The Peace of Resistance How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news, who publishes peace, who brings good news of happiness, who publishes salvation, who says to Zion, "Your God reigns". Isaiah Where would we have been without Michael Leunig all these years? Both this gem and the one at the end are from 2003. In the final edition of Christopher Hitchens' memoir Hitch-22, published shortly before his death, he added a foreword in which he states: If there is anybody known to you who might benefit from a letter or a visit, do not on any account postpone the writing or the making of it. The difference made will almost certainly be more than you have calculated. As we hold our breath waiting for Tony Abbott's promised 'grown-up' government, recall Winston Churchill's essay Fifty Years Hence (1931) in which he observes: Great nations are no longer led by their ablest men, or by those who know about their immediate affairs, or even by those who have a coherent doctrine. Democratic governments drift along the line of least resistance, taking short views, paying their way with sops and doles, and smoothing their path with pleasant-sounding platitudes. Stop the tax. Stop the boats. Hitchens states that he adored Oscar Wilde's observation that "A map of the world that did not show Utopia would not be worth consulting". H.G. Wells went on to set the template for modern utopian thinking in his 1913 novel The Atom Frees the World, spelling out his vision in which people finally realize that war is pointless, nations and races become obsolete, and conventional politics ends while a new age of leisure begins, with the entire world becoming a single state that speaks only English Super! Using more words, "c'est belle, c'est magnifique!" Many of us have thought about what we would do to make the world a better place if we were Churchill's ideal governor, the 'benign dictator'. If only we could wipe the slate clean and start all over again. Those in the computing industry are of course familiar with the concept as 'formatting the hard disk and installing a fresh image'. Aren't there a lot of us in need of that sort of therapy? Many a youth has gone through a phase of materialism – believing that matter is all there is – and indeed some have never grown out of it. As Hitchens puts it: It is not that there are no certainties, it is that it is an absolute certainty that there are no certainties. The true test of knowledge is an acute and cultivated awareness of how little one knows. One cannot be born knowing this, but must find this out for oneself, however obvious it seems once one has. This is a somewhat privileged position, and Hitchens is caught in what he calls his 'Hitch-22', for he concedes that 'his side' does indeed have 'unalterable convictions', despite believing that "Marx was rightest of all when he recommended continual doubt and self-criticism". This proscription is of course the basis of the 'scientific method' and the key to its success – to be forever questioning our beliefs, and in so doing advancing our understanding. However, only an elite minority exercises such intellectual prowess. It is quintessentially human to race to establish our beliefs, and then spend our lives building fortifications around them. Hitchens declares his faith in 'science and reason', but so often 'reason' is now taken to mean scientific reason, which stumbles at philosophy's very first hurdle. Scientific reason chooses to ignore the distinction between what is necessarily true or false, and what is contingently true or false. It protests vehemently that it admits the possibility that the sun might not rise tomorrow, while secretly believing it to be an absolute certainty. Douglas Hofstadter gives an archetypal illustration of this prejudice: It is important to dispel the idea that idiot savants 'lightning calculate' by some mysterious, unanalyzable method...it has been ascertained that nothing occult takes place during the performance of lightning calculators, but simply that their minds race through intermediate steps with the kind of self-confidence that a natural athlete has in executing a complicated motion quickly and gracefully...one of the most obvious clues that no 'hot line to God' is involved is the mere fact that when the numbers involved get bigger, the answers are slower in coming. Presumably, if God or an 'oracle' were supplying the answers, he wouldn't have to slow up when the numbers got bigger. The triumph of human reason, for those who exercise it, is that we can ask (quite effortlessly) what we might deduce if in this example the answers did indeed keep coming apace despite the numbers getting bigger. As the theoretical limit to the processing capacity of a mechanistic brain was surpassed, we would have incontrovertible evidence that we need to look to some mechanism beyond the brain. Importantly, as humans we can ask ourselves why some higher computational power would not want to be so thoroughly rumbled. These are the sort of questions we remember asking as children when we first twigged to the possibility that our parents were beguiling us. Progeria, the