[P2P-F] Elon Musk's bourgeois Mars

[Eric Hunting]

What Musk was describing in this interview is a concept sometimes called 
'ballistic terraforming' and which can be achieved in a variety of ways. 
Musk chose to refer to a method that sounds more realistic to most 
people; nuclear bombs. The easier and more practical way more commonly 
proposed is steering small comets or icy objects from the outer solar 
system into collision with Mars. As inconceivable as that sounds, that's 
relatively simple through the use of automated spacecraft as 'gravity 
tugs' to coax planned changes in orbit, though it may take decades to 
move an object into the desired path. The point of all this is simple; 
triggering an atmospheric thermal cascade by putting enough water vapor 
into the atmosphere at once so that, by the greenhouse effect, it raises 
temperature and causes more water in the Mars crust globally to 
evaporate into the atmosphere and progressively increases the 
temperature and atmosphere density to where the surface might be 
colonized by very hardy plants like lichens--if they can be adapted to 
tolerate the large amounts of toxic perchlorate salts in the water and 
soil. In this way enough atmosphere might be built up to where humans 
can operate on the surface without space suits--though still requiring 
supplemental oxygen. This 'fast' process is still a process that would 
take many generations to accomplish, as opposed to the very many 
centuries pumping synthetic greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere would 
using the other more commonly suggested method. Realistically, it may 
take generations of research from the present day before we even know 
enough about Mars to say whether or not these methods would work and it 
remains an open question of whether it would be worthwhile given that 
Mars, lacking an active planetary core, cannot produce its own 
magnetosphere to help hold an atmosphere sustainably--which is why it 
lost it's formerly dense atmosphere in the first place. And, of course, 
we don't even know if long term living under Mars' reduced gravity is 
safe or if a clinical solution to that problem is possible. By the time 
any of that matters, the technology proposed may be made completely moot 
by nanotechnology and the 'human race' may be long supplanted by 
transhumans who would need none of these elaborate machinations to live 
in that environment.

So, basically, the author of this piece, triggered by the 'N word', is 
complaining about something that is, at best, pure speculation if not 
retrofuturist SciFi. What personally annoys me is the playing to the old 
argument of; "why should we go to space just to export our terrestrial 
madness?" This is rooted in a notion that the human race is ultimately a 
mistake that needs to be contained, that all works of man are inherently 
profane, and that we need to 'grow up' more and get our terrestrial 
house in order to be worthy of doing things in the sacrosanct heavenly 
realms beyond Earth. It never occurs to proponents of this notion that 
the act of going to space might be a necessary part of that process of 
growing up. That we might need the challenge of the space environment to 
ultimately learn the craft of sustainability because Mother Earth 
molly-coddles us with a too-benign environment that make its too easy to 
cheat. That we might need frontiers on which to experiment in new ways 
of life when every single part of the Old World is now owned and 
ruled-over by someone with vested interests in doing things old ways.

There is a fundamental lack of understanding of the concept of space 
settlement here which relates to preconceptions about space activity and 
its relationship to the military industrial complex and exploitation for 
nationalist prestige. It is assumed to be some expression of 
militaristic or corporatist culture--understandable given that the 
outpost architecture commonly illustrated is always militaristic in 
character. But in practice every plausible space settlement must--of 
necessity--be a cohabitation eco-village seeking an ideal 
sustainability. (on pain of death) The ultimate space settler will not 
see themselves as a 'conqueror' of space but a gardener of the universe 
and an experimenter in alternative lifestyle. The garden is the 
essential functional and cultural core of any truly plausible space 
settlement concept. The bottom-line of space development is that 
learning to live in space means learning to go from dirt, rocks, and 
sunlight to a sustainable middle-class standard of living using tools 
and systems on the scale of home appliances--and there is nothing about 
life on Earth and the way civilization here works that such capability 
will not radically change. If one wished to make a valid argument here, 
argue about the largely disingenuous and retrofuturist nature of 
contemporary proposals for so-called space settlement coming from 
governments who are, ultimately, not in the business of inventing new 
places for people to go and not pay taxes and from corporations who are 
fully aware that the only sustainable ROI from space not based on 
exploiting government bankrolls cannot realize that ROI in banks on 
Earth but only in infrastructure out there. Complain about the root 
corruption of priorities in national space agencies that must pander to 
the vanities of opposing political interests to survive as venues for 
pork-barrel politics. Complain about the continued elitism and 
militarism of the contemporary space development vision when the 
technology emerging and already at hand points to a near future where 
the settlement of any body in space is soon to become a community 
project akin to Linux.



On 9/29/15 2:35 AM, p2p-foundation-request at lists.ourproject.org wrote:
>     1. Fwd: [NetworkedLabour] Fwd: [Debate-List] (Fwd) Elon Musk's
>        bourgeois Mars (Michel Bauwens)

-- 
Eric Hunting
erichunting at gmail.com

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