The Truth

PART I

EVOLVING IN A PLACE CALLED EDEN...

Who are you?

You read this document as a living homo sapiens animal clothed in manufactured fabrics, staring into an electronic communications system – you've called it the Internet – which for the first time ever touched large populations of animals on planet Earth in the early half of the last decade of the second millennium of time since the birth of a being named Jesus.

You are a speck of dust of biology on a speck of dust of geology in a revolving arm of the Milky Way. As far back in time as you have been able to peer through your Hubble Space Telescope, you have learned that the Milky Way is one of about 150 billion vast astrophysical cyclones you call galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of suns and planets.

A strange introduction to yourself, isn't it? Yet that is actually a more complete description of you in this moment from the eyes of the Cosmos and distant future history books of Earth.

Whenever we think about such abstract ideas, we all seek to answer the basic questions of life:

Who am I?

Why am I here?

What is my purpose?

What is my place?

These are difficult questions to answer. Let us start by looking at what we're made of.

You are made of Milky Way galaxy. You are made of the Cosmos. The Cosmos includes everything you smell, taste, touch, hear, see, know, or do. It is everything that is.

We have been taught for millennia the tale of the origin of the Cosmos. Scientists in the discipline of cosmology call it "the Big Bang". Those faithful to the Western world's dominant religions call it "Genesis". In the beginning there was a special kind of energy, or light, a light that makes all things – a kind of temporal potential. Billions of galaxies, trillions of stars, and an uncountable number of worlds formed. On many of those worlds, when of just the right size, just the right distance from their suns, with just the right chemistry, as night parts with day in a rare ecological harmony, the spiral of life springs forth from their oceans and gardens.

The Earth upon which you stand and all of the chemistry within your body and in the air you breathe was formed from simpler matter as a star perhaps like our sun exploded in death over 6 billion years ago. It spat out atoms in forms suitable for the evolution of a wondrous place such as Earth, and a being such as you. Perhaps the first time we homo sapiens truly understood the majesty of Earth was when we could see a picture of her. She was the cover star of Life Magazine in October, 1968. For the first time in our recorded history of the planet, millions of her own children – human beings – saw her whole face, and understood that they were looking at the home creation has made for them.

It took a decade from those first Apollo images of Earth for a human to loudly proclaim that our planet is a living being. In James Lovelock’s Gaia, the evidence is as plain as ink on a page. There is life-like precision, care, and process across all the disciplines of "non-living" science --physics, astronomy, chemistry, geology, meteorology --not just biology, particularly as these disciplines interrelate in the definition of place suitable for human life.

If we take a brief trip to visit the life on Earth, it becomes clear that our world simply must be categorized as an organism herself with a metabolism tuned by biology, for the sake of biology itself. And since biology clearly serves the purpose of evolving consciousness, it can now be said that the Earth exists to advance consciousness.

We live upon an amazing engine of life!

Life

"Of all the planets in the solar system, why is Earth the only one fit for life? Simple: because Earth has a surface that supports liquid water, the magic elixir required by all living beings."
--James Kasting, Scientific American, 3rd Quarterly, 1998

Oceans cover over 70 percent of the Earth’s surface. Scientists theorize that the oceans formed upon the Earth’s crust through some combination of liquid and gas release from the interior of the planet and impact of ice-laden comets from the heavens. Whatever the source of the water, there is now 350 million cubic miles of it sloshing upon Earth’s crust, reaching to a depth of 36,200 feet in the Pacific’s Marianas Trench, where the pressure from the weight of the water is equivalent to over a thousand atmospheres.

The ocean is separated into its barren and fertile zones just like the land. Massive rivers within the ocean called currents carry water around the globe in huge circling patterns, influencing and influenced by global weather systems. Powered as forcefully as they are, currents move quickly only at the surface, for deep cold water takes about 1,000 years to recirculate with the surface.

