The Aenean Journey is Long

Earth: you might want to take care of it.

The frontier is pretty much closed – unless you want to colonize the frozen far north or the driest deserts. Humanity has multiplied and subdued the Earth. Reckless growth threatens the world we live in. Caution is in order. The Faustian Age is over. But what shall follow? Is it time to retreat into ascetic spirituality? Or can we still move forward? The Tree of Woe offers an upbeat answer:

The Dawn of a New Civilization

Please read it before continuing. I was going to do a quick summary to explain the Tree’s terminology, but my prose clunks compared to his. But though my prose is lame by comparison, I have some details to add to his story, some woe to cancel his upbeat tone. While space travel is getting seriously real these days, it is not going to provide significant real estate opportunities in our lifetime. We need to take care of Earth.

Born at the End of the Faustian Age

The Faustian Age was both peaking and failing about the time I was born. My earliest memories include broadcasts of rocket launches and dirty hippies getting back to nature. This was the age of DDT and Silent Spring. My elementary school years included in class movie watching of The Lorax and Who Killed Lake Erie​? The theaters showed movies such as Soylent Green and Silent Running.

Today’s global warming scares are the Diet Coke of environmental fearmongering. During the 1970s there were serious fears of overpopulation, pollution, and running out of natural resources. And there was data to back up that fear. There were major famines going on. The air in American cities was visible and it stank. Large birds were disappearing due to DDT. People had to wait in line to get gasoline. There were brownouts.

At the same time, we were entering the Space Age, and the expectation was that we would not only have a moon base by 1980, the purple haired women operating it would be good looking.

It turned out that both the fearmongering and the Space Age optimism were a bit premature. The EPA was created, and automobile exhaust was cleaned up bigly. When acid rain and the ozone hole emerged at threats, governments acted and fixed the problem. On the other hand, gas lines were fixed by dialing back government. Those lines turned out to be an artifact of price controls, a war on “price gouging.” Likewise, much of the starvation around the world was due to Marxism.

But we are not out of the woods! The human population is still growing and the planet isn’t. And while capitalism saved the day for some of the crises of the 1970s (energy shortages and starvation), other crises required burdensome government meddling. And that latter issue is not going away. The more powerful we become, the more regulation we need to prevent that power from becoming catastrophic. Take the Second Amendment. It was fine and dandy for black powder muskets and even cannons. Over the counter machine guns are a bit problematic. Privately owned atomic bombs and ICBMs are even more so.

Quiz question: How to you maintain a free society with basic constitutional rights when anyone in the upper middle class can afford to do gain of function research in their garage?

Freedom Without a Frontier

Way back in high school I became an anarcho-capitalist before I ever heard of Ayn Rand or Murray Rothbard, before I even heard the word “libertarian.” I got my proto-libertarian ideas from reading C.S. Lewis and Robert Heinlein. And while today my theology differs greatly from Lewis and I am deeply disgusted with Heinlein’s ideas on sex, these two authors remain my biggest influences.

Heinlein believed that freedom required a frontier, that without a frontier “civil servant would be semantically equal to civil master.” [*] A quick glance at an American electoral map would prove him right. Where people are crowded together, they vote Blue. Where they still have elbow room, they vote Red.

There are some exceptions to this rule. The history of the Civil Rights era has even rural Blacks voting Blue, and so you can see Blue districts on the Black Belt (where the soil was especially conducive to cotton farming) and along the Mississippi river.

But in general, crowding people together gets people to vote for big government. And there are good reasons for this. If I’m in the middle of my 800 acre farm blowing up stumps with dynamite, burning them with used motor oil, and doing target practice with a machine gun, it’s no big deal. But were I to do these very same activities in Times Square it would be a HUGE deal.

