Trying To Think Better By All & Any Means. To Be Human Is To Unleash As Much Intelligence As Possible, Instincts & Values Flow, Even Happiness. History and Science Teach Us Not Just Humility, But Power, Smarts, And The Ways We Should Embrace. Naturam Primum Cognoscere Rerum
Global primary energy consumption has increased by a factor of roughly 25–40 since 1800, and has doubled since 1980. In part because of the self-destructive, pathetic and counterproductive efforts of the self-righteous Europeans, energy consumption is accelerating and is 82% fossil fuels. The planet’s biology and climate will not be capable of taking this much longer, and we must colonize space as a relief valve ASAP (while developing all sorts of nuclear and space solar techs also ASAP)..
Yes, it is possible to go to the stars with soon-to-be developed tech on such times scales that a colonization project would be viable.
In an accompanying essay, we explain the simplest way to go interstellar. The key is to mix four technologies, solar sailing, nuclear fusion, magnetic braking, plus well established gravitational assist (but grazing stars). That tech mix will allow the colonization ships to get to the closest star system in a century of travel or so.. The same tech, when it works, could be scaled up, with even higher speeds, to reach much further without using the “generations ships” of science fiction lore. “Generation ships”, as many science fiction works have shown, are highly problematic at best… Moreover, it is hard to see what could be the motivation for building those gigantic contraptions whose return would millennia away.
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THERE WAS GOD, AND IT WAS US
The solution I propose is to use smaller but much faster ships, the centerpiece being direct a particular type of propulsion thermonuclear fusion, safe and effective. That can be achieved with the aneutronic reaction:
The alpha carries 3.7 MeV and two positronic charges, the Proton carries most of the energy, 14.7 MeV, and one positronic charge. By charging the engine positively we can guarantee their ejection without touching the walls. Electromagnetic radiation is neglectable. The fusion engine does not need a shield: all the energy goes into the propulsion beam
The temperature of the naked exhaust is from E = 3/2 kT, namely 114 BILLION degrees Celsius…one thousand times the temperature of the heart of the Sun! However it would get mixed with water to develop thrust, instantaneously dissociating in OH+ and H+ ions, and exit around 6 10⁵ K, around 200 times the temperature of a chemical rocket’s combustion chamber. Expect beautiful blue flames as the radiation would peak in Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) / soft X-ray boundary.
The ship’s mass would be around 150,000 tons at launch, 80% being fuel, and 95% of said fuel being simple… water. So we would go to the stars, water propelled. The first human crewed, colonization ship would of course be preceded by ample optical inspection of the objectives with telescopes kilometers across (deployable in space) and robotized missions would forge ahead with simpler, cheaper, less safe and less effective, to set things up.
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In March 2026, as expected, NASA announced it will fly a nuclear fission powered mission to Mars as soon as 2028. Nuclear fission is the only reasonable way to make the Solar System into our next colonization target. With nuclear power, much of the Solar System can be settled, because it has turned out that much of it has water… A huge surprise and a great gift. Water was the hard problem, now it’s solved. The next hard problem can be solved: it’s enormous energy, and thermonuclear fusion can provide it (fusion will literally fuse the water out of frozen expanses…)
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Nuclear fusion propulsion reactors ought to be easier to realize than thermonuclear power reactors on the ground, because fusion products will be ejected and thus unable to pollute the fusion reaction as they can do in a power plant.
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Some European celebrity intellectuals covered with honors recently declared interstellar travel was impossible and besides the future is to use less and less energy (all the way back to Neanderthal, I presume). [1] This outrageous viewpoint reminded me of these fables where animals show disdain for things they can’t get: Europe is not investing in the conquest of space enough, and will pay dearly for that. Adding moral reasons to a politico-economic strategic catastrophe is not wise. Thus I looked into the possibility of interstellar travel, and I was surprised to find that it was feasible with near technology on such a time scale that it could be financed.
Technology is not the problem of intelligence on Earth, as many European intellectuals pretend it is, it’s its gift and the one and only humane solution.
The fundamental problem is that humanity’s powers are now so great that they have exceeded, for several generations, the long term sustainability of civilization, with existing technology. So we need to expand: Mars provides twice the continental real estate of Earth within one atmosphere’s difference (paradoxically much of “Earth” is under water, and more hostile to colonization).
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It has been proposed to send a solar sail powered by a laser to Proxima at 20% of the speed of light. I have no idea if it would work, I did not study the proposal. Such an object will probably have fatal problems with interstellar dust and communications, IMHO. My own proposal avoids such problems by using large masses (30000 tons habitat), where the physics is familiar and predictable.
It is a bit early to make such plans because we have not identified yet the situation of Proxima b. The planet is a touch bigger than Earth (7% more massive), but it’s tidally locked to its star with always the same side facing it. Proxima b’s terminator zone, where Proxima would be low on the horizon, would be 3000 kilometers across, with a potential habitable surface area of 120 million square kilometers, twice that of habitable ground on Earth )(once one has subtracted mountains, deserts and polar regions)….
We have to wait until the Extremely Large Telescope looks at Proxima b (the European ELT is under construction).The conditions on Proxima b are violent, as the star , a Red Dwarf with 12% of the Sun’s mass, would fill the sky… And with much radiation. Such stars live long agitated lives…
It is also possible that the two Sun-like stars of Centaurus, Alpha and Beta, have planets: we don’t know, their ecliptics are poorly oriented for the present primitive planet detection techniques….
The general idea of flying to stars in a frozen state would also work for further stars, but the travel would extend to centuries, making it unlikely except if one went to higher speeds (say frankly relativistic 20000km/s; that would require quotients of fuel/mass vehicle comparable to what we have today). As far as we know now there are two habitable candidates at 11 light years…
The tech exposed in the accompanying essay ought to be available and dependable within a century. It goes without sayin that, if one is not transporting humans, one could get higher accelerations from the sail system with futuristic sail tech (the one underlying the computations here exist and were tested in labs), and thus greater speeds… for free.
Notice an interesting, orthogonal twist: spaceship Mira would be an AC, an ARTIFICIAL CONSCIOUSNESS (rendered possible by a decillion qubit quantum computer, or more)… AC would be like us, but instead of being powered by photosynthesis as we ultimately are, Mira’s mind would be powered directly from thermonuclear fusion.
Fusion powered AC minds would not be barred by questions of time and space: they could expand through the galaxy… So we better teach them well. My teenage daughter just informed me she didn’t feel like talking to me anymore at this point. We would have the same problem with Artificial Consciousnesses: they will be our descendants.
So maybe we don’t need, as apes, to colonize the planets: Artificial Consciousnesses will do it for us…
Patrice Ayme
What is striking in the tableau of planets discovered so far (around 7000) is that there is a huge number, a high density of the type of planet we would have though as rare: short orbits, grazing stars. But that’s due to our present detection methods which are indirect in 99.99% of cases. When we can directly image planets with more powerful telescope (which are feasible now, it’s just a matter of financing them), we may suspect that the density of planets similar to those found in the Solar System will be enormous. At least around single stars.
Patrice Ayme
[1] Europeans have understood the exact opposite of reality about energy policy: more is the solution towrds less CO2…. such are Europeans these days, that they all too often understand the opposite of reality…. Ever since Michel Foucault used to kiss Ayatollahs torturing in Iran.Such self-mortifying mental positioning is exactly the trap humanity ought not to fall into if the aim is to rise above the tyrants who want to finish it. Such surrender monkeys do not know it, but they may be worse than the Mollahs terrorizing Iran, because the latter, at least, are technology friendly.
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There is a moral reason for NOT going to Mars, we are told obsessively with a smirk by people of little imagination... Minding our business on Earth first. This mussel-clinging-on-a-rock style of argument ignores human nature, and what motivates it.
Clinging to the old ways and the ancient rock is the usual argument of those obsessed by their navels and who are reluctant to move out of their gardens: we must solve what we have where we are, they whine from their wheelchairs.
Brian Cox, or an AI pretending to be Brian Cox, a well-known British science guru, posited, in a gloomy, feverish voice, that “humans can’t reach Mars”. According to him, that would kill Earth. A few days later an AI produced a similar podcast supposedly from Brian Greene. (These podcasts are often very interesting, although they also containing glaring, most significant errors!)
Mr. Brian Cox AI pretends we cannot inhabit Mars any time in the future, it’s too harsh out there, but then he mentions, to his sorrow, that human colonization and Mars terraforming may already be going on thanks to our domestiques, terrestrial critters already there because they survived our sterilization attempts…
Indeed, lots of Earth species can survive Martian conditions and others can be tinkered with to colonize there: research labs already have plenty of these modified species. Modified easily and at little cost. Martian dust, like Moon dust, is a big problem: it goes everywhere and it is toxic and abrasive. We will see what colonization by primitive forms of terrestrial life does to the Martian dust (in the long run, it will make it manageable). Transported Earth life will change Mars, on its own, and fast.
