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.
* * *
Last week I was bored and so went to the library to find some light reading. I noticed a slim science fiction book about the first Mars landing. When I saw that it was a first novel by the author of The Case for Mars and the main brain behind the plan to send manned missions to Mars IN 10 YEARS!, cheaply, using current technology by being smarter than the average bear, I knew I had to take it home.
Though it read like a novel written by a scientist, it was a cool little corker of a story with with some freeper touches.
It takes place in 2012 and starts with a crew of 5 (3 men 2 women) and looked like it could be PC as hell, but I stuck with it. And I'm glad I did because it was anything but.
The Captain was a John Wayne type who was prouder than hell to plant an AMERICAN flag in Martian soil (no mention of the UN or Russia or anyone else in this story)
One woman was a Vasser Lib and the other was a fundamentalist Christian 'hillbilly' and the sparks flew. There were crooked politicians and an enviromentalist whacko cult that was looking to scuttle the mission.
I finished the book this last Friday night and felt a pang when the heros, defying orders by corrupt politicians and by getting help from a military man who refused to shoot down the returning craft, crash landed in NY harbor at the base of the Statue of Lberty! (I told you it was written by a scientist...ha ha). As he described the flottilla of yatchts and pleasure boats (the Vasser Lib ask for, and got, a latté) the author mentioned the World Trade Center as being behind them. OUCH!
The author was the writer of this artcle and I recommend his book First Landing.
Plus our transporters will help beam bin Ladin into jail, and our phasers can be set to cut right through the rock of the mountains he lurks in.
Lets not even discuss the tribbles.
You got troubles with tribbles?
I knew you were a Klingon!
(and a Canadian Klingon to boot)
I'm not a one-planet kinda guy. But Mars is nowhere. We can do better. The money that will be wasted on terraforming should be spent on developing better propulsion systems. Then we can have our choice of destinations.
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.”
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. The buildings themselves were, to use a seriously devalued word in its truest sense, awesome. But they were only the cherries on top of the cake, which was to see the surface of planet Earth curving away, as the lights of the Metropolis slowly came on during a crystal-clear sunset.
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.
Well, the buildings are destroyed, but the truth remains.
That's one of the principle reasons I hang out in the evolution threads. Fundamentalism is a major problem in the West too, potentially. But it's not in power at the moment.
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