Project Starship

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Project Starship

By Monart Pon

1976

The Starship (General)

In the boundless universe of stars, in a small region called the Milky Way Galaxy, is one star

called the Sun. Spinning around this Sun, on a planet called Earth, is an organism called Man. This man is

tapping the energy of the Sun and transforming the material of Earth to build his starship, his starship to

seek, hold, and give the beauty that brings him his happiness.

The starship that man creates is an expression of his mastery over his own destiny, a mastery that

breaks the circle of nature with a straight line, a line that reaches from this earth to touch the farthest stars.

The structure of the starship is the product of mans shining his cool, strong light of reason upon

the wilderness of reality to tame it into the home that supports his life. Growing from this work of

discovering and unifying truth, goodness, and beauty, the starship is a selective re-arrangement of various

aspects of reality into those forms that further his well-being.

Abstractly, starship is a complex concept, integrating the knowledge that leads to the success of

human life. Concretely, the starship is an artificial planet, an earth re-created into a hierarchical unity of

arts and machines, performing the functions of sustaining and enriching mans spiritual/material health.

Symbolically, the starship is a badge that signifies mans ultimate purpose, his central activity, his highest

achievement.

The starship for beautifying man can inspire him on his quest for new arts, new machines, new

adventure: on a voyage that blasts off from this port of Earth and shoots outwards to other ports of other

worlds--outwards to the countless stars of the countless galaxies of the unbounded universe.


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The Project (Introduction)

Project Starship is an adventure to the stars, a romance for the ideal of starship--a consecration to

the ultimate purpose of creating a world comprised of all those things from which comes the experience

called happiness.

Project Starship grows from the acceptance and expression of ones responsibility as a special

kind of being, whose honor is ones volition and whose glory is ones starship.

Project Starship begins with understanding these facts:

a. Starship is the integrated structure of knowledge and processes, of arts and machines, of

ideas, values, and inventions that, together, can nurture the continual growth of life and

happiness.

b. The necessity of starship is based on the volitional nature of human life, the rational process

of ones consciousness, and the unlimited capability of ones actions.

c. The starships vital core is ones conceptual consciousness, ones mind, ones reason, the

basic faculty that discovers and invents the ships knowledge and processes.

d. The starships most basic and crucial knowledge is philosophy, the knowledge of

fundamental principles, the knowledge that integrates and guides all other knowledge, the

knowledge that yields an attitude of romanticism for the wisdom as summarized in this way:

Man is a rational animal, whose existence in objective reality is sustained by the volitional

operation of his conceptual consciousness called reason towards the cognition, evaluation and

invention of his starship to happiness.

I. The Basis

Man is a living, conscious, volitional being. Starship is an expression of this volitional nature.

Man, like all living things, is alive conditionally upon his generation of a series of successful

internal-external actions to fulfill the needs for his lifes existence. Like other conscious living things,

man uses his faculty of consciousness, his power of being aware of reality, to understand the meaning of

the information gathered by his senses. This consciousness is a power to determine the good, or life-


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enhancing, and evil, or life-destroying, aspects of reality. It is a power to guide the course of actions

towards the production of the good, and a power to experience, through emotion, the resulting state of life

called happiness.

Unlike other conscious things, however, man has volition. He has direct control over the

operation of his process of awareness, and, therefore, over his life. He can choose to be conscious and

live, or to be unconscious and die. He can choose to be sharply or vaguely conscious: he can raise his

level of awareness, sharpen its focus, enlarge its field, increase its cognitive efficacy, or he can blur,

shrink, blank out and sabotage its processes. Volition begins with the choice to drive the mind to the

highest achievement of successful life, or to leave it to stagnate to a rotting death.

Born ignorant and naked, man is innately ignorant of what is good or harmful to life, and is

inherently naked of the tools to achieve the good and fight the evil. He has no instincts, no fur, fangs, or

claws. To acquire knowledge and tools, man has to discoverthem by means of his mind. To fulfill the

needs for his lifes health, he has to earn them by directing his mind towards the understanding of reality,

the detection of possible good, and the invention of those extensions and augmentations to himself that

can achieve the good. To attain the successful state of life called happiness, man must accept and express

his responsibility as a volitional being: he must deserve his honor as the driver of his own mind, the

master of his own life, the maker of his own destiny.

This honor and responsibility of volition grants man the freedom of a potentially unlimited

capacity of awareness, a potential to know the simplest, or most complex, part of reality, a potential

whose limit is essentially determined by mans own choice and desire. At his command, man can

enhance, elevate, focus, his level of awareness, from the automatic but limited, perceptual state of non-

volitional beings, towards the virtually unlimited, conceptual field that only he can achieve. The con-

ceptual mode of consciousness brings into his grasp a vivid understanding of the nature of himself and his

world--an understanding that can transcend the immediate moment and place around him, to ultimately

span an eternity of time and an infinity of space.

