Just after tomorrow, a spaceship filled with plucky adventurers will land on our planet’s surface. They will see our species, residing in mobile hell-fortresses circled by tireless killer robot drones and rings of dead birds, their stomachs stuffed with plastic. After a suspenseful quest, they will find the bowels of these machines powered by a constant stream of cute, innocent-looking animals; with the occasional dissident tossed into the furnace for good measure.

Such a monstrous race of tyrants, they will conclude, must be stopped.

in this game you could be a sentient octopus, whose mind has been uploaded into swarm of nano-machines, that’s dating a rockstar who is actually the third person to play that rockstar, and whose persona is a different gender than the body it inhabits, and is fighting against a person who has modified themself past being human while at the same time is infected with an alien nano-virus that is slowly turning them into alien agent while sabotaging a space habitat that’s made largely from bacon.

We are as gods and might as well get good at it. So far, remotely done power and glory—as via government, big business, formal education, church—has succeeded to the point where gross defects obscure actual gains. In response to this dilemma and to these gains a realm of intimate, personal power is developing—power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the WHOLE EARTH CATALOG.