- THE FUTURE -

Could the Earth be turned into a superior model of Victorian England? The Earth as a manor land. Factory towns fringe Earth orbit instead of the sea. Outer space, the colonies?

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Le pire imbécile se croit le plus sage- apprentimarcv
Ne traitez personne d'imbécile – Jésus

The greatest fool thinks himself wisest - learnermarkv
Call no man a fool. Jesus

Chapters

• 0:06 picture God as a senile old coot once lauded as the Picasso of his day
• 3:04 to ward off this fate
• 7:37 picture this planet’s civilization dedicated instead to World Peace
• 10:29 colossal corporate hijack
• 23:08 there is a simple test for new technologies
• 24:02 data trespass
• 25:45 a mosaic of parklands
• 29:48 soft and sharp technologies
• 33:04 we may explore other planets

Transcript

WORLD WAR COVID
From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
Learner, begin

- THE FUTURE -

“In constraining carbon through rationing, we might soon find that we were building a different sort of society, one emphasizing quality of life before the raw statistics of economic growth and relentless consumption. I have no grand plan for how this society might look, nor do I pretend that it would be some kind of utopia. Life would go on, with all its trials and tribulations — and that, after all, is precisely the point. Unless we do constrain carbon, life will very largely not go on at all.” Mark Lynas, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, National Geographic Society, Washington, D.C., 2008, p. 302. 

Picture God as a senile old coot once lauded as the Picasso of his day. Having lost the better part of his vision these last few years, he has simplified his worldly pallet to four shades: desert tan, basalt gray, the purest aqua blue and cotton cloud white. Gone ice’s silver white, wiped off of equatorial mountains (one degree Celsius), from the Arctic Ocean (two degrees), from the Alps, the Rockies and the Andes (three degrees), and finally from the mighty Himalayas, even from Greenland and the Antarctic Archipelago after a mere four degrees’ rise in the average heat on Earth. Gone forest green, tropical or temperate, since the ice fields’ life-giving rivers no longer flow so dependably in summertime. Gone the dark brown of good soil, either flushed away by floods or blown away to dustbowls by drought. 

Given the heat engine of a hotter Earth, rains will conform to the biblical scheme: “For to those who have much, more will be given; but for those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.” No more fallow fields, no forests, no living coral reefs and no fish left alive. 

Gone all the port cities, flooded no matter how well fortified; gone the bioluminescence of human cities by night. A few smudges of luminosity might close up against polar shores, subsisting any way they can. Instead, countless bright flashes explode out to sea, where once deep-frozen and sublimated methane hydrate froths up from square miles of continental shelf and detonates in titanic explosions that punctuate Force 6+ hypercanes with tsunamis and top off the congealing yoke of atmospheric greenhouse gas.

The oceans are the purest aqua blue because there is no oxygen left in the water and therefore no life. On every seashore, the lethal, rotten-egg stagnancy of sulfur dioxide has replaced the bracing ozone tang of ocean breakers. What biomass subsists on land consists of inedible scrub or mangrove swamp and not much of that; all induced by a mere five-degree rise in average world temps. Six degrees and forget the human bioluminescence of industrial cities for at least a few centuries until the world climate restabilizes from the equivalent of a Permian-Triassic die-off, during which the Earth almost went to barren rock. A ragged remnant of humanity might survive, reproduce and rebuild, but not much and not at all quickly. 

An equivalent drop of six degrees from the norm would glaze the whole planet with mile thick layers of ice, perhaps all the way to the equator. 

To ward off this fate, we must start scheduling tranches (“wedges” or statistical pie slices) of conserved energy and reduced greenhouse gas. Each wedge would reduce CO2 emissions by 1,000 metric tons per year by 2050; this according to Robert Socolow and Stever Pacala of Princeton University. If we “inserted” enough of these wedges into our world, say 13 or more of them, we might avoid the deadliest manifestations of this heat death. 

