an imperative. To complicate things is the hyperconsumeristic-materialistic bent of technological societies, a steamroller cornering the soul (Mind) into smaller and smaller quarters of a shrinking horizon.

Homo siliconis should not take part in such a squeeze. To the contrary, it should be, as the MCD paradigm proposes, a powerful and purposeful new impulse toward the Mindification of reality.

But within artificial intelligence might eventually develop an internal (inside the computer) initiative to ban Homo carbonis from its own newly generated domain. To ban it to the servo-system domain, a domain instrumentalizing the evolution of Homo siliconis, the new species. (A luddite movement could develop in the ranks of dispossessed Homo carbonis.)

The silicon butler of the house, androgynous and Apollo- Cartesian, would become the new master ... the Master Race. The carbon "has-been" master of the house, bisexual and Dionysio-Pascalian, would become the new maid of the house (even silicon needs shelter) ... the slave race.

The intellection graph of the master is straight and climbing, with no sex and no sexual violence, no infancy or senility, and no life-death anguish. The master never dies. Silicon is above the fray.

The new theologians, the cybernauts, have invented God. He takes over and finds his carbon ancestry no longer useful. One of the first proclamations of God will concern "pulling the plug": automatic and immediate capital punishment. Electricity is the blood running photons in the fiber optic of its artery.

Is the androgynous ideal we see gaining popularity in the United States an anticipation of and a wish for artificial intelligence to take over? "The baby maker and her womb? Isn't that embarrassing?" Master Androgynous chirps.

In the budding cybertheology are the germs for the splintering of human history:

The genome that holds the "Truth," the insiders' lineage; the genome that does not hold the truth, the outsiders' lineage.

The holders of the "Truth" are the Chosen Ones. Given the uniqueness and novelty of the cyberspace theology with the immense power the computer confers to it, the dilemma for Homo sapiens is epochal.

To splinter and not to splinter? It must be noted that in other domains such a dilemma has inevitable resolutions. For instance, in space we will sooner or later develop the lineages of Earth man/Space man ... Cyber man ...

Going by the "codes" of the cyber-revolution pacemakers, a differentiation is in the making right under our eyes, and it is inevitable. Two lineages develop: The insiders, in a minority, are the holders of "the force," while the outsiders, in a majority, are no longer in touch with the truth. They now compose a servo-system for the insiders. Once upon a time they incarnated human life in its full enigmatic self. Now they are viewed by the insiders as sclerotic.

Even a sustained injection of tolerance in the shared process of living on one planet will turn out to be barely sufficient to maintain the two lineages in a semblance of mutual respect, if not harmony. The fact is they cannot go on by themselves.

Whenever the Chosen People syndronie comes up, the level of suffering inevitably rises. The conflict between the two Chosen People lineages, the Jews, a minority with a long and prodigiously tormented history, and the Nazis with their sudden virulence in all its cruel warpage of values, is but one tragic example.

The Global Hermitage

(The global village has always been necessarily a poor Utopian notion.) The global hermitage that the insider hermits are moving into is the place where the very nature of the technology of Miniaturization forces the flesh with its 3.5 eons of baggage to step aside or simply be put in charge of the care, maintenance, satisfaction, and possibly even reproduction of the elected hermitage dwellers.

The insider, potentially asexual, lineage is occupied intensely, often exclusively, by the brain-machine interaction. The astonishing feat of the brain's Complexity matching its power, courtesy of Duration, with the magic feat of Miniaturization in the form of the "vanishing" microchip is the matching or mismatching of an atomic domain working at close to sonic speed, with the photon domain working at light speed.

The cyberspace evolution seems to be in constant need of "uncontaminated" minds. That is why it proselytizes successfully among five-year-olds, and why, beyond the drive for artificial intelligence, it also has a self-immolation, a martyrdom side: the demise of the flesh lineage as soon as no "real" advantage remains in carrying on with the carbon-cycle intellection.

It would be a cruel irony that a millennium ago, 30 was the age of demise, and now at the 80-year average threshold we find ourselves arguing for a demise at 30. Biologically speaking, 30 years make sense. Reproductive responsibility has been covered, and from there it is simply a question of vegetating while being a minimal burden on the species. In the mammalian kingdom postmature animals are a sad show, meat for the predators.

