Project. What we are talking about will make much more sense to you at that point, and it will be much easier for you to make the decision.”
“The decision?” I asked.
“The decision whether you want to leave with us or not.” Linda said.
“I’m all ears.” I replied.
Linda began describing.
“The Australia Project is what we call a fourth generation civilization. Prior to the Australia Project, civilization has been through three phases. There was the hunt/gather phase, the agrarian phase, and then the industrial phase. What you are experiencing here in the terrafoam system is the ultimate destination for many of the industrialized nations of the world. In your case, in America, robots created a massive concentration of wealth that, eventually, imprisoned millions of people.”
Cynthia added, “What you are experiencing in America is the worst that the robots have to offer. Robots control the humans, rather than vice versa.”
Linda continued, “The Australia Project was born specifically to solve these problems and create a new form of human civilization. It is a fourth generation civilization conceived of by Eric Renson. Eric was an American who was heavily involved in what was then called the open software movement. As an American, he had seen Manna in its earliest phases. He could envision what Manna, combined with the coming robots, would mean to America and Western civilization as a whole.”
“He at first tried to fight it, but realized that was impossible. Instead, he eventually came up with a completely new way to think about human societies. In the Australia Project, humans get the best that the robots have to offer, rather than the worst. He took the open source model of free software, added the robots and brought the model to the material world. The revolutionary idea in open source software is the fact that no one owns the code. Because there is no owner, the code is free to everyone.”
Cynthia picked up the thread. “Eric’s key concept was extremely simple. What he realized is that, in a robotic civilization, everything can be free.”
“How is that possible?” I asked.
“It works like this. Let’s say that you own a large piece of land. Say something the size of your state of California. This land contains natural resources. There is the sand on the beaches, from which you can make glass and silicon chips. There are iron, gold and aluminum ores in the soil, which you can mine, refine and form into any shape. There are oil and coal deposits under the ground. There is carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen in the air and in the water. If you were to own California, all of these resources are ‘free.’ That is, since you own them, you don’t have to pay anyone for them and they are there for the taking.”
“If you have a source of energy and if you also own smart robots, the robots can turn these resources into anything you want for free. Robots can grow free food for you in the soil. Robots can manufacture things like steel, glass, fiberglass insulation and so on to create free buildings. Robots can weave fabric from cotton or synthetics and make free clothing. In the case of this catalog you are holding, nanoscale robots chain together glucose molecules to form laminar carbohydrates. As long as you have smart robots, along with energy and free resources, everything is free.”
Linda chimed in, “This was Eric’s core idea — everything can be free in a robotic world. Then he took it one step further. He said that everything should be free. Furthermore, he believed that every human being should get an equal share of all of these free products that the robots are producing. He took the American phrase ‘all men are created equal’ quite literally.”
I said, “That sounds great. In fact, that sounds perfect. But Eric does not own California. Rich people own all of the land and all of the resources in the United States, and they are going to give none of it to anyone. They expect to be paid for what is ‘theirs’.”
“Yes, that is true. That ownership model is, ultimately, why you are here in the terrafoam system. If a small group of people own all of the resources and have complete control of them, then everyone else is at their mercy.” Linda said. “The key to Eric’s brilliance is the fact that he found a way around this problem.”
“Eric realized that ownership, in the Western sense, is the problem. His solution was to turn ownership upside down. Eric used the corporate ownership model to create a civilization that accomplishes his goals.”
“Eric formed a corporation called 4GC, Inc. He sold shares in this corporation for $1,000 each to one billion people. You will learn about all of this during your orientation. He put lots of rules around the shares to avoid abuse - for example, one person can access only one share of stock. The upshot is that, by selling one billion shares of stock in 4GC, Inc., Eric accumulated one trillion dollars in the corporation.”
“With that money, he started to build his new civilization. The first thing he needed was land — resources. He approached several governments, and eventually formed a partnership with the government of Australia. He was able to buy 1.5 million square miles of the Australian outback for $250 billion. Eric then began buying other resources he needed — factories, mines, companies around the world. He also began building new factories in Australia, all of them completely automated, to build robots. With his $1 trillion, he needed to buy all of the resources necessary for one billion people to be completely self-sufficient. He was able to accomplish that goal in Australia for about $600 billion.”
“The amazing part,” Cynthia pointed out, “is that, once he had done all that and started the major work in Australia, the citizens of Australia decided to merge with the project. The entire continent of Australia — all 2 billion or so acres of it — became the Australia Project.”
Linda continued, “Eric also started with several core principles that govern life for people living in the Australia Project. One of those principles, as I mentioned, is that everyone is equal. Each person gets an equal share of the resources that the corporation owns. Another is complete recyclability. The resources owned by the project are finite, and by making everything completely recyclable, they are reused over and over and never diminish. The LC for this catalog, for example, is manufactured entirely from carbon, hydrogen and oxygen in the air. If you burn it, it returns to the air. The same thing happens if you drop it on the ground and it decomposes. Every object, every product that the robots make for us is completely recyclable in the same way. Whether the object is made from carbohydrates, carbon polymers, aluminum, glass… it is all completely reusable. All that you need is energy and robots to break any object back down to its core elements and then form it into something new.”
“Another one of Eric’s core principles is that no one owns anything. It is quite likely that, when you lived in America, you leased everything. You never owned anything, but someone else did and you had to pay for every single thing you used. That’s another form of resource ownership that concentrates wealth. In Australia, you own nothing, but neither does anyone else. Whatever you have is yours until you die, and then it gets recycled. Or you can give it back to be recycled whenever you want. There are lots of people who do that constantly with clothes. They wear something new every single day, and the old clothes are recycled.”
“That’s what I do. I like to be up-to-the-minute on fashions,” said Cynthia.
“Another core principle is that nothing is anonymous. Eric grew up during the rise of the Internet, and the rise of global terrorism, and one thing he realized is that anonymity allows incredible abuse. It does not matter if you are sending anonymous, untraceable emails that destroy someone’s career, or if you are anonymously releasing computer viruses, or if you are anonymously blowing up buildings. Anonymity breeds abuse. In Australia, if you walk from your home to a park, your path is logged. You cannot anonymously pass by someone else’s home. If someone looks up your path that day to see who walked by, that fact is also logged. So you know who knows your path. And so on. This system, of course, makes it completely impossible to commit an anonymous crime. So there is no anonymous crime. Anyone who commits a crime is immediately detained and disciplined.”
“There has not been a murder in years. It is impossible to do it anonymously, and everyone knows what happens when you murder someone else. People do commit crimes occasionally. Mostly it is kids who have not completed their education.” Cynthia said. “They are disciplined and the problem goes away. You’ll learn all about this in the orientation.”
“Can I ask you something?” I asked.
“Absolutely. That’s why we are here.” Linda said.
“You are telling me that you live in a society where everything is free. And everyone is equal. Everything is completely recycled, so I take it there is no pollution…” I said.
“True,” Linda said. “Zero pollution, because of total reuse. To have pollution, it would mean that you are spewing something into the environment rather than reusing it. There can be no pollution in our society because of
