Replacing Mother Nature : Synthetic Autarky and other male fantasies

Making clone babies in test tubes without any woman being involved is not a lot different than making silk in a test tube without Mother Nature being involved.

Investigate a tiny little bit and you soon see that Males/Men/Guys are almost always the push behind these schemes and one always wonders if their overt reasons for pursuing these aims are the actual and full truth.

For even those men most opposed to feminism never speak of Father Nature or Father Earth -- their unconscious speech betrays that they still see the fecund plentitude of the Earth's natural world being somewhat more female than male in orientation.

But a future new human colony set up on the sterile stone surface of Mars - powered totally by nucleosynthesis (fusion power) and totally fed and clothed by the products of chemical synthesis (itself powered by fusion energy) -  could run quite well without Mother Nature, maybe even without women.

Synthetic Autarky : bye bye women 

Autarky means self sufficiency -- in this case, a male self sufficiency, brought about by Man's ability to synthesis everything and anything Mother Nature can do by the manipulating of the smallest known bits of matter and energy into existing and new materials.

This vaseline and tissue powered male scientific fantasy is quite accurately ? amusingly ? known as Hard Science Fiction --- and emerged not long after Rutherford and Soddy atomically 'transformed' some elements in Montreal back in the first decade of the last century.

Like racism , it is far more hidden under post war post modernity but it has never really gone away.

Mars colonies, Fusion, Geo-engineering, Terraforming - they are all examples of grownup men putting youthful male fantasies into reality with the help of fawning male newspaper journalists and male politicians offering up lots of female taxpayers' money...

Researchers - not data - change

The historical ("primary") documents that fuel this blog don't change - can't change - frozen in time from the Manhattan of 75 years ago.

But my contemporary understanding of them continues to change, evolve, regress, whatever.

For a long time I saw today's bad climate change deniers as the best single contemporary example of the once widespread pre-war belief that denied any limits to Man's ability to control Mother Nature.

But these sort of deniers were actually the weak case.

They were the negative option : these deniers weren't actually actively claiming to control Nature, merely weakly claiming that they were sure another Manhattan nuclear Project, done by others, could quickly clear up any weather issues arising from normal human activity.

It all starts with an unrealistic faith in Synthetic Autarky

But all this fitted uneasily with my main contentions - that the overwhelming pre-war faith in "synthetic autarky" lead to "plenticidal indifference" and hence ethnicities and species extinction.

I eventually realized that nucleosynthesis ("fusion power"), geo-engineering/terra-forming and the active efforts to start human society again on a sterile Mars were the more active contemporary expressions of this pre-war fantasy.

And that the horrific fallout from our tolerance of all these bizarre efforts was a collective plenticidal indifference that has led us to today's runaway (Sixth) Mass Extinctions.

I am not sure there are even a handful of "Extinction Denier" bloggers lurking about  --- rather there are about seven billion of us Extinction Tolerators reading about another beetle species gone extinct, sighing for a moment then resuming our daily lives.

After all, pace J B S Haldane , who - besides God - really wants 150,000 distinctly odd species of beetles anyway ???/

The One Percent's solution : the ultimate 'gated community' is the billionaires' spaceship

Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins' best-selling series entitled LEFT BEHIND is a fascinating read.

It details how a secretive group of  avowedly secular-minded billionaires from the Silicon Valley 'pretend' to fund a project to mine asteroids.

Actually it is all to help terraform Mars into Earth 2.0 when our planet, the original Earth 1.0 , finally flatlines.

In fact the project is secretly designed to "Rapture" the saving remnant, (the Chosen Ones) of the Protestant Race to the new Earth, in a silver seed spaceship that becomes, defacto, the ultimate "gated community".

This is because the price for travelling to Mars (sorry Earth 2.0Earth 1.0%) and successfully pioneering there will run into tens of millions of dollars per person.

It is true that no where in the Protestants' Bible (or in the Christian/Jewish or Moslem Bible for that matter) does God instruct Man to abandon Earth and go off and evangelize slash rape the rest of the Universe.

But what Fundamentalist actually knows their Bible, anyway?

All that Word of God stuff  just gets in the way of the ministerial hubris.

Forget the Bible (the new right protestants already have). Feel the width : think of the electoral impact !

All white, all rich, all Protestant : there won't be any need for any more pesky elections on the new Earth 1.0%, not when everyone there already votes Republican.

A cold and hostile chunk of dead hard rock that was originally named the "RED" planet, after all ; you can just tell that this is the true galactic home of the Greedy_Old_Party.......