How, Where, When

Reconfiguration is the task of Techne: to make this into that. The whole evolutionary Becoming is the making of this into that. And, by the way, this reconfiguration of space is probably all there is. If so, time is a purely mental invention with not one ounce of reality attached to it.

Western man took the lead in exobiological Techne with the scientific and industrial revolutions. As the end of the second millennium (in Christian theology) approaches, the miracle of Techne, applied science, is the silicon microchip, the sought-out, artificial intelligence -- cyberspace invention.

This is another "triumph" of Miniaturization on the back of organic and neural Miniaturization. This means that the innerness typifying Complexity, the inside drive of organisms, is generating the complicated in the arms of Miniaturization. In this outer reconfiguration of space in search of memory, or Duration, we found the atom too coarse, too large, and too slow. We have to base our memory search on light, the photon. Immense Miniaturization must now seek immense Complexity so as to generate immense memory, Duration.

In this scenario, time, a symbol of reconfiguration of space, is more and more squeezed out of reality by the limitless urge of our incredible ability to know how to do things, of Howness. "Infinite" Miniaturization, "infinite" Complexification, and infinite "memory" are all the necessary ingredients for self-revelation: Duration as reality in Being.

In this ephemeralization, an "angelic" attribute, the "where" and the "when," remain critical but will begin to show their marginality in a reality that could eventually drop them altogether. It would have to: "Being" by definition has no "where-ness" or "when-ness."

What

Attached as we seem to be to the notion of a necessary creator, God, I would suggest that godliness is BEING aware of itself. Such a self-revelatory state of reality is necessarily beyond space-time because it is the full memory of the whole past, the Becoming of evolution, in its utterly detailed self. And space-"time" works in the Becoming domain, not in the Being domain. At the end of space-time is "where" BEING is.

Astonishing and frightening as the implications of this "Howness" generating "Whatness" are, the very nature of cyberspace, the MCD paradigm ad infinitum, shows the way to the "angelic" character of a successful evolutionary drift.

Astounded and frightened, we stand, vis-a-vis the first elementary steps in such a direction, toward Duration deploying crude fragments of a transcendence, which through technology, the How, breaks the planetary confinement.

If we let Howness run away from knowledge and wisdom, we will be in a frenzy of arrogance and brute force, transforming the self-Chosen People, the insiders, into the new despots running amok in a disintegrating world.

Why?

We must reject all theologies proclaiming exclusivity on the "Truth," and they all are forced to do so by their very genesis. We must reject the notion of a benevolent reality anxiously nudging life toward such nonexistent truth. The Mind, self-consciousness, is life to cope with the powerhouse that reality is.

Reality is indifferent to life, running according to its own unreflecting rules, and steamrolling more and more into mindlessness: a reconfiguring of space with no aim, a purely technological, entropy-oriented, cosmic bravado.

But puny mind is still a great inventor-creator. Intellection, love, compassion, altruism, and grace must give and maintain the right spin to the cosmological-technological tide, a spin away from determinism, destruction, intolerance, and violence.

If successful, at the very end of the evolutionary tunnel could be the esthetic resolution, self-revelatory and equitable, the grace of durational Being. It would be the fully implemented "KNOW THYSELF" of reality on its all-inclusive cosmic scale. I call it the Omega Seed.

15. Business as Usual?

OCTOBER 1999

Prepared for UNESCO

The cyberspace revolution in all of its ephemeralizing virtue seems to produce a run toward materialization, a paradox if ever there was one. It is the materialization of riches and riches that promises, for at least sometime, a new depth of inequality, that is, inequity. This is a profound transformation in the human condition, and it might demand some changes via "seminal" ideas.

Since agriculture and habitat are the two main presences at the service of man on the planet, it is critical that we do the right thing when and where they (food and shelter) are concerned. It is my opinion that we, especially the USA, do poorly in habitat. I call the USA habitat a run toward catastrophe.

The American Dream dwells on the family home (what might be left of it), which translates into a truly colossal, self-perpetuating "produce-consume unlimited" powerhouse.

