75 years ago, Winston Churchill delivered a speech in Fulton Missouri announcing a new Iron Curtain that had descended upon the world with the free capitalist nations united under an Anglo-American alliance on the one side and authoritarian states organized under the control of the Kremlin. In the speech which put the nail into the coffin of FDR’s vision of a US-Russian-Chinese alliance of win-win cooperation, Churchill announced that:

“Neither the sure prevention of war, nor the continuous rise of world organization will be gained without what I have called the fraternal association of the English speaking peoples. This means a special relationship between the British Commonwealth and Empire and the United States.”

In the wake of this announcement, new mechanisms and operational procedures were brought online from the creation of the CIA after a purge of military intelligence which began with the dissolution of the OSS, to the establishment of a new security doctrine under NSC-75: ‘A Report to the NSC by the Executive Secretary on British Military Commitments’ which tied America’s destiny to the preservation of British territorial possessions to keep independent-minded nations from falling under Soviet influence.

The rules of game theory were thus elevated from perverse thoughts floating around the paranoid minds of statisticians like Oscar Morganstern, John Nash and John von Neumann, to governing levers defining international military policy in an age of intrigue, coups, espionage and assassinations. This system of controls would guarantee a peace shaped not by cooperation or the pursuit of large scale goals as FDR announced in his Four Freedoms speech of 1941, but rather by the terror of mutually assured annihilation. This geopolitical perversion of “peace” necessitated isolated arrays of small wars, hot and economic alike in the pursuit of an overall balance. This is a game that would only function to the degree that all players acted like selfish short sighted opportunists incapable of thinking outside the terms of the game itself.

As I outlined in my previous article, despite the darkness and bipolarity of the Cold War, efforts were made to break humanity free of the rigged game by connecting our economic sphere of influence to the infinite expanses of space. Sadly every time new revolutionary advances were made by saner forces among all sides of the Iron Curtain, those advances were soon sabotaged as humanity was pulled back into the closed-system geopolitical cage like the lab rats which certain influential Malthusians and technocrats wished to believe we were.

The Anglo-American Special Relationship in Space

Today, Churchill’s ghost has come to haunt the world once more as the vicious terms of the Cold War rules of conduct are again being forcefully revived under the priests of the “rules based international order” that have obsessively made it clear that they will not tolerate the existence of a multilateral system of governance challenging their perceived right to total hegemony.

The first sign of Churchill’s re-emergence was seen in June 10, 2021 as Biden and Boris Johnson signed the ‘New Atlantic Charter’ in London which re-committed both nations to their Cold Warrior identities in defense of NATO, the Rules Based Order, Open Society and democracy. The New Charter said that both nations “affirm our shared responsibility for maintaining our collective security and international stability and resilience against the full spectrum of modern threats, including cyber threats.”

On July 29, another joint US-UK alliance was solidified in the form of a statement published on the Telegraph by General James H. Dickenson (head of US Space Force) and Vice Marshall Paul Godfrey (the head of the UK’s new Space Command that went into operation the same day). The title of the statement read: ‘We Need a Special Relationship for Space’ and opened with a tribute to Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech where the duo stated: “Today, Churchill’s words are more resonant and relevant than ever as we look to adversaries threatening us not just from Earth but from space.”

Citing Russia explicitly and China implicitly as new threats to world peace which must be combatted in the new domain of space, the duo outlines the danger of space based warfare which threatens to takedown the entire western infrastructure system saying:

“Satellite constellations in low-earth orbit link almost every aspect of our daily lives whether it’s our transport networks, banking systems, mobile phones, the internet or television. Almost anything, or anyone, who is on the move benefits from the positioning, navigation and timing capabilities of our Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS). Militarily, space-based assets are critical for communication, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and navigation.”

Describing the apocalyptic effects of the takedown of the GNSS, which neither China or Russia are reliant upon having built their own alternative systems of GPS, the space duo said: “It would be a day of market volatility, of local blackouts, of delayed journeys and of malfunctioning emergency services. It would be a day of chaos… Make no mistake, our potential adversaries are working hard to make this nightmare a reality.”

There is undoubtedly an element of truth in these statements, since both China and Russia have been forced in recent years to respond to military encirclement of their nations by the expansion of new defensive military capabilities which involve space-based warfare including potentially new ICBM Silos in China, new anti-satellite weapons and powerful Peresvet laser trucks designed to blind any offensive attack.

However, it is important to recall that neither China nor Russia are the instigators of this new military agenda, nor are they acting on an offensive program. In fact, in recent years, both nations have only offered olive branches of cooperation in the face of aggressive policies which speak sweetly of freedom publicly while making every effort to destabilize target nations through asymmetric warfare, terror financing, economic warfare and outright military encirclement.

Additionally, these remarks could also be seen as a form of predictive programming as they echo earlier statements made by General Mark Milley who warned of a “new Pearl Harbor in space” when he said on December 3, 2020 that “there’s an argument to be made and many have made it in various unclassified writings that a country might try to seek a first move or advantage, for example to blind the United States… the Next Pearl Harbor could happen in space”. Milley pointed out that space warfare could takedown “the internet and electricity grids”.

Hold in mind that the World Economic Forum’s Cyber Polygon cyberwar game scenario exercises unfolded on July 9, 2021 with a specific focus on the takedown of western electricity grids, internet, medical and telecommunications support systems and banking systems. The WEF’s Klaus Schwab had referred to the “frightening scenario of a comprehensive cyberattack [that] could bring  a complete halt to the power supply, transportation, hospital services, our society as a whole… the COVID-19 crisis would be seen in this respect as a small disturbance in comparison to a major cyber attack”.

Anyone who paid attention to Event 201 should not be surprised to feel goosebumps emerge at this point.

The New York Times lost no time before amplifying the fear fest writing such evidence-free articles as “Russians Who Pose Electrion Threat Have Hacked Nuclear Plants and Power Grids”. Meanwhile on July 29, 2021, Biden revived the petard that China and Russia were responsible for cyberattacks on American companies and infrastructure warning of a shooting war, saying: “I think it’s more than likely we’re going to end up, if we end up in a war – a real shooting war with a major power — it’s going to be as a consequence of a cyberbreach of great consequence.”

The new US-UK space-based special relationship professes to expand upon the Five Eyes dominated Combined Space Operations (which involve the USA, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand as well as France and Germany), and also the Olympic Defender exercises which featured US-UK collaboration on space-based warfare scenarios in 2020. The US and UK are joined by Japan which announced its own Space Operations Squadron in May 2020 and by working directly with the Anglo-American alliance, has managed to circumvent the post WW2 ban on acquiring a military program.

