In the early part of that zoom, most of us see an earth and solar system filled with free men and women using and rapidly developing the miracles of technology that science is now making possible. Our power is nuclear; our homes, food, and means of transportation are wonders of convenience and effectiveness; our lives are long and healthful; and our technological creations are blended into a lush natural environment that is continually enhanced by advancing technology. (For one truth that our pseudoenvironmentalist enemies pretend to overlook is that free enterprise and advanced technology enable mankind to be generous and benevolent toward his environment, while tyranny and a lack of that technology require him to damage his environment in his struggle for survival.)

Zooming farther out in time, our individual secular images increasingly diverge as our abilities to predict become more unstable. As the stage upon which mankind is permitted to live expands to include the nearby stars, the technology at our disposal becomes more difficult to imagine. Certainly, with freedom and time at our disposal, that future can be wonderful indeed.

As this exercise continues, we divide into two distinct groups -both groups completely allied in their support for science, technology, and freedom and yet differing in their expectations for the ultimate future. One group is solely secular in its outlook, while the other believes in more than just a secular world. In America, this belief is primarily Christian and is based upon the Bible. The Robinson family is in this group as were most (but not all) of the originators of the great experiment in human freedom that is called the United States.

Our optimistic view of the future, whether we focus upon its technological wonders or on the fact that it is morally right, always includes human beings. For if humans are not there, what have we accomplished? Slightly rearranging a small corner of the universe and then ceasing to exist seems a poor goal for all of this effort. In any case, humans will almost certainly be there. We have little choice in that. Humans provide, of course, our secular means of getting from here to there, our primary motivation for making the trip - and also our only major impediment to doing so.

It is absolutely necessary that the small bandwidth - the small capacity to learn - in our own individual brains and in the brains of our fellow human beings be filled with the truth about science and technology and the truth about human freedom. If we are serious about the Access to Energy masthead and are not merely using it as a vehicle for entertainment, then our job is not the easy one of ridiculing ignorance. It is the hard job of educating our countrymen - most of whom are currently unknowledgeable not only of relevant facts, but are even unskilled in the rational methods of thought by which those facts may be properly understood.

Suppose that next week one of those cute cars or trucks labeled "for official use only'' that we see all over our highways (the label means that we pay for the vehicle with involuntary taxes, but it is illegal for us to use it) were to drive upwind of an American city and release a few canisters of aerosol-borne anthrax spores and that the resulting epidemic of suffering from this disease killed 2 million American men, women, and children. Moreover, at his subsequent press conference, the President announced that he was pleased by the success of this project and had ordered that it become a yearly event. Each year, two million innocent Americans would be murdered by disease. He explains that he is acting on an Environmental Protection Agency reportconcluding that the environment is suffering from the impact of too many people, so the obvious solution is to kill some of them. Being a moderate in all things (and this being an election year), the President has decided to kill only 2 million per year.

This series of events is unthinkable. Right? Well, the details are probably unthinkable, but the program is not just thinkable - it is effectively a current program of the Environmental Protection Agency, all of whose employees work for the President of the United States.

"Yesterday's Malaria Wars'' by Robert S. Desowitz in Nature 383, p 135 (1996), reviews a book The Tomorrow of Malaria by S. Litsios which gives an "account of malaria's current annual toll - 300 million cases with 2 million deaths. DDT is gone.'' Green and Gold 6, No. 7, September 1996, p 4, P. O. Box 74416, Lynwood Ridge, Pretoria 0040, South Africa, quotes a 1994 World Health Organization report that the number of countries considered to be malarial rose from 90 in 1992 to 140 in 1994. In 1994, the 140 included 33% of the world. WHO estimated the annual cases at 500 million, with 2 million deaths and 90% of the cases occurring in Africa.

As Marjorie M. Hecht reports in "Bring Back DDT to Defeat Malaria and Save Lives'' in 21st Century Science and Technology, available from P. O. Box 16285, Washington, DC 20041, even in localities where mosquito strains have developed resistance to DDT, it is effective in repelling these insects from treated houses if not in killing them.

According to the National Academy of Sciences, DDT saved 500 million lives before it was banned. This is an ongoing story of political power, nonscience, and genocide on a scale rivaled only by the mass killings under Stalin and Mao. It is not mitigated by the claims from the EPA and the President that they are acting with good intentions.

