MEDIUM | Douglas Rushkoff – July 13, 2018: The article starts off: Last year (2017), I got invited to a super-deluxe private resort to deliver a keynote speech to what I assumed would be a hundred or so investment bankers.
After I arrived, I was ushered into what I thought was the green room. But instead of being wired with a microphone or taken to a stage, I just sat there at a plain round table as my audience was brought to me: five super-wealthy guys — yes, all men — from the upper echelon of the hedge fund world.
They had no interest in the information I had prepared about the future of technology. They had come with questions of their own.
They started out innocuously enough…slowly but surely, however, they edged into their real topics of concern.
Which region will be less impacted by the coming climate crisis: New Zealand or Alaska? Is Google really building Ray Kurzweil a home for his brain, and will his consciousness live through the transition, or will it die and be reborn as a whole new one? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked, “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?”
The “Event”. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr. Robot hack that takes everything down.
The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers — if that technology could be developed in time.
Taking their cue from Elon Musk colonizing Mars, Peter Thiel reversing the aging process, or Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from a very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is really about just one thing: escape.
For all their wealth and power, they don’t believe they can affect the future. They are simply accepting the darkest of all scenarios and then bringing whatever money and technology they can employ to insulate themselves — especially if they can’t get a seat on the rocket to Mars.
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COMMENTS:
tars…, July 14, 2018: “The ultra rich would not be able to survive a man made or nature made catastrophic event for very long without the peons doing the dirty work for them. Show More For every ultra rich person in his bunker, he would have to take at least 100 of the lower class people to keep him in something close to the life style he had before the event. Who will keep his plumbing working? Who will keep him fed after his freeze dried food runs out? Who will keep his automobiles running even with an unlimited amount of fuel stored? Who will make the tires, the cloth, the batteries, the what ever that is in abundance now? Most of the ultra rich have no clue how the market forces work. The safest place is not in a bunker. The safest place is in a small community where everyone works together in a voluntary free market. The recovering earthly people would be best off if the ultra rich do hide in the bunkers and sealed in to stay out of the way and the idea of government would die and be buried with them.” Profe…, July 14, 2018: “Most wealthy dudes today think they are gods like the pharaoh mentality of ancient Egypt and others before them who were much wealthier and stronger. In reality nobody owns anything because nobody can own himself and only found ourselves on Earth not knowing who we were before nor where we came from. Wealth is an illusion and a mighty trial by the Creator upon his creatures. The Earth was here before us and who dare to claim it as their personal property without sharing it fairly ! And at the end of this Cosmic Cycle, man bought Earth with toilet paper; that is the biggest joke in Earth history.” aubc…, July 14, 2018: “Money and bunkers will not be a determining factor in who survives and who transitions to the new world of peace. The sooner people come to grips with this the easier it will be to let go of that world and those who continue to worship materialism. Most of the people in the bunkers will experience a unique form of madness. When the earth is ringing with 8.0 + earthquakes and volcanoes are going off all over the place and the highest levels of radiation ever experienced by man are happening while highly magnetic photon energy is pouring into the planet penetrating to the center of the earth, a bunker under the ground won’t help. Those whose electrical body systems can handle the influx of photon energy will transfigure like Christ and remain in a transfigured state in a 5D earth. Those whose electrical body systems cannot handle the influx of photon energy will either parish or evacuate to a planet in the solar system farther away so as not to be so affected by the incoming energies. The incoming energies will not allow lies, or feelings of superiority or inferiority. The incoming energies are purifying down to the smallest atom. Every man, woman and child will be forced to face themselves and their addictions, whatever they be and whatever form they come in. Most Android and Hybrid beings will suffer physical degradations more rapidly and will many will experience spontaneous combustion, melting and sometimes just fading out, depending upon the makeup of the entity. This is the meaning behind the Hopi Prophecy about those who disappear at the emergence of the 5th world. Learn to meditate and practice allowing the inflow of energy into your being.”
Billionaire bunkers: How the 1% are preparing for the apocalypse
CNN | Elizabeth Stamp – July 13, 2018: The article highlights that the threat of global annihilation may feel as present as it did during the Cold War, but today’s high-security shelters could not be more different from their 20th-century counterparts.
Many of the world’s elite, including hedge fund managers, sports stars and tech executives (Bill Gates is rumored to have bunkers at all his properties) have chosen to design their own secret shelters to house their families and staff.
Gary Lynch, general manager of Texas-based Rising S Company, says 2016 sales for their custom high-end underground bunkers grew 700% compared to 2015, while overall sales have grown 300% since the November US presidential election alone.
Robert Vicino, a real estate entrepreneur and CEO of Vivos, a company he founded that builds and manages high-end shelters around the world, says Vivos received a flurry of interest in its shelters around the 2016 election from both liberals and conservatives, and completely sold out of spaces in its community shelters in the past few weeks.
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First space tourist flights could come NEXT YEAR (2019)!
YAHOO – July 13, 2018: The two companies leading the pack in the pursuit of space tourism say they are just months away from their first out-of-this-world passenger flights – though neither has set a firm date.
Virgin Galactic, founded by British billionaire Richard Branson, and Blue Origin, by Amazon creator Jeff Bezos, are racing to be the first to finish their tests – with both companies using radically different technology.
SpaceX and Boeing are developing their own capsules to transport NASA astronauts, most likely in 2020, after delays – a significant investment that the companies will likely make up for by offering private passenger flights.
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15,000 Scientists Just Said Humanity Is Pretty Much Doomed
D’MARGE – (Posted November 15, 2017) July 13, 2018: More than 15,000 scientists in 184 countries have issued a dire warning for the future of humanity, saying the continued existence of the species is severely jeopardized by climate change, deforestation, dwindling access to fresh water, species extinctions, and other forms of environmental harm.
The bleak missive, published this week in the journal BioScience, comes 25 years after the Union of Concerned Scientists and more than 1700 independent scientists penned the World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity.
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