SPACE – THE FINAL CAPITULATION

Space: consolation for the loser.

by Eugene Westerly

I frequently see articles from race realists and others expressing faith in some kind of futuristic, pro-technology solution to the problems of the present. Such solutions are usually dependent on assumptions of uninterrupted technical innovation, driven by large and successful industries and markets, over a lengthy period of time. These are the unquestioned assumptions of these futuristic solutions, but extract fossil fuels from the equation and even the beginning of such a scenario is infeasible.

Roman Bernard's recent film review, Interstellar: Finding A New Telos is a fine piece of writing, but provides an excellent example of the sort of blind assumptions that undergird all techno-futurist thinking. Even scientists make these assumptions. They may in fact be among the worst offenders. So Bernard is in good company.

This article will focus on the likelihood that ours is not a technological future, that our destiny – at least in a time scale meaningful to humans – is not in the stars, but that we are essentially stranded on Earth, and it is this, our home and only "destination," for which we must fight without hope of redemption by a form of interstellar White flight.

Our challenge is to resume our proper place as rulers and guardians of our lands and people. We are not destined to run away to some sublimated version of Heaven on some distant planet, for, as Mr. Bernard properly notes, "we are the heirs of conquerors." Our ancestors entrusted us with the care of a great treasure, a treasure which our immediate forbears have allowed to be despoiled by interlopers. It falls to us to recover what is ours, to remember and celebrate our ancestors and become ancestors worthy of honour in our turn.

I certainly do not expect complete agreement from all readers to what follows; but I strongly suggest careful study of the numbers on present and future oil production from unbiased sources.

Mr. Bernard was inspired to write his review by the line from Interstellar that states: “Mankind was born on Earth. It was never meant to die here.” It is a dramatic line, no doubt. It's the line that made me want to write this piece. But it could not be more wrong.

Just because something sounds good doesn't mean it is true or even makes sense. Man is an animal like any other, in essence a biological machine. No animal can survive for long outside of its element. To exempt man from this rule is to make him a god – and for the Romans to “become a god” was a euphemism of death.

Man was not merely born on Earth, he is born of Earth. Man is Earth.

Little better than a fish out of water is man beyond our atmosphere. A man could more easily survive under the sea than he could in space. Imagine a life entirely under water, never to have contact with land or air or any of the resources of that world again. Once your breathing apparatus is gone, its replacement would have to be manufactured underwater, as would the machines to manufacture that apparatus. All the structures you occupy, any transportation or communications equipment you use, would also have to be built underwater.

Space: the new escapism.

At present, all work of any consequence is done by burning fossil fuels. Imagine doing that underwater. Well it would be even more difficult in space. Then consider farming and the food we need to survive.

And then there are the psychological effects of trying to adapt to an underwater (or outer space) world. Imagine the long term effects of a necessarily tiny, enclosed habitation: the decreased light, the lack of wide open spaces, the suffocating effects of holding a hostile, deadly element or vacuum at bay, and the way that would slowly sap and crush the human spirit.

Man needs Earth because, again, he is Earth. We are made of the same carbon and water, in a finely tuned mix, as the planet. Man is adapted to fulfil his bodily needs with what this planet provides. He is adapted psychologically to the demands of this planet.

You may retort that all we need to do is find another planet like Earth to go to. Outside of Hollywood movies, do you realize the odds of that occurring? Do we – here at the all-time peak of civilization – even have a close approximation of Earth in our sites? Do we not yet realize how delicate is the balance of factors that created and maintain life on this planet? A simple virus can wipe out a continent of people, as it did with the American Indians. Even our own planet is dangerous to human life. Why should an alien environment be any kinder?

Even if we were to find a planet identical to Earth, it would be unreachable, requiring vast resources both in terms of finance and fossil fuels. How many space missions to date have carried more fuel than just enough to complete the mission? Imagine the weight of the payload with enough fossil fuels to build a civilization on another planet, along with the crew of workers required to put that fuel to use. Imagine the danger of such a launch if it were to fail on lift off. The explosion would be immense and the attempt would never be repeated.

It  didn't work out on Earth.
Mars will be better.

Instead of that, perhaps we could build a civilization with the resources we find there. If that’s what you think, then you haven’t really done your homework. Get yourself a shovel and dig a hole sometime. Back breaking labour is instructive. It would be even more instructive light years from the Earth.

And further, consider the numbers of people required to make a successful settlement on another planet. It would take hundreds of individual communities on this other planet before we could be assured of the likelihood of man's survival there. Adam and Eve is a myth. A mere two people would not be able to successfully populate a planet. Some early disaster would befall them and wipe out the entire population, thus the importance of scattered individual communities.

The numbers that could travel to another planet per mission would be substantially smaller than those that came from Europe to America on our own planet. Even in that case with larger numbers and help from the natives, we initially failed.

I found the idea in Bernard's piece of a secret government program to fund such adventures interesting, but not plausible. The government's days are numbered. It should be obvious that it is already failing. And with the inevitability of worldwide poverty rapidly encroaching – a point the movie appears to get right – there will be no tax funds to plunder.

But why will we become poorer? It’s because we are rapidly running out of oil. Yes, I know, we're all currently being told that thanks to fracking we are awash in oil, but that is not going to last. Already the rich are starting to bail on fracking, as they should. Some say that what OPEC is doing currently with low gas prices is an attempt to drive some of the fracking companies out of business.

