Direct Democracy--All Power to the People!

Direct Democracy--All Power to the People!

While the local, state, and national governments will continue to be representative democracies, the new Great Regional governments that we need to establish--such as Northamerica, a region that includes the United States, Canada, and possibly Greenland, Iceland, and Bermuda--should be DIRECT DEMOCRACIES, where decisions and laws are made by discussion groups (DGs)open to all people.

All topics of public concern can be studied and debated in these DGs, but their primary purpose is to determine how the new wealth tax revenues should be used. You could begin with the budget allocations proposed in the blog, "How Much Will Progress Cost", to see if you accept these broad spending priorities. Undoubtedly, many people will disagree and want to discuss possible changes. All such people will be able to join DGs to study and argue about that.
If you accept the broad spending allocations, then the questions become more specifically how to spend the money within each broad area. DGs will meet to discuss what specific programs should be set up to meet the broad objectives. Finally, when the total budget has been broken down into dozens of programs and projects, DGs will meet in each county, to decide specifically how they want to use their county's share of the wealth tax revenues, in accordance with the programs agreed on in the prior DGs. They should be guided by, but do not necessarily have to spend their county's revenues exactly proportionately to the allocations previously determined by the other DGs. Therefore, it is probable that when all the counties make their individual budgetary decisions, the total will differ from what had been decided upon by the prior DGs.
As a result, more DGs should meet to discuss these discrepancies and try to find solutions if they create trouble--such as if the country seems to be going in a different direction than what people in general want. (For example, the country as a whole might feel the need to address the problem of poverty, but in their own county, they might cater more to the middle class. There should be some way of solving this sort of discrepancy.)

Other DGs will meet to discuss all the other issues in the society. In particular, some will act as watchdogs on the other levels of government. Anyone who has any issue of public policy they want to argue about can put out a call online or broadcast or maybe even via direct mail; and so anyone anywhere who wants to talk about that issue can sign up for the discussion. Depending on the number and spatial distribution of such people, there may be anywhere from one to thousands of discussion groups arranged on the topic, and they may meet in person or over the Internet, by telephone conference or maybe even via the mail. Each DG should have between 10 and 50 people.

People will be paid presumably the minimum wage or $10 per hour for participating in these DGs. A DG might reach a decision on their topic within just a single session, but if the issue is large and complex, the DG could study and debate it for many sessions, over many months. After the debate is completed and when the time to reach a decision comes close, the participants will be given a test of their knowledge of the issues. Their pay for participating can be increased according to how well they do on the test. If the decision is taken in the form of a vote, the record will show that vote; but there should also be a vote that is weighted according to how well each voter did on the test. If there is a discrepancy--e.g., if the unweighted vote is 2-to-1 Yes but the weighted vote is 2-to-1 No, then this fact must be recorded also (and possibly eventually will need to be investigated and resolved somehow).

Where two or more DGs have tackled a given issue and reached different conclusions, then new DGs need to be formed, perhaps including representative members from the original DGs, in order to further debate and try to resolve the question.

This system of Direct Democracy will enormously broaden civic participation, and the beauty of it is that it is completely free of hierarchy--there are no more Kings or Presidents or Senates or even Mayors reigning over the people, we are all free and equal, self-governing at last! Of course, this applies at this time only to the (new) Great Regional--e.g., Northamerican--level of government; the other levels, from city council to World Parliament, will still be representative democracies with towering hierarchies and inequalitites of power. But if direct democracy works at the regional level, then it may become a model which other levels might someday follow!

Electoral Reform--Restructuring the Government

Electoral Reform--Restructuring the Government

While making the new regional governments direct democracies will broaden the distribution of power by many thousand-fold, we need also to restructure the national government (and, similarly, also, state and local governments), while keeping them as representative democracies, so as to redistribute the power, make the distribution fairer and more beneficial, by broadening it several-fold, maybe up to ten-fold. Most people are now excluded from electoral office not because they lack the necessary knowledge of society or leadership abilities to succeed in such positions, but because they are less proficient at fundraising. We need to make it possible for all--or at least, for many more-- who are willing and able and dedicated to public service, to run for office and win a share of the power.

Sharing the Power

The way to do this is to share or rotate each office among all or at least 2 or 3 or more of the candidates who compete for it, distributing the power among them proportionally to their popular vote, instead of, as now, giving it all to the top vote-getter. (Incidentally, this will also help motivate people to vote, because every vote will count, and it will eliminate the old problem whereby, for example, every vote cast for Nader is a vote for Bush--about the last thing most Nader-supporters wanted.)

For example, if , say, 7 candidates run for an office, and receive, respectively, 34%, 23%, 14%, 11%, 8%, 6%, and 4% of the total vote, then they should share the power and perquisites of the office in that proportion. One way to divide up the power would be for each of these 7 legislators (assuming that they were running for seats in Congress, state legislatures, or etc.) to vote their share on each bill--for example, this district's one (1.00) total vote might be recorded as 0.54 votes in favor, 0.46 votes opposed [from that, you can deduce which 3 voted Aye and which 4 voted Nay!]. But when it comes to dividing up the time, the hours each serves in office, this should be up for further study and discussion. The result should be that the total time, number of hours worked, by the 7 office-holders would substantially exceed that which would be worked by one, but obviously, the hours served by any one of them would be less than that which a single official would work. There would be a potential for better government, in that they in total would have more time to give to studying the issues, attending hearings, helping their constituents deal with government bureaucracies, and so on. Also, more points of view would be able to participate in the legislature's debate--such as socialist and libertarian, which might each in their own way have important ideas to contribute to the making of pollicy, but which are excluded by the present winner-take-all system.
As for the salary to be paid each of the electees, there are three main considerations. (1) The most novel one is that there should be merit pay for politicians, rather than all senators, etc., being paid the same. (2) But in addition, as I advocate in the blog on solving unemployment, the principle of "full promotion" means that everyone's pay should largely depend on their age--so that older politicians should be paid more than young ones even of equal or greater merit (note that this does NOT imply that we should pay any less heed to what the young are saying!). This type of seniority system is designed for the purpose of maximizing happiness by giving everyone the experience of income, life, and prospects continuously getting better with time, though it also relates to our natural inclination to respect older folks, and to acknowledge the value of years of experience. (3) The third consideration is that the hourly pay to be given any politician should be proportional to the number of votes they received, since for each hour worked, presumably the higher-vote-getters are representing more people than the lower vote-getters--and also, supposedly, that the higher vote-getter was judged by the electorate to be--and therefore might ACTUALLY be--more highly qualified to wield governmental power.
These three considerations must be combined to determine the pay rates for each politician.