Mankind and the biosphere are on the block, so to speak, if the Americas, Africa, India, China, and the whole planetary real estate catch on and up with the American Dream: The planet itself would be a global hermitage in endless gridlock with itself. A logistical system of preposterous dimension will imprison the land and its dwellers, bipedal, quadripedal, and all. The waste, the destruction, the pollution, and the segregation would be "biblical." Democracy would be a dream lost in the nooks and crannies of fading notions of equity and compassion. Greed would be rampant and as raging as it would be frustrated. The physical gridlock would be a tangible, mirror image of the ethical-creational gridlock of brain-mind.

The laws of nature, gravity and thermodynamics, at the head, would be sufficiently ignored to make the Garden of Eden, the universal hermitage, into an unsustainable, pernicious dream.

There might be only one alternative to the advancing nightmare: the lean, intense, rewarding, and (quite) possibly more equitable urban habitat. The cradle of civi-lization again called upon to serve mankind.

Successful life is reachable only via the lean organism and its peers' association. That a person might survive and act out his or her life on a few ounces of nutrition per day is leanness personified. The miracle of life, now about 3.5 billion years in the making, is also a long tale about the unfitness and the incoherence of the gigantic. Exurbia is the most gigantic among giants, a true perversity. (Wait and see.)

Once the Londons, the Bedins, the New Yorks, the New Delhis, the Beijings, and all are suffocated by the metastasis of exurbia and then abandoned for the dreamed country living, the country will have disappeared and the hermits, bolted in front of the virtual delivery of pseudolife, won't have the city to kick around anymore, just the gray estrangement of endless enclaves, the isolation booth of suburbia transmuted into the exurban materialistic dream.

The Internet says the shopping center is on its way out. Right, every household is becoming a shopping center. And nothing is more inducive to buying than a shopping center. Making habitation and shopping access into one is to give new fuel to the production-consumption cycle. The weekly or so excursion from garage to the shopping center becomes the daily browsing of the Internet in the living room. A merchandizing coup of vast proportions and even greater consequences. The global hermitage becoming global merchandizing hermitage has to face among others the delivery diaspora, to the joy of the trucking industry and to the gridlock of bad dreams. A further grand step toward materialization made possible, "instigated," by the ephemeralization of the Internet.

Escalating consumerism and escalating expectations are inseparable when a society puts a premium on opportunism. Soon greed is iconized, and from there only one route is considered worth following, the road to riches. It goes straight into the shopping centers, the real one and the virtual one. Now the real one and the virtual are con-fusing into one, the planetary hermitage with the WWW finger tips on the marketplace, a global, if potential, nemesis.

16. Arcosanti Is an Urban Laboratory for a Lean Society (AULLS) and Brief Encounters

DECEMBER 1999

Premise of "Brief Encounters"

AULLS is the critical mass of Arcosanti, an anticipated town of about seven thousand people. With the residential private spaces comes "instantaneous" access to production, merchandising, learning, health, entertainment, the arts, promenading, socializing, and the pristine land.

1

The critical mass of Arcosanti involves one thousand residents interested in building and experiencing a habitat that might produce answers to some of the problems Homo sapiens is facing: hyperconsumption, environmental collapse, sprawl, waste, pollution, physical and cultural segregation, materialism, violence, mediocrity, despair, intolerance, xenophobia.

In order to become a persuasive instrument, Arcosanti must grow into its own critical mass. That means to go from its present population below one hundred to a population above one thousand. If this becomes possible, the alternative of the lean society will have an important testing ground that has performed in a lean economy for over thirty years. The implications are many and more than just worth considering.

Within ten years, society may find itself on an exhausting incline. We think that an Arcosanti critical mass might be an important mooring for the assessment of the cyberspace-virtual, superaffluent culture.

The fact is, the website is shattering boundaries, national borders included, and the augmenting power of the noosphere is undergirded by multiplying unknowns, a frailty constitutional to all complex systems. We may need to divest ourselves of some of the "attraction" posted at every corner.

