You don't have to come from one of the world's current superpowers to be consumed with hubris: you only have to have been a global powerhouse a few hundred years back to still strut like a skygod.
Take the Dutch - please - take the Dutch !
A group calling itself MARS ONE and headed by a Dutchman with a Masters in Science called Bas Lansdorp, is confident it can have a tiny colony of Dutch men on Mars permanently by 2023, 11 tiny earth-years from now.
The Dutch never tire in boasting that they reclaimed much of their land back from the ocean.
(Albeit before it started rising and storming thanks to global warming).
So they like to fancy themselves as past-masters at this terra-forming stuff.
Terra-forming : aka flying safely to Mars or Venus or Jupiter's moons and then turning them into Earth 2.0 , bit by extremely expensive bit.
Biggest problem is this extended experiment in drinking your own kool aid ?
We humanoids have had great difficulty in getting non-human-bearing spaceships to make soft (non-smashed-up) landings on Mars, despite almost 50 years of trying.
It's unique combo of location in the Solar System, thin atmosphere and lowered gravity make the methods that work elsewhere quite unsuccessful.
But admitably, it is a guilt free way for some Dutchmen to slide away from Shell Oil's part in creating global warming : toss Earth 1.0 aside like a used condom, used trophy wife or unwanted Christmas pet, 'light out to the territories' and start again.
Every perpetual teenage boy's dream : eternal freedom without responsibility....
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Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...
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