Capitalism in outer space y'know. Fer sher!
Our current Secretary of Commerce, Wilbur Ross, wrote an editorial for the NY Times: "That Moon Colony Will Be a Reality Sooner Than You Think," available here if you can't get at the NYT site. The Ross editorial is dated 5/24/2018, so this is recent stuff.
I'm always amused by the idea of capitalism in space. My guess is that in this era it's a sequel to the Muppets' bit titled "Pigs in Space," since the current US President does have more than a passing resemblance to Link Hogthrob. At any rate, since no diary at C99% is perfect without a video, here goes:
To get back to the topic, our esteemed Secretary of Commerce presents the whole capitalists-in-space sales pitch in his NYT editorial:
The future for American commercial space activity is bright. Space entrepreneurs are already planning travel to Mars, and they are looking to the moon as the perfect location for a way station to refuel and restock Mars-bound rockets. As much as this sounds like the plot of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” it is coming closer to reality sooner than you may have ever thought possible.
A privately funded American space industry is the reason.
Yep! Capitalism on Mars! There you have it, folks! Of course, this is a dream of Elon Musk and of Jeff Bezos, and so it's no wonder our privately-owned White House has picked up on this stuff.
There are of course a few problems with the capitalists-in-space dream. Here are my predictions for how it will all turn out:
1) the long journey to Mars will probably screw up the astronauts both mentally and physically past the point of no return.
2) people aren't meant to live in Mars' three-eights Earth gravity and will need elaborate prosthetics to survive for any significant period of time (and the current operating assumption is that Mars colonists aren't coming back to Earth).
3) the perchlorates in Martian soil will make Martian agriculture impossible and will poison any interaction with it (the Martian soil, that is). The perchlorates will not go away if we melt the Martian icecaps, and they will be a lot harder to remove than perchlorates on Earth. As for terraforming Mars, the atmosphere will not thicken sufficiently to be breathable even if said icecaps could be melted and gases below the surface could be released and if it could all somehow be converted to oxygen.
4) everyone in these projects will eventually die of radiation poisoning.
There are, in short, a number of ways in which it could all go south really quickly, and since our nice bubbleheaded capitalists don't seem to have much of an eye for how they're managing Earth and have to be corrected now and then by local socialists, and since they, and not local socialists with an eye toward the intrinsic value of human life, appear to be in charge of the whole project, it won't be surprising if the disasters I've predicted actually come to pass.
Here's a fun snippet from Michio Kaku's gee-whiz "#1 best seller" book The Future of Humanity that ought to amuse:
Scientists at the University of California, Irvine exposed mice to large doses of radiation equivalent to the amount that would be absorbed during a two-year ride through deep space. They found evidence of irreversible brain damage. The mice showed behavioral problems and became agitated and dysfunctional. At the very least, these results confirm that astronauts must be adequately shielded in deep space. (69-70)
And good luck shielding them from solar radiation when they get to Mars, which has an atmosphere about 0.61% as thick as Earth's atmosphere.
The whole of a genre of literature known as "space opera," through Star Trek and Star Wars and going far beyond them, is based on the proposition that space will be just like Earth, and so the writers can take Earth dramas and move them creatively into outer-space settings. This is of course wrong. The first thing they're going to try to put into space is the capitalist system, prized possession of the global neoliberal leadership. And the problem with capitalism in space of course is that whereas outer space is dangerous and expensive, capitalism pushes the dangers onto nature and onto the working class while trying to make everything as cheaply as possible. This phenomenon is what environmental historian Jason W. Moore calls "cheap nature," nature as seen from the eyes of capitalists. The capitalist "cheap nature" mentality is perhaps part of why so many previous missions to Mars have gotten lost. Let's explore space cheaply, so that the likes of Bezos and Musk can make a profit! Or maybe not.
Of course there will still be rich folks willing to pay a lot for short joyrides into orbit. But what appears to be going on with this stuff is more like this: the super-rich people who dream of this stuff have been informed, whether they believe it or not, that capitalism has really screwed up the planet, and so they are looking for other planets for people to live on. What else could they do with their American frontier mentality? The only one in the Solar System with a remote possibility of being viable, however, is Mars, and even then the current sales pitch vastly underestimates what needs to be done for Mars colonization to be possible.