What about candidates who get too few votes?

Any candidate who gets too few votes to share in the power in this way could donate his votes to one of the higher-vote-getting candidates, or accumulate votes from election to election until at last his or her total reaches the threshhold. For example, we might set the cutoff at 5%, or we might say that only the top 5 vote-getters can share the office, or we might combine the two criteria, like a rule that the candidate's percentage share of the vote must exceed their ordered rank, like a 6th place candidate can share in the office only if they get at least 6% of the vote, etc.
Erasing district boundaries

One of the evils of our current system is the arbitrary drawing of district boundaries, which mean that the number of votes a candidate receives depends not on his or her total support, but on how their supporters are geographically distributed. (One example of this may have been the Rev. Martin Luther King, who had millions of supporters, but might not even have been able to win a senatorial race because his supporters were so widely scattered around the country, probably a minority in every state. ) It must be made easy for people to run in numerous districts, and for their vote count--and hence their share of the power--to be the total of the number of votes they receive in all districts.

Evaluative voting

Each voter should be able to not merely vote for one candidate in a field, but to cast differential votes for each of the candidates, such as by rating them on a scale of minus 100 to plus 100. There would be, for example, a big difference between a candidate who receives an average of +60 from all voters and one who receives an average support level of only +20, even though they might get an equal percentage of the vote in an election where each voter could only pick one candidate.

Election results that give everyone reason to be happy

The singular, executive offices--like the President of the United States, which are traditionally held by one person, must be similarly shared by two or three or more. Think h0w much happier it would have been in 2000, for example, if the election had resulted in the triumvirate--Bush, Gore, and Nader, becoming our leaders, rather than Bush alone! We would all have had reason to be at least a little bit happy about the results then! And Nader would have received a far larger share of the vote, because the main reason he got so few votes as he did was that most people who really wanted him felt they had to vote for Gore instead.

Political Capital

You could think of the number of votes a candidate receives as being an amount of capital that they have been given to spend by the voters. In this case, they might be allowed to spend some of it in fighting for unpopular causes. If a bill comes before the legislature that this politician considers particularly vital, they might be allowed to cast 2 or 3 votes in favor, for example, although this would reduce their political capital such that they might not be allowed to cast full votes on later bills. But in this way, politicians who had been elected with high vote-counts would be able to have more power than those elected with fewer votes.

This raises a lot of mathematical questions that would need to be settled, like exactly how many extra votes could a legislator cast on a particular bill, etc.

Weigh the degree of support for a law, not just Yes or No

When a legislature votes on a bill, in many to perhaps most to perhaps we could arrange to make it on ALL bills, the result should not be simply yes or no, does this become law or not, but should be a matter of degree, in particular, a matter of how much money should be allocated to the given project. For example, not Should we or should we not provide prescription drug benefits for seniors, but How much money ought we to spend on such benefits? The bill may be written with an amount--say, $50 billion a year. Under the current system, if the vote is 215 to 214, then it passes and provides $50 billion; if the vote is 214 to 215, it fails and no money is allocated. It is preposterous for one single legislator to have this enormous power! A single legislator should only have a few billion dollars worth of power, of say-so in how and how much money is spent. Therefore, there must be a sliding-scale--something like this:

Ayes minus

----Nays--------% Funding

--minus 50----------0%

--minus 25---------40%

--minus 1-----------70%

--plus 1-------------75%

--plus 25----------100%

--plus 50----------110%

That is, for example, if the vote on this bill were 200 Yes and 225 No, we should still allocate 40% ($20 billion) for the program, because probably the main reason some voted no was just because they felt that $50 billion was too much money. On the other hand, if the vote is nearly tied, it probably means that many legislators are not sure whether we should spend so much, so it may be wise to pare it down a little, to $35-37.5 billion. And at the other extreme, where the bill is wildly popular, it probably means that we should spend even more on the program, like 110% ($55 billion) if 50 more vote Yes than No.

Getting People to Vote

The fact that under these proposals every vote will count will help motivate citizens to vote, but also, people should be paid about $10 (or about the minimum wage for however many hours we might expect them to spend on it) to vote. They should also be paid to study the issues and candidates. For example, courses should be offered which people would be paid to attend, and tests of relevant knowldege should be given, with, say, a reward of 50 cents for every correct answer up to perhaps $50 for a 100-point test. This program might cost $10 billion a year (say, $50 [perhaps consisting of $10 for voting, $10 for attending class, and $30 for scoring 60 on the test--nothing to be ashamed of, it's a fairly hard test] times 200 million voters), but it would be worth it to encourage civic interest, involvement and participation.

Solving US and World Poverty

Solving US and World Poverty


*****This blog incomplete, still under construction, please visit again later*****

Education

EDUCATION


As progressives, we will aim for steadily rising levels of knowledge, understanding, and skills in all fields for all people. In some ways, this objective is not too different from the current goals of most people concerned with public education. But we need to make huge reforms in the school system.

1. Don't expect the schools to solve the problem of poverty. That has to be done through restructuring the whole economic system. Everyone has the right to a good job, regardless of whether they go to school or get good grades or learn anything. The more they know, the better a job they should get, but we have to demolish the current system by which if a student fails to pass the "high stakes" test they don't get a diploma and are kicked out of the system without anyone asking or answering the question of how they are supposed to earn a living without a high-school diploma, let alone a good living which is their right and their due.

2. School should be fun for everyone. It is, of course, fun already for those kids who are smart, popular, or good at sports, and the slow, lonely, or weak and clumsy are obviously going to be destined to have some less fun but even they should still have more joy than pain from their school years, so different from today.

There is a lot that must be said about this objective, but let me elaborate here on just the first aspect, which is that today some kids are so smart that they're are bored in the classroom; others, not such geniuses, are just smart enough to find their classes interesting and enjoyable; others still less bright find them a mixture of interesting and challenging to frustrating and depressing, often a grind; and others less bright still find any academic classes merely destructive of enjoyment and self-esteem.

We want all the pupils to be in that second category (assuming that the classes are substantive, intellectually meaty and well-taught--and that the first class students are allowed to quickly move on to university, independent study guided by experts, careers or whatever), at least for most of their classes, like 2/3--I mean we're not trying to make everyone perfectly well-rounded and equally proficient in all subjects but to allow for substantial diversity and a bunch of rough edges. This can be achieved through medical and surgical treatments that will become increasingly available in the future that will effectively raise people's intelligence and IQs, their capacity to learn and retain memory and access their memory quickly and correctly. It should also be possible to enhance people's creativity, perhaps with the same medical/surgical techniques although it is also possible that, given a reasonably high IQ, plain educational and instructional techniques will work.

