One of the things that you believe when you call yourself a Conservative - that you should believe - is that Man is Unique. And that it is his God-given right to make use, to the fullest extent, of the riches of the Earth.
Of course, we should do so wisely. Not only because ruining our habitat would endanger our species, but also out of respect for the wonder that our planet is.
It follows naturally that, as Humanity advances through the ages, our ever enhancing technology compels us to not limit ourselves to this World (no matter how Unique it is itself) and reach for the stars.
Naturally, we should forever cherish Earth as "the place where it all began". But our Destiny is Out There and just like discovering the New World 500 years ago led to Humanity making great strides forward, discovering New Worlds in Outer Space will lead to our species' Next Grandiose Phase. Unrivalled development of technology, unimaginable riches in natural resources, colossal trade volumes, the understanding of hitherto mysterious physical phenomena, and possibly the evolution of the Human Mind towards as yet unfathomable capabilities (mastery of mind over matter, telepathy) may literally lay just over the horizon.
The Left does not see it that way. These wretched creatures want us to stay on this planet and resort to pitiful navel-staring. They have abandoned God and Christianity's vision of Humans as utterly unique beings. The Christian Scripture cites God who, while blessing the first humans, tells them to "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground."
By contrast, leftists have created their own God, the State, and replaced Christian and other religions with their own one, essentially a pagan belief that worships "Gaia" and which makes Man subordinate to Earth. Where Christians are told to "increase in number" - a quintessentially optimistic, hopeful vision - leftists want the exact opposite: they want us to decrease in number. Mainstream leftism has thus far refrained from openly calling for a deliberate reduction of the Earth's population, but the idea certainly lives in their circles. It pops up now and then, sometimes rather explicitly, and has historically had strong advocates among the feminist (Margaret Sanger) and environmentalist (Rachel Carson, Paul Ehrlich) branches of the Leftist Tree. A hint of what these people have in store for humanity was given when rich leftist lunatics erected the so-called Georgia Guidestones and inscribed in them the chilling message "Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature". Given the fact that the most horrible mass murders in history originated from leftist ideologies (70 million dead in Communist China, at least 30 million dead in the USSR, 6 million dead Jews under National Socialism, between 1.5 and 3 million dead by the Khmer Rouge), sensible humans should have every reason to dread the means by which the fine specimen of our Moral Betters who are responsible for that ugly "monument" in Elbert County, Georgia, want to "maintain humanity under 500,000,000". Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, a Greenpeace offshoot, once famously said that earthworms are more important than people. Thank God that this lunatic does not hold his finger on the trigger of some doomsday device that would finish nine tenths of the world's population - but by no means do not make the mistake that he's an isolated leftist loony.
We rightwingers think differently. We do see that the Earth's population increases and as such becomes a heavy burden for the planet's resources. We contend however that if more countries had embraced capitalism, general prosperity levels would be much higher than they are today, and as such the population growth would definitely have been much slower. How ironic is it that the main reason for people staying poor in developing countries, and thus having so many children, is because their leadership embraced socialist policies! Post WWII Thailand and Tanzania had comparable levels of prosperity and population growth rates. Tanzania most definitely adopted some form of afrosocialism, best exemplified by their disastrous 'ujamaa' project. Thailand by and large chose for a more capitalist approach. Today, Thailand's population grows at about a quarter of the speed of Tanzania's!
At the same time we know that God was only joking when He said that we should fill merely "the earth". Or if he did not joke, that the unimaginative bloke who translated His Words omitted the 's' at the back end of 'earth'. Indeed, why shouldn't we fill countless other Earths???
At some point a surplus population must and will leave Earth. 150 years ago a substantial portion of Irish left Eire because it could no longer sustain them, and settled in the United States to ultimately flourish to such an extent, that they now outnumber several times those who stayed on the emerald island. In the same manner, at some point in the future a substantial portion of humans will leave Earth bound for other planets, and as time goes by they will one day outnumber those left on the Mother Planet. Irish in the States celebrate Saint Patrick's Day. In times to come, those humans on faraway colonized planets who can trace their ancestry back to a country called the United States of America will perhaps still celebrate the 4th of July.
