MIRLI BOOKS
  • Home
  • Books
    • Henry's Trials >
      • Extract from Henry's Trials
    • Smethurst's Luck >
      • Extract from Smethurst's Luck
    • Murder in the Red Barn >
      • Extract from Murder in the Red Barn
    • Reverend Duke and the Amesbury Oliver
  • Talks
    • Talk on Henry's Trials
    • Talk on Smethurst's Luck
    • Talk on Isambard Kingdom Brunel
    • Talk on the Murder in the Red Barn
    • BBC
  • Publications
    • The Amesbury Union Workhouse
    • The Separate System
  • Peter Maggs
  • Shop
  • Blog
  • Family History
    • Mirli
    • BM Creeper >
      • The Significance of Stonehenge
      • Educating Ealing I: How Lady Byron Did It
      • Educating Ealing II: Church of England Primary in the 1920s
      • All Because of Crystal Palace
      • Innocent in Ealing - Extract
      • Miss McDonald

There is no Planet B

28/4/2021

2 Comments

 
It was a combination of Jules Verne (From the Earth to the Moon), H G Wells (The Time Machine), and C S Lewis (Out of the Silent Planet) that got me hooked into science fiction literature in the early 1960s. I was soon putty in the hands of the likes of Arthur C Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and many others. The romance of travel to distant stars and encounters with super-intelligent robots and alien races was intoxicating. I loved it all, and looked forward to the real space age.
 
So it was with a feeling of déjà vu that I saw the news that NASA has awarded Elon Musk’s Space X the contract to fly astronauts to the moon. Next to the story was an illustration of his proposed Moon-lander. There is no atmosphere in space or on the Moon, so streamlining is entirely unnecessary; the Apollo lander was a chunky almost amorphous shape dictated entirely by the practical needs of the craft. The Space X lander looks like something straight out of 1950s science fiction magazines—a smooth, streamlined rocket with a pointed nosecone sitting upright on its end. Real-life engineering imitates science fiction …
 
Musk wants to go to Mars; he says he’d like to die there. He also wants to travel to the stars. ‘Futurist’ Michio Kaku, he of the long white hair and plonking Californian drawl, insists we must travel to other planets. He says we need a ‘backup plan’ in case something goes wrong with the Earth. Even the blessed Stephen Hawking declared that we need to colonize planets in other star-systems because of climate change, overpopulation, and dwindling natural resources.
 
It pains me, therefore, to say that all of this is complete moonshine. What is most surprising, is that someone with the wisdom, knowledge, and insight of Hawking was willing to lend his name to such nonsense. 
 
There is no Planet B. Practical travel to the stars is impossible, and the none of the other planets or moons in the Solar System are in the remotest way habitable by human beings without impossibly expensive life-support systems. It seems that Musk, Kaku, Hawking and others have failed to understand that science fiction is just that--Fiction. There is talk among them of ‘warp drives’ and ‘terraforming’. I’m surprised that no-one has mentioned dilithium crystals …
 
We have to preserve Planet A. Even now, it may be too late. Global warming is a double whammy. As the sea heats up, it expands and the sea-levels rise; higher temperatures melt more glaciers further raising the sea-level. Low-lying countries will be inundated. As the climate gets hotter, weather patterns will change—possibly even ocean currents. If we lose the Gulf Stream average temperatures in this country will plunge, even as the rest of the world gets warmer. The changing weather will affect agriculture yields. And how long, I wonder, before the first water wars?
 
Three billion people, nearly half the population of the planet, rely on fish as a primary source of protein. There are virtually no sustainable fish species left due to overwhelming demand and industrial methods of over-fishing. Fishermen will tell you that the size of the individual fish they catch has been steadily declining; the fish they do catch are younger and younger. It cannot go on.
 
The real problem, driving all other issues to do with the health of the planet, is the size of the human population. This currently stands at 7.8 billion, and increases by more than the population of the UK every year. It is what drives the ever-increasing demand for water, food, energy, and raw materials. Pressure on governments to reduce the emission of carbon dioxide only address the symptoms of the problem. The only real, long-term solution for saving Planet A, is a massive, world-wide programme of birth-control. Until we do that, we are doomed to end up fighting over dwindling resources in an environment becoming ever more hostile to human life.
2 Comments
Paul ROBERTSON
28/4/2021 02:18:48 pm

Yes to all of the above.... But. You know that we never will agree to a world-wide programme of birth-control. We never have. Our basic ‘firmware’ is that of an animal, and animals procreate up to the practical limit of their environmental constraints. It is built in to our very nature, and although, unlike animals, we can predict the consequences of acting the way we do, only a minority of us take the predictions seriously enough. Worse, huge numbers of us use their higher non-animal nature to turn their back on science and go in entirely the wrong direction, adopting the senseless and outdated edicts of religions, and in the case of the Abrahamic ones, their command to “go forth and multiply”.

Where does that leave us? Since world-wide birth-control can never be voluntary but would have to be imposed, world-wide government is required. I cannot see how this would be anything other than a harsh mechanistic dictatorship if it wants to be at all effective. Further, since by nature we compete rather than cooperate, this unhappy state can only be arrived at as the outcome of conflict, and I think that you point the way when you suggest that the next war will be over the planet’s resources.

Those of us who are alive today might like to consider ourselves lucky. We probably won’t live to fight in the first resource war, but I would bet a substantial amount of money that if anyone has already started planning for it, it is the Chinese.

Reply
Peter Maggs
29/4/2021 07:24:10 am

All that you say is true, but the conclusion is that nothing can be done. Do we then just resign ourselves to the inevitable?

It needs someone much cleverer than me to come up with a solution, but at least by signalling the problem there is a hope that someone might start considering the options, and come up with some way of addressing the issue.

A very good start would be an enlightened Pope who woke up to the evil of the Catholic Church’s teaching on contraception.

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    Author

    Welcome to the Mirli Books blog written by Peter Maggs

    Archives

    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    May 2018
    March 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Website and Contents © Peter Maggs 2023
  • Home
  • Books
    • Henry's Trials >
      • Extract from Henry's Trials
    • Smethurst's Luck >
      • Extract from Smethurst's Luck
    • Murder in the Red Barn >
      • Extract from Murder in the Red Barn
    • Reverend Duke and the Amesbury Oliver
  • Talks
    • Talk on Henry's Trials
    • Talk on Smethurst's Luck
    • Talk on Isambard Kingdom Brunel
    • Talk on the Murder in the Red Barn
    • BBC
  • Publications
    • The Amesbury Union Workhouse
    • The Separate System
  • Peter Maggs
  • Shop
  • Blog
  • Family History
    • Mirli
    • BM Creeper >
      • The Significance of Stonehenge
      • Educating Ealing I: How Lady Byron Did It
      • Educating Ealing II: Church of England Primary in the 1920s
      • All Because of Crystal Palace
      • Innocent in Ealing - Extract
      • Miss McDonald