It is in view of this that the life of a lean nature might become optimal if not indispensable, and in view of this my appeal goes far beyond the idiosyncratic and self-promoting. We are seeking financial input from those financial-corporate centers that can well afford an investment. Even though, as things are historically running, the investment could be viewed as a just-in-case eventuality. Many of us unbelievers go to mass, just m case.

2

There are evolutionary and revolutionary sides to AULLS.

Evolutionary if we accept the notion that the intensity and worth of life are proportional to the complexity of the experience and to its containment in ever more ephemeralizing minimal (physical bulk) containers. An indictment of materialism and its devolutionary stresses.

Revolutionary if we accept the notion that the "established" financial, productive, societal, and cultural agencies we developed in the last thousand years or so are no longer capable of keeping the door open to personal and collective fulfillment. The missing ingredient may be a better perception of the potentially noble construct of the human genome (revolution escalating into evolution).

We had a green revolution; we are in the midst of the silicon revolution; we are in need of a transcendence revolution. A transcendence firmly anchored to the physicality of the real.

The fact is, of the many present conditions keeping us within the hyperconsumption mode, the exurban habitat and its indispensable automobile logistics are the two emblematic agencies that together might do in our civilization as we know it. We are told that cyberspace will come to the rescue and the planet will enjoy the Garden of Eden made of 3 billion or so ("family") hermitages. A delusion in grand scale and paradoxically, a delusion where materialism and "virtuality" -- that is, ephemeralizations -- will be in a neat paradoxical and squalid embrace.

The awareness of widespread inequity nibbles or bites at the freewheeling of our hedonistic incline. We are victimized by our "happiness" and it isn't just guilt; it's also fear. Fear of the senseless, of the meaningless, of the transient, of futility charged with anguish ... and we want to be "practical" about the whole thing! But the practical thing has a fractal and two-dimensional governor. It keeps cloning itself over and over again.

AULLS does not want to be another of those glamorizations of wrongness. The orthodoxy of the marketplace is routinely challenged. AULLS could be a very unorthodox and fruitful challenge.

As an alternative, AULLS should not adopt the ways of that which it is intent at finding alternatives to. A new territory ceases to be new when it is hemmed or hammered down into an old territory.

AULLS IS NOT A MONEY-MAKING ENTERPRISE. IT IS A FINANCIAL INVESTMENT THAT IN A "LABORATORY" MODE SEEKS TO GENERATE PROCEDURES AND UNDERSTANDING ABOUT THE ARGUABLE "LEAN ART OF LIVING" DEMANDED BY A LIMITED BIOSPHERE, BY A POPULATION OF 8 TO 12 BILLION PEOPLE, AND FOR A MODICUM OF DIGNITY, EQUITY, EXCELLENCE, AND HOPE.

If the American Dream turns out to be obese, mediocre, and inconsistent in the biosphere-human boundaries, the experience of a lean commitment in tune with some of the Founding Fathers' ethics might be essential if not providential.

3

Arcosanti refers to the residences and to the many resources the town intends to develop as its normal infrastructure: learning, industry, services, health, culture, entertainment, horticulture, sports.

The project does not offer financial returns for the first ten or more years. It offers a laboratory, a concrete foundation for learning, experience, knowledge, methodologies, experimentation, discoveries, applicable norms, know-how, etc.

The "instrument" in its laboratory prototyping is a threedimensional landscape in construction, exonerated from the usual consensus (part of the alternative process).

The patrons and benefactors (a corporate alliance initiative) provide the financial resources that will maintain the process as an urban laboratory.

The residents pay for their stay. That is, they cover a percentage of the running costs of the project. The transient "under" class is "central" to the project, and their cost to the project is covered by patrons and benefactors (see "The Brief Encounter Initiative" below).

4

For about 35 years (the Cosanti Foundation was established in 1965), we have been practicing within the "lean economy" boundaries. In the meantime, Cosanti and Arcosanti, a fragment of it, have been constructed, which suggests that a dignified, convivial, and often fulfilling life can be pursued, even in this country, on an economic base that may be more in tune with the condition of man and the status of the biosphere.

But frugality is not just a necessity, it is also the virtue of interiorization, which in turn is the essence of life: reality made into persona. Let's remember that each person is a superb example of matter (space) organizing itself into astonishingly complex patterns, the whole 100-200 pounds of it, of immense economy and interiority.