With the remarkable exception of the ocean floor itself, where perhaps millions of species of life remain undiscovered, the deep of the ocean is a desert compared to the dazzling garden of beings found inhabiting the more temperate, shallow zones. The upper two percent of the ocean’s volume contains most biological organisms, at least those familiar to us. From the smallest single-celled amoeba to the largest blue whale, the ocean courses with simple, intelligent, and majestic life. It might surprise you to learn that the ocean supports a greater diversity of living body types than land. Indeed, of 33 animal phyla, 30 describe residents of the ocean. Only 16 describe residents of dry land or freshwater.

The tree of life grows swiftly in water. Indeed, the root of the tree of genetic biology spirals outward from the oceans, and has turned a pregnant clump of geology into a verdant garden on the land.

If ever there was a true Garden of Eden, its last superpower sprawls across our South American continent. No place on Earth is the majesty, power, and truth of the double helix of life more splendidly evident than in the depths of the jungle, across the plains, in the canopy, along the mountain peaks, and near the edges of this great labyrinthian river. Indeed, might not the river basin itself be alive, and thinking the thoughts thought by it’s many different cells --the trillions of organic life forms among millions of species which it sustains and evolves?

We know of no other place like this in the universe, at least none most scientists believe we could ever hope to reach. All the more precious this last vast preserve of Eden would then have to be to the life of Earth, and to all humans. Certainly to any true scientist.

First, the obligatory numbers.

The Amazon basin and adjacent regions in Central and South America represent 50% of the remaining rainforests on the planet. The basin delivers 20 percent of worldwide river water to the Atlantic ocean, from the reaches of 2.7 million square miles of rainforest. Its total water flow is greater than that of Earth’s next eight largest rivers combined, with a mouth at the ocean 200 miles wide, containing an island larger than Switzerland. Oceangoing vessels can travel up the river for 2,300 miles, placing them much closer to the Pacific ocean than the Atlantic.

The rainforests contain 50% of living species of life on this world, yet they cover only 7% of the area of land. That 7% forms an indispensable segment of the branch of the tree of life upon which humanity stands at this moment.

Underlying these dry numbers rests a secret of incredible majesty: the rainforests are the most powerful and concentrated womb of life ever created on the land of Earth.

The most pervasively beautiful life form in this place is the tree. Trees of every possible variety, thousands and thousands of different species. Some individuals are older than the Bible, some stretch as high as the length of a football field, these mighty creatures shelter the biosphere of Amazonia. They shield most of the sun’s light from reaching the forest floor, creating an enclosed womb for the dance of life below.

At their roots, the life of the jungle is a product of the geology and chemistry of Earth, and at their highest leaves, they are home to the most fantastic winged life forms known to man. In between soil and canopy is an infinitely complex yet stable web of life, with millions of species of microorganisms, plants, and animals evolving at a breathless pace. Would it surprise you to learn that much of your DNA, the programming in the cells of your body, is the same as within the cells of these trees? It should surprise you, and it is true.

As you climb from the flood plains towards the mountainous peaks of the Andes, the temperature drops about 1ºF for every 330 feet of elevation, which means that ambient temperature can drop below freezing at 16,400 feet at the equator. Hence the snowcapped peaks above the hot heart of the tropics.

In the steep mountains of the rainforest, the clouds themselves become the integral part of the fabric of life, rather than the rivers of the basin below. The clouds create an atmosphere rich in water, which accumulates on leaves through condensation and rainfall. In this place, the leaves themselves have evolved drip systems to gently convey condensed water to the soil below.

By shielding much of the sun’s light, the clouds inhibit the pace of photosynthesis, thereby slowing the pace of life in the misty forests below the canopy. But among the clouds, whole new forms of life spring forward. The trees in this zone of our ecology are coated in thick ferns and mosses, and are inhabited by thousands of plants and animals of incredible variety.

At night, the forest does not sleep. It is often not even completely dark, as luminous fungi in the rotting leaves on the ground glow an eerie green light, covering the forest floor with a veil of light like a living Christmas decoration. And in this almost silent night, the luminous fireflies have there way too.

