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Very recently, on 19th April, I, the creator of Our Future Planet, sent all citizens of OFP a letter entitled ‘My April Letter to The Citizens of Our Future Planet’.

This is my second letter to you.  My plan is to write more letters to you.  And I hope that Our Future Planet will receive replies from you.  I invite cooperative responses because the essence of my first letter was to try to emphasise the importance of planetary cooperativeness.

What is the significance of Our Future Planet?  I believe its importance is as a vehicle, a system, that will assist Our Present Planet to replace its present competitiveness with planetary cooperativeness.  This is a learning procedure.

First it is necessary for the inhabitants of Our Present Planet to discover, and hence learn, that our present planet’s competitiveness is highly destructive and self-defeating and that it is very likely to destroy our planet as a liveable home for humans.

There are many ways in which our present planet’s competitiveness is destroying the earth as a site for human life.  One of the primary ways competitiveness does this is by creating not only winners but also, inevitably, losers. And losers seek vengeance and retaliation and this leads to further competitive behaviour.  It’s that simple and inevitable.  Someone wins.  The losers try to win back.  One nation wins a war and the loser tries to win back through another war.  The history of our present planet illustrates this over and over again.

At the end of our so-called Second World War, wherein millions of the citizens of our planet were killed and wounded and filled with hatred and the desire for vengeance, our planet’s competitive nations tried to create an organisation to avoid a third world war and the future killing of human inhabitants of our planet.  That system, The United Nations, has failed.

It has failed because more humans have already been killed in various competitive procedures, wars, uprisings, revenges, etc., than were killed in the Second World War.  On the basis of deaths by competitive violence, the Third World War has already occurred.  And who were the winners?  Not the dead and wounded, nor the survivors who are filled with vengeance

Of course its very name, The United Nations, was a guarantee of failure.  Our planet’s nations have not united.  To do so would require the creation of a United Planet. That is Our Future Planet’s procedure.

Our first step is to learn, to become aware, to realise that only a United Planet can have the possibility of stopping the killing and the competitive destruction of our planet as a sustainable home for us all. On a planetary basis, our planet has no enemies or competitors unless and until another hostile, competitive, planet comes and attacks us.

Now our present planet and its citizens have not yet learnt this lesson, this reality, to a very high degree and certainly not sufficiently to begin to behave in a cooperative planetary manner.  The wars continue.  The weapons are produced and desired and distributed and used.

Now, like you, I have a dual citizenship.  I am both a citizen of Our Present Planet and a citizen of Our Future Planet.  It is my citizenship of Our Future Planet that gives me pleasure and excitement and a curious desire to learn about the possibilities Our Future Planet may offer.  I hope it may give you hope and pleasure and curiosity and a desire to create a cooperating planet, a home for all humans, living and yet to be born.

What have you learnt from the existence of Our Future Planet?  What do you hope to learn and discover?  What can you contribute?

Why did I decide to draw a line in time, leaving our present planet on one side, and proceed to say, “Let’s try to design and create a better future for our planet and ourselves and our children”?

The answer is simple.  I had no faith left in the ability of our present planet to survive as a sustainable home for humans.

It seemed to me there was lots of evidence that our present planet will not be a sustainable long-lasting home for human life.

A simple starting point for present planet pessimism is the fact that human beings have already caused the extinction, one way or another, of a vast majority of various animal species.  On this basis there is every reason to expect humans to cause, one way or another, their own extinction.

And global warming seems a likely way to cause our self-destruction in an integrated doomsday.  Part of the deadliness of this integrated scenario is that it is complex and chaotic, as is our present planet’s history and on-going behaviour.

For example, global warming is really simply a bi-product of human competitive behaviour driven by international and corporate and individual greed.

When the historians and social scientists on another planet look back at the extinction of life on our planet they will surely see the self-destructive nature of our competitive greed.  “Those stupid earthlings.  They were not intelligent enough to realise that their planet had no enemies, and therefore to cooperate and work together to create and maintain a happy, liveable, planet (at least until another hostile planet came along).  Instead they kept killing each other in endless wars.  Planet Earth really had no enemies, but they kept killing each other and stealing natural resources, thinking they could be winners, forgetting that they were always creating losers at the same time and that sooner or later they would be losers themselves.”

“They just didn’t have the wisdom of our citizens on Planet Hocus Pocus!  Planet Earth’s extinction was really based on the stupidity and inability to learn to cooperate in a planet-wide manner.  Of course some of them may have enjoyed the competition assuming they were ‘winners’.  Their schools were designed to teach competitiveness and their pastimes were watching competitive games.  It was dog eat dog and the dogs lost.”

And so OFP offers some humble alternatives.

First is the simple concept of planetary cooperation.  Even as our present planet’s inhabitants begin to think on a planetary basis, some of them say, “If only our present planet had another ‘enemy planet’ then we could all ‘cooperate’ to compete against it!”  For ‘present planet’ humans, only competitive victory (and eventual self-destruction) has any appeal.  Think about it and give Our Future Planet some cooperative plans and procedures for our future survival and watch for my May letter.  It will be full of cooperative ideas (including some of yours if you present them, as fellow citizens of OFP.

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