I cannot stress enough, all the hype you are hearing about American oil is just that. It's about investing concerns creating a cornucopian narrative, based on very little, to keep the profits rolling in. And the media is just as corruptly enmeshed in all of it as Wall St., K St., and the government. Another major economic crash is coming in the not too distant future.

What? Me Worry?

Fracking, no matter how you slice it, is in no way anywhere near as profitable as conventional wells. It costs much more to get oil through fracking, and the wells play out much sooner. The same can be said for Canada's tar sands oil. It too is expensive to extract, as well as being very destructive of the environment. Both of these are textbook examples of the phrase "to scrape the bottom of the barrel." The only reason we are doing this is because the price of oil had gone high enough to make it temporarily profitable and there were no conventional sources that weren’t already being exploited.

Let me repeat again: we are running out of oil. There are fewer and fewer, and ever smaller deposits of oil of poorer and poorer quality being discovered. And yet we burn it as if our very lives depended on it, as if it were a use-it-or-lose-it proposition. Whatever happened to conserving for the future?

And while oil is running out, don't think that there is anything that can replace it. Solar power is a bad joke. There's a lot of solar energy, yes, but it is extremely diffuse. Fossil fuels are useful because they are very concentrated. Concentrating sunlight to run a few lights around the house might be a fun hobby, but it won't power a civilization. All the other alternative energies are equivalently useless, including nuclear. Until things like nuclear power plants, solar installations, wind farms, etc., can be built using power from their own respective power sources they are essentially just another form of fossil fuel energy. Without fossil fuels these other forms of energy cannot be usefully exploited in the first place.

Technically speaking, we will never entirely run out of oil. It will simply take more oil to drill and process the crude than the retrieved oil can replace. I expect we will go on for quite a few years expending more energy to drill than the energy retrieved. Thus is the nature of our oil-based civilization. Everything is made of oil, right down to the food on your table! Plowing, planting, fertilizer, packaging, shipping, even cooking – all of it involves fossil fuels.)

Returning to our main theme, the abandonment of our planet, the roots of this view can be found in Christian teachings about Heaven and the afterlife:

Life on this planet is awful. Live a righteous life and you'll get to Heaven. Life here is meaningless. The greater your suffering is here, the greater your reward will be in Heaven. Give no thought to making the Earth a paradise, your paradise awaits you above.

And so on. Why worry about the perishable Earth?

Techno-futurism is either a form of cowardice or escapism. It abandons all that is real and valuable for that which is illusory. It says in effect, “Screw all of you, I'm out of here. I'm going to Heaven.” All this talk of technology overcoming everything is no more valid than Christian fantasies of rapture, and is in fact their modern equivalent.

In space no one can hear you reach the afterlife.

Every innovation comes with a cost, and in the future every step forward will come with an increasingly large downside, as increased complexity inflicts a process of diminishing returns. Increased complexity is one of the major causes of the collapse of societies, empires, and civilizations, replacing simple, brutal efficiency with confusing entropy. It's why it would simply be impossible for the government to run something as big as an Interstellar-type program.

Our government is much closer to collapse than most realize. Oh sure, it keeps the facade in place, but if you look closely, the cracks are visible and the foundations subsiding. One major crisis could bring the whole thing crashing down. So not only is there no "out of here," but worse, we're embracing the cause of the problem – complexity – as the solution to the problem.

No, what's needed is radical simplicity. Instead of pinning our hopes on a technological saviour, we must face some simple and painful truths.

Bernard writes:

"I believe such a dream should be space conquest. I obviously won't live it, nor will my children, and I don't think my grandchildren or even my great-grandchildren will."

Forgive me, Roman, with all possible respect, this is the very definition of procrastination. Earth is our only home. We are not going anywhere. Let's put that thought out of our heads. We simply do not have the resources to make a success of such a project. The stars are nice to look at, and they have much to teach us. But if aspirations of space travel are the lesson we take, we take the wrong lesson.

Space travel is White flight writ large. Space is the wall against which the white man is backed, not some comfortable zone of escape and respite. When your back is against the wall, you have no alternative but to stand and fight. This far and no farther! And not for our children tomorrow, but for ourselves today! Right here, right now!

We know what we want, let's go get it. No vainglorious, procrastinatory speechifying. Futurism is an excuse for sitting on one's backside and doing nothing, for putting off today's work to a tomorrow that will never come. Let's roll up our sleeves and get to work.

Our Earthly problems are vastly easier to fix than to build some ridiculous White-topia among the stars. If we can't conquer our enemies here on Earth, we are not going to conquer them in space.

The past half-century has seen White men living as zombies, not quite dead yet not truly alive. But even the spark of manhood is dying. It's a death of a thousand indignities. Our once proud race has been taught hatred and shame for our own people. We must recover our pride and dignity and channel our anger into vengeance upon those who have tried to destroy us, so that they may never be allowed to manipulate us again.

The urban spaceman: spacing out of the rat race.

Nature has provided us with a tool to fix all our problems. It has always worked in the past and will again today.

Behind every law, written or implicit, is the threat of violence. Know this. There is no fixing our problems without violence. This will not be our choice, it will be forced upon us. When we stand up, we will be attacked. Accept that. So we must stand together. Our lives must not be thrown away for naught, as is the case currently.

We will no longer allow our brothers to be beaten and killed, our women to be taken from us, our children to be taken from us, our livelihoods, even our manhood to be taken from us. I have no stratagems, no tactics, no plan, but I know the truth of the words in this paragraph. There is no running away. Turn and fight.