In the evaluation of every quantitative scientific investigation, it is mandatory that the scientist give a quantitative evaluation of the errors inherent in his work. Along with many other principles of ordinary honesty, however, the analysis of errors has been a casualty of press conference publication, politically correct interpretation, and the tax-money driven pseudoethics that are the hallmarks of enviroscience in general and the global warming industry in particular.

From Global Warming to the ban of CFC refrigerants, from DDT to Endangered Species, and from Missile Defense to nuclear power, if you are wondering why the United States seems to continually pursue public policies that are the opposite of those that would be expected -based on rational scientific data and evaluations - and why there are always sufficient "scientists'' and prestigious scientific publications available to propagate the erroneous ideas upon which these wrong-headed policies are based, you need look no further than Figure 3.

"Pro-science,'' to the horde of non-defense "researchers'' funded each year by $33 billion of your tax dollars, means voting more money for the research porkbarrel and "anti-science'' means voting for less.

For the spenders, pro-science also means bias and sometimes outright lying about scientific matters if their big-spending political friends are in need of support; it means avoiding politically incorrect experiments that might produce data contrary to the policies of these big spenders; and it means producing blizzards of research papers with politically correct biases in order to keep the money flowing in the authors' directions. The competition is not for better science, it is for science that more nearly conforms to the desires of those who hold the purse strings. Also, even among honest scientists, it means keeping quiet about one's misgivings about the activities of colleagues which may affect the flow of money.

If this $33 billion dollar annual porkbarrel were removed from the backs of the American taxpayers, the United States would be richer by far more than this amount.

This is separate from the acknowledged 700 excess cases of thyroid cancer in children resulting in three deaths near Chernobyl. These resulted from Soviet negligence in not providing the children with thyroid blocking doses of iodide during the weeks following the accident.

The radiation effect studies, as is now so common, focus upon finding a measurable effect rather than upon finding differences in health.

Recently, during a visit to our laboratory here by a tax-funded scientist, I was explaining that we are finding that the health and longevity of mice is not diminished even at carbon dioxide concentrations as high as 3,000 parts per million (the current atmospheric level is about 360 ppm, and 700 ppm is at the outer limit of most future global scenarios). "Yes,'' our visitor exclaimed, "but did you measure their blood pH?'' No, we are interested in their health and longevity. If health is not diminished, there is little motivation to look for reasons for nonexistent ill health. Regardless of substantial buffering, a slight change in blood pH might occur at very high carbon dioxide levels, but why would this be of importance? He disagreed. Those blood pH measurements were, in his opinion, of very great importance.

If we were among the new breed of tax-guzzling "scientists,'' however, we would probably agree with him. We would look for changes in blood pH and not bother with the laborious health and longevity studies. Just raise the carbon dioxide level around a few rabbits until a blood pH change is detected (carbon dioxide becomes carbonic acid when dissolved in water, and pH meters are now very sensitive), call a press conference, issue dire warnings about the potential health effects of this newly discovered phenomenon, and send the resulting articles in the popular press to the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Institutes of Health along with grant requests for a few hundred thousand more tax dollars per year.

If we were really astute, we would use baby rabbits. Relating the new crisis to "the children'' should ensure an even larger tax grant.

Biological systems are so complicated and measuring instruments are now so sensitive that it is trivial to find a measurable difference and then relate it to some hypothetical problem by convolutions of reasoning that can be neither confirmed or refuted by honest scientists. Then press conference generated tax dollars can be made to flow copiously over the whole charade.

• "Is Your Kid on Drugs? The FDA Makes It Hard to Know'' in The Wall Street Journal, September 25, 1996, p A12, reports that David Kessler's Food and Drug Administration is blocking a home urine test for drugs. The FDA does not find the kit defective. They claim instead that families cannot be trusted to handle the results. The FDA also threatened a mail order company that performed drug tests on hair samples by claiming that the envelope used for mailing the hair to the lab was a medical device.

This is the same Dr. Kessler who is using the FDA to wage an election year regulatory war on cigarette companies because he claims to be concerned that children may take up smoking.

• During a recent visit to our new local Barnes and Noble giant bookstore, I found long shelves of books for children that focus on colored pictures rather than text, over a hundred titles on Attention Deficit Disorder and Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder, and exactly one book on learning to read by phonics.