Earthrise changed everything.
The title
The
Visioneers by W. Patrick McCray is a portmanteau of ‘vision’ and ‘engineer’
created by the author. The title intrigued me and so did the word. The idea is
basically the technological advancement of someone’s vision. I immediately saw
how this notion applies to CyberEnglish. CE was the engineering of an
educational vision to make education better and more efficient through good and
better use of technology. My
Limits to Growth was
misguided US educational policy borne from
A Nation at Risk and
the eventual reliance on tests and not to product and technology.
Suggesting man put limits on his endeavors stopped the
world. Considering how technology had gotten us to where we are and where we
wanted to go, limits was a real downer, bummer, show stopper. Moderation,
compromise and such became catchword ideas. Ecological considerations needed to
be addressed in a more serious manner and Rachel Carson provided that. OPEC
provided that. The major rivers of the world showed us the errors of our ways.
As man’s life expectancy was growing, scarcity of land and food was a serious
issue for the future. Man was living longer because of the technological
advances I medicine, growing food, and creating livable spaces. Outsourcing
helped corporations but not America and now we slowly see a return of those
jobs. Spaceship Earth, The Biosphere, and 19th Century Science
Fiction became realities in the middle of the 20th Century that
foretold disaster for the 21st Century. Disaster on a huge economic
level. The science fiction ideas of space colonies have become campaign slogans
for 21st Century politicians. Technology is a double-edged sword.
Gerard Kitchen O’Neill was a scientist, a physics teacher,
who taught at Princeton. He came up with the idea of a space platform, a space
floating earth. While trying to realize his goals, he decided to make his work
public in 1972, which coincided with the publication of Limits of Growth. The only way O’Neill could go public was to
publish in the existing media of the day, science journals. It took him a few
years to finally publish his work for peer review. The process was troubling as
the reviewers of his article were unable to truly understand his concepts and
after many revisions he got published, not on his terms but on other reviewer’s
terms. That just ain’t right. The beauty of CyberEnglish is that each of my
scholars can publish their work, engage in peer review, and then pass it n for
others to read and use accordingly. CE exists because of the technology and
medium and the World Wide Web. The difference between O’Neill’s work and my
scholars’ work is my scholars’ work is not compromised so that it can be
published. We are seeing it happen right in front of us as technology by the
people is overshadowing the older traditional medias, because the old is compromised
by owners, publishers, people with a political and economic agenda and are one
way media; unlike the Internet which is interactive and democratic. Sure
Internet writers have a political agenda, but the conversation between reader
and writer is more extensive and possible whereas it is not interactive with
old traditional forms of media. We merely need to look at the Arab Spring and
compare it to The Berlin Wall, Eastern Europe during the Soviet era, WWII, WWI,
the French Revolution, the American Revolution. Consider the differences
between the Drudges of today and the one and only Thomas Paine.
O’Neill ran into the same wall that most innovators and
visionaries encounter. He did not propose that his space station would be a
panacea for earthly problems merely “an opportunity to ameliorate social,
environmental, and economic anxieties.”(p 69) Just as CE is not a panacea for
educational woes, it is simply a way to provide another way to evaluate the
scholars in our schools. There is always that careful balancing act between the
old ways and utopia. The possibility of the future is unfortunately always
projected through a lens of what we know as opposed to a lens of what could be.
In education we still teach the way we were taught instead of the way we should
be taught. O’Neill, too, ran into this problem in his field. His success gets
beyond him. As a result of the published article a group called L5 form in
Arizona. They distributed newsletters and tried to behave as any Internet based
group would, but in a pre-Internet time. The problem for O’Neill was that the
conversations about his ideas were out of his hands and he wasn’t part of the
conversations being had by Stewart Brand, Timothy Leary, and others. O’Neill
inspired others but had no input as to how they behaved or what they said. Were
this to have happened in the Internet world, well we al know how much better it
would have gone. This is all happening a few years after Brand’s Whole Earth
Catalog success and a decade before his much acclaimed creation of
The Well, of which I was an
early member. On The Well, O’Neill would have enjoyed a very public and
spirited discussion on a list or in a conference. We have seen how Internet
technology has sparked better communication and more democratic conversations.
I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention the ecological
advantages to O’Neill’s space station ideas. It would be pure solar energy. Any
pollution generated would be jettisoned to the sun for disposal. There are so
many advantages to manufacturing in space. CE also offers ecological advantages
as no need for paper, everything is digital. Digits travel better than atoms,
take up less space than atoms, and can be shared more quickly and efficiently
than atoms. O’Neill ran into his problems because of the atoms. If only he had
access to the digits.
When Omni magazine
emerged, O’Neill became a regular contributor. His book, The High Frontier and
these articles kept the ideas alive, but in 1985, O’Neill was diagnosed with
leukemia. In addition, with the election of Reagan, space stations for living
became military, weapon dispensers as in the Death Star in Star Wars. It is amazing how many ideas go through the military
before reaching the citizens. Heck the Internet was a military idea called
ARPANET.
With waning of space programs,
nanotechnology emerged. The
aspect of passing it on for O’Neill was in the person of
Kim Eric Drexler, an
MIT student who did some work with O’Neill and embraced O’Neill’s ideas and
those of L5 too. Drexler’s
Engines of
Creation will lead him to Nanotechnology.
Publishing as a visioneer ain’t easy as these two can
attest. The key is that these two
made their work public, engaged in critical if not cruel peer review, and most
importantly passed it on. They passed on their vision realized to a degree that
served as inspiration for others who followed and took it one more step. That
is what scholarship is all about and a foundation for CyberEnglish.