It’s a Wild West vision of lawless space colonists doing whatever they like and taking over the universe.The first stop is Mars There are huge frozen oceans just discovered up there. To get that moving just takes a bit of global warming (we can do that) This is all very attractive. Sign me up, Scotty.Sir Martin Rees bases his analysis on the great human driving forces – the search for adventure and the search for profit .But space represents the other great thing Freedom Unlimited genetic engineering. Planetary laws from home base will become as remote as gravity Humanoid replicas will do extraordinary things. Modified plants will survive in airless environments, replicating themselves. We, if that’s the right term for what we’ll be, will be able to encode ourselves and be beamed through deep space at the speed of light.And what would these colonists, these cowboys, these freaks of nature think about those of us left at home, evolving biologically? As humans, even post- humans, they’d have mixed feelings about us, I predict They’d be like Australians.

They’d feel an ancient connection mixed with contempt, laced with disgust at our feeble, outdated, unmodified structures They’ll kill us, and explode our planet I think we’ve got 200 years, and not a minute more. Facing up to a terrorism-free retirement* Last year – and to my shame I can’t remember whether it was before or after 11 September – I was discussing the opportunities of recreational terrorism with a colleague. It was an attractive option at the end of one’s career, it seemed at the time. My plan was to wait until retirement.Having got the children off my hands, settled the mortgage and moved to somewhere more manageable, my general plan was to bring society to a standstill.

You need to keep an interest in life after you retire; you need to keep busy. And this was one way of remaining – what’s the word? – relevant.Now lest this be regarded as lacking in taste, it must be said that the terrorism in question would be conducted without the use of terror. In fact, it would be a movement without any personal violence and would achieve enormous popular support.Casting around for a schedule of demands (you need demands) to justify the outrages, I came up with the fact that we all work too hard and that we need more holidays. The first demands therefore would be to raise the number of public holidays to the European maximum.The plan would be to make it impossible or pointless to get to work every other Monday.We’d use sharpshooters to disable important but remote power lines around the country We’d disable a number of train signals. We’d have a truck breakdown on Westminster Bridge in the rush hour. We’d get into the phone system and permanently connect every ministerial phone to Dial-A-Whore.We’d cone central London. We’d make it so that employees could justify their calling in every other Monday with their regrets.How hard can any of this be? With the appropriate warnings, any level of activity is multiplied exponentially.

Were you to send one sealed package of anthrax to a government office, and mark it This Is Anthrax, that would cause the evacuation of every public building in Britain, provided you’d sent them a dozen envelopes of talcum powder marked This Is Anthrax.With the internet, every anarchist, every idiot, everyone who dislikes their job can be enlisted to restrict their car to 50 miles an hour on three lanes of the motorways. In our highly calibrated society, small disruptions have enormous repercussions.We haven’t even started thinking about the water supply, or what happens when the movement gets into the hands of fundamentalists, separatists, anti-statists etc.The idea doesn’t appeal to me anymore. I recently got into a physical scuffle with someone and saw something in his eyes that is normally concealed by our bourgeois culture.A small incident, you might think And it was. But now my entire retirement plan has to be left to others to execute.The way things are going, there’ll be no shortage of volunteers
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