The road upwards
(no direction home)
You know, stones tend to fall down, they usually do. Unless you launch them with a certain speed, which is called escape velocity, at least 7,9 kilometer per second.
When Hitler launched his V-2’s, his so-called Vergeltungswaffen, on London, he wasn’t thinking of spacecraft and exploring the universe, but his scientists led by Werner von Braun were aware of the possibilities of the immense speed those rockets were capable of.
Now let us look at history, the whole, seemingly complex and chaotic road that led to the firing of this weapon in the beginning of 1945 which could, launched out of The Hague, reach London in about five minutes. One may ask where to start this history, in the Renaissance, in Old Greece, or with the caveman, maybe with the extinction of the sauriers or even further back in time. I suggest we’ll go as far as the first unity capable of duplicating itself and thus setting into motion a biolocigal mechanism, skip all the details and facts of evolution and also the details of human history, horrible or not, many, maybe too many books have been written on the matter of coincidence or a more or less logical or even determined route with just a few sidesteps, like the nose of Cleopatra. Let us just jump into the reality of today. For example, the actual state of space investigation and the posibble development of space colonies in the next, let us say, 30 years from now. It is clear that if people are to survive in such a condition outside the motherplanet for a lifetime, their environment will have to be a small copy of their natural environment and that is why experiments on this project were called, for example, Biosphere II. This may come true and be reality within 50 years, who knows? Let us suppose it does happen in that not all too far future. Does it ring any bell? Is my association with procreation pure madness or just what one politely should call a hypothesis and nothing more.
(Since I am working on this idea for quite some time, before I had a letter published in Nature, correspondence, 7 january 1982, containing in other words the same, I am aware of the reactions. People seem to think that a certain plan is necessary but, sorry, reality does not work like that; it is just a biological mechanism if it works out or not.) It seems hard to understand, this possibility of a determined process leading to independent copies of the biosphere - very basic and in this case on a planetary scale. This defenitely is not a metaphore but an analogy and language cannot do without it. The main problem, I suppose, is the unwillingness to accept the idea of being an instrument of living nature rather than the steward, the plant rather than the gardener.
Maybe the right subject or category should be not “biocentrism”, but “futurology”
I would like you to take in consideration that it maybe wise for a prisoner to know his whereabouts. And not being just a rolling stone.
Roeland A. de Bie