The One Percent's solution : the ultimate 'gated community' is the billionaires' spaceship

Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins' best-selling series entitled LEFT BEHIND is a fascinating read.

It details how a secretive group of  avowedly secular-minded billionaires from the Silicon Valley 'pretend' to fund a project to mine asteroids.

Actually it is all to help terraform Mars into Earth 2.0 when our planet, the original Earth 1.0 , finally flatlines.

In fact the project is secretly designed to "Rapture" the saving remnant, (the Chosen Ones) of the Protestant Race to the new Earth, in a silver seed spaceship that becomes, defacto, the ultimate "gated community".

This is because the price for travelling to Mars (sorry Earth 2.0Earth 1.0%) and successfully pioneering there will run into tens of millions of dollars per person.

It is true that no where in the Protestants' Bible (or in the Christian/Jewish or Moslem Bible for that matter) does God instruct Man to abandon Earth and go off and evangelize slash rape the rest of the Universe.

But what Fundamentalist actually knows their Bible, anyway?

All that Word of God stuff  just gets in the way of the ministerial hubris.

Forget the Bible (the new right protestants already have). Feel the width : think of the electoral impact !

All white, all rich, all Protestant : there won't be any need for any more pesky elections on the new Earth 1.0%, not when everyone there already votes Republican.

A cold and hostile chunk of dead hard rock that was originally named the "RED" planet, after all ; you can just tell that this is the true galactic home of the Greedy_Old_Party.......

the Wild West of the climate wars: miners versus farmers

Think back to all those western movies of our youth : and envision today's climate deniers as the mining barons back then with today's climate renewers as the farmer settlers.

Farmers husband their soil , 'renewing' it and they expect to have at least a dozen generations of family occupying the family farm.

In a word, they settle - they commit to something and stick with it, fight hard to keep it alive forever.

Today's farm is Earth 1.0 : for the renewers, it is Life's only known foxhole in a hostile universe, and only "if you know a better 'ole , should you go to it" is their attitude to talk of Mars colonies if the Earth bellyflops.

Renewable energy will let them farm this piece of ground forever : hence 'renewers' .

By contrast, the deniers have staked their future on non-renewable energy. And at first blush, that sounds impossible : perpetual (future) supplies of something that is non-renewable and hence by definition  destined to run out ?

But not to the prospecting mind: they deny all thought of any resource really running out.

They do the running out and running away.

To a denier,  a nonrenewable only runs out in England - and then in Boston - then Kansas - then California and then China ,then Kuwait and then Nigeria and then ??????

Then Mars and then Venus and then Jupiter and then the Stars and the next Galaxy : ever onward.

Eternally cutting and running ; externally raping and running away but without ever running out of non-renewable/ non-recyclable minerals and fuels.

The opposite of commitment to a home, a farm, a family.

Eternal male teenagers,in other words, always fancy free and foot loose.

Once the Earth is mined out for its hydrocarbons, "who cares about CO2 in the air - that's no different than waste tailings in rivers and streams , now is it ?"

Denier-watchers are wasting jaw muscles thinking that once these denier fellers realize the earth is in real danger, they will cut back use of hydrocarbons.

Nonsense, they'll use them up all the quicker, once they realize the whole shooting match is in the pooper : de-investing in The Earth Project and moving up investment schedules for The Mars project.

Instead of telling these people that The Earth Project is in trouble, we should be taking them on to demonstrate The Mars project is in trouble.

That might just be more fruitful......

Climate Debate's "Included Middle" and excluded edges

When I claim you can't simultaneously be an environmentalist and a supporter of Mars colonies, I really mean you shouldn't be both.

Because obviously many of us - perhaps most of us - feel we can have our environmental cake and eat a little Mars bar as well.

We like to be both Modern and Post-Modern : we just feel richer by settling for both, without letting our sense of consistency keep us up nights.

In that sense, what is excluded from the Climate Change debate is the 'excluded ends' - those hard core earthlings-only and  the hardcore skygods-only   - because right now the included middle holds the wishy-washy, foot in both camps, majority.

Its not a situation that Aristotle would have predicted when he developed his system of Logic , but hey - it happens.

My job is to 'lift and separate' that included middle until it splits and divides into its two polar opposite positions.

Then both sides conduct their appeal to reason and their appeal to emotion and then they collectively do a headcount.

Heads the Earth lives ! We work together to save it. Tails the Earth dies ! Then a few of us (a few rich "us") move on to Mars, the new Earth 2.0, while the rest boils up, like the rest of the planet  .....

RIO+20 celebrate ! Western MINERALS all gone ; Western NATIVES still there

     In the early 1950s, the conventional opinion of the proto-denier class was that the various "western" Frontiers (Alaska, the Canadian and American Wests, Australia, South Africa, Argentina et al) would always have lots of mineral wealth but that their natives/aboriginals were on the inevitable path to total extinction.
   Sixty years on, at the cusp of the disappointing Rio+20 Conference, let us pause in our lamenting to celebrate a small victory over the forces of greed and hubris.

   The best, most profitable, mineral deposits in these various "Wild Wests" are gone and now we're expensively shifting millions of tons of overlay to get at mere tonnes of metals.
   By contrast the natives are not dead and gone - in fact they are well and truly out-breeding the Angry White Guys (AWGs) who predicted (and plotted) their rapid extermination.
   In response, the cut'n'runner AWGs are falling back on Planet "B" --- the latest 'western" Frontier is the Asteroid Belt and Mars & Venus where they claim there is immense mineral wealth (but without providing us any firm ROI figures, of course - these are bull-shit-prone deniers after all.)
   One of the biggest advantages of this latest in a long line of "Big Sky Countries" is the fact that none of these places seem to have any pesky natives - or government taxes and regulations, or school marms and settlers.
   Don't believe the deniers are planning to leave the 99% behind?
   One only has to regularly read Google News to see all over the world private companies talking up their space ventures.
   Soon they will abandon us earthling ground-pounders stuck down in 'the lower 48' at the bottom of Earth's deep gravity well.
  They'll be heading to the utimate in the High Frontier, higher even than Alaska, where one can live a live of libertarian bliss, in a time and space devoid of government regulations but awash in indirect government subsidies.
   Paid for by the tax-dollars of  space-struck environmentalists down here at Base Zero.
  I'd like to say that one can't believe in both Mars Colonies and Environmental efforts to save the Earth but that is not true - billions of people hold both positions - mixing oil and water with chalk and cheese.
   But I will say a true green environmentalist group will purge its membership of all those who hold these views.
   One must decide whether one favours Peter Ward's theory of a possibly unique , truly "RARE EARTH" and thus focus all of your energies on saving the only lifeboat we have got.
    Or you give a little energy to saving the earth but hedge your bets by believing (and funding) Frank Drake's "MANY EARTHS" theory (that there are probably billions of Earths out there we can always move to if and when we deplete this particular Earth of everything profitable).
   This blog is definitely in the first camp, the Earthling camp.
    And it holds that anyone in the second camp is both a proto-denier and a Skygod : because what deniers really deny is not climate change but rather : any limits on the ability of humanity to spoil natural habitats and then move on, care-free, to new natural habitats to spoil.....