Posted on 10/14/2001 3:50:37 PM PDT by AdrianZ
Victory From Space
By Robert Zubrin
How can America's space program contribute to victory? There are a number of obvious ways. Our reconnaissance satellites will spot the terrorist encampments, our navigation satellites will guide us to them, and our communication satellites will allow us to coordinate our forces to assure that they prevail in combat.
To previous invaders, Afghanistan was a maze of death. Because of our spacecraft, however, we will be able to view the maze from above, rather than within. These are critical capabilities. They will provide the essential margin needed to eliminate Bid Laden's guerillas before they can strike too many more and deadlier blows.
Unfortunately, however, the enemy is not just a few thousand cultists. It is a cult. To defeat the enemy, we must not only destroy its current forces, we must discredit the ideology that allows it to recruit.
We are not at war with a handful of savages. We are at war with an idea.
The Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon signaled the beginning of a war by fundamentalist Islam against the West. Why does fundamentalist Islam hate the West? it hates the West because of its core beliefs.
The central idea behind western civilization is the radical proposition advanced by the Greek philosopher Socrates that there is an innate faculty of the human mind capable of distinguishing right from wrong, justice from injustice, truth from untruth.
This idea was embraced by early Christianity as the basis of the concept of the conscience, which thereupon became the axiomatic foundation of western morality. It is also the basis of our highest notions of law ("We hold these truths to be self evident ...") and science, man's search for universal truth through the tools of reason.
Fundamentalist Islam denies all of this. It denies the existence or deserved authority of the conscience. Instead, right and wrong can only be known through the Koran, as interpreted by fundamentalist mullahs.
It denies moral responsibility further because it denies the existence of free will. It denies reasoned investigation of nature completely because it denies the idea of causality. Instead, it argues that the universe is created and destroyed repeatedly in every succeeding instant by the will of Allah. Thus scientific activity is useless, and in fact is proscribed.
It should thus be clear why fundamentalist Islam is at war with the West. But the West has not been its first target. Its first victim was rationalist Islam.
In the Islamic world, the fundamentalists have not always been on top.
In its formative period, Islamic society included a strong rationalist current led by the Mu'tazilites, who believed in the parity of reason and revelation, and produced many profound philosophers such as Al Farabi, Averroes (Ibn Rushd), and Avicenna (Ibn Sina).
A thousand years ago, it was not the West, but Islam, that had the broadest intellectual horizons. Islamic thinkers created algebra and radically advanced astronomy and medicine. At a time when there were no colleges in Europe, the Islamic world had hundreds. At a time when the largest European libraries contained a few hundred volumes, there were Islamic libraries with hundreds of thousands.
But then the fundamentalists took over. The philosophers were made into fugitives. Scientific inquiry was banned. Libraries that were found to contain scientific works were burned.
Printing, which appeared briefly in the Islamic world several hundred years before its advent in Europe, was banned, and did not reappear until its reintroduction by American missionaries in the 1830s.
The colleges were turned from centers of inquiry into mental slaughterhouses where generation after generation of the brightest youth were made to memorize the Koran by rote.
With the fundamentalist takeover, the most glorious civilization humanity had ever known was turned into a dung heap of misery, mental slavery, degradation and ignorance. A quarter of the world was turned into a graveyard of the mind, which for the past 700 years has not produced a single significant scientific advance.
It is thus ironic to hear the arguments of the apologists for Fundamentalist terror who claim that the terrorist actions are some kind of counterattack against the maceration of the Islamic world supposedly caused by the West, or even more absurdly, the minute state of Israel.
In fact, it is the internal combustion engines invented and manufactured in the West that have for the better part of the past century supplied the Islamic world with its only significant source of wealth. No, the poverty and degradation of the Islamic world has been caused solely by the fact that those within it who would use reason to advance its condition have been suppressed by fundamentalism.
I believe we need to use science to defeat not only the fundamentalists, but fundamentalism itself. A grand work of reason is not simply an object of utility, but a celebration of the human spirit. This is nowhere more true than when man looks out into space to attempt to comprehend the universe itself.
As the Renaissance scientist Johannes Kepler, the discoverer of the laws of planetary motion, put it, “Geometry is one and eternal, a reflection out of the mind of God. That mankind shares in it is one reason to call man the image of God.”