Given this kind of volitional awareness, an awareness unlimited in possibility of clarity, depth

and scope, then the kind of actions possible to man is also unlimited. The sophistication of a conceptualconsciousness can guide the most complex series of actions, the kind that can significantly alter the

environment to suit human life, and that can enrich mans health and extend his life-span.

Mans possession of a conceptual, volitional consciousness distinguishes his life as, symbolically,

a straight line, an endless line transcending the immediate bounds of this Earth, of this Sun, of this


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Galaxy, to ultimately touch all parts of the vast realm of stars. To complement this volitional life, to

clothe his nakedness and replace his ignorance, to glorify his honor as a master, to seek his happiness--

man creates the starship.

Starship could be the highest expression and achievement of human rational being. It is a ship of

knowledge and processes: an integrated mobile environment that provides man with nourishment for

growth, shelter against decay, and locomotion to explore his boundless realm. It is a starship because its

primary source of energy and inspiration emanates from the stars. It is a starship because it is the kind of

structure that can house and fly, comfort and move, mans life on an astro-adventure. It is a starship

because it can inspire man to be starbound, to seek new knowledge, new powers, new beauty--to seek his

happiness and glory by sailing the endless sea of stars.

II. The Constitution

Starship is an integrated structure of the knowledge and processes, the arts and machines, the

truths, goods, and beauties that, together, can enhance the continual growth of mans life.

The starships vital core is mans consciousness calledreason. Reason is the creator, commander,

coordinator, of the starships every part. Reason builds, organizes, integrates and maintains the ships

entire structure by forming ideas, values, and inventions. It conducts the long and complex process that

begins with raw materials and energies of the universe and ends with pro-man products. Reason is the

basic generator of mans happiness and the starships potent dynamo.

Reason performs the three general stages of starship-building: cognition, evaluation and re-

creation. Cognition is the process of identifying the facts of reality, of discovering the properties and

relationships of entities, of determining what is available for transformation.Evaluationis the process of

detecting values and goals, the process of judging the possible good.Re-creation is the process of re-

shaping, re-arranging, converting the raw elements of reality into those forms that can further life. The

knowledge thus acquired, the ideas, values, and inventions, is integrated into the structure of the starship,

constituting part of what may be called the starships intellect and spirit.

Reasons supreme power of creativity is made possible by its conceptual manner of perceiving

and understanding reality. The rational, conceptual process is one of perceiving, identifying, and

integrating the data received by the senses, condensing the multitude of observations into simplified

groups calledconcepts.


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A concept is a mental unit concretized by a word and individualized by a definition. It is a con-

densed unit of knowledge formed by the differentiation and integration of essential attributes and

relationships among entities. A concept reduces a multitude of facts about reality into easily grasped

essentials, thereby freeing the mind from routine in order to study the new. Each concept thus formed is

further combined with others to form larger concepts, or is divided into smaller ones, continuing this

process of differentiating and integration indefinitely, bringing in ever-more organized knowledge,

forever expanding the scope of mans awareness.

The starships knowledge may be divided into science and technology. Science is the faculty of

facts, the faculty that studies what is. Technology is the faculty of fancy, the faculty that, based on the

sciences, studies what couldbe. Linking the two is ethics, the faculty of morals, the department of philo-

sophy that studies what shouldbe. Directing science and technology is philosophy, the faculty of axioms

and fundamental principles--the faculty that studies the basic nature of, and relationship between, man,

reality, and the starship.

Philosophyis the starships most crucial knowledge, the knowledge that unifies all the

complexities of science and technology, the knowledge that gives a comprehensive framework of

principles guiding and inspiring the conduct of all other knowledge. Philosophy identifies the underlying

nature ofexistence, of that which exists, of what is real, describing realitys meta-laws, defining the

principles of reasons conceptual process, and prescribing the basic principles of life-seeking actions.

Two axiomatic concepts of existence that philosophy studies are identity and causality.

Identity is the concept that an existent, any existent, if it exists, then it exists with an identity--

with a set of characteristics that distinguishes it from all other existents, making that existent a thing, not a

nothing and not just anything, but a something. Identity thus distinguishes the real from the unreal, the

natural from the supernatural.

Causality is the concept that an action or process is generated by specific entities, generated in a

specific manner, resulting in a specific effect, according to the identity of the entity generating the action.

Every action, every effect, presupposes an entity that generated or caused that effect. All of realitys pro-

cesses, including mans, are accountable by certain properties or principles governing those processes.

Causality thus distinguishes the kind of actions that an entity can generate from those it cannot, those

actions that are explainable from those that are miraculous.

These axiomatic concepts are the basis, integrator and compass of all other concepts of the

starship, guiding the ships science and technology to study the specific identities of entities and their


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actions. Applied to mans actions, identity and causality yield the ethical derivatives of honesty

and justice.