Space remains a trans geopolitical domain of new undiscovered principles that shape our weather systems, ice ages, the activation/de-activation of viruses and even the forces of evolution of living systems. Returning to a paradigm driven by creative discoveries in space would not only animate the best of humanity’s powers of creative reason, but also increase our standards of excellence in all fields to solve real problems and achieve real goals that not only serves to accomplish concrete tasks, but which offers the densest array of technological breakthroughs that we know will feed back into our earth-based economy in unimaginable ways. It is a fact that there is hardly a single branch of human activity from medicine, mining, chemistry, industrial production, telecommunications, or even entertainment that wasn’t revolutionized from the original space program put into motion by President Kennedy nearly 60 years ago.

Chinese and Russian policy makers have emphasized their desires to use this domain as the foundation for mutual cooperation between all nations in the defense of earth against asteroid threats, the development of new resources on the Moon, Mars and other celestial bodies. At different times, sane forces within Europe, and NASA have echoed this call for a new era of cooperation as outlined in the original spirit of the Artemis Accords and western opposition to the absurd block on US-Chinese space cooperation put into law with the 2011 Wolf Act.

However, despite this reality, smaller minds obviously see space as merely a extension of the fixed rules of imperial geopolitics that have been used for millenia to keep human beings locked like rats in a cage managed by oligarchs. Where the maritime choke points of yesterday took the form of the straights of Malacca, the Bosporous, or Panama Canal, today’s heirs to this Hobbesian worldview that animated Churchill’s life, are only capable of seeing space as yet another choke point in the Great Game.

The author can be reached on his Substack.

In these days of profound uncertainty, it is comforting knowing that certain fundamental truths still exist and serve as guiding lights through the dark waters.

Among the highest of those fundamental truths are those enunciated in 1967 by Reverend Martin Luther King who ruminated over the dangers of imperialism and nuclear war by stating “we still have a choice today: nonviolent co-existence or violent co-annihilation”.

When leaping ahead over five decades past the April 4, 1968 assassination of King to our present time, that truth stands as valid today as ever.

While asymmetric never-ending wars following the ‘Vietnam model’ have continued across the Middle East and while the world faces no shortage of modern Dr. Strangeloves giddy over the visceral power offered by the red button, humanity’s obligation to recognize the scientific truthfulness of King’s words have existential importance.

In the face of today’s lunge towards extinction, the Greater Eurasian Partnership and broader Belt and Road initiative spreading across the face of the globe has pulled more people out of poverty and despair at rates unseen in all history. Yet an under-appreciated aspect of this dynamic has taken the form of the ever-expanding “space silk road” which is what I’d like to discuss in this first of a two-part essay.

The Trans Geopolitical Roots of Space Exploration

Since the days of Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon (1865), the dream of a new space-exploration driven age of mankind was something that animated the scientific imagination of the greatest minds of the 20^th century. A generation of German rocket scientists inspired by Fritz Lang’s 1929 Frau Im Mond (Woman in the Moon) innovated new aerodynamic and chemical designs that began making the impossible possible. With every new breakthrough, the realm of ideas that Jules Verne could only dream of became ever more a part of the field of potential shaping humanity’s available pathways.

Imperial geopoliticians seeking to keep humankind locked within a closed system of diminishing returns and monopolized resources on the face of the earth were certainly nervous at the new age that was unfolding.

Like so many technological innovations in human history, many of the breakthroughs in rocketry, space science and the atom which so profoundly altered the world during the 20^th century happened within the unfortunate momentum generated by wars both hot and cold. Today, many cynics who have drank heavily from the chalice of misanthropy, are quick to pounce on this unfortunate irony as proof that humanity only creates when we are busy killing each other. However, by changing our point of view a bit, we could just as easily conclude that this irony is proof that despite our frequent falls into barbarism (shaped more often than not by oligarchical interests manipulating nations into self-destruction), humanity has the power to create higher goodness even amidst strife. MLK put this in his own words when he said that “the arc of history is long but it bends towards justice”.

Is there a Scientific Case to be made for King’s Optimism?

While it is nice to hear such statements as those uttered by MLK, can we find evidence that this optimistic view of human nature stands on firmer ground than mere rhetoric?

I think there is.

For one thing, were the forces of evil truly more powerful than forces of good, than it stands to reason that the last 100,000+ years would have resulted in mankind either never having made it out of caves, or self-exterminating long ago, leaving the world a much better place in a state of “technology-free” balance.

And yet, here we are. Nearly nine billion members of our fragile species conglomerated on the face of our fragile planet spinning around a sun within a small neighborhood of a small galaxy amidst a cluster of galaxies which we have barely even begun to understand.

It was, after all, not long ago that humanity still believed that all observable spiral galaxies were contained within the confines of the Milky Way. It took the discoveries of Henrietta Swan Leavitt (1868-1921) in the early 20^th century to prove that this was not true and that ours was but one of a multitude of galactic islands in the universe (1). It was at this time that breakthroughs in aviation were allowing humanity to finally construct primitive airplanes and breakthroughs in electromagnetism and radiation were expanding our understanding of the structure of space time far beyond the visible zone of light waves, many octaves into the domain of radio waves below infrared and above ultraviolet into shortwave x rays and gamma radiation. With each cognitive leap into the unknown, boundary conditions of our collective knowledge were increased in tandem with our potential carrying capacity as new technologies beneficial to sustaining more people at higher standards of living were made available.

Of course, giving the cynic his/her due, it must be admitted that with each conceptual advance of mind’s grasp of the forces of matter, our freedom to create was increased along with our freedom to destroy.

In 1926, the brilliant Russian biogeochemist Vladimir V.I. Vernadsky (1863-1945) recognized that the thing dubbed the biosphere was not a closed system of Darwinian objects competing in a universe of diminishing returns, but was itself a singular system whose identity was more than the sum of parts, driven by 1) photosynthesis (the power of living matter to transform solar energy into work) 2) a tendency towards increasing the flow of atomic migration of elements, 3) a principle of ubiquity of all life which tended to expand to its fullest and generate new “technologies” to constantly overcome nature’s limits to growth and was 4) the intersection of a multitude of octaves of cosmic radiation from intergalactic space with the lithosphere mediated by nested magnetic fields. The conception outlined in Vernadsky’s Biosphere was that living matter and ecosystems were not localized to the earth, but were rather cosmic processes tied to the entire environment of the solar system and beyond. This concept was not only new but irrefutable and revolutionary. (2)

In 1957, a new milestone was reached as Russia’s Sputnik I satellite broke into orbit and mankind officially became the first space-bound species on record. As humanity extended its sphere of activity beyond the limits of the biosphere, yet more incredible new discoveries were made, such as the existence of nested positively and negatively charged magnetic fields dubbed the Van Allen Belts that were a part of a structure of Birkland currents shaping pathways within electromagnetic fields that allowed fluxes of coronal mass ejections emerging from the sun, and even other stars, to flow into the earth’s biosphere, driving the flow of evolutionary activity over long periods of time.

