Everything we are aware of has already happened. Everything we think of as facts are predictions. The solidity of chairs is a prediction about what will happen if we sit on them. The fact that they rarely let us down is reassuring but not a basis for realism.This is important because our sense of being alive is all about the space between glimpses of what just happened and predictions about what these glimpses portend. This is one reason I hope to persuade you that we need a diaspora from urban circumstances. Our glimpses of what just happened are becoming too narrow to sustain a sense of ourselves and one another. There are political and economic benefits to be gleaned as well. Most of what follows deals with them. These benefits are trivial compared to not subsiding into primitive lives, no matter how well-appointed they become.