From some of the experiences lived at Arcosanti, we can move on by expanding the "instrument" into a tangible place of life and all the operations life is made of. With the assistance of academia and of the marketplace, we may surprise ourselves with a pattern of life of great richness but lean, and approximating an equity applicable to society at large, the have-not societies included.

Drops of wealth, tiny drops, soliciting human presence in the urban effect that might also help rejuvenate the biosphere, the lean alternative in its first laboratory.

5

The Brief Encounter Initiative

Perhaps we are not targeting in racism the most important enemy. The enemy in the family of man is theological dogmatism. Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, and all the variations of them are now joined by capitalism and by the possible corruption of cyberspace into a new form of theocracy. In this scenario, I would introduce the notion of "man under one roof habitat": dozens of then, somehow reminiscent of the (medieval) centers where kings, popes, and merchants would combine in one -- study, science, documentation, and transmission of knowledge, health, charity, and celebration. The patronage of the powerful would grant the life of those urban centers -- the Bill Gates, the Steve Jobs, etc., of those times.

Given that "belief," more than skin color, might be the bloody divider of the future, to have a human mix under one roof even for only a few days may be an all-important experience about our common humanity. Brief Encounters might be born, and if so, it better be born in a lean society mode, not only because the lean society is the survival society, but because it is the most capable of interiorizing, that is, proceeding in the conversion of the "mineral" into the mindful (not just the mineral into the most fun mineral as proposed by consumerism-materialism).

A 365-day-a-year play intended as the incubator for the development of personal relationships between persons of very different backgrounds, have and have-not, for instance. The 500 paying guests match their "hotel bill" with a donation to Brief Encounters.

Universities and other institutions contribute as dragnets of the planet to discover and bring together the guest "population." (See the work of the MacArthur Foundation.) Brief Encounters is theater. It reaches for the "wealthy" and for the "poor" and matches them under one roof epitomizing in somewhat prestructured fashion the lean urban laboratory for a lean society. The encounter will generate in 5 to 10 percent of the participants permanent relationships. Some of those will be wake-up bells scattered throughout nations.

Brief Encounters, the right instrument for the specific music, the music a modest achievement of personae toward a lean society. From the human tidal wave, few, very few, and for few days converge together in the lean urban play, away from their habitual train of life to which they then return enriched by the experiential immersion.

Get to a point in planning Brief Encounters where the 500 hosts feel it an honor and privilege to be one of them. To honor the obscure heroes and the disenfranchised victims, but to honor them with the yeast of interactive presence, a first step toward reciprocal appreciation.

Racism, intolerance, xenophobia, and elitism will have to be deposited at the front desk. The possible cleansing effect of the experience would be one of the gifts of persona to persona. A gift of unforeseeable consequences. Eccentricity would be a presence, not an asset. It will likely be displayed (through flagrant and intentional bad manners) but not imposed on others.

As suggested before, many times in history there have been hybrid institutions that one way or another seem to fill gaps in the development of sociocultural economic systems in process. Hybrids because they uncommonly mixed heterogeneities: power, learning, health, science, agriculture, architecture, influence, notoriety, and philanthropy. Nobility, clergy, warriors, and merchants were in grand part heading those hybrids. The labels in consonance with the politically correct of the times were caravansaries, academies, monasteries, bastions of learning and orthodoxy, hospices, etc.

In contemporary terms, it is a sort of coming together of universities, churches, and hostelries. Timid attempts at a sort of holistic concoction responding to some not entirely satisfying institutions and catering to disparate domains: learning, well-being, religiosity, economy, philanthropy, and "tourism."

Brief Encounters is a variation on the described theme with a sharp focus on the nature of habitat and the lean imperative it embodies.

No delusional fantasies but tete-a-tete encounters, with facilitators and translators "keeping things going." National boundaries, financial boundaries, cultural boundaries "set aside" in the play. Silicon Valley, Wall Street, favela, Pentagon, the Andean and the Londoner, Africans and Asians under one roof.