Scientists across the world soon found themselves looking to these invisible nested arrays of magnetic fields within our galaxy and the dense ocean of cosmic radiation and plasma in order to seek the causes of weather, ice ages, viruses, volcanism, extinction cycles and more. Frank Capra’s 1959 The Strange Case of Cosmic Rays sponsored by Bell Labs provides a glimpse into the trajectory of scientific thinking at this time.

John F. Kennedy Takes the Helm

After Sputnik’s breakthrough, it didn’t take long for humans to follow suite with Yuri Gagarin’s orbital voyage on April 12, 1961. Amidst the fog of assassinations, coups, asymmetric wars and psy ops of the Cold War, space flight continued to offer humanity a pathway out of hell. Seeking desperately for a creative exit from the Game Theory-driven rules of Mutually Assured Destruction, President John F Kennedy embraced the strategic value of space not merely as a geopolitical tool to beat the commies, as is so often portrayed in history books, but as a driving force that could transform the world and the rigged rules of the Cold War. Kennedy’s September 20, 1963 United Nations speech championing the establishment of a joint U.S.-Russian space program is a testament of this strategic outlook which has been too easily forgotten over the years. Additionally, Kennedy made it clear that space exploration generated long term goals and intentions that would “serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills”. The stochastic idea of economics defined as “hedonistic beasts with money seeking to maximize their pleasure and reduce their pain while buying low and selling dear” which free marketeers and libertarians advocated could never stand up to this higher conception of capitalism as outlined by Kennedy and the best American System traditions.

Nuclear technology that also emerged in the fires of war similarly found itself forged into tools of creation as well as destruction.

As nuclear bombs were built at record speeds on both sides of the Iron Curtain, civilian nuclear reactors began producing abundant, high quality cheap energy at such rates that for the first time, billions of people could be alleviated from poverty forever. While Russia was less fortunate with her efforts on the Moon, she landed 10 probes on the surface of Venus during the 1961-1984 Venera program and began applying nuclear reactor technology to space craft eventually sending out 30 nuclear reactor units in 30 yeas. In the USA, Kennedy unveiled a program for nuclear rockets under the NERVA program, and Project Rover which promised to offer humanity a means of flying not only to the moon and mars but to the furthest reaches of the solar system and beyond. As the NERVA and Phoebus rockets passed all tests with flying colors (3), programs were outlined to begin Mars colonization with plans to land on the red planet by August 1982.

Even in China, Premier Zhou Enlai had ensured that space pioneer Qian Xuesen had received state support to create a Chinese space program which began in earnest with the 1958 Project 581 which aimed to put a satellite into orbit. Although suffering many setbacks throughout the 1960s-1980s, the Chinese resiliently pushed forward, eventually becoming the third nation to send astronauts into space through their own efforts.

Despite the intrigue and evil that dominated geopolitics these precarious years, the call of a new age of cooperation continued to resonate with milestone achievements as the 1967 Space Treaty, 1969 Moon landing, and Apollo Soyuz 1975 cooperation between U.S. and Russian space agencies.

So What Went Wrong?

So why did the Apollo Program, which had generated revolutionary technologies in every branch of economics and medicine find itself dissolved by 1973 and advanced Saturn rockets retired into museums? Why were Kennedy’s offers to the Soviet Union dropped upon his death despite the fact that Khrushchev wrote of his desires that they happen? Why did NASA’s budget peak in 1964 maxing at 4% of GDP and find its funding drained into the war in Vietnam, never to rise again? Why were the nuclear rocket programs dismantled in 1972 despite having beaten all expectations? Why did the Apollo-Soyuz program fail to serve as the foundation for a new era of space diplomacy?

As I outlined in my previous article on The Dynamics of Nuclear Diplomacy, the answer to this strange set of anomalies is found in the rise of a new breed of misanthropic statecraft called “neo-Malthusianism” which took the levers of western foreign and internal economic policies over the dead bodies of pro-development leaders like Kennedy, Enrico Mattei, Dag Hammarskjold, Daniel Johnson Sr., Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. As the neo-Malthusian revolution was effected across western governments during this period, studies such as Limits To Growth began to promote a new wisdom of degrowth and conservation of ecosystems as a replacement for the “old wisdom” that cherished big infrastructure projects and scientific discovery as the driving ethic of humanity. “Ecosystems” under this new age of digital computer modelling were increasingly defined as closed, thermodynamic processes bounded by mathematical homeostasis, and humanity was expected to adapt to those supposed limits like any other beast within nature.

One of the founders of the Canadian branch of the Club of Rome was Maurice Lamontagne (former President of the Privy Council Office) who called out the problem of creativity itself in his 1968-1972 Science Policy Senate Reports:

“Nature imposes definite constraints on technology itself and if man persists in ignoring them the net effect of his action in the long run can be to reduce rather than to increase nature’s potential as a provider of resources and habitable space… But then, an obvious question arises: How can we stop man’s creativeness?”

Calling for a redirection of funding from science and discovery which had the troubling effect of increasing humanity’s power over nature and thus disrupting the mathematical equilibrium which Malthusian computer models demanded govern all reality, Lamontagne stated:

“The new wisdom prescribes that the additional R&D effort be devoted to the life sciences and social sciences rather than the physical sciences… to economic and social objectives rather than curiosity and discovery.”

The 1970s-1990s saw the largest onslaught on all domains of science policy that involved discoveries into the universe of the immeasurably large (space science) and immeasurably small (atomic science) which threatened to disrupt the formulas for population limits that the new breed of neo-Malthusian craved in their quest for total power under a New World Order.

In the next installment, we will review China’s re-activation of space exploration as a creative flanking maneuver to break humanity out of the rigged fixed rules of the Great Game while also reviving the dream of attaching our destiny to the infinite.

The author can be reached via his Substack account.

