Until recently Savage has self-generated much interest in the LUF, serving as a prophetic writer/leader who has gradually surrounded himself with a core of aerospace scientists and other specialists. LUF's next director after Marshall Savage was Dr. Carol Rosen, who was according to Savage, "a spokesperson for Werner Von Braun for several years near the end of his life, she was a corporate manager for a major aerospace defense contractor, and was with Gerard K. O'Neill at the inception of the L5 Society. She also headed up the project to launch the ashes of O'Neill, Gene Rodenberry, and Timothy Leary into space."

The LUF will need to survive its 'Seldon Crises' (major organizational challenges that required Asimov's Foundation to radically alter itself) if it continues to implement Savage's increasingly panoramic steps – a mass driver sled/laser guided launch system (Bifrost), geosynchronous orbit habitable ecospheres (Asgard), miniature Moon communities (Avallon), terraforming Mars (Elysium), colonizing the Solar System (Solaria), and finally creating the pan-Galactic civilization (Galactica) that Asimov envisioned.

Judging whether or not organisations like the LUF or the Artemis Project, which both operate outside NASA's strict program, are 'kooks' is impossible to do in the short term, since both derive their models from mainstream scientific models (for example the industry/government OTEC studies for Aquarius Rising have existed since 1978-81, while similar technology for the Bifrost launch system exists in mid 1980s Russian developed maglev rocket sleds). Few remember that the now respected British Interplanetary Society were regarded as cranks in the 1930s, yet in retrospect they had a clearer picture of the progress of space technology than their mainstream counterparts.

Like its fictional counterpart, the LUF will only survive if it is able to harness Humanity's deeply mythical and religious impulses and transcend the bewildering array of socio-political fluctuations confronting it. For Asimov's Foundation it was Seldon's 'psychohistory' synthesis, whereas Savage clearly stresses at each step our ability to 'generate futures,' moulding the objective cosmos to our subjective visions like nascent gods.

Ironically the two most common criticisms of Savage's book were its New Age-style project designations (hiding a wealth of credibly sourced mainstream scientific information), and a neo-Marxist model of future socioeconomic development that relies on the innate 'goodness' of humanity. Like Asimov's 'psychohistory', it is future extrapolation based on large groups, not individuals. Some critics view Savage’s biological ecosystem analogies with scepticism.

Savage concedes that such social re-engineering "is incredibly difficult, and our greatest challenge," echoing a point Robert Anton Wilson made to me that "the information revolution is changing everything so fast that futurism scenarios extrapolated from the current Dominator paradigm are doomed to failure." Thus longterm details of socio-economic ecosystems are impossible to predict, due to the many potential factors involved.

Space Migration not only offers lucrative manufacturing industries, but also a laboratory that will radically alter human consciousness – the long-term effects of the current information explosion and cyberculture are a distant rumble before the approaching storm. Savage cites Asgard ecospheres and Avallon domes as examples of 'total environments' structured along symbolic or ideological lines that will further shatter contemporary urban habitats.

Space colonization will radically alter civilisation and human consciousness, much like TV or the Internet's alteration of communications, according to Savage.

"Once you get large-scale colonization of space, which only occurs after something like the Foundation has succeeded in pioneering the Frontier, humanity will drag those kind of problems along with it; although at a lesser degree than the history of Earth would seem to indicate, simply because in space you probably can’t wage war at a profit. The infrastructure is too fragile, each side is far too vulnerable to the other to make it worthwhile. The resources that are up for grabs are so abundant and so widespread that its always going to be a better bet to colonize further and penetrate further into the Frontier than squabble over resources that somebody else already has."

As co-founder of the San Francisco Bay Area Chapter and chronicler of the LUF's annual Colorado Conclave, Levitt explained that these organizational aspects were being sped up by using the Internet and other emerging communications technology serving as a social dynamics engineering tool akin to Hari Seldon's 'psychohistory' synthesis.

"This is one of the perfect applications of the Web for these kinds of globally distributed information and essentially what is a scientific, technical, political, economic organization on a global scale involving very few people at the start," Levit believes.

"It's such a tremendous job to try and influence the very attitudes of the human race enough to get them to take this direction," Savage states. "Its going to take any means at our disposal, and some we haven't even thought of yet. Things are evolving pretty rapidly in the whole multimedia sphere. We have to be ready to jump on the opportunities that present themselves as we go along."