We have to imagine, in conclusion, that the Trump-era space-capitalist imaginary counts as a hindrance to actual space exploration, and not as an opportunity.
Comments
Space travel will require huge amounts of outlay...
and we cannot fund it properly by a few guys telling us they can totally do it... provided we pony up first.
As long as the MIC eats all of our best and brightest, peaceful advances necessary for space travel will not be even looked into. (Space travel has been incredibly innovative for products on earth. Of course, they're "Evolutionary" and not "Revolutionary" advances, and as a result, people don't notice them.)
I support space travel, but NOT in the "Toss people on rafts and hope they can cross the ocean with zero experience". While it would be a great way to get the hard earned experience, how bout we try paddling around our neighborhood first. Almost all the same challenges exist on the moon, and that has the bonus of being made of mostly the same stuff as the earth.
I do not pretend I know what I do not know.
It's too hard
to fix the societal and ecological problems we have on earth so let's go screw something else up.
I'd prefer the human race to perish here before it befouls someplace else up.
Regardless of the path in life I chose, I realize it's always forward, never straight.
It would be amusing --
if anyone trusted the Trump administration's attempts to funnel money into outer space while said same Trump administration was busy downsizing the EPA. If the government won't protect you from environmental hazards here on Earth, what's it going to do for you in the much more dangerous regions of outer space?
The ruling classes need an extra party to make the rest of us feel as if we participate in democracy. That's what the Democrats are for. They make the US more durable than the Soviet Union was.
At least Mars doesn't seem likely
to have any life capable of suffering to screw up and kill off on it... just the human Poors they want to bring in first to set things up - and see what happens to some Disposables in an area completely outside the law and away from any oversight.
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.
Right --
Mars is significantly inhospitable to human life, probably inhospitable to life in general, and definitely inhospitable to capitalism.
The ruling classes need an extra party to make the rest of us feel as if we participate in democracy. That's what the Democrats are for. They make the US more durable than the Soviet Union was.
Lol, therefore eminently suitable for Earth life
to pack the worst of the capitalists off there by themselves. Without taking any vulnerable Poors with them.
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.
What did Mars ever do to you?
What did Mars ever do to you?
"US govt/military = bad. Russian govt/military = bad. Any politician wanting power = bad. Anyone wielding power = bad." --Shahryar
"All power corrupts absolutely!" -- thanatokephaloides
We have concocted so many stories of Martian invaders,
but I turns out that we are the invaders. Projection much?
"The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?" ~Orwell, "1984"
invaders
-- parody of H.G. Wells
"US govt/military = bad. Russian govt/military = bad. Any politician wanting power = bad. Anyone wielding power = bad." --Shahryar
"All power corrupts absolutely!" -- thanatokephaloides
Nice!
"The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?" ~Orwell, "1984"
Lol, nothing
but at least there's no pre-existing life there to be 'done to' by TPTB, et al.
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.
Earlier re-inhabitants were radiated.
The 100: A Netflix Original
A century after Earth was devastated by a nuclear apocalypse, 100 space station residents are sent to the planet to determine whether it's habitable.
https://www.netflix.com/title/70283264
"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon
irradiated mice
And they started spouting right-wing talking points like the export of capitalism into space.....
"US govt/military = bad. Russian govt/military = bad. Any politician wanting power = bad. Anyone wielding power = bad." --Shahryar
"All power corrupts absolutely!" -- thanatokephaloides
Hopefully people will come around to this diary.
It's got some fun stuff in it! And the comments section too!
The ruling classes need an extra party to make the rest of us feel as if we participate in democracy. That's what the Democrats are for. They make the US more durable than the Soviet Union was.
The capitalist's attempts to push their system
...into the complex interdependent environments that we live in is almost comically flawed. They fail in the exact way every time and are utterly confused by it. "Who could have foreseen....?" they ask. We can. Their systems always end in — and are reborn out of — predator-caused extinction. Their mind-map of reality relies on key environmental constants that run counter to the laws of nature (ie., constant growth and net expansion).