The encounters justify the contrivance of the play, a dramaturgy. This is also to be the task of the theater and literature community called upon. So the dramaturgy and Brief Encounters generating the interactive, participatory theater by definition: the human condition. Brief Encounters will not be a moral play, not an indoctrination center, not a normative injunction. It will be a brief interface of different worlds present by way of their inhabitants. The participants will be persona experiencing the uniqueness of living in a unique environ.

Playwrights, choreographers, directors, actors, technicians, and "social scientists" will be active in developing the "condition of man" ongoing play (365 days per year) experience.

The insertion of Brief Encounters into the critical mass of Arcosanti seems to me an example of the music, intense and focused (the inhabitants or players of the instrument) generating the instrument itself, Arcosanti.

The elements of pause and cohesiveness find a place for them in the distinction between Arcosanti residents and Arcosanti guests. For the one, it is the normalcy of belonging to place and community. For the other, it is the exception and somewhat a crowding of diversification and changed routine with the awareness of the brief experience. The sudden and the surprising, the conviviality and the choreography.

6

The "music" could turn out to be "excellent." In which case, Brief Encounter siblings crop up on all continents. To hit it right is the critical element. I would choose as a guiding drive the human condition play, an uninterrupted development of experiences calling into question the status of our financial, economic, ethical, circumstantial, global, and esthetic givens.

But the calling into question would not be judgmental but factual, not abstract but personified. The encounter and the reciprocal recognition of personae of the most disparate backgrounds, experiences, and anticipations.

This laboratory could become a guidance in the development of a new urbanism, if it is true that the city is primarily factual experienced intensity faceted with the avalanche of conditions-situations and the dynamics they generate and that they are the causation-consequence of.

The Brief Encounter arcology will remain committed to the open-city physiology, the climate, the sun, etc., as active participants in the life of Brief Encounters. The place expresses elegance, sophistication, and also an austere perception of the human condition. The guests (all 600) feel the presence and the tension of the play, the positive intensity of seeking a transparency of persona vis-a-vis persona.

As for planners and architects, an international body with the power of selection and implementation for each country, a Brief Encounter hosting a kind of body-mind nomadism in our anxious world.

Society would be dealing with a new animal, a participatory urban dramaturgy. A UNIFIER in disguise. An offering to mind's creative faculties. A new Techne, by the way, displaying the power of Howness. A sort of distillation knocking at the gates of equity and esthetics, the art of living, from the ordinary to the trans ordinary, reaching into the extraordinary. The medieval church (the building) evokes an almost palpable awe and an imploration made into an esthetic object, the building and its content, toward the God of animism, God the father. Brief Encounters, places of intense tranquility? The anti-Utopia gathering places. A sort of polarizer in the brief encounter of the other. The persona and the other.

Earlier notes on Brief Encounters then labeled:

Treasures 600: A Place for Religio (Binding)

("The Hotel-Cathedrals" was written in 1995 as a section of a more detailed paper. Recently, it has evolved into the "Brief Encounters Initiative." I think Arcosanti is a fitting stage for the proposal.)

• It seems that ours are cultures of clustering, the "neutral" recognition of what otherwise is called segregation, negative clustering. The gaps between clusterings are enlarging and isolation sets in. Such is the case of the isolation of the very poor and the very wealthy, the southern societies from the northern, the blacks and whites, the body sets and the mind sets, the young and the old, the believers -- themselves of diverse shades -- and the nonbelievers, the environmentalists and the technocrats, the "freedom" lovers and the bureaucrats ... the violent and the nonviolent, the nomadic and the settled.

• One unifying activity, a most unfortunate exception, is gambling, now redefined as gaming. Gambling, an equalizer of sorts, is becoming extremely pernicious.

• Short of a heroic effort and a truly honest commitment to seek and implement resolutions, the trend will probably intensify and exacerbate the cluster's adversary, litigation, confrontational positions and behaviors.

In this millennium's end, one could identify five great negative trends: theocracy, technocracy, mediocracy, xenophobia, and injustice-inequity. It would seem that they must complete their run before a "new beginning" might be in sight.

