Take even a momentary glance at the news and you will notice a lot of bad energy directed at Elon Musk. It seems he’s become one of the world’s most popular targets for outrage.
But the founder of the Space Development Steering Committee and co-founder and co-chair of the Asian Space Technology Summit, Howard Bloom, says that we are blind to what’s really at stake in the story of Elon Musk. And details like how many children he’s had and with whom, his on-again-off-again desire to purchase Twitter, and the reactions of the people who are afraid he will bring back Donald Trump’s Tweets, are distracting us from the real meat of the matter.
Yes, Elon Musk has failings like you and me. But he is changing the relationship between nature and the solar system. He is not just creating new opportunities for humanity, says Bloom, he is opening new frontiers for life itself.
In other words, says Bloom, Elon Musk is creating not just revolutionary change, but evolutionary change. Something seldom accomplished by a mere mortal. But something crucial to nature’s imperative, in the words of Bloom, “to garden the solar system and green the galaxy.”
Explains Bloom, currently, Elon Musk is the only human on this earth who is developing the capability to take us to the moon and Mars to live, settle down, and stay, and to do it in the preciously small amount of time before China reaches the finish line ahead of us.
Warns NASA administrator Bill Nelson in an interview with Germany’s newspaper Bild, “”China is landing on the moon and saying: ‘It’s ours now and you stay out’.” Explains Nelson, China’s space program is a military effort that builds on ideas and technology stolen from others.
Why is this important? According to Bruce Pittman, a member of the Space Development Steering Committee, whoever settles the moon first will dictate “the rules of the road.” Whoever settles the moon first will set the rules by which humanity lives in the late 21st century and beyond. And under China, those rules will be controlled by the CCP, the dictatorial Chinese Communist Party, the party that holds China in an iron grip. The party that believes Western human rights are an abomination and a curse. The party whose toilet paper dispensers in public places are equipped with facial recognition technology that will refuse you even a single sheet of tissue if your “social credit score” isn’t up to snuff.
And what is your social credit score? A digital record of everything you’ve ever done rated to make sure it conforms to the Chinese Communist Party’s orders.
Howard Bloom puts this in a bigger context. “In the last 3.85 billion years,” he says, “an audacious, ambitious, and unstoppable project has gardened and greened one poison pill of climate catastrophe, the Earth. Now life’s imperative is to garden and green the other poison pills of stone above our heads, starting with the moon and Mars.” And only Elon Musk is building the space ship with which to do that.
On his launch pad in Boca Chica, Texas, Musk’s SpaceX is testing a Super Heavy Booster with 33 rocket engines, the most powerful booster rocket this planet has ever seen. The Super Heavy Booster is designed to loft a space ship carrying 100 passengers or 100 tons of cargo, SpaceX’s Starship. For a cost that’s unbelievable. Musk aims to be able to launch and land each Starship and its Super Heavy Booster for two million dollars. Sounds like a lot of money. And it is.
But NASA’s laughable heavy-launch rocket, its Space Launch System, will cost four billion dollars to launch. Meaning you could buy 2,000 Starship launches for the price of one SLS takeoff. 2,000!
Then there are a few other disadvantages to NASA’s alleged space ship. It has never flown. SpaceX Starship prototypes have flown eight times. What’s worse, NASA’s Space Launch System cannot land on the moon. It cannot land on Mars. And it cannot come back to earth.
Musk’s Starship can do every one of these things. In other words, Musk’s Starship will provide regular transportation to space the way the steamship provided reliable transportation across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans for millions of people in the 19th century.
The Space Development Steering Committee’s Bloom, who is also the author of seven acclaimed books on the evolution of the cosmos, life, and the forces of history, says that despite his flaws, Elon Musk has taken on a superhuman task. As Musk puts it, he is intent on making life “multi-planetary.”
Bloom repeats that, “Musk is moving us toward gardening the solar system and greening the galaxy. He is about to accomplish a great leap for biology and a giant step forward in the evolution of nature.”
“So,” says Bloom, “stop throwing rocks at Elon Musk. Yes, he has weaknesses. And he has an occasional wacky political idea. So do you and I. But Musk is literally taking nature’s great inventions–the team of cells and DNA and the biological system that gives birth to the human spirit–to whole new homes. Whole new homes beyond the sky.”
References:
http://spacedevelopmentsteeringcommittee.org/garden-the-solar-system-green-the-galaxy/
https://www.itechpost.com/articles/111856/20220706/nasa-bill-nelson-china.htm
Howard Bloom, The Lucifer Principle, a Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, Atlantic Monthly Press
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Stewart Atkinson is a writer in Texas.