Post-Industrial Society = Beyond Idiocy

Reindustrialization is the best way to repair damage to earth. Terraforming deserts, building new ecosystems, MagLev trains, redesigned cities, nuclear and space based power. Not neofeudalist deindustrialization

Early 21st century was supposed to have been one of high speed trains zipping between continents, hypersonic air travel, 3 hour workdays or 2 workday weeks, increasingly colonized space, completely reimagined cities, mechanized infrastructure, and large scale terraforming of the planet to turn deserts into farmland (as well as creating new ecosystems where they weren't previously by building new desalination water infrastructure). All of this would be supported by first the increasingly more advanced fission reactors and then fusion reactors complimented by a large network of satellites beaming energy down to earth.

So what happened? Why do people actually believe the corporate media (when they stopped believing it in many other areas) in that the only way forward is for educated people to shovel mule manure, compost food, live in sustainable shacks with solar panels on them, ride in bicycles made from recycled garbage, and to devolve back to 19th century living while actually advocating that poorest people of the earth never even experience the 20th? Was it THAT easy for rich people to fill the meaningless nihilistic existence of educated westerners by replacing Jesus Christ with mother earth (environment) as their object of dedication?

Middle classes always pick up on cues from the ruling oligarchy on what to think, how to behave, and what obsessions to have. There is little regard to the fact of some of these cues often being propaganda of control. Eventually the propaganda trickles down to the poorest sectors of society through community role model emulation.

This appears to be the case with the concepts of "conservation", "post-growth economy", and "post-industrial world" (where most of 7 billion homo sapiens are all magically white collar innovator businessmen [!] living on a decentralized renewable power grid). The world's people are now supposed to make all necessary personal sacrifices and live in balance with nature as a punishment for their rulers having wiped out and poisoned large swaths of the biosphere.

It is now western oligarchy's barely concealed desire for the proletariat (anybody living paycheck to paycheck rather than from capital gains, roughly 99% of planetary population) to devolve to use of slower transport and more provincial community living. They would love nothing more than for people to return to horse and carriage (or its bicycle equivalent) and to spend a large chunk of the day and their caloric energy "conserving", recycling/reusing trash, making their own organic food, self-flagellation for sins against the planet, and creating pottery/trinkets to sell to each other. The rich themselves would of course live on large gated estates spread around the world, fly on advanced personal vehicles, have increasingly stronger healthier bodies through genetic engineering/cybernetics, etc. Globalization would homogenize the world's poor into an interchangeable mass just as it does the same with their neofeudal lords.

This is not an exaggeration. Post-growth and post-industrial means exactly that when rich man's stooges like Gordon Brown mention it: arrested development of heavy industry (such as creation of new comfortable futuristic cities and supporting large scale infrastructure). Most of the human herd is to enter an "equilibrium" and see an end to major annual increases in quality of life. The world is to enter a period of gradually declining population with younger poor people worshiping and sacrificing for mother earth while living in "harmony" with it. They would all do demeaning service sector jobs like being each others bartender, taking care of the elderly that outvote them, and grooming the large playground (planet earth) for the enjoyment of the concealed oligarchy.

Such a scheme is so absurd that it will probably collapse before being internalized as a value by most educated westerners and their children. The reason for that is that all the key problems of the world require exponential increase in heavy industry to be solved. Western world can  most definitely outsource all its industry abroad but the planet itself can never be post-industrial in that by definition that would mean large famines and vengeful outbursts of violence. Only more industry can create the energy necessary to feed all, provide comfortable housing for all, and to otherwise fulfill United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The collapse of the Copenhagen conference on stifling industrial growth in the poorest region of the world showed complete rejection of Western neofeudalism by Asia, South America, and Africa. These people want to live and they want to live well. Chinese and Russian leaderships completely understand the malice of post-industrial concepts since their own societies only got off their knees through rapid expansion of heavy industry, high tech, assembly plants, and construction of powerful new power sources. Since Beijing and Moscow understand how real economy works, they will increasingly take global leadership from the weakening, hypocritical, moralizing, incompetent and malicious hands of Westerners (whose only solutions to Africans for instance seem to be more environmentally friendly and sustainable slums). Chinese have done more for Africa in recent years than all the western money poured into the black holes of corrupt officials ever did. That is, they built new infrastructure in exchange for commodities rather than distributing drugs and food.

We obviously need to stop (and then reverse) mass ecological destruction and to decrease the use of carbon based fuels. The solution is not to succumb to luddite anti-human and anti-progress drivel by brainwashed millionaires with finance or law degrees. The only solution is terraforming the lifeless regions of the globe through dramatic increases in nuclear power production and corresponding high tech heavy industry:

1) Utilization of the newly available power (solar and geothermal have their places to complement the atomics) for expansion of the biosphere (alongside conservation) through bringing water to hundreds of thousands of square miles of all the world's desert. We can make endless lifeforms live where they weren't able to before. There are ways of introducing certain fungi breeds which create soil which in turn allows new ecosystems to be created. For the price of one month of occupation in Afghanistan or Iraq, brand new forests can be created where they haven't been able to live before. Working via collaborative central planning with Chinese, Russians, and Indians, Westerners can systematically eliminate deserts, restore and enrich topsoils, desalinate water for entire regions, and allow small and medium sized animals to thrive in the new territories.

2) Systematic destruction and recycling of abandoned urban sprawls and suburban areas to create building materials for more compact medium sized cities of the future (these new cities would most likely utilize modular design for rapid replacement of their neighborhoods every certain number of years). Hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of earth for ecosystems can be opened up this way. Former highways and roads can be hiking trails once they are ripped out.

3) Implementation of mass high speed MagLev train lines between the new cities to make cars, buses, and airplanes seem like a wasteful way to travel.

