Space colonization - what we can and can't do

Is space colonization possible?

Let us set aside opinions as to the usefulness of such a venture for a for a brief spell, and ponder as to whether it is even an endeavor our stage of civilization is capable of.
Sometimes it is instructive to delve into our historical past and see if one can draw parallels with deeds performed by our ancestors, comparing them to our own experiences with the caveat that there may be similarities, but also strong differences.

There they stand, constructed some 4800 years ago. The Great Pyramid complex on the Giza plateau is truly a breath-taking monolithic, remarkable structure. It is hard to comprehend that the individuals who created this did so at the very dawn of their civilization, during the First Dynasty. To be sure, there were pyramids constructed in the Middle Kingdom and during the Late Period, but we only know where these stood. They are gone because, compared to the earlier structures, these did not stand up to the test of time.

For emphasis, it is worth mentioning again that these structures are truly breath-taking and if you have not had the privilege of seeing them, the repetition of emphasis is not a waste. One can stand in gob-smacked awe staring at these over-sized monoliths, trying to wrap one's mind around the notion that the early Egyptians overcome the organizational, technological and architectural hurdles necessary for these structures to come into being.
Carving limestone with bronze age technology, dressing red granite on an elaborate scale. Persuading and organizing the construction could only have been have been a political and logistical masterpiece.
Most archeologists agree that the early pyramids were not the result of slave labor, the quality of the construction alone suggests otherwise. The exactitude of measurements of these grand-scale Giza structures is such that the error could be covered up with a thumb, well beyond any specifications expected of 21st Century construction.
The Great Pyramid incorporates Pi and a unit of measurement based of the circumference of the Earth, discoveries what were until relatively recently, attributed to the classical Greeks some 2,300 years later.
Although there is disagreement amongst archaeologists, this structure seems to have served no overt practical purpose. The funerary monument concept is in dispute because no trace of bodies were ever found inside them, apart from an intrusion burial from a later age in the smallest one. *

Now, consider the overall resources available to these ancient Egyptians at the dawn of their civilization, to the immense technological, scientific and logistical capabilities we can marshal today.

...Can you really tell me, in all sincerity, that we can't colonize space?

* "Secrets of the Great Pyramid" by Peter Tompkins.

WikiWar: Why Governments and Corporations will lose

Since WikiLeaks proprietor Julian Assange was arrested in Britain on the thinnest pretext, the Wikileaks battle, has started to rage. By Wednesday evening Mastercard.com was brought down, then Visa.com. "Operation Payback" - a loose affiliation of cyber revolutionaries - had already crashed the Swedish prosecutors website and the Swiss bank that had kicked Wikileaks off its account. PayPal, Amazon and a host of other clueless corporations and politicians have found their websites either under siege or brought down.

US State Department, Swedish judicial system, British judicial system. All swayed by a cadre of heavy-handed back-door diplomats. It is amazing to see the arrogance - and ignorance - of these powers-that-be. With no attempt at due process of law, these institutions sucked up to their puppeteers and did their dark bidding - and the indicted corporations that assisted in this travesty are now paying the bitter price by losing what they crave the most: money, profits.

Incredible as it may seem, the nature of the internet befuddles them, they have demonstrated to all that they have no clue of the consequences that will inevitably follow in the path of their ill thought out and shameful actions.

And this is amazing, because for most of us, there could never be a more clear-cut, black & white separation of sides: The hidden lies, the money, the power aligned against revelations of truth. It is simply a war between subterfuge and transparency.

Never before has the beast been so blatantly forced to show its ugly head, and this time - this time, the good guys are going to win.

Compounding their mistakes, The US State Department will probably attempt to have Wikileaks branded as a terrorist organization, which will only pour oil on an already furious fire that will ultimately consume the individuals involved in this shameful cover-up.

Why will the forces of of evil fail?

Because many of the techies and code monkeys who are (under)paid by these corporations and institutions have no loyalty, a behavior weaned out of them by lower wages, fewer benefits. Or they are simply contract laborers not beholden to their masters. Can you can guess what a LOT of these good folks do when they get home and switch on their PC's? That's right - they bite the hand that feeds (bleeds) them. They fly to aid Operation Payback, they help Wilileaks. And they do this because they know who the good guys are and who the bad guys are. If you have seen "Fight Club", you know what I mean. There is simply NO WAY the corporations can insulatee themselves from a determined attack by the athackers, none.

The scales of battle are already tipping in the favor of the rebels, even the old-fashioned media machine is starting to realize this too. And beginning to smell blood.

Consequently, the ONLY way the secretive governments and their lackey cooperations could win at this point, is to close down the internet, NOW - and they can't do that because it is the corporatist life blood - the corporations are addicted to the torrents of MONEY the internet procures for them.

Eventually, they will get fed up with and lose tolerance for these government officials who are ruining their profit margins and there will be a little quiet power struggle. The corporations will order the statesmen to back off.

Almost overnight, the new World Order has become the Old World order, and it is happening almost as fast as I can write this.
The end result is inevitable. Meet the new boss - as if we didn't know it all along. A subtle change of scene - you won't find it announced in the news (well, perhaps Wikileaks.) The the corporations will be the masters, and the nation-states do their bidding. Some would say this has already happed, but after this debacle there can be no doubt. And I suppose we should feel good about that, because after all, according to the US Supreme Court, corporations are people too.
In the aftermath of this stream of lies and subterfuge there will be endless boards of inquiry in a plethora of varied nations. They will all want to know what diplomats pulled which switches, and when they did it. There will be scapegoats, there will be a reckoning of sorts.

