It’s been the main question on my mind, and the central question of my life for a while now: If, as I’ve supposed, there’s a historic cycle wherein freedom-loving civilizations eventually succumb to rust, and those few who hold the population’s remnant of pioneer spirit must periodically seek a way out to a new frontier, and if the chain of developments and preparations leading up to the next exodus can be characterized as a sort of “escape sequence”, then what are the implications for those who seek a new frontier that is not yet within reach, and will likely not be within their own lifetimes? What does it mean to “be” escape sequence? What can individuals like us, who share a preference for the wide-open freedom of the frontier life, contribute to bringing the next frontier within reach for our posterity?

For me, it means I’ve got a job to do, and it’s been urgently important to me to figure out what that job is while there is still time for me to do it.

If I want to help realize the potential of a future frontier, and make movement to that frontier eventually possible, how will my efforts be most effectively spent? What field should I be working in? Aerospace engineering, perhaps? Any field of technology that might be relevant? What projects should I be working on? What’s not already being done that should be? What hasn’t even been thought of yet?

As part of this, I wonder: What kinds of preparations for exodus to a new frontier can even be usefully made or anticipated at this early stage? Speculative engineering? Supply logistics? Acquiring skills and assembling knowledge? What can we do today that will help things along years from now, and bring that future closer? Given the great difficulty of predicting the future, how much can we be reasonably sure of, or hope to influence by our actions now? Helping the next generation learn useful skills? By and large, the answers may be things we should be doing and will be doing anyway. But there must also be pieces of the puzzle unique to this calling and endeavor, that have to be identified and figured out. I’m in the process of finding those, in a search that has very much preoccupied my thoughts. As new possibilities and lines of thinking occur to me, and as I find new resources and work by others that sheds light on possible answers, I’ll be sure to post about those discoveries here.