So we could start some sort of Terraforming pretty quickly? Not so, claims Mr. Cox, because we must not colonize Mars. But we can’t, according to him, why must we not? If we can’t, we can’t and whether we must or not is irrelevant.
This silly video worries about nuclear devices in space, although nuclear devices will be on the Moon within ten years because the Moon has nights which are two weeks long (the programs are launched by NASA and its Chinese equivalent).
Example of glaring errors in those videos making war on Mars? Pretending that radiation shielding from fuel aboard the spacecraft would go down, because we need fuel to go to Mars… Except one needs no fuel while cruising (that shows that the anti-Mars videos have not been reviewed by someone with high school physics).
Another glaring absurdity: pretending that aerobraking is impossible on Mars because of the thin atmosphere… While actually the aerobraking happens at much lower pressure than Mars’ ground pressure, even on top of Olympus Mons… And Martian aerobraking was used many times already, and in two different ways. Or claiming that Mars’ quakes would be a threat to a human base. A French seismometer carried by NASA made it on Mars, and functioned very well, so we have data… Mars quakes are much rarer and much weaker than on Earth… As anticipated, for the obvious reason that Mars has no plate tectonics.
The whining about things taking longer than expected, and have never been done before, which Mr. Cox AI or Mr. Greene AI engage in profusely, is besides the point: colonization of Mars already is, and long will be, a matter for robots and AI.
The long litany of problems that Mars human exploration and colonization will keep on presenting is not a showstopper, just the opposite: the more problems colonizing Mars presents, the more interesting Mars gets. For example building a Martian magnetic shield is feasible (in two different ways; holding a device at the Lagrange point is already routine: see the James Webb Space Telescope, and the energy could be produced easily from solar panels… that has been studied). On top of that Mars colonization will be mostly preceded by colonization of the Moon. AI and robots will lead.
Real scientists rejoice in questions and problems: they do not whine because brain teasers appear all over. Boredom is the enemy: change is a friend.
Many, if not most problems on Earth will not be solved mostly because the problems themselves are in balance with the power of today’s Earth elite hierarchy. For example, using massively fossil fuels advantages a number of nations which have enough clout to keep the present order going (not that there is much choice).
Colonizing Mars would be another reason to make compact controlled thermonuclear fusion work… And so on. This is a good example: thermonuclear fusion would be nice to have on Earth, but most authorities behave as if it is not necessary (in truth, it is). On Mars, thermonuclear fusion is pretty much a necessity to terraform the planet quickly… Authorities will agree with that.
Another must to colonize Mars is to be able to commute there quickly. And sure enough, now that sending humans there is imaginable, not to say proximal, nuclear rocket propulsion is becoming something desirable, and research programs have been relaunched… Nuclear rocket engines were made to work more than half a century ago, the NERVA program… And they worked very well, achieving 800-900 specific impulses, more than twice the best chemical rocket engines, hydrogen-oxygen engines… The program was considered highly successful technically, meeting or exceeding goals for power, thrust (up to ~120 tons of thrust in some designs), and reliability: a worst case nuclear explosion was deliberately engineered, and proved not bad at all, as expected [1].
and even safely: a fully functioning nuclear engine was deliberately made dysfunctional and shut down OK…)
Brian Cox pretends that a Mars colony will be extinguished by the “Tasmanian Effect”, the fact that isolation will cause cultural degeneracy, as happened in Tasmania. But a Mars colony will not be isolated at all. Tasmania was isolated from all communications for millennia, whereas communications with Mars will be at most twenty minutes away…
Pretending that future science will not come to be is silly. Especially in light of the fact that going to Mars will force us to find new science and develop new technology!
“Planetary protection”, the sterilization of probes sent to Mars has been tremendously costly. As the situation is getting clearer (perchlorates in Martian soil), strenuous sterilization has been relaxed. There are two possibilities: either there is remaining life on Mars, and then we must rejoice as we will learn a lot, or there is no surviving life, in which case there is no ethical problem in colonizing the planet.
The truth is simple: Mars will double the landmass at the disposal of humanity and the techniques developed to establish a colony there will enable the colonization of the asteroid belt and moons around Jupiter and Saturn… And there are plenty of important resources out there, for example Helium 3…
It is likely that terrestrial life originated on Earth (because Earth had a tremendous heat episode)… So we are going back home. In the future, going there back and forth will probably take a few days… And the litany of horrors of Mr. Cox will remind us of the horrors of the Atlantic as seen by some intellectuals during the Middle Ages. It seems Mr. Cox has billionaire envy: how do they dare want to go there, propelled by their egos? Well, the “discovery” of the Americas by Colomb was financed by an extremely wealthy woman…
What could be a serious problem in launching Mars terraforming soon (with Earth’s organism)? Residual Martian life, underground. One will have to make sure there is none, or if there is some, we will have to analyze it thoroughly before smothering it with Earth’s life.
Practically, everybody is going to space, even Europe is starting to realize it’s surrounded by space, the ultimate frontier. The reason is that space is going to be highly profitable. Many ultra polluting and under powered industries can and should be moved to space (free energy from the sun, and stability at the Lagrange points). Voltaire concluded his novel Candide with:”One must cultivate one’s garden.” Yes, but the wise, and any primate with a brain, will look beyond the garden, and go there if it looks feasible.
Making humanity multi-planetary will increase the survivability of the species. But that reason is somewhat abstract. We suggested here a much more fundamental and pragmatic reason: solving a lot of problems that we would not solve otherwise, staying on Earth (which will not happen, anyway, except for nuclear war all too soon…)
Redirecting human aggressivity, curiosity and ingenuity towards space is wise, just as it was wise to get out of Africa, and for the same exact reason. Africa still has problems, and quite a few solutions were found out of Africa!
We are not simply from Earth, we are from the Solar System…. Which protected our planet for the last five billion years (and it was a miracle). And, once again, we are probably from Mars originally, so let’s find out!
[1]. In January 1965. Engineers intentionally modified a Kiwi nuclear reactor rocket engine to induce a rapid power surge (prompt criticality), causing it to self-destruct explosively. The goal was to simulate a worst-case failure and study containment/dispersal of radioactive material.
The explosion was controlled and equivalent to a small amount of conventional explosive (estimates vary from ~50 kg TNT to a few hundred kilograms). It destroyed the reactor pressure vessel, nozzle, and fuel assemblies, scattering fragments and some fission products. Importantly, the test confirmed design predictions: fallout was limited, and cleanup was manageable (personnel collected debris after a cooldown period without major issues). This, along with plenty of normal emergency shutdown tests (e.g., rapid insertion of control rods to “SCRAM” the reactor), helped prove the engines could be safely operated and shut down, even under off-nominal conditions.
The NERVA technology was deemed flight-ready by the late 1960s, but the programs were canceled in 1973 due to budget cuts induced by the rather anti-tech lawyer Nixon, who happened to be US president, and who also shut down the Apollo program (an adviser, Weinberger, persuaded Nixon to allow the flight ready last two Apollo landings).
Nixon also selected a modest program presented to him by NASA, the Space Shuttle, an abvious mistake which, from the start achieved nothing special except dangerously manned hypersonic flight (all the other Shuttle exploits would have worked better by extending the Saturn rockets)…
NASA had offered Nixon with the choice of going to Mars… And NERVA would have been handy. We are back in this configuration, 55 years later….
When the Ming decided to stop overseas sailing expeditions, they condemned China to shrinkage (and becoming dependent upon Potosi silver brought by Spain to the Philipines!) Fortunately, by an interesting twist, China is now going to the Moon, and the US has to try to precede the “Central State”…
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CIVILIZATION, EVEN HUMANIZATION, WAS ALWAYS ABOUT COLONIZATION
Abstract: Humans have always not just survived, but evolved, for the better, by expanding into new environments. This expansion—call it colonization in the biological sense—is not a historical aberration but the defining feature of our genus… It’s our human genius.
It carried us from forests to savannahs, from Africa to every continent, often rescuing our lineage from population bottlenecks. If we truly care about the values we claim to cherish—reason, compassion, justice—then we must ensure they outlive the fragile round rock on which they first appeared. In this light, going to Mars is not only adventurous and long-term profitable; it is also a moral duty to the future of intelligence.
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Going to Mars helps us define and refine the human condition in all its dimensions, including the most glorious and the most compassionate. Starting with introspection. Space, not just Earth, is our home.
Conquering space is all about what life does best, and humanity even better, colonization (it will also divert human aggressivity towards the stars instead of the neighbors). Species appeared and initially were thermophiliac, they lived in infernos they conquered (now those species, our most distant ancestors, tend to live in geysers and under volcanoes).
