Long-term Sober Alarm

The massive, huge concrete architectural work-the cities, highways, dams and other structures around the world may be taken as consequences of the orderly resolution of the nature of the Earth-Moon system, with its identification of the nature of the barycenter of that system.  It is the emergence of order in silicon, of course.  These structures are not only anticipated with a hope that they will exist for a very long time; they emerged exactly as a result of the resolution of the very long Galactic rotation. Their existence is a singular, temporal event in that geologically immense duration.

In other words, the cities, highways and dams emerged because of the attainment of the Moon, and their strong and durable forms will endure, continually existing on an appropriately vast span of time.  They are more than literally a sign that the Moon has been attained; they are a physical symptom of the new order of interplanetary exploration that will never be forgotten.  More than that, the next hundred million years will be entirely different from the last.  It will be impossible to escape the reminders, and impossible to avoid the change whatever it is.  Even so, it could be the only place human beings will live.

To any shrewd adapting species or even individual or family this has advantages.  To those cultures that may be unwary of the existence of such long term processes, it holds potentials for disasters large and small.  Losers will simply become poor and extinct.  Winners will become wealthy, and thrive to survive alive - on a million year time scale.  Moreover, the changes are immediate and taking place with every budgetary review, bond issue, new product and planned obsolescence.  The great changes taking place as a consequence of reaching the Moon are behind the success and failure of national economies. The changes are immense, and sometimes distinct to well advised legislators, business leaders, and other planners. 

These facts are not a surprise to some, yet they underlie present economic difficulties more certainly than is often admitted.  It should have been described candidly to the public by economic planners attempting to make sense of the difficulties, for instance, with the Euro zone countries - especially Greece and Spain which have obvious historical difficulties accepting the depth of the implications of space flight.

The sudden success brought back with the Moon rocks also has implications for the colonization of the Western continents, for they are no longer required to be enforcers of the struggle to accomplish the Moon voyages which are past successes already.  If the Moon had not been attained, it is likely that the world would have already engaged in the Third World War and much of the world would be radioactive rubble. 

The cities are thriving, and human beings are lovingly cultivating them, with a very just and deep aversion to being interrupted with any hint of another war, and that is a natural outcome of the world's success.  It was remarkable how attentive the entire world became when the first Apollo Astronauts were walking on the Moon. The entire human population was rapt, with an intensity that saturated the general concern for their local environments; they were engrossed with a global unity that is difficult to describe and it contained serious, determined responsibility for how the world is to be governed.  Now, people everywhere are turned away from war, and happy not to be interrupted by it as well as justly annoyed when reminded of it by those who profit from war.

It is time to mention, once in a while in budgetary events, that the economics of the new world have only somewhat to do with ancient traditional patterns of economic activity.  In the days of Old and New Kingdom Dynasties and their intervening hiatus, entire civilizations had to collapse and be left to future generations whenever a new principle was discovered that was not understood workably.  That's not happening now.
Modern practice is quick to peacefully, though aggressively, conduct and perform research programs to determine any new fact, event, or principle as soon as it is identified.  Each new economic activity is now, to an extent, tested for its long term value. 

Even so, this could be improved by more candid mention of the difference between the vast future ahead, and the groping, ignorant and prehistoric past.  Ensuring that all members are given a sense of the very long futures which modern decisions may affect goes far to cause them to turn to the problem with an intention to strengthen the peace.  In the outcome, peace is far more important than it ever was before, and it can afford to be strong.

People are sick of war.  The whole world is tinged with regret at the magnitudes of war that were fought during the long development of whatever it would cost to reach the Moon.  In retrospect, though half a billion years of instinct drove the final thousands of years to attain that celestial disk and the struggle could not be avoided, it is becoming clear that none of the techniques that were successful in those flights, required killing anybody on Earth.  It did not require human or animal sacrifice, even if it was concealed or inveigled into the complex and intricate physical systems as an accident. 

The systems used to get to the Moon were not merely an accommodation or arrangement with some god,  deity, or principle.  No sacrifice of life was actually necessary to reach the Moon, collect Moon rocks, and return alive to Earth unharmed-with the rocks.   Yet thousands of years of myth, superstition, ignorance and tyranny had convinced vast populations that human beings would inevitably find someone or some thing to fight against in the planets and stars.  It is not just a matter of "so far, none have been encountered."  The real though rare danger from falling rocks, which are meteors or asteroids, is used as a lynchpin to enforce convenient, ruthless and false ideas that space aliens are always just around the corner.

The Moon and Mars turned out to be the only places in the Solar System where human beings could stand (aside from dozens of moons so small as to be worthless as property).  Even Mars and the Moon have no significant air or water, despite the enthusiastic determination to hope for those elements essential to life.
There are NO places in the solar system where any living alien threat can exist.  Claiming that danger from space aliens among the planets, or nearly upon us from the stars,  in the hopes of drumming up more war profiteering is literally criminal.   It is irresponsible, tantamount to insane.  It is a product of the lucrative behind the scenes skullduggery collusion between the Military and Hollywood.

Consider the science fiction industry. It pumps out what in earlier days would have been hysterical propaganda accusing another human group of being monsters, demons and insane murderers.  Nowadays, subtle changes still depict false and amplified scenarios of human beings desperately fighting strange forces, monsters, aliens, Martians, and interstellar space craft.  These "thrilling" scenarios are almost plainly recruiting scenarios for was on the ground, at sea or in the air.  They are warmongering industries.  One of the Strangelove scenarios is lent as a prop to the Hollywood science fiction industry in a state recently troubled by outbreaks of "unexplainable" violence.  That prop prop is the North American Air Defence Command Headquarters in Cheyenne Mountain, a granite outcropping in the Rocky Mountain range that runs north
and south through several states. 

Balancing a thermonuclear arsenal poised with the capability of annihilating Cairo, Paris, Beijing, Moscow and scores of other million-person cities, with the manufacture of speculative and fictional "extra"-terrestrial demonism in a nation that labels illegal immigrants as "aliens" describes the United States in a sad yet too accurate way.  The state in which those acts of "unexplainable" violence occurred is notorious for its hard line internal contradictions.  The Cheyenne Mountain combination of Hollywood near superstitious space fiction and nuclear armed Continental Defense industries is only one of  those contradictions.  There are more, in that state and others.

Here in Seattle, at the old Union Station rail depot, there is a twenty foot statue of the astonishingly barbaric, obscenely brutal ancient superstition god Anubis, the Egyptian Jackal God.  What in the name of human decency is that doing without at least some indication it is a human superstition and not an accurate representation of any actual living creature? 

It is time to take a more responsible look at what the last six, maybe ten thousand years of armed warfare to reach the Moon has made of America and the rest of the world.