In the rainforests you will find plants that eat only air, sun and soil, plants that eat plants, and plants that eat animals. You will find plants that can survive 50-foot floods and plants that withstand the harshest of droughts. You will find plants larger than airplanes and smaller than pinheads.

You will find plants bearing all manner of fruits, undiscovered thousands with the most mysterious healing powers, some with fruit containing 30 times the Vitamin C of citrus, and a few with the most lethal toxins known to science.

Animals

The fruit of the kingdom of plants is the kingdom of animals, and it is yet more majestic. Animals are far more sophisticated creatures than plants. On Earth, there have been the smallest insects, and the largest dinosaurs. There have been the most curious beetles and the most frightening spiders; the slowest turtle and the fastest falcon; the florescent green frog, and the bright red snake; the sound-navigating bat and the electric eel; the homing pigeon and the childlike dolphin; the most gentle kitten and the fiercest tiger; the finest horse and the fattest cow.

Living today, the smallest animals are the chlamydia and rickettsia bacteria, and are only a few hundred atoms in diameter. The longest insect is the pharnacia serratipes of Indonesia, measuring up to 13 inches. The longest worm is the bootlace worm, and has been recorded at lengths up to 100 feet. The oldest form of animal on Earth are the deep-sea snails, which have not changed in 500 million years.

The fastest land animal is the cheetah, reaching speeds up to 60 miles per hour. The largest animal is the blue whale, with one individual found to measure over 110 feet long. The world's largest carnivore – the sperm whale – also has the world's heaviest brain. At 20 pounds, it's four times heavier than the human brain. The only cold warm-blooded mammal is the Arctic ground squirrel, which can lower its body temperature below freezing.

What absolute cosmic majesty!

Animals live lives of wildly different durations. The longest authenticated human life in modern times is 120 years. For a housefly, the longest life has been about 2 months. The cat, 34 years. The goldfish, 41 years. The orca, 90 years. The tortoise, 150 years. Yet scientists do not yet know exactly why animals age the way they do.

There are some 10-30 million species of animal on planet Earth. Of these, we have catalogued only about 1.2 million. Each year, 10,000 new species are added to the list of forms not already included in zoological classifications. Thousands of these wondrous forms of creatures face extinction because of the environmental hubris of the human animal. We are not simply killing animals. We are burning the blueprints that made them.

As with the plant kingdom, the mecca for animal life is the rainforest. In the Amazon, there are animals that live in the sky, never to cross underneath the canopy below. There are animals that live only amongst the branches. There are animals that live on the ground, others only under the soil, and yet thousands of species that scurry all over. Some animals eat plants, others eat animals, and still others are omnivores.

Some are day creatures, while many roam only unseen in the black of night.

There are 30 pound rodents with webbed feet. There are tapirs, distant relatives of rhinos, zebras and horses, with an aquatically adapted fused nose and lip system. This accommodates their penchant for swimming, and is used to spray water at attacking dogs. One remarkable creature is the basilisk lizard, also known as the Jesus Christ lizard because of its ability to literally run over water. It would be impossible for humans to emulate this action, because the size, shape, and power of our legs are not evolved to accommodate such a rapid-fire energy-consuming propulsion task.

Tending the garden's soil are the ants. A mature community of leaf-cutter ants can have as many as three million members. These animals are the gardeners of the forest because they carry leaves into underground chambers, not to eat, but to use as food for the fungus gardens they cultivate. These colonies play vital roles in returning plant nutrients into the deep soil, for the cycle of life to continue.

There are stunningly colored species of frogs, many mysteriously disappearing, whose biological powers are remarkable. Not only do their skin pigments warn predators of their extreme toxicity, but many species possess a potent antibacterial substance on their skins which may hold promise for human disease prevention. And living in the land of these frogs are thousands of species of insects, spiders, scorpions, and other crawling creatures, many of which are colored and patterned so finely matched to their habitat that they are essentially invisible.