A species expands into new ecological niches, and learns to adapt and to exploit it. Life always does this, to the point that it transformed the atmosphere of the planet Earth from full of greenhouse methane to cool oxygen, causing “snowball Earths” episodes (during which glaciers reached the tropics at sea level, all over). Possibly a somewhat similar event occurred on Mars, and life would have made the planet unlivable faster. So colonization in the broad biological sense is what life always tends to do (this has nothing to do with domination of people). Research teams have made considerable progress in adapting some terrestrial species to martian conditions.I
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Although life on Mars probably lasted at most a billion years, we may well be all Martians. Indeed, Mars cooled much faster than the Earth, when it still had a thick atmosphere, and may have seen the evolution of early life, while Earth was still a magma inferno.
Huge splashes from bolides, extremely frequent at the time, may have transported Martian life to Earth inside rocks (it’s called lithopanspermia): we know that is feasible, as the interior of a meteorite can stay cool enough to preserve organic materials… Meteorites from Mars have been found, and the maximum of their inner temperatures could be evaluated. In particular, the Martian meteorite ALH84001 was found to have taken ten million years to go from Mars to Earth, and it stayed cool inside.
So going back to Mars may well be going back to our distant roots. A memorial of sorts..
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Naive critics often say the superficially obvious and they inflate with the wisdom of the self-satisfaction of displaying so much virtue : “We should fix Earth’s problems before going to Mars.” Critics of adventure have always said this, ignoring human nature.”We should fix problems in the Philipines before going to Polynesia.“
Problems on Earth exist because either we don’t know how to fix them, or because the powers that be are unwilling to fix them, and the two situations feed on each other. Going to Mars provides with the will and the necessity to fix chronic problems on Earth, for which not enough of motivation or technique has been found yet. Going to Mars provides the motivation and will force the technology that the present state of civilization has been unable to find.
Technological investment in space usually helps Earth: look at weather predictions, GPS, and all the indirect technological developments.. Risk management is not sequential: you don’t stop buying insurance (human life on other planets) because you still have debt (problems on Earth). Solving Earth’s problems and establishing off-world resilience are not mutually exclusive. Instead they are mutually helpful.
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And then there is the Dark Side nobody wants to talk about, but states will always consider. The military supremacy argument: the world has been calm because the West had military technological supremacy. Now the MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine is going to be replaced progressively by space defenses. Going to space before tyrants build palaces on Mars, is how democracy survives. Besides, the West can’t let China (say) grab all the Helium 3 on the Moon, etc…
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Granted, “colonialism” is supposed to be an evil concept. Violating the red Martian deserts with human footprints make the squeamish blemish. But that’s only a misreading of the human condition. Indeed, that attitude, that colonialism is evil, is a pinnacle of hypocrisy, as 99% of humanity can be traced to pretty recent colonizers. Yes, in the past there were many occurrences of genocidal, inhuman and atrocious colonizations. There have also been millions of people killed by knives too. And still we use knives all the time all around the planet… just as, in a sense, we use colonization: show me a country, I will show you a colonization. Tools can be used for harm or for good. Colonization, in the biological sense, is a tool not just of survival but also of evolution and even progress for the best.
The human species, even the human genus has been defined by its will to colonize: first out of the forest, then out of Africa, then to Australia, and the Americas, and all over Earth. Europe was colonized around 7,000 years ago by Middle Eastern farmers who arrived with their genetically improved crops.
That human expansion may well have saved the species as there seems to be evidence of near-mass extinction and evolutionary bottlenecks, during the existence of Homo Sapiens (the last couple of hundreds of thousands of years).
Thus no expansion without colonization, and no safety about evolution without colonization either.
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It is good to have superior humanitarian values. But how sincere are we? If we are genuinely attached to superior human values we must want them to survive us. So going to Mars is not just an adventure, and probably an extremely profitable one, in the long run. Going to Mars is also a moral imperative .
To remain confined to one planet is to gamble everything humanity has ever achieved and values on the blind hand of fate when expanding through the Solar System is now possible, providing us with the overall vision and wisdom we need to make it so.
Patrice Ayme
Mars four billion years ago, before losing its churning magma inside, thus its magnetic shield, hence its atmosphere and water… Human intervention with nearly existing technology could rebuild the shield, the atmosphere, the ocean, jack up the temperature and introduce advanced life…
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The PROBLEMS WITH EUROPE’S ENERGY POLICY RUN AS DEEP AS EUROPEAN DEFEATIST PHILOSOPHY:
The US innovates, China imitates, Europe regulates…. In vain… While the USA evolves and builds new (energy-guzzling) intelligence systems (AI) and is reducing the cost of going to space by orders of magnitude, China, besides imitating the US, is forging ahead with new nuclear technologies launched in France before France became woke… then senile… and soon incontinent. Those nuclear technologies are one hundred times (10000%) more energy efficient than existing nuclear fission reactors. They require new materials which China is developing.
Big energy sources will feed big AI.
Europe has outlawed burning fuels for energy by 2035 (in newly made engines)… another self-destructive policy. That includes synthetic fuels from algae… Europe is still fueled by tyrant Putin, eleven years after Putin started to invade Ukraine, 14 years after it invaded Georgia, and more than a quarter of a century after Putin’s genocide in Chechnya. Meanwhile burning the Qur’an lands you in prison, in Sweden or France, reversing three centuries of Enlightenment.
Europe is in full reverse towards the abyss. It’s as if Hitler didn’t happen and Europe learned nothing from that teacher of idiocy and the frantic herd of fanatics who egged him on.
So Europe, 90 years after Hitler and Stalin is again going towards SUBMISSION (in Arabic, Islam) to ignorance and energy has a lot to do with it. Europe has decided to REDUCE its energy usage considerably just when ascending powers (USA, China, India) are doing their best to make more energy, and AI requires it. The European plan is apparently to leave AI to the US, and beg for a piece.
European leaders grandly explain that reducing energy will save the planet with solar and wind, just as in the Middle Ages, 1,000 years ago. In practice, European leaders became addicted to the Kremlin’s energy and oligarchs. As Putin himself observed for the record in 2013, “the problem with the Europeans is that they gave me no reason for not being in Kiev within two weeks”.
How to explain Europe’s self-harm program? Woke gone rogue? An intellectual failure? Mental processes so erroneous that they achieve the exact opposite of what they are trying to do? All of the above, my general, grounded in an educational system which teaches a parody of history and inept wisdom, kindergarten level.
Yes, Europe suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) consecutive to World War One: it has been called Absurdism, Post-Modernism, Structuralism, Decolonization…And also Communism, aka Stalinism and the betrayal of 1939-1941, when beasties Hitler and Stalin were besties. More recently European self-mutilation has been called many other things: Deconstruction, French Theory, Wokism… All these ideologies have European self-harm in common.
European leading democracies won against the fascists… But were defeated by the USA brandishing Germany, debt servicing and anticolonialism like wrecking balls while taking control of the world. Aghast Europeans are not yet sure they should dare to fully understand what happened there.
WW2, rendered possible by a US double face, the offering to Stalin at Yalta of half of Europe, courtesy of plutocrat FDR, the Suez Canal confrontation while giving Hungary for the Kremlin to devour (1956), and the forced de-imperialization of Europe made the situation worse for Europe. How to cope? By making defeatism into supremacy! It’s superior to be inferior!
However, the defeatist mood in Europe… long encouraged by the US Deep Plutocratic State… has brought Europe to the point where it tries to justify self-harm and engage in ever more absurd policies. Even the Americans are starting to feel this is too much of a good thing. Youngster JD Vance, the US Vice President, came to Bavaria and tanced an aeropagus of seasoned European grandees for forgetting what civilization was all about.
Yes, self-harm is not new in Europe: that’s Germany 1914, or 1939. But then Britain and France disagreed strongly and were what’s called “democracies”… while the Germans and their imitators (Austrians, Ottomans, Russians) were outright fascists. In other words, not all of Europe was insane in 1914, or 1939: Britain had basically no army, so could hardly be accused of provoking Germany (actually that appeasement backfired as the German military computation was then to occupy France before Britain could draft an army… As happened in WW2). The French Republic didn’t want war with the German maniacs next door, but knew she had no choice. All along the Middle Ages, the two superpowers, France and Britain, were two aspects of the same polity, one less continental, and therefore less fascist, pragmatic and militaristic than the other.
But now the problem is that self-harm has contaminated France and Britain: the core is not holding!
Consider Britain which exited the EU to reduce immigration and now has experienced an enormous leap in immigration, to a quasi grotesque extent? This invasion was fully predictable, considering the laws installed post-Brexit (immigration to make Britain into “Singapore on the Thames” forgetting Singapore is hard core and very restrictive in matters of immigration).
All of Europe does this sort of self-harming: the obviously corrupt Merkel torpedoed the German nuclear industry, which never hurt anybody, because she feared Japanese tsunamis, she said, and now Germany is rushing to build ten giant coal plants… which will kill thousands of people every year while poisoning the climate.
