Time: Sat Nov 16 13:40:13 1996
To: Libertarian Students at the University of Arizona              <LIBERTARIANS@LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU>
From: Paul Andrew Mitchell [address in tool bar]
Subject: Formation of the Noosphere
Cc: 
Bcc: 

I can share an electronic copy of
"The Formation of the Noosphere,"
by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,
upon request.  Please choose 
BinHex, MIME, or Uuencode if you
know.

/s/ Paul Mitchell


At 09:46 AM 11/16/96 -0700, you wrote:
>>>Imagine what would have happened if, back in 1970 or so, a delegation of
>>>libertarians had gone to the Pentagon and asked the US military to build a
>>>distributed, self-routing communications systems that anyone should use for
>>>exchanging pornography, radical politics and personal attacks. "Swiftly
>>>escorted from the building" would probably have been an inadequate
>>>description of their reaction.
>>>
>>
>>Are you implying that the internet would not have eventually developed
>>without the government? Perhaps sooner, perhaps later.  Would you feel the
>>same way about the exploration of Space?  I would make the argument that in
>
>My point was that in our own generation we have seen several huge
>libertarian advances take place totally out of the blue, from unexpected
>origins: deregulation of telephony, the collapse of Communism, and the
>emergence of the Internet. Nobody sat down and planned the totality of any
>of these advances; we gained a small increment of freedom in a given area
>because somebody needed to solve a limited specific problem (such as
>internal communication by the military), and a host of unexpected,
>private-sector uses popped into existence as a result. This is why I'm an
>empiricist, not a philosopher.
>
>Yes: space, like information technology,cannot possibly be explored by
>governmental initiative. Just as the planners of the military Internet in
>the early Seventies could not possibly have imagined the uses we put it to
>today - and would have been totally against it HAD they imagined today's
>uses - none of us can foresee how space exploration will develop. The NASA
>approach is as though the settlement of the West had been organized and
>controlled by governments. Had this been done, we would still be sitting on
>the right bank of he Mississippi, debating whether we should feed the
>starving children of Pennsylvania before pushing out into the Oklahoma
>Territory. Instead, governments emerged from the settlers themselves and
>took a primarily judicial role, nailing down locally devised systems of law
>and property/human rights as settlement of the West unfolded. This is
>exactly how I think it should be in space.
>
>
      

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