lørdag 15. februar 2014

Space travel is dead





Human beings will never set foot on Mars. And they will never return to the Moon. That much is certain.

The space age is a thing of the past.

Some robots will continue to visit the Moon and Mars and other places in the solar system during the next decades, but missions will be gradually fewer as resource scarcity tightens. Space is hostile to life, and colonizing extraterrestrial celestial bodies is way too expensive and difficult to be achieved under the coming years of famine, war, social upheaval and economic turmoil. Austerity measures will squeeze every last drop of blood out of the human population, while desperate banksters, politicians and economists will continue doing everything in their power to "stimulate the economy", i.e. printing increasing amounts of Monopoly money for the megabanks and trying to make people breed more to produce more taxpayers. Space travel isn't profitable enough in the short term, and more and more resources will be allocated to a financial sector desperate for more liquidity and higher profit margins.

I'm a space enthusiast and used to be a futurist and transhumanist. When I was younger I firmly believed in the possibility of human colonization of space, and I wanted it to occur in my lifetime.

However, as I've grown older I've become more disillusioned. I've learned about the harsh realities of economics, peak oil, peak everything and the petrodollar. I've followed the hype train surrounding Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic, and I've seen the numerous delays and cancelled flights of that company and others like it. I watched as the otherwise wildly successful genius John Carmack gave up on space travel after he realized it was too expensive and too hard to accomplish.

Yes, things like space tourism and asteroid mining are still hyped. Just like Mars terraforming and other juvenile visions. They will, however, never come to fruition in a world that's collapsing due to ever more rapid resource depletion fuelled by an accelerating population explosion. They are bubbles, empty talk, clever marketing schemes to make easily fooled investors jump aboard the hype train that ultimately leads nowhere but to war and chaos and the total destruction of biological diversity and eradication of most multicellular lifeforms, including humans.

We're forever stuck on Earth. This is where we'll perish, fighting against each other, inevitably turning to cannibalism in a last, desperate attempt to stay alive.

So just forget about space.


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