Capitalism seems to owe its greatest successes to cronyism, political collusion, top-down rigging of established systems, and the opportunistic privatization of natural resources and public investment projects. They dismiss long-term planning and the accountability that comes with it and insist that planning and commitment to past values interfere with their responsiveness in today's so-called free market. In keeping with this, the political arm of capitalism has declared that nations who make long-term economic plans (or who nationalize their natural resources or public utilities) are in fact totalitarian dictatorships that try to block capitalists from "creating jobs" and rewarding shareholders. For our entire lives, we've seen these accused nations become economically crippled by deadly US sanctions. The entire world watched as these designated nations were invaded, destroyed, and depopulated, and their assets were again privatized and given to favored Western corporations for exploit. Venezuela, Iran, North Korea, and many others know that this may be their future.
The philosophical capitalist believes that when industries or financial systems are regulated by the state, it takes too long to deconstruct them and extract their wealth and assets. It never occurs to them that we may not share their ultimate goals, perhaps because we do not share in the spoils. They push a preposterous ideology that claims that an industry or business sector without state-imposed regulations will beget even better "self-regulation" by going through the "natural" economic cycles of disaster and correction. The staggering suffering and inhumanity inherent in this process are completely over-looked because capitalist-thinking seems to be governed by short-term situational ethics. Their analysis has been unencumbered by concepts of economic morality or by an evolution of social conscientiousness taking place among the People.
Capitalism exhibits no purpose greater than itself, for its own sake. The most galling calculation on the balance sheet of the capitalist endeavor is a void in the cost paid by the civilization they occupy and cannibalize. There is another void in the amount owed to the millions of shoulders they stand on in an established civilization as they reach for the stars. There's no giving back or paying it forward with them. The money that remains at the end of a year — after a commercial entity has deducted all costs of doing business and every possible expense, including the lavish sums they pay to themselves — is the surplus profit they generated in a year's time. The nation that provides these commercial entities with their marketplace and their global protections and courts of law, will in turn tax these surplus profits at now historically low rates, which capitalists see as an assault to be resisted. By my reckoning, they are a drag on the advancement of civilization and the human experience.
The devil is in their books and the immoral bookkeeping that records the one-sided extraction and depletion and emptying of a nation's resources and the strains on the infrastructure. They do not give back sufficiently to fill the potholes they made, nor do they add sustainability for future generations of that civilization. They destroy what they touch with their gluttony for hoarding all the profits they can grab today. They leave behind their empty wells and strip mines and polluted waters while their financial cohorts trigger sudden economic destabilizations along the way. They are unprepared for these sudden economic shifts that result in financial downturns for the public because they cannot see them coming. The capitalists are blinded by the bright phosphoresce of their own frenzied greed.
It is no wonder that capitalism is completely incompatible with democracy.
Capitalists strongly believe in the philosophy of...
Give a Man a Fish, and you cut into your profits.
Teach a Man to fish, and you cut into your profits even more.
Unless of course...
You can put him into debt for fishing lessons,
then charge him rent on the fishing pole,
Licensing costs,
Dock fees,
A fee for the spot where he pitches his tent...
Yeah, it's pretty much this guy...
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWzBtuGsXGc]
I do not pretend I know what I do not know.
That does explain a lot...
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.
metastasis
Is there a doctor in the house?
where have you gone, Ben Casey?
Considering that 'bots
must go first, to build infrastructure and life support for humans, It's going to be until the end of this century, at least, before Musk et al think about making a space buck on anything besides tourism. We're a long damn ways from Star Trek. Hell, we haven't even made it (back) to the moon yet. And if there's no WiFi on Mars what's the point?
the little things you can do are more valuable than the giant things you can't! - @thanatokephaloides. On Twitter @wink1radio. (-2.1) All about building progressive media.
No wifi, no lattes...
what precisely is it that Mars has to offer, again?
The ruling classes need an extra party to make the rest of us feel as if we participate in democracy. That's what the Democrats are for. They make the US more durable than the Soviet Union was.
False hope, IMO.
"The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?" ~Orwell, "1984"
Ah, but a lucrative false hope.
Billionaires seeking eternal existence in some form or another wish to pour money into this - for private ownership of space.
But at the rate these loons are messing up the planetary life-support system, they need to think that there will be somewhere for Those Who Matter to go, in the rapidly approaching disappearance of our future.