The snakes of the rainforest are as amazing as the frogs and lizards. Across Asia, Africa and America are the bushmasters, coral snakes, rattlesnakes, vipers, cobras, and mambas. Of course, we seem to know best the giants of them all, the boas, pythons, and anaconda, which kill by constriction and consume their prey whole. But one of the most striking snakes is the flying snake, which has no wings to fly, but has a body shape which allows it glide as much as 165 feet with little loss in altitude. For millennia humans have feared the snakes of the jungle, but this fear is largely unfounded. Most scientific teams have adventured in the jungles for years without single instances of snake bites.

The most common deaths resulting from snakebites occur on farms.

There is the giant anteater, which forages for food in the form of termites exclusively on the forest floor, while its lesser cousins exploit both the floor and the canopy. Then there are the slow-moving sloths with what you'd swear are permanent smiles on their faces, looking like they're just fine with an other-than-A-type lifestyle. They really don't need to move all that much, because they can turn their heads in a 270 degree radius.

Of the exceptional large mammals of the Amazon, the jaguar is the king cat. The jaguar climbs among the trees and swims among the rivers, feeding upon the fish, alligators, and primates of the jungle. These carnivores hunt either through stalking or ambush, and they will take almost anything on. Indeed, large cats dominate the tops of food chains in all major rainforests in the world.

The primates – the closest large classification of animals to the human, live at all strata of the rainforests of Earth. These creatures are stunningly beautiful and remarkably human-like. The face-painted mandrill, the scarlet-faced uakari. The swinging orangutan. The howling monkey. The macaque. The gibbon. The striking black and white diurnal lemur. The stunning red-haired tamarin, being rescued from the brink of extinction by biologists in Brazil.

The tiny, one-pound marmoset. The nectar drinking, white-faced capuchin monkey. The cousin to the human, the chimpanzee, often seen clutching, grooming, feeding, playing with, and generally loving their children. And we find the largest ape, the gorilla, threatened of extinction by civil war among homo sapiens animals in Rwanda.

To the cloud forests large mammals rarely go. But in this elevated paradise, countless animals flourish. Tree-dwelling monkeys with hauntingly-human looking faces stare at us through our camera film. Hundreds of variety of scurrying mammals inhabit the holes, nooks, and knots of the trees. Scores of species of bats navigate through the dusk, like the vampire bat, which consumes only the blood of other animals. And at night, as we shine flashlights into the dark, we see thousands of pairs of reflecting retinas staring back at us from the deep, indicating that the forest remains very much awake. The most frightening ocular reflections are those of the caiman crocodiles, peering back from the surface of the dark flowing waters.

Up in the canopy, the birds are the most beautiful creatures. The resplendent quetzals. A stunning variety of hummingbirds hover amongst the flowering plants of the forests. The toucans, macaws, eagles, parrots, cotingas, and cacique birds live among the emergent trees where hawks and vultures also land to perch. The vulture's large cousin, the Andean condor, gracefully glides above the trees, with a wingspan of over 10 feet. Under the canopy fly the woodpeckers, trogons, jacamars, and puffbirds. At eye level you will see ant birds, tanagers, flycatchers, and manakins, and on the forest floor, tinamous, ground doves and wrens.

All of these animals live within and contribute to an incredibly harmonious symphony of biology. Every animal in Amazonia is a basic part of the ecosystem we call life.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing for modern humans to learn from the biota of Earth is that the human may be the most sophisticated Earth-based life form in terms of its collection of capabilities, but it is far from the most sophisticated in terms of its specialized capabilities. Plants directly convert inorganic chemistry into the food of life. We do not. Some plants can live for thousands of years. We cannot.

Hawks can spot a mouse from hundreds of feet away. We cannot. Cheetahs can outrun an automobile. We cannot. Pigeons can home. Some snakes can see infrared light. Electric eels can shock. Bats use sonar to see a vivid image in a pitch black night. Some sea life can smell across their entire bodies. Some animals can see in two places at once. Some animals can fly with wings. Some animals can exist in water. Some animals can walk on water. Some animals can biologically clone themselves.

