The Frontier Alliance

By Corey Alambar (cja8174@runt.ca.boeing.com)

Introduction

The Bay Area is one of the greatest centers of learning and technological advancement in the United States, or even in the world. With Stanford, Silicon Valley, Berkeley, the biotech firms of San Mateo, ILM, and more, they are on the cutting edge of everything technologic. Needless to say, it takes more than supernatural beings to make such an engine of creation work as potently as it has.

There exists a small but growing non-profit organization, the Frontier Alliance, that analyzes new technologies, new lines of scientific inquiry, and tries to extrapolate what the future will hold for humanity -- and how to shape the most optimal future from current advances. The Frontier Alliance has identified some of the most potent trends, years in advance of their introduction, and extrapolated some stunning models of the future based upon what information they have today.

Vanguards of the Future Mind

The Frontier Alliance has existed since the 1940s, an outgrowth of a council created by the military to study emerging technologies from World War II Germany. They successfully predicted the bomb three years before it was successfully fired, and quickly found themselves in high demand by the policymakers of the time.

The end of the war brought many of them out of military and into the private sector, but they continued to stay in contact with their colleagues. The letters that went back and forth became voluminous, eventually collecting into a journal, Outpost on the Scientific Frontier, with each member contributing a single article in each monthly edition.

Soon, bright young students were encouraged to join in, and this process of passing information back and forth led to some amazing insights, including the prediction of room temperature superconductors and manned space colonies years before such things were considered feasible.

More importantly, however, the group discusses society and social structures that would be caused by these technologies. Their image has evolved over the course of decades, into a form of technolibertarianism, coupled with an economic ideology based firmly on the works of Ayn Rand. Many of them are social Darwinists and strong believers in pure libertarianism.

Attempts to convert these mundane scientists to either the Traditions or the Technocracy has met with mostly dismal failure. Their methods are intensely rigorous, with a firm grounding in modern scientific theory, yet they do not believe that technology will be an oppressive force, and fight surveillance technologies, etc., by discussing and in some cases even building jamming devices and similar technologies.

The Post-Modern Alliance

Today, the Frontier Alliance consists of many different thinkers, including brilliant economists, sociologists, psychiatrists, and even religious leaders, as well as the traditional representatives of the hard sciences. Anyone is encouraged to join in the discussion, which takes place via a modified site on the WWW, but anyone who does not show knowledge of her subject, and a scientific rigor in her logic, will be quickly overwhelmed, or at worst ignored, by the rest of the members.

Oftentimes the members of the Alliance will get together at impromptu meetings, coffee house gatherings they only somewhat jokingly refer to as Symposia. Here they get into discussions (sometimes heated) about the nature of technology, the evolution of society, and the direction in which advancements will take place over the next fifteen to fifty years. Each Symposium has a theme to it, often something generic such as Life Extension, but the discussion is often freeform and very wild and insightful. Some members have gotten in the habit of recording these sessions and tracking down references and information to prove or disprove a certain point.

Brilliance Is As Brilliance Does

This group has had an incredible impact on scientific advancement and public policy, as many of the members are research scientists for some of the major corporations and universities. Using these massive resources available they engage in a sort of cooperative race to develop the next breakthrough technology, the next little bauble that could change the nature of humanity as a whole.

They have attracted a few, mostly silent, members of Iteration X, the Virtual Adepts, the New World Order, and the Sons of Ether, who watch carefully for signs of Awakenable talent or just brilliant insight. Many of the members of this group have been groomed at one time or another by at least one of the major factions, and some have gone on to become full-fledged magi in their own rights, though many of them continue their researches in a mundane fashion, prefering to use the established tools rather than paradigm engineering to accomplish their goals.

Sometimes the outside world hears of one of their discussions, or a paper is jointly submitted to an outside journal and the Outpost. In cases such as these, there is often a major uproar, since it seems to the rest of the world to be a quantum leap in theory, with earthshattering consequences. Sometimes these leaks are planned, but often are totally accidental.

Areas of Inquiry

The Frontier Alliance has sponsored entire conventions to discuss the technologies, and more importantly the impact, behind several areas of scientific inquiry. As such, they have several "Working Groups" that focus tightly on certain areas of scientific inquiry.

Hot issues, such as Life Extension, Artificial Intelligences and Cognitive Science, Space Exploration and Colonization, Nanotechnology, Very Large Scale and Megascale Engineering, and Electronic Currency, have drawn some of the most heated debates, as well as the most intense scrutiny from the Traditions and the Technocracy. Many of their ideas have been achieved in secret SoE and IX laboratories, but many others have actually spawned Awakened inquiry along those theoretical lines.

A Future Out of Control

This group holds a secret hope for the Tradition magi that know of its existence, because they see many of the ideas held by the Virtual Adepts and the Sons of Ether bearing fruit in the minds of some of the most brilliant mundane researchers. Coupled with their very anti-authoritarian point of view and the pursuit of infinite personal empowerment, this makes them very attractive to many of the members of the Traditions.

Conversely, many members of the Technocracy view these humans as the biggest threat since Quantum Mechanics. They eschew many of the social ideas of the New World Order, and they often ride roughshod over any kind of control, even the most modest form of direction. Some members of the Technocracy, however, are pleased to see their ideas pushed forward so far without their intervention, and believe they see true Mass Ascension on the horizon.

Meanwhile, the members of the Frontier Alliance still write about a future they see, or at least that they would like to see. Any mention of magic is scoffed at almost from the start, though discussion of anomalous quantum events and loopsed wormholes and nanomachines taking apart and reassembling entire planets are discussed almost without a second thought.