I can't access this following article, (URL provided below for any who can) and trying to copy the title makes it vanish, but the initially visible blurb mentions that as early as 1965, wackos with White House access were trying to say that global warming could be addressed by their covering the ocean in reflective metal particles (at public cost) - which wouldn't work.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/geoengineering-how-to-cool-ea...
And, while rarely admitted by only some officials, here and there, and often denied, it has been ongoing for a very long time.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/mar/24/us-scientists-launch...
Right, and (apart from destroying the ozone layer and affecting/ultimately destroying the possibility of plant and animal health by reducing sunlight while making sunlight required for life into a hazard) the increase in weather disruptions by doing things (there are others involved, as well,) known to cause weather disruptions has nothing to do with these weather disruptions. TPTB certainly aren't going to inform us of which of the factors being introduced may be responsible as contributing/causal factors or even of the true rate of resultant health and other damage, although we are still free to guess - at least for now.
Recent examples:
https://www.rt.com/usa/427978-maryland-flash-flood-emergency/
https://www.rt.com/uk/427957-lightning-strike-uk-photos/
https://www.rt.com/usa/424225-snow-midwest-3-dead/
https://www.rt.com/usa/420801-us-storm-northeast-weather/
But because business interests must maximize profits, which involves also maximizing 'cost-effective' pollution, what remains of natural processes and a once self-maintaining global life support system consisting of life has to go:
for business interests to be paid by the poisoned public (we know that Trump's already given out some geoengineering funding, because we hear about what he does) for spraying even more toxic pollutants to shower gradually down all over the Earth from the sky;
in order to block sunlight and disrupt other natural processes absolutely and utterly required for planetary health and life;
while disaster captalists 'privatize' (water systems, even to area rainfall; Monsanto, et al, patenting as well as distorting life; bankster-scammed-away housing bought to stand empty, etc.) whatever they think might survive for a while, so as to profit off any of the dying billions of people able to scrape up any money for a little longer, such money only to be obtained from business interests - who refuse to pay a living wage to them - and who somehow get to run the planet straight into a hell-scape.
All this for more soon-to-be-worthless money than they could ever spend before the people and world they've drained this from perish.
Unless, of course, they invest in the creation of an escape off-planet for themselves, and for which much money will be required. So they loot more heavily of what little remains, in every way possible, creating more and faster destruction on Earth in the belief they'll be able to escape the consequences of their own actions by going off-planet, to do it to themselves again, wherever they might escape to, no doubt.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-30197085
And these are to be the only choices? Both selected by destructive and lunatic self-interests, which then get to continue 'business as usual' either way, while the world painfully perishes of their profiteering? They're already 'lost in space'.
When 'business as usual' destroys the only ground beneath all of our feet, as well as poisoning the air, food, water, global life-support system, we'd better get those business interests the hell out of ours. There is no time left to waste.
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.
The biggest expanse of ‘space’thst needs
exploring right now is the one between old Wilbur’s ears.
We don’t even understand space and it’s conditions and forces yet.
Sure, we can send someone up there. But that’s not going to do much good when you don’t even understand your surroundings.
Wilbur thinks The Jetsons are for real.
I'm tired of this back-slapping "Isn't humanity neat?" bullshit. We're a virus with shoes, okay? That's all we are. - Bill Hicks
Politics is the entertainment branch of industry. - Frank Zappa
Ever heard of "emergent gravity"
I agree that we do not understand gravity, especially the so-called "dark matter". To me, dark matter has the kind of impossible properties that were attributed to the "aether" 150 years ago.
With that attitude, I was open to alternative theories; and I found one. Given your response, I thought you might find the following material interesting.
There is a maverick physicist, named Eric Verlinde, who has a very interesting theory. Namely that gravity is not a fundamental
particleforce, but rather an emergent property of matter and dark energy interacting. (He still thinks there is dark energy.) He describes gravity and quantum physics and being related in the same manner as thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. That is, gravity is the macroscopic observable of microscopic statistical events.Surprisingly, the physics of all this is accessible to the scientifically literate lay person. Once you have bought into the "holographic principle" stuff from black hole theory, the derivation of emergent gravity is little more than algebra.
Interestingly, this theory explains the behavior of rotating galaxies with ZERO free parameters, whereas the dark matter theories all have some free parameters to twiddle. Also, the theory includes the Hubble constant (related to the "galactic horizon", which has been invoked by the "EM drive" people).