Honesty is the principle of being natural, of being true to reality, of perceiving reality as it is. It is

the principle that since reality is objective and since man is a rational being, then to be true to nature, to

be human, is to be conscious and conceptual. This means to pay attention, to understand reality with the

clearest and fullest focus of the mind, with the widest context of knowledge, according to the law of

identity. Honesty thus distinguishes the kind of thinking that man must perform to understandthe nature

and meaning of his life.

Justice is the principle of being fair, of being true to man, of treating men as they are. It is the

principle of men acting to seek, grant, and accept only the earned and deserved from each other. It is the

principle that since every effect presupposes its causal agent and since ones desired effects are not

achieved without cause, then every part of the starship must be earned, earned by exerting effort in a

specific manner according to the law of causality. Justice thus distinguishes the kind ofactions that man

must perform to achieve the happiness of his life.

Honesty and justice form the basis of ethics, the set of principles (independence, integrity,

courage, etc.) that guide the actions of the starships creation, the set of values that helps to unite the

major faculties of science and technology, linking the facts of raw nature with the fancies of mans desire.

Science is the faculty that scrutinizes the kinds of entities and processes that exist. Science

systematically analyzes the properties of existents, determines their relationships, defines the methods ofmeasurements, and categorizes the results into ideas.

Technology is the faculty that imagines the possible beauty that could come from the ideas of

science and invents the techniques of re-creation to concretize the imagined ideals--creating the forms of

artistry that enhance mans spiritual life, and the forms of machinerythat enhance mans physical life.

Thus, the starship is generally a structure constituted by the knowledge of science and

technology, and by the products of arts and machines, integrated by philosophy for the purpose of mans

happiness.

III. The Crew

The crew of a starship is a society of individuals. Each member of the starships crew is guided


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by the principles of honesty and justice. He is a specialist in some industry of the starship for a certain

period of time, trading his particular service for that of other members. Some may be scientists trading

with technologists or philosophers with artists. Whatever the relationship, each concentrates his energy on

some specific profession, and combines his effort with others in trades that yield industries too difficult

for one man. Some benefits of this co-operation are the diversity of services and products, an

amplification in the power of an individual to seek his happiness, and a more efficient, faster creation of

the starship.

The benefits of such a social starship are protected by an agency devoted towards the defense of a

mans right to his own life. This political instrument functions as a police and court to secure the

individual from possible interference and destruction caused by the physical force of other men. It

governs the retaliatory use of force to defend against initiated force, and may be called upon to resolve

peaceful disputes.

Todays government at times protects the freedom of men to pursue their happiness, and yet,

other times, commits (for the sake of cowards and parasites) the very crimes against which it is

commissioned to fight. This legalized violation of rights causes injury, hardships, and unnecessary

obstacles, and must be opposed morally and politically, in order to free mans achievement of his starship

to happiness.

The Project (Conclusion)

. Project Starship is a life-long purpose, an industry of philosophy, science, and technology, a

career of understanding man, reality, and the starship--a study and practice of creating the starships basis,

constitution, and crew.

The first symbolic step in the starship project, for those who choose it, is the naming of ones

starship (e.g., Starship Pegasus, Starship Phoenix, Starship Prometheus). The name serves to symbolize

and unify the specific stages of ones project and serves as the banner of ones quest, the emblem of ones

home.

In the name of ones starship, an introductory study of philosophy is undertaken. The study of

philosophy begins with gathering the knowledge with which to understand such subjects as: the nature of

objective reality, the nature of mans mind and emotion, the principles of moral action, the preconditions


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of a rightful society, and the nature of the romantic spirit. This knowledge will aid in the identification of

whatthe starship is, why man needs it, and how he can build it.

The place to initiate the study of philosophy is Objectivism, the philosophy originated by Ayn

Rand. Objectivist philosophy provides the principles for the starship project described in this article.

Specifically, the starting point is her essay, Apollo 11 (The Objectivist, vol. 8, no.9, September, 1969),

in which she wrote:

Nothing on earth or beyond it is closed to the power of reason. Yes, reason

can solve human problems--but nothing else on earth or beyond it, can.

(p14) Let us hope that some men will learn it. But it will not be learned by

most of todays intellectuals, since the core and motor of all their incredible

constructs is the attempt to establish human tyranny as an escape from what

they call the tyranny of reason and reality. (p14-15) If the lesson is

learned in time, the flight of Apollo 11 will be the first achievement of a

great new age; if not, it will be a glorious last--not forever, but for a long,

long time to come. (p15)

* * *Monart Ponwww.starshipaurora.com Email:monart at starshipaurora.com
http://www.starshipaurora.com/http://www.starshipaurora.com/mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]://www.starshipaurora.com/

Project Starship

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