European logic is increasingly reminiscent of (self-harming, intolerant and stupid) Nazi logic (Nazis were great ecologists, and animal rights activists, in part because these were coverups… Nazi national parks and animal rights laws have survived the demise of their legislators…) The Nazis were so self-harming that they launched a world war, just to lose it (there was no way they could win it, although God, Fate and millions of enraged Nazis did their best for them to win)…
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Many Concepts Which Europe Is Now Burning, Europe Used, Rightly, To Adore, Because They Are Core To the Human Experience:
The human adventure uses intelligence to expand its colonization, and this requires energy. Non human apes have huge beer bellies because they (mostly) extract energy directly from plants, like climbing cows. Humans instead eat the fat and protein of vegetarians, providing themselves with much more compact sources of energy. So humans have smaller guts, bigger brains… And much higher metabolism.
Notice that all the concepts fundamental to the human adventure for the last seven million years: expansion, colonization, energy, intelligence are big no-nos, on the NOT TO DO list of Europe. In other words, Europe has become anti-human, inhuman.
In particular (pseudo-) ecologists decided to discontinue nuclear research and deployment and instead finance tyrant Putin (to this day the EU sends 3.5 more money to Putin than to Ukraine). France has a law forbidding the extraction of French gas (France has one century of gas… it’s unlawful to verify). Instead, Europe whines when the Ukrainians bomb pipes bringing Russian gas… to Europe (Trump is trying to force Europe to acquire US gas instead of Kremlin gas, and, in their perversion many European view that as pervert…).
So Europe has a psycho-philosophical problem with energy and self-harm. In turn, that mental deficit and disorder in the largest economic area of the planet, is having disastrous effects on the planet’s economy and general sense of what civilization means. Europe is wasting hundreds of billions a year (350 billion) on wasteful “green” energy whose most spectacular effect is to zap the electricity networks… Indeed, solar and wind were the big European revolution of.. 12 centuries ago. Now space beckons: Earth has 15 kilograms of Helium 3, and the Moon… a million tons. He3 fusion allows to produce electricity directly, no neutrons.
And these fast Chinese surgenerators now entering their third generation? They get fueled with nuclear waste and can be made passively safe.
The principal reason to worry about Europe Despondency Syndrome is that Europe used to lead civilization. Now it’s turning into a brake on civilization. So little dictatorships can thrive all around the planet, and be inspired by the European nonsense… Such as Thailand, a preferred vacation spot of Politically Correct Europeans, and where Europe has only business and no criticism… In Thailand, criticizing the revered dictator’s late dog can land you in prison for years. Judgement will come later. If one does not die in prison first. Nobody is safe: an Australian who had sold seven (7) copies of a single book critical of an imaginary monarchy was grabbed at the airport in Bangkock, and got three years in prison. The concept of hereditary plutocracy, aka monarchy, is sacred in Thailand… Europe has nothing to say against such dictatorships.
Thus European obscurantism brings a general decay of civilization and progress, worldwide, by lowering the requirements of reason and learned discourse, and the respect they used to enjoy.
So then what to do with EDS, Europe Despondency Syndrome, as Europe seems too far gone to understand what went wrong and self-correct (although both Starmer and Merz are pointing in the right direction… pun intended…)?
Well the USA, a child and product of France and Britain, can take over, as it is presently doing, and show the general direction to save civilization from itself: think anew and expand… Use more energy… To save the planet!
Europeans must follow. As bleating sheep unable to get to space on their own, or even to warm themselves up in winter without the help of the genocidal tyrant next door whom Europeans fed, armed, financed and cultivated… Europeans have little choice, and must pile up in the Oval Office to be told what to do. In Trump Europe must trust: Europe has found the leader it needs… and deserves…
But then, of course, maybe Europe could restart thinking on her own: hope springs eternal. A very influential French leader such as Mélenchon who parrots Putin word for word, ought to be tried for high treason: France is at war with Russia (but few want to notice)… This is what happened in Germany where a right wing politician was condemned to prison just for pro-Putin propaganda. He then claimed to be a woman, to be put in a milder prison… Never mind that s/he made stridently anti-trans genre statements in the past. All very funny, but Europe’s energy policy, combined with its anti-science policy, is no laughing matter…
It is true that the USA’s present energy policies may sound like a return to the pre-Cambrian. However many US startup companies are developing new nuclear technologies (the US economico-political system is much more favorable to startups than the European one). Moreover, one needs energy to get energy. The problem with the CO2 crisis is not another ten years of increasing emissions: that’s unavoidable, and we will end up with a near-Jurassic climate. The problem is what happens afterwards. The solution is to switch to mostly non-carbon emissions 20 years from now for the entire planetary energy accounting. But those noncarbon sources can only be from technologies which don’t exist yet, because the ones which exist presently are INSUFFICIENT (that’s why 85% of present primary energy is from making CO2!)
Only new energy sources will get us there, not tinkering with wind mills like Don Quixote, or sunstroked dream-like as Camus’ Stranger, babbling that sunlight will solve it all…
Patrice Ayme
Europe’s President Trump with his cabinet: from left to right: the chief of NATO (the European army), Meloni, Italian PM, Merz, German Chancellor, Starmer, UK PM… hidden by French president Macron, with the Finnish president (longest border with the Kremlin and his family was a direct victim of Moscow…) and then Ursula von der EU (hidden by Donald). On the right, Machiavel’s not so secret accomplice, and apprentice, Zelinskyy…
All on my mailing list…
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IMPERIAL UNDERSTRETCH A THREAT, COFA A SOLUTION, REALITY A NECESSITY
The planet has shrunk. Anywhere is half an hour away as Weapons of Mass Destruction go. Mastering the neighborhood means mastering the planet, and it’s a question of survival: no more Putins! However Europe, which has sovereignty, sort of, over Denmark, has amply proven unable to defend itself, either economically or militarily. The mood in Europe is that Europe has to pay for the sin of having brought civilization to the world. Ironically, most of the world’s great powers subscribe instead to the old European mood, and model: expand and prosper. There are more than a dozen of these powers, great in various ways. All reject the present European mood of degrowth and amusement. So, if there is a vacuum, they will push in. China considers itself now an Arctic power, and Russia made it known that it owns the North Pole. This is a serious claim: it uses UNCLOS and the Lomonosov Ridge; it overlaps with Canadian and Danish claims. Russia is also armed to the teeth, including with brand new giant nuclear icebreakers…by comparison the USA has just one aging heavy icebreaker used mostly to serve the McMurdo basis in Antarctica. Russia has more than 50 heavy icebreakers. If anything, acquiring Greenland would encourage the US to acquire an icebreaker fleet: while the Arctic is quickly opening up to the appetite of ravenous great powers, much ice still has to be broken through.
Why Europe is degenerating is a complex subject beyond the scope of this essay. A factor is that, whenever European powers have to choose between the nuclear armed fully independent French republic and the USA, they nearly always prefer the USA. This is why the UK has US nuclear missiles (France makes its own) and why all European powers prefer to buy (ineffectual) US F35 jets, rather than superior French planes… So Denmark may protest a US power grab, but Denmark is, in many ways, already a US vassal state. If Europe has chosen the USA as the boss, it may as well go all the way. Denmark could become the US fifty-second state?
***
Most of the territory of the USA was annexed, or purchased, after treaties. So annexation is natural, all-American. (Some of the most ancient treaties were under duress and violated, true, but most of the area of the present USA was acquired with treaties that were neither violated nor signed under duress… Napoleon was clearly pro-American when he signed off gigantic Louisiana (2.1 million square kms; Napoleon wanted to retire to the US, Britain refused… So most of the US was acquired fair and square, not like the “Unequal Treaties” between China and Russia…)
Yes, it all belonged to somebody else, way back in the past… So what, Mr. and Ms. Woke-know-Nothing? Indeed, most of the world is like that, the fruit of annexation and colonization, not always pacific: The Bantu-speaking peoples began arriving in what is now South Africa during the Bantu expansion, a gradual migration and colonization of Bantu-speaking communities from West and Central Africa that began around 2000 BCE. Their arrival in South Africa specifically is generally dated to between 500 CE and 1000 CE. Bantus arrived with agriculture and steel technology, which was used to push away the native Khoisan people.
So annexing Greenland would be nothing new, but following a four century old American tradition. Greenland annexation could also be done advantageously for all parties concerned. For example the Greenland Natives have asked for a bigger airport in the capital Nuuk so decent sized planes full of tourists can land.
One argument has been that military spending by Canada (with a gigantic Arctic archipelago immediately west of Greenland with some of the largest islands on Earth with no permanent inhabitant) has been only 1.3% of GDP. Europe, similarly Denmark is at 1.4%, both in violation of the 2% NATO guideline. The US is at 3,4%, France and the UK are slightly above 2%. Meanwhile Putin’s minions claim a large part of the Arctic for Russia.
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IMPERIAL UNDERSTRETCH:.
“Imperial overstretch is a well-known concept; a classic example would be the Ottoman empire, when it stretched from Vienna to Algiers, Arabia and Iraq. However, as the falls of Athens and Rome illustrate, and as Putin would tell you, “imperial understretch” is also a menace. Although “Representative Democracy” as promoted by the USA is not really democracy, the danger right now is that dictatorships extend their wings. For example, as France, led by a president who does not appreciate history, ignominiously retreats from Africa, Russian mercenaries and Chinese conspiracies take over the second largest continent.
