Description
A newborn baby opens its eyes and looks at the world in wonder. It smiles as it perceives the miracle of life. There are family and friends to love, romance, goals to achieve, intense effort for great ambitions, duties to be fulfilled, others to be helped and nurtured, food and beverages to be savored, countries to visit, knowledge to discover, books to be read and written, sunsets to watch, mountains to climb and many other pleasures.
Yet, the baby is only a few minutes old, but within it is a cancer. If not vanquished, the greedy cells will cripple the baby and condemn it to a short life of pain.
The baby is humanity; it is us. The cancer is a lack of a plan for us to have a good life for ourselves and future generations.
This book and its companion book, "The Nature Ternary: The Nature of Humans; The Nature of Groups; and The Nature of Reality," detail a plan. These two are the most important books. The companion book includes the topics: The Meaning of Life; Plan for The Best Possible Life (For Those You Care For and For Yourself); Providing the Social, Cultural, and Economic Environment for Individuals to Have The Best Possible Life; Ending Wars; the Ranch Model of Economics; Foundations of Human Thought; What is Reality?; What Is and Is Not Science?; Why do We Die?; Practical Immortality; etc.
The pursuit of happiness is possible for everyone when they have a share of economic and political power, but in most of history and even in many parts of the modern world, power is concentrated beyond the requirements of efficiency, and most humans have lived the lives of serfs. As we look at the world around us, we see wars, genocides, and dictatorships. Humanity is also on an unsustainable path of consumption of available resources and lacks a plan for providing the maximum possible resources to future generations. The first part of this book argues that we cannot allow this to be baby humanity's future and outlines our consequent Duty.
It has been less than 500 years since only a portion of the world's population has been able to escape feudal tyrannies and have a life with opportunities for the pursuit of happiness. Another marker for the beginning of the modern world would be around 400 years ago when an old man rolled balls down an inclined plane (Galilei, 1638), and humanity began experiments to discover the fundamental mathematical laws that govern the physical world.
Compared to the current age of the modern world, the "main sequence" of the Sun will last for 5 billion more years.
The baby has only lived for 500/5,000,000,000 = 0.00001% of its possible Earthly life or about 4 minutes of an average human lifespan. Baby humanity is just starting out; it is only 4 minutes old and has 80 years to live.
Can humanity really survive for 5 billion years? There are no laws of Physics that say it cannot; it depends upon what Culture we create and pass on to future generations. Our Sun will, for 5 billion more years, provide us the energy needed by life to continue in a Universe of constantly increasing entropy.
Stars are the conventional prime source of energy (the energy stored in fossil fuels originally came from our Sun). The last star will be born about a trillion years from now. Our current knowledge of Physics does not indicate any obstacle for humanity continuing till the end of the Stelliferous Era, roughly a hundred trillion years (10^14) away. Assuming we only colonize our galaxy and the average length of a generation is 33 years, the ratio of possible future humans to every present human is 84 × 1030 = 84 million trillion trillion. For every one of us alive, I calculate in the second part of this book that there will be 84 million trillion trillion future humans.
I call this number the Galactic Foundational Multiplier (GFM). This very large number of future humans, whose fate depends upon our actions, makes us a Foundational Generation.