We can do none of these things... yet.

These are truly majestic, awe-inspiring creatures, with kinds of abilities we would ascribe to science fiction if possessed by a human. What symphony is life! It is the music of time, the music of creation.

We are just as remarkable, for the human is the only animal presently native to Earth that can read and write, and even then only in the last few thousand years. We have just begun the process of learning about our Cosmos.

There are some 6 billion individual homo sapiens animals presently living on Earth. Human animals have evolved to communicate through physical gestures and vocal sounds, organized in temporal patterns called speech, and have learned to record these communications through the process of reading and writing. A human's brain is sufficiently advanced for it to be able to correlate observations of itself and its surroundings. Possessed with remembered senses and the ability to interpret time --periodicity, duration, and precision --the human has evolved a way to manipulate its future. Homo sapiens animals refer to themselves individually as "me" and collectively as "we".

We have become a flower, long since evolved from seed of the plant that created us.

Human beings are undergoing evolution of the mind as the ability to observe is enhanced through technology and perhaps biology of our own imagination. The rapid rise in our ability to acquire truth through observation has, in the past 100 years, given us a most remarkable and I believe physically significant new sense, what you might call a sixth sense: the ability to see into time – both the past and the future. This sense of prediction exists in the mind alone, as the synthesis of the perception of the past and the imagination of the future.

The human is now made even more remarkably unique because of its rapidly growing ability to learn history and predict the future from knowledge drawn from dramatically enhanced skills and tools of observation – skills such as science and tools such as telescopes. The more truth we perceive, the better we predict change.

What wondrous revolutions in the history of worlds must occur when its most advanced beings come into such power? How powerful and sacred must evolution be, to have created such beings as we? As you and I evolve to be able to know more through greater and greater powers of observation, what secrets of time will we be able to predict, or even at some point "see" in our mind’s eye? Might we someday be able to reverse this power of observation and "make" reality with imagination alone?

Whatever we may see or do in the future, we must pause now and look upon the history that I have just briefly described, all 15 billion years that we know of.

What an incredibly precious legacy of creation are we! Even though I've known and studied it for years, my jaw still drops whenever I consider the majesty of our history.

The Cosmos has labored for billions of years to produce us. Regardless of what life may exist outside of Earth, we know that we are unique and special, for whatever life outer space may hold for us to find, we know that we are rare in time. Our gestation just to the point of reaching homo sapiens has been one of incredible majesty, through hundreds of millions of human generations worth of time. And the combination of all human mechanical or electrical technology ever invented pales in comparison to the simple beauty of a single fish in the sea, let alone a human being. The Cosmos simply must have wanted to create beings like us.

What other forms of animal are we likely to meet one day as we venture into the Cosmos? What capabilities might they possess which perhaps lay undeveloped or nonexistent in homo sapiens? And how might we acquire such powers? Will it be a natural process, or a derivative technology? Both?

As we prepare to ask yet the most important questions of our future, we must ask ourselves a deeply profound question: what from this distant past of creation do we wish to take with us, as a species, into the distant future? We often ask this question for knowledge recently acquired to be reused soon, but almost never do we ask this question with an eye for eternity.

Evolution has taught us that only the most robust and stable creations will survive over time. If we wish to make our distant future the brightest it can be, what are the core principles we must learn from our past in order to flourish in the crucible of billions of years of future evolution?

We shall address this question later.

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EVOLVING IN A PLACE CALLED EDEN IS A PROMISING YOUNG CIVILIZATION...

Look at the headlines seriously this past week. Observe the magnitude of the issues in play, in the history of civilization:

The White House and Congress are locked in battle over the significance of the President's lies told while under the oath of truth.

The first "city in space" is under construction.

Spacecraft are heading out to survey asteroids and physically examine the polar caps of Mars.

