Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

“It's okay for things to fall apart
If they weren't very well designed to start.”
—Dori Adams, 2017

Imagine, if you would, a planet orbiting a star about a third of the way in from the edge of a spiral galaxy somewhere in the universe. On this planet there are four species of intelligent being. For the most part, they occupy related ecological niches on different parts of the globe. These species are capable of interbreeding to create hybrids.

Some tens of thousands of years ago on the planet in question there was a flourishing civilisation that included representatives of all four species. It reached out to the stars over a hundred thousand years ago and spread to neighbouring stellar systems. Then a global cataclysm occurred about seventy thousand years ago, and these species died back. Their starfaring days were ended. Then, after tens of thousands of years, they again built up a high technology that flourished thirty thousand years ago. Again there were travellers through the region around this unusual and tectonically active planet.  About twelve thousand years ago another global cataclysm pitched everything back toward chaos.

At various times in the history of this planet, enormous events on a global or even stellar system wide scale, changed everything. In some cases a nearby star went nova or supernova. In other cases, an asteroid or comet struck the planet. In still other cases a supervolcano ripped apart the climate and plunged the planet into a prolonged ice age. The fossil record of this planet includes the extinction of most the species of plants and animals on several occasions. Little wonder then that when the last global cataclysm took place, huge land animals all over the globe became extinct, and so did three out of four of the intelligent species.

“There's a moon in the sky. We call it the Moon.”
— B52s

Some readers will already have identified the planet as Earth. The four species of hominid that existed at the time of the global cataclysm around 70,000 years ago were Neandertal, Denisovan, Floresiensis, and Sapiens. The one that survived is our species, homo sapiens.

We can identify the Toba supervolcano as a possible cause of the cataclysm of about 75,000 years ago. We have recently identified human remains in archaeological digs in North America dating back perhaps 125,000 years ago. There are model aircraft found in Egypt, “myths” about space vehicles and missile systems in ancient Sanskrit texts, and a robust amount of information regarding the more recent global cataclysms of 12,800 and 11,500 years ago. Among other major species, the megafauna of North America, especially large mammals, were wiped out. So were the wooly mammoths on other continents.

Can I demonstrate that there was a past starfaring civilisation on Earth? No. It provides an explanation for a large variety of cultural traditions. “And there was a war in heaven,” appears in Revelations and in one of the Dead Sea Scrolls known as The War of the Sons of Light Against the Sons of Darkness. There is also a discussion in Genesis 6 of the Nephilim and the sons of God having children by the daughters of humans to create the “ heroes of old, the men of renown” and other stories suggestive of vastly different beings on Earth. Some aspects of the mythology of other cultures, especially ancient Hindu writings are very suggestive. The Annunaki of ancient Sumer are consistent with a starfaring civilisation, one possessed of matter transporters. Of course, all these things might be myths, stories, fantasies.

But, having read the Iliad by Homer as a fifth grader, I was struck by the thought that here were ancient Greeks, supposedly goat herding warring peoples with city states and limited navigational technology, who fought a war across the Aegean sea with peoples in Asia Minor, describing robots and androids. The wedding feast celebrated on Mount Olympus, at which Eris sends in the golden apple to create the circumstances which led to the Trojan war includes a description of “golden girls” who dance to please the assembled party goeers. These golden girls were manufactured by Haephestus, who is named Vulcan in Roman mythology. The same inventor has serving carts that move around by themselves providing the partiers with nectar and ambrosia. Later in the story Achilles is given a shield by Athena, and the description of the shield is that it has moving pictures on it.

Now, today we would not think it remarkable to see motion pictures. We've had them for over a century. But how would Homer know of them? That puzzled me as a child. It puzzles me less, thinking that Homer was expressing a cultural heritage of artefacts from a previous high civilisation bestowed on heroes in his story of the Iliad. Odysseus comes up with a number interesting things in his travels. Achilles meets Myrmidons, which is Greek for “ant people” and befriends them. They explain that they come from underground - where a civilisation that was experiencing a series of asteroid and cometary impacts would likely create large communities.

Graham Hancock

Much understanding of the previous civilisations on Earth may be gained by reading some of the recent books of Graham Hancock. These include The Sign and the Seal: The Quest for the Lost Ark of the Covenant; Fingerprints of the Gods (paperback, kindle); Magicians of the Gods (paperback, kindle); and America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilisation (hardcover or kindle).