Anyway, if you are a science groupie, emergent gravity is very interesting. Here are some starting points for searching:
There is a writeup at Wired magazine: The man who is trying to kill dark matter
Verlinde's latest paper is: Emergent gravity and the dark universe
There are several hour-long lectures of his on YouTube.
Thank you. I love science articles. I was in high school in the
60s. Science today is nothing like it was back then.
I’m a science illiterate. But I’m trying to learn.
I'm tired of this back-slapping "Isn't humanity neat?" bullshit. We're a virus with shoes, okay? That's all we are. - Bill Hicks
Politics is the entertainment branch of industry. - Frank Zappa
Speaking as One Who Knows Nothing,
matter in many cases apparently has different properties at the nano-level, as in nano-particles of inert substances no longer being so.
They say that the first step toward wisdom involves realizing how little you actually know.
Surely a corollary must be that the health and existence of planetary life must not be experimented with as a whole on a free-form basis of environmental releases 'to see what happens'/for profit, as with GMO viruses and other novel organisms and the pumping-out of vast quantities of nanoparticles in commercially-sold products and oceanic/atmospheric experimentation.
Edit for the traditional letter-typo.
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.
Aurora
Is an interesting novel by Kim Stanley Robinson on both the ethics and feasibility of interstellar colonization. He concludes that both are highly questionable.
As for the purpose of Martian settlement, KSR actually saw it as a way to break out of end stage capitalism. Romantic I suppose, but worth considering. Maybe the despoilers are not the only ones looking for a fresh start.
I’ve also seen arguments that the best place to colonize might actually be the clouds of Venus. Earth normal gravity and pressure.
But why would we do such things? Partly because as a species we need challenges like this, and partly because it gives us a place to create societies that are not prisoners to history. But breaking those chains is difficult without self sufficiency- which is really hard in space.
Cass, you speak of utopian thinking being something we need in the present moment. And while I agree that space provides yet another way to extend structures of economic slavery beyond our planet, it also may provide a way to create such utopias quarantined from the past by the vast distances involved. Maybe that is only a pipe dream, but if we don’t have those dreams now, we may not be able to take advantage of the opportunities should they arise.
We can’t save the world by playing by the rules, because the rules have to be changed.
- Greta Thunberg
Thank you for the engaged and cogent reply.
I have no beef with those who want to colonize Mars. But I do think that the current Bezos-and-Musk-led notion of colonizing Mars is the worst kind of utopian dream, composed of a little recycled space-race hubris, a touch of space opera, and about 80% capitalist ego-trip. Maybe Wilbur Ross's editorial was timed to coincide with the release of the latest Star Wars movie.
As for Venus, Robinson has a plan for terraforming Venus outlined in his novel "2312." It involves enclosing the whole planet in an aluminum bubble so no sunlight can get in, waiting until the atmosphere freezes, and then sending in automated bulldozers to bury the frozen carbon dioxide underground. I can't imagine any currently-existing government taking on such a project.
I'm definitely an advocate of utopian dreaming, though I'm also an advocate of utopian critique. So for instance the Heinrich Himmler Nazi utopian dream, in which the Ukrainians were to be wiped out so that the Ukraine could become Germany's new homeland, merited critique rather than further dreaming. One remembers that Cristobal Colon came to the Americas looking for Eden in 1492, while the primary material result of the Conquistadores and their multiple search for Eden after him was the importation of smallpox into the New World and the wiping out of civilizations we still don't know enough about.
The sort of utopian dreaming we need today is dreaming of a utopia of sustainability, of a society in which ecology would matter. The closest ecology itself has gotten to this sort of utopian dreaming is the agroecological dream of sustainable agriculture. So let's think on this -- if we can't think carefully today about how an ecological society would come from the current unecological one, how are we going to create an ecological society on Mars?
The ruling classes need an extra party to make the rest of us feel as if we participate in democracy. That's what the Democrats are for. They make the US more durable than the Soviet Union was.
Space economics
is something these clowns haven't really thought through. Imagine you can set up an asteroid mining operation that extracts industrially useful and/or socially fetishised metals in quantity and ships them down. Sure you could probably extract more gold than has been mined in all of human history but you would also crash your market. But I guess you can make it up in volume...