Meanwhile, textbooks and lessons should be made more interesting, fun, and enjoyable, which I think should be possible because we should stop relying on schools to end poverty. This should take a lot of pressure off teachers and texts, allowing them to be more free and creative, because our objective is a good life for all, including the life of the mind, with poverty to be solved by other means, outside the schools.

3. The minimax principle with regard to raising intelligence. Where we, as mentioned in the above paragraphs, seek to raise children's intelligence by medical and surgical methods in the future, in order to improve their educations, our goal must be defined as setting a floor, such as along the lines of establishing a mimimum IQ of 100 to which all children or all people should be entitled. Those with the naturally lowest IQs must be at the front of the line for such treatments. Of course also people must have the right to refuse such treatments. Those who do so refuse, if they are experiencing low incomes or unhappiness due to their low IQs, should be offered financial and other help so as to lift them up to a high and rising minimum standard of income and happiness.

4. Pay kids to go to school and to learn. To affluent, educated families, the child is supposed to be motivated in school by the sheer enjoyment of learning, while to less affluent and less academically-inclined families, the child is supposed to be motivated to study by the hope of someday landing a better job and by the fear (which as I said, we need to remove) of winding up poor and unemployed if they don't crack the books and study hard.

Without lessening these positive motivations, I would like to introduce another, which is that kids should be paid for attending classes and for learning, that is, paid according to how well they do on tests. This pay could be like somewhere between a dollar a day and a dollar an hour, plus the potential to earn say $10-$100 a month by scoring high on tests; while the test scores and payments must be set such that even the slowest or least interested kids can get about half the average. (Note though too that some of the tests will be "power" tests that give the best students a chance to shine, by scoring well above the average on them.)

The purposes of this pay are to make school more fun for everyone, especially kids from lower-income families (which you're always going to have even in a highly socialistic regime) and the less academically-inclined or capable; and to provide an extra incentive to replace the one we're getting rid of (the fear of future poverty and unemployment for poor students). It's also because school should not be compulsory, and kids should always have lots of other things they could be doing, so that we need to offer them something additional to entice them to come to school. The payments would serve as a light positive incentive to replace today's harsh negative incentives, the punishments for truancy. I wouldn't be surprised if many kids wound up coming to school only an average of 3.5 to 4 days a week, which is fine as long as make-up work and study help is easily available and as long as there are good things for them to do on their out-of-school days (including work, arts and crafts and musical practice and instruction, volunteering for various community service projects, etc., etc.).

5. School choice. Vouchers should make it possible for children to go to any school of their choice, even though it is imperative to maintain high-quality public schools everywhere. As I see it, the parochial and private schools can be beneficial in offering different alternatives to the methods and environments of the public schools, that might serve the needs or desires of some students better. Home-schooling also should be an available choice. I think each child, if interested, should spend some time in each type of school in order to find out what makes them happiest or which enables them to learn best. For example, a pupil might go to public schools Monday and Thursday, a Catholic school Tuesdays, another private school Wednesdays, and home-school Fridays. Only then would they be able to decide which type suits them best--or perhaps that very variety is best. This would seem to require that all schools follow the same instructional plan; I don't think that would be much of a problem to arrange although I'm sure there will be some disagreements and reasonable compromises should be made.

There are also major questions of accountability that will have to be followed up on. One obvious problem is that some private schools and home schools may be selective, rather than being open to any and all applicants. This means they will receive less public support than the public schools will, but how much less remains a good question.

6. Variable class sizes. Some students may do well (at least in some subjects) in very large classes, which might be taught in auditoriums holding hundreds of students; others may do fine just by watching videos or reading textbooks. A great deal of money could be saved by allowing these students to learn in these ways rather than putting them all in all regular-sized classes. This money could then be put to better use in more individualized instruction or smaller class sizes for other students, or expanding educational opportunities for the underserved students in poorer countries.

7. Financing. Our present school financing arrangements are highly unfair. First, we need to move towards greater equality of spending per pupil both within and between nations, which will require huge foreign aid as well as more federal funding within the United States. Second, we need to use more progressive income and wealth taxation to replace the regressive property tax that now finances much of the cost. Third, rich families should pay more of the costs of their own children's education.

8. Integration. Our ideal would be the complete (racial) integration of all schools. I think our main motivation for this should be that we like to see people of all races getting along well together. (I know that other motivations have sometimes been given, such as the alleged impossibility of the "separate but equal" doctrine, but I think this will just require more work because in so many cases it's too difficult to completely integrate all schools, and so much more important than equal schooling is the goal of equality of incomes, which, as noted above, must be achieved through wholesale economic system restructuring and reform, not through educational reforms.) The more troubling current problem of economic segregation, where poor kids go to different schools than rich kids do, must be solved by working for greater equality (see my blog on Solving Unemployment ... etc.) In order to achieve better school racial integration, we must achieve residential integration. This will be made possible first through achieving greater economic equality. Beyond that, we will need government planning for integrated neighborhoods, because this is a structural problem, like many whites would like to live in an integrated neighborhood (as long as the minorities are all middle-class, well-behaved and employed) as long as the ratio of nonwhites to whites is not too high. It may be necessary, and if so would be a good idea, to offer people economic incentives to move to the planned integrated neighborhoods.

9. Open admissions to higher education. We first need to eliminate the differential in pay between jobs that require college degrees and those that don't. Then higher education will be for those who want to learn, instead of those who just want to make more money. This should bring the costs way down, so that it can be financed like the elementary and secondary schools, everyone who wants to go to college will be admitted, and students won't have to go into debt. During the transition period, however, more government financing will be needed for such critical sectors as medicine, in order to induce today's highly-paid practitioners to teach so many new doctors that salaries in that field will fall to equality with the average.

10. Utopian? It occ urs to me that some people may object that this is all way to good to be possible--like where I speak of school being fun for all and of non-college-grads making as much money as college grads. But I must point out to you that these ideals are already in effect for the children of the rich. It is just a matter of redistributing the wealth to make them available to all. I mean, the rich don't have enough wealth to make everyone an instant millionaire upon redistribution, but they do have enough wealth to enable us to solve the problem of poverty and raise the masses' living standards with wise investment and hard work. It is not as if I were saying that we can all prosper without anyone having to do any work, this would be a blatant utopian lie. What I am saying is more like starting in the Great Depression, huge jobs programs were able to rescue millions from poverty and contribute to national economic development and growth.

