Evolving Our Imagination

It is a symbol of America's economic triumph and a place that spawns most of the country's new millionaires for whom retirement is sooner rather than later.

But one of those young millionaires isn't exactly celebrating Silicon Valley because, to hear him tell it, Boomtown USA—and perhaps the rest of us—needs to reexamine what wealth means.

	Joseph Firmage, CEO, Project Voyager and Chairman of the International Space Sciences Organization

It is this perspective toward a new global ethic that brought him to the State of the World Forum 2000 to rub elbows with scores of luminaries—former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark, Queen Noor of Jordan, and former Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers among them.

James Garrison, president of the State of the World Forum, spoke of Firmage's visit this way: "You hear a lot about innovation, about mergers and acquisitions, about venture capital, about breakthroughs in digital technology, bio-technology, that literally stagger our cognitive capacity to both imagine and understand. And almost no one on that frontier has any maps, and almost no one is asking the question about the ethical dimension of what we are doing with what we are creating—except for one man: Joe Firmage."

In Salt Lake City, Utah, Firmage grew up with an obsession "sparked by wondrous science fiction. It grew into a commitment to science and physics in particular. The desire to comprehend the deepest functions and meaning of physics evolved into a study of scientific anomalies." It was that interest in science that eventually took him to Silicon Valley.

But Firmage, still just 29 years old, wants to move beyond business to implement an ambitious globalization plan that promises to turn the world into a laboratory of ideas—a vision grown from what many of his critics dismiss as thinking gone radically askew. Firmage's scientific frontier expands well beyond the boundaries of what many are willing to entertain. That frontier, simply put, is outer space, and Firmage is a believer in the late spacemaster Carl Sagan's theory that the discovery of extraterrestrial life will ultimately become the single greatest unifying force for humanity.

"In this story, the CEO in me has become a human being, the scientist has turned from a pessimist to an optimist, the skeptic has opened his mind," he says. "My [scientific] views are way out there, but I'm going to let the future unfold and see what happens."

It was in that spirit that Firmage, in his World Forum keynote lunch address, invited the audience to imagine a future of limitless possibilities, reminding them that a jet plane would have been inconceivable to even Isaac Newton.

"I think that in the midst of such great change, all of our imaginations really do need to evolve," said Firmage. "We need to evolve them in interesting ways and stretch both our intellectual faculties and our ethical faculties."

Whatever the world's future is, ISSO, at least, is continuing to forge its own with its stated mission to open the frontier of space. Organized into two operating groups, ISSO has a scientific as well as a spiritual mandate. Its scientific agenda includes theoretical and experimental studies of propulsion, energy generation and the physical processes of consciousness. ISSO Science has provided grants to a small number of researchers and organizations involved in advanced study of space.

ISSO Spirituality studies ethics, ontology, philosophy and religious faiths from an interdisciplinary and interfaith perspective.

For all that, Firmage is concerned with immediate world problems, like global poverty and infant mortality. While under-5 mortality rates fell by more than half between 1960 and 1990, progress slowed in the 1990s and, according to estimates, in most regions, a major effort will be needed to attain a two-thirds reduction by 2015.

Standing in the way of progress are unsafe water, inadequate immunization, war and civil conflict, high levels of poverty and malnutrition, poor access to basic education—especially for girls—the spread of HIV/AIDS and the resurgence of malaria and tuberculosis. Firmage believes these are all catalysts to a meltdown that can only be halted through global collaboration.

The possibility for that collaboration is being vastly improved each day when one considers what has been achieved through advances in information technology. Recent estimates that traffic on the Internet doubles every 100 days.

For a comparison, consider the following: It was 38 years after the first radio broadcast that 50 million people tuned in. Television took 13 years to reach 50 million viewers. After the introduction of the first personal computer, it took 16 years before 50 million people were using one. But within four years of the Internet being opened to the public, 50 million people were connected.

Today, a strand of optical fiber as thin as a human hair can transmit the equivalent of 90,000 volumes of an encyclopedia in a single second, and the number of e-mail messages that cross international borders each day is 1.5 billion.

Technological responsibility, says Firmage, will determine where these advances take us. "We believe that the rapid increase of knowledge must be united with a new global ethic that ensures the responsible application of technology in building a sustainable future," is how an ISSO statement put it. "Only a new global consciousness will enable the diversity of life and cultural expression on our planet to flourish."

Firmage believes he can make a difference, and his track record suggests he is a man unaccustomed to failure. He was an 18-year-old whiz kid when he founded his first company, Serius—a software tools firm—in 1989, which he sold for $24 million four years later. He then launched USWeb with two partners in 1995 and, in 1997, was named "entrepreneur of the year" by Ernst and Young. By the time Firmage left USWeb last year, it was worth $2.1 billion.

He is optimistic about the future, and that is why he wants us all along for a ride on his latest venture, Project Voyager. An integrated media network, it aims to transform entertainment and learning through science. Some $23 million dollars in financing are already in place, with launch scheduled for January 1, 2001.

A self-proclaimed optimist, Firmage described Project Voyager this way: "It is a way to educate and provide a new type of entertainment that's scientifically and spiritually nourishing to people through the modern technology that we have painstakingly crafted."

Then drawing the audience's attention to a photograph taken in space, he asked the audience to imagine "a new type of place appearing online that allows every 12-year-old and every 52-year-old with a personal camera to cross a sweep of vision of the cosmos."

And sometime in the coming years, said Firmage, we might even move that view from the desktop to the dashboard of every car.

copyright © 2000 State of the World, Inc.