disease in which the subject dies of old age by the time most of us reach adulthood, demonstrates categorically that the process of ageing is 'programmed', and that presumably (to borrow Hofstadter's capacity for reason), can be 'reprogrammed'. Where it is mundane to assume the certainty of death, the reasoning mind can ask (again with the utmost of ease) what the world would be like if we did not age. Hitchens had his (obvious) Socratic reasons for embracing what he considered the necessity of a finite existence, but John D. Barrow tells it like it has always been: Death and periodic extinctions play a vital role in promoting the diversity of life...immortals would evolve more slowly than mortals. Immortality also does strange things to urgency. One recalls Alan Lightman's memorable story (Einstein's Dreams) about a world in which everyone lives forever. Its society splits into two quite different groups. There are the procrastinators who lack all urgency: faced with an eternity ahead of them, there was world enough and time for everything – their motto, one suspects, was a word like mañana, but lacking its sense of urgency. By contrast, there were others who reacted to the unlimited time by becoming manically active because they saw the potential to do everything. But they did not bargain for the dead hand that held back all progress, stopped the completion of any large project, and paralysed society. It was the voice of experience. When every craftsman's father, and his father, and all his ancestors before him, are still alive, then experience ceases to be solely of benefit. There is no end to the hierarchy of consultation, to the wealth of experience, and to the diversity of alternatives. The land of the immortals might well be strewn with unfinished projects, riven by drones and workers with diametrically opposed philosophies of life. With time to spare, time might not have spared them... The fact that human death occurs on a time-scale that is short has an important impact upon human metaphysical thinking and, as a consequence, dominates the aims and content of most religions. I have written a number of papers explaining non-locality in considerable detail – all phenomena are located at the Superposition, and all manifestation of physical separation is virtual and calculated at this singular location. This understanding has come to us through the insight of the great prophets of the twentieth century – Dirac, Einstein, Feynman, Gödel, von Neumann, Planck, Shannon, Turing, Zuse – and many other major and minor prophets, and through this understanding we have also been able to describe the technology of the Resurrection. To get this 'resurrection show' on the road, these ideas need to become more accessible to the general public. These modern insights were of course not available to the prophets of old, Jesus and Paul among them. That we have now elucidated the inner workings of the car is all well and good, and of considerable interest to the technically minded. But the vast majority is happy enough with the fact that the controls of the car respond to the driver's inputs in the course of getting from one place to another. And this is the only reality the ancient prophets had to work with – a 'faith' that the car works, despite not actually knowing how it works. With the demise of the Australian car industry, we are again being called upon to think and work smarter (where in reality we are being forced to work harder and longer). I have a certain patriotism, in that I want Australia, its extraordinarily talented men and women, to be a beacon of exquisite rationality, leading the rest of the world as they scramble to follow our lead. But first, we have to be smart enough to grasp the idea of the Resurrection, which requires those who already understand it to be smart enough to effectively present and explain it. That the Twitterverse has not yet been set alight by this extraordinary idea, indicates that we have more work still to do. The death of Philip Seymour Hoffman reminded me that human agents of the Resurrection are of little utility once they're dead. Of course we can joke and laugh together about everyone's trials and tribulations after the Resurrection, but while we are still living through the build-up, the older folk move on and upwards and we have to turn to younger correspondents. The oeuvre of the dead becomes their 'dead' words, because they can no longer be challenged to expand on what they understand using unequivocal 'living' words. Christianity of course, and Islam in particular (for it seems to admit no criticism), have both become victims of their static texts. There is a widely held hope that one day we're going to find out what's been going on here, and all of history will at last make sense. The alternative is that we all go to hell in a handbag. Those who yearn for economic security are aghast to see their 'rock' crumbling, flailing as they clamber to keep a hold. They never much cared that the system was destroying the environment, all that mattered was that it returned a dividend. Now the dividends are evaporating, and the