The only way that space industry works is as a post-scarcity economy. And scarcity is one of the drivers of capitalism (monopolies are the ultimate scarcity - and the investors wet dream). But scarcity is the opposite of sustainable. So capitalism has to go before we can go to the stars.
Back here on earth, sustainability is much harder with our current population. The curve is bending now, but greed keeps us from deploying life-enhancing technologies for the basics of food, clothing, shelter and medical care. I work in tech and most of the other stuff we do is pretty useless - if not simply evil (FWIW I work in data analysis, which is a tool that can at least be used for many things). The biggest thing we need is energy (not so much for us rich westerners, but for places like hospitals in India that lose more babies to power cuts than anything else). Instead we get Facebook and other "siren servers". Yay for free markets.
So we need dreams (and not just those of "the proud" as Pink Floyd put it) but we also need to figure out how we get there. I'm an aging techie who is congenitally fascinated by those hows but I wish more of my collegues would look up from their screens and really see what is going on in the world - and where we are headed. The younger generation seems to have more of a clue about the depths of our problems, which gives me some hope.
We can’t save the world by playing by the rules, because the rules have to be changed.
- Greta Thunberg
Indeed --
though --
The flip side of population is that more people means more minds which can be productively focused on problems of sustainability. (Yes of course in the real world nobody thinks of sustainability, which is why population is so often regarded as dead weight.) Or, if you want to think of it in agroecological terms, more people means more people-poop which can be composted to produce more food to feed more people. And --
Yes of course.
The ruling classes need an extra party to make the rest of us feel as if we participate in democracy. That's what the Democrats are for. They make the US more durable than the Soviet Union was.
OT... FINALLY saw the cartoon...
where your avatar comes from.
Good show, and the fact it pisses off conservatives just makes me like it more.
I do not pretend I know what I do not know.
SvtFoE ROCKS!
And it keeps getting better with each episode!
The ruling classes need an extra party to make the rest of us feel as if we participate in democracy. That's what the Democrats are for. They make the US more durable than the Soviet Union was.
Definitely, utterly and completely!
Need sane people in government for that, though!
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.
What was the purpose of colonizing Europe, Australia,....
Mankind originated in Africa and was optimized by evolution to live there. Why did they move?
It's what humans do. Why do people go on vacations? They could stay home and read and watch videos of foreign places instead?
I've seen lots of changes. What doesn't change is people. Same old hairless apes.
Need contraception and some common sense.
And those of us accepting medical advances and able to access them need to accept that we should have no more than two children per couple, with those not wishing to have children being 'permitted' to avoid doing to, to get the already excessive global population down via a gradual and natural attrition.
While much exploration may have been fostered by not only curiosity and an urge for adventure but the hope of gaining riches and honors, much of historical migration was in the hope for a better life, to escape perhaps even intolerable conditions and in some cases, was forced migration. And large families creating an expanding population among limited resources often played a great role in the need for such migration.
If people are happy where they are, they may enjoy travel but generally feel that there's no place like home.
And if we're supposed to have intelligence as a species, it would behoove us to at least demonstrate having enough brains to save our skins by not out-breeding the ability of the life-support system to sustain itself and us.
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.
Wall-E comes to life
Except in that movie the humans were just being fattened up by TPTB to be compliant. In a Bezos on Mars version, humans would be treated to the Amazon warehouse mentality but without the ambulances waiting outside.
I'd sooner trust my life with a ravenous animal than I would with the likes of Bezos (which my spell check wants to change to bozo).
There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. ~ Minnie Aumonier
Spellcheck haz intelligence!
First example I've heard of it demonstrating this, lol.
Couldn't agree more; many murder mysteries/horror novels have been essentially based on a person/group being isolated with some psychopathic person, entity or group.
When you're talking about an isolated, privately owned space colony where the psychopathic corporation/billionaire owner makes whatever law exists because no Earth law applies up there; anyone regarded as a nuisance or dead weight is likely to be simply... vacuumed away. And even if the news got out somehow, what could anyone do about it?
Edited because I can't type, lol; missed several letters and a couple of freaking words during a sentence reconstruction.
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.