I represent Inner City AAA, which is just one branch on the Association of Autonomous Astronauts' world-wide network of local, community-based groups dedicated to developing their own strategies for building spaceships. The AAA is infact the world's only independent, community-based space programme, and what I want to suggest to you is that this Intergalactic Conference is happening at a very important time for anyone in Austria interested in these issues concerning space exploration. Very recently the Austrian Space Agency publicly stated that they no longer support manned space flight; for them it is not a viable option. So this means that anyone in Austria who wishes to go into outer space has no choice but to create their own space programme.

Now the organisers of this conference did invite representatives of government-funded space groups to attend; we spoke to the European Space Agency, to the Austrian Space Agency and even the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (who have their headquarters here in Vienna). None of them were willing to send a representative, and even Franz Viehbock, Austria's most famous state-sponsored astronaut, was unable to attend: apparently he informed the conference organisers that he felt alarmed at the AAA's open hostility towards NASA. Well, of course the AAA has never tried to hide its hostility towards all government-funded space agencies, but we are still prepared to debate publicly with them, and to open up negotiations with them concerning how they intend to re-distribute their resources to the Association of Autonomous Astronauts.

OK, so this Intergalactic Conference actually represents the convergence of three very distinct elements within the AAA's independent space programmes; that is, it is a recruitment drive, a media invasion, and a propaganda effort. Infact, this conference demonstrates the practical application of the AAA's desire to introduce non-deterministic methods to the construction of spaceships. This is a point that I will return to later when I discuss the complexities of three-sided thinking. John Eden, the AAA's current Press Officer, will talk later about the AAA's various media invasion techniques, so I want to concentrate for the moment on the propaganda aspect to our space programmes.

One very important promotional ploy that the AAA has used is the promise of sexual experimentation in zero gravity. Indeed, whilst all other existing space programmes refuse to conduct any research into sex in space, the AAA has declared that we intend to openly explore the sexual possibilities of zero gravity. Autonomous Astronauts have already designed several experiments that they wish to conduct to test out our hypothesis that sex in space will be even better than it is on planet earth. However, whilst we will carry out these experiments, it is important to stress that the improved quality of sex in space is not the only reason to build spaceships.

It seems that since the AAA was launched the idea of independent space travel has gained a wider exposure in more mainstream channels. This is not only the direct result of AAA propaganda, but also due to a process that, following on from evolution theorist Rupert Sheldrake, I want to describe as 'Morphic Resonance'. As our ideas filter out through society, and as more people become exposed to the possibilities of space exploration, it becomes easier for others to be affected as well, and this process cannot be expressed in purely causal terms. We are already seeing our ideas resonate in films, music and advertising and amongst people who know nothing of our existence. This has helped to create a wider acceptance in the possibility of non-governmental groups building spaceships, and the idea that space exploration technology is going to get cheaper and more widely available. However, the AAA is the world's only space programme that makes technological issues secondary to our concern with what we will be doing when we form autonomous communities in space. What interests us about technology is how a specific technology can be used, and, of course, who gets to use that technology.

Let's now return to this three-sided aspect to this Intergalactic Conference. I want to suggest that this three-sidedness demonstrates the introduction of non-deterministic methods to the construction of spaceships, and shows how, at an organisational level, the AAA has embraced the complexities of what I will call 'Three Body Dynamics'. Mathematicians have long since realised that when they introduce three objects into an environment where they can all affect each other in some way, then the results of this cannot be predicted. Chaos theory has in part been developed from this, and there will be another AAA speaker talking about that in more detail. For the moment I just want to say that state-funded space agencies have yet to absorb the full implications of this uncertainty; indeed, the moment that they do realise that the universe is subject to intense and random proliferations that are beyond human cognition, these space agencies will conclude that the only course left open to them is to realise their own extinction by promptly handing over their resources to the AAA. So, whilst die-hard universalists will be horrified at the idea that pure chance is as fundamental to space exploration as a desire to escape from gravity, the AAA regards all this as further support for our ability to move in several directions at once.

Now I shall move in another direction. When the AAA was launched on April 23rd 1995, we also began a Five Year Plan to establish by the year 2000 a world-wide network of local, community-based AAA groups. This Five Year Plan has now moved into a new phase which we have called the Dreamtime. The Dreamtime refers to a collective process whereby Autonomous Astronauts explore the possibilities that open up when they form autonomous communities in space. And this Dreamtime also relates to the projects that have been happening leading up to this conference. Behind you is a spaceship that has been constructed with an interior entirely built and designed by various groups of Viennese school children over the last two weeks. This was a project organised by Public Netbase and the Kinder Museum. And at Public Netbase this week we have had a project with a group of teenagers who travelled to the future to take over the abandoned Russian space station Mir. They made a report about their experiences on the space station to send back home to their friends and family in the form of a world wide web site, which you can look at on the terminals at the back there.

So all this connects with the AAA's Dreamtime. The Dreamtime asks, "What is the point of going into space if all you do is replicate the same conditions that prevail on planet earth?". You know, what is the point of, for example, going to the moon if all you do when you get there is visit a McDonalds?

I want to conclude this short talk by picking up the propaganda thread again. Since the collapse of the Cold War, government space programmes like NASA have struggled desperately for a new identity. NASA no longer has the Soviet enemy to compete with, and must dream up new excuses for itself, like the life on Mars scam last August which was basically an attempt by NASA to get the US Congress to give them more money. The Cold War space race was nothing more than a two-sided football match played between competing ideologies, and as such was designed to hide the social forces, on both sides, that maintains the state, corporate and military monopoly of space exploration. Today, we perceive a three-sided race between government space agencies, emerging private enterprise space groups, and the Association of Autonomous Astronauts. This contest is becoming a complex, interactive and continuously evolving game of chance that both the proponents of government space agencies and the free-market propagandists are unable to even comprehend given their continuing attachment to binary thought structures.

Meanwhile the AAA has been developing new trinary concepts, like our use of three-sided football played amongst ourselves and designed to develop essential skills in the art of deception. I don't want to say too much about three-sided football because tomorrow we will be playing it as part of a training day for Autonomous Astronauts, but I will say for now that Intergalactic Conferences, like games of three-sided football, will be organised throughout the AAA's Five Year Plan, in order to help map out how our independent and community-based space programmes move and develop in complex, contradictory and completely unpredictable ways.

Thank-you.