| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Human Drift by Jack London: of Xerxes with killing weapons. And, in spite of its magnificent
equipment, war no longer kills as it used to when its methods were
simpler. A bombardment by a modern fleet has been known to result
in the killing of one mule. The casualties of a twentieth century
war between two world-powers are such as to make a worker in an
iron-foundry turn green with envy. War has become a joke. Men
have made for themselves monsters of battle which they cannot face
in battle. Subsistence is generous these days, life is not cheap,
and it is not in the nature of flesh and blood to indulge in the
carnage made possible by present-day machinery. This is not
theoretical, as will be shown by a comparison of deaths in battle
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Critias by Plato: abundantly from the soil. He also begat and brought up five pairs of twin
male children; and dividing the island of Atlantis into ten portions, he
gave to the first-born of the eldest pair his mother's dwelling and the
surrounding allotment, which was the largest and best, and made him king
over the rest; the others he made princes, and gave them rule over many
men, and a large territory. And he named them all; the eldest, who was the
first king, he named Atlas, and after him the whole island and the ocean
were called Atlantic. To his twin brother, who was born after him, and
obtained as his lot the extremity of the island towards the pillars of
Heracles, facing the country which is now called the region of Gades in
that part of the world, he gave the name which in the Hellenic language is
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Captain Stormfield by Mark Twain: outside our system snub our little world, and even our system. Of
course we think a good deal of Jupiter, because our world is only a
potato to it, for size; but then there are worlds in other systems
that Jupiter isn't even a mustard-seed to - like the planet Goobra,
for instance, which you couldn't squeeze inside the orbit of
Halley's comet without straining the rivets. Tourists from Goobra
(I mean parties that lived and died there - natives) come here, now
and then, and inquire about our world, and when they find out it is
so little that a streak of lightning can flash clear around it in
the eighth of a second, they have to lean up against something to
laugh. Then they screw a glass into their eye and go to examining
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