The Case For Mars and the advantages of a frontier

Ro came back from the ocean-deprived portions of the southwestern U.S. today. After I informed him of the state of his laptop, and the sole option for replacing his battery, he expressed a desire to take the bottom off the laptop and see what he could do with a digital multimeter and a voltage supply. Given that we don’t have such items, (and my concern about frying the laptop), I’m going to check on the return policy on the batteries tomorrow and try again to convince him to buy it.

Then we whined a bit about our respective finances. I find my whining more convincing 😉

Off to dinner with the requisite alternative social structures conversation. I proposed a community of vegetarians with a goal of the education of the larger community, which Ro was quite enthusiastic about.

We also exchanged “assigned” reading. I gave him Preludes and Nocturnes of the Sandman series, as well as Born in Fire of the Rising Stars series. He gave me The Case for Mars, particularly pointing to the epilogue, wherein the author, Robert Zubrin, explains the reason he sees colonizing mars as vitally important.

In the epilogue of “The Case for Mars”, Zubrin makes many claims. While I disagree with a great deal of the version of history he argues for, I feel differently about some of the principles he extracts from this, specifically that frontiers inspire innovation, improve intelligence, raise the value of human life (by offering workers a meaningful alternative to, oh, say, printing webpages), and cultivate freedom, and further, that it extends these benefits both to those who go to the frontier and those who stay behind (the first two rather directly, the latter through availability and demand). And phrased differently, that the lack of a frontier results in the domestication of humans, which has results not unlike the domestication of other animals, we become stupider, weaker, less capable of surviving independently.

He also cites a progressive cultural homogenization. The entropic loss of difference between the traditional geopolitical cultural entities (the spread of mcdonald’s, tshirts, country music to foreign countries he specifically mentions without commenting on things like honky buddhists, or the Chinese adoption of a political system conceived, if not gestated, in Germany, equally relevant though they are).

But this doesn’t concern me as much. I see and predict a geographic dispersion of culture, simultaneous to intensive subdivision of culture, more akin to the future depicted in Transmetropolitan where nazi skinhead gay-for-pay prostitutes brush past socially democratic born again police officers in a bustling downtown (similar to predictions made by Alvin Toffler), rather than the only temporarily and superficially differentiated monoculture found on the Earth of Niven’s Universe Earth, which seems to be more in line with what he’s suggesting.

His history is horrifically Amero-centric, and smacks more of meretricious children’s pablum (okay, so maybe not that bad, but how often do I get to use the word ‘meretricious, eh?) than a fully informed education on the subject, but, I do not fault his claims regarding the sources and consequences of human domestication.