Book Review:(review by J.R. Mooneyham)
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Medium: Hard copy paperback book
This is the stuff many of us live for. High adventure, high tech, high purpose, high profit, all rolled into one.
Though this information will appeal most to those who want to **DO** something, it also offers much to those looking for nothing more than entertainment of the ‘hard’ science variety. Whichever type of person you are, you’ll definitely want to know about this wild new ride of hope and imagination.
The litany of ills is all too familiar: The population explosion. Worldwide poverty and starvation. Imminent exhaustion of fossil fuels. Destruction of the environment. Mass extinctions. Nuclear proliferation. Nuclear winter.
What can we possibly do to save ourselves from these threats?
Fight fire with fire.
Fight off our waking nightmares, with a dream come true.
Many would-be saviors have given us proposals for dealing with one or another of our biggest troubles. But usually their suggestions address one problem by worsening another, or ignoring everything beyond a certain narrow focus. Another way savior-hopefuls often miss the mark is by making wholly unjustified leaps of faith in what we or our technology will likely be capable of in the near term.
What we really need is a practical, straightforward plan for addressing all our biggest problems across-the-board, both present and future.
If such a plan could also be proven to pay for itself, it just might have a chance at realization.
If the plan not only paid its own way, but could be shown to be immensely profitable as well, then such a plan might become implemented almost automatically-- at least after sufficient numbers of people heard about it.
But all this will never happen, right?
It’d be far too difficult for anyone to digest and integrate all the required scientific and technical knowledge, plus find a way to make it all politically and economically attractive to the forces that be.
Maybe an advanced artificial intelligence in the 22nd or 23rd centuries might be capable of such a feat. But not one of us mere mortals. Now now, not today.
Trouble is, we don’t have time to wait for some super cybernetic brain to figure out a plan for us. Because if present trends continue we’ll all be nuking each other for what remains of a poisoned food supply and dwindling energy resources by the year 2100-- and it’ll be too late for anything but desperate, mad-stab-in-the-dark measures.
Fortunately, we’re smarter than we give ourselves credit for.
Because one of our fellow 20th century citizens appears to have put together just the plan we’ve been looking for. It’s called...
The Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps.
The Millennial Project is written by Marshall T. Savage. It begins with specific instructions for producing enough food and energy for all the world’s burgeoning population, while simultaneously cleaning up the environment-- even as vast fortunes are made doing it.
Savage describes how all this may be done even as we develop the technologies and practices required for the next step in our destiny: self-sufficient space colonies. We’ll ‘earn-as-we-learn’ by building fabulous floating cities in the oceans of Earth.
Part of the great profits generated by the floating cities will be used to build an economical bridge to orbit, based on an elegant system of mass drivers and lasers. Then, we’ll go on to construct habitats, factories, and resorts in Earth orbit and on the Moon.
The off-Earth installations generate the additional income required for terra-forming Mars, and seeding the asteroid belt with what will ultimately become the majority of humanity inhabiting our solar system.
From the outer regions of our own planetary system, Savage next convincingly takes us to the stars beyond, expanding to encompass the entire galaxy in our wake.
The richness in technical detail and supporting references is incredible. Almost every conceivable argument against Savage’s proposal is dealt with decisively by the author.
This is no still-born concept, as so many proposals floated these days are. Savage does not intend to wait for existing political and economic concerns to take up the task he envisions; he’s creating an all new organization to implement the mission, with this book being the call to would-be pioneers across the globe.
Avoiding yet another trap which has felled many a visionary before him, Savage has plotted a course not only from the great sea-based cities to the stars, but from the publication of his book, to those floating cities.
How many times have you seen or heard of some grand design, only to see it brought down by some awful technical or logical flaw? Or beheld some beautiful utopian plan you ached to be a part of but could not join, as it was no more than a theoretical jaunt of its author?
At this moment, the Millennial Project suffers none of these problems or drawbacks, and yet may offer as many or more wonders and opportunities than anything presented to us along these lines before.
The author makes a compelling case for how this far-flung, futuristic project to colonize the galaxy could also stamp out hunger, misery, and poverty in our present day world, and even eke out respectable profits besides.
Imagine Disney’s Epcot Center merged with Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek, and devoted to spreading life across the galaxy while simultaneously cleaning up Mother Earth and lifting all of humanity out of poverty and despair, and you get in a nutshell something of what the Millennial Project is all about.
Savage has shown us how to get from our tormented present to something as good or better than a Gene Roddenberry (Star Trek) tomorrow, over the course of the next millennium.
As Savage points out, we today stand at perhaps the most important crossroads in human history-- maybe in the whole history of Life itself. What we do now could easily have a greater impact on the future of all living things, than anything that ever comes after.
We might not feel like Gods today, but it’s within our power to have a God-like impact on the future of the Universe, based on the decisions and actions we make today.
There’s a real chance that if we don’t carry out something like the Millennial Project-- and don’t do it soon-- the proverbial End of the World will overtake us; leaving the only known spark of life and consciousness in a hundred billion galaxies extinguished forever, with nothing but a cold, dead Universe left behind to mark its passing.
But Death and Chaos don’t have to prevail. If we take action, and take it soon, we can take ourselves and much of the biosphere that spawned us not only into a more survivable course, but a much more glorious and expanded one; into a wondrous, promising future, where the horrors and miseries of the past can be left behind forever.
I (J.R.) often wonder what I personally shall do with all my money when I reach the status of wealthy philanthropist. Since money is so hard to come by, and the need in the world so great, I’d want to target something especially beneficial to the world (and the future), in order to help as many people as I possibly could.
If the text of the Millennial Project is a true reflection of where Savage’s First Foundation is headed, and what it’ll strive to accomplish, I’d want a big chunk of my philanthropic resources to go into its operations.
This is about the highest praise I’m capable of giving to an enterprise that’s not my own! ha, ha
If you have any real interest at all in space travel, the future, or just want to help make the world a better place in general, you should read this book, and then (if sufficiently in agreement with the author) join his cause on whatever level you can, whether it’s just a magazine subscription, or an endowment of some kind.
The Millennial Project:
Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps
by Marshall T. Savage
© 1992, 1994 by Marshall T. Savage
published by Little, Brown, and Company
508 pages, illustrated
U.S. $ 16.95
First Millennial Foundation
PO Box 347
Rifle, Colorado 81650
First Millennial Foundation E-mail:
73163,[email protected]
Internet: [email protected]
First Millennial Foundation BBS:
(303)-625-3273
(303)-625-2815
Author's Note: Neither FLUX magazine or J.R. Mooneyham & Associates are in any way financially connected to, or involved with, Marshall Savage, the book publisher Little, Brown, and Company, the magazine New Millennium, or the First Foundation. •