There it is. The human mind, because it is the image of God, is able to understand the laws of the universe. It was the forceful demonstration of this proposition by Kepler, Galileo, and others that let loose the scientific revolution in the West.
But works of reason can be more than contemplative; they can be creative. Consider the object of the terrorists rage; the World Trade Center. A triumph of the human mind, the WTC was the most recent of the series of astonishing feats of civil engineering New York City has shown the world over the past 118 years.
These architectural marvels have their uses, but their value goes much deeper. The creator of the first of them, Johann Roebling, designer of the Brooklyn Bridge, said it well; “No one will be able to look at it and not feel prouder to be a man.”
Prouder, indeed. Roebling's bridge doesn't just have Gothic arches, it is a Gothic cathedral, whose unprecedented span and poetic form constitute a soaring salute to the power of the human mind. But some people have not gotten the message yet. So I propose we hit harder. Let's build a gothic cathedral whose significance no one can miss. Kepler et al showed that we could understand the heavens.
Let's drive the point home by using our space program to show that we can navigate them, or better yet, take possession.
There are those who, panic-stricken in the current crisis, would gut our space exploration programs. This makes no more sense than a decision to tear down our skyscrapers. In fact, it is worse, because it would undermine our war effort.
To defeat fundamentalism we need to do more than hunt down its current batch of expendable pawns. We need to utterly humiliate the doctrine itself by demonstrating for all to see the sublime and infinite power of human reason. So let's send probes to Europa and humans to Mars. Better yet, let's settle on Mars, and bring the dead planet to life.
Let's show that we can not only understand creation, but continue its process, by transforming barren worlds into new homes for life and civilization.
This is no time for science to retreat; it must attack.
Let's launch an offensive to free forever the minds of men from fundamentalist tyranny.
A universe open to humanity would be a hymn to reason written large across the firmament. It would be the key to true victory. Because no one will be able to look upon it and not feel prouder to be human.
* * *
I think it does. The true believer is someone who regards himself as essentially worthless, and he finds a fake kind of self esteem in some movement which is larger than himself. In a free enterprise society, people can find fulfillment in many ways, so there are fewer victims for cults like Marxism, etc.
Part of the reason I'm so strongly anti-UN. I don't like the idea of putting all our eggs in one basket. Plus the UN seems to be strongly dominated by African and Islamic dictators, not exactly fonts of freedom and enlightenment.
Some of the most cherished and profound moments of my life were experienced on the top and in the observation deck of the south tower of the World Trade Center. ...
It was an achievement-worshipper's religious experience.
I have no doubt that, at some point, the plan to destroy those particular towers was hatched when someone connected to the event went where I went, saw what I saw, felt what I felt, and hated it. When the towers were destroyed, I knew immediately why they, of all things in the world, were targeted. They were an embodiment of human greatness, and a vantage point from which one could see further greatness, still. Of course they had to be destroyed. Anyone going up there was put face to face with the irreducible truth of the greatness of mankind.
Eloquent-defense-of-reason BUMP!
Lunar Zion
Now, what to make of Dr. Bob Zubrin?
Not being a current Space News subscriber, I haven't read the opinion piece that he wrote a few days ago, though I saw the following excerpt at Keith Cowing's NASA Watch web site:
With the [Islamic] fundamentalist takeover, the most glorious civilization humanity had ever known was turned into a dung heap of misery, mental slavery, degradation and ignorance. A quarter of the world has turned into a graveyard of the mind, which for the past 700 years has not produced a single significant scientific advance.
If I am informed correctly, Bob proposes that we really spite and put it to those scientifically-ignorant medieval towel heads by colonizing Mars. Now is that in your face, or what?
What with calls for new gun control, increased wiretapping, airline and hospitality industry bailouts, more handouts for the national strategic peanut industry, etc., I probably would have been shocked if Bob hadn't also figured out a way to hijack last month's atrocities for his own narrow political agenda. But even for Bob, it's almost breathtaking in its verve and audacity.
Unfortunately for Bob and humanity's near-term future on subdividing the Red Planet, I suspect that the political establishment will find his call to arms less than compelling. Even if it were viewed as an effective tactic for ending terrorism ("Take that, Osama, you unscientific infidel"), the time frame involved in implementing his solution to terrorism would likely strain the patience of the American people, who, if we are to believe the polls, are willing to wait a few weeks or months to see some concrete action, but probably not decades.
