Skeptic Project

"Looking Forward" is really goofy, you guys should check it out.

http://www.thevenusproject.com/images/stories/Looking-Forward-v2.pdf</p>

Page 52:

"With kitten-like playfulness Hella slaps Scott on the buttocks and runs toward a cylindrical chamber. Scott catches her just as she reaches the entrance to the twenty-first-century bathroom. Although she is forty years old, Hella looks like a young girl of eighteen. She has light brown hair with sparkling brown eyes. Her mouth is expressive and perfectly spaced teeth show when she laughs. Her breasts are firm and slightly smaller than the average of previous centuries. Her hips are beautifully formed but not wide. Her buttocks and thighs are softly rounded. Laughingly, Scott pulls her inside the cylindrical walls of the shower. Air and water, mixed under pressure to form a soft, cleansing spray, delightfully comb every part of their bodies at a speed and pressure that they have taught the cybernator. No soap is used; ultrasonically activated water loosens any clinging particles. This bath not only cleans their bodies but also furnishes the most delightful tactile sensations with sprays that tingle and massage every part of them."

page 70:

"We shouldn't be too proud," admonishes Hella. "It was only two decades ago that we were able to dispense with the last law, the last lawyer, and the last courtroom. Only in our age could we be sure that human beings could be fully trusted if they are reared in ways that avoid hostile conditioning. Happy, fulfilled people never commit crimes!"

"I'm not sure that it's all a matter of trusting people," counters Scott. "I'm not sure I could be trusted not to harm myself or someone else if I were put into one of the automobiles of the last century. We've used technology to avoid hurting ourselves or others. Try to imagine, Hella. They had no automatic controls. They sped along those narrow highways. The death rate was horrible, the injuries even worse. In the United States auto accidents killed more people each year than their wars! This slaughter was so unnecessary. It's been decades since one of our surface transportation units injured anyone."

"The availability of the medium-range aircraft that we used to come here was shelved for four years until proximity control devices were perfected," says Hella. "This safety system reduces the probability of a crash to less than one chance in six trillion miles. The danger of a crash is more remote than being hit by lightning."

"Yes, I remember reading about the probabilities of a crash on the nameplate as we entered the craft," answers Scott. "There's no 'Big Brother' making decisions for us. We're given the facts and probabilities, and we make our own choices."

I hope they use this as the script for their movie. I bet it would turn out even better than Plan 9 from Outer Space. Can't you just imagine Angelina Jolie saying "The availability of the medium-range aircraft that we used to come here was shelved for four years until proximity control devices were perfected,"

""With kitten-like playfulness Hella slaps Scott on the buttocks and runs toward a cylindrical chamber. Scott catches her just as she reaches the entrance to the twenty-first-century bathroom. Although she is forty years old, Hella looks like a young girl of eighteen. She has light brown hair with sparkling brown eyes. Her mouth is expressive and perfectly spaced teeth show when she laughs. Her breasts are firm and slightly smaller than the average of previous centuries. Her hips are beautifully formed but not wide. Her buttocks and thighs are softly rounded. Laughingly, Scott pulls her inside the cylindrical walls of the shower. Air and water, mixed under pressure to form a soft, cleansing spray, delightfully comb every part of their bodies at a speed and pressure that they have taught the cybernator. No soap is used; ultrasonically activated water loosens any clinging particles. This bath not only cleans their bodies but also furnishes the most delightful tactile sensations with sprays that tingle and massage every part of them.""

Well, this certainly fits in with the creepy old perv vibe I get from Fresco. He probably got laid a ton in his younger days with this stuff, before he turned into a troll.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J04gTJvynjg

I have seen the future!

"Looking Forward" also describes people from the 20th Century as disgusting primitives, like in the Stallone film "Demolition Man" set in the year 2032.

Come to think of it, I wonder now if they modeled the utopia's creepy founder, Raymond Cocteau, after Jacque Fresco.

@ Sky:

If the Venus Project wants to bring in some serious membership numbers with their film, they better aim higher than a SciFi Channel Original Movie.

You can tell an actor has hit the skids when he or she shows up in a Saturday night SyFy Channel movie.

But some of the series on that channel have drawn respectable fan bases and received critical praise, especially "Battlestar Galactica."

Someone made a film about the Venus Project back in the 1930's:

Things to Come

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1981575298541267699&ei=bcZyS_qsNqeKqQPCivyPDQ&q=things+to+come&hl=en#

@Ed,

I think Looking Forward is pretty relevant to understanding Fresco's weird mix of 1960s free love and science fiction.

Another way to look at Fresco, along with his friend FM-2030, whom I knew slightly:

Both guys read Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and interpreted the novel as a proposal for making a better global society.

"But I like the inconveniences."

"We don't," said the Controller. "We prefer to do things comfortably."

"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."

"In fact," said Mustapha Mond, "you're claiming the right to be unhappy."

"All right then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."

"Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen to-morrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind." There was a long silence.

"I claim them all," said the Savage at last.

Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders. "You're welcome," he said.

I know a lot of people won't agree with me, but I think if the Venus Project society ever came about, we would end up with the same kind of New World Order that the first Zeitgeist described.

@Ed,

Yep.

It was in response to:

"Both guys read Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and interpreted the novel as a proposal for making a better global society."

It was not so much a reply to advancedatheist as the idea that someone would look to Brave New World as a model to emulate. Hopefully atheist did not interpret it as such, but if he did that was not the intention.

I realize that Huxley was writing from the position of a satirist. My point was that Fresco didn't. My original reply was somewhat incomprehensible due to trying to work while posting and needed severe edits to even get it that far. Posting at work is not always a good idea. Regardless, it was a failpost.

I don't like this lame touchy-feely utopia crap. The 60s ended forty years ago. Let's get back to real debunking before we wind up sitting around in muu-muus listening to sitar music.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhqUk28OwHs

It made me lol.

At any rate...

The original question this thread poses still stands I guess.

>"I submit the conjecture that you can identify a crank idea from the fact that its proponents catastrophize an imaginary, benign, overblown or manageable problem which the crank idea allegedly solves."<

And now the Venus Project is being sold by Peter Joseph as the answer to the conspiracy theories that Zeitgeist propagates.