·     Double the fuel efficiency of every car;

·     Halve their yearly mileage;

·     Halve their number on Earth; 

·     Make as many (?) houses as possible energy-neutral;

·     Seven hundred one-Gigawatt nuclear power plants (watch out for those that pop!) PeaceWorld’s Thorium reactors might work more cheaply and safely than WeaponWorld’s Uranium ones;

·     Fusion reactors? Cold fusion? Impossible? As nuke physicists put it: “We’ll get there in the next fifteen years!” So they’ve said for the last 75. It would neither be the first time nor last that the powers-that-be were 100% misleading and misled;

·     Two million, one-Megawatt wind- or water-driven turbines;

·     Dozens of artificially dug, optimized Bay of Fundy tidal power basins generating thousands of megawatts each;

·     Five million acres of photovoltaic solar panels (27 square feet per person on Earth). Should I lead by example and go broke lining my roof with not very efficient solar panels? This number would shrink with significant efficiency improvements, comparable eventually to that optimal of plants;

·     Massive reforestation (X million acres of replanted trees) and bury those trees once matured, then replant. The tailoring of fungus/microorganism communities to accelerate this process and re-establish soils worldwide. Look out for horrific ecological damage from mismanaged mushroom projects! See The Cosmic Serpent to forestall such likelihoods;

·     End all industrial clear-cutting and forest burns as of yesterday;

·     Devote 618 million acres to biofuels, as opposed to food. This would be massively inefficient: fertilizer, pesticides and farm equipment generate massive carbon releases. Plus arm yourselves against those you have deprived of cheap food! Typical Repugnant bullshit;

·     Sequester 1,000 metric tons of liquid CO2 underground every year from now on;

·     Artificial photosynthesis (biomechanical, in vertebrates, in humans?);

·     Genetically engineered coccoliths (planktons) that produce millions of tons of calcium carbonate, thus suck huge quantities of carbon from the atmosphere and sink it to the sea floor. It seems that Gaia may have managed something similar in the distant past and may also have mixed up submarine sediments to stimulate the growth of this kind of oceanic life; 

·     Loft billions of large, plastic mirrors into orbit, or fog up the sky with shadow-inducing nitrates and sulfates? Turn Earth into a hellish version of Venus on reprieve. Do so forever, or else! This project would be relatively simple, local and cheap, even if it promises infernal consequences; thus as tempting to weapon corporations as the choking smog of coal and peat fires of the Victorian era, and its sewerfied rivers.

·     Orbital solar power plants beaming power back to Earth (beware of unforeseen atmospheric consequences!);

·     A massive “cull” of humanity? One Plague or several (natural or weapon-grade?) or some other Apocalypse that would subtract 25%, 50% or more of humanity, and probably you and me too, between now and as soon as possible. I’ve been told that even if a “small” atomic war broke out (like that between India and Pakistan, say), the resulting Nuclear Winter might kill a billion human beings but leave six billion more without basic resources and infrastructure;

·     ?... Other ideas, good, bad or crazy? Allow a pool of spent fuel rods underwater to leak out, burn up à la China Syndrome, and contaminate the rest of the planet, the way Fukushima Daichi No. 4 threatens to do the next time a 7+ earthquake strikes nearby?

·     massive industrial applications of terra preta, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/08/100810122030.htm;

·     Some unforeseen new technology; several of them complementary and synergistic? By all means, go for it! As long as your solution does not present more profits for the rich at the risk and expense of the poor into the indefinite future…

In any case, no matter what transformations may be undertaken at present or endure in the future, the Earth will stay hotter for at least another few thousand years until its climate restabilizes naturally, with or without the burden of us and our civilization.

Picture this planet’s civilization dedicated instead to World Peace. I know that’s hard for you to imagine, but try. Fair and serene on its surface, Earth will devour the resources within solar reaches.

·      Limitless vacuum and weightlessness will allow die-casting, crystal cultivation and alloys and compounds of extreme purity. For example, perfect ball bearings and gears without lubricants. Glass poured in the arid vacuum of space is twice as strong as steel.

·      Tremendous new energy reserves tapped directly from the Sun. 

·      Powerful engines run on temperature differentials between sunlit and shadowed surfaces in the vacuum of space. Venus and Mercury covered with a spider web of caloric conduits: future power plants of the solar system? The moon: their prototype?

·      Freezing lakes of liquid oxygen, frozen water and dry ice (carbon dioxide).