But some enclaves of coherence might be needed here and there to keep the future open to better drives. This anticipates a sort of constructive collision with the correspondent negatives:

• the encounter between the have and the have-not (injustice)

• the encounter between persons of different or no creed (theocracy)

• the encounter between people of different technological skills (technocracy)

• the encounter between people of different ethnicities and races (xenophobia)

• the encounter among different cultural and excellence levels (mediocracy)

• the young against the old and vice versa, another frightening prospect

If a way, a mechanism, were to be found capable of generating and financing such encounters, then the road would be open for important and perhaps momentous experiences.

• One approach that might generate such a countercurrent is a kind of unusual contact among "clusters" with a process blatantly market based but not market oriented.

• This could be pursued via the activation of centers where hedonism mingles with humanitas. More precisely, a chain of hotels-academies with three kinds of guests:

  • the large group of (paying) guests is made up of 500 "tourists": the nomads of means (paying something like $1,000 per day);

  • the second group composed of 50 (nonpaying) guests with extraordinary minds;

  • the third group composed of 50 (nonpaying) guests who lead extraordinary lives.

• In a super-refined and austere habitat with 600 suite-rooms and the best supporting hotel facilities, 500 "hedonist guests" mingle with 100 humanitas treasures, many if not most of them from nonaffluent lives. All guests from all countries and all disciplines.

• A cosmopolitan atmosphere would be spontaneous, as spontaneous as the kinds of contacts and new relationships would be, with truly surprising if not exotic ties developing from the diverse kinds of temperaments, experiences, insights, and passions.

• In a way, the power of money would come face to face with the power of mind and with the power of compassion. The guests empowered by money would underwrite the cost for the other guests (for one or two weeks each) in a year-round activity.

• It is not a simple or plain philanthropic transaction cast in a moneymaking enterprise but instead a bartering for all to gain from and most of all for society to be able to take a peek into different human conditions in a setting that far from being bland and neutral would want to be powerful and beautiful. One could anticipate some momentous breakthroughs with some of the most surprising mechanisms: social, economic, integrative, cultural ...

• No impositions with overbearing programs, encounters, seminars, conferences, classes. Just a group of facilitators- translators to cope with the babel of tongues and mores.

• Academia's presence would be mainly as a facilitator and as a source for the choice of the 100 treasures guests. Foundations the likes of MacArthur could also be involved in searching and listing potential guests.

Another way of putting it:

Put Las Vegas in a retort and light the fire under it. Two beakers would collect two kinds of fumes-spirit:

1. The fume-spirit of hedonism unlimited.

2. The fume-spirit of anxiety unlimited.

This latter is the fume-spirit to cultivate in the Brief Encounters. A chain of them, one per nation.

This fume-spirit of anxiety unlimited is cultivated via the urban effect, author of civilization.

• 500 extraordinary anxiety-prone nomads of means. Paying guests.

• 50 extraordinary anxiety-transcending minds. Nonpaying guests.

• 50 extraordinary anxiety-coping lives. Nonpaying guests.

The hotel-cathedrals themselves to be extraordinary "greenhouses" for bodies and minds, for staples and people. Those hotel-cathedrals would physically generate what I call the third environment between the indoor spaces and the outdoors. The in-out environment with a modified climate, light, and adapting to the seasonal changes.

The "fame" of such places would run fast and hot: a seminal, refined habitat where three separate body- and mindsets come together in a tete-a-tete: THE BON VIVANT, THE BON PENSANT, AND THE BON "AMANT."

Among the "nomads of means," tens of millions of them, there are those who travel to go places and there are those who travel to get away from places. One place to get away from is the persona place. To get away from themselves. Brief Encounters is a place to go for a percentage of both groups. Perhaps more from the second group, those running away from themselves.

A literature would have to be developed presenting the year-round theater of Brief Encounters, the human-condition play staged in the lean urban locos dotting the continents.

Playwrights, directors, actors, and theater-movie, TV, and cyber-spacers, the market, engaging actors and Brief Encounters participants in the "perennial" play supported by academia and the local policy makers.

The Brief Encounters focusing mind would generate numerous programs capable of spreading information about the initiative and emphasizing the necessity of a human and civilizing binding if we do not want to be overwhelmed by the violence of intolerance, bigotry, greed, and mediocrity.

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