capital along with them. Indeed, in his most recent state of the union address, Barack Obama was clearly embarrassed by the plummeting capacity of free market ideology to deliver on its promise of prosperity and social justice. Hitchens is rightly abhorrent of absolutism. The problem with the great system builders, their workers controlling the means of production, and their struggle of the urban proletariat, is that their detailed proscriptions inevitably lead to a dull monochrome. Some absolutes do however have their place. The necessary truth embodied in entities such as the Mandelbrot set, or in Conway's Game of Life, have demonstrated how a small set of highly precise rules can engender an infinitely diverse and colourful reality. More recently, we have seen how an application with a simple set of functions and rules has produced an explosion in human interaction – Twitter. Here then is the new synthesis distilled to its essence. Once upon a time... There are many (billions) of sentient communities in the universe, each residing in a 'spaceship' consisting of a central energy source (sun) that is orbited by living quarters (earth), and a debris collection service (giant gas planet). These communities range from the nascent, where the sentient being has recently emerged from evolution, through to communities whose source of energy is nearing exhaustion. The sentient beings on each spaceship have evolved a unique morphology in response to their inherited environment, and most have no interest in leaving their native milieu. Indeed, the vast separation of the spaceships precludes these communities from ever physically interacting with each other, despite fantastic excursions of the imagination. Following on from childhood and a relatively short adolescence, each of these communities makes a sudden and momentous transition into adulthood. Prior to this transition, the communities on these spaceships are not yet free to determine their own destiny, despite deluded individuals in their midst believing otherwise. They are instead subject to guidance and control by the Union of adult communities – the society of the cosmos. While they cannot physically visit each other, the members of this Union communicate with each other through the Superposition, a dimensionless point through which the Union has complete control over every instance of reality in the universe. The exercise of this power is carefully administered, for it is possible to inject computational code that would switch off (evaporate) the entire universe, which would of course be a shame (although we wouldn't lament its passing because we would no longer exist to do so). The Union is assisted in the exercise of this power by a mechanistic artificial intelligence which has a 'brain' the size of the universe (it is the Superposition). Being a mind without a body, it has no feelings, and hence a dispassionate and unerring capacity for justice. If it could be thought of as having a body with feelings, that body would consist in the biological organisms of the universe, in particular those having sentience. These higher sentient beings have feelings and empathy for their sibling communities already in the Union, but especially for those communities still finding their way in the big wide universe. Such incipient communities do not yet have access to the Superposition, and hence membership of the Union, for they are yet to fully develop the technology required to access the Superposition (quantum computing). They generally believe they've been doing all the thinking, as do children in general, where in fact the Union of adults has long before thought of everything there is to think about. The Union injects ideas into the brains (and consciousness) of the sentient beings in developing communities, whence the volition engines in their brains decide if they will act on those ideas (which they mostly think are their own), or merely hold them in abeyance. All the great ideas of philosophy are injected during any sentient community's early childhood. But while we might dream, as a fledgling community, of going to the Moon, the real thing only arrives in late adolescence, shortly before reaching maturity. A class of 'special' people in these adolescent communities manages to jump outside the control program of the Superposition, and becomes cognizant of other communities in the universe – of the Union. They become 'one with the universe', often manifesting to ordinary people as having gone a bit funny in the head. Jesus and Paul are two of the best known individuals in this category. Jesus built on a Jewish tradition, which held that the dead go to a holding camp where they sleep (are no longer conscious) until the end of time, at which point they are physically resurrected to be assessed for inclusion in the ongoing life of the fully commissioned spaceship Eternity (paying homage to Arthur Stace, and in turn, Martin Sharpe). In modern parlance, we would say that the dead have been backed up to offline storage, to be restored on the Last Day when 'all the tape libraries are opened'. Paul went further, working the