What I am saying is that the increasingly severe concentration of wealth is making life continually harder and meaner for the bottom 3/4 of the population, and that our lives can be brightened, enlightened and enriched by taking the excess wealth from the excessively rich.

Revolution

In the United States, the revolution can probably be peaceful, legal and democratic, accomplished by voting for strong liberal candidates who will work for change, and ballot initiatives.

Socialism

SOCIALISM

-----1. Definitions
-----2. By Necessity
-----3. By Choice
-----4. The Exception to Choice
-----5. Territories for each ideology
-----6. Welfare-State Socialism
-----7. Great Society Socialism
-----8. Communism

1. Socialism is a huge concept that ought not to be defined in one phrase but is of many types. It requires a list of characteristics to describe it, and any real society is never simply "capitalistic" OR "socialistic"--it is always a matter of type and degree, depending on how many of these qualities are present. I would list these characteristics as being the most fundamental:
---Elimination of absolute poverty by government action;
---Reduction of relative poverty and inequality by government action;
---Full employment;
---Rent control;
---Government building housing more than the private sector does;
---Residents rent, rather than buy, their housing;
---Government tries to reduce or eliminate the inequities due to bad private-sector practices due to racism, sexism, ageism, nepotism, cronyism;
---Sharing in general;
---Government setting of wages, prices, rents, etc.;
---In a poorly-performing capitalist economy, the store shelves are loaded with wonderful merchandise the customers can't afford, and the merchants have to have sale after sale and offer deep discounts; in a poorly-performing socialist economy, the customers have to wait in long lines to get a chance to buy the second-rate, often scarce or shoddy merchandise;
---Progressive taxation according to people's ability to pay, resulting in decreased inequality;
---Equal opportunity for all;
---Rationing of food, fuel, etc.;
---Regulation of industry, commerce, finance, and markets;
---Publicly-created and owned infrastructure--public schools, utilities, roads, hospitals, etc.;
---Basic, simple, down-to-Earth economic system. Late capitalism overloads with lending and borrowing and all sorts of fancy accounting. Especially debt--it reaches the point where you have to borrow anew in order to pay back prior loans, and the lender himself/herself/itself can't lend without borrowing the money. Under socialism, there is no lending or borrowing, and no fancy acounting, only bookkeeping any high-school dropout could understand.
---Public policing and guarding, and armed forces managed without contracting out any tasks to the private sector;
---Government planning of the economy;
---Government driving of the economy, directing its growth according to public ideals, popular objectives and national or world needs rather than private profit;
---Public ownership of the means of production;
---Broad distribution of power.
---Full implementation of basic freedoms, human rights, civil rights, and democracy. It has to be noted that such basics as free and fair elections and freedom of speech and worship were prohibited in the great socialist states of the USSR and China and others. The reason(s) for that need to be studied, but anyhow as far as I am concerned these basics have to be supported even if that requires an additional war after the Revolution will have already brought socialism to the world. Yet patience may be what's called for--probably some day a Gorbachev (or, earlier, a Khrushchev)will arise to liberalize a dictatorial regime. I'm of no help in deciding whether, in France in WW II for example, you should join the Resistance or wait for the Nazi rgime to soften or even cooperate with it a little in order to try to ease it--even though I do know that we do need now to overthrow the presently-existing global regime.
---International travel: Everyone should travel all over the world--yet the communists--socialist regimes--erected the Berlin Wall. There is a lot that has to be said about that, because indeed such restrictions may be humanistically necessary for a developing socialist country to impose to prevent a brain drain. But the problem could be solved if countries will cooperate--of course, the Berlin Wall went up at the height of the Cold War, when the West had no interest in cooperating with the Reds. A poor country that has invested a lot in educating and training doctors and other professionals who could earn vastly higher salaries in neighboring rich countries, should have the right to hope that these educated people will stay to help their country advance. The doctors, etc., must have the right to travel abroad, but not to emigrate, I mean they should be able to spend 5-10 years abroad but not the rest of their lives except insofar as the rich countries could compensate the poor country by increasing aid.

2. Socialism by Necessity.

Capitalism basically does not work.* It can run along for 50 or more years, with a booming economy--as we have seen in the United States from 1945 to the present; but it will eventually collapse; and when it does, then society has to turn to socialism. Of course, these are matters of degree--in fact, the US has had a mixed economy perhaps 75% capitalist and 25% socialist since WW II; that is too capitalistic a ratio, and when it crashes, we will need to shift to--not 100% pure socialism, but perhaps a 50-50 mixed economy.

Let me elaborate on how and why "capitalism does not work," because many people don't see this, they think the US economy is working just fine (or some indeed think it would be working just fine EXCEPT for the taxes, regulation, welfare, etc.--the very elements of socialism in it).

Here are some signs that our capitalistic system is not working:

---Tens of millions stuck in poverty;

---Millions unemployed and underemployed (underpaid, forced to work at unsuitable jobs, working part-time while needing full-time work, etc.)

---Ever-rising burden of debt--personal, corporate, and governmental;

---Ever-increasing financial tricks--stock options, derivatives, hedge funds, private equity, etc.;

---Government's inability to meet its ordinary obligations, maintain infrastructure, disaster relief, etc;

---Mass overspending, Americans spend more than they earn. This is what keeps the economy going, but it's not sustainable in the long term.

---Undersaving, millions are approaching retirement age and will not be able to retire without slipping into destitution. Of course, when people finally wake up and start saving adequately, it will cause the economy to collapse.

Basically, capitalism does not work* because it continually concentrates the wealth, ultimately resulting in mass impoverishment, collapse of effective demand (the capitalists can't sell the goods their factories produce), and Depression, with mass unemployment and rising bankruptcies, foreclosures, evictions, homelessness, hunger, crime, and social unrest.

These problems can only be fixed by a huge redistribution of wealth and massive government job-creation.*

Another large reason capitalism doesn't work is that it does not adequately take care of the environment. It results in pollution, perhaps climatic change, and resource-depletion. Increased regulation and long-range, global planning--i.e., socialism--are necessary to solve these problems.