Notes

(1) Leavitt observed a correlation between the brightness and periodicity of pulsating stars which generated a system of triangulation of parallax that was used to determine relative distances of stars both within our own Milky Way and also other galaxies beyond.
(2) In his 1926 book ‘The Biosphere’, Vernadsky wrote: “The biosphere may be regarded as a region of transformers that convert cosmic radiations into active energy in electrical, chemical, mechanical, thermal, and other forms. Radiations from all stars enter the biosphere, but we catch and perceive only an insignificant part of the total. The existence of radiation originating in the most distant regions of the cosmos cannot be doubted. Stars and nebulae are constantly emitting specific radiations, and everything suggests that the penetrating radiation discovered in the upper regions of the atmosphere by Hess originates beyond the limits of the solar system, perhaps in the Milky Way, in nebulae, or in stars …The importance of this will not be clear for some time, but this penetrating cosmic radiation determines the character and mechanism of the biosphere.”
(3) Wernher von Braun stated at a 1966 NY Academy of Science conference: “The technology now available will enable us to accomplish the manned lunar landing in Project Apollo… For really serious manned exploration of the planets, however, to include manned landings, nuclear or electric propulsion will be required. And I would personally prefer a nuclear stage for a manned fly-by mission to Venus and Mars. And a manned Mars mission, which could be achieved by the mid-eighties, would very definitely require nuclear propulsion… The highly successful test firing program of the NERVA I engine lends confidence to the belief that a nuclear rocket stage can be designed.”

Those of you drawing sustenance and stimulation from the traditional acronym UFO best brace yourselves. The less exciting and dull term accepted by the defence clerks – unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) – is renewing its march into the extra-terrestrial hinterland.

On June 25, the Pentagon’s UAP Task Force will release a declassified report to Congress that will do little to shift ground or alter debate on the nature of such phenomena. For those exercised about green creatures, ancient aliens and that roguish charlatan Erich von Däniken, nothing would have changed. For sceptics, it will be a case of tired yawn before returning to work. There will be many “I told you so” moments and no one will be any wiser.

Since 2017, various eyewitness accounts and videos have been circulating in such measure as to worry members of Congress. This came a decade after Senate majority leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) first began tooting the horn on the subject, a measure that led to the creation of the $22 million Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. That program, along with the even lesser known Advanced Aerospace Weapons Systems Application Program, saw the involvement of such proponents of extra-terrestrial life as billionaire Robert Bigelow.

Such programs were hardly the first. From 1966 to 1968, the University of Colorado’s UFO Project, which lead to the publication of the tome heavy Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects, was funded by the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research. Led by physicist Edward U. Condon, the report, totalling almost a thousand pages, covered 56 “cases” (UFO sightings), of which 33 were suitably explained as “normal phenomena”.

The unexplained cases were not sufficient for Condon and his co-authors to encourage further government study or scientific investigation of UFO sightings. The words of the report are unequivocally damning: “nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years that has added to scientific knowledge. Careful consideration of the record … leads us to conclude that further extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified in the expectation that science will be advanced thereby.”

Decades after, with interest rekindled, the Pentagon was duly pressed by US lawmakers into compiling a report examining UAP sightings.  Legislation passed in December stipulated that the resulting work should contain “detailed analysis of unidentified aerial phenomena data and intelligence” gathered by the FBI, the Office of Naval Intelligence and the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force.  The latter was created in August 2020 on the direction of Deputy Secretary of Defense David L. Norquist.  It was done so with a view to improving “understanding of” and to “gain insight into the nature and origins of UAPs.  The mission of the task force is to detect, analyze and catalogue UAPs that could potentially pose a threat to US national security.”

The focus of the report is bound to be workmanlike, given the DOD’s concern about “the safety of our personnel and the security of our operations”.  Emphasis is placed on the potential risks posed by “any incursions by unauthorized aircraft into our training ranges or designated airspace”.  “This includes examinations of incursions that are initially reported as UAP when the observer cannot immediately identify what he or she is observing.”

So far, news outlets have veered between panting anticipation and bemused interest.  The BBC suggested that, “The review of 120 incidents is expected to conclude that US technology was not involved in most cases.”  The Hill, not quite grasping the meaning of secrecy, concluded that this fact “effectively rules out any secret government operations conducted by the American government”.

Both the New York Times and Washington Post went for common ground.  The Times reported that senior administration officials briefed about the report found no evidence that the sighted objects seen over the past decade by Navy pilots were not of this planet.  But these same officials “still cannot explain the unusual movements that have mystified scientists and the military.”  US technology, it was confirmed, was not involved in the sightings.  The report, according to the Post, “finds no proof of extraterrestrial activity, but cannot provide a definitive explanation for scores of incidents in which strange objects have been spotted in the sky”.

The Post goes on to make some broad claims, detecting a shift from “fringe conspiracy theory” to the “mainstream”.  To justify the assertion, they cite such figures as Luis Elizondo, a former military intelligence official who told reporters on an April roundtable call that many objects recorded in the videos under review had “baffled pilots, military and intelligence officials for their apparent defiance of known laws of flight and gravity”.

Fox News, for its part, can call upon the observations of former director of national intelligence John Ratcliffe. Those interested in the report would read of “objects that have been seen by Navy or Air Force pilots or have been picked up by satellite imagery that frankly engage in actions that are difficult to explain.”

The minds of former presidents are also being tickled with interest. “[W]hat is true, and I’m actually being serious here,” Barack Obama claimed in May on the Late Late Show With James Corden, “is that there are, there’s footage and records of objects in the skies, that we don’t know exactly what they are.  We can’t explain how they moved, their trajectory.”

A good number in the scientific and sceptical fraternity have been much cooler to this excitement.  “Recently,” a reproachful Andrew Franknoi, astronomer at the Fromm Institute for Lifelong Learning at the University of San Francisco observes, “there has been a flurry of misleading publicity about UFOs [based on military reports].  A sober examination of these claims reveals there is a lot less to them than first meets the eye.”

Science writer Mick West, who has viewed much UAP footage released by the US military, affords a good perspective for debunkers.  Most sightings can be put down to distortions in the image or problems in the instruments themselves.  For all that, he admitted that unidentified objects appearing “in restricted airspace” presents “a real problem that needs solving.”

UFO sceptic Robert Sheaffer sees no reason for a Damascene conversion.  “There are no aliens here on Earth, and so the government cannot ‘disclose’ what it does not have.”  With a measure of unflagging confidence, he suggested that government sources knew “less on the subject than our best civilian UFO investigators, not more.”

Another good reason for dampening any excitement around the UAP Report is the motivation of the Pentagon.  Instances of costly bungles are many, from the vast expenditure in such failed conflicts as Afghanistan to the $1.6 trillion debacle over the F-35.  Perhaps, writes Matt Stieb, the DOD “simply wants a flashy reason to demand more money.”

Reid, for his part, expects little but urges continued interest in funding ventures in UAP investigations.  “I don’t think the report is going to tell us too much.  I think they need to study it more and not just have one shot at it.”  Condon and his research team might have set him straight.

dissidentvoice.org

So in case you haven’t been keeping up it’s been pretty thoroughly confirmed that the US government’s highly anticipated UFO report due this month won’t contain any significant revelations and certainly won’t verify anyone’s ideas about these phenomena being extraterrestrial in origin, but it absolutely will contain fearmongering that UFOs could be evidence that the US has fallen dangerously behind Russian and Chinese technological development in the cold war arms race.

