Sixth Extinction is a Guy Thing

Because 'Man' (with-a-penis) faces a stark existential choice over the Sixth Extinction : attempt autarky without Mother Nature or embrace commensality with Mother Nature...

Synthesize anything, perfectly

The goal of modern scientism era synthesists was not to synthesize everything : in their minds 'everything' already existed : way too much of 'everything' ---- and none of it perfect.

They hoped instead, for example, to synthesize just one - perfect - species of the beetle and then plenticide all of God's 150,000 (imperfect) beetle species, now rendered totally redundant.

The 1940s era synthesists simply could not conceive of a universe so physically diverse, so dynamic and so suddenly changeable that only a great variety of species and life forms would be ensure that the Earth's life-sustaining nutrient cycles could keep going.

For an atmosphere of a sort might survive if every single life form on Earth perished -- but it would eventually not contain enough oxygen to keep humans alive, assuming we suddenly decided to drift back here from our wonderful new underground homes on Mars.

Modern scientism's synthetic autarky was really a form of unconscious and collective human suicide.

We humans can only survive if we accept - like it or not - that we are bound together in involuntary but open commensality with all other lifeforms on Lifeboat Earth ...

Synthetic Autarky : Patenting the Bomb

For centuries, nominal democracies like America and Britain have yearned to control a war-stopping super-weapon that will give them a patent monopoly against others' aggression.

A super-weapon that they alone control because they have (a) kept it top secret and (b) hold all the patents on it.

Gosh, we might just as well be talking about the actual A-Bomb !

Now the 'top secret' bit we get - totally.

But why then also seek patents over the atomic bomb's components and production as well ?

One might argue that as capitalistically minded people, the American elites knew that even in free market economies, patent holders were totally free to deny licenses to some firms or nations while offering them to others.

This would allow the iron fist of the new American totalitarian political cum military monopoly on this world-destroying atomic bomb to appear softened by the velvet glove of the traditional free market patent monopoly process.

This is part of the picture - true - but only part of it.

We might ask ourselves why were entrepreneurs, businesses and governments around the world so interested in all three forms of synthesis (chemical, physical and biological) in the heyday of the Modernity period ?

Philosophically, I might argue that we can't really invent anything physical that isn't also fully natural - we can only copyright ideas inside our heads that defy natural laws.

So if everything we synthesis is really a variant on already existing natural materials or processes - why bother ?

The publicly stated reason is that the newly synthesized variant has been made better, cheaper, faster.

The real - private - reason is that Mother Nature, is by definition, all PD (Public Domain).

Anyone and all nations can turn rubber tree sap into some sort of tire.

There is no way to create a cartel or monopoly on rubber plants for very long, because someone always ends up slipping out a few seeds or stems out past the national border guards and then starts growing rubber plants a continent away.

But Man-made synthesis allows firms (and above all nations) to erect patentable synthetic autarkical monopolies against other firms and nations and even against Mother Nature herself.

So, on the chemical front, German chemists avoided having to rely on overseas suppliers' natural guano to make fertilizer or explosives during WWI - inventing a synthetic way to fix nitrogen instead.

During the interwar years, these same chemists hoped to perfect methods to turn abundant German coal, water and air into synthetic rubber, petroleum, wood and steel substituting plastics, fabrics and medicines - the list of possibilities went on and on.

Equally hard at work on the biological front, German eugenic experts (and murderous dysgenic experts) were trying to convert the raw natural population of Germany into a synthetic Aryan race - pure, perfect, tough, resistant, resilient.

In the area of physics, German atom-smashers hoped to bust atoms of raw natural elements common in Germany into the atoms of scarce and precious elements not common in Germany.

If we forget the traditional view of a man-made patent as something that is invariantly made public when confirmed, and drill down deeper, we see it is just an inherent monopoly that needn't be made public at all.

Because when Mother Nature made rubber tree sap strong enough to work as tires, she did so world-wide : no monopoly is possible in her world as long as seeds exist along with the winds to blow them hither and yon.

But man-made objects can be synthesized inside tightly guarded buildings and kept under wraps far longer than wild rubber plants springing up here there and everywhere in tropical forests.

Man-made synthetics needn't make all the natural variants of natural materials : why bother to synthesize the body excretions of 149,999 species of beetles when only one beetle species actually produces a life-saving drug in those excretions ?