·      Giant chunks of raw ore in accessible orbits. At least ten times the ore contained in the Earth’s meager crust (a billion times more drifting in the Oort Cloud?). Imagine solid veins of pure gold or even more precious water ice floating out there in the silky, merciless black — fractured heavy, fused and set adrift in some cosmic collision. Those fragments orbit in three layers around the solar system, each one more massive and attractive to a ravenous space race: the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, the Kuyper Belt beyond Pluto, and the Oort cloud half-way to the nearest stars… As if they had been installed there like training wheels for a bicycle beginner;

·      Artifacts? Documents? Biology? 

Once these resources are properly developed (a major dividend of WeaponWorld’s disarmament), high pollution, high-energy industries will migrate to Earth orbit and beyond. 

This said, outer space must not become more polluted thereby. Learner debates on this topic will be crucial. 

The skyward uplift of materials management industries, of energy generation and heavy manufacturing will release much of the world’s acreage to regrow climax ecology. This liberation of the natural world will help restore it to an approximation of its pre-urban purity. 

Learners may fulfill Gaia’s apparent intent by seeding space with life forms of terrestrial origin. 

Recent world leaders are militarizing orbital space. Against whom, the Martians? A frenzied schedule of military satellite launches prompted the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. The Columbia was doomed once NASA withdrew civilian funding in favor of military projects. These last fifty years, the militarization of orbital space has hamstrung civilian space research. It has left us enough nukes to sterilize fifty earthly civilizations, enough spyware to film it in High Def, and a junkyard clutter along low Earth orbits. 

It’s striking to note that the interval between the Wright brothers’ flight and those to the Moon was sixty years long, and that the sixty years since then have been semi-paralytic in comparison, with the exception of the strokes of genius described directly above.

As we speak so placidly, genetic treasure troves are ransacked in the wild. Corporations lock away a few tissue remnants in giant seed-bank repositories and then seek patents for every biological remnant (even human cells and their genes) relying on the rulings of reactionary judges. 

Some sociopaths among our Victorian predecessors dreamt of doing the same thing with chemical elements. “Pay us for the contractual privilege of breathing. We own patent rights for oxygen!” 

Once those corporations have stripped most biological resources from their natural settings, they plan to reissue the surviving progeny – with or without genetic tampering, changes useful, benevolent or otherwise – then ransom those hostages with imperial royalties. What nerve!

This colossal corporate hijack reminds me of the Consultant’s words in Douglas Adams’ brilliant satire, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Longmeadow Press, Stamford, Connecticut, 1986, p. 299. He’s gone now — we’ll miss his comical wordplay.

[Note: A management consultant is addressing a crowd of emigrants banished from their home planet because their job skills were considered “redundant” … The population of the planet of origin died out soon thereafter because a seemingly redundant skill (that of telephone receiver wiper) turned out to be fatally crucial for public health.] 

“‘…Since we decided a few weeks ago to adopt the leaf as legal tender, we have, of course, all become immensely rich.’ 

“Ford [the protagonist] stared in disbelief at the crowd who were murmuring appreciatively at this and greedily fingering the wads of leaves with which their track suits were stuffed. 

“‘But we have also,’ continued the management consultant, ‘run into a small inflation problem on account of the high level of leaf availability, which means that, I gather, the current going rate has something like three deciduous forests buying one ship’s peanut.’ 

“Murmurs of alarm came from the crowd. The management consultant waved them down. 

“‘So in order to obviate this problem,’ he continued, ‘and effectively revalue the leaf, we are about to embark on a massive defoliation campaign, and … er, burn down all the forests. I think you’ll all agree that’s a sensible move under the circumstances.’ 

“The crowd seemed a little uncertain about this for a second or two until someone pointed out how much this would increase the value of the leaves in their pockets, whereupon they let out whoops of delight and gave the management consultant a standing ovation. The accountants among them looked forward to a profitable autumn.” 

Surfing along the crest of Global Warming, conspirators of greed may bake sterile the Earth’s equatorial zone, overheat or chill the seven seas, turn tropical rain forests, barrier reefs and micro-organic marine colonies into regretted dead zones. As we struggle to restore these air-purifying biomes gone to waste, we will dedicate a lot more arable land and sunlit shoals to natural growth.

Will Gaia accept our confession of guilt, contrition and offer of amends? Will she let us commute our self-imposed death sentence? Can we readjust our lives with that of Nature, temper chaos-driven catastrophes and evolve from simpleton exploiters into subtler caretakers of the Earth? 