Unknown US officials have done a print media tour speaking to the press on condition of anonymity (of course), with first The New York Times reporting their statements about the contents of the UFO report and then CNN and The Washington Post. Each of these outlets reported the same thing: the US government doesn’t know what these things are but is very concerned they constitute evidence that Russia and/or China have somehow managed to technologically leapfrog US military development by light years. All three mention these two nations explicitly.

This narrative was then picked up by cable news, with MSNBC inviting former CIA director and defense secretary Leon Panetta on to explain to their audience that the US government should assume UFOs are Russian or Chinese in origin until that possibility has been exhausted.

“Is it your assumption that it is Russia or China testing some crazy technology that we somehow don’t have, or are we sort of over-assuming the abilities of China and Russia and that the only other explanation is that if it is not us ourselves then it is something otherworldly?” MSNBC’s Chuck Todd asked Panetta.

“I believe a lot of this stuff probably could be countries like Russia, like China, like others, who are using now drones, using the kind of sophisticated weaponry that could very well be involved in a lot of these sightings,” Panetta replied. “I think that’s the area to go to very frankly in order to identify what’s happening.”

“It sounds like you think we should exhaust that out, exhaust that hypothesis first before you start dealing with other hypotheses,” Todd said.

“Yeah, absolutely,” said Panetta, who for the record is every bit as much of a tyrannical, thuggish imperialist cold warrior as any other CIA director.

This UFOs-as-Chinese/Russian-threat narrative has quickly been picked up and thrust into mainstream orthodoxy by all the major branches of the mass media, from Fox News to Reuters to The Guardian to Today to the BBC to USA Today. Whenever you see the imperial media converge to this extent upon a single narrative, that’s the Official Narrative of the empire. We can expect to see a lot more of this going forward.

Interestingly, the only mass media segment I’ve seen on this topic since the New York Times story broke which doesn’t promote the UFOs-as-Chinese/Russian-threat narrative is a guest appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight by Lue Elizondo, the military intelligence veteran who got the ball rolling on the new UFO narrative which emerged in 2017. Elizondo goes out of his way to tell Carlson (who himself has been promoting the idea that UFOs may be a foreign adversarial threat with cartoonish melodrama) that there’s no way these could be Russian or Chinese aircraft.

Elizondo, who seems to favor the UFOs-as-extraterrestrials narrative, argues that there are extensive records of military encounters with these phenomena stretching back seventy years, which rules out China since it could barely keep its head above water back then and rules out Russia because it shared its UFO knowledge with the US after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

I don’t know what’s going on with that last bit; I see no reason to trust that an American spook is acting in good faith on such an easily manipulated topic, but it is entirely possible that Elizondo set out on this road out of a sincere desire for government disclosure on UFOs and is now trying to regain control of the narrative now that he sees the cold war arms race direction it has taken.

Chris Melon, another major player in the new UFO narrative, recently complained on Twitter that “some important information was not shared” with the public in the UFO report. So who knows, maybe the initiators of this new UFO narrative were acting in good faith and their efforts were just swiftly hijacked by forces beyond their control to advance preexisting cold war agendas.

Clearest indication yet that the Imminent UAP report to Congress was neutered by access problems, this from @ChristopherKMe4: “Undoubtedly, some important information was not shared, potentially for a variety of reasons. Congress should inquire about that” https://t.co/9jmZRDFdsH

— Ross Coulthart (@rosscoulthart) June 5, 2021

Regardless of whether or not that’s true, it was always inevitable that this strange new rabbit hole of UFOs going mainstream was going to lead to more cold war propaganda. I’ve been interacting a bit with the online UFO community for the first time ever, and it seems like they’re mostly decent people with good intentions and a lot of hope for this new governmental investigation. But it also seems like they’re largely a community which mostly just talks to itself and is only just beginning to meet the cold harsh light of day that is the impenetrable depravity of the US war machine.

The US government is pure swamp; you can’t use the swamp to fix the swamp. Democrats were never going to use a Special Counsel to remove Trump, Trump was never going to take down the Deep State, and the US government isn’t going to investigate itself and tell everyone that aliens are real.

If there are indeed extraterrestrials and they are indeed flying around our world in strange aircraft, we are more likely to get the truth about this from the extraterrestrials themselves than from the US military. The war machine only does killing and destruction; it’s not going to suddenly develop an interest in truth and transparency. The sooner UFO enthusiasts realize this the better.

caityjohnstone.medium.com

The New York Times has published an article on the contents of the hotly anticipated US government report on UFOs, as per usual based on statements of anonymous officials, and as per usual promoting narratives that are convenient for imperialists and war profiteers.

Together with one voice, the anonymous US officials and the “paper of record” which is supposed to scrutinize US officials assure us definitively that the mysterious aerial phenomena that have reportedly been witnessed by military personnel are certainly not any kind of secret US technology, but could totally be aliens and could definitely be a sign that the Russians or Chinese have severely lapped America’s lagging military development.

“The report determines that a vast majority of more than 120 incidents over the past two decades did not originate from any American military or other advanced U.S. government technology,” NYT was reportedly told by the officials. “That determination would appear to eliminate the possibility that Navy pilots who reported seeing unexplained aircraft might have encountered programs the government meant to keep secret.”

Oh well if the US government has ruled out secret US government weaponry programs, hot damn that’s good enough for me. Great journalism you guys.

One senior official said without hesitation that U.S. officials knew it was not American technology.

He said there was worry among intelligence and military officials that China or Russia could be experimenting with hypersonic technology https://t.co/bgYtohKC9O

— Jonathan Lemire (@JonLemire) June 4, 2021

“Intelligence officials believe at least some of the aerial phenomena could have been experimental technology from a rival power, most likely Russia or China,” the Times reports. “One senior official briefed on the intelligence said without hesitation that U.S. officials knew it was not American technology. He said there was worry among intelligence and military officials that China or Russia could be experimenting with hypersonic technology.”

“Russia has been investing heavily in hypersonics, believing the technology offers it the ability to evade American missile-defense technology,” NYT adds. “China has also developed hypersonic weaponry, and included it in military parades. If the phenomena were Chinese or Russian aircraft, officials said, that would suggest the two powers’ hypersonic research had far outpaced American military development.”

The article goes on to describe how the US military have been “unsettled” by aircraft moving and behaving in ways known technologies cannot explain. The implication of scary foreign adversaries having “outpaced American military development” to such an extent is of course that the US military is going to require a far bigger budget with far more intensive weapons development.

This would be the same New York Times that has consistently supported all of the US military’s devastating acts of mass murder around the world, by the way.