You are welcome to dispute his version of events, but it is really hard to establish that he's making all of it up. There really were city builders at Gobekli Tepi 11,500 years ago, long before ancient Sumer or the accepted age of settlements in Egypt or India. Of course, what is accepted by contemporary anthropologists and archaeologists and ancient historians for the age of things may very well be false. Certainly there was great falsehood in the “Clovis first” view that mankind entered the Americas about 13,000 years ago and wasn't here previously. It turns out mankind was here as early as 125,000 years ago, and probably earlier.

Poor Designs

Human understanding of hybrid vigour or heterosis and stresses as sources of species advancement suggest that many of the things we're told about previous and contemporary “ruling classes” suggest their behaviours have been based on poor understanding. There is extensive evidence that certain people who claim to be rulers or the ruling elite are extremely conscientious of blood lines, heritage, and geneology. That concern might arise on a world where multiple hominid species existed simultaneously, but is wholly incorrect and inappropriate today since there is only one species. Nevertheless, racism was built into cultures in many countries and cultures, and seems to go back a very long time. Thus, these cultures have been and continue to be poorly designed.

Economic systems have, similarly, been designed to create state-enforced monopolies which are supposedly able to generate economies of scale. The argument that power utilities and other basic services should be provided on a government-protected monopoly basis for the benefit of consumers has been proven false. Not only do the consumers never receive any of the economies of scale, but also none of the supposed protections of government regulation ever actually protect the consumers, nor limit the profits of the mega-corporations, nor allow for dynamic economic growth. Instead, all systems tending toward the benefit of a privileged few are poorly designed. Yet, because the few have long believed that their privileges are essential to civilisation, in some cases because they believe their ancestors' privileged roles in the last high civilisation were granted by “divine right” they won't ever care about anything else, let alone anyone else.  We've been getting the shaft by an extremely corrupt system that actively hates everyone who is not part of that very narrow elite.

Injustice systems are evidence of poor design. Non-adaptive technologies such as roads and bridges as compared to much more fuel efficient flying cars are evidence of poor design. Limits to growth mentality rather than spreading out through the Solar system to take advantage of the enormous material resources available out there is symptomatic of poor design.

Wars are evidence of poor design. The people who profit from them are never the people who fight in them. The people who allocate wealth for wars are compensated in corrupt ways by those who profit from wars. Those who profit from wars never care, at all, in the least, about anyone harmed in the wars. And millions of people volunteer, often out of poverty, to serve in military organisations that spew propaganda about fear and terror while being the greatest sources of fear and terror themselves.

We've Known

For many decades we've known not only that freedom is appealing and works when not actively prevented by scoundrels, but also that free markets actually work much, much better than regulated ones. We've been able to prove since about 1920 that the economic calculation problem can only be solved with free markets fully open to competition. We've also known that every single controlled economy has led to tyranny, and typically mass murder on an industrial scale.

For decades now we've known that no system of logic is complete unto itself, that chaos makes it very difficult to predict the outcome of complex systems because very small changes to initial conditions create wild swings after only a few cycles - in the case of weather only about four or five days are reasonably predictable. We now understand quantum reality which also illustrates the utter falsehood of the command economy fiction. In sum, we know that the very venal, greedy, corrupt, and frequently evil people who promote the concepts of a managed society are not only liars and scoundrels, but promoting something that can never be. Not only are they incapable of managing society, it is not possible for society to be managed. Thus, all systems seeking a managed society are very poorly designed.

We Can Do Better

After my rude awakening at the hands of the state in February and May 1991, when I was at first falsely accused and then exonerated of charges of felony gambling promotion of a lottery, I began looking for a free country. I've concluded that for my purposes there is no free country on Earth. Certainly nowhere that one could build a space industry and create ships and systems capable of navigating the celestial void to build hotels in the Moon and human settlements of all kinds throughout the Solar system.

Therefore, I've decided to build free communities. That has been the purpose of the Resilient Ways Foundation, that is the purpose of Invictus, communities for the unconquered, and that is the purpose of The Liberty Project, by Chris Boehr. Not only do I seek to build more than one free place, but also to do so by open source methods so anyone else seeking to do so can use the same methods, or adapt them to local conditions. Within a few years, we could have tens of thousands of free countries on Earth.

Wouldn't that be better than what we have? Wouldn't that be worth building? Wouldn't that be worth living to see?

If you agree, please join us. Thank you.

 

Jim Davidson is the vision director of Houston Space Society, the founder of Resilient Ways Foundation, the chief financial officer of Dialogue Key, author of four books, and friend to many freedom enthusiasts. You can find him in Dayton at the Friends meeting there. Recently, the Houston Space Society reached terms for service from PayPal and so the link below, and payments to [email protected] work. You can also email Jim for other ways to get involved.