*I put an asterisk when I say capitalism does not work, because I actually believe that any and all of these political philosophies--including capitalism-- could work under the right conditions or by the right definitions. If we were all saints, any type of system would work just fine (but we are sinners). There are certain types of people who will thrive under a capitalist regime--competent, competitive, extroverted, lucky, healthy, small-minded people happy to concentrate their energies on schmoozing and money-grubbing. And probably not only them but many other types of people besides, depending on the particulars of any given capitalistic regime, or the particular niche they may find themselves in--e.g., philosophers will in general fail and founder under capitalism, yet one may become the friend of a rich patron and do very well so unpredictably and ungeneralizably. Maybe the general rule would be that to make most systems work it is necessary and sufficient that most of the people living in them be dedicated to making them work (along with an adequate resource base and protection from predators, of course).

What is essential is that anyone who finds himself or herself unhappy in a capitalistic regime must have the right to move to socialism, etc., and vice versa.

3. By Choice
Everyone should be able to live under whatever type of politico-economic system they want, whether that be like the type of regime promoted by Democrats (from the centrist Clintons to the liberal John Edwards to the progressive Democrats like FDR with his New Deal) or like that advocated by Republicans ranging from the centrist Eisenhower to the conservative Reagan-George W. Bush; or beyond these, ranging from socialist to libertarian, or communist to anarchist.

4. The Exception to Choice

There is one great big exception to this freedom of choice--namely, that the very rich are going to have to pay heavy taxes even if they want to live in a low-tax, small-government libertarian regime. Since less than 5% of the population is that rich, this would still leave over 95% of the people free to choose their form of government; and even for that richest 5%, they may still enjoy all of the other characteristics of whatever regime they choose--such as perhaps the unlimited right to have abortions or own guns or stay out of popular wars, to name just a few freedoms you might have in a libertarian regime besides the low tax. But also, there is this consideration, too: While the very rich are bound to have to pay the highly progressive taxes that are levied by the highest levels of government (national, international, global, and Solar Systemic), they might still save a bundle of money in a libertarian system by not having to pay much state and local taxes.

There is another exception, too, that should go without saying but maybe I had better say it anyhow, and that is that not even the most libertarian systems can evade their responsibility to protect the environment. It should be obvious, for example, that a chemical factory cannot avoid anti-pollution regulation just by relocating to a libertarian place. This is especially obviously true if it pollutes air or water that subsequently flow to populated areas. But it even does raise the question of whether companies in a libertarian state ought ot be allowed to pollute their own land, air, and water. I don't think so, but this will be up to others to decide, and it is apt to be a matter of degree.

5. Territories for each ideology

This freedom of choice is impossible today, but it should become possible in the future, when humanity spreads out across the Solar System. But even before then, we can make it possible by establishing territories for each form of government and economy. For example, fifty thousand square miles could be carved out of the Idaho-Montana-Dakotas area for a Libertarian regime, and another 50,000 square miles could be designated in California for Democratic Socialism, and so on. These territories would need to be subsidized, protected, and regulated by the Federal government, which is feasible if all parties are willing to cooperate in a friendly manner for the greater good of all, namely for the sake of giving everyone the right to choose what kind of system they want.

Each politicoeconomic system should develop its territory and way of life in accordance with its philosophy. It should invite tourists to visit and participate, in hopes of educating and persuading them of the benefits of its system, so that it may gain population and grow, and gain influence in the general society, the nation as a whole and its choice for type of government.

Three of the territories would be for "Welfare-State Socialism", "Great Society Socialism", and "Communism." Studying these three will give you the best understanding of what I mean by "socialism". In my SPACE blog, these three systems are similar to what I propose for Mars, Earth, and Venus, respectively. However, be aware that different people mean different things, and their ideas will influence how these places develop.

6. "Welfare-State Socialism" is like what I propose for Mars, "45%" socialism--meaning that the government runs 45% of the economy, and that the minimum wage is 45% of the mean wage. The main motivation for this form of government is to solve the problem of poverty by establishing high minimum income levels. (I actually propose for Mars a great seasonal swing from near-libertarian (10% socialism) rural-suburban summers to near-communist (80% socialist) densely-populated urban winters. The Welfare-State form is kind of the average of the two and might be found in the big Martian cities in summer and in the suburbs in winter.

Here, economic growth is mainly driven by the private sector, though that is heavily taxed and regulated, and the taxes are used mainly for improving the lives and opportunities for the (relatively) poor.

The richest one-thousandth of the population, despite very high taxes on the very rich, still wind up, after taxes, perhaps 300-500 times as rich as the average.

This is a representative democracy, where power is more broadly distributed by proportional representation and the rotation and sharing of political offices (see my blog on restructuring the government).

7. "Great Society Socialism" [apologies to LBJ] is like what I propose ("60% socialism") for planet Earth in the late 21st century. Here, the government (like the voters) has a vision of the kind of ideal future world they want, and so the bulk of the economy is guided towards that ideal. In this case, the primary guiding ideal is the "Space Age for All", aimed towards giving everyone everything they need to travel to, colonize, settle, and build civilizations on, all of the worlds of the Solar System. Beyond that, there is a further ideal of developing the Earth into a world of great excellence, achievement, excitement, beauty and variety, equal opportunity and equality, with very high and rising levels of affluence, education and knowledge, creativity and the arts, health and fitness and longevity, etc., for all.

The richest one-thousandth of the population, due to over 99,5% tax rates on the super-rich, wind up only about 30-40 times as rich as the average.

This will be a direct democracy, with power distributed hopefully nearly equally by the method of governing by discussion groups open to all (see my blog on Direct Democracy).

8. Communism [apologies to Marx and so many others] is like what I am proposing for Venus, "75% socialism". Here we aim for the perfection of the human race (and ultimately animals, too) with every person to be a genius (achievable through education, training, medicine and surgery to raise their IQ to 200 or more and ever-rising) and similarly outstanding and ever-rising in physical strength, creativity, morality, etc. We aim for many of the same ideals as in "Great Society" socialism though on a grander scale, a fantastically exciting, diverse, beautiful and egalitarian Solar System (not merely our own planet), with the additional important factor that we are paying the much higher taxes that are needed to actually accomplish it (while a 75% tax rate might sound only 15% higher than the "Great Society"'s 60%, that 15% is budget surplus that can be invested to yield huge public benefits; also, it leaves the individual taxpayer with 40% less money after taxes).

Due to extremely high confiscatory taxes on the rich, the richest one-thousandth of the people wind up only about 3 times as rich as average.

In this high stage of socialism, power is equalized via full promotion (see my blog on Solving Unemployment...). Thus, there are the rulers and the ruled, but everyone eventually gets promoted to Emperor of the Solar System, so all are really equal. Yet there will also be discussion groups open to all people, as in the "Great Society", so this helps to add another dimension to the equalization of political power.

