It is rather discouraging to look at the overriding negative and bitter attitudes of many people who are vehemently against the very idea of humanity becoming a spacefaring species. They say that we are abandoning Earth at its most dire need and that we need to “fix” it before we “waste” resources on anything so nasty and self cantered.

But our planet isn’t broken.

They can only see the world as the worst it could be, not as it actually is. They do their patron saint, Thomas Malthus, proud. A century and a half of epic failure to be right on anything and they still keep saying that the world is ending.

They are the same people that a hundred and fifty years ago believed that the cities could never get any bigger because there was no foreseeable way to dispose of all the horse excrement that was a completely unavoidable byproduct of the only possible way to transport people inside a metropolitan area. They also knew for a fact that long distance transportation was not sustainable since we were obviously going to run out of wood for railway ties. It was also completely self evident that if the world population were to ever hit two billion, this could never last more than a decade or two before an epidemic of smallpox wiped out almost everyone.

These people live in a horrible, nasty, ugly world… which thankfully has no real connection to the world we actually live in.

There is some minor warming that our climatologists think may be attributable in some small part to human activity… so they immediately jump to the conclusion that the world is going to be destroyed and it is all our fault? Of course there is climate change! What did you expect, climate stasis? The world will warm or the world will cool, now guess which one is worse… I’ll give you a hint, it isn’t the one they are demanding we bankrupt ourselves over. The earth has been much warmer in the past than the AGW alarmist’s “worst” case scenario… they used to call these warmer periods the global optimum because they were the periods of greatest abundance for life on the planet. That was before they started contorting reality to fit computer models and a need for crisis.

The world population growth rate is slowing and will probably stabilize within a couple generations at a level that is sustainable for even the current technology- let alone for what forty years of technological innovation will bring. If the free market is allowed to give cheap energy and abundant food to the developing world, this will probably cause the population to dip back below where it is now. Where social and economic freedom reign, people have smaller families.

The developed world is less polluted than it was fifty years ago and unless the enemies of progress stop the spread of social and economic freedom, those engines of creation will allow the rest of the world to follow suit. When your family’s stomachs are full and there is a roof over their heads, you can afford to worry about the pollution that your job creates. It is almost a certainty that our children and grandchildren will live in a cleaner world than we have.

Of course there is there work to be done. One of the more pressing problems is potable water; but like most of our problems, abundant and cheap energy can fix that. What cannot fix it is expensive “green” energy or artificially expensive carbon based energy.

I have to start creating some updated graphics that can be put into the Creative Commons so the we don’t have to rely on antique images from NASA.

I know that it will make these people very angry and resentful but I’m sorry to give them the bad news…

Planet Earth will be just fine.

All of which is irrelevant to the importance of opening space. Becoming a spacefaring species is the most important thing that it is possible for us to do. Crawling out of the primordial ooze and evolving the intellect that can actually give value properties to things like the environment of planet Earth is all well and good but if we stifle ourselves in this one tiny bastion of life, all life as we know it is a dead end.

There are men and women all over the planet that are working to give us a grand and magnificent future… for both those who stay in the cradle and those who venture out. It is sad but inevitable that people mired in unfounded despair will bitch and moan the entire time.

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