In 1983 Colonel Burns wrote a poem in which he envisioned how his fledgling communications network might one day influence the world. Imagine the emergence of a new meta-culture. Imagine all kinds of people everywhere getting committed to human excellence, getting committed to closing the gap between the human condition and the human potential... And imagine all of us hooked up with a common high tech communications system. That's a vision that brings tears to the eyes. Human excellence is an ideal that we can embed into every formal human structure on our planet. And that's really why we're going to do this. And that's also why The Meta Network is a creation we can love. Notwithstanding Colonel Burns's failure to foresee that people would use the Internet mostly to access porn and look themselves up on Google, his prescience was admirable.