First Millennial Foundation

The First Millennial Foundation was a space advocacy and futurist group founded by Marshall Savage in 1988.

Beginnings

I am delighted to report that I have located the perfect site for our New Atlantis project. It is an idyllic island located approximately 90 miles southwest of Nassau in the Bahamas. It is called, with uncanny serendipity, Little San Salvador (San Salvador, of course being the island where Columbus first made landfall in the New World). ...

— Marshall T. Savage, Vol. 1 No.1 First Foundation News, July 1993 [1]

Living Universe Foundation

On 30 April 1999, it was announced that the First Millennial Foundation obtained 501(c)3 status and renamed itself as the "Living Universe Foundation" [2], by William Gale, Secretary, LUF. [3]

William Gale was involved in a related eco-village project in the early 2000s, but he died and his ownership passed to Richard Crews [4] [5]

Prominent members of LUF:

• Eric Hunting (the only substantial contributor from 2006 - 2016)
• Steve Carr [6]
• Keith Dauzat, former board member, Living Universe Foundation [7] [8]
• Charles "Chad" Lupkes, who advocates for a long-term approach and had a spirited exchange on the Space Show at the 1:00 mark [9]
• William Gale (died early 2000s)
• Richard Crews (1937 - 2012) [10]
• Jamal Wills, who posted board meetings in 2011 [11]
• Edward F. Nash, Jr., who appears as a director in the LUF 2011 articles of incorporation.

Hunting and Dauzat were interviewed on 8 May 2011 for the Space Show [12]

Around 2000 Marshall stepped away from his organization. Dauzat gave this explanation on 8 May 2011 during the Space Show podcast for why he did so:

I have a great deal of respect for him. Why did he leave? Has a personality that isn't very well-suited to celebrity, and for his own benefit, and for the privacy of his family, he decided to step away. I hear he is working on a new book on life extension technologies.

— Keith Dauzat, 8 May 2011

2011 Revival

As of early 2011, the following was posted to the About page of luf.org:

The Living Universe Foundation (LUF) was originally established as the First Millenial Foundation based on the book "The Millenial Project" by Marshall Savage. The current leadership of the LUF came together over the luf-team mailing list in early 2011 with the desire to revive and continue the vision originally presented by Mr. Savage.

Board Members (as of 2011):

• President - Open
• Vice President - Open
• Treasurer - Dmitri Donskoy [13]
• Secretary - Tom Hanson (also referred to as Hansen)
• Visionary At Large - Eric Hunting
• Executive Director - Keith Dauzat

Core Members

• Aaron Method
• Chad Lupkes [14]
• Jonas Allesson

LUFoundation is established as an educational organization to spread the word about the 8 point vision. TMP2 is published, and gathers new energy for the movement that we haven't seen since the first book was published. People want to know what they can do. We start bringing the Conclaves together again, and we start building a community.

The money from the sale of the book is enough to start a small media company, Living Universe Media, which continues to expand the TMP2 website with new graphics and content derived from the Conclaves and interested artists all around the world.

The money from the book is also used to launch Living Universe Investments, which is a financial institution dedicated to providing the means to fund Aquarius and expand the New Space movement to the next level. We come up with some new financial products that let people buy shares in the Aquarius Fund, the Bifrost Fund, etc. These funds invest in the technology companies that are in the process of developing the technology to make each step in our vision a reality. They are also dedicated to providing financing to companies and non-profits around the world that are changing our global culture and improving people's lives. The more these Funds and other financial products see success, the more people want to be part of them, leading to the construction of Aquarius in the North Pacific Gyre where the plastic is mined and recycled for reuse and for building additional platforms that go all around the ocean providing fresh water to coastal communities through desalinization and spreading the word and wealth everywhere they go.

The LU Investment Corporation invests in water purification, renewable energy, education and job creation all around the world, building itself into one of the strongest and most well respected organizations the planet has ever known. We fund scientific expeditions to the Moon, the Near Earth Asteroids and Mars, bringing back knowledge and hope. Some of our scientific expeditions transform into long term residences, and the first Avalon station is built on the Moon in the year 2069, my 100th birthday.

The rest is history.

