Marshall T. Savage
Marshall Thomas Savage (born 6 August 1955) has lived for many years as part of a notable family in Rifle, Colorado.
Early life
The Savage family is very active in the development of natural gas, real estate, water, timber, and wind power.
See main article: Savage Family of Rifle, Colorado
Savage was born 6 August 1955 to John Savage Sr. and Joan Leonhardt, the third of four sons.
In 1963, John and Joan Savage moved their family of four sons to Graham Mesa in Rifle from Grand Valley.
He attended Swarthmore College. [1] He also holds an English degree from the University of Southern California. [2] [3]
Marriage and family
By 1995 he was married to Tami Savage and had at least one child: Dyson A. Savage, named after Freeman Dyson.
The Millennial Project
From 1988 to about 2000, he was a prominent member of the tech futurist community, especially after the publication in 1992 of his book, "The Millennial Project".
The Millennial Project was a book first published in 1992, written by Marshall T. Savage. It discusses an expansive vision of the future for humanity, a utopian vision where men live among the stars in space colonies. It was highly influential on the thinking of a young Michael Currie.
The First Millennial Foundation
In 1988, Marshall Savage founded the First Millennial Foundation, a Colorado-based organization dedicated to promoting the colonization of space. The basic building blocks that he lays out for this grand mission -- extraordinary transport systems, self-sustaining space cities and terraformed planets -- are not fully his own visions, but he explains them in detail in the TMP book.
By January 1995, Savage had an assistant, Theresa Hamilton [4], and TMP had 700 people on their mailing list and 150 memberships, according to correspondence with future Red Hat Senior Patent Counsel David Perry, then a sophomore student at Whitemore College [5] [6]
Sometime in 1999, Savage left the organization.
It eventually was renamed the Living Universe Foundation (LUF). [7] As of July 2018, the Facebook page for LUF has 1,114 "likes". The group has
It was managed from about 2006 to 2016 exclusively by Eric Hunting.
Though starting with a promising and rapidly growing community, the FMF ran into critical trouble when Marshal Savage abandoned his own brainchild and his career as a futurist around the turn of the century, supposedly because of interpersonal conflicts with some of the 'core' members of the original FMF. This was followed by a rift in the community between supporters of the original scheme and a more Libertarian influenced faction that sought to abandon the marine phase of development as a distraction in the belief that we were entering a new commercial space race with the advent of the Lockheed VentureStar --a notion that proved very premature. I spent about a decade seeking to revive the organization, eventually becoming president by default and cultivating the wiki project TMP2 [8] in an attempt to update TMP to more contemporary technology and futurist thought, create a Sourceforge-like project development forum, and seek the creation of new futurist media. However, for some ten years, I was the only person who ever contributed significantly to the project.
— Eric Hunting, private email correspondence, 2017
Hunting goes on to reflect on how TMP typified several trends: the rise of the Internet as a force for social organization, and the fading of the space-advocacy community as a serious driver of technological development.
Marshal Savage was originally a strong believer in the potential of the Internet as a catalyst for global social action. But the space advocacy movement was already in a decline at the time the FMF was founded, the original founders of the movement retreating into the formal space establishment and relegating the movement to a non-participatory role, a haven for establishment outcasts like Robert Zubrin, and a growing infiltration by purveyors of New Age and SciFi inspired psuedo-science, conspiracy theory, and radical Libertarianism. Instead of catalyzing action, the Internet created increasingly sheltered echo-chambers that cultivated increasing cladification of the movement into ever smaller, more ineffectual, groups pursuing their own pet 'magic bullets' for space's challenges. People with actual science and engineering backgrounds were progressively driven off until little more than a bunch of SciFi fans remained.
— Eric Hunting, private email correspondence, 2017
Eric was interviewed 8 May 2011 by David M. Livingston for his show, "The Space Show" [9] [10]
Savage withdrew from the futurist community from 1999 to 2001. His last contribution appears to be a short article for Wired Magazine, on 1 July 2001, entitled "The Moon Base Race" [11]
Since that date he has given no interview nor made any contribution to the futurist community.
Career
As of 2018 he is Vice President, Technology Development at Independent Energy Partners (IEPM) [www.iepm.com]
On their website his biography states:
Marshall Savage was born with a visionary and innovative mind that he applies across broad entrepreneurial experience in a variety of fields including energy development. He is the inventor of Geothermic Fuel Cells and is responsible for primary technology development. This includes ongoing patent applications, design refinement, and prototype development. Mr. Savage was the founder and President of West Anvil Water & Power Company, which was established to develop the Webster Hill reservoir and hydropower project on the Colorado River. Mr. Savage joined a co-venture with the Shale Energy Corporation of America to develop an oil shale project on lands owned by the Savage family. The Savage family is very active in the development of natural gas, real estate, water, timber, and wind power. Mr. Savage continues to participate in all of these activities on a limited basis.
— Independent Energy Partners
References in media
In 1999, Savage was one of three visionaries discussed in the documentary, "Space Colonies: Living Among the Stars", produced by David Hickman [12] for the Discovery Channel. It was later packaged as part 54 of The Discovery Channel's "The Cosmos: The Ultimate Space Collection".
Producer David Hickman [13] is now as of 2018 Senior Lecturer in Film & Television Production, University of York.
See main article: Reviews of The Millennial Project
Personal life
He was married to a Tami A. Savage in the 1990s.
Sources
The Millennial Project: Colonising the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps Author - Marshall T. Savage ISBN - 0 316 77163 5 Publisher - Little, Brown & Co Price - £11.99 Pages - 508
"Go Up, Young Man," by Marcia Bartusiak. Washington Post, 8 January 1995. [14]
Docuwiki [15]
The Millennial Project Revisited: a Book Review, by Jeff Fullerton. The Libertarian Enterprise, Number 822, 17 May 2015. [16]
TMP2, by Eric Hunting [17]
LUF Facebook Page [18]