Someone once compared Earth to a living tree. Its vital epithelium is a thin outer layer covering a thick inner core of dead tissue. The anthrosphere appears to veneer the Earth like the mottle of luminous lichens on the bark of a tree. 

The Environmental Protection Agency of the World Court will exert enormous influence over future events, as will its Administrative equivalents locally. They’ll shield the environment from further corporate insult; not corporate profits, meaningless in the long term, from marginalized environmentalists. 

It is time we confronted multinational paper, timber and agro-monopolists and confronted their self-serving ads. “We plant x million trees!” They mistreat the World Forest the way some hard-bitten cracker might wear out his back-forty cornfield before moving on to the next one. Corporate elites strip-mine old growth forests and restock some of that devastated ground with methane farting cow herds and timber monocultures of fast buck, forced-growth inbreds. 

In like manner, oceanic coral reefs, the rain forests of the sea, are being destroyed. This mayhem began with the construction of historic ports; it accelerated during the Greater Paroxysm’s frenzied construction of coastal airfields and fortifications; and is coming to an end with overheated and acidified ocean waters.

The sea-surface microlayer is a molecular membrane of water and air that teems with microbial life and covers the oceans’ coasts. We’ve flooded it with toxins while its densely stratified but super thin micro-communities suffer additional heat and ultraviolet stress. Even though coastal wetlands are crucial to our long-term survival, we’ve turned most of them into landfills and parking lots.

Learners will restore wetlands out to the edge of select urban and rural continental shallows by removing infrastructure and human populations displaced by future hurricanes and rising sea levels. Follow-up biological rest and restauration would take a certain amount of time to re-seed,  restore water plants and bio-colonize, coral and faunal communities. Where applicable, restored biohabitats will be installed  with floating chain mails of family scale human habitats properly anchored and submersible during emergencies. These habitats will be occupied by Cham, local, and other shoreline global warming refugee communities. There, they will harvest nutritious aquatic plants (horsetail, lotus, hydrangea, rice, etc.) and fish, amphibians, reptiles adapted to these wetlands.

Clumsy recombinant genetic projects may lead to unforeseen disasters, especially out to sea. The sea release of recombinant gene technology threatens to induce toxic disasters we may never manage to clean up afterwards.

Subtler minds will restore shattered ecosystems, focusing along altitude/latitude boundaries, as well as lake, river and ocean shores. This undertaking will be titanic: the global regrowth of wildlife habitats and reduction of industrial exploitation to the minimum necessary to sustain a comfortable peace economy. 

First priority: replant diversified habitats along those demarcation lines. The rest may grow back naturally in their own good time, even though the need to reverse global warming quickly may not permit such finicky regrowth. 

Oceanic plateaus, marine highlands and land-bound seas will be declared Marine Sanctuaries, Parks or Preserves. Those will double and redouble in size under the jurisdiction of genuine Environmental Protection Agencies — no longer an exploitation bureaucracy like Defense, Agriculture, Fisheries, Commerce, Interior or Tourism. In most cases, local Administrations will relieve national governments and international corporations of their environmental mandates. No longer will ecological concerns be overseen by corporate and government interests that devastate the most extensive landmass in the least amount of time, in pursuit of trivial, short-term profit. The environmental branch of the World Court will oversee them.

Some preliminary eco-projects will halt the spread of the Earth’s deserts and reverse their growth. While English speakers talk about desertification, their peace-shallow and war-deep vocabulary offers no worthwhile antonym. “Afforestation” reads too much like “aforestation,” strip-mining forests for profit. Besides, not all biohabitats will take kindly to brute reforestation. Perhaps the term “edenization” will do.

Learners will irrigate mountain and desert regions from nearby rivers and seas. By using solar power and perhaps thorium-fueled nukes, as well as new genetic biotechnologies and filter nanotechnologies, water treatment plants will convert brackish water into fresh. Using bio-osmotic power or Jerold Polack’s liquid crystals, fresh water will be pumped into deserts to irrigate heat-resistant green cover. Such installations, built big, will ensure public access to clean piped water; built small, they will serve as public fountains from local springs.

