Is Space The Final Frontier? Who Will The Man Of The Future Be? (Ch.13c)

Ch.13c : Is Space The Final Frontier? : Who Will The Man Or Woman Of The Future Be?

Janus sat in the middle of his room in the rocking chair facing Vidscreen.  A presenter spoke to him about the advantages of using MIOST’s passenger spaceline when taking tours to the near planets.  Unable to proclaim they were the cheapest and best value of the spacelines because if they did they would leave the House open to libel actions in the courts, which could prove very costly, they used other arguments to attract customers.  Of course like all the spacelines they charged a variety of prices to different groups and it was difficult to say who was generally the cheapest.  It probably wasn’t MIOST, who employed thousands of Management Accountants to determine to a very detailed extent exactly how much they could charge to different groups of customers without losing customers and revenue.  If a competitor raised its prices in a particular market segment MIOST would be sure to follow, although they would be able to capitalise on their competitor’s “capitulation” by advertising that the competitor had raised prices first and more than themselves.  Instead customers were being wooed with shots of space flight, the excitement of lift-off; comfortable passengers wearing smart clothes sipped tasty fruit drinks while looking out of the window at the receding planet.

Janus had never been into space.  It was generally prohibitively expensive unless you were on House business, or were lucky enough to win one of the many “special offers” advertised all over the place.  He did not really ever want to go there.  Space travel was for those whose work took them there or for rich people who could think of nothing better to do with their money than to waste it.  The rich would say that the money only enabled them to do something which was a valuable experience.  Flight beyond the world’s atmosphere was exciting.  New planets and new views of space could be discovered.  After such a journey you could return to Gallanol at peace with yourself for the rest of your life because you had been up there.  You would have proved yourself, achieved something which the rest of the world wanted.  You could impress friends and acquaintances.  IT would give you something very interesting to talk about at social gatherings.  If you were on the look out for a potential marriage partner it would make you more attractive to the opposite sex.  If you were getting on in years it could revitalise your life.

Janus thought this view of life was childish.  A journey into space would enhance no one’s life significantly.  A human being naturally wants to enjoy life experiencing comforts and entertainments where possible.  Natural comforts and entertainments for most people would mean hobbies.  Many people failed to find these things, necessary for a good life on the planet.  That was the fault of the system for many people.  Janus believed that very few people led genuinely happy lives.  The work ethic and the system with its consequent loneliness was responsible for that.  Space travel was not something any human being required to live a good life.  It was not a human essential, and most people would rather have those natural enjoyments if faced with an immediate choice.  Those paying travellers probably went into space because their own planet was not providing enough satisfaction for them.  It was the fact that they sought satisfaction in space rather than where it was potentially to be found, in Gallanol, which made them childish, because they did not understand themselves.

He appreciated many of the developments which had taken place in the world in recent years.  The United Nations had grown in power and stature.  That was comforting and long overdue.  No longer did they stand to watch at border crossings, practically waved aside, as their blue helmeted peace keepers were ignored by the people they were there to protect.  Now they were a peace keeping force with a bite.  They had become world conflict policemen, spreading peace and justice where once there had only been war and chaos.  Those powers they had been given to attack and arrest offenders against the rules of new international law and human rights had enabled them to intervene.  Thousands of lives had been directly saved over the years as a result and probably millions of lives improved.

Democracy had spread further over the globe and even poverty had been relieved.  But life was far from perfect.  The Big Corporations were in charge of so much.  Faceless bureaucrats slaved away all over the world and the mad, senseless dance of competition held sway.  No one starved or was malnourished any more but life for millions was dull and unexciting, controlled by a higher authority, the International Economy.  Working conditions and standards were prescribed everywhere.  There was nothing anyone could do to change them.

He wanted, like millions of others, to do something about it, to make the world an even kinder place, but the best efforts of idealists and visionaries over many years had led to this, a dull grey computer and money driven world, where humans were only pieces with votes which could not change the inevitable.  Writers, idealists, reformers, fantasists and artists appealed to the people in their varied ways appealing to differing visions, but most were critical of the present in one way or another.  They attempted to appeal to the people, the voters.  He believed that it was a vain hope.  What was needed was a political group with credible alternatives, but right now there was no such alternative.  Existing parties in most countries had no sufficiently radical policies to change the system in any way.  But even a radical and popular party would need to be very popular to overcome the interests and powers which benefited from the world economy.  He believed that to achieve progress they must put forward arguments to existing political and economic leaders as well as to ordinary voters, to persuade them of the sense of the new ideas for human progress.

MAN OF CULTURE – MAN OF THE FUTURE.

 Freed and not enslaved by technology.  Spends his or her days engrossed in his / her projects – art, music and literary.  He / She creates new worlds and people read them.  They have satisfaction that what they do is reaching people.  Gone is the world of the past where a man would waste his life for the sake of his masters’ profit, and where, if he did produce anything of creative value only the simplistic and the childish, the half thought out, are fully realised.  The world of the past, where people never got the real picture, the real story, except by hard experience.  People worked, fulfilled by the vision of their own status to be earned through work, satisfied it seemed by the promise of money, as if that could ever be enough to satisfy us.  They told themselves that when they had the job, the money, the car, the wife, the husband, the position, that they would be something and they would have enough.  But they didn’t seem to be aware that as soon as they achieved these things, and they wouldn’t all, they would be at the optimum point of life before the slow decline.  What followed was the onset of old age, the gradual decline, the paling of love, the frustration of forbidden lusts, in a body which could increasingly no longer attract.

The man or woman of the future has solved these problems.  First he/she has the right to a good life at birth.  He or she need not work hard although some effort has always been required by society.  He or she must learn and if the teaching is done right the person soon finds they want to learn.  They choose fields that interest them and learn more.  Never do they tire of the work that they do because they are not expected to spend long dull hours on repetitious and dull tasks.  There are machines, computers, robots to do much of that, and where work by human hand is necessary the people of the future share the work equitably and learn to enjoy it.