Hurdles to Comprehension

The Many Obstacles to Imagining Free Energy and the Fifth Epoch

As I worked on what became my big essay, it became increasingly clear that nobody ever foresaw the next Epochs before they arrived.  The events that the new Epochs brought were simply unimaginable to the beings of the day.  Even the Epoch we are in, which I call the Fourth, which industrialization made possible, was unimaginable to the people of the time, as it was arriving.  The Industrial Revolution was about a century old before anybody realized that it was a revolution. 

As I gained an appreciation of how nobody ever saw it coming, it helped me understand better why almost nobody today can imagine the Fifth Epoch, even though the technology to usher it in is older than I am. 

As the first comment to my Substack effort showed, one of the most prominent objections cites the “laws of physics” and announces that free energy is impossible.  But it is just one of many objections that I have encountered since the 1980s.  In my experience, all objections reflected the indoctrination and conditioning of those naysayers, and it took me many years to finally understand.  In the end, all of those objections are rooted in scarcity and fear, and abundance is literally outside of their universe of the possible.  The irony of declaring something impossible that already exists has a rich history in science; Edison’s lightbulb and the Wright brothers’ airplane are two particularly infamous examples. 

Soon before he died, Brian O’Leary informed me that scientists in the 21^st century are even more closed-minded and blind than they were in the days of the Wright brothers.  Brian used another Wright brothers’ analogy in his work.  He traveled the world for years, visiting free energy inventors, laboratories, and workshops, before he wrote his first free energy book.  Brian likened those free energy inventors to the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk, getting their plane to limp through the air.  The airplane at Kitty Hawk was a long way from taking passengers and freight across the world.  In his later years, Brian tried to educate the public on the vast gulf between a working prototype and something ready for public use.  One of the most persistent delusions in the free energy field is the idea that a bunch of garage tinkerers, working in secret, are going to bring free energy technology to a commercial level.  Free energy technology for public use is going to come from something like an Intel facility, not somebody’s garage, and that is just one of many aspects of the free energy conundrum. 

The denial of mainstream scientists, the naïveté of free energy inventors, the ignorance of the public, a lying media, often doing the bidding of the global elite, are some of the many aspects of this issue.  For the mind that can get past the chorus of “it’s impossible!,” the next hurdle is its desirability, believe it or not.  The arrival of free energy will be like giving everybody on Earth a billion dollars, but all that the naysayers can see is an array of negative outcomes, even the destruction of humanity. 

I have repeatedly witnessed a reaction that goes like this: “Thank god free energy is impossible, because we would only destroy ourselves with it.”  A corollary to that is arguing that if free energy arrived, humanity would just get fatter and lazier, with nothing to do.  Arguably the majority of my work is about addressing the desirability of free energy technology and its transformative potential.

Over the Epochs, human societies have become far more peaceful and humane, as their energy surplus rose.  They could afford to be more humane and peaceful.  As Azar Gat astutely observed, scarcity is the root of all violence.  In the Fifth Epoch, in a world of abundance, violence will become obsolete, even largely unthinkable.  All forms of coercion will go into history’s dustbin. 

In coming posts, I will discuss some of those ideas in some depth.  All of my Substack posts so far are only summaries of deep discussions of these ideas, and I link to some of them.