People like stuff. I like stuff. People like to have the AC cranking when it gets hot in the summer, and they like to build tall buildings that use extreme quantities of raw materials. Millions of us use electronic gadgets loaded with trace amounts of rare Earth metals like gold, silver and platinum.

This lifestyle has negative consequences on the environment, a nasty side effect. Many third world countries are striving to live like we do in the first world and the best known method for reaching this level of wealth is industrialization. We want them to live the good life, yet we also want them to keep the rain-forests flourishing. It's easy to see where these ideas begin to conflict and merge to opposite sides of the political fence.

We already have our own local UK evidence of this. Once it was reported that Al Gore lives in a mansion (did anyone really doubt he lived in a mansion??), several local liberals chastised him, crying disappointment and such and, of course the local conservatives swam in this seeming triumph like gnats in sweat.

This came as a bit of a shock to me. I'm liberal, yet, I very much want a mansion. I want an indoor/outdoor pool, that can be heated in the winter (I like four seasons). I want to swim from the backyard into an entertainment room. I want to eat dinner while sitting in this pool. I want to write articles while sitting in this pool. I want every outlet in my house to have a 6 plug power strip. I want an extension cord in each of those strip-plugs, and I want some electronic device buzzing or glowing or sensing or snapping plugged into every cord-plug and, I want a power-box that can handle such a load without catching fire.

I want a heated driveway that melts snow automatically.

If I had my own jet, I'd use it all the time. If I could afford it, I'd like a jet big enough to contain a pool – is my general sentiment coming through yet? Still, like Gore, I could afford, and would buy, the latest in solar tech, sun-powered hot water in the summer, and all the rest of what's available.

For the rich, being green can be bought. My future house, and Gore's existing house, would be more energy efficient, foot for foot, than an elevator and certainly more than the average middle class liberal house. Quality trumps quantity. It's all about efficiency.

John Waters sent me this libertarian-slanted article awhile back which further highlights this coming chasm and asked me to comment on it. It blasts liberals for being against progress. While I disagree with the specifics which seem to me to be implicitly hung up on global warming (the reality of which no sensible individual should doubt), I agree with the basic underlying implied sentiment in a quasi-sense. I don't want to solve our environmental issues by moving en mass to caves.

Moving back into caves would exterminate the human race. We need to be practitioners of high technology to survive long term as a species. While the universe seems to allow life to pop into being, it also seems hell-bent on winking it out. The list of non-man caused, space-born ways to wipe us all out with one dispassionate blip is increasing. Our entire history, and every place we know, fit together on a tiny dust speck in time and space. If that one speck gets flicked, we lose Everything with a capital E - every culture, every language, every book, every nation, every religion, every hero and every villain, gone forever.

The most obvious long term solution is to send some of us away so that we can't all get snuffed at the same time. And away we must go, at first to the other worlds within easy reach, and soon after, to those bodies much harder to reach. To reach this level of sophistication, we need to remain a technical species - but that entails being messy. So, how do we avoid killing ourselves to save ourselves?

We could start by spending serious money on space. We need to tell those NASA types who want more money for pure science research instead of manned missions that they are right and give it to them. We need to tell those NASA types who want more money for manned spaceflight that they are right and give it to them. We need to give government subsidies and similar to urge private industry to go above the clouds. We need to live and work in space.

Contrast this:

The Space Interferometry Mission, also known as SIM PlanetQuest, is a planned space telescope being developed by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), in conjunction with contractor Northrop Grumman. One of the main goals of the mission is the hunt for Earth-sized planets orbiting stars other than the Sun (extrasolar planets). The project is being managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. The initial contracts for SIM PlanetQuest were awarded in 1998, totaling US$200 million. Work on the SIM project required scientists and engineers to move through eight specific new technology milestones, and by November 2006, all eight had been completed.

With this, which can only be called BS:

SIM PlanetQuest was originally scheduled for a 2005 launch, aboard an Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV). As a result of continued budget cuts, the launch date has been pushed back at least five times. NASA has set a preliminary launch date for 2015 and U.S. federal budget documents confirm that a launch date is expected "no earlier" than 2015 or 2016. The budget cuts to SIM PlanetQuest are expected to continue through FY 2010. As of February 2007, many of the engineers working on the SIM program had moved on to other areas and projects, and NASA directed the project to allocate its resources toward engineering risk reduction.

We need to end this typical behavior. We need to quit cementing concrete blocks to our collective feet.

We need space filling stations and bulldozers and mining operations and cities. No liberal would cry if we strip mine the heck out of an asteroid, a single one of which would be worth trillions in heavy and precious metals.

No one gives a hoot if we damage the Lunar surface, or leave trash on an asteroid. No one loses sleep at night because we use too much fresh water, if that water comes from the virtually unlimited supply in the comets.

And what about solar power? Isn't that one answer, perhaps the ultimate solution? Estimates I've seen claim that we'd need to cover 10% of the Earth with panels – about as much as we use now for faming – to cover our existing energy needs. Yet, humans, to survive long term, must be energy GODS! We need to be able to generate enormous amounts of energy to continue our expansion and ensure our long term survival. And, should we cut down forests to replace them with solar panels? Or farms?

What about putting them in space - there is plenty of room there, I've heard, and not many “not in my backward!” issues...

Wouldn't it be nice if we spent enough on space such that adding a new few kilometers of paneling up there would be routine? We already have the technology for this, though it comes at a price. Getting the energy down here is a matter of converting the power to microwaves and receiving those beams, perhaps on modest sized platforms in oceans someplace on the equator. I haven't run the numbers, but if we can service this floating power station from space, without constant costly up and down flights, sooner or later it ought to pay for itself in a strictly economic sense, though of course the environmental benefit would be the real boon.

Every raw material we use is available in space. For the more complex and special substances, we'd need to build factories up there, say, on the Moon. Who cares if we pollute the Lunar “atmosphere”?

How much further will we push this speck? What condition do we want the Earth to be in when we do finally venture into space? Will we escape to space BECAUSE of a wrecked Earth? If we want to leave this place a green paradise, we should move many of our resource-gathering/converting operations to space sooner. We really can have our cake and eat it too – the sky is full of guilt-free resources ready to be RAPED, PILLAGED and PLUNDERED.

If the liberal movement ever wholeheartedly advocates a retreat from technological based progress, then I'd consider voting for the conservative candidate. Retreating inwards and backwards like some modern Amish society is not the path for me, and it shouldn't be the path for humanity. Indians want big suburban houses, not caves, and this is why they go to college, get modern training, and why India now has more English speaking workers than America does. This is good for them, like it is good for all third world nations. Ironically, India also has a space program. Perhaps they'll do something with theirs...

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