Just because technology allows you to do something, it doesn't mean that you should.
Unfortunately, our response to technology is just this. It is if we can now do something that we were
once never able to do, then we should do it.
Not only that, but we should throw all morals values out the window just
like a person who opposes Putin is similarly thrown out of a window. Not
only should we do the new thing, but we should celebrate it. To ensure we do,
we should be subjected to endless propaganda and lies, and force if we don't,
just as in the most shameless dictatorships.
Surgery and medical technology have developed far beyond
anything that we could have imagined at the start of the last century, when
simple infections would kill a healthy adult, minor breaks would result in
amputations and infant mortality was common. These horrors have largely been relegated
to the past.
Instead, we can now synthesise hormones and mass produce
them and deliver them to children at a cost that is well within the budget
imposed on them by their pocket money.
We can remove the penis and testicles from a male and create
a pseudo virginal opening. We can do the opposite and remove skin from the arm of
a female and create a pseudo penis, through which a lady can urinate whilst
standing up. We can do this while ignoring the inevitable medical complications,
such as incontinence and sexual dysfunction.
We can support all this with marketing and funding channels.
Companies like Gender GP sprung up to supply the hormones, and the NHS in the
UK and insurance companies in the USA funded the operations.
Economies of scale make all this possible. This meant schools
had to be enlisted to guarantee a strong stream of new customers. They welcomed
their role in this by being able to compete against their rivals for the privilege
of being the most diverse and they were encouraged by Ofsted to do so, in what would could be called a pissing contest. Competition
did not create a virtuous upward spiral in educational outcomes as was intended,
but a race to the bottom as they funneled the children in their care to the charlatans
of transgenderism. To avoid any blockage to the newly formed stream of customers,
dissenters were drowned out by compulsory Pride celebrations and then
threatened with legal action under the Equality Act for objecting.
Dystopia was delivered on plate, and everyone was forced to
pray to the god of medical technology. All
political parties supported this descent into moral oblivion and, until recently,
no one was able to exercise any restraint at the ballot box.
So, what’s this got to do with Elon Musk and what can he
learn from it?
Elon Musk is an outstanding entrepreneur and technologist. Probably, the best the world has ever seen. He
can now enable things that were once impossible, and the most staggering thing he
has enabled is a technically feasible way of getting significant numbers of
people to Mars, though he has not yet demonstrated he can get them safely back.
But just because he
can, should he and should we, as a society, not be actively attempting to stop
him before he does any more damage in trying? In so doing would we be learning from the
disaster of the silence on the transgender movement by again being blinded by
the outstanding technology that was in front of us?
So, what can possibly go wrong? Well, everything, and
working backwards from Mars illustrates.
So, let’s pretend that there is an Elon Musk based outpost
of humanity on Mars. Would it pass the toilet paper test. That is can this outpost
of humanity cope without toilet paper and replace any shortages of toilet paper
with locally produced alternatives?
For those who have looked in awe at the artist renderings of
prospective human habitations on Mars, they may have noticed the lack of trees.
That’s because there are none and nor is there any prospect of trees, even
though the atmosphere is CO2
rich. There won’t ever be trees because the radiation will kill them, and there
is no water for them to grow. At best there may be some shrubs growing in greenhouses
which may just about provide a subsistence level of food for a small population,
but trees with long fiber cells growing at sufficient volume for a plentiful supply
of toilet paper will not exist.
So, no tress, means no wood to produce pulp, and even if by
some miracle there were trees, then there would no spare energy to run a pulping
machine and no materials to build one, and likewise with the paper machine. So,
the prospective Martians will have to find a substitute – what about soap to
support a lifetime commitment to cleaning one’s anus by washing it? Well, soap needs fat or oils, and in the absence
of available fat or oil, that needs cannibalism, and the prospect of being killed
by your peers to make bars of soap is likely to dissuade even the most ardent
supporters of Musk’s project from signing up.
What about doing without toilet paper and soap? Again, I
would not want to risk my life in the journey to Mars only to find I would have
continuous dirty backside and no water to wash it, and that the problem may be aggravated by the inevitable diarrhoea
from radiation sickness.
What about waiting for the next delivery from a Starship? Well that somewhat defeats the object of the exercise. The whole point of which was to provide a base for humans to survive on in the event of life being wiped out on Earth. So, the citizens of Mars would be desperately at mercy of the good people on Earth and they will have to hope that the Earthlings remain benevolent enough to both build and launch Starships and pack them with toilet paper despite the inevitable challenges they will be facing to feed themselves in near future.
So, if something as simple as toilet paper provides an insurmountable
problem, what about the myriad of other problems associated with all the high
technology devices and foods that will be needed for survival in an environment
that does not have oxygen to breath or water to drink.
Working back further from the people about to kill
themselves on Mars over toilet paper, what about the building and funding on
the Spaceships on Earth and the problems that this causes.
Elon Musk is keen on telling
us that technology is going to create a world which is no longer zero-sum because
technology will grow goods and services to the benefit of everyone and a rosy
future beckons for us all. But the raison d'etre of the Mars colony is that civilisation
on Earth is likely to collapse. Perhaps only really intelligent people like Musk
can hold two such conflicting views in their mind at the same time, because I certainly
can’t.
If Musk doesn’t understand that a zero-sum game model is a relevant
model for future, he could do no worse than reading the news, on X or
elsewhere, of the crisis in Ukraine or the many other war zones in the world. The estimated $5billion cost associated with his
Starship project could easily have led to victory for the Ukrainians in their war
with Russian invaders. Instead, the debate in the USA is why they should
keep funding the Ukrainians when their own cities are in at a point of collapse. That
sounds very much like a zero-sum game problem to me, were resources are constrained,
and everyone must fight amongst themselves for their fair share.
These wars are not going to stop, they are going to continue
spreading and the resource shortages that start them will continue to intensify.
Is it really the right response to this for
the world to focus on diverting so much of its scare resources to build a Starship for a few
people who will not even pass the toilet paper test.
Then there is the climate change impact of this madness.
Each flight will require 4,600 tonnes of methane. This sounds a lot, but most likely
far bigger is the carbon budget associated with building the Starships and
funding them. Against this, how can any government be expected to persuade its
citizens to cut their emissions when they see everyone worshipping the technology
in a development like this.
It is therefore hardly surprising that Elon Musk’s X is
littered with nonsense comments that climate change is not happening, or that high
CO2 is good because it is a plant food, or that it is all a scam.
The reality is that never in the history of the planet has CO2
increased so rapidly and there is now a zero percent change of avoiding
catastrophic change. We actually have a paradox before our eyes; the worse climate change
becomes the more we will disbelieve it.
So, Elon Musk now must do what everyone else would think impossible.
He must deny climate change or significantly down play it, even though it is
unquestionably the biggest threat facing humanity and all other higher level life
forms on the planet, because he needs the economy to keep grow as fast as it can
to support his project, while at the same time telling everyone that humanity
needs a second home on Mars because life on Earth will come to an end. At least achieving the first will make the
second a necessity, even though it will fail as quickly as it will run out of toilet
paper.
None of us mere mortals would be able to do this, because we
cannot get the rest of the world to worship at the feet of our technology, but
Elon Musk can, just in the same way as the beneficiaries of the transgender ideology,
such as Martine
Rothblatt, were able to do.
He must therefore replicate the strategy of the transgender ideologues, the very people who has committed to destroy. That strategy is to treat technology as a religion, even though it can be every bit as dangerous as radical Islam. In so doing, you must embrace lies and conflicting positions and silence dissent to support it.