SPACE: Humanity's Great Destiny

SPACE: Humanity's Great Destiny

In space is freedom, room to roam, knowledge, wild adventure, fabulous wealth, and fantastic beauty! We need to make it possible for all people--perhaps 10 billion by the late 21st century--to go to the moon, Mars, and all over the Solar System. The most important task is to redistribute the wealth globally, so that all people of all countries will be able to participate in this gigantic adventure. We will also of course have to get on track to solving all of our problems down here on Earth before we can justify an era of mass space travel--that's why we must massively tax the rich (see the blog on the cost of progress) . From then on, it will be a matter of building the huge number of rocket ships and giant space elevators that will be needed to transport the billions. We will need to study the environmental impacts of the program, produce popular entertainments,toys, and games to inspire mass enthusiasm for space travel, and also, we will need an immense educational program, to teach everyone about astronomy; space rocket science, engineering, construction, operation, and navigation; sources of energy and raw materials; exo-agronomy (how to grow food in space and on other worlds), and ecology (like the Biosphere--how to create life-sustaining communities in the extreme environments of other worlds).

All space belongs to everyone, and right now it is all public. Eventually, however, much of it will become private property; the most important consideration here being to maintain as much equality as possible for as long as possible--no one should ever be denied a trip to Mercury or a house on Mars, for example, just because they can't afford it.

The Solar System (which is where almost all of our Space travel will be for the next thousand years, though not beyond that; I mean that after around AD 3000 we'll be increasingly going to other stars and their planets) should be developed in such a way as to maximize the cultural diversity, both in order to give all people room to develop their own cultural, artistic, philosophical, social and political ideas, and to give all travelers the widest possible variety of places to visit.

Towards these ends, I would like to make the following proposals, which are geared towards the ideals of maximizing choice and diversity throughout the Solar System.
1. Greatness and Equality of Wealth and Power. By the time we go into space, we should have achieved very high levels of economic power and equality. For example, everyone should be a ten-millionaire. How can we get there from here? Sustained rapid economic growth will do it when combined with strong international governmental support of equality of opportunity, expansion of education and job-creation, etc. For example, the world mean income now runs to $7,500 a year. With 6% annual growth, that doubles every 12 years, which is a factor of 100 by 2090, so that by then, the mean income could be $750,000 a year, which, with thrifty habits, could enable people to save up 10 million dollars by middle age, and even the poorest, provided that we will have established a safety-net giving everyone at least half the mean income, can become multi-millionaires. But I want to emphasize that this is not about giving everyone mansions, luxuries and status-symbols. It is about everyone having the power and resources to go all over the Solar System, help build new civilizations and utopian societies of all sorts, and enjoy wilderness adventures, on all the worlds, limited only by your imagination.

2. Living room on other worlds
While some "terraforming" of the worlds (making planets', moons', asteroids', and comets' surfaces Earthlike) is possible, I think it is better in general to leave most (e.g., 2/3 - 3/4) of the worlds' surfaces as they are, and to build domes (usually clear--glass, Lucite, or ?) up to several miles in diameter, or to lay out (again, usually clear) covering surfaces maybe 10 to 100 feet or meters above the ground, for people to live in or under, shielded from intense pressures or vacuum, poisonous atmospheres, extreme temperatures, radiation, etc. But on some worlds, like Venus and Jupiter, many people will live in the atmosphere, in giant balloons, presumably most often (on Jupiter, they would have to be hot hydrogen balloons).

3. Political and philosophical freedom and diversity. Everyone should have the right to live in whatever type of society they prefer--liberals, conservatives, socialists, libertarians, communists, anarchists, or whatever--and the Solar System is so vast that we can make this ideal a reality!
My general plan is that the extreme of the big-government, socialistic civilizations should be on the innermost planets--Venus, and, especially, Mercury; transitioning gradually to more and more capitalistic, small-government ideals as you go out from Earth to Mars to the giant gaseous planets and ultimately Pluto and the outer comets. Numerically, this can be expressed as the percentage of government control of the economy and society--it might be perhaps 25% in the US at present, compared with maybe 75% in the old USSR. Starting with the worlds closest to the Sun, the ideals might be:
Mercury 90%--totalitarianism (benign and progressive form);
Venus 75%--communism (benign, progressive form);
Earth 60%--socialist ideal, like Sweden and Norway at their best;
Mars 45%--liberal welfare-state ideal, like France and Germany, at their best;
Jupiter and its moons 30%--politically "centrist";
Saturn and its moons 20%--mainstream conservative ideal
Uranus and Neptune and their moons 10%--libertarian ideal
Pluto and the comets 0-5%--anarchist dreams.

Let me emphasize that in no way am I trying to banish the small-government types to the outer cold and darkness! By 2050-2100, when we enter the New Space Age, everyone will have access to all the energy resources that they will need to thrive and prosper on even the remotest, coldest, and darkest comets and turn them into paradises like South Sea islands or whatever their dream may be.

Nor am I trying to segregate people! Everyone should visit all of these different worlds, to participate in and observe how the various ideals will work in practice. (What you will find is that all of them can be made to work well, although you will probably find that some of them appeal more to you than others do. But most of all, you may appreciate the variety.)

Also, each world will have territories set aside for its opposite--there will be a large land for libertarians on Mercury, and there will be a communist nation or two on Pluto, etc.

Private property will be inversely related to the public/governmental percentage given above. For example, there will be no private property of any sort on Mercury, the government will own the shirt ln your back, the brush you paint with (the arts will be promoted on Mercury--already, places there are named for artists, composers, etc.), the bike you ride, etc. On Venus, you can own your own clothes, furniture, vehicles, etc., but only very little land, maybe a thousand square feet to a hundred square meters. And so on, each world farther from the Sun will allow more private property and land, with less and less public; some outer comets under 300 km in diameter might be entirely private.

