If we let our most positive hopes for the future and our imaginations zoom out from our present locations and from our present time, what do the subscribers to
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.
For both of the two distinct groups mentioned above have subgroups (not usually subscribers to
Access to Energy) whose enormously exaggerated view of their own self-importance leads them to work for various sorts of mental and physical tyranny. This tyranny -sometimes exercised only over small numbers of people under their immediate control and sometimes the driving force behind dreams of world domination - is definitively anti-science, anti-technology, and anti-free enterprise. Pleased to use the fruits that science, technology, and free enterprise have already provided, these people generally work to prevent further advance which they see as threatening to their own self-interests. Their primary weapon is misinformation. This weapon is effective because of human ignorance.Even as our information technology expands rapidly toward a time when entire libraries recording the lives, thoughts, and progress of billions of human beings will be made almost instantly available to machines in our homes by wire transfer and by small pieces of plastic memories, the bottleneck between us and human freedom lies in the human mind. The bandwidth (information capacity) of our technology is expanding enormously, but the bandwidth of the human mind is not. The accuracy of our technological information is increasing, but the accuracy of the human mind - ever influenced by self-interest and ignorance - is not. Regardless of the specific outcomes, brutal reminders of this are awaiting Americans in the November elections.
It is easy to thrive upon a cause that is shared by a large enough market. To sing and dance each month for the entertainment of scientists, technologists, and their free enterprise allies in the general public is more recreation than work. There is lots of new technology to brag about and the antitechnologists busily provide endless material for ridicule in "Stark Raving Mad.'' That's entertainment, but it does not solve our underlying problem - a problem that could bury all of our hopes in a thousand years of tyranny and mysticism if we prove unequal to its solution.
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.Each human mind has only a small capacity, and it also learns at a slow rate. Moreover, as it becomes older, the capacity to absorb new knowledge (and fit it in around the accumulation of prejudices and other irrational content) decreases. It is absolutely essential that fundamental thought processes be taught at an early age and be continually augmented with a reliable flow of useful and truthful facts.
For these reasons, the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine has started a school. (We have no delusions of grandeur. Thousands of such schools should be started.) Through our initial six self-teaching home school CDs, we now have about 5,000 students between the ages of 6 and 18. Soon, our CD curriculum will be expanded to a set of twenty CDs containing a very complete curriculum up to age 18. With these, we hope that our student body will grow to about 20,000 during 1997. It is our plan to then start producing university level courses. We hope, before the year 2000, to have a complete curriculum through at least four-year college and to begin producing graduate courses.
We make no apologies that our courses are designed to produce students who are pro-science, pro-technology, and pro-freedom. There are not "two sides'' to these issues. There is only one side of value - the truth. The truth is the only thing that we will teach.
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Vol. 24, No. 3
Newsletter: Access to Energy Newsletter Archive Volume: Issues Issue/No.: Vol. 24, No. 3 Date: October 01, 1996 01:04 PM Title: Human Bandwidth
Copyright © 2004 - Access to Energy Newsletter Archive
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