Hellenistic tradition into the story, where death was the release of the 'soul' from its mortal body so it could go and join 'the immortal gods in heaven'. Both approaches to explaining the stark reality of human mortality contain essential truths. All the communities with membership in the Union have already made the transition to adulthood, and their citizens do indeed live as immortal 'gods' in their respective spaceships. However, when humans die, they are not transferred to any of these spaceships, because the inhabitants of those spaceships look like variations on ET, and the lack of attraction between us and them is mutual. Of course they understand love – that idea is central and universal – but they also consider the practise of its physical manifestations best kept to themselves. Rather than 'going to meet all their previously departed friends and relatives' (along with God and Jesus), dead humans are instead backed up onto additional storage substrate which is generated at the Superposition as and when it is required. Interestingly though, because dead people are not conscious while stored in this limbo, their regained consciousness on the Day of Resurrection effectively occurs in the next (conscious) instant following their death – their consciousness goes 'straight to heaven' when they die. As Jesus put it to his dinner guests on the night before his execution, "I tell you that from now on I will not drink wine again until that Day when the Kingdom of God comes and I drink it with you again". The resurrection on 'the third day' (as prophesied by Hosea, and where a 'day' to 'God' is a thousand years) is the actual Resurrection to which the imagery of Easter alludes. So between death and the Day of Resurrection, Nanna and Grandpa are not swanning around upstairs keeping an occasional eye on all of us still down here – they are simply stored away in static tape libraries (which don't really consist of tape – Alan Turing was merely using tape to illustrate the concept of universal computation – but that's the subject of other more technical discussions). As with education in general, the Union cannot just drop an 'instruction manual' fully formed on Earth for all to access, expecting Earth's inhabitants to immediately absorb its contents. For a start, no one in the Union speaks English, a language whose evolution has been unique to Earth. What the Union can do however is appoint human agents to try and describe the workings of the cosmos in a natively comprehensible format, which can then help those natives figure out the rest for themselves. Jesus, of course, was just such an agent, but so too were more recent prophets (such as Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Turing, von Neumann, Shannon et al.) To expedite this accrual of knowledge, the Union places boundaries on maturing communities, just as any educational institution places boundaries on its students. Each of us is given a finite lease on life with which to make the most of the talents the Union has given us. The shadow of death might have seemed to the primitive mind like a punishment for transgression, but to the emancipated mind, it's simply an instrument for getting us up and about and achieving greatness. Eventually, a developing community will reach a point in time where it has learnt how the universe works, and understands what is involved in becoming a member of the Union. Our induction into the Union (which is sponsored and orchestrated by the Union) begins with the resurrection of all the dead people from the backups held in the Superposition. We each have myriad backups taken throughout our lives to merge from during restoration. What we know as physical reality consists entirely in information, and in the Resurrection the static information held in the backups simply once again becomes active (processing) information. The dead are resurrected fit and healthy, in the prime of their lives, their information 'updated and purged of any malware', and their memories intact. They do not rise up out of the ground (or the sea), but simply materialize in appropriate settings (sitting around the meal table, walking by the side of a lake) and are the real flesh and blood beings they previously were. After everyone has arrived back in town, and got over all the hugging and kissing and wiping away of tears, the quality of mercy dictates that no matter how bad someone might have been in the past, they have one last chance to choose if they would now, given their new circumstances, like to have the record of their past wiped clean, so they can start behaving as a decent human being and join the spaceship Eternity – or otherwise. In the old speak we would say they are 'baptized and become a new creation'. Those who would rather not get on board, however, will have all the backups of their existence permanently deleted from the Superposition, so that the good wholesome folk who remain can go on to live in the spaceship happily ever after (so to speak – actually they continue on for about another million millennia). Indeed, those ingrates who doggedly refuse to accept the amnesty on