Consilient Network· The graph of everyone who built this · Add your entry ↗
Story path

Three generations of one family, three existential threats

One man helped build the deterrent that held for fifty years. His son spent his life arguing with what it became. The third is trying to build the layer that makes both arguments unnecessary.

5 stopsFor: Everyone. This is the one to send first.All paths
They met once. The boy read a book on Roman history across the room and the old man watched him read it. Nothing needed to be said.
The path

Follow it in order

Each stop is a page in the graph. The order is an argument — but every one of them is also a door into the rest of it, so you can leave the path wherever it stops being useful.

01My grandfather ran the Titan II program, stood up ARPA, and has a 200-word obituaryNuclear physicist, Titan II, ARPA, and a basement company in 1975. Almost none of it is in his obituary because almost none of it could be.→02June Whitson, 1916–2015, who carried the whole record and taught me the methodWho carried the record and transmitted it — and who put Consilience into her grandson's hands. She taught him more than anyone.→03My father marched beside Martin Luther King at Selma, and photographed itDrove 2,300 miles in a two-seat car to walk at the front of Dr King's march, and photographed it.→04My other grandfather invented chaff, and died at forty-sixThe other grandfather. Chess by post with the first one, which is how Hare's parents met — and a death the family has never resolved.→05Jonathan Paul Hare, who invented the Quantum Privacy NetworkThe promise made by video on a deathbed: to carry it on, because it was the same mission.→
Where it lands

What the path is for

The point

His father marched to make a system admit people it had excluded. That was the right fight. But a system that can be made to admit people can be made to exclude them again, usually within a generation. The promise was not to win the argument — it was to build the thing that makes the argument unnecessary.

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