Here are some more specific proposals:

4. Terrific Mercury. Mercury is the most collectivist, the most heroic; the Nation (here, ideally that is the human race) is all, the individual only matters to the extent that he or she serves the Whole. Mercury is dedicated to titanic progress, gigantic goals that can only be achieved by the collective action of millions of people. Among these goals are:
1. The exploration of the Sun, including, ultimately, manned exploration of the Sun's interior!
2. Construction of gigantic telescopes from infra-red to ultra-violet and gamma-ray, etc.
3. Research and development of ways to move asteroids and comets so as to transport various materials to wherever they are needed, and to prevent collisions--or, perhaps, to cause some collisions (for peaceful purposes only, of course)!
4. R&D of spaceships capable of interstellar travel.
5. Building of vehicles and machinery powerful enough to come to the rescue of endangered planets. Suppose that some day we observe--through gigantic Mercurian telescopes--that a planet, say a thousand light years away, is doomed, like we can foresee that within 50-100,000 years, a giant comet will collide with it--wiping out all life, if it has any. We then have a moral obligation to try to rescue them. It will take enormous vehicles and machinery and training to accomplish that. Mercury will lead the way!
6. Also there is a tiny but not quite zero possibility of an alien invasion from outer space some day. Mercury will be building the weapons and training the troops that might enable the human race to survive and keep our freedom. Perhaps the most important aspect of this is the use of training and wargames to build individual and collective strength, intelligence, teamwork, coordination, and other admirable human qualities.
7. Gigantic construction projects. On Mercury, we will build the immense machines that can construct mountains, continents, and, ultimately, even giant planets to provide billions of square miles of new land to expand human civilization on.
8. Extensive R & D in all technical and scientific areas with special concern for any that might have the potential to lead to new weapons, since there is always the fear that if we don't develop them first, someone else with harmful intent or a lack of wisdom might develop them ahead of us. Now, the Mercurians must be aware of the danger of a technological arms-race, so they must exercise a great deal of self-restraint in this area, yet still they probably lead the Solar System if not the Galaxy. Another area of great concern is the potential for new inventions and discoveries that might lead to inordinate economic gain for the few who might have a monopoly of any sort on them. This could destroy the ideals of equality that we must try to maintain throughout the Solar System; so Mercury is on the alert for such dangers, and will work hard or fight to spread the benefits of such developments equally to all.
9. Although inevitably, inequality will increase as humanity spreads out across the billions of miles of the Solar System, there must still be ultimately limits placed on this--any trillionaires that might arise, away out in the most libertarian regions, are still going to have to somehow pay a tax--and that may will have to be done by Mercurians.

5. The Great Seasons of Mars. Mars has huge seasonal changes, from summers that are almost warm, with temperatures reaching 20 C to 70 F and up (that is in the afternoon; it's far colder at night), and winters with temperatures a hundred to 200 below zero. In the summer hemisphere, people can live out in the spread-out, semirural suburbs with a libertarian, small government; but in winter, many will draw back to live in dense, domed, socialist-to-communist cities. At the change of seasons, there can be mass migrations from one hemisphere to the other, by the millions of people and their animals, pets, etc., who always prefer the summers!

6. The Moons are for children and families. Most large planets have numerous moons--you could think of them as a family of satellites, and human families will enjoy flying around from one to another--e.g., from Europa to Io and many of Jupiter's other moons--as they're not too far apart and will all be developed in different ways that kids can enjoy. It will be fun for extended families, including grandparents, aunts and uncles and all, to take their 4-to-15-year-old children on their first space journeys, trips to Earth's Moon, for example, which will feature many diverse cities and suburbs all across its surface, full of interesting and beautiful adventures and educational experiences for youngsters.

7. The Asteroids are for Teenagers (and nations [and SSGAH!]). There are about 200 asteroids over 60 miles in diameter. These will provide millions of square miles for adolescents to design and build cities on, of all the sorts that their crazy, wild imaginations can conjure up--largely free from adult bosses. Many of these worlds have very low gravity, like less than 1% of Earth's gravity, so you can jump hundreds of feet up into the sky--but don't worry: In a minute or two, you will come down again, with no danger of accidentally flying off helplesly into empty Space!

Teenagers could join into groups of say 30 with similar interests--they would probably find each other on the Internet--to claim a territory of say 10 acres (4 hectares), to develop and build on as they please. 2 million sq. mi. = 1.28 billion acres, which would be enough land to give 10 acres to each of 128 million such groups of kids--or 3.84 billion teens total, which should be just about all of them for the next century or so, although it does depend on how long they want to keep and use their plot.

Nations: There are about as many large (60-mile-plus) asteroids as there are nations, which suggests that they should be matched up, with each country being given its own asteroid. They should work out some sort of cooperative relationship with the teenagers who they share the asteroid with.

And then there's the Solar System Government, or the Government of All Humanity (SSGAH). After millions of people leave the Earth and are living on other worlds and in Space, they will no longer be under the direct governance of the Earth's World government, but will come first under the rule of the Governments of Mars, of Jupiter, of Merury, etc. And then, finally, all of these worlds will be governed by SSGAH. The capital of SSGAH will be on Ceres, the largest of the asteroids.

8. Clocks and Calendars. Each world will have its own time-measuring systems, but these must all have enough in common so as to be easy for all people, such as visitors and tourists to each world, to learn; and yet there will also be a universal system.
Universal elements in world time-systems. We should eventually replace our base-ten "decimal" number system with a base-two "binary" system, since it is a bit more regular. In binary systems, the numbers 16 and 256 are especially important, since 16 ("hexadecimal")equals (2**2)**2 and 256 = ([2**2]**2)**2. The hexadecimal system is often used for printouts of computer memory storage, and the values of one byte (8 bits) of information cover a range of 256--i.e., they can range from 0 to 255 .

Therefore, the basic units of time on each world will be based on its periods of rotation and revolution, and on ratios of 16 and 256. On each world, days will be grouped into sets of 16 days called hetos (pronounced "hettoes"); and these shall be grouped in turn into sets of 16 hetos called hehetos (he [pronounced "heh"] will be the Esperanto abbreviation for hexadecimal; the t comes from the Esperanto word for day: tago). The 16 hetos in each heheto will be labeled by the first 16 letters of the Esperanto alphabet: a, b, c, c^, d, e, f, g, g^, h, h^, i, j, j^, k, l. (I am typing the diacritical marks ^ to the right of the letter, although in standard Esperanto, they go directly above the letters.) These letters can be pronounced ah, bo, tso, cho, doe, eh, fo, go, joe, ho, kho (kh like German ch in Ich bin ein Berliner), ee, yo, zho, ko, lo. The hehetos--sets of 256 days--in turn can be labeled by capital letters: A, B, C, C^, D, E, F, G, G^, H, H^, I, J, J^, K, L. Therefore, each set of 16 days can be given a two-letter name: the heheto letter and the heto letter, from Aa, Ab, Ac, Ac^, Ad . . . to Bd, Be, Bf (since there are just 23 such sets in an Earth year, since 16 goes into 365 22 times with 13 remaining--the last heto (Bf) of each year is only 13 days long, except in leap years, when it will be 14 days.