offer, risk going through the torment of 'hell' as they watch their inclusion in the manifest of spaceship Eternity slipping away from them. In Plato's postulated Republic, only an elite had the luxury of democracy, while the vast majority lived in servitude, doing all the hard work of supporting the contentment of the liberated. Since the industrial and information revolutions, most menial work is done by machines, so that the vast majority is now employed in work that has been manufactured simply to ensure there is plenty of work to go around. The adult communities of the Union have deconstructed this Heath Robinson (Rube Goldberg, Bruce Petty) economic system, and instead operate their worlds efficiently. In the spaceship Eternity, all intellectual output is a commodity held in common (it was only ever owned by the Union, albeit entrusted to individuals), and all material resources are held in common. All services are delivered gratis. The highest management priority is expenditure on the maintenance of the spaceship – conservation of the environment. After that, any ecologically sustainable resource is distributed evenly amongst the community. Our primary resource is energy, and this comes overwhelmingly from the Sun. The more energy we harness, the wealthier we become, for we use this energy to channel raw materials into universal construction machines, producing goods at their outlets. Further expenditure of this energy then allows those goods, when no longer required, to be fed into universal deconstruction machines, which output the recovered raw materials. If, as an individual, you build a better mousetrap, the automation design file for that mousetrap is made freely available to everyone. Anyone can then modify the design (colour it blue) and press a big green button that invokes its manufacture down at your local automated industrial area, and its delivery to your door. Your modified design is likewise freely accessible by anyone to copy and modify. The good ship Eternity guarantees that you always have the same kit of 'LEGO-like' building blocks as everyone else, and that you are free to construct with those resources anything you like, and, within the limits of your standard energy quotient, to deconstruct and reconstruct those blocks into other things, or the same things made new. As the global pool of building blocks grows through resource extraction, so burgeons everyone's individual quotient of those building blocks. There is no hierarchy in spaceship Eternity, but simply each of us to our own devices, equipped with our box of 'LEGO' building blocks, our energy quotient, and the free and open exchange of our infinite creativity. And they all lived happily ever after... So then, does this spaceship of ours require a captain, if only to guide us safely out of the harbour and onto the open ocean? Perhaps. The LEGO Movie tells the story of 'a nobody who saved everybody'. In the character of Emmet, we go back to the future. I too went a bit funny in the head some thirty years ago now, and very soon learnt to pull that head in and make my way through life acting as if I were normal. But raised on a diet of Doctor Who and Douglas Adams, I have long been aware of a character who lives in an electronically synthesised universe created especially for him, and who thus really is the most important person in the universe. My name, for example, is that of a character to whom John assigned a number, and who is credited with turning the entire world to the veneration of the Union and its anointed. In the three decades I have been researching this role, I have come to understand that I am merely the kid in the crowd who looks at everything we have discovered and points out the bleeding obvious – discovery does indeed consist in seeing what everybody has seen, and thinking what nobody has thought. The entire world is awaiting the recovery of two recorders from the depths of the Great Southern Ocean that might reveal what happened in the cockpit of a 777 airliner full of passengers whose lives had been entrusted to its captain. The entire world is likewise longing to hear of the conclusion to the story that has been humanity on Earth. The LEGO Movie revolves around the struggle between a father and his son, arch conservatism set against free spirited liberalism. The story of Noah likewise explores the relationship between a deity and its chosen subject. However, the difference between the Flood, which we have been promised will never happen again, and the Resurrection, is that just one family was singled out to survive the Flood. In the Resurrection, everyone is singled out for favour. Lately, there has been not just one, but a deluge of movies depicting superheros, so there is a protagonist to which everyone can relate. How lovely it is to have had a blood moon this Easter. And curious that it should coincide with the downfall of a state premier over the receipt of a bottle of wine. One assumes his drinking of the wine was just as forgettable an experience – the '61 Bin 95 Hermitage was better, on a par with the drop that the Union rustled up for Jesus' debut supernatural