This applies to “A man’s home is his castle.” What if the man’s home is an apartment in a 30 story apartment complex? Firing off a gun against a home invader is likely to send a bullet into a neighboring apartment. Moreover, the concept of “mine” is divided. Even with a condo arrangement, the owner of an apartment is not the owner of the building that the apartment is in. Maxing out private property rights does not necessarily max out rights, since property lines are not clear in a dense city.

For this reason I have abandoned the libertarian movement and joined the Dissident Right. Closing the border is essential to preserving what is left of the freedoms that Americans took for granted when I was young. The sand dunes I slid down as a kid are now off limits, and it’s not due to socialism or even deep environmentalism. It’s due purely to population growth. A few kids playing on the dunes is no big deal. Too many causes unacceptable environmental damage.

But for the very same reason, I also disagree with the natalists on the Dissident Right. A drop in population is a Good Thing – even if it means reduced GDP, delaying retirement, and upping Social Security taxes. I shudder to think of what would happen if we get into a ethnic population race to maintain control of this country.

Like it or don’t, the West got onto the exponential wealth curve in large part due to population control. We had monasteries, nunneries, and bundling. Then we were “blessed” by the Black Death followed by the discovery of the New World. (And the New World was emptied by plagues that make the Black Death seem like COVID-19.)

Once upon a time India was the most advanced civilization on Earth. India had the world’s best farmland and the best mathematicians. But India was too peaceful, and hit the Malthusian Wall.

Robert Heinlein knew this, and begged mankind to go to the stars. And I agree with this message.

But going to the stars will not fix the problem here, unless we develop interstellar transportation technology as described in Tunnel to the Stars and there are habitable worlds out there not already occupied by intelligent life. There is an immense gap between getting some humans offworld so humanity doesn’t have all its eggs in one basket¹ and relieving population pressures at home. Indeed, there is an immense gap between getting humans offworld and restoring the pioneer spirit somewhere – a subject I will get to in a later section.

Schools of Thought at the End of the Faustian Age

Back in the 70s, when it seemed that we were already hitting the Malthusian Wall and the end of Growth, three main factions emerged:

1. The Tofu Eating Luddites. This is the school of The Limits to Growth and Diet for a Small Planet. Eat the beans – or the bugs. Limit cities with growth boundaries. We need to live with less. Consumerism needs to be replaced with spirituality, recreational drugs, and/or electronic entertainment.

2. The Deniers. Thomas Malthus was proven wrong; productivity surpassed population growth in the past and it will do so in the future. Just deregulate and cut taxes on the rich and GROWTH! WHEEEEEEE! will solve our problems. And economic growth leads to a cleaner environment. This was the standard “conservative” [sic] position until very recently.

3. The Prometheans. The environmental problems of our age are real, but we can solve them through high technology. Power the grid with nuclear power plants or orbiting solar power satellites. Put dirty industries in orbit “where God meant them to be.²

The first school is perhaps epitomized by Jeremy Rifkin, author of Entropy. The Peak Oil movement is another manifestation of this school. Today, we have the World Economic Forum promoting an especially dystopian spin.

The second school was perhaps epitomized by Interior Secretary James Watt in the Reagan Administration. While he didn’t necessarily ascribe to the idea that Growth would solve our environmental problems, he thought instead that Jesus would return and remake the Earth before we could damage it too badly. But there are innumerable conservatives who like to poo-poo environmental crises. Indeed, there is a meme floating around about past panics – like acid rain and the ozone hole – which never amounted to much. What the meme omits is the fact that we fixed those problems using annoying and expensive government regulations.

I was once a huge fan of the third school, the Prometheans. Jerry Pournelle coined the term “Prometheans”, and had his debate with the Tofu Eating Luddites in both essays and novels. His climax to Lucifer’s Hammer where the heroes defend a nuclear power plant against deranged fanatical cannibals is truly classic. I’m still a partial fan of this school, but I now have reservations. Pournelle advocated putting solar cells in orbit and beaming the power down to Earth with microwaves. I’m currently leery of the microwaves given off by my WiFi router and cell phone; gigawatt microwave beams from orbit bother me more.