Apparently the National Space Society and the Mars Society (at least the Canadian branch) have disavowed his comments, and made clear that he spoke for himself alone. But the little imbroglio did get me to thinking. Is there some way to hijack^H^H^H^H^H^H assist in the War on Terrorism (still need a better name) that can also advance the cause of space development? Doing well by doing good, so to speak?
A week or two ago, I started a thread on sci.space.policy entitled "Lunar Palestine." The thread quickly drifted off to the topics of single-stage-to-orbit, and gun control, and what asses various members of the newsgroup are (no, I'm not going to name names) as threads on s.s.p are wont to do, and we never really resolved the issue of whether or not, assuming that we did make the Moon at least as habitable as, say, circa-1982 Beirut, the Palestinians could be persuaded to move there in their own homeland.
But thinking some more, I now have a better solution. In a discussion with Jim Bennett, it was pointed out that the Zionists (being socialists, and largely atheistic) were originally not even seeking to live in what is today Israel--they were looking at places like Madagascar and Siberia. The Holy Land only became the favored destination after they joined forces with the Orthodox Jews already living there (who were actually opposed to a Jewish state, but eventually went along, as long as it would be in ancient Judea, and be a real Jewish state). This marriage of convenience resulted in modern Israel, with all its quirks, contradictions, and violence.
Perhaps, with what's been going on the past few years (you know, intifadas and stuff), the Zionists could be persuaded to say, "To hell with it!", pull up stakes and move to Luna. A space colony is actually pretty well suited to a kibbutz social model, and they could get back to their socialist roots. They're already used to living places that are short of water--they'd figure out how to make do. That would be a form of socialism that I could probably get behind, because it might save us more money in reduced oil prices than it would cost, and it would push the development of the technology, making it affordable for us capitalists to do stuff in space as well.
Sounds like a very expensive way to solve the "Palestine problem" and I don't like it one bit. It would be insane for the US to "give" the moon to anyone, and certainly not to a gang of socialists. The moon may have little value today, but that was true of Alaska back in the 1860s, when we acquired it. Besides, if we need the moon for a pit-stop to elsewhere, do you want to be begging a bunch of socialists for landing rights? The moon belings to us. All of it. That's my position, and I ain't budging.
Imagine a steel crowbar, weighing about 20 pounds, floating in orbit with a small rocket motor.
Upon receiving a command from, say, a Theater CinC, the rocket motor fires, and the crowbar loses ALL of its orbital velocity vector. It is now coming down at about five miles per second.
The crowbar is shaped to cut cleanly through the air; small tabs act as steering vanes. Multispectral imaging allows it to see through the superheated plasma it generates on reentry.
It's target description was transmitted as it received the order to deorbit. It consults computer memory and compares its intended target to what its sensor sees, fine-tunes its aimpoint, and drops down onto its target...with the force of a 500-pound bomb concentrated onto an incredibly small surface. Tanks cannot hope to have enough armor to stop it. A bunch of these scattered along a road can turn an armored division into a mass of wrecked tanks, each one occasionally spewing forth fire and explosions as ammunition ignites. A single one dropped onto a bigwig's limo can turn it into a small pile of scrap metal.
YEE-HAW!
Bump for bibliomania, the only hobby that is classified as a medical pathology! I, too, suffer from the gentle madness.
Mabye not our phasers, but mass drivers can tear a mountain complex up pretty good, and create new lake (or ocean)front property to boot! :-)
The Moon's a Harsh Mistress indeed......
Did you now that the word "gullible" isn't in the dictionary?
Rail Gun! :) I have a friend who made a working one in his garage! :)
He and I also made a 7 fot high Tesla coil that would produce 10 foot arcs! The first time we lit it up in his driveway (about dusk to see it better), it was a sight to see. We had installed a rotating spark gap oscillator and the secondary coil leaked a bit. So we wound up with this flikering electric blue seven foot high cylinder throwing off 10 foot arcs on top. WOW! Well, it made quite a racket, destroyed all forms of radio communications from DC to light, and got noticed by the neighbor. Duh! :) She calls the cops and reports UFOs have landed. Cops show up and we never turned it on in his front yard ever again.
Really? No fooling? Golly. Upon realizing that you had gulled me, I was about to hit the abuse button, but my mouse jumped and I hit the self search button too. I ended up in self-abuse mode! Try it; you'll like it.
Relax; there still time.
Sheesh! :)
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