WHY TO ANNEX GREENLAND?
Greenland is between America and Eurasia. It is a buffer zone. All the stuff thrown from Eurasia at America has to pass on or next to Greenland.
Thule Air Force base in on the north west corner of Greenland. The three large island archipelagoes to the right of Greenland above are all Russian. Russia pretends that it owns the North Pole too (in the center) because of a ridge underwater…
US citizen Robert Peary built a support station by a protected harbor at what would become Thule in north-west Greenland. The area had been void of inhabitants, but afterwards acquired a permanent population. But in 1917, the USA abandoned its claim to Greenland, in exchange for the purchase of the Virgin Islands from Denmark, which acquired control in 1937. However, in 1940, Denmark was occupied by the Nazis , and the US was back in force in Greenland, all the more that the Nazis established secret weather stations. In the 1960s, 10,000 US servicemen lived in Thule.
Greenland is the world’s largest island. Placed over the continental U.S., the island of Greenland would stretch from the southern tip of Texas to north of the Canadian border.
***
RIGHT NOW IT IS NOT TOO CLEAR WHO IS IN CHARGE OF GREENLAND.
Historically the Vikings, but then after 5 centuries they departed, as the Inuits appeared… before the Viking came back as Denmark. Denmark is sovereign, but not really, as Greenland and its 56,000 inhabitants are “autonomous”. Moreover, bizarrely, Greenland is NOT part of the EU anymore (although Denmark is). In a way it makes sense as Greenland is not part of Europe, as it is on the AMERICAN tectonic plate….
The US and NATO have a crucial military base in north-west Greenland, Thule, 1.200kms north of the Arctic circle. Thule serves for early warning of a missile attack on the USA coming from Eurasia, and is a VITAL asset of the US and NATO. No termination clause is known to exist. Grabbing Thule from the US would be viewed, rightly so, as an existential threat against the USA… Low flying missiles coming from hostile Eurasia can’t be detected easily from space.
After Trump evoked the lack of defense spending problem on part of Denmark and Canada, leaving the roof of the USA undefended, the next day, Denmark announced a gigantic military spending bill for Greenland. But how real is that? Denmark is small, a straw among giants. After Japan ordered Denmark to arrest Paul Watson, the savior of whales, Watson was put in a Greenland prison for 5 months, waiting for extradition and (de facto) execution in Japan (which wants to eat whales). After France got angry, Watson was released by Greenland, to France Whether it likes it or not, Denmark is under the French and US nuclear umbrellas. Not Japan’s (which has no nukes).
***
ONE HAS TO CONSIDER WHY THERE ARE EMPIRES.
“Empire” comes from “imperium”… a place where absolute orders are given. The Roman empire arose under the Roman Republic. It was an assembly of nations under the imperium of the Roman military led by its Senate. The nations kept their own laws, as long as they collaborated with Rome, especially in trade and strategy. Europe up to 1918, was made of several empires, but one othem, the newly constituted Germany, became lethally insane, and Europe got torn apart, with 40 million dead. The peace wass won by the USA, the core of the American empire. Western representative democracies form an empire, NATO is within it. The core of the empire is the US, because Europe has refused to become a full sovereign. More exactly, the core of the Representative Democratic empire is the US and its two parents, France and Great Britain: the latter two have 8 strategic nuclear subs, and the US has 14… The rest of Europe is under the Franco-UK-US (FRUKUS?) nuclear umbrella (whether they admit it or not). FRUKUS enrages Putin,as FRUKUS can terminate Russia in twenty minutes, using just ten percent of its strategic arsenal, so Putin can’t invade all that he wants to invade, and Xi can’t plant the Chinese flag all around the South China sea, recovering old possessions such as Vietnam… Or why not Indonesia? Kublai Khan sent a fleet with approximately 30,000 soldiers, a significant military operation, helping Raden Wijaya establish the Majapahit Empire, covering most of present-day Indonesia and Malaysia by 1293 CE..
This is only part of Thule Air Force base. The important giant radars are twenty kilometers, or more, away. The runway is more than three kilometers long with around ten flights a day. The installation is crucial, and if a power tried to seize it, the US would certainly grab it back. The closest village is 120 kilometers away…
LOSING CONTROL OF GREENLAND WOULD BE WORSE FOR THE USA THAN ANYTHING HITLER COULD HAVE DONE: Because Greenland at this point is the shield above the heart of the USA.
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AMERICAN IMPERIUM SAVES LIVES WORLDWIDE, BUT IT IS EXPENSIVE:
The core reason and nature of an empire is military: a large empire can afford a large army which then can protect a large population doing great things, such as great agriculture, giant hydraulic works, nuclear plants or landing on the Moon. The US territory is presently around ten million square kilometers, most of them arable, with a population of only 350 million… Compare with mountainous China, with roughly only half of the arable area of the US and four times the population… Moreover, the USA has an enormous web of allies… its friends. Basically the USA controls the planet already… softly.
So, with no Lebensraum, no need to expand its vital space, the USA has no interest to engage in war (the same reasoning doesn’t apply to Russia; as Russia acquired a lot of its territory by war with peers… and the peers are resentful, and Russia knows it…)
Maintaining the Pax Americana, since 1945, has been incredibly expensive, but worth it, not just for Americans, but also for most of the world in general: a modern world total war would kill billions of people. Pax American prevented that. While the US imperium (where the US commands) has grown, France and the UK have become increasingly appendages and, so doing, also lost individual relative wealth, influence, and agency. Even worse for the rest of Europe.
In other words, the world is ordered by an imperial US system, and it works. Sort of, so far..But the USA and all those vested in the present imperium (that includes all of Europe) have interest that the imperium be economically optimized: Europe seem to have neither the will nor the ways to take care and exploit Greenland, so it should get out of the way, and let the boss (the US) handle it. Surely Europe would not want to fight Russian mercenaries in Nuuk?
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ANGER AGAINST US CONTROL WHY TRYING TO DUPLICATE IT:
The USA imposes a representative democracy system, which is plutocracy friendly, a sort of double control, squeezed between billionaires and “representatives”. Generally the plutocracy is not blatant, but with 12 billionaires in the Trump cabinet, the cover has been blown…
In any case, as the technological pie has been spread out worldwide, many demographic and land powers are now plain powerful… They are trying to leverage their power by duplicating the Euro-American imperial system. For example Iran tried to control much of the Middle East, all the way to the Red Sea… While helping the fellow dictator in the north extend his own empire (as of 2024, roughly 10,000 powerful Iranian drones have been used against Ukraine…).
Accordingly other great powers, notably Russia, and China, but also second rate but determined actors, such as Iran, North Korea, have tried to use what they consider to be similar methods, to insure imperiums of their own. Seeing what happened to dictatorships in Serbia, Iraq, Libya, and now Syria motivates them even more (Putin whined about Serbia in December 2024, claiming the NATO attack against Serbia was illegal; he forgot to mention that originally it is the French, under UN mandate, who fired on the Serbian forces of Milosevic and his allies… Ultimately the dictator Milosevic was arrested by his own people and sent to La Hague…)
***
SIZE MATTERS, CONSIDER RUSSIA:
Putin boasted (December 2024) that, counted in Price Purchase Parity, Russian PPP is several times Britain’s. The observation has merits, and greatly depends upon Russia’s immense physical resources. Putin and his agents, including pseudo-ecologists, European oil majors, and at least two German Chancellors (Schroder and Merkel) made it so that Europe became dependent upon Russia’s oil and gas.
Russia: Total Area: ~17,098,246 km². Largest Country in the World: Spanning 11 time zones, it covers about 11% of Earth’s total landmass, and Russia, under Putin, claims much of the Arctic Ocean
United Kingdom (UK): Total Area: ~243,610 km². Includes England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.
Relative Size: Russia is approximately 70 times larger than the UK in terms of land area.
Despite its smaller physical size, the UK’s population (~67 million) is half that of Russia’s (~146 million), demonstrating the vast sparsity of Russia’s population distribution.
Territories Gained by Russia in 1858-60, after China lost wars against France and Britain (the Opium Wars): Signed after the Second Opium War, when British and French forces had captured Beijing, forcing China into submission.
Approximately 1.5 million km², including: Modern-day Primorsky Krai. Parts of Khabarovsk Krai.
Amur Oblast. Sakhalin Island (partial claims settled with Japan later).
Historical Context:
Unequal Treaties: These agreements are often referred to as “unequal treaties” in Chinese history, as they were signed under duress, threats of military action after skirmishes with Cossacks, when China was militarily and politically weakened.
Geopolitical Impact: These acquisitions gave Russia critical access to the Pacific Ocean and expanded its influence in Asia.