As soon as our prejudices get slightly subtler, we may edenize large stretches of the desert. Learners will make use of advanced irrigation techniques to avoid salt-poisoned soils. Ancient aquifers will be topped off. Many deserts can be watered in a logistical exercise on par with a global war. In the long run, no insurmountable problem should present itself. The great deserts may expand for a while longer, despite initial attempts to reverse their growth. 

The disenfranchised of the Earth – be they refugees or populations declared “surplus” – could find a new home in arcologies of the kind proposed in the chapter “White Noise.” A watchful World Court will see to their communal charters, political rights and self-determination. 

The logistics required to edenize each continent’s deserts will come from a pool of funds collected from that continent’s governments. Each would contribute in proportion to the number of volunteers it sent and reduce its desert area to the minimum required to sustain a healthy biosphere. 

Wimps and Prisms may see this project as a convenient way to dispatch undesirables to perish out in the desert. That kind of genocide will be forbidden. Every colonist will require the life support inputs of an expeditionary soldier. The Israeli kibbutz movement has published handbooks that outline exactly what would be needed per capita and per community.

Mountain ranges can be adapted to terrace agriculture. One has but to look at the magnificent terraced fields of Oceania, Asia and South America to see that much more land could be cultivated in this manner. This project will demand much more intensive labor than spendthrift capital. In addition, mountainsides stripped bare should be carpeted with lush ground cover and tree stands, thus moderating floods, landslides, erosion and water-born pollution. These would make excellent work projects for urban youth setting off for summer camp or on quest treks of self-discovery.

Priority would go to replanting areas stripped of vegetation and protecting them. Learners will micro-manage corporate exploitation to re-establish climax native ecologies. Industrial forestry will be limited to fringe orchard areas while old-growth forests expand outward. If possible, native populations and their guests will administer these areas. Learners will clean up sterilized seas and waterways and restock their fauna and flora. 

Official dosage rates of pollution will be curtailed. Tolerable maxima will be established for every pollutant, much lower than our “scientific,” hope-for-the-best guesstimates. Reversible processes will fine-tune toxin inputs to neutralize their harmful effect. If necessary, major polluters will be fined until they have to shut down. Funds so acquired will finance cleanup programs for less shitty industries and municipal waste treatment systems of sound design. Urban storm drains will become just that, not sewage outflows during heavy rains. 

Learner genetic architects will redesign plankton and marine algae to flourish in changing conditions of oceanic salinity, acidity, eutrophication and warmth. Current conditions are stressing natural strains and becoming less and less survivable. Tailored bacteria and fungi will break down persistent toxins into less harmful substances. Those whose toxicity cannot be minimized to tolerable levels will become Controlled Substances and outlawed. 

The World Court will offer generous bounties to whistle-blowers who turn in the hoarders of weapons of mass destruction and spreaders of omnicide toxins. Gene architects will restock wrecked ecologies and refill barren niches with newly tailored wildlife. Learner naturalists will restore biological diversity after decades of weapon-directed biosimplification. 

Genetic engineering horrifies thoughtful people with its elaborate preparations for horrific new weapons and runaway disasters by deliberate, cumulative error. The prohibition of genetic engineering would drive its military research apparatus underground. As usual, military applications are at the forefront of secret research. What did you think would happen while you didn’t pay attention?

Gene architecture is a problematical peace technology; it will grow in reward as other peace technologies mature concurrently. However, it would be unrealistic to expect weapon managers to regulate genetic engineering since they are neither able nor willing to address its negative consequences. Without corrective action by thoughtful adults, their spoiled-child tantrums will prove suicidal in the long run.

The exponential increase of greenhouse gas emissions threatens to cook the planet to such a degree that plants won’t grow anywhere: eighteen degrees F or hotter by 2100 or sooner — almost ten times as much additional heat as that falsely predicted by the powers that be, in about half the time they predicted. 

So be it. Forget the Kyoto protocols and their appeal for sanity. Instead, we could let emitters of sulfur- and nitrate-based pollutants multiply their atmospheric pollution to such extent that its solar dimming properties would counteract the greenhouse effect. Whoopee! Let everyone pollute, pollute, pollute! Our weapon managers contemplate balancing the solar regime of Earth by turning its atmosphere into something like the pea-soup smog that shrouds Venus. Maintain it without cease from then on, for fear of catastrophic fallouts from any interruption.

