Virtual Missionaries 1

Technology is our friend and the Internet is a marvelous place to spread the gospel. God is keeping an eye on the whole thing.
Every year, for as long as I can remember, someone really intelligent has predicted robots would put people out of work. Whether it would result in good or bad changes isn’t important, because it ain’t happening. The resources for that sort of development don’t exist. Instead, the resources have always been invested in the godlike weapons systems.
In one episode of the Star Trek original series, we were permitted to see an accidental encounter with a mirror universe. There, the doppelganger Captain Kirk possesses a device — the Tantalus Field — that can make anyone anywhere disappear with total impunity. This is the dream of any tyrant. While there will always be some research toward making life better, the serious money goes into anything that brings us closer to a real Tantalus Field. Perhaps you remember the old space based weapons research called Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), often ridiculed as “Star Wars.”
Trained assassins are still too expensive and too human; even the best snipers can make mistakes. Helicopters with very long range cameras and integrated guns brought us closer — still very expensive with a human crew. The recent advent of drones with missiles brings us much closer to impersonal warfare at a far cheaper price. Still, the precision is lacking. It also requires a human hand, but that may not be for long. Very soon you can buy a rifle scope that obviates the training and skill of real snipers. The scope calculates for the weapon, round and powder charge, wind, temperature, etc., and grants anyone with reasonably still hands deadly accuracy out to 1200 meters. Oh, and once the trigger is pulled, the weapon doesn’t fire until the reticle lines up with the ideal trajectory. Mounting them on an even smaller and cheaper drone would be a snap.
We are closer now than ever. At the same time, there is a lot of semi-secret research into robotics as the means to enhance human combatants (robotic exoskeletons) and even to replace them. Thus, the Clone Wars are not so far-fetched, but hardly so easily defeated as depicted in the movies. The real thing won’t be so comical. While energy weapons and defense fields are still a ways off, battle competence with still deadly projectile weapons would be easy to produce in robots. The current difficulty is mobility and range still carry huge energy requirements. Give it time; the investments in mobile power systems research are massive.
Meanwhile, improvements in armored vehicles are progressing rapidly. Nothing is perfect; they don’t want you talking about how, for example, MRAP trucks can still be rather easily rolled onto their sides and those run-flat tires still burn if you set them alight. Those are some obscenely expensive trucks. The all-too-advanced technology of manned fighter and bomber aircraft warns us of the limits. The two best hopes in US military industries are both plagued with major difficulties and astronomical prices that tend to make drones look really attractive.
The one place where government remains weakest is networking technology. For every highly publicized foreign attack on US computers, there was at least two of three attacks by the US first on theirs. Meanwhile, there are more Bradley Mannings than anyone wants to admit. While it’s possible things like Wikileaks is all a big propaganda ploy, seriously damaging releases of government and corporate secrets is likely proof our national Cyber Warfare defenses are pitiful. It’s been that way for a long time, with no serious improvements in sight. The vast ocean of bureaucratic incompetents guarantee the majority of the government networks will always be vulnerable. Large government bureaucracies tend to draw the least professional, bottom-of-the-barrel employees who will tolerate the hideous dehumanizing working atmosphere. The average teenager knows more about computer security than the average government employee.
When you read the crazy ideas Congressmen and other officials dream up to control the Internet, you realize just how bad it is. Most of what they demand is simply not possible, even in a mirror universe.
We face a genuine growing threat to life and limb from all governments, our own in particular. The increasing restrictions on our human behavior have already raised many challenges to daily life itself, not to mention walking in genuine Christian faith.
Brothers and sisters, let me encourage you to consider what it really takes to remain free to serve the Lord. I’ve tried often to show people the future is the Network Civilization, the place where you and I can carry the gospel message as virtual missionaries. We can’t use the methods of Apostle Paul and his associates, but if we become as comfortable with the virtual world as he was the Roman Empire, we stand a good chance of getting the message even farther across humanity. Don’t get the idea God will only bless door knockers and street preachers. Those things may have their place, but God also blesses idiots like me who struggle to focus on how things work in the virtual world of the Internet.
If you sense a call to examine this, realize the need to learn more than the average computer user. You need to be well above the level of the average bureaucrat, as computer savvy as you can possibly be. Right now, it’s wide open to exploitation. This is our time.