Similarly and at the same time Russia expanded into Ukraine, Central Asia and the Caucasus region, in long, extended, often extremely brutal military campaigns some of which lasted centuries [1], followed by ferocious colonization. This caused long term resentment, the repression of which explains much of Putin’s behavior and his support by the Russian public (been there, seen tha, and it works…) [
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Am I advocating that the USA does what Russia did? It may look so, but that’s only superficial. Neither Greenlanders nor Danes, nor Europeans are hostile to the USA. The religion, the system, even the language (everybody speaks English). Moreover Europeans and Greenland, depend upon the US military for protection. So it is a matter of doing what makes the protection better.
And definitively dissuade bad actors to keep on going with their bad, invasive and tyrannical ways.
Annexation would be easy: conduct a self-determination-US annexation or COFA, Compact Of Free Association, referendum, after proposing one million dollars to all the 44,000 voters of Greenland, put in an escrow account, available if the annexation passed. That would cost 44 billion dollars (soon reimbursed from leases to mine operators). Europe, somewhat derelict in its protection and development of Greenland, would not be entitled to compensation (was France compensated for surrendering Algeria? My family, born there, certainly was not!)
Patrice Ayme
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[1]: The US has grown through a succession of massive annexations
The United States began as thirteen British colonies along the Atlantic coast, declaring independence in 1776. The colonies themselves were the result of annexations of Indian territories.
2. The Treaty of Paris (1783) ended the American Revolutionary War.
The U.S. gained territory east of the Mississippi River, excluding Florida and British Canada. The American Natives were not consulted, they had been defeated in war. A problem leading to Independence of the US had been Britain protecting American Native territories (which were protected by France before France’s defeat in 1763).
3. Louisiana Purchase (1803): purchased from France under President Thomas Jefferson. Cost: $15 million. Area Added: ~828,000 square miles (2.14 million km²), doubling the size of the U.S.
4. Florida Acquisition (1819): Adams-Onís Treaty with Spain. The U.S. gained Florida and clarified borders with Spanish territories.
5. Annexation of the Republic of Texas (1845): Texas declared independence from Mexico in 1836 and was annexed by the U.S. in 1845. This led to tensions with Mexico and contributed to the Mexican-American War.
6. Oregon Country (1846): Resolved by treaty with Britain. Established the U.S.-Canada border at the 49th parallel in the Pacific Northwest.
7. Mexican Cession (1848): Following the Mexican-American War, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ceded a vast area to the U.S. Territory Gained: Modern-day California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and parts of Colorado, New Mexico, and Wyoming.
8. Gadsden Purchase (1854): Purchased from Mexico for $10 million. Added southern parts of present-day Arizona and New Mexico to facilitate railroad construction.
9. Alaska Purchase (1867): “Seward’s folly“. Purchased from Russia for $7.2 million. This acquisition added vast natural resources.
10. Annexation of Hawaii (1898): US tycoons, angry to pay custom duties to sell in the USA, overthrew the Hawaiian monarchy and annexed the islands as a U.S. territory. Dastardly as Hawai’i had been a fully recognized country. Became a state in 1959.
11. Spanish-American War Acquisitions (1898): Treaty of Paris ceded Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines to the U.S. Cuba became a U.S. protectorate (though not annexed).
12. Other Pacific and Caribbean Acquisitions: American Samoa (1900): Acquired through treaties with Germany and Britain. Virgin Islands (1917): Purchased from DENMARK (partly in exchange for recognizing Danish sovereignty over Greenland; Denmark made it to Thule by 1937… But as Denmark fell and Nazis prowled, the US was back in formal control within three years…).
***
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Musk wants to put a million people on Mars for a self-sustaining colony… to insure the survival of consciousness, he says… (I did not introduce Musk to my dog, who is fully conscious.)
Lord Rees, an astrophysics Nobel, calls colonizing Mars to insure the survival of consciousness a “dangerous illusion”.
With the tech SpaceX intends to have in a few years, a trip to Mars is imaginable. Sustainable colonization, no…. be it only because an ultra powerful compact energy source is needed.
***
An example is making a magnetic field sheltering Mars from the radiation, Solar Wind, Mass Coronal Ejections, and Cosmic Rays… It’s feasible with 3,000 kilometer long superconducting wires… They would need to be powered. However, the energy of Earth’s magnetic field is millions of times the energy of Hiroshima! So a new energy source is needed. Thermonuclear fusion is the obvious candidate… But maybe zero point energy could be made to work (I have sketched a way to do so)..
***
The problems humanity face right now are of two types:
Problems we don’t solve because our leaders don’t want to solve them (inequality, nuclear weapons, etc.)
Problems we can’t solve from lack of technology (various ecological crises, including the fossil fuel crisis)
The two classes of problems are entangled, as the inequity, unfair human leadership uses 2) to enable 1). For example the very serious climate crisis-energy quandary has been understood poorly and treated inappropriately… this enables plutocracy to reign by the distraction climate brings, just as MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction does…
Attempting Mars colonization forces technological advances, because without these advances it will not happen. So if engaging in Mars colonization, deliberately not researching the needed new tech is not an option, nor is using its absence a way to distract people from social change.
***
Hence to solve problems on Earth one needs first to be willing to take the Mars exam. Reciprocally, refusing to pass the Mars exam means one is not serious at researching the needed tech advances to mitigate the deterioration of Earth’s biosphere and Earth’s civilization.
***
Hence to solve problems on Earth one needs first to pass the Mars exam.Reciprocally, refusing to pass the Mars exam means one is not serious at researching the needed tech advances… On Earth. In other words, going to Mars forces humanity into the longtermism needed to make Earth’s biosphere survive..
Certainly a new, much cleaner and powerful energy source has to be found and deployed. Without it, terraforming Mars will not happen.
***
Some are sure to laugh and point out that it’s the world’s wealthiest persons (Musk, Bezos) who want to go to Mars, and thus going there would reinforce the world’s plutocratic order… Well, not at all, Musk and Bezos are themselves fringes of the plutocratic order. Most billionaires are more like France’s Arnaut, busy getting one billion Euros in help from the government for a company he bought for 44 millions… In other words, the wealth class is mostly made of corruptocrats and heirs who want ever more power… rather than giving humanity new powers (as many entrepreneurs were during the Gilded Age/Belle Epoque, around 1900… Creating colonies on Mars would force a delegation of powers to the colonists, just as happened to several European colonies (but not the French ones, from too much centralization!)
***
Science is not the main objective of colonizing Mars. Instead, the main objective is to confront difficult problems we would not otherwise confront.
Patrice Ayme
Terraformed Mars is feasible if we can get thermonuclear fusion to work really well…
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That’s not something one usually does, and that’s a shame. Here I was swimming, in a small, very historical crique guarded by two thick medieval military towers. Contemplating ancient pink and ochre apartment buildings… On the other side of a labyrinth of deep and narrow stone middle age streets lies the port. That port was dynamited by the Nazis in August 1944. It took more than six years and a giant floating crane to rebuild it… At the end of the work, the crane lifted out of the sea giant Roman columns which had laid there, too heavy to bring back to the surface for two millennia…
Along the kilometer long port, enormous yachts from plutocrats proudly exhibit the name of their tax havens…There is no pleasure in oppressing others if they don’t notice it…
More than 26 centuries of culture… And wars. In the Tenth Century, the Roman Navy spitting Grecian fire destroyed a Muslim fleet in the Gulf of Saint Tropez, while the Frankish army squeezed the Islamists bandits from the interior. For two generations, Muslims had raided from the Var they occupied, all the way to Switzerland and its passes. Their central fortress was at La Garde Freinet, on the heights of Saint Tropez’s hinterlands… To this day the little mountain ranger there is called the “Massif des Maures” (Range of the Moors). After the Franks regained European control of southern France, they took no measure whatsoever against Muslim civilians (and to this day a least a fourth of France carries traceable amounts of Berber and Arab genes… so there was no genocide whatsover…)
The last battle in the area was the Franco-American landing of August 1944, Operation Dragoon… which was highly successful…the initial names of the landings in Normandy and Provence were sledgehammer and anvil: as the Allies landed in Normandy, 300,000 of the best Nazi units were waiting for the inevitable and then they were engaged in Provence… The names of the landings were compromised and then switched to “Overlord” and Dragoon”. The main force of Normandy was from the British Commonwealth (UK and Canada mostly), facing the most Nazi armored divisions. The main force in Provence was French (with a huge US contribution in both landings). While Normandy was long a stalemate, the Provence landings saw fluid action, followed by amazingly ferocious French assaults on Marseilles and Toulon which saw French gunners in action in a festive ambiance. Dragoon, a major victory over 4 weeks, saw 26,000 Franco-US casualties… for 159,000 Nazi casualties…. The French army freed major French ports, including Marseilles and Toulon, while all other ports on the continent were either fully destroyed or stayed occupied or controlled by Nazis until May 1945… The Allies depended upon these ports, because they had only Cherbourg in Normandy…
*** .
Athenopolis of Marseilles, mentioned by several Roman authors, was a Greek and then Roman town, under that name for more than a millennium. When Rome became a “Christian” dictatorship, the name was changed…
Saint Tropez is named from the unlikely story that a bodyguard of Nero supposedly converted to Christianism. Unsurprisingly, sources are hard to find. According to the fabrication, refusing to renounce his lover Christ, Caius Silvius Torpetius would have been decapitated. His severed head was thrown in the river Arno at Pisa while his body was set adrift in a boat with a rooster and a dog.
