Living in our new POST-Copernicus world

Copernicus's "Revolution" was not unlike Stalin's in impact

peter ward's RARE EARTH

We are frequently told we live in a Copernicus World, contrasting it with the pre-Copernicus world, when humans still thought the Universe revolved around the Earth.

Pause a moment, for a snicker of scorn at our poor dumb ancestors.


When Copernicus told us that the Earth was but one of a group of planets circling the Sun, a certain type of human took away a very particular - one might even say, peculiar - lesson.

Let us call them Skygods and imagine them to look a lot like Pierre-Simon LaPlace or Rene Descartes.

They saw this Earth, as nothing special, just one of a half dozen equally inhabitable homes for Mankind.

Use one up, toss it aside and move on to another.

Earth-centric

The Pre Copernicus view, by contrast saw the Earth as the only place for their  form of Life, in the Universe.

Let us call them Earthlings and cite any number of founding myths from many cultures around the world, for a more detailed account on how early humanity viewed the Earth in relation to the stars.

Earth was their nest, their one and only nest.

How far they'd go in fouling that nest was still up in the air - but how far would a bird go, or any lifeform go, in fouling up their one and only nest ?

So two views : a powerful new Modern scientific view and an older, fading, primitive, powerless mythical view.

Cut to 1965 : Annus Horribilus for Copernicus and Modernity.

The first pictures and scientific measurements were coming back from Mars and Venus and they were not good.

If there was a Christian Hell, it came in two flavours: Hot for Venus and Cold for Mars.

The other planets ,closer or further from the Sun, were even worse.

Apparently The White Man had Spoken with a Forked Tongue : this was not just Earth 1.0 in a long lineup of planets to exploit and toss aside ----- it was in fact Earth one point everything.

All Alone - in a hostile Diracian Sea

Our only lifeboat, in a very big and very hostile Diracian Sea --- and it was starting to leak badly.

Call this new view of our fate counter-culture, hippie-dippie, green, environmentalist, post-modernist, global commensalist, call it what you will ---- but above all call it POST Copernicus.

Very,very,very,very Post Copernicus.

 Yes Copernicus & his latterday disciples (shout out to SETI, Drake  & Sagan !) : we are but one planet  among trillions in the Universe.

But so far, we are:

(A) the only known one attractive enough to ensure life survives on it.

(B) the only one known to permit intelligent life to flourish on it.

(C) if there are any equally or more attractive planets elsewhere in the Universe, they are so far away as to be beyond our fiscal and technological capability to successfully colonize.

The new Epoch of Rare Earth ?

A RARE Earth indeed : will two centuries from now, will we look back upon Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee the same way as some still look upon Copernicus : as people who ushered in a major new epoch in Human History ?

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.....