How different would it have been if Earth was just Australia, the north and south poles, and ocean, with no other continents or islands? It would be a paradise for Sylvia Plath, for one thing. For her, the entire world would be an enormous metaphor. Would we still exist, and would we be better or worse for it? Australia itself had people on it a long time ago, people who were isolated from the rest of the world for long enough to forget that there ever was a rest of the world. Sometimes I forget that there is a rest of the world, and I live with other people every day.

The people in Australia would eventually have developed technology and machinery of their own and they would be us. Whether they would be one people or whether they would have shut themselves off from each other I do not know. There must be a limit to the amount and type of natural resources in Australia to prevent certain technologies from emerging; a lack of oil might be one. There is plenty of uranium but many other things have to be invented before nuclear weapons - and the reasons for building and using them - can become.

There would be no shortage of marine life to eat. If we kept to the coast we could build boats, and sail the One Sea. Would we explore, without any reason to believe that there might be something over the horizon to explore? Would our boats become ironclads, submarines? And the deserts would be there to be farmed and tamed. But then again the deserts of North Africa have not been farmed or tamed and people have had thousands of years to do that. Some things, however, are beyond human beings and our technology, or more realistically our money. We could theoretically move all the sand from the desert right now and have orbital sunshields to modulate the temperature, but it would be hugely expensive and would take ages to do.

Therefore we are limited by money. Time is money. But time to a machine is nothing. We need to develop robots to do work for us, as quickly as possible. And we need a way to power the robots. It all comes down to power. Once we have portable, safe nuclear fusion, we are set. Or if we could burn soil, or human waste, or sand, or water, we would be able to concentrate on other things. Why does God torment us this way? He gives us the senses and minds to see how beautiful things could be, but puts obstacles in the way. I assume He is trying to toughen us up, challenge us, like in 'Moon Patrol' when the rolling boulders come in on the challenge stage. Yes. It is our duty to insert the coin and continue. We have six billion lives left, easily enough to cycle the score, but only if each life is part of the same game. Many people today are not even inside the arcade. They do not own a ten pence piece. Their names do not go onto the high score table. G-O-D. It fits.

But they say God is dead, and we are trapped in the decks of His inverted vessel, trying to work our way up to the belly, and the vessel is sinking. And who is on the hull to rescue us, if we get there?

You know, there should be an Anglo-Saxon religion. Paganism, perhaps, but it does not have the same following as the middle-eastern religions, and of the supposed pagans few take it seriously enough to, say, defend it with lethal force. And if your beliefs are not strong enough to rouse you to the ultimate extreme they are worthless, a weak compromise for people who, when asked what kind of music they like, reply "oh, all kinds, chart stuff, r'n'b". Such people are lower than Buddhists. Their passivity is not even justified by an ideology. It only takes one man with a scythe to behead an entire field of corn. And if that man was bred and trained to hate the corn with his every conscious thought, there would soon be no corn. Just the scythe, and the sickle. Man and his tools versus nature and its tools. Bring them on, all of them. It is much easier to build a religion around hate than it is to build it around love, and that is where Christianity tends to fall down, as it emphasises love and forgiveness, which are merely a small part of the human condition.

My new religion therefore will have the scythe as its emblem. It is a tool, and it cuts, like a guitar. Harvesting and using corn to make bread and food is fairly complex, and the scythe can be used to feed people, and also to behead people, so it expresses both sides of the technological coin. Each of my followers will be compelled to kill an amount of non-believers per week, the amount determined by the relative sizes of (a) my followers and (b) the others. As my current tally of followers totals myself and my imaginary friend Eugene, this presents a challenge. But challenges and constraints are good, they force one to adopt unconventional solutions and/or poses.

Written language itself is obsolete as recorded sound is now a trivial thing. And as human institutions are automated, and responsibility is divested to machines, there will be no need for human beings to communicate with words, because there will be no need to communicate. When we have attained perfection - our bodies in tanks, fed with heroin, moved and cleaned and bred by our machines - there will be no need for words. Or even other people to communicate with; perfection would come with a single, immortal, perfectly-happy individual living alone on a world of plenty with his or her mind. I have said this before, although not with such clarity of thought and vision, and of expression.