- And then the corporations are going to have to figure out how to cut the balls off the hatackers who can be at their throats at ANY time.

So - what comes next is anybody's guess.

The Retardation of Space Travel

...and its Consequences

In the light of mankind’s seemingly natural escalation of exploration and technological progress, the last forty years marks the non-appearance of giant white elephant which few seem to acknowledge or comment on much: How has it come about that Mankind’s thirst for new frontiers has come to a screeching halt?

Consider the time-line comparison below:

1909 - 1949 Forty years of accelerated expansion In 1909, Luis Bleriot crosses the English Channel in his monoplane. 1919, manned non-stop flight from New York to California 1929, first round the World flight is achieved. 1939, first successful manned flight of a jet plane. 1949, first manned non-stop flight around the World. Summary: From the ground hopping to non-stop circumnavigation of our planet in 40 years.

1969 - 2009 Forty years with no significant expansion In 1969, manned space craft lands on the moon. 1979 the manned Space Shuttle nears completion. 1989, unmanned launch of the Galileo spacecraft. 1999, Manned Space Station, 200 miles above the Earth. 2009 sees the beginning phase-out of the Space Shuttle. There is no replacement. Summary: Regressing from the Moon to orbiting a scant 200 miles above the Earth.

In the first seven decades of the last century, our ability to rapidly cover large distances went from barely getting off the ground to flying non-stop around the World. This breath-taking pace of technological advancement culminated in placing a man on the Moon, 76 years after the first tenuous leaps into the air at Kitty Hawk.
The next forty years, from 1969 to 2009 one could best describe manned expansion into space as exceedingly retarded. Forty years after Mankind landed on the moon, all we have achieved is a tenuous foothold in space, the barely funded Space Station, orbiting a scant 200 miles above the Earth. Even more disturbing, the Space Shuttle, which was America’s only versatile space-going vehicle, is about to be scrapped, with no foreseeable replacement.
In 1967, the imagery in Arthur C. Clarke’s “2001 Space Odyssey” movie did not seem far-fetched. Man was due to land on the moon in a couple of years, and extrapolating from the past meteoric rise of aeronautics, moon bases 30 years hence seemed so predictable that the concept was almost humdrum.

The real surprise was that this amazing technological expansion and advancement has come to a screeching halt.
It is an ominous sign, for it suggests that a major shift in our species modern social behaviour has occurred.
Apologists will state several reasons for this shift away from manned spaced exploration, chiefly amongst the arguments is that long-term resource output does not justify short-term gains, visualized as a profit incentive. The essence of other objections can be boiled down to the gradual stripping away of financial resources, these being increasingly reallocated towards the escalating proxy wars in Third World countries as competing nation-states bicker over diminishing global resources.
The less than enthusiastic move to send men to Mars is a concept visualized to happen so far into the future that it allows politicians to complete their tenure with no real commitment, passing the project along to the next generation who would be likely to inherit the unsubstantial drive of their predecessors. The whole affair is reminiscent of a Monty Python sketch in which a chartered accountant wishing to become a lion-tamer, advised by his job guidance councilor to approach his job-change by gradual degrees “via, banking.”

The retarding trend is disturbing, because manned expansion and settlement of the solar system would alleviate dangerous nation-state competition brought about by expanding populations and an increasing need for diminishing energy and raw materials.
Expansion into space is also the ultimate species insurance, in that we are less likely to be wiped out by any number of conceivable planetary catastrophes.

It may be quite possible that the only real hope for a future in which Mankind emigrates into space will once again to boil down to the military might of nation-states jostling for tactical high ground. After all, a strong argument could be made that the only reason Man made it to the Moon was due to the Cold War competition between the Soviet Union and the United States. It is perhaps no coincidence that the decline of outward expansion is directly related to the lack of competition. One can draw a direct parallel between the collapse of the Soviet Union and America’s flagging interest in manned space projects, in which case the emergence of new, powerful nation-states will topple the placid World Order of the last twenty years, in which the US was indisputably dominant.
Sad indeed, having to entertain the notion that, in order to accelerate space exploration we must tolerate the military competition of nation-states as they vie for high ground. This is a dangerous path, fraught with the possible seeds of our own self-destruction.
Sadder still would be the continuing strangulation of space expansion which will ultimately herald an inevitable self-destruction as diminishing nation-states, trapped like competing molds in a petri dish, slowly strangle each other for lack of resources.

If this ‘cold war aggression’ is what it takes to re-awaken the expansion outwards, then it is with some trepidation that I welcome the coming competition between the USA and the emerging super-states, whilst praying that we succeed in gaining a foothold in space before we run out of resources and self-destruct.
Our insatiably increasing need for ever more resources is rapidly driving us down a one-way corridor towards an inescapable dead end. From this corridor there is but one avenue of escape: We must continue to expand outward into the Solar System if for no other reason that to feed the material appetite of our voracious species.
To this end, we desperately need to develop our technologies in order to build space elevators so that inexpensive payloads can be brought out of Earth’s gravity well, and do the research necessary to understand how sealed biospheres can function.

Mankind is rapidly out-growing Mother Earth and the bio-mass of our species is becoming too large for her insular womb. The time is rapidly approaching when we have to emerge from the planet Earth and cut the umbilical cord - or perish.