...place. If you can select currency from a hole in the wall anywhere in the world, and register a preference for six numbers out of fifty twice a week at high street shops, or choose a code on your mobile while travelling, or e-mail information from your home P.C., it would certainly be possible for everyone to participate in decision making.

Recent 'Genetic Programming' using artificial genetic algorithms in conjunction with ultra-fast computers are proving more ingenious and creative at solving problems than the best efforts by humans. Combine these synthetic skills with those of the most qualified human decision makers, and places like the White House and Westminster will become museums for tourists to visit. Moreover, partisan government with its abysmal juvenile bickering for party priority, more reminiscent of primary school playgrounds, will become an embarrassing relic of misplaced political romanticism about the human condition.

Despite its astonishing success, the category of knowledge we call science has also led us towards what some consider to be a terrifying abyss. As Stephen Hawking reminds us, science has revealed that we apparently inhabit an utterly insignificant planet orbiting a medium sized star in the outer suburbs of a mediocre galaxy of which there are probably a hundred thousand million that can be seen. It has led many scientists like Steven Weinberg, a Nobel prize-winner to conclude:

It is an attitude of despair mirrored by Samuel Beckett, a Nobel prize-winner in literature, one of whose characters in ' Waiting for Godot' comments on the pointlessness of every human life by saying that it is as if women, "give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, and then it is night once more". (5) You could hardly get more pessimistic than that!

And yet; is the universe just a meaningless accident? On a much deeper level Einstein pointed out that the greatest mystery in this universe is that it is capable of being understood. Tiny as our almost invisible smudge of consciousness might be on a cosmic scale - it cannot be insignificant. Science has also shown us that the pre-atomic matter and energy that gave birth to the universe was pregnant with us. Our consciousness is the end product of something that existed before atoms formed, and has evolved to be the human brain. In us this immensity of 15 billion light years in all directions has become conscious of itself.

As far as is responsibly known we are the torchbearers of the universe self-awareness. We can hardly escape the fact that we appear to be the final result of everything that has ever happened since the moment that time began! Surely, there can be no more awesome responsibility? Could this be the basis of a new belief system based on science and not ideology?  (next)