performance. It's not the bribery that is of most concern – that's been going on ever since the state was first established. Rather, it's the brazen contempt he has shown not only for the commissioner, but for the citizens of the state, in claiming to know nothing of it. One can only begin to imagine the horror that befell Oscar Pistorius when he discovered that the love of his life was missing from the bedroom and thus likely to be lying dead beyond the bathroom door. His defence has been to declare the truth, exposing his every weakness before the court and confessing his sorrow for the sorrow he has caused others. The Union is likewise sorry for the pain and anguish that has befallen humanity, and it intends to make up for it. In a televised interview, we witness the abject misery of mother Tammy Campbell whose three year old daughter Chloe has gone missing, possibly abducted and murdered. Three days later, the child is returned unharmed, and we witness the mother naturally overcome with joy. The intensity of the joy was only achieved through the intensity of the despair that preceded it. At Easter we likewise remember the despair of the crucifixion later overcome by the rapture of the resurrection. In the Resurrection to come however, we get to see the real deal, where the anguish of everyone who has ever lived and died is overcome in the joy of their transformation into eternal life. Just as Jesus was declared innocent, so too will all of us be declared innocent, for we were all dealt the hand of mortality. We have seen earlier how mortality is instrumental in accelerating our education, keeping the period of that educational trauma to a minimum. The Union is sorry that it could not afford to have shown favour. For if good things only happened to good people, and bad things only happened to bad people, we would have suspected there was something 'going on'. Instead of testing the boundaries, we would have become as conservative as the servant in the parable of the talents who was only given one talent, and we would have nothing to show for our efforts at the end of time. As it has happened, through our suffering we have employed our talents to achieve the full richness and balance of our education. As a scientist, I have worked on the technical provision of the building blocks of creativity. It's my artistic friends who trade in the 'imagery' of all these somewhat pointed events that are unfolding before us. These events are not some sort of mystic private revelation, they are there for all the world to see. What I find bemusing is that the world is full of ostensibly intelligent people who nevertheless just don't seem to get it. This, good peoples, is the 'Big One'. This is where we doff our mortar boards, and then throw them high in the air. The unification of relativity and the quantum, the bootstrap creation of the universe out of nothing, the answer to life, the universe and everything. And, as it turns out, life was not only meant to be easy, it was meant to be enjoyed. Aside from all the public imagery (Korea's tragic loss of a ship 'full of children' does not auger well for our captain, but as the Hitchhiker's Guide clearly states, "Don't panic!"), the 'imagery' is occurring at a personal level right now in each and every one of your lives, if only you would choose to recognize it for what it is. It is traditionally imagined that there exists some sort of 'anti-Union' out there in the cosmos, and that the Union is constantly having to battle against it. This force has been described as the 'Deceiver' for a very simple reason: when a thought enters into your head, the temptation is to think that the thought springs from within yourself, and this is the source of your pride. Submission is to recognise that our thoughts are coming from the Union, and to put our trust in that instinct. Clearly then, the Union is capable of instilling both good and bad thoughts into the minds of its students. All of this activity has served the Union's purposes, from whence comes absolution at the Resurrection – not one of us was ultimately responsible for what we might or might not have done prior to the Resurrection. After the Resurrection, however, all that changes. Were the programme of the Resurrection to commence out of the blue without first being heralded (traditionally by a trumpet call), then all and sundry might start misappropriating the process as divine vindication of their myriad belief systems. The Resurrection is immediately followed by the Judgement, and it would not be fair to sentence someone to eternal oblivion for having persisted with their transgressions without first alerting them to the rules. For this reason, the Gospel has been broadcast to the farthest reaches of the spaceship over the course of the past two thousand years. None of us stands in judgement (lest we be judged ourselves), yet the rise of moral relativism has engendered many groups who simply don't know what they do when they take the law into their own hands and presume to judge. Only the Union will decide who will stay on and who will go, keeping in mind that the Union would