This is why it's a crying shame that a man like Charles Bolden is still NASA Administrator. A couple of years back, Bolden made an immortal fool of himself when he stated that henceforth NASA's core mission should be an "outreach to the muslim world":
It's been five years since Bolden's NASA Muslim Outreach Program got kickstarted, and imho the results obtained thus far do not exactly warrant continuing the program:
Probably even Bolden realizes this, which is why, being his Master in the White House's sock puppet, these days he argues for a 2 billion dollar NASA budget for "earth science" instead. We all know what that means: Global Warming studies. You see, Obama having identified the Rise of the Oceans as THE challenge facing America, what better use of NASA satellites than to map the enemy's advance from orbit?
Well, here I come back to my intro with there being some use for republican lawmakers in control of the House, since even despite being jelly-spined, their marginally higher common sense at least thwarted Obama's and Bolden's budget plans. American Thinker's Christopher Carson reports:
"Yesterday, the House Appropriations Committee voted for a significant change in NASA's priorities. Instead of the nearly 2 billion dollars requested by President Obama for "earth science" (read: global warming studies), the Republican House cut funding down to $1.68 billion, a merciful change in the right direction and enough to incur the ire of both the administration and Democratic critics like Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), who blasted the bill. (Mikulski claimed without evidence that global warming is damaging Maryland's Chesapeake Bay).
The House Committee also helpfully bumped up funding for planetary exploration at the expense of "climate change" studies. With a total NASA budget of $18.5 billion, NASA has been ordered to spend $4.76 billion next year on exploring the planets, a huge increase from the current level of $4.36 billion. What's special about this increase is that the Committee's budget is ordering NASA to go to Europa by 2022.
Europa is a moon of Jupiter that's covered in ice but has a massive, liquid-water ocean underneath its frozen surface, kept warm by radiation from the moon's inner core. When betting on extraterrestrial life in our own solar system, Europa is near the top of the hand, because on Earth, wherever you find liquid water, you find life. In theory, a mission to Europa could detect signatures of subsurface life and pave the way for a future lander that could melt through the surface layer and "swim" underneath in the ocean. The good news is that the Committee has directed NASA to launch its Europa Clipper mission within seven years with the new SLS launch system.
Congress has also prescribed a separate "Ocean Worlds Exploration Program" to "discover life" in the moons of Saturn – namely, Titan and Enceladus. Titan has a methane atmosphere and lakes, which might be conducive to life of some kind, and Enceladus has water vapor plumes that shoot out from the moon's poles from a Europa-like subsurface ocean. Basically, this new initiative would allow NASA to plan out future missions to the Saturnian system but would not yet authorize a new mission per se.
The search for extra-solar planets also gets a needed boost next year, with new funding for the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) to directly photograph exoplanets circling other stars. The telescope could detect signatures in these planets' atmospheres that might mean that life is present on their surfaces.
This bolder direction toward exploration and away from gazing at the Earth itself from orbit caught some surprising flack from the NASA administrator himself, Charles Bolden, who exclaimed that "the House proposal would seriously reduce our Earth science program and threaten to set back generations [sic] worth of progress in better understanding our changing climate. … [T]his would affect our ability to prepare for and respond to earthquakes, droughts, and storm events." How anyone could ever predict an earthquake, let alone from near-Earth orbit, was left unsaid.
Ultimately, the Democratic Party's current obsession with "climate change" stems from its lack of imagination, lack of adventure, and lack of vision. In 1962, JFK gave a stirring address in which he spoke of mankind's destiny in space: "We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because it is easy, but because it is hard." To this administration and its allies in Congress, the call seems to be closer to "we choose to stare at the Earth from orbit and to wish away the pause in global warming, not because it is hard, but because it is easy."
Indeed.
This is where we should be headed first: Mars. We should be there by 2030.
And no lame, abject failure of a NASA Administrator and Obama acolyte, who revealed more of his inner convictions than he probably wanted to by naming his firstborn son "Che", should stand in the way.
And beyond that?
Who will tell? Let us boldly go where no man has gone before!
Leave it to the likes of Charles Bolden to boldenly stay where we all have been since time immemorial.
MFBB.
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