There is a simple test for new technologies. Will the Lloyds of London insurance company (representing the hallowed Free Market) insure it against accidents? If so proceed with caution; if not, drop it like a hot potato. Lloyds will not insure any nuclear power plant at any premium, nor will it insure recombinant genetic engineering carried out in the open; it won’t even insure communications industries against the health hazards of electrical transmission towers. Will anyone insure high-tension power lines against their biological effects? 

Lessons for the wise.

Once PeaceWorld takes root, we won’t need so many polluting inputs. 

Atomic and other high pollution industries will be exiled to Earth orbit and beyond or taxed out of existence. Smaller communities will pay more attention to local ecologies. Finally! The brightest minds among us may go back to elucidating the paradoxes of human nature, nature and the supernatural. 

Data trespass and environmental pollution – both “legal” and not so according to current law – will fuel the mobster crime of the future. This will happen whether or not we regulate it today.

Of course, now that I think of it, the worst criminals will gravitate to the highest-paying crime: the traffic of human flesh, whether or not this involves spare organs, enslaved human/animal chimera, immune and other cloned cells, bioweapons, illegal human fertility or other biomedical technologies yet to be foreseen. Nightmare criminality will fester in this heart of darkness. An unspeakable syndic will take root, whether or not humanity organizes a rational program of global eugenics to shrink its swarms peacefully and thus ensure its survival. See the chapter "Please Don't Vomit in the All You Can Eat Buffet".

Drug, gambling and prostitution crimes of today are just warm-up exercises for the data-and-pollution-driven crimes of tomorrow. Its victims suffer multi-facetted punishments, while wealthy racketeers and their reactionary political patrons go home free and well rewarded. In the same way, the American Prohibition was a cozy nursery for organized thugs and their police “controllers.” Psychopaths always dominated both sides. 

In pollution law of the future, the burden of proof and cleanup will fall on polluters both primary and secondary. Such environmental criminals will include organized thugs, government collaborators (like congresspeople), corporate managers and other powerful interest groups that profiteer from pollution. We will stop subsidizing those absentee polluters who have managed to evade the worst personal consequences of their greed up ‘til now. Nowadays, they live in fortified, high-luxury communities tucked away from the outfalls of their crimes and pollution. That form of high-profit escapism will be brought to a halt.

A few decades from now, the Earth may turn into a mosaic of parklands inlaid with lovingly tended squireships smaller, more scattered, and environmentally friendly than today’s cities and corporate agro-complexes. Agricultural freeholds and garden/university townships will flourish. Extended family and volunteer collectives will practice intensive horticulture and aquaculture on just enough cultivable land and shoreline to support local communities. Cottage industries will produce exquisite crafts for luxury export. Every bioregion will pursue climax reforestation in local parklands, as well as intensive restoration projects for soil, flora and wildlife. 

We should pickaxe another fault line here. Squireship implies a hereditary succession of proud yeomen and land-loving squires equally intent on fruitful landscapes, sleek livestock and vigorous offspring. This alternative – like that of Hindu castes – might stabilize skills, talents, political order and consumer demand. However, it would consign many people to inherited duties and to lesser accomplishment. 

A common social alternative is promotion by merit. If administered with grace and imagination, it offers more promise than its caste equivalent. But such systems often go wrong when hyperactive scoundrels promote themselves by abusing their Napoleonic share of skill and hypocrisy. 

As usual, neither solution fits every circumstance; a flexible combination of them would be more promising and more challenging. Future agricultural communities may become collective and hereditary, while built-up municipalities would provide restive talent with free market certifications of merit. Freedom of choice would be secured by allowing voluntary transfers between these communities and many more whose local arrangements will best suit their circumstances. 

We have not mobilized our full public health potential against AIDS and older, resurgent epidemics (transmitted sexually and otherwise). This shocking oversight is just another weapon effort at mass misery and slow-mo’ genocide. As we speak, plague, ebola, tuberculosis, malaria, hepatitis, meningitis, polio and cholera stiffen their grip on humanity. This list of inexcusable pandemics grows yearly, while effective drugs and acceptable preventives dwindle back down to a medieval blank page. 

Once the cities that remain offer better accommodations to their inhabitants, here and there, great heaps of corporate competition, harsh living conditions and high pollution will fester. In these last citadels of Capital, Blade Runner visions of dystopia will hold sway. Everyone accepts this abortive vision as the most likely future for the world. We should aim for better outcomes in all but the worst cases.