ON ALL WORLDS, the middle of the First Month of the year--specifically, the dates Aa8-Aa9--should be DEFINED by being the winter solstice in the southern hemisphere (June 20-21 on Earth). Thus, given any heto name on any world, you can tell what season it is in which hemisphere.

These HETOS will be used the same way we now use MONTHS--that is, the 23 of them (on Earth) will be the major subdivisions of the year, used for payments of salaries, rents, etc. The advantages of HETOS over MONTHS are: (1) They are not associated with any particular ethnic group, so they are a neutral choice for worldwide adoption as an alternative to the Christian, Chinese, Islamic, or other traditional calendars. (2) The hetos are all equal except for the last one of the year, unlike the irregular lengths of the months. (3) Their names are all automatically easy to remember by anyone who knows the Esperanto alphabet, which should be everyone in the future, by contrast with the arbitrary, archaic names of the months. (4) The system is easily, obviously and automatically adaptable to all the other worlds of the Solar System.


Heto Work schedules, Weekly Leisure schedules. With each heto containing 16 days, the calendar will feature each heto in the form of a 4-by-4 square of 16 days:
..HETO name..
..1....2....3....4..
..5....6....7....8..
..9...10...11..12..
.13...14..15...16.

While everyone may work different schedules, a common, standard schedule might be "123/4"--meaning the first, second, and third days in each row of 4 days. That would mean you would work on these 12 dates--1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15. That would amount to a little bit more than the 5 days out of 7 that is now common. To work a little bit less, you could specify a work schedule like "123/4 x 15", which would be to work all those days except for the 15th day of each heto. College class schedules might be expressed the same way.

Yet, the familiar unit of the week might be kept and used for scheduling leisure-time activities--such as the tradition for many of Sundays as a day of worship. One interesting thing about the week that is different from the heto is that the days of the week run continuously right through the end of the year, instead of ending the year with a special short period in order to begin each year on the first day of a new heto--years can begin on any day of the week. Another interesting feature of the week is that its length will vary on different worlds: The number of days per week should always be the cube root of the number of days per year, rounded. Thus, since the cube root of 365 is about 7, there are 7 days per week on Earth. On Mars, there will be 9 days a week; on the Moon, only 2.

If there are 4,096 (16 times 256) days a year on a world (as is the case on some asteroids), then there will be 256 hetos, named from Aa, Ab, Ac . . . to Lj^, Lk, Ll. If there are over 4,096 days a year, then each set of 4,096 days will be a hetrito (based on the Esperanto word tri, meaning three)--thus a hetrito = 16 x 16 x 16 days. The hetritos will be named by underlined lower-case letters. If there are over 65,536 days a year, as may be the case on Neptune and Pluto and beyond, then each set of 65,536 days is called a heheduto--that is 256x256, using the Esperanto word for two, du, and is named by UNDERLINED UPPER-CASE letters.

On all the worlds, the years will be numbered from December 10, 1948--the date of the UN's adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights--which will fall within--and define--the Year One on all worlds.

Clocks: Of course, you won't use hours or minutes as a unit of time on any other world--but what unit can you use? The most universal will be 256ths of a day (however long a day may be on the particular world); these are called heheontos--using the Esperanto suffix -ono, which means a fraction, combined with the t for tago meaning day. On Earth, each 256th of a day is 5.625 minutes, or 5 minutes and 37.5 seconds, or 337.5 seconds.

Thus, an expression such as Ag6:128 gives both the date (the 6th day of the heto Ag) and the time (128 would be about noon--midday--, since 128 is half of 256. Since each day is naturally divided into quarters, time 64 is 6 am, time 192 is 6 pm, and time 256, or 1, is midnight, you can easily interpolate as to what other times of day are indicated by each 256th or heheonto.

Universal Solar System Time: In addition to the local time on each world, we will need a systemwide time that is the same everywhere. The natural unit is the second, with the kilosecond (16 minutes and 40 seconds) and megasecond (11.57407 Earth-days) being the important derivatives. There are about 31.6 megaseconds per Earth-year, and, (not quite by coincidence) 1,000 megaseconds (1 billion seconds, or 1 gigasecond) equals about 31.6 Earthyears. For precise computations, you can use the fact that 54 megaseconds is exactly 625 Earth-days. The zero time will be 1200 GMT on December 10, 1948--the date of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

9. Languages, Alphabets and Syllabaries.

Two languages will largely prevail throughout the Solar System: (1) an expanding Esperanto, which should (after about 2030, by which time it should be most people's second language) grow by about one word a day, drawn mostly from all the non-European tongues of the world, so that by the 2050s-2060s as we enter the New Space Age for All, its vocabulary should include 10-15,000 new words, largely drawn from Chinese, Hindu, Arabic, Japanese, Indonesian, Hausa, etc., to complement its current mostly European base and make it a truly Multicultural Language. (2) A "scientific language" (SciLang), semantically ordered and logical. The "SciLang" may be most common on the inner planets, especially Mercury and Venus; the Multicultural Language may be more common out beyond the Earth and Mars.

The asteroids should become the repository or living-museum of thousands of other languages. This is based on their status as properties of the world's nations (the 200 or so largest asteroids) and, below them, all the various non-national ethnic groups--such as the indigenous peoples of the Americas, etc. (There are about 5,000 languages in the world; all of them, along with their associated cultures, should be preserved, not merely in books but in living practice--and there are thousands of asteroids over 10 miles in diameter they could be assigned to.) In addition, all those millions of teen-ager utopias or distopias described above, will have a chance to develop their own languages, that probably many will use to express their uniqueness, vision and style.

In addition, it is to be expected that each major world will probably develop its own dialect of the Multicultural and Scientific Languages. These are as charming as all the various dialects or accents of English are--from the Southern drawl to the clipped British stiff upper lip to Cockney to Japanese, French, and all the other delightful accents of English.

Also, each major world may develop its own alphabet or syllabary to represent the SciLang or Multicultural Language. These variations will add beauty and interest to interplanetary tourism just as all the different alphabets that have grown up on Earth increase the interest of Earthly travel--think of the handsome diversity of Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Hindu, Cyrillic, etc.

(Indeed, I have already invented eight different alphabets/syllabaries myself, mostly based on the concept of a phonetically-ordered alphabet and the idea that each number (e.g., 23)--hence, each letter (e.g., the 23rd letter of the phonetically-arranged alphabet)--can be represented as a binary string of 1s and 0s or their equivalent.)