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The Green Socialists of Mars
[SultanKnish] We live in a strange world in which the weather is a subject of furious political debate. People have been arguing about the weather ever since the first rainstorm caught the first man without the umbrella that he did not yet know how to make, but they didn't hold political debates over it.For the last fifty years, the anti-weather side has been insisting that the world is headed toward a Frostean apocalypse of ice or fire. The calm biblical assertion that "Seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease" was replaced by the terrifying certainty that the planet would soon turn into Mars or Venus; either too hot or too cold. The end of weather was here. Instead of stable rhythms and cycles that might last for months or centuries, there was a runaway weather apocalypse that would culminate in unlivable conditions. The doomsday predictions roll out daily without any regard to scientific or experiential reality. The more the predictions fail to match up, the more urgently Warmists insist on immediate action. The harder it snows, the more articles appear warning that snow may soon be a thing of the past. Never mind the weather; the end of weather is almost here. There is a fearful logic to the Warmist creed. Of all the planets, minor planets, moons and assorted rocks drifting through our solar system, only one is inhabitable by man. It is very easy to assume that, but for the grace of random chance, the Earth might be just as uninhabitable as Mars or Venus and to worry that one day it will be. Some people call it circumstellar habitable zone (CHZ): but what do they know. Mars and Venus inspired more than a series of bestselling books about gender relations. They also convinced the Warmists that Mars and Venus are what the Earth would become. "Venus is too hot. Mars is too cold. But the Earth is just right a heaven for humans. After all, we evolved here. But our congenial climate may be unstable. We are perturbing our poor planet in serious and contradictory ways. Is there any danger of driving the environment of the Earth toward the planetary Hell of Venus or the global ice age of Mars? The simple answer is that nobody knows," Sagan wrote in Cosmos. I stopped taking Sagan seriously after reading his SF novel with a message from aliens hidden in the value of pi---just one more moron who rote memorized holy physics, and thinks he's omniscient. The insistence that Mars and Venus were variations of Earth, rather than entirely different planets, was a false assumption that predated Sagan. This geocentric fallacy insisted that Mars and Venus were teaching us about our world, rather than about those worlds. Their unlivable atmospheres reinforced the neurotic obsession of doomsayers who treated them as failed Earths. ...Socialist science fiction had become a booming field in the late 19th century. Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward had envisioned time travel to a Socialist American utopia in the year 2000. It was a bad book, but a popular bestseller because it used the frame of pseudoscience to depict Socialism as both a practical model and inevitable. Likewise, Lowell's Mars allowed Socialist theorists to depict the Martian Socialist utopia that Earth could become. Novels such as "Politics and Life in Mars", "Unveiling a Parallel", "To Mars via the Moon", "A Prophetic Romance" and "Red Star" envisioned culturally superior Martians demonstrating their advanced Socialist societies with income equality, planetary labor unions and pacifism to the human race. In the Russian "Red Star", the Lowellian canals are a Communist triumph over inhospitable nature anticipating the USSR and Communist China's disastrous dam projects. The German writer of "Two Planets" envisioned the advanced Martians invading Earth to impose their superior Socialist society on human beings. Prompting EBR to write "Moon Men"? Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2015-08-15 |
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