We should expect the last of these dystopia enthusiasts to assemble in a few cramped conurbations. The last economic ghettos will relocate toward the Equator where extra-planetary payloads require less energy to lift into orbit. Hyper-urban space gantries of this kind will be set in the Andes, the mountains of equatorial of Africa, Sumatra, Borneo and other elevations dotting the Tropics. 

Otherwise, people will live in orbital habitats, in self-sufficient squireships, in small, garden and university communities and in the giant arcologies described above — or as primal hunter-gatherers in the heart of the World Forest. As the aspirations of this world citizenry evolve, its members may migrate from one of these communities to the next or back again. None of these settings would rule out the rest. On the contrary, each would complement and reinforce the others by offering new markets and sources of luxuries and necessities. The only big problems would be those posed by sustainable surface transport, which local Learners will certainly figure out.

Domed cities and new recycling technologies (Paul Lackman mentioned the Biosphere experiment) may show more effective ways to deal with pollution, incoming ultraviolet and heat exchange problems in each of these settings. Future freight shipping technologies may include super canon, MAGLEV and space elevator payloads, once they stop threatening us as cheap strategic weapons. Our customary transport methods will shrink, replaced by others we cannot yet imagine. See the chapter, Plus LTA, Minus Nukes.

The problem is not the lack of scientific soundness of “soft” technologies like parapsychology and New Age research, no matter how much well-financed “debunking” of zero scientific validity has been brought to bear against them. But as long as weapon managers retain control of them, it would be hard to imagine a greater threat than their potential to summon new, effectively uncontrollable and enormously destructive energies.

Mega-project technocrats want to construct giant orbital solar power collectors/transmitters and moon-based solar power plants. They intend to refine lunar regolith into deuterium, cement and water; and use these materials to build power plants that would beam raw energy back to Earth. That would be fine, provided that orbital and lunar factories soak up all this extra energy. Forget about microwaving power back to the Earth’s surface through the atmosphere. Such techno-hubris (hoobreess, God-aping pride) could invite unimaginable weather disasters. The ozone layer might tear apart, Grand Chaos cyclones might blow up and we might have to endure another Deluge or Ice Age for good measure. It's likely that the Earth's Van Allen belt would weaken, aggravating cosmic radiation bombardments at least until unknown new energy technologies harvest these radiations. Bad news all around.

Energy collected from outer space should be expended on-site to manufacture beautifully finished products from raw materials mined in outer space. These artifacts could be delivered relatively cheaply by free-fall to Earth-surface communities that had become edenic by means of low populations and low energy signatures. Solar energy collected along Earth orbits will power the orbital Birminghams, Coventrys and Glasgows of this new Victorian model — not gigawatt weapon technologies squirming on the land. 

The near and far reaches of the Solar System would represent the outer colonies of this Victorian model. Braving great peril, enterprising pioneers will cast off from the Earth. A few survivors will make it back bearing fantastic treasure. At first, expect these space colonies to be plagued by isolation, dearth, primitivism, terror and exceptional lethality. Very needy humans + very thin police = space piracy and savage black markets, unlimited opportunities for crime and corruption, petty and elite.

All puns aside, we cannot expect to explore space in a vacuum. Colonists will require massive shipments of survival necessities, energy sources and elite human reinforcements, which only a thriving Earth-base could provide. We will have to dream up new peace technologies in order to colonize outer space successfully. 

Before the bidding begins, ambitious contractors must study plans, sample soils, pick up new techniques, price innovative materials, satisfy all kinds of bureaucratic requirements and line up skilled craftspeople as well as a good food truck. Like them, we will have to focus on the Earth itself – the wellbeing of its inhabitants and its ecologies – and fine-tune these titanic details before we can begin to explore the heavens in earnest. 

The robust health and matriarchal solidarity of an elephant herd allow it to raise a delicate calf, despite what appear to be insurmountable difficulties and dangers. The African savannah: what a thorny environment in which to raise a tender cub! We Earthlings will need to cultivate hardy utopias and ecotopias. Only a well-run Learner civilization can nurture space exploration into the latter decades of this century. 

