Grounded on the Mothership

Earlier this week as MB and I walked through our mostly quiet town of Brunswick, Maine we saw colorful signs of spring popping out of the ground.  Then on Thursday and Friday we were gifted with a beautiful couple of inches of large snowflakes that graced the trees seen from our apartment windows.  Our quiet town became even more still.  Nature has that wonderful ability to hush the noisy human race.

Lately, during this virus epidemic shutdown, I've come to wonder if our Mother Earth might just be intervening to slap her unruly children up side the head in order to get our attention.  We are so busy with this and that, rushing about destroying this lovely planet, that most hardly even notice what harm we collectively cause.

Growth has become almost a 'sacred word' to the capitalists who have no thought or concern about what our industrial society is doing to the mothership.  They press on, blinded by their love for the dollar bill, unable to feel our spiritual connection to this tiny spinning orb that gives us life.  In fact, many of them are rushing forward with great zeal to move our 'civilization' into the heavens where they believe they can promote limitless growth and at the same time extract massive profits from the unregulated gold rush that awaits them.

This sickness of spirit blinds many.  Yesterday I put Will Griffin's new video for the Global Network (see just below) on the Facebook page of The Mars Society.  Almost immediately more than 30 comments were posted boasting about the profits to be made from mining the sky.  They laughed at our concern about repeatedly launching nuclear devices into space.  Several commentors claimed that 'this time' human civilization would get it right and create an almost perfect world in the space colonies they envision.

I responded, not with anger, to several of the commenters reminding them about past space nuclear accidents by the US and Russia (see here), about space junk that now circles our planet, and that unless our consciousness changes before we rush headlong into space we will be poised to carry the 'bad seed' of greed, war, and environmental degradation with us into the heavens.

This was just too much and after several hours of this back-and-forth on their Fazebook page my entry was removed.  When I checked out the link that gave the reason for removal it said the following:

Group Rules That Were Violated: Be relevant
Please post only articles, photos, videos, graphics, etc. that involve Mars exploration and planning for human missions. Off topic or irrelevant posts will be removed.

Of course my post was not at all 'Off topic' nor was it irrelevant.  My only transgression was that I had challenged them to consider what kind of seed they intend to carry into space.  But in an organization where the president is a Lockheed Martin executive, no such friendly discussion can be allowed.  Space capitalism, mining the sky, rejecting the United Nations Moon and Outer Space Treaties, Trump's 'Space Force', questioning the use of nukes in space - none of this can be allowed to be discussed.

As unemployment accelerates across the US, and our national economy teeters toward full collapse, one must wonder how Washington could imagine spending hundreds of billions of needed dollars on space colonization projects while doctors and nurses go without sufficient resources to deal with the growing virus across the land.

We know that the aerospace industry understands that they must come up with a 'dedicated funding source' to pay for their expensive vision to bring the 'free market' into the heavens - despite the UN's call to make space 'the province of all humankind'.  Thus they've set their sites on those pesky 'entitlement programs' for defunding - which are Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and what little is left of the social safety net.  These are the programs the space colonization industry has sent their lobbyists to Washington to secure on their behalf. (I know this because the plan was outlined in an editorial years ago inside the industry publication called Space News.)

Thus it should not come as any surprise to me that my post on The Mars Society page was removed.  Many years ago while on a speaking tour of Southern California I was reading an article in the Los Angeles Times about the Mars Society and their grand vision.  I will never forget the quote from the president of the club.  It read:  'The Earth is a rotting, stinking, dying planet.  We must terraform [make green with life] Mars and move our civilization there.'

Imagine the cost to turn Mars into a beautiful planet full of life - like our Earth mothership.  If that is even possible.  It is indeed a sickness of spirit.

Bruce