This won’t be the last time we hear the imperial media warning us that UFOs may be a sign of a frightening gap in technology leaving the US defenseless against far more powerful foreign foes, and they’ve already been priming us for it. Republican Rachel Maddow aka Tucker Carlson has been shrilly pushing this narrative for weeks now and demanding that the US government do more to address the fact that in alleged encounters with these aircraft, “our military was completely outmatched technologically by whatever these were.”

“UFOs, it turns out, are real, and whatever else they are, they’re a prima facie challenge to the United States military,” Carlson said on a segment last month. “They’re doing things the U.S. military does not allow, and they’re doing it with impunity. And they appear to be focused on the U.S. military.”

“Why isn’t the Pentagon more focused on this? It seems like a threat if there ever was one,” Carlson huffed.

In another segment Carlson had on military intelligence veteran Luis Elizondo, a leading figure in the steadily intensifying new UFO narrative which kicked off in 2017, claiming the aforementioned Senate report on the subject will reveal “an intelligence failure on the part of the US intel community on the level of 9/11.”

“If there’s a foreign adversary that can put a nuclear warhead within moments over Washington DC, okay, that’s a problem,” Elizondo told Carlson’s Fox News audience.

All this over some completely unverifiable testimony, and a few videos being confirmed by the Pentagon which can all be explained by easily identifiable mundane phenomena.

I can’t predict the future, but I won’t be at all surprised if we begin seeing this arms race angle become the dominant aspect of this UFO story in the coming months/years. It would certainly fit the pattern of the US war machine and mass media promoting completely unverifiable allegations about foreign governments to justify further cold war escalations.

In the early sixties President John F Kennedy falsely promoted the “missile gap” narrative, telling the public that the Soviet Union had surpassed the United States in nuclear weapons when he knew full well the US nuclear arsenal had always far surpassed the USSR’s in number, quality and deployment. Kennedy used this hawkish narrative to win an election and advance the largest peacetime expansion of US military power ever, leading directly to the events which gave rise to the Cuban Missile Crisis which came far closer to ending our world than most of us like to think about.

I have no idea what if anything is going on with these UFO phenomena, but I do know the world-threatening new cold war the US is waging against Russia and China is insane. There is no valid reason our planet’s dominant power structures cannot at the very least cease brandishing armageddon weapons at each other and begin collaborating toward a better world together.

Reject the propagandists and cold warriors, no matter how elaborate or bizarre their manipulations become. Keep an eye on these bastards, and help spread awareness of what they’re about.

caitlinjohnstone.substack.com

Back in 2019 I wrote an article titled “Things Are Only Going To Get Weirder”, and from Covid to the 2020 election to the steadily increasing regularity with which UFOs are now mentioned in the mainstream media, that has indeed proved to be the case.

Our ongoing slide into the abyss of infinite weirdness may have eclipsed this from your memory by now, but there was once a time not too long ago when frequent mainstream news stories about the possibility of extraterrestrial aircraft in our skies would not have sounded like something from real life. Lately it’s been a daily occurrence, and the president of the United States is now being asked about it at news conferences.

“President Obama says there is footage and records of objects in the skies — these unidentified aerial phenomena — and he says we don’t know exactly what they are. What do you think that it is?” a reporter asked Biden near the end of a joint press conference with South Korean President Moon Jae-in on Friday. Biden brushed off the question in his trademark almost-but-not-quite-lucid way with the comment “I would ask him again,” and hustled off the stage.

The question followed comments by Barack Obama earlier in the week on The Late Late Show with James Corden.

“But what is true, and I’m actually being serious here, is that there are, there’s footage and records of objects in the skies, that we don’t know exactly what they are, we can’t explain how they moved, their trajectory,” Obama said. “They did not have an easily explainable pattern. And so, you know I think that people still take seriously trying to investigate and figure out what that is.”

This follows a recent high-profile 60 Minutes special on UFOs (or Unidentified Aerial Phenomena as the cool kids are calling them nowadays), while the Pentagon continues to release “information” to the public about the existence of these encounters and the US Senate prepares to receive a mandated report on the matter next month.

A new Telegraph article titled “The Pentagon thinks UFOs may exist after all… and the evidence is growing” just trended on Twitter under the much more click-friendly title “The Pentagon strongly suspects aliens exist — and we’ve got the evidence”, and it ominously warns us that there is “a growing acceptance among defence officials around the world that there may indeed be something ‘out there’ — and that it might pose a genuine global security threat.”

These are just a few of the many, many mainstream news reports that have been pouring out lately on a subject which until recently was the sole purview of fringe “crackpots” and “conspiracy theorists”. Speaking of which, another weird thing we’re seeing is the roles between mainstream reporters and UFO enthusiasts being almost reversed: we now see MSNBC pundits openly musing that “UFO’s are clearly real? And have been hanging around our airspace for a while?”, while influential UFOlogists like Steven Greer are warning that this is a hoax by the US military to get a bunch of dangerous weapons into space.

I swear I have not fully devoted the necessary attention and cognitive energy to this topic but my peripheral sense is that UFO’s are clearly real? And have been hanging around our airspace for a while?

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) May 18, 2021

Dr. Steven Greer went live on Youtube today to address what is going on with attorney Daniel Sheehan and Luis Elizondo, and to discuss the false disclosure.

Watch & Sharehttps://t.co/Bbwoz8bWzn#DrStevenGreer #CE5 #ET #Extraterrestrial #CitizensDiplomacy #OneUniverseOnePeople

— Dr. Steven Greer (@DrStevenGreer) May 20, 2021

I’m not interested in being one more person on the internet claiming to know exactly what’s going on with all this, but I do know there’s an exactly zero percent chance that all this is coming out into the mainstream spotlight because the US war machine suddenly decided that the public has a right to know about a potentially dangerous security threat. The Pentagon did not spontaneously evolve an interest in radical transparency, and it is not coincidental that this is happening as we hurtle into a new multi-front cold war and an accompanying race to weaponize space.

As I’ve said before, the simplest and most likely explanation for all this UFO stuff is that the US military is manipulating us yet again to advance yet another strategic agenda. I’m not saying that’s necessarily the full story, but it’s definitely happening.

Again, there is a high-profile Senate report on this subject due next month, so we can expect the weird to get even weirder quite soon. This is happening as narrative manipulation gets even more ham-fisted and overt, with the empire having now graduated from just imprisoning inconvenient journalists to literally bombing inconvenient journalism offices.

The only prediction I’ll make out of all this mess is the same one I’ve been making: that things are going to keep getting weirder and weirder. Patterns are unpatterning, power structures are struggling to retain their foothold, humanity’s relationship with narrative is radically transforming, and we are not just plunging into the unknown but actively flooring the accelerator into it.

And, in a profoundly sick society with profoundly unhealthy patterns, that might just end up being a good thing.

caityjohnstone.medium.com

In January it was noted by a New York Times’ columnist that the nominated Secretary of the U.S. Defence Department, General Lloyd Austin, had “told the Senate he would keep a ‘laserlike focus’ on sharpening the country’s ‘competitive edge’ against China’s increasingly powerful military. Among other things, he called for new American strides in building ‘space-based platforms’ and repeatedly referred to space as a war-fighting domain.” This was not a surprising commitment by the about-to-be confirmed head of the Pentagon, which had already added the ominously named Space Force to its war-fighting assets.

Former White House incumbent, Donald Trump, announced creation of the Space Force in December 2019, stating it would be responsible for “the world’s newest war-fighting domain.” He considered that “Amid grave threats to our national security, American superiority in space is absolutely vital. We’re leading, but we’re not leading by enough, but very shortly we’ll be leading by a lot. The Space Force will help us deter aggression and control the ultimate high ground.” His explicit declaration that Washington is prepared to engage in warfare in yet another “domain” was not surprising, but it is regrettable that the Biden Administration shows no sign of reversing the intention to deploy weapons in space.

Russian reaction to establishment of the Space Force was President Putin’s observation that “The U.S. military-political leadership openly considers space as a military theatre and plans to conduct operations there” which is entirely against the letter and spirit of the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies, known generally as the Outer Space Treaty. In Article IV of this agreement of 1967, as recorded by the U.S. State Department, “States Parties to the Treaty undertake not to place in orbit around the Earth any objects carrying nuclear weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass destruction, install such weapons on celestial bodies, or station such weapons in outer space in any other manner.”

111 countries have agreed to abide by the treaty, and the 23 that have as yet failed to ratify it are unlikely to engage in space activities of any sort. The accord was a major step forward during the Cold War, and it was hoped that in later years its provisions might be extended and made more precise and binding, but this was not to be. The attraction of space as a war-fighting domain was too attractive to be ignored by Washington, and in 1982 the U.S. Air Force was directed by President Reagan to form Space Command, known as the “Guardians of the High Frontier” and it is not surprising that members of the new Space Force are also titled “Guardians”. The problem is the mission of these people includes “maturing the military doctrine for space power, and organizing space forces to present to our Combatant Commands.”

There has been no rebuttal of Trump’s definition of space as “the world’s new war-fighting domain,” and no modification of the Space Command Mission to “enhance warfighting readiness and lethality through the integration of space capabilities with the joint force, allies, and inter-agency partners in all domains.” And there is rejection of international moves to reduce the possibility of confrontation in space that could lead to outright conflict.

Unconditional U.S. opposition to peace in space was exemplified by its 2014 rejection of a UN General Assembly resolution on the prevention of an arms race in that domain. It is extremely difficult to see how any government could object to a proposal that calls “on all states, in particular those with major space capabilities, to contribute actively to the peaceful use of outer space, prevent an arms race there, and refrain from actions contrary to that objective.” But sure enough, although 178 countries consider this to be a good thing for the future of the world, and voted for the resolution, the United States and Israel abstained. It is verging on the incredible that these countries would not endorse a proposal that there should be peaceful use of outer space.

There was worse to come in the saga of space militarisation, for in November 2020 the First Committee of the UN General Assembly received no support from the U.S. for further initiatives that could guide the world away from the disaster that will befall us if there is no check on movement to “war-fighting” in space. Five resolutions were put forward concerning the furtherance of peace in space, and the U.S. voted against four of them, including the one that specified there should be “No first placement of weapons in outer space.” It seemed that the then U.S. administration actually favoured placement of weapons in space, and it is woeful that the Biden administration has not made it policy to cease militarisation of Trump’s “war-fighting domain”.

April 12 is the International Day of Human Space Flight, marking an important anniversary, not only of technical achievement but of a hoped-for dawn of international cooperation. The UN notes that in 1961 there was “the first human space flight, carried out by Yuri Gagarin, a Soviet citizen. This historic event opened the way for space exploration for the benefit of all humanity.” Formalisation of the anniversary was declared by a UN General Assembly stressing that celebration is merited because of international desire “to maintain outer space for peaceful purposes,” and the U.S. representative declared that the “cold war space race is over and we have all won”.

Unfortunately, the Cold War has been resumed by Washington, and the “space race” has been re-established by creation of the Space Force intended to “control the ultimate high ground.”

The fact that the International Day of Human Space Flight involves remembrance of a Russian astronaut is enough to keep the anniversary out of the U.S. mainstream media, and this affected reporting of an important statement made on that day last month.

Russia’s foreign minister Sergey Lavrov reiterated Moscow’s space policy by stating “We consistently believe that only guaranteed prevention of an arms race in space will make it possible to use it for creative purposes, for the benefit of the entire mankind. We call for negotiations on the development of an international legally binding instrument that would prohibit the deployment of any types of weapons there, as well as the use of force or the threat of force.”

The policy could not be clearer. And it was followed by a similar declaration by China’s Zhao Lijian that “We are calling on the international community to start negotiations and reach agreement on arms control in order to ensure space safety as soon as possible. China has always been in favour of preventing an arms race in space; it has been actively promoting negotiations on a legally binding agreement on space arms control jointly with Russia.”

On February 22, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a speech in Geneva that the U.S. should “engage all countries, including Russia and China, on developing standards and norms of responsible behaviour in outer space.”

Even if Blinken’s words fall well short of equating “responsible behaviour” with any indication of a commitment to refrain from placing weapons in space, he did conclude that “I pledge that the United States is here to work, cooperate, and once again use the Conference on Disarmament to create bold, innovative agreements to protect ourselves and each other.”

Well: get on with it, Secretary Blinken. Start talking with people rather than at them. You might even manage to convince your own Space Guardians that peace is better than war.

The world’s two wealthiest people are fighting over the moon, which just says so much about where our species is at right now.

Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are in a dispute with NASA over whose private spaace exploration corporation will get the $2.9 billion US government contract to return to the moon. I gleaned this annoying piece of information by way of an obnoxiously sycophantic Atlantic puff piece titled “Elon Musk Is Maybe, Actually, Strangely, Going to Do This Mars Thing”, subtitled “From his private Cape Canaveral, the billionaire is manifesting his own interplanetary reality — whatever the cost.”

The mainstream press cannot get enough of these two unfathomably wealthy plutocrats and their outspoken ambition to colonize space, with Musk advocating Mars colonization and Bezos preferring to ship us all offworld to live in giant Amazon space tubes. They love it for the same reason they love war and status quo politicians: it fits in beautifully with the capitalist world order.

Space colonization is largely a capitalist perception management op promoted by the likes of Musk and Bezos to strengthen the narrative that it’s okay to continue the world-raping global capitalist principle of infinite growth on a finite world because we can escape the catastrophic ecological consequences of that paradigm by fleeing to space.

“Ecocidal capitalism is fine, we’ll just go to space before it kills us!” is the message we’re all meant to absorb. And too many do. A large obstacle to waking people up to the existential crises we are facing as a species is the blind faith that technology will save us from the consequences of our mass-scale behavior, and therefore we don’t need to change. Which suits the world’s richest men perfectly.

But it’s a lie. Humanity will never colonize space. We are not separate or separable from this planet in that way.

Boca Chica, Texas, has changed so much since I visited in 2019. One big difference: Elon Musk has started calling it Starbase. https://t.co/HwGfs84J2U

— Marina Koren (@marinakoren) May 6, 2021

People believe we can just snip humans out of their ecosystemic context to colonize space for the same reason they believe in rugged individualism: they don’t grasp how inseparably interconnected each human is. With our ecosystem, and with our society. Separation is an illusion.

We are not separable from our ecosystem. We are our ecosystem. We’re so inseparably one with our ecosystem that we need to send astronauts into space with a little box full of it or they’ll die. Thinking a human can be snipped out of its ecosystemic context and permanently transported across the desert of space is like thinking you can snip a ripple out of a pond and place that ripple in a teacup on the other side of the world. The ripple is the pond. It’s not separate.

We know how to build rockets, and how to keep a human alive in space for a short time as long as they bring part of their ecosystem with them, but there’s no scientific evidence that we can live separately from our ecosystem, and we’ve barely begun exploring our ignorance here.

Many imagine we’ll have people living independently of Earth’s ecosystem within the next century or two, but there’s literally no basis for this assumption; we essentially know as much about how to keep a human being alive apart from Earth’s ecosystem as we knew ten thousand years ago. Our Biosphere attempts to create a closed-Earth system were as clueless and silly as monkeys poking around at a supercomputer, and that was right here on our home planet.

The myriad ways in which we are connected with the ecosystemic context in which we evolved boggle the mind. Science is barely even beginning to explore those connections. There are tons we know about, but that’s just scratching the surface. We don’t know how much we don’t know. We’re only barely beginning to understand our own gut bacteria, and how those mini-ecosystems relate to our health. Those mini-ecosystems have their own relationships with our greater ecosystem. We know next to nothing about any of this. Most of the picture is missing.

And Elon says he’s going to ship humans to live on Mars?? What, because we have the technology to get there? Our bodies might get there, sure, but the whole staying alive part is a riddle that science is not even the tiniest fraction of a percentile close to solving.

Musk likes to argue that we must become a “multi-planetary species” because if an asteroid strikes Earth or we wipe ourselves out in a nuclear war, that’s it for our species. Our survival as a species, he argues, depends on colonizing other planets.

This is false and toxic thinking, because it will not happen. Our survival does not depend on our becoming a multi-planetary species, our survival depends on collectively waking up and learning to collaborate with each other and with our ecosystem. We’ve got an infinitely better chance of developing the technology to deal with an asteroid than we do of developing technology that will allow us to colonize space, and if we can transcend our self-destructive patterning the threat of nuclear war will be neutralized by our no longer being crazy enough to keep weapons around that make it a possibility.

Some argue for the possibility of terraforming planets like Mars to give them Earth-like ecosystems, but terraforming runs into the same problem: not just humans but all organisms are dependent on Earth’s ecosystem for survival. You couldn’t begin creating an Earth-like ecosystem without snipping out all the organisms which give rise to it. This can’t be done. A tree can’t be snipped out of its unfathomably interconnected ecosystemic context any more than a human can. To terraform you need trees and a near-infinity of other ecosystemic building blocks, none of which are separable from their terrestrial ecosystemic context.

We’re just going to have to make this Earth thing work. People assume space colonization is part of our future primarily because science fiction takes this as a given. But science fiction is just that: fiction, written to entertain and appeal to the same ego which imagines it is separate from the rest of the world. It’s an illusory premise.

People think Capitalism is the best we can do, but I can’t think of any other form of society that would intentionally destroy the planet because it was more profitable to do so.

— Existential Comics (@existentialcoms) December 16, 2017

We’re not going to rocket ship our way out of this mess. We’re not going to be able to keep doing things the way we are doing them. The “growth for its own sake” ideology that Musk and Bezos have dedicated their lives to embodying is, as Edward Abbey put it, the ideology of a cancer cell. Such an ideology is unsustainable. We’re going to have to change.

“I must change” is always the first possibility that an ego rules out when evaluating a dilemma, and it’s the same ego which says we are separate individuals, and it’s the same ego which created our dilemma in the first place. But we must change. We must transcend the ego.

That’s always the last thing anyone wants to hear, that we need to change, but it’s true. We’ll either collectively change our minds in a way that enables us to drastically shift the way we operate on this planet, or we’ll go extinct. It is evolve or die time. We’ll either make it or we won’t.

Space will not save us, and we will never colonize it. We can explore space, but it will be done via satellites and other tech, not by living organisms. Our astronauts have up until this point been nothing more than glorified scuba divers, entirely dependent on boxes of Earth’s ecosystem, no more independent from that ecosystem than someone holding their breath. This will remain the case.

Hell, forget colonizing space, try colonizing part of the Sahara Desert. Get everything you need, then seal yourselves in a bubble completely separate from the rest of the ecosystem. Even on Earth, with many of the terrestrial connection factors still intact, you will fail relatively quickly.

Such a project isn’t even on Musk’s radar, which shows his pet space project is really about making money and justifying an economic/political paradigm which will necessarily destroy our ecosystem. It’s justifying his cancer cell ideology, proving Robert Heinlein correct when he said, “Man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal.”

They work to make it appear that we’ve got some other option than to end our ecocidal trajectory and all the systems which feed into it, because otherwise it just looks like they’re a bunch of psychopaths burning an entire world and throwing its ashes into a gaping hole their hearts that can never be filled. If space colonization isn’t possible, then the people who are destroying our environment for money are just deranged lunatics who must be stopped at all cost.

But they are. And we must.

This is our home. It is our only home. I really, really wish we could stop treating it like a womb we plan on leaving or our parents’ house we plan on moving out of. There is nowhere else to go. This is it.

The earth is not some temporary transit station. We – the earth. We are inseparable from it. We are all indigenous terrestrials. We need to stop trying to move out, and start moving in.

It’s so, so beautiful here. We should be willing to change to keep it alive, like we would if a loved one’s life depended on our changing our behavior. Because that really is the case. I hope we see this before it’s too late.

caityjohnstone.medium.com