[P2P-F] humanizing the cosmos

[Michel Bauwens]

Hi Eric,

I'm using excerpts on the 28th, thanks a lot!

On Fri, Mar 18, 2011 at 4:02 AM, Eric Hunting <erichunting at gmail.com> wrote:

> You might want to reconsider presenting this article at all. It's rather...
> weird. The premise of a more humanist approach to space development had much
> promise. I have myself been bothered by both the radical shift toward
> regressive right-wing conservatism at NASA that saw it casually bend-over to
> support the Bush administration's climate agenda (and that also saw an
> acquaintance of mine -a whistle-blowing shuttle program engineer- ousted,
> viciously vilified, and framed for 'terrorism') and a rising undercurrent of
> Randian Objectivism among the advocates and developers of New Space. But
> this guy is laboring under such a huge mass of misconceptions, bad science,
> and obvious ignorance that it spoils any credible argument he hoped to make.
> He is not using the term 'humanization' in any positive context. He is
> characterizing it as synonymous with everything he considers negative about
> contemporary Industrial Age culture; economic and social injustice,
> environmental degradation, war. He's declaring 'human' a dirty word.
>
> I was reminded immediately of the introduction to the book Gaiome by Kevin
> Scott Polk (a book on the use of permaculture models as the basis of new
> space habitat designs) where the author describes a small space conference
> attended by a younger Jeff Bezos -who went on to become founder of Amazon.
> Bezos was presenting a paper on a scheme for asteroid utilization and as he
> was talking a woman in the audience became increasingly visibly agitated
> until she finally jumped out of her seat shouting; "All you want to do is
> rape the universe!" and then ran from the room sobbing. Bezos then turned to
> the author and said; "Did I just hear her right? Was she arguing for the
> inalienable rights of barren rock?" Now, working in the textbook business as
> I do, I can think of a great many other reasons why people would want to
> angrily shout at Jeff Bezos in public, but this article seems to be making
> the same sort of peculiar accusation toward space activity in general. It's
> boils down to the suggestion that we should stay out of space because it has
> no possible ROI for the exploited common man and we'll only F-it up. So
> instead we should focus on a concerted global effort to solve terrestrial
> problems and make ourselves nicer people. And in that is the critical
> misconception. A presumption that there is an inherent dichotomy between
> improving life on Earth and pursuing settlement in space based largely on
> the presumed character of the corporations and institutions that seem to
> dominate space activity today, rather than a consideration of the nature of
> space development activity and its impacts. It has the tone of the argument
> of environmental extremists who regard the human race as a 'mistake', a
> cancer that must be contained before it metastasizes across the universe,
> confined to an ascetic meditation on its own pathology until it evolves to a
> more noble state more deserving of a place in the universe. How do you learn
> and evolve without actually doing anything?
>
> One thing I find astounding is this author's use of the Space Renaissance
> Institute's manifesto (apparently triggered chiefly by the presence of the
> word 'renaissance') as a basis of his argument. He uses this as an example
> of what could be called an 'Enlightenment pathology'; the systematic
> exploitation of notions of liberty, reason, modernity, and progress as a
> ploy to sell Industrial Age paradigms. It's a standard trope of
> environmental extremists, with just enough exceptions to prove the rule.
> Basically, he's accusing anyone who espouses an aspiration to these virtues
> of being liars simply because, through history, some other people who also
> espoused those aspirations were ultimately proven disingenuous. I'm actually
> a member of the RSI. I recall how the leaders of that very nascent space
> advocacy group labored for two years over every single word in that
> manifesto like it was going to make or break the whole future. Right now the
> organization is facing a crisis of confidence, losing people -particularly
> in America- because it is accused of being too humanist. Too fluffy. More
> concerned with cultivating a philosophical stance than bending metal -which
> turns off those of an engineering bent who would rather get on with
> launching hardware than have tea with the PM. RSI's core objective is to
> re-establish the cultural relevance of space as a drive for social and
> economic progress -and, of course, today you can't use the word 'progress'
> without it being assumed by the fundamentalist left as a codeword for
> exploitation and environmental degradation. My chief complaint with the RSI
> is that, so far, they haven't demonstrated a very coherent strategy for how
> to do what they intend to do, but then this is a nascent organization. Its
> membership is modest and it's still largely unknown in space advocacy
> circles, though a bit more well known in Europe than elsewhere. It hasn't
> yet approached the name recognition of the Mars Society, L5 Society,
> Planetary Society, or even the Lifeboat Foundation.
>
> But what really blew this fellow's arguments away for me was when he
> started noting some really bad science. The suggestion that failure of the
> Cassini probe launch could have caused 40 million deaths because it was
> powered by plutonium is just breathtakingly stupid. Either this guy doesn't
> know one isotope from another or is deliberately exploiting people's general
> lack of that knowledge for the cheap fear factor -as a few less than honest
> environmentalists once did during the Cassini launch, scaring some people
> enough to hide in their basements as the spacecraft took off. I realize the
> PhD is no longer the hallmark of a rounded education it once was, but how do
> you even get one in any field and fail at high school level science?
>
> I could go on for days with what's wrong with this article, but the bottom
> line here is that, for all the large numbers that get bandied about with
> space programs, the totality of what we have so far done in space is pretty
> penny-ante compared to the scale of economics of mundane industry, commerce,
> and transportation. It seems like a big deal because it's high-profile, but
> more money is spent every year building cruise liners than is spent every
> decade on space. Satellites may be significant today in communications and
> military applications, but even they are on their way out in commercial
> roles since latency is becoming increasingly critical to mainstream
> communications applications and they can't keep up with the pace of