In fact, why bother keeping any of the 150,000 species of beetle alive, period, when they are only a competitor for raw materials human chemists need to synthesis some more scientific wonders ?

Why bother to live in open commensality with all the messy plentitude of Mother Nature's beings as they compete with us human synthesizers over the earth's scarce natural raw elements ?

Patentable synthetic autarkic monopoly (Modernity in a long phrase) is thus inherently plenticidal : it sees no real need for keeping anything around in the natural world beyond a few raw basic elements.

Above all, it will seek the single simple raw element required for atom-smashing-together nuclear fusion synthesis to work : basically just hydrogen.

Easy then to imagine some future modernity-oriented new human colony on some vast hydrogen gas planet.

Outside is nothing but this vast ball of natural hydrogen gas but inside the plastic bubble is a world of gaudy artificially coloured materials recreating a simulacrum of whatever the human mind and the human chemist can invent.

Too bad about the pesky gravity three times as strong as on Earth - but the DNA boffins are onto it - soon they will perfect a synthetic new body for all these former earthlings....

Scientism's powerful ability to unite the polar opposites of CUT and RUN

     Scientism is the unbreakable faith belief that human mindpower will inevitably triumph over anything mere Nature can throw up.
     While its days of unquestioned total hegemony was only between 1875 and 1965, it still dominates the political and economic classes and is successfully winning back intellectual hegemony among the environmentalist classes, through the back door of hard core SF films and books.

   Scientism currently posed the gravest threat to the survival of intelligent life* on this planet.
   Much of Scientism's (aka High Modernity) power lies in its awesome ability to combine chalk and cheese / water and oil.
   Technological autarky is a static or vertical activity.
    It claims that inside the 1939 borders of The Third Reich ( or of any nation on earth) lies all the elements needed for an utopia to make its people powerful and prosperous.
    Just let the chemists and atomic physicists loose with their powers of fundamental transformation upon the atoms of rock, water and air and they will create synthetic food, metals and even life itself.
   By contrast, Technological imperialism offers up a horizontal and dynamic utopia ---- this, the current Earth 1.0, and all the other Earths in the universe allow us to go on consuming and depleting and destroying local resources and natural habitat willy nilly, without fear of ever killing the Golden Geese that lays these golden eggs.
   One advocates CUT : consuming not just all the biomass but even the rocks of a particular place to satisfy humanity's whims.
   But it hasn't always worked out in practise.
   So the RUN option (after first DENYING) comes to the fore: abandon the failed autarky to try it again in a different virgin frontier - say the wheat and oil lands of the Ukraine and Russia.
  The history of the Third Reich, 1933-1945, shows the Nazis did in fact follow this two step approach of High Modernity - carrying out home-grown autarky and imperial expansion into others lands.
   What united their efforts, without the Nazis suffering from the strain of intellectual inconsistency, was the over-riding Scientism belief in the dynamic and infinitely flexible ability of the human will to triumph against mere Matter by either using CUT techniques or RUN techniques.
   In the winter of 1940-1941, I'd say that the 'Matter' of a Russian Winter settled that hash pretty quickly !
   But unfortunately, the newest denier movement, birthed in that 'Mayberry sort of town', Wichita Kansas, has learned nothing and is repeating all the old Scientism mistakes and disasters that the Nazis inflicted on the world in 1939-1945....

* Admittedly, like the Higgs boson, there is still no actual proof that there  IS  intelligent life on Earth....

Asteroid miners DENY 'global commensality'

Michael Marshall

Is planet earth our best, most attractive, our least expensive (& only) lifeboat ?

Will we humans survive best by living within limits, the limits set by the need for us to accept that other life on earth has a right to be there too - in part because they keep us alive ?

Do we humans not live, in effect, on microbe poop - just as they in turn live, in part, off human poop ?

Does not all life on earth survive by living off each other's poop - dining together at one table,  via 'global commensality' in fact ?

Asteroid miners deny all this.

All that humans really need to survive and flourish in their minds  is 'minerals and mental agility' .

Mineral & Mental Autarky.

Listen up lower-archy, here is what the higher-archy is planning:

Wealthy DENIERS aren't putting their heads in the sands over our ecological crisis: they are busy putting them into spaceships, aimed far far away from our messy problems.

The 1% is busy abandoning the 99% to  our fates....