They washed ashore in modern day Saint Tropez with the dog and bird, who had left Torpetius untouched… Christ ruling men and beasts alike in the collective imaginary of the theological fascists of the collapsing empire.
***
Location of my swim: in the center… 26 centuries of written, reflective culture… Twice as long as Islam. What are cultures exactly? Software programs adapting circumstances to the state of collapsing ecology and the hardware of the available technology… Making a lot of mistakes learning therefore a gigantic amount.
***
HOW THE GREEKS ESTABLISHED AN EMPIRE IN PROVENCE IS INSTRUCTIVE:
The Greek colonies along what is now the French Cote D’Azur were established peacefully, as a win-win project. An accord was made between the Greeks and the Celts. The Celts were a fascinating culture. Probably well over one hundred states. The Celts were very advanced technologically. The Celts had superior metallurgy, and sold their military equipment, from helmets to swords, to the Romans. The Celts were also permeated with some Greek culture: Mercury, god of commerce, was very popular. The Celts under the Druids were also savages practicing mass human sacrifices, and would make the mistake of mass burning alive Roman military captives.
The Greeks of Massilia came from Phrygia. Phrygia is in the middle of present day Turkey, but the area was threatened by the great dictatorships arising in the Middle East (maybe because of desertification combined with their own success). Phrygia was obsessed with freedom, and the Pryghian cap became a symbol in the French revolution of 1789.. Phrygian caps came to signify freedom and the pursuit of liberty first in the American Revolution and then in the French Revolution
The Celts had progressively adopted many Greek ways, but the Greeks brought the networks and habits of distant trade and sailing technology. (Interestingly, the Celts, three centuries later, reached Phrygia and established a colony there.)
The Marseilles empire was powerful: it took Carthage head to head for centuries. Being a democratic republic obsessed with freedom, and Rome having arisen from the mother Greek civilization, Marseilles became a natural ally to Rome (which had learned everything from the Greeks and the mysterious Etruscans).
The accord between Celts and Greeks was sealed by a famous marriage. Between the daughter of the chief colonist and the prince of the local Celts, basically. Colonialism well done: everybody benefits. There was never a problem between Marseilles and the Celts.
Marseilles will end up as the longest independent Greek state. After choosing the camp of Pompey the Great, supposedly great defender of the Roman Republic instead of Caesar, Caesar had to subdue Marseilles, its fleet being too powerful. There was a long and difficult Siege and finally Marseilles had to surrender…After 6 centuries of Independence. And producing the first scientist who discovered the Arctic and the size of the Earth. A state which fought mighty and smart Carthage to a standstill…
***
So a good swim, full of history. And history is a teacher, the teacher. The first thing history teaches is that if something can go wrong, it will… except if one anticipates it… and one takes countermeasures.
Another thing to learn is that greed has no limits. Roman plutocrats preferred the collapse of civilization to the potential end of their privileges.
Rome fell as a state and a cvilization, after being ravaged by invasions, and the often ridiculous, even grotesque, deals that plutocrats made with the invaders…the Europeans, as the Franks learned to call themselves, made it so that Europe could not be invaded again: no more deals with invaders (something to think about, as Europe opened itself to Islamist invaders under the guise of progress… which in truth was propelled by the same sort of divide and conquer by Roman plutocrats against We The Roman People which had enabled their allies the Barbarians… Qui se ressemble, s’assemble….
But guess what? Europe now imports more gas from Putin, a thermonuclear tyrant, than from the USA, a democratic colony that mostly France and its own colony Britain, founded. Austria, which claims to be democratic and a republic, and also “neutral”, imports 95% of its gas from the mass murderer Putin. That sort of deal is reminiscent of what brought the Greco-Roman civilization down.
While swimming, freshened up by the sea, having to worry about what could compromise survival, one learns to get one’s priorities straight. The next day, I tried to swim to an island with my daughter. But the wind suddenly blew, and the waves rose… We turned back in time (the island is at the end of a cape, and I didn’t want us to drift away…)
Smarts rule the waves…
Patrice Ayme
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Propped by diverse obligations and opportunities, moods are changing. Colonization is becoming again civilization’s best friend. Space colonization, as usual. Once the immense space of the savannah was conquered. Now everybody is going to space. Korea just announced the creation of KASA, the NASA equivalent. Korea is already highly competent in space, but now wants to colonize Mars. No less.
Only Europe has no colonization plans. Europe, or at least its fake intellectuals thinking what they have been told to think by their empoyers, only believes in shrinking. Europe believes colonization to be a terrible concept. However, Europeans are, with few exceptions, descendants of colonialists. Not only did Homo Sapiens hybridized with Neanderthals conquer Europe, but the Celts conquered nearly all of Europe, around 3,000 years ago… Europe which had been previously greatly colonized by Middle Easterners farmers’ descendants…those Middle Easterners had brought superior technology (herding and farming). These are not opinions, but facts establsihed by archeology, and, more recently and independently, by genetic studies…
Why is colonialism a bad word? Verily, Homo Sapiens is the colonizing species.
We shall die, but the institutions shall go on… And the mental institutions even more so. Colonialism, this is what Homo does.
Institutions will perdure, perhaps. For a while. But human institutions will not perdure if we do not colonize! European strategy in the last three decades or so, was to export the badness elsewhere, for example industry and pollution to China. Now China is making a habit of landing robotic rovers on the Moon… while Europe begs Elon Musk for rides to orbit…
Europe has generated policies according to which, if Europe produces less CO2 than most countries… by tightening belts… It will contribute to solving the CO2 crisis. Per capita carbon dioxide emissions in China reached 7.8 metric tons per person in 2022. … a bit more than Germany and roughly twice France… Although the real French emissions are around 11 tons, once included all the French stuff made in China. The UK, with 4.7 tons, is on its way to emit as little as France…
Tightening belts is counterproductive with CO2. When the rest of the world’s living standards are up to European level, pollution by CO2 would have roughly doubled.
So the solution is to find non-carbon energy sources. Thermonuclear is the obvious solution for colonizing space.
SpaceX intends to build one giant Starship a day, and crush launch costs by a factor of 10^4, or so…Not surprising: to put in orbit, I computed decades ago, doesn’t have to cost more fuel than a jumbo jet crossing the Pacific… But as we will see below, it can save lives…
Ian Miller: Not sure what they will do with hundreds of them. Patrice Ayme said: Ferry stuff to the Moon and Mars… That’s what SpaceX will say…. Indeed, establishing a base on Mars will require lots of ships landing. One primary activity will be to set up reliable robotic factories on Mars to make oxygen and methane. (Making CH4 on Mars has already been demonstrated by NASA to be feasible… by a NASA lander, on Mars!)
Right now there is no obvious industrial use of the Moon… Although potentially Helium3 may be mined on the Moon. Rare on Earth, He3 is abundant on the Moon. The fusion of Helium-3 with deuterium (isotope of hydrogen with one added neutron) can produce energy without generating neutrons, thus without significant radioactive deterioration or waste.It makes He3 ideal for spaceships, etc.
When Helium-3 is used in fusion reactions, particularly when fused with deuterium (another isotope of hydrogen), it can produce a substantial amount of energy. The reaction is: D+He3 → He4+p+18.4 MeV.
This reaction produces energy primarily in the form of kinetic energy of the Helium4 nucleus and the proton, without generating significant amounts of radioactive waste.
The entire primary energy production of humanity at this point is more than 85% from fossil fuels. 600-700 Exajoules (EJ) per year. An Exajoule is 10^18 Joules. 12% of that is from electricity, corresponding to two tons of He3.
It is thought that hundreds of thousands of tons, and maybe five million tons of He3 lay next to the surface on the Moon.
***
The Pentagon would have a different story about SpaceX if it wanted to speak freely… Landing troops and equipment anywhere on Earth within 40 minutes of launch opens lots of strategic possibilities… In somewhat related news, Ukraine put out of service a Beyond The Horizon Russian strategic radar… The strike damaged buildings and the radar’s phased array antenna systems. The Voronezh-DM radar, operational since late 2016, is capable of detecting ballistic and hypersonic targets up to 6,000 kilometers away. This radar forms part of Russia’s missile early warning network, providing critical data on missile launches to enhance the response of Russia’s Armed Forces.
