SIGHTINGS



Firmage Elaborates On
ISSO Plans To Media
By Matthew Broersma
ZDNN www.zdnet.com
7-30-99
 
 
 
 
Joe Firmage, the founder and president of a prominent Internet company who quit to pursue space-travel-related interests, Thursday launched his new venture: the International Space Sciences Organization, devoted to raising human consciousness and discovering an interstellar propulsion system.
 
Firmage, 28, made headlines earlier this year when he walked away from US Web, an Internet consulting firm he founded that makes hundreds of millions in revenue and has a stock market value of nearly $3 billion, to devote himself to such larger issues as the future of humanity and contact with alien beings.
 
ISSO is his first new venture since leaving US Web. Initially to be funded out of Firmage's own pocket, ISSO is designed to stimulate research into physics. Firmage believes ISSO will achieve a breakthrough in human consciousness and discover gravity-powered interstellar propulsion. As a side project, the ISSO research group will decide how to respond when humanity comes into contact with alien beings.
 
The plan is to sign on board 20 "visionaries" to ISSO's board of directors and attract enough donations to keep the project going until its objectives are achieved.
 
Chief among those objectives is the achievement of interstellar travel, which in Firmage's philosophy will be the outgrowth of a singular scientific breakthrough -- what he calls the discovery of the nature of "that."
 
When the nature of "that" is revealed, Firmage wrote on ISSO's Web site, "we fish will then know for the first time, at a fundamental physical level, the water in which we exist and of which we are made.
 
 
"And we will swim!" he continued.
 
One of the advantages of being aware of "that" will be improved control over basic physical forces, Firmage writes.
 
"A means for Cosmos to direct 'gravitational' force at will is among the abilities such an understanding would almost certainly confer upon human beings," reads a tract on the ISSO site.
 
This will, in turn, make possible a "Star Trek"-like Utopia of interstellar adventure.
 
"We will develop a new from of propulsion and energy production completely unlike anything human beings have previously invented," Firmage explained. "We will use this knowledge to construct devices which 'tap' and redirect spacetime energy, powering interstellar starships into the depths of Cosmos and in the same sweep enabling us to evolve civilization rapidly towards benign and sustainable technologies."
 
Internet entrepreneurs can rest assured that their businesses, while well-financed, are also important to helping humanity achieve its techno-scientific revelation, according to Firmage.
 
"With this new system of energy transmission, humanity is possessed with the ability to see the largest reflection of its collective mind ever," clarified the former Internet consultant on his site. "The luminance of our consciousness grows with every change to every page of every site across the Web of humanity."
 
Indeed, a simple way of thinking of all scientific achievement is as different ways of using and arranging "energy," Firmage says.
 
"Energy is indeed an interesting subject to study," he stated.
 





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