We may explore other planets with specially trained and equipped colonies of insects and extremophiles (like water bears). Their life-support requirements would be minimal. Their curiosity and survival instincts would drive them to explore the terrain of Mars, for example, with inhuman thoroughness, at a fraction of the cost of manned exploration and more thoroughly than clumsy robots. 

Specially tailored multi-species colonies of insects could be dispatched via one or more centralized “nests” with scout patrols equipped with miniature video and sampling equipment. Life support necessities would be issued from these nests; sampling results could be collected, fractionated and transmitted from there back to Earth. Freight payloads, slowly boosted and parked in orbit, could supply these insect colonies. Insect sterilization would delay the biocontamination of new habitats. Or they could operate under pressurized dome tents (perhaps self-propelled) and die out as their oxygen and supplies ran out.

The difference between extraterrestrial contamination and terraforming is largely moot. This problem is critical; future Learners will have to thrash it out in detail. Indeed, we shall have to pay particular attention to the pollution of outer space. 

A ballistic junkyard clutters near-Earth orbits with thousands of thoughtless discards and weapon remnants that threaten astronauts with fatal collision. Every collision between large pieces of this whizzing cloud of junk worsens the problem exponentially by producing sprays of smaller debris. An entrepreneurial genius will no doubt earn a fortune by sweeping up this orbital trash and recycling it as precious raw materials for future use in outer space. Land-based entrepreneurs will sort through landfills with the same intent. As it stands, our best-laid plans involve slowing the trajectory of as much of this horrifically expensive junk as possible, so that it will fall into the atmosphere, burn up and disappear from our radar screens. What a waste!

An attractive but very dangerous alternative would be to park relatively large asteroids in low Earth orbit to act as bullet-proof butts for small debris and gravity sweeps (electro-magnetized?) for larger objects, allowing them to impact, be absorbed and perhaps harvested for re-use in orbit. Whether these objects would be manned, automated or just dumb rocks, very severe technical and safety problems will need to be resolved.

Outer space offers a relatively clean slate. Insofar possible, we should clean it up. 

Earth’s consolidated space program will assemble permanent space stations and factory complexes at every Lagrange point: five orbital coordinates where the Earth's and Moon’s gravities cancel out and satellites require minimal fuel burns to remain stationary relative to the Earth-Moon system. Two of those points are fully stable; the other three require periodic fuel burns.

Remote-controlled, long-endurance orbiters, fuel tankers, surface landing and takeoff craft for transit at both ends of the trip, as well as Earth-return vessels; those vehicles will be parked at leisure, tethered in orbit or mothballed on distant planets for later use. Giant unmanned spaceships will store massive exploratory payloads and elaborate life support systems. They will orbit other celestial bodies or touch down softly to await future crews. Unmanned, modular payloads will swing toward other planets along broad, lazy trajectories. These vehicles will supplement chemical or ionized rocket propellants with gravitational fly-bys and solar wind sailing.

Other projects worth studying include the interplanetary repositioning into optimal orbits of comets and meteors captured and hollowed out to provide exploratory, mining, repair, rescue and trans-shipment bases in solar orbit. There they’d await much swifter, smaller, more specialized human-transit vehicles built like fast armored cars shielded against cosmic rays with brand new shielding technologies, by protective layers of melanin-saturated living cells or simple walls of ice, rock and metal. 

This deliberate project will take decades and generations instead of months and years; it will eliminate the need for a complete life support/exploration/return vehicle package bearing a minimal crew in one costly, pared-to-the-bone and triply redundant spaceship almost as fragile and hazardous as a World (sic) War I biplane. 

Already, NASA plans to make rocket fuel from the oxidized sands of Mars and to generate power, water and ceramics from sun-kilned Moon cheese and lunar ice. According to the Russian newspaper, Izvestia, the U.S. plans to harvest Helium-3 from the Moon where it is plentiful and bring it back to the Earth where it is rare. This turns out to be a less risky fuel for fusion reactors. Shipping it back from the Moon would be cheaper than refining rare traces of it from Earth dirt. http://www.hindu.com/2004/01/26/stories/2004012600601500.htm.

It might be a good idea to limit space exploration to automated recon probes and fully stocked orbital satellites parked for later use, at least until our methods and technologies improve. 

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COMMENT?  markmulligan@comcast.net