A single European currency has begun its life.

Uneasy truce remains between Catholic and Protestant.

Peace or war between Arab and Jew to be determined by election.

Confrontation of superpower and dictator has the world watching.

Preparations are underway for an unprecedented test of computing technology at Year 2000.

Rise and fall of modern national economies abroad troubles the world.

Brutal weather patterns and systems continue to circle the globe.

You are participating in all of this, every concept, person, event, headline, and consequence as the Cosmos unfolds time.

Richard P. McBrien in his book Catholicism has related in striking metaphor the radical degree to which human history has changed in the last tiny fraction of our human existence.

He notes that if the last fifty thousand years were divided into periods of sixty-two year life spans, we’ve enjoyed eight hundred lifetimes.

"Six-hundred and fifty were spent in caves. Only during the last seventy lifetimes has it been possible to communicate through the written word, and only during the last six lifetimes has the human community had access to the printed word."

We traveled by camel caravan before the Christian era, at about eight miles per hour. This form of travel was common for just under eight thousand years, until the chariot, which pushed human travel to 20 mph. Steam locomotion of the early nineteenth century allowed speed of only thirteen miles per hour, and the sailing ships, before and after, were slower still. By the latter part of the nineteenth century, with improvements in the steam engine, we reached speeds of 100 mph.

As McBrien notes, it had taken this hominid species millions of years to be able to communicate with each other and travel to each other. Then, in a revolution during the last part of the last one of our eight hundred lives of the last fifty thousand years, we have seen planes, jets, rockets, and space travel with astronauts and space capsules and the capacity to reach Neptune and one of its moons, and send back computer-enhanced photographs from celestial bodies at the edge of our solar system.

And during just the last lifetime, we have seen the rise of literacy, telegraph, telephones, radio, television, transistors; and computers, microchips, and the Internet; and radio telescopes and space probes with the capacity to send and receive messages to the outer reaches of space. Perhaps the most haunting and emotive of all advancements in communications recorded in our lifetime are the images from the Hubble Space Telescope --humanity’s first clear-vision eye peering into the secret places of the history of the heavens.

Clearly we live in an important time.

But what knowledge of history has the culture of the United States, the bastion of Western idealism, left in the minds of its children? Instead of McBrian’s yardstick of time at 800 lifetimes in 62 year units, let us resolve further to human generations, for simplicity’s sake let’s say averaging just over 20 years from time one gives birth to the next. By that reckoning, what is the state of mind of our newest generation, the last in 2400 human generations over 50,000 years?

Circling recently on the Internet was a simplistic but wonderful answer to this question, adapted below.

The people who left high school last spring across the U.S. were born in 1980. They have no meaningful recollection of the Reagan era and did not know he had ever been shot. They were prepubescent when the Persian Gulf War was waged. Black Monday 1987 is as significant to them as the Great Depression. There has only been one Pope.

They can only really remember reading about one president. They were 11 when the Soviet Union broke apart and do not remember the Cold War. They have never feared a nuclear war. "The Day After" is a pill to them, not a movie. CCCP is just a bunch of letters. They have only known one Germany. They are too young to remember the Space shuttle blowing up, and Tienamin Square means nothing to them. They do not know who Momar Qadafi is.

The New Deal is most likely a rebate on a new VW Beetle.

Their lifetime has always included AIDS. They never had a Polio shot and likely do not know what it is. Bottle caps have not only always been screw off, but have always been plastic. They have no idea what a pull top can looks like. Atari pre-dates them, as do vinyl albums. The expression "you sound like a broken record" means nothing to them. They have never owned a record player. They don’t enjoy playing Pac Man and have never heard of Pong. Star Wars looks very fake, and the special effects are pathetic. There have always been red M&M's, and blue ones are not new.

What do you mean there used to be beige ones?

