[P2P-F] Elon Musk's bourgeois Mars

Wed Sep 30 09:58:19 CEST 2015

Dear Kevin,

Show some love and expand a little on these cryptic remarks that leave me puzzled.

Anna

> On 30 Sep 2015, at 01:59, Kevin Carson <free.market.anticapitalist at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Kim Stanley Robinson presented a pretty level-headed terraforming
> scenario in the Mars Trilogy IMO.
> 
> This article reflects a false "Green vs. Expert" dichotomy that is,
> sadly, all too common on the Left. Being green and anti-capitalist
> means, ipso facto, being at least a primativist lite.
> 
>> On Tue, Sep 29, 2015 at 7:53 PM, Eric Hunting <erichunting at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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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> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Kevin Carson
> Senior Fellow, Karl Hess Scholar in Social Theory
> Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
> 
> "You have no authority that we are bound to respect" -- John Perry Barlow
> "We are legion. We never forgive. We never forget. Expect us" -- Anonymous
> 
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