— Chad Lupkes

Yahoo Group

Rise and decline of the LUF discussion group

The LUF existed as a Yahoo Groups discussion, which yielded hundreds of posts, until the group died around September 2013. [15]

The successor site, sea2space.org, no longer exists, so the historical record ends at this point:

The Living Universe Foundation is moving away from Yahoo Groups. Please be aware that posting on luf-team will close on September 9th, 2013. Please feel free to post on our new forums at http://sea2space.org

— Living Universe Foundation website

TMP2

From 2006, Eric Hunting pioneered the second version of the TMP book (TMP2). This resulted in the TMP2 site: [16]

Legal Status of LUF

The Living Universe Foundation experienced a very gradual decline in activity over a period of about a decade. Around 2003 the Executive Board determined that the nonprofit status of the foundation was no longer economically worth maintaining. The charter was permitted to lapse and the foundation reverted to the default status in the state of Colorado which is an "unicorporated association."

The group continues to maintain several legacy communications portals, especially the Yahoo! Group LUF Team where former members and occassional new parties collaborate on projects such as CELSS, Mars Society, 1000 Planets Inc, OTEC news, and others.

The LufWiki fell into disarray when the primary administrator became unable to devote sufficient time to maintaining things server side. A corrupted file or table somewhere led to edits being lost rendering most of the wiki unreadable. The revision files were largely intact so the entire set of 7 webs in LufWiki universe were downloaded and burned to CD and otherwise backed up on the private server space of long time members. The wiki remains suspended in the ether until it can be properly archived allowing the content to be put back into use. Several content management systems are being explored for use in a new website for the LUF Phoenix Project but it is unlikely that a TWiki platform will be chosen again.

There is also talk of a "new book" to refresh the now outdated technology that spawned the first iteration of the foundation.

--KeithDauzat 20:43, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)

History of the Foundation

The history of the name change from FMF to LUF goes like this.

In about 1997 or 1998 we decided to have the First Millennial Foundation (FMF, which was a not-for-profit Colorado corporation) apply to the IRS for tax-exempt status. This would allow people who made donations to not pay income taxes on the donation. More importantly, it would make the FMF acceptable to grant-making foundations.

As executive director I worked with a tax lawyer to prepare the application to the IRS. This took several months and cost $1,000 (of my money). And it involved personal, one-to-one negotiations between our lawyer and the IRS examiner (which was the main reason for paying the lawyer $1,000--we found a lawyer who knew the system and the IRS people and had worked with them many times before).

The IRS examiner finally ruled that the FMF needed to own all rights to the book, TMP, because it looked too much like the corporation could serve as a front for making a profit on the book.

I was jubilant at our success. But when I asked Marshall, he refused to assign all rights to (and future profits from) his book to the FMF because he still hoped to make money on a Hollywood movie and a board game based on the book.

This surprised me because he and I had previously talked about this (this had been part of the negotiations between our lawyer and the IRS examiner) and he had agreed that rights to the book probably weren't worth anything without the FMF.

In fact he got pissed off at me because he considered it a betrayal for me to ask him this. (This, by the way, is the same route that led to Jack Reynold's leaving the FMF--he was running the Rifle office and Marshall got unreasonably and unrealistically angry at him.)

I thought Marshall was wrong, but I resigned as executive director and member of the FMF because I had told Marshall when I "joined up" in the early 1990s that I recognized him as founder and spiritual father of the FMF and that I would always and only function in line with his interests as he saw them.

Tami Savage, Marshall's wife, felt bad about all this (and I think pretty much agreed with me--she had been aware of the developing negotiations with the IRS examiner as they were going on). A few months later she contacted me that she had incorporated a new not-for-profit organization (also in Colorado) under the name Living Universe Foundation (LUF) and had had a lawyer rewrite the IRS application without any mention of the FMF or the TMP book (but otherwise using the same application materials I had laboriously--and expensively--prepared), and the renewed application had been approved by the IRS examiner for tax-exempt status. And would I please come back on board and get back to all the good work I was doing developing the Foundation.

So I re-upped, became executive director of the new organization (actually the same organization but renamed LUF rather than FMF).

That was a couple of years before I went to Texas to try to get SEE going.

We (the LUF) never were successful getting any donations bigger than a few tens of thousands of dollars (there were four such donors--me, William Gale, Phil Kopitski, and Marshall--many people, probably hundreds, made lesser donations of either money or services).

We did not get positive responses from any of the couple of hundred grant-making foundations I contacted.

— Richard Crews, 13 August 2011 [17]

Other sites

6 Billion, a board game, was inspired by TMP [18]

Sources

Facebook page [19]

https://theluf.blogspot.com/

http://www.luf.org/

https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/luf-team/info?guccounter=1