“Bar The Exit Door!”

     One thing that’s perfectly consistent among totalitarians of all stripes is that they don’t like for anyone to escape them. Enough escapees and the totalitarian could find himself exercising power over… no one. What fun would that be?

     Today, governments control the habitable land surface of the Earth. (Only penguins consider Antarctica habitable.) Thus, there’s nowhere on this ball of mud where one can go to be left alone. The only prospects for escape from the ever-tightening grip of one State or another are off-planet: in space or on some other solid body.

     So the Left wants that prospect eliminated:

     Savannah Mandel, a PhD candidate at Virginia Tech and an “outer space anthropologist,” adds to what seems to be a trendy argument about investigations into outer space.
     According to Virginia Tech News, Mandel’s book “Ground Control: An Argument for the End of Human Space Exploration” argues that “rushing to send more humans to space […] mirrors an imperialist mindset that harms Earth’s humanity and environment.”
     Mandel (pictured) said the space industry is “highly bureaucratic, highly politicized, and highly technical,” and the more she learned the more she began to question the utility of continued manned space operations.
     She said she wants a “systemic change” in human-led space efforts, one of which is “the inclusion of more social scientists” at NASA and elsewhere.

     Mandel is hardly the first. There’s this moonbat:

     Wesleyan University Dean of Social Sciences Mary-Jane Rubenstein, a “philosopher of science and religion” (who’s also affiliated with the school’s Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program), says she’s noticed how “many of the factors that drove European Christian imperialism” have been put to use in “high-speed, high-tech forms.”
     Rubenstein wonders if “colonial practices” like “exploitation of environmental resources and the destruction of landscapes,” all “in the name of ideals such as destiny, civilization and the salvation of humanity,” will be part of man’s expansion into space.
     Of course, we’re reasonably sure that, especially in our own solar system, there is no life — not even microbes — about which to worry. Hence, what’s the big deal if we help save Earth by exploiting Mars, Mercury, the asteroid belt, etc. for mineral and other resources?
     To her credit, Rubenstein notes that Mars Society President Robert Zubrin has made this exact case. In a 2020 op-ed, Zubrin ripped a “manifesto” from a NASA DEI — diversity, equity, and inclusion — group which had argued “we must actively work to prevent capitalist extraction on other worlds.”
     Such “brilliantly demonstrates how the ideologies responsible for the destruction of university liberal-arts education can be put to work to abort space exploration as well,” Zubrin wrote.

     There are others.

     Now that most of the workable approaches to getting off the Earth’s surface are under private control, the decision to go somewhere else in the Solar System, for whatever reason, rests largely in private hands. That’s got the Left’s knickers in a twist. Even were 99% of the world’s population to remain Earthbound, that 1% would constitute an unacceptable insult to them. Worse, it could prove more successful than any Earthly society. The odds favor that, as persons eager to make lives off-Earth are likely to be both smart and individualistic.

     This is a theme many science-fiction writers have explored. (Yes, I have, too.) How many of them expected the Left to condemn it – and them – for daring to inspire new dreams of freedom?

     Perhaps we should have known. After all, look at all the effort recognizably totalitarian countries have put into hanging on to their subjects. The border guards of such nations aren’t tasked with keeping immigrants out.

     But the subject doesn’t end with the possibility of establishing viable habitats off-Earth. Even the use of off-Earth resources is anathema to the Left. After all the work they’ve put into keeping the greater part of Mankind poor, they’re not about to let Elon Musk and his confreres ruin things by making the riches of the Solar System available. The hoi polloi might actually realize what’s been done to them – and by whom!

     Regardless of their putative ideologies, governments worldwide are dominated by power-mongers. They’re hostile to anyone who appears to threaten their power over us. And they are quietly doing everything they can to seal off the high frontier. “National security” forbids it, don’t y’know.

     A fanciful story from fifty-five years ago, J. W. Schutz’s “The Bubble,” proposed that a space-oriented entrepreneur could break the government’s stranglehold by turning enough Americans into stockholders in his enterprise. It might work, if enough people could be convinced that a positive return is probable. But you can bet your last dollar that the stock offering would somehow be torpedoed. The escape hatch must be closed.

     And the anti-human, anti-prosperity, anti-freedom Left would lead the charge.

4 comments

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  1. You were the first in my experience to make it a point that Earth government would condemn it. An enmity so huge that it set a booby-trap for any who dared return. I’d bet nobody else saw it that clearly so soon.

    • NITZAKHON on October 17, 2024 at 10:53 AM

    As an amusement: Jews exiled to the Moon.

     

    JEWS EXILED TO MOON – Weird Jews — LiveJournal

    1. If you can find it, I commend to you Joel Rosenberg’s short story “The Emigrant,” which first appeared in the anthology Perpetual Light: a collection of SF stories that incorporate religious themes and motifs.

  2. Shortly after ‘Glasnost’ and the wall in Berlin coming down, I was stationed with the OPFOR (Opposing Force) In Hohenfels Germany.  We ‘hosted’ and wargamed against not only US DotMil, but the Dutch, Brits, Germans and a slew of ‘other’ DotMils.  I think it was early 94 we had a contingent of Russian DotMil come through just doing a ‘look-see’ of our Training and as the OPFOR we were running around playing “Russians” with visually modified US vehicles made up to look like BRDMS and BMPs.

    At one point the OCs (the referees) stopped our truck as the Russian General? and/or other Occifers wanted to talk to a random set of troops, i.e. us.  I think they picked us at random so to see if we were a ‘Potemkin’ setup or not…meaning they wanted to speak to -real- troops and not ones that were set up to give the answers our Higher-Higher would have wanted us to…  So they got the 3 of us, basically rough uncouth US Infantry, 2x Spec-4s (one of them me, the gunner) and our Driver a PFC.

    My Boss the TC, Boli took most of the questions via a translator.  At one point the General wanted to know our mission?  Boli started telling him, and said “It’ll be easier to show him” and went and got his map board.  ALL of the Russians were positively AMAZED that a mere “Corporal” (Boli and my rank equivalent) had not only a map, but had the ENTIRE Operational layout with the other units on it, to include the defenses, operational axis, and all the ‘normal stuff’.  When asked about it, Boli had Me and McKnight grab OUR map boards… (we all had one… I still have one in my kit today) and we played “Show the Rooskie our gear”

    McKnight had on his an additional overlay with all the radio freqs on it.  THAT positively freaked them out the most…

    I thought the Russians were going to stroke out from Amazement.
    That a PFC and two Corporals had MAPS even the Battalion Radio Freqs and Net???
    What sorcery was this?

    We found out later in Soviet times having a map was a ‘no-no’ as it could help you escape… a most enlightening experience Aye?

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