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One Vote For Science

By Eric McErlain
Over at Potential Energy, Gia Milinovich is striking a blow against Luddism:
Investing in advanced technologies creates far more money than is spent. Queen Isabella and Spain reaped untold fortunes from her investment into Columbus’ journeys. All mankind has continued to benefit from the scientific and technological knowledge gained from the six Moon landings. Why does anyone in their right mind believe that scrimping and saving our energy is a ‘long term’ solution?

If we look at nuclear power as our first step to becoming a space-faring species (I mean, we’re not going to get to Mars using hydro-electric-power, are we?), then to me the idea of spending time and money on developing and building wind farms seems ludicrous. Almost as ridiculous as someone in the 19th Century saying that we shouldn’t develop steam engines for industry and should instead make more efficient water wheels. Actually, not ‘almost’, it’s more ridiculous than that because we have the advantage of hindsight, we can see very clearly that, throughout history, taking the ‘Science’ route has advanced civilisation time and time again. And that believing in power, beauty or perfection of ‘Nature’, that ‘Nature’ knows best, has only ever hindered our development.
Read the rest right now.

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Comments

Anonymous said…
Such a refreshing antidote to the misanthropic ideologies of the environmentalists and perfectly reflects my own thinking. Either we 'settle down' to a energy scrimping lifestyle waiting for some natural disaster to finish us off or we head into space(or the Moon and Mars, at any rate). We may be the only intelligent life in the universe - reason enough to aim for the stars!
June 19, 2006 at 11:59 PM
Anonymous said…
I don't think we'll ever colonize space - the energy requirements are just too great (read Charlie Stross's essay here).

The most that I see happening is some workers temporarily travelling to Mars or the Asteroid Belt* in order to control resource-extraction robots.

*Not the Moon, as it's close enough that the robots could be controlled directly from Earth.

The idea of space colonization was the creation of Technocracy - the third modernist ideology of the 20th century (after Communism and Fascism). Space colonization is to Technocracy what Lebensraum is to Nazism or what World Revolution is to Communism.
June 30, 2008 at 3:53 PM
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