Look up at the moon tonight, as people have done for tens of thousands of years. In the mind’s eye, one can envision the few remnants of the Apollo landings strewn across the tidally locked side of the earth’s huge satellite we see.
If the greedy fools in China and America have their way however, instead of the awe-inspiring site of a full moon, your grandchildren may see massive solar farms with the naked eye.
“Building an industrial base on the moon is necessary to enable China’s ambition to build a ring of orbital power stations to supply all of Earth with constant green electricity built from lunar materials, a concept called space-based solar power,” the Washington Post reports.
That gives new meaning to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which is building the global infrastructure to feed, literally and rapaciously, the insatiable appetites of billion and a half consumers in China.
“The moon offers humanity the materials to become a space-faring species…and the country that establishes a viable jumping-off point from the moon will be the first to get the opportunity to benefit from trillion dollars worth of space-based resources.”
That’s the theme of a hang-wringing piece in the WAPO entitled, “Trump is focused on the China trade war when he should be concerned about space.”
The moon may offer humanity the materials to become a space-faring species—if we can begin to live in imperfect harmony with nature and each other on the earth.
But to say in the next breath that “the country that establishes a viable jumping-off point from the moon will be the first to get the opportunity to benefit from trillion dollars worth of space-based resources” is lunacy.
Such ‘development’ will not be the “intermittent insanity once believed to be related to the phases of the moon,” but the permanent insanity of man. We may as well put up billboards on the moon declaring the bottomless stupidity of our species.
China has “plans to establish an Earth-moon space economic zone by 2050, with the potential to generate $10 trillion annually.” Do China’s precious “internal affairs” now extend to strip-mining the moon?
The conclusion we’re supposed to draw from such folly? “Just as China has attempted to expand its influence over the seas here on Earth, it may try to do so in space, with tremendous implications for the future of democracy in the solar system and beyond.”
Nothing renders the tribalistic impulse of nationalism, ‘my country first,’ more absurd than the phrase, “tremendous implications for the future of democracy in the solar system and beyond.”
American capitalists have been drooling over the Chinese market for 30 years. But China’s future may look more a lot more like Hong Kong than Beijing. The Communist Party of China (CPC) fears millions of people tearing apart their gleaming cities, which offer plenty of goodies for atheistic materialists, but destroy the spiritual, intellectual and political freedom of human beings.
Of course that’s also why the CPC has pumped billions into artificial intelligence surveillance systems, which threaten to make everyone, inside and outside China, a “Person of Interest.”
As over a million Uyghurs, an ethnic Muslim minority in a supposedly autonomous territory in northwest China, can attest, entire peoples can now be surveilled and interned.
It is one of the greatest ironies of human history that Chinese communists figured out how to have their capitalistic cake and keep eating communist power too. The purported power of capitalism to bring democracy in its wake has been turned on its head. Without radical change, we’re witnessing is democracy’s funeral wake!
Sadly, with the exceptions of Hong Kong and Taiwan, Confucian contentment with China’s bargain with the devil speaks to the character of the Chinese people, and the intractable self-centeredness of human nature. It appears the adage “absolute power corrupts absolutely” applies not just to the CPC, but China as a whole where humanity is concerned. Why are the Chinese people so weak?
“The moon could serve as a new and tremendous supplier of energy…whoever first conquers the moon will benefit first.” The clarion call for a new space race rightly receives a shrug by Americans 50 years after winning our nationalistic moonshot against the USSR.
“Accessing vast new stores of energy to fuel its economy is a key motivation for China’s space economic zone.” After they have denuded Africa and South America no doubt.
The idea that a single nation would have the grandiose dream of ringing the moon with solar stations, while laying claim to its minerals for its own nationalistic purposes, is preposterous. The entire Western, Westphalian model of sovereign nation-states has reached its dystopian nadir in the People’s Republic of China.
As a people Americans have turned inward in all the wrong ways, while the Chinese have turned outward in all the wrong ways. It’s time for a massive course correction in both peoples.
Martin LeFevre
