What is America?

Now that the future has been completely plotted, analysed, condensed, published, proved and debunked, I'm out of a job.

Or, rather, I may or may not have been paid to keep my mouth shut about what's going to happen next.

All of us have a Jonathan Pryce we're willing to accept. Many a Moss has been traded for sports entertainment purposes rather than gather on immovable old Stones.

It takes six to ten years to build a list of anything interesting to the majority of people in a major culture.

While the interplanetary citizen subcommittees met secretly out in the open, I assigned myself the task of figuring out who was farming the people, letting a vast number randomly reproduce while a select few were closely observed and chosen to attempt to create a special group to use as a control against which modified-DNA beings will be compared.

Is a potato really more intelligent than anything on or in Mars? To whom/what are we potatoes? Why do UFOs always have flashing lights?

A secondary schoolmate of mine is a Zionist living in Israeli settlement. A colleague of mine is a Muslim born of a Muslim father and Christian mother, both born and raised in Lebanon. A Chinese friend of mine lived in terror during the Mao revolution because of her parents' school teacher background. Another friend of mine, of Italian heritage, married a woman of Vietnamese heritage. My wife and I have, amongst a lot, little extractions of various European countries in us.

These people are or were American citizens. Thus, they/we are by definition global citizens because the U.S. is a melting pot of players in international business and politics.

We depend not only on each other but also on our planet.

Politics is not local. But it's hard for us to see thousands of languages and subcultures at once.

What, then, is the ideal extraplanetary citizen?

If we are 99.xxx% alike, what is the average .xxx% percent that will represent us in our first attempts at permanent colonisation on an extraterrestrial body?

Recruits are competing across the globe to define the group(s) to eventually live permanently offworld.

Some secret teams are developing the advance robotic group that will build the colony's living quarters and defensive perimeters (can't let just anybody land and live there first!).

Meanwhile, those who are happy to call Earth home but want more exotic travel destinations are filling up the rosters of promising spaceship companies' train-and-fly programs.

Can I trust you with a little more information I gathered from an intimate bedroom conversation between two people in the know about different sets of secrets? Mmm...not yet.

There is no such thing as the ideal interplanetary citizen. Good traits like hard-working, determined, quick-thinking and cooperative will get us through this next stage of our species' expansion.

The stage after that will require quite a bit of imagination on our part. Better start planting the seeds now that'll take six to ten years to mature, one opened secret at a time, vigilantly wary of future shock.