Input from such radars is used to confirm or deny an attack by ICBMs… As of 2024, Russia has a total of seven operational Voronezh-DM radars. So Russia is at risk of going blind nuclear strategically… And so therefore the nuclear armed Western powers (US, France, Britain) are at risk of a massive Russian nuclear attack…
So the world war is heating up, and SpaceX is no doubt told discreetly to hurry up… Expect blistering development…
Patrice Ayme
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Saving Earth and colonizing the Solar System are basically the same problem and have the same solution: much more advanced technology [1].There is no contradiction, far from it. There is complementarity, as technology that will have to be developed for space will be found to be useful for Earth. For psycho-political reasons those technologies won’t be developed directly for Earth. So those who complain about space, while claiming we should focus on Earth, get it only half right.
Colonizing Mars with present technology is not going to happen anymore than the technology of the 1960s enabled to colonize the Moon. A visit from a human crew on Mars with the technology SpaceX wants to develop is imaginable… Barely. And those will just be visits, multi-year commitments full of lethal radiation and worse living accommodations than the highest maximum security prison: basically what was done on the Moon in the 1960s, but much more daunting.
It’s much more feasible to establish bases on the Moon. First, there is plenty of oxygen and hydrogen (so water) on the Moon, imprisoned in rocks: one only needs energy to extract them, and the Moon has plenty of that (solar panels!) Second, the gravity well of the Moon is also half that of Mars. Third, the Moon is close by and one can go there all the time (whereas Mars can be visited with present fossil fuel tech only every two years, when the planets align; serious commuting of goods and people between Earth and Mars will require nuclear propulsion).Monitoring robots on the Moon is possible, whereas on Mars, with up to twenty minutes delay, one will have to use advanced, autonomous AI. Fixing problems caused by dust in robots on the Moon with roaming human crews… A solution that won’t exist on Mars, for decades.
Thus AI is the first order solution: AI just needs energy, not shelter, air, water and food. AI colonies on the Moon, and then, later, Mars could build environments that humans could then inhabit. Say pressurized lava tubes…
Skeptics could object that I didn’t roll out specific techs. But space colonization, especially if robot and AI driven, will require much higher tech. For example solar energy, which works wonderfully, was led by its usage in space… where it has long worked splendidly. The solar cells used in space have an efficiency more than twice that of the ones used on the ground… from using more advanced (but expensive) materials, like Gallium… That has invited researchers and companies to boost the efficiency of the silicon and now perovskites cells used on the ground. SpaceX uses Reliable Reusable Rockets (RRR), lowering the cost of space access… That is revolutionary, but actually follows the tech used to land on the Moon in the first place. But the first landing rockets, the LEMS, were Lunar Exploration Modules… They showed the way…
Technology is impossible without wisdom, and wisdom impossible without technology. One can’t grow without the other. The quest for tech is a quest for wisdom.
We don’t need AI on Earth, at least so many “leaders” will think (and they would be very wrong)… However, for space colonization, clearly, we need AI. Space AI will then bring in the Earth AI we need to solve countless problems, including the ones we didn’t think we had.
Patrice Ayme
NASA picture from Curiosity rover on a rather barren, poisonous, irradiated, dusty and dry Mars
P/S: Scifi novels are an old genre: The Birds of Aristophanes, making fun of the colonies Athens established everywhere, by establishing one in the sky, preceded the space colonization of Lucian by seven centuries…
***
[1] The European solution to the Earth Crisis has been Mathusianism: use less energy. This weakens Europe and encourages its dictatorial enemies. Actually the best solution is rather the opposite: to use more ABSOLUTE WORTH ENERGY. Use, much more EFFICIENT energy. In particular, we have to leverage fossil fuels to get out of them… using the energy theu provide to invent new science and tech….
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Africa’s population is increasing fast. It’s now 1.5 billion in what is essentially a hostile land (from desert or ferocious jungle). The solution of course is war, and wars all over blossom. Just contemplate Ethiopia-Eritrea: so many deaths there, so many wild beasts eating the corpses, so much administrative mayhem, one has not even an idea of how many people were, and are killed. So great is the chaos that the Nobel Prize winning leader is now accused to be an active war criminal (a bit as in Myanmar, but way worse).
I grew up in Senegal, I saw the situation decay. Decolonization was an illusion. If anything many colonized countries went from colonial administration protectorates to plutocratic exploitation. This is not my choice of words: countries such as Senegal have switched from the abusive concept of colonization which didn’t really happen, as there were not too many “colons” to the concept of “protectorate”: throughout West Africa, “colonizer” France was paying for one hospital with free service every one hundred kilometer. After France was removed, so were the hospitals. Deprived of contraceptive services, Niger went from a population of 3.4 million in 1960 to more than 28 million now in what is essentially a desert.
When Africa was integrated in the “colonial “ systems, there was free trade of goods and people. The French constitution of 1945 was partly written by African MPs (say Leopold Sedar Senghor). Many Africans were de facto citizens of Europe. Investment flows were directed to Africa. Now many European powers feel it is wiser to direct investments towards Eastern Europe, Ukraine, Turkey. Up to recent times, even Russia and China profited from Euro-US investments. But it is dawning on everybody that maybe it’s wiser to invest only in democracies.
Direct administration, as in old times, is the only solution. A few decades ago, my own father, an African born geologist, who had personally discovered Algerian oil and gas, no less, was put in charge by the United Nations to oversee international fossil fuel searches in several African countries (Cameroon, Kenya…), to lessen corruption….
If superior Euro-American minds do not feel that recolonizing Africa with the idea of justice is a solution, Putin’s Wagner Group and Xi will happily oblige. Inferior Euro-American mind will be happy with “colonizing” Ukraine…
Patrice Ayme
Mayhem will concentrate where the population does… With the possible exception of historically democratic Senegal… A place that was already with French citizenship in the 17C….
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AKIRA Intellectual Property Law
Intellectual Property Attorney, PhD Biophysics, California Bar, UK Solicitor, Member of the Bar of the Supreme Court, Computer Science Professor
EVIL EVOLUTION
Evil Is Not An Accident But A Necessary Mean To ecological Sustainabiilty. That It Is A Solution Is Also A Warning.
Ian Miller
New Zealand Physical Chemist musing very cogently about the state of everything
Our Friend Barry.
On Barack Obama’s formative years as a scholarship student at the Punahou college preparatory school in Hawaii, by his classmates and friends.
Tyranosopher
State of the Art Philosophy, Devouring the Feeble Minded.
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AKIRA Intellectual Property Law
Intellectual Property Attorney, PhD Biophysics, California Bar, UK Solicitor, Member of the Bar of the Supreme Court, Computer Science Professor
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EVIL EVOLUTION
Evil Is Not An Accident But A Necessary Mean To ecological Sustainabiilty. That It Is A Solution Is Also A Warning.
0
Ian Miller
New Zealand Physical Chemist musing very cogently about the state of everything
0
Our Friend Barry.
On Barack Obama’s formative years as a scholarship student at the Punahou college preparatory school in Hawaii, by his classmates and friends.
0
AKIRA Intellectual Property Law
Intellectual Property Attorney, PhD Biophysics, California Bar, UK Solicitor, Member of the Bar of the Supreme Court, Computer Science Professor
EVIL EVOLUTION
Evil Is Not An Accident But A Necessary Mean To ecological Sustainabiilty. That It Is A Solution Is Also A Warning.
Ian Miller
New Zealand Physical Chemist musing very cogently about the state of everything
Our Friend Barry.
On Barack Obama’s formative years as a scholarship student at the Punahou college preparatory school in Hawaii, by his classmates and friends.
Philosophy and science: the human adventure. Philosophy is not as popular as it should be, as it supports not just civilization, but human evolution. It matters what we love. Philo-Sophy: Love of Wisdom. But what is love, and what is wise? We humbly examine all the issues we can possibly imagine having to do with defining love, and wisdom. Plus Oultre!
New logic solving 25 centuries old logic problems such as the Liar Paradox And Incorporating Spirits of Quantum Logic, Local Time, And Local Truth. More General Than PDL ,
Trying To Think Better By All & Any Means. To Be Human Is To Unleash As Much Intelligence As Possible, Instincts & Values Flow, Even Happiness. History and Science Teach Us Not Just Humility, But Power, Smarts, And The Ways We Should Embrace. Naturam Primum Cognoscere Rerum
New logic solving 25 centuries old logic problems such as the Liar Paradox And Incorporating Spirits of Quantum Logic, Local Time, And Local Truth. More General Than PDL ,
Trying To Think Better By All & Any Means. To Be Human Is To Unleash As Much Intelligence As Possible, Instincts & Values Flow, Even Happiness. History and Science Teach Us Not Just Humility, But Power, Smarts, And The Ways We Should Embrace. Naturam Primum Cognoscere Rerum
New logic solving 25 centuries old logic problems such as the Liar Paradox And Incorporating Spirits of Quantum Logic, Local Time, And Local Truth. More General Than PDL ,
Trying To Think Better By All & Any Means. To Be Human Is To Unleash As Much Intelligence As Possible, Instincts & Values Flow, Even Happiness. History and Science Teach Us Not Just Humility, But Power, Smarts, And The Ways We Should Embrace. Naturam Primum Cognoscere Rerum
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 