More recently, a fourth school has come to prominence:

4. Christian Luddites. Nature is made for Man but Man should be a good steward of nature. C.S. Lewis was of this school before it was cool. Today, Joel Salatin is the most prominent guru of this school. Exploit nature, but care for it. Treat animals nicely and then eat them.

The Tree of Woe marks the second Trump Administration as the beginning of the Aenean Age, and he has a point. While the ingredients of this age predate this event, the second Trump Administration marks a jump for the Republican Party from full Denialism to a mix of Prometheanism and Christian Luddism. To get to this point we had ultra Promethean Elon Musk spending big bucks to get the Amish (Ultra Christian Luddites) out to the polls. Oh happy day!

While going into space is very very cool, we need to take better care of the planet we are on, and recognize that we cannot offset population growth with space travel in the foreseeable future. And yes, I have some sympathy for the deniers; environmental regulations are a royal pain in the ass. We can, and should, make that regulation less painful, but denial is not the solution; it is conceding victory to those who love regulation.

Space Travel vs. Liberty

For those sick of Woke and Equity, space travel is a dream come true. The irradiated vacuum of outer space doesn’t care about your feelings, your race, or your sexual orientation. Until it gets super easy, space travel is a filter that cuts off the left side of the bell curve—as well as nerdier members of the right side. An absent minded aspie with a 150 IQ is less suited for space travel than a mid grade Marine. Avoiding mistakes beats occasional brilliant insights. Bummer.

So while a spacefaring civilization inherently cannot be woke, it can be ultra authoritarian in a military kind of way. Today, astronauts are basically high-functioning puppets. Their days are planned out as much as medieval monks. Maybe more so. The only reasons astronauts aren’t classified as slaves is that they volunteered for their duty and their missions are of finite duration. Or maybe we should compare astronauts to the Protectors in Larry Correia’s Black Sword epic fantasy series [highly recommended, BTW].

If you are game to be commanded, as long as the commanders are competent, then today’s spacefaring life may be to your liking. For far more than 50% of humanity, these conditions do not apply. For the near term, space travel cannot be the path to freedom. And that near term is a rather long time.

Seasteading faces a similar dynamic but to a much lesser degree. While a seastead may be independent from any government, it’s homeowner’s association rules will have to be stern. Sure, some of the paying residents can gamble and partake in interesting drugs, but somebody needs to keep the city afloat and the machinery working. A seastead is like a core downtown without the suburbs. Might end up Bluer than anticipated.

Space Travel is Hard

Way way back in a bygone era, when Ronald Reagan still stalked the Earth, I joined the L5 Society. Gerard K. O’Neill’s vision of massive habitats in the stable L4 and L5 points in the Earth-Moon system was a desirable dream. Establish a base on the moon. Fire off buckets of ore using mass drivers into the L4 or L5 stationary points, and then build massive spinning cylinders filled with air. We could build artificial gravity habits to our specifications. Who needs planets? We could even set up worlds where human powered flight is feasible.

Several decades later, I was reading Larry Niven and Gregory Benford’s Bowl of Heaven. That novel described a truly gigantic bowl shaped structure which both focused solar energy enough to trigger secondary fusion and spun fast enough to create artificial gravity despite a radius on par with Earth’s orbit. Something bugged me as I read: any bowl (or ring for that matter) of that size which spun fast enough to create artificial gravity would be under colossal stress. It didn’t seem feasible.

So I did the math. With unrealistically perfect graphene you could make a ring around a planet, but not around a star. And that ring would be close enough to the planet that the higher gravitational harmonics might be enough to destabilize things. Based on this calculation, I worried that the L5 colonies I was sold on in my youth would likewise be unrealistic. The thickness of an air tank needs to go up the bigger the tank, and a space colony is a gigantic air tank. So I did the math for O’Neill colonies as well. It worked out. Required hull thicknesses and materials needed were in ranges we use for suspension bridges and ships. Whew! You can follow my calculations for both ringworlds and O'Neill colonies here:

https://conntects.net/members/GroovyRINO/postPermalinks/159/Planets-or-Orbiting-Habitats

(Conntects is better for doing math than Substack.)