4) Opening up lunar colonization for helium 3 mining to feed earth based fusion reactors.

Humanity currently has the technologies already available to make all of these things happen. If any of this sounds too fantastical then the oligarchy has already won. Some terraforming has been possible and done as early as 1930s. In his amazing inauguration speech, FDR mentioned that without a vision, the people perish. Devolving back to a simpler 19th century life on an organic plantation run by
"eco friendly" corporations is not a vision. It is surrender and invitation for control and mass global suffering at the hands of the same people who damaged the ecosystem to begin with. Only grand new 21st century assembly lines churning out powerful new machines can help restore what the older industrial methods have helped to destroy. We can't repair the damage with a plow in hand and a wind farm here and there. Seven billion people are asking for more.

Future of American Space Exploration

Macro level technological improvement as a whole has stagnated, not just NASA. America's decline from the peak of industrial capitalism in 1970s only partially explains current state of the space program. 



The 40th anniversary of the moon landing brings to attention the general macro level technological stagnation that occurred in the West since the 1970s. Lack of further human expansion in deep space corresponds neatly to the lack of new mega projects in United States as well as other economically powerful nations. American government didn't just give up on building lunar bases and ISS type docking platforms in the 70s and 80s when technology more than allowed for it. It also gave up on attempts at provision of mass affordable housing (through utilization of best conceptual design research and recommendations), further exploration of increasingly cheap and speedy transcontinental travel, new mega canal/highway/rail/tunnel/bridge systems as well as concentrated effort to make use of the earth's oceans for national and global betterment. The national GDP since the 1950s ( when United States emulated the autobahn with the Interstate highway Act of 1956) has risen exponentially whereas the will to engage in grand projects increasingly stagnated.

Media outlets like to say that continued space expansion became too expensive and superfluous since Soviet Union's abandonment of its lunar program. How would they explain abandonment of major efforts to make supersonic travel safe and widely used or to link up NATO space with high speed rail networks? Of course there are ready explanations from structural economic perspectives. Soviets passed their industrial economic peak in the 60s while the American civilizational peak (with similar subsequent decline) was in the early 1970s. That explanation would also explain the physical inability to construct impressively at home towards the end of the 20th century. Medium Western powers such as England, Germany, and France all saw stagnation in the 1970s after the heady days of postwar consumer driven booms.

This tangible explanation does not explain the loss of creative will among world's governments. The ancient desire towards national greatness (that China so readily demonstrates these days) has left the West along with ambitions of lunar settlements. Western oligarchs and adventurous playboys did not adequately follow their nationalist predecessors in quests for glory. It was enough for them to do money speculation in a personal playground that is the globalizing world.

Sure, they emulated the previous tycoons in terms of support of militarism and financially parasitic existence (from 1870s to 1950s) but not as much in terms of daring stunts. The decades since the 1970s did not really see the equivalents of Howard Hughes ( basis for Scorsese's The Aviator), Thomas Edison, or Andrew Carnegie. Only militarism and mass financial manipulation on a global scale remained after some cosmetic modification.

We didn't see Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, or George Soros trying to develop affordable flying transport, trying to get support to turn world's deserts into new farmland, or similar efforts towards awe inspiring historical milestones. Such construction was delegated to the needs of corporate shareholders and governments under ceaseless ideologically free market pressure. The trend continued even after the maximum income tax on the rich went from 70-80% in the 1950s-1960s to 35% today. American government had less resources to spend by not taxing the rich sufficiently and the rich themselves became less willing to engage in tangible glory seeking construction and development.

To be fair, United States has a lot of restrictions on private development and exploration of space. The government was also not proactive in encouraging private competitions towards technological milestones through awarding prizes. Only half a century after first manned flights did we start hearing about things like the Ansari X Prize (and even then from private pockets) to stimulate development of cheap private vehicles capable of reaching the orbit. The tax payer funded awards mostly went towards less inspiring new weapon systems. The sheer material benefits that space exploration spin off technology gives to humanity are undeniable. Thus, lack of sufficiently concentrated state effort to develop new ways for humans to get around and live (or actively encourage private development) is an irresponsible betrayal of national interest.

It will take major competition from non-western nations and public national humiliations to get political elites to exert themselves again. The days of economic tycoons are not over and as long as capitalism remains there will be cowboy trailblazers in various parts of the world. We've seen the recent rapid construction of artificial resort islands in Dubai, the scores of skyscrapers in Asia that overshadow the Sears Towers, and some Russian oligarchs actively thinking of space tourism to compliment their industrial empires. Besides billing American astronauts over 50 million dollars per ticket to space when the shuttle is retired, the Russian Space Agency is actively thinking of salvaging its parts of the International Space Station to make a new space platform as well as actively collaborating with Europe and China. The technologically advanced South Korea has recently completed their first spaceport. Beijing for it's part, besides having the national excitement and pride in its space program, also has followed George Bush in terms of stating desire to mine the lunar surface for valuable Helium 3 (which is much more plentiful on the moon than earth). Perhaps a profit motive (or an illusion of one) is just what is needed. The looming prospect of not having access to space for years without Russian support doesn't seem to be nudging United States any.

Things are coming together in such a way that a new leap into space is imminent even amidst a severe international crisis in market capitalism. The tangible material benefits are endless. For example there is potential for hundreds of megabytes per second satellite based broadband, new building materials and transportation methods, and popular psychological uplift that humanity is moving ahead instead of stagnating. Western societies need competitive shock treatment and severe humiliations first in order for movement in the right direction to start happening. Then maybe we can start also seeing actual mass improvements on the ground as well as in space. All it takes is to tax the top earners as they were after World War 1 and WW 2, transfer material funds from the military to NASA, and prod the public into contributing meaningfully with substantial incentives.