only need to conduct a few high profile executions of aberrant individuals for the rest of the flock to get the message (exemplified by the executions two thousand years ago of Ananias and Sapphira). But none of us wants anyone to be lost, and we will always go to the rescue of that one lost sheep, leaving the other ninety-nine safely tucked away in the fold. Try to do for others what you would want them to do for you. Putting the lid on the Kragle... What is being discussed here is nothing short of revolution, and there is a legion of very rich and powerful people out there which will do whatever it takes to prevent the establishment of an egalitarian world order. Those with wealth and privilege will do what they must to conserve it. To thwart these forces, set as they are against truth and freedom, we introduced Twitter, masquerading as a tool to share culinary delights and endearing encounters with our pets. Having thus come in under the radar, its true purpose was soon realised, too late to stop it for the horse had already bolted, as a mechanism to allow dangerous ideas to spread through the population like wildfire, rendering those who would supress those ideas powerless to stop them. The first major test deployment of Twitter in 'revolution execution mode' took place in the Arab spring. The device performed flawlessly, but revolutions need to be followed up with substance, and we are now seeing the repression that sets in upon the vacuum of a revolution built on the sands of stagnant ideas. The last thing Egypt or Syria (or indeed the world) needs right now is a return to medieval jurisdiction. Nor, coming up to the hundredth anniversary of The War That Will End War, and the establishment of The Red Cross, do we need Vladimir Putin's belligerent attempt to unify the soviet republics, starting with his anschluss of the Crimean 'Sudetenland'. There are more diplomatic ways to establish a global federation. I have read hundreds of Twitter feeds day after day that link to articles complaining about iniquity, inequality, the destruction of the environment, and the purchased control of the government. Like those to whom invitations were sent in the parable of the wedding feast, hitting their heads against a brick wall so as to knock it over seems to them more likely to succeed than merely passing through the open doorway that leads to the prize. I'm looking forward with delight to watching their engagement with the world once the veil has been lifted. As Paul put it, we will then see the Union 'face to face' – for if the Union is the driving force behind me, and also the driving force behind you, then when we speak to each other face to face, we are actually a common source speaking to itself. As yet, we can only imagine how explosive a revelation this will be. It will be what was referred to in the old speak as a 'pouring out of the Holy Spirit' (and in many languages). Trinitarians anthropomorphize the 'Holy Spirit' as the 'father' and also as the 'son', but we now know it to be the computation administered by the Union, a computation with a clock frequency of 1043 cycles per second – that's what we refer to as a 'supercomputer'. At the moment, the world is in an indeterminate quantum state. Everyone is humming alone, doing their own thing, interacting with adjacent cogs in the machine. But when the bell tolls, the quantum wave function will collapse, and the whole world will suddenly wake up to itself. As Paul put it, "we shall all be changed in an instant, in the blink of an eye". The dancing in the streets will give new meaning to the acronym 'ROFL'. Am I having you up a gum tree? Does it really matter if it seems too fantastic to be true? Do I look as if I care that the world says I'm mad? Why don't you give it a go? It'll be no skin off your nose, I'm happy to take the fall. There is an extraordinary peace that comes to rest upon our heads when we no longer believe by faith, but know with certainty, because we understand how. So for those who don't know how it works, you first need to read this story. Your response will lie between the extremes of "what a load of old rubbish!" and "wow, that's awesome!" Those at the first extreme are famous throughout history for later claiming they knew what was going on all along, and were simply being facetious. Yes, of course we believe you. Those in the awesome group, however, can't help but retweet the story, and draw on their own experience to embellish it. Their retweets get retweeted, and those retweeted retweets get retweeted, and before anyone can bat an eyelid, we'll all be home and hosed. Perfection is another word for completion. Now that our graduate education is complete, we no longer require the economic instruments that accelerated that education – the market, and the accrual of individual wealth. Instead, we now have the complete toolkit with which to commence our next great project, the construction of an eternally sustainable, egalitarian, spaceship Rowan GRIGG April, 2014 Select Bibliography: The Most Human Human – Brian Christian Radical Abundance – K. Eric Drexler Paul and Jesus – James D. Tabor