According my calculations, one can offset the radial forces for a full atmosphere of pressure and about 20 feet of dirt with 10cm worth of cable grade steel. Ambitious, but not fantasy woo woo. This is for a cylinder one kilometer across. If this stress was contained with actual cables, then you’d also need cables running lengthwise to hold the endcaps. If you lower the gravity, the numbers get better, and that’s probably what would happen. A low gravity retirement home for billionaires is probably the first application.

But don’t bother getting on a waiting list. It’s going to be a while before anyone tries something that big. An underground resort on the Moon itself is more likely – which will be a side effect of exploration colonies and mining colonies. With the tech SpaceX is working on, Moon bases within a generation or even a decade seem realistic. And Elon Musk is on a pace to get to Mars before he gets too old. But he’ll be roughing it. We’re talking spartan underground quarters and need for frequent resupply from Earth.

To make Mars truly habitable would require shipping in stupendous amounts of gases (or their precursors) from Saturn’s rings or other far away place. To get Earthlike air pressure you need the mass equivalent of over 20 meters of water covering the entire planet. You might want more, in order to get the surface temperature up and radiation down to acceptable levels. (Mars has no magnetic field to speak of.) And you also need enough water to create some significant seas if you want acceptable humidity levels, or even some rain.

After a couple centuries of terreforming (I’m being optimistic), Mars will be low gravity desert with irrigation water available. Mars has a quarter the surface area of Earth, so currently it has the same amount of dry land. If we limit the artificial seas, a terreformed Mars could double the amount of dry land available for human habitation – which would be insignificant if Africa continues its current population grown rates.

Stuck With Earth

Space colonizing is cool. I’m all for it. But we to care more about Earth in the meantime. Colonizing Siberia, Northern Canada, and the Sahara Desert are considerably easier enterprises. And the next big source of food is not prison farms on the Moon as per Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. It’s adding nutrients in now mostly barren areas of our oceans.

Jerry Pournelle wrote about the subject back in the 1970s. The temperature difference between the surface and deep waters is enough to power heat engines. If we pump up the deep water for the cooling side of the engine, we bring up nutrients which produce blooms of plankton followed by fish. We could also take the surface temperature down a few notches in the areas which feed hurricanes. This is a much more effective cooling mechanism than dropping giant ice cubes from outer space as per Futurama.

But it would affect climate, ocean currents, and more. Orders of magnitude more than HAARP or chemtrails. Caution is in order. And that means some mix of regulation, tedious studies, and or informed altruism. Pure unleashed profit motive doesn’t cut it. The Faustian Age has ended. Our power to break our current home exceeds our ability build a new home.

This does not mean that we need to downgrade our lifestyles towards owning nothing and sleeping in shared cubicles, as per the World Economic Forum dream. It might mean more people returning to what was a middle class rural lifestyle in the 1960s. I’ll have more to say on living the good life while preserving the planet in future posts.

But for those who haven’t read my back catalog, please note that I have already written quite a few posts on the subject. Look for the Green RINOs in my archives. Here are a few posts to get you started:

For starters, environmentalism is a powerful argument for closing our borders and preserving our society. No need to focus on crime and sound like a racist:

Is is also an excuse to restore law and order:

And I have written two Green Old Deals for you to choose from:

For those who think that global warming is a century old hoax, the Tree of Woe has recently pointed out that fossil fuels are a finite resource. The relevant alternative energy question is not if, but when:

The Aenean Challenge

Let’s have fun making the transition.

1. Robert A. Heinlein paraphrase.

2. A Jerry Pournelle catchphrase is memory serves.