Prolog
"Collectively humans can be the
most hopeful of pessimists, though the Old Ruling Class usually perceived
Humanity without the benefit of hope. As a result, Humanity's leaders historically
fall short when predicting the human potential. And so it was with
Mars.
"Political, scientific, and literary
leaders of every persuasion glumly predicted the New Martian Frontier yet
another painfully chaotic and disastrous continuation of Humanity's historic
self-serving extremism, yet another futile display of our arrogant presumption
to exist.
"But in the early Twenty First Century,
Humanity's definition of self-serving extremism had fundamental changed.
Finailly being given the framework for a functioning globally connected
brain, Mankind soon discovers itself to be the Earth’s seed. Humanity looked
out into our local star system and discovered a sky full of Sol’s stony
children, once teaming with life but now either cold-dead or slowly falling
into the long starry chill. Then, like a weed in the desert, we remembered
something we had always known. That life exists to live.
"Most of Earth's established political
hierarchies found uncontrolled and freely cooperating individuals colonizing
their
star system highly disturbing. They also found themselves quickly replaced.
No wars, no blood, just PCs and TVs and telephone and FAXes. Talk-shows
and satellite-news did the rest. The Cooperatists simply cooperated with
the cooperative and the Old Guard fell away like dry leaves. But then,
no establishment could ever stand against the billions of watchers watching
them with recording eyes.
"This sudden Old Guard die-off, coupled
with a mild reactionary baby-boom following the decades of intellectually
enforced anti-childbearing practices of the early Twenty First, only partially
explain the apparent suddenness of the Martian bloom. The Great Immigration
also recieved a boost from the radically modified governmental infrastructures
suddenly filled with new more cooperative individuals who increasingly
found more and more ways to spin out our thin web of Life around Sol.
"This heightened collective
awareness does not lead to Universal World Peace, nor the end of all poverty
and suffering as we know it. Humanity’s many facets continue to reflect
the odd riot, mass murderer, suicide cult, revolution, and tremendous explosion,
but these events become increasingly anomalous, and generally perpetrated
only by the disgruntled elderly.
Having acquired much of its power
and knowledge through the sheer breadth of Humanity's extremist expression,
the people of Sol have neither the heart nor hand to purge themselves of
their extreme and sometimes aggressive peculiarities. Much better for both
current and future generations to put these extremisms toward serving
Humanity; as evolution had designed them.
"And, no longer trapped like rats in a tiny
box, new generations grow to find new more positive vents for Humanity's
natural manic, aggressive, adventurous, and sometimes even contemplatively
reclusive acts of extremisms. These new generations find a new frontier
-- the frontier Out."
(Preface voice-over from Roseanne
DeSilva’s third level history lesson. E2082)
Chapter 1
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