> land-based communications evolution. It's not unusual for telecom satellites
> to become obsolete before they're even ready for launch. Only military
> applications have seen sustained growth -thanks to the Forever War On
> Terror. Concerted civilian space development is actually in decline,
> abandoned by both left and right sides of the political aisle. New Space is,
> still, largely dominated by a tiny community of eccentric middle-aged
> billionaires with Tahiti Syndrome. It's pretty well understood that, because
> of its origins in the Cold War and the nature of western governments,
> contemporary space development has had bad priorities and an unhealthy
> relationship with the military industrial complex. And, as I noted, there
> are issues in the New Space community that derive from the isolated culture
> of the small eccentric faction of IT-boom nouveau riche that is
> predominately driving it. But there is a fundamental aspect of space
> development that has huge potential positive impact on terrestrial
> civilization that some in open manufacturing are starting to clue into.
> Inhabiting space means figuring out how to go from sunlight, rocks, and dirt
> to a sustainable middle-class standard of living using hardware on the scale
> of home appliances. That's what it's essentially about. If you can't
> visualize the potential socio-economic-environmental impact of that kind of
> capability, you're not trying. That by itself means a potential change in
> how we do just about everything on planet Earth. We can do that on Earth
> too, but there isn't the same imperative because the terrestrial environment
> is too kind to us. Mother Earth lets us slack-off or cheat, and that's
> exacerbated by vested interests that resist innovation on Earth.
>
> The laws of physics largely prohibit the costs externalization common to
> terrestrial industry and economics and will, in the near-term, limit simple
> ROI on Earth from space to a region of space relatively close to Earth.
> Ultimately, space will have to be settled by people seeking an ROI
> realized/used out there. Even Wernher von Braun understood this. His
> experience with both Nazi and American militaries taught him that the
> strategic military imperative could not get you past Earth orbit and neither
> could the profit motive. There was neither economic nor strategic military
> value any farther out than that. To go farther and to stay there space had
> to be a cultural imperative. So he pursued the concept of a civilian space
> program and, in partnership with none-other than Walt Disney (who understood
> the potential entertainment value inherent in visions and narratives about
> the future), an imperative for space based on the humanist ideal of
> inhabiting it. Sure, much of the first Space Race was fueled by nationalism
> and Cold War paranoia, but the 'promise' of space that mattered to the
> culture was the prospect of opening it up for all as a place to live an
> aspiration shared by both East and West. The loss of this is the basis of
> the long ennui in public space support. NASA's key problem is forgetting
> that essential original intention and, thanks to its progressive political
> and corporate corruption and increasingly self-absorbed nature, the result
> has not been an advance to space but an incremental retreat from it. New
> Space may have some current gravitas, but too few objectives. For space
> tourism to actually realize CATS (cheap access to space) it would have to
> reach a tremendous scale, like those that have made conventional air travel
> affordable. CATS is not a technology problem. It's a logistical question
> based on operational economies of scale. (the reason why we have A360s and
> not as many Cessnas as cars) We would have to be building an Orlando Florida
> on orbit to get to a Pan-Am Orion. Not a very likely prospect soon given the
> extreme up-front costs and functionalism still demanded by space habitats
> today.
>
> So maybe it's time for a people's space program as I've been proposing with
> the International Open Space Initiative concept. A global open-participation
> public space program based on a Linux model of development, a very direct
> unrestrained back-flow of technology transfer, and a social ROI sought in
> that technology back-flow.
>
> As I've suggested in my writing for TMP2, future space settlers will not
> consider themselves 'conquerers' of space but rather the gardeners of the
> universe -because their lives will generally revolve around the cultivation
> of garden habitats in that environment for them to live in. We go to space
> to bring it to life as an act of creative expression, an exploration of the
> spectrum of potential lifestyle, an expansion of culture, not to futilely
> attempt to externalize the costs of an unsustainable terrestrial junk-world
> civilization. And in so doing we are compelled to learn, and bring back to
> Earth, the craft of sustainability because, in space, you have no choice.
> It's not forgiving like the Earth has been with its benefit of three and a
> half billion years of biological alchemy. Carl Sagan said that we are a way
> for the universe to know itself. But there's more to that than just
> passively bearing witness. We have to interact with it, inhabit it, bring it
> to life, make it conscious. We have to make love to it as an artist makes
> love to his medium. Like the sculptor discovering, with his hands, the forms
> hidden in the rock at the interface of mind and material. This is what
> humanizing the cosmos really means. Maybe we're still too clumsy by far at
> this and, like a too-inquisitive toddler, consequently an inherent danger to
> ourselves. But you can't learn this schtick waiting, meditating, and hoping
> for a spontaneous quantum leap in human consciousness before the next
> asteroid hits. Better to go out like a proper human being; with a hammer in
> your hand rather than a bible.
>
> Searching for an example of the kinds of videos I intend to develop for the
> TMP2 project, I found one on YouTube recently that is derived from one of
> the very few hard SF anime called Planetes and which well sums up my point
> of view here;
>
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBZSN_OIamo
>
> Eric Hunting
> erichunting at gmail.com
>
>
>
> On Mar 15, 2011, at 11:52 PM, Michel Bauwens wrote:
>
> > http://monthlyreview.org/101101dickens.php
> >
> > Dear Eric, Bill,
> >
> > perhaps you could read this article and write one or two paragraphs to
> present it to our readers, from the perspective of humanity's relations with
> nature and the universe, while Eric may perhaps mention some of the open
> manufacturing projects related to space?
> >
> > Michel
> >
> > --
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>
>


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