Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. Blog, Internet resources, online reading groups, articles and interviews, Illuminatus! info.

Friday, March 28, 2025

Timothy Leary's space migration plan


A space colony from Gerard O'Neill's book,The High Frontier. (Public domain image, via Wikipedia). 

In "Mine the Moon, Seed the Stars," the space migration part of Timothy Leary's SMI2LE proposal gets a nice writeup in the November 1976 issue of Mother Jones magazine. The writeup by  Don Goldsmith does a good job of covering the details of Gerard O'Neill's proposal for colonies in space. 

Goldsmith's article opens with a description of Leary talking to several dozen listeners in a house in Berkeley. "The man's name is Timothy Leary. Berkeley made him a PhD, Harvard a professor, LSD an ex-professor, the media a devil, the government a convict, prison a space-oriented philosopher. He is, perhaps, sane. But what is this elixir he is pushing? Space travel to other star systems? The aging process slowed by a factor of ten, halted entirely before long? Can you get behind it?" I thought the article would tell us more about Leary, but it shifts quickly to O'Neill and the pros and cons of his proposal. 

Goldsmith, 82, has written many space-related books and also is an astronomer.

Hat tip, Jesse Walker. 

No comments: