People who would consider the idea of living in the Gobi Desert intolerable – where, an estate agent might point out, there is oxygen, radiation-screening, atmospheric pressure and 1 g of gravity – rhapsodise about living on Mars. People who imagine that human life on Earth will end because of power and greed and oppression imagine that we will be able to escape these forces in pressure vessels controlled by technicians, in which we would be trapped like tadpoles in a jamjar. If space colonisation is impossible today – when Richard Branson, for all his billions, cannot even propel people safely past the atmosphere – how will it look in a world that has fallen so far into disaster that leaving it for a lifeless, airless lump of rock would be perceived as a good option? We would be lucky in these circumstances to possess the wherewithal to make bricks. ....This [is] a religious impulse... Just as it is easier to pray for life after death than it is to confront oppression, this fantasy permits us to escape the complexities of life on Earth for a starlit wonderland beyond politics. ... Technological optimism and political defeatism: this is a formula for the deferment of hard choices to an ever receding netherland of life after planetary death. No wonder it is popular. Barry Knob
Posted on: Wed, 12 Nov 2014 15:09:15 +0000
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