They may have heard of an 8-track, but chances are they probably have never actually seen or heard one. The Compact Disc was introduced when they were 1 year old. As far as they know, stamps have always cost about 32 cents. Zip codes have always had a dash in them. They have always had an answering machine. Most have never seen a TV set with only 13 channels, nor have they seen a black and white TV. They have always had cable. There have always been VCR's, but they have no idea what Beta is. They cannot fathom not having a remote control. They were born the year that the Walkman was introduced by Sony.

Rollerskating has always meant inline for them. They have never heard of King Cola, Burger Chef, The Globe Democrat, Pan AM or Ozark Airlines. The Tonight Show has always been hosted by Jay Leno. They have no idea when or why Jordache jeans were cool. Popcorn has always been cooked in a microwave. They have never seen and remember a game that included the St. Louis Football Cardinals, the Baltimore Colts, the Minnesota North Stars, the Kansas City Kings, the New Orleans Jazz, the Minnesota Lakers, the Atlanta Flames, or the Denver Rockies (NHL hockey, that is).

They do not consider the Colorado Rockies, the Florida Marlins, the Florida Panthers, the Ottawa Senators, the San Jose Sharks, or the Tampa Bay Lightning "expansion teams."

They have never seen Larry Bird play, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is a football player. They never took a swim petrified by the idea of Jaws. The Vietnam War is as ancient history to them as WWI, WWII or even the Civil War. They have no idea that Americans were ever held hostage in Iran. They can't imagine what hard contact lenses are.

They don't know who Mork was or where he was from. They never heard the terms "Where's the beef?", "I'd walk a mile for Camel", or "de plane, de plane!". They do not care who shot J.R. and have no idea who J.R. is. M.A.S.H., The Cosby Show, The Facts of Life, Silver Spoons, The Love Boat, Miami Vice, WKRP in Cincinnati, and Taxi are shows they have likely never seen.

The Titanic was found? They didn't know it was lost. Michael Jackson has always been white. They cannot remember the Cardinals ever winning a World Series, or even being in one. Kansas, Chicago, Boston, America and Alabama are places, not groups. McDonalds never came in Styrofoam containers.

Very few have felt the deep emotion from the hand-me-down memories of World War II and the Holocaust. Fewer still have any recollection of the basis for the Cold War. Almost none can personally relate the two World Wars together, distinguishing or even remembering their teachings for the future of the world. The term appeasement doesn’t ring a bell for them. Neither do they admire Churchill as a hero, if they even know why they should.

Do you feel old now?

Remember, the lucky few of the people who don't know these things will be in college this year.

And in four years, they'll be part of the workforce. I hope college teaches them well.

Ungrounded in technical history they may be, this new generation is the most innately conscious of all before it. It has been barraged with the loudest, most, biggest, brightest, strongest, tastiest, foulest, best and worst that western marketing can offer, all delivered in THX sound, with digital fidelity, on widescreen, at 400Mhz and at 28.8Kbps, or better yet 56, or even better, a megabit over a cable modem.

To the older generation, if you don’t know what those words mean, let it be your clue to the vast, valuable and potent new advanced culture now leaping up on its own two feet, as the very skeletal and nervous system of our future civilization.

Despite all this noise, or perhaps because of it, this new generation is more resonant with the soft, subtle, true qualities of life than any before. Their culture reveals it in the way they talk, dress, eat, work and socialize. They have no desire for war. They have an intuitive concern for the world, a concern that leaves some depressed, others lost, some on a returning path to religion, and a few motivated like crazy to save the Earth from humanity.

Most of them feel powerless in a society where the only thing that seems to have power is money. They have the least desire for amassing wealth since their great-grandparents’ generation, which, incidentally, was in the previous 62-year life span. Sometimes the best advances can come only after funerals for arthritic minds.

It is this new generation that will carry our world into the future, perhaps through some of our greatest crises, certainly through some of our most painful challenges, and hopefully into the grandest of discoveries.

Let us teach these young men and women well, for we are entrusting the future of the world to them, and humanity’s future across the Cosmos.

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