Be technomoral

Support the pursuit and moral application of knowledge. Develop and share your own specialist knowledge.  Maintain and share a broad general knowledge.  Be self-aware and aware of the world around you.  Tune into Nature^[1], its cycles and its ebbs and flows.  Encourage and support others in their pursuit of knowledge.  Protect knowledge from abuse, loss and subversion.

Only marginally less important than diversity for ensuring the indefinite and civilised survival of the human species is technological progress: the continual advancement of knowledge and its moral application to the challenge of human survival. 

We will not survive without the ever-expanding capacity to influence our environment and our destinies.  Until we can learn to control our natural environment fully, including our own deleterious impact on it, the forces of nature will remain a threat to our survival. 

However, civilisation is also significantly at risk from ourselves if we do not mature sufficiently as a species to cope with the power knowledge brings us.  We must learn to better control ourselves through appropriate ideologies and values, and the development of institutional checks and balances that will prevent the abuse of the power of knowledge.

While we have made considerable progress^[2] over the millennia much remains to be done.

Knowledge, and its application, must advance on all fronts, including the moral, political and behavioural, if we are not to be destroyed or to destroy ourselves. 

To advance in this manner knowledge needs stability.

It has been said that necessity is the mother of invention.  Perhaps necessity is the mother of development, but stability is the mother of invention?  Truly seminal and creative thought generally does not take place under stress.  Historians will point to the acceleration of technological development during wartime to support the view that necessity is invention's mother.  But necessity generates the political will and the funding stream required to develop pre-existing theory and invention into fully functional technology.

Knowledge does not grow for long in an environment which is physically or socially hostile.  It is only a stable and supportive environment that will sustain the growth of knowledge.  Repressed minds don't create.  Angry minds don't create either; they destroy creatively.  And an unhappy or undernourished mind doesn't fire on all cylinders.

Basic research, the advance of seminal knowledge, is inherently subversive of conventional wisdom - by definition, its findings may fundamentally challenge rather than build upon prior knowledge.  In the field of political economy and sociology it will be subversive of the prevailing Establishment.  The path to new knowledge will therefore never be a smooth one.  To the contrary, the interests vested in the preservation of the status quo^[3] will stop at little to scuttle new and uncomfortable truths.

History is replete with examples of the ordeals our most creative thinkers have had to endure to establish their truths.  Galileo Galilei was accused of heresy by the establishment of his day for having had the temerity to argue that the Earth was not at the centre of the Universe; and, one of our greatest philosophers, Jesus, was crucified^[4] for his inestimable contribution to humanity.

That alleged new knowledge should be subjected to intense challenge is entirely proper.  For every one new theory worth adding formally to the body of human knowledge, there are perhaps thousands that were not.  The line between genius and madness is a very fine one indeed.  Nevertheless, default social processes^[5] tend to overdo it, and are a hindrance to the advance of seminal knowledge.  It is for that reason that diversity^[6] is more important than technological progress, as a success factor in our indefinite civilised survival^[7].  The culture of tolerance and openness, and the stable institutional frameworks that are required for the deliberate nurturing of diversity are a prerequisite to the continual and rapid advance of seminal knowledge.

There are some who, conscious of the potential abuse of technology, hold a low-technology or perhaps appropriate-technology vision for the future.  They would, for example, proscribe the nuclear generation of electricity; they would foresee circumstances where the use of old-fashioned sail and horse-power should be encouraged.  There is no difficulty with such a vision provided it does not dilute our collective resolve to push out the frontiers of knowledge and technology as rapidly as possible. 

The reason for the sense of urgency is our unacceptably high exposure to species-threatening disaster.  There is no doubt whatsoever, for those who heed the bad omens^[8], that the indefinite survival of the human species hinges on the colonisation of Space.  The sooner we can get off the Planet in a sustainable manner, the better. 

At present all our eggs are in one basket.  While the probability of cosmic disasters, such as collisions with large asteroids or comets, is so small that we could probably quite safely count on many millions of years of continued life on Earth, the potential consequences of such a disaster are so great that to not vigorously pursue a programme dedicated to the colonisation of Space, when we are able to do so, is a fundamental abdication of our responsibility to all future generations. 

The lesser disasters of climate change, epidemics, famine, war, and geological perturbations, while probably not species-threatening, may well be civilisation threatening.  They may well occur on a scale that would push civilisation and technology back several generations.  Each such reversal would distance us from the technological base required to insulate us as a species from terminal cosmic disasters. 

The political will behind the space programme all but dissipated when the race to the Moon was won.  Many regard that race, and the spending since, as a ridiculous waste of money on idle fantasy; money which should have been and be spent on more pressing problems. 

In denigrating the vision of human beings colonising Space, and in leaving the programme to flounder under-resourced, uncoordinated and misdirected, we are doing future generations a great disservice. 

But there is a more immediate need than pure technological advance, and that is moral consolidation and progress.  Without morality even the technology we have now will be abused catastrophically.  Morality needs to be continually delineated and internalised because we are not inherently moral beings^[9].

There is little alternative to a technomoral future that is vigorously and systematically pursued.  However, that is not at all regrettable.  To the contrary, it is a future that is as exciting, as creative, as positive, and as challenging as any that could be conceived of.  It is a future that is completely congruent with all that is admirable in human beings.  It is a future that will harness our innate curiosity and faith^[10].  It will motivate us with limitless shared adventures; adventures that are not enjoyed at the expense of others^[11].

By encouraging individuals and societies to channel their creative energies into the shared pursuit of curiosity and morality rather than the pursuit of possessions, wealth, and power, we will flourish together as a higher order civilisation.