Humans Grim Green Future

I recall my Biology professor taking our class outside to walk the grounds of our school and saying that what most people feared was being attacked with a nuclear bomb.

Not so, he said. What’s likely to kill us all is already here, in our backyards and shelves of your local markets or warehouses of e-commerce companies. “Green solutions” may add to the problem as I point out in Nature v Man Made: Hydroponics, Aquaponics and Aeroponic Systems

Speaking food, hydro, and e-commerce, Mr. Bezos, visiting a California Whole Foods your company may have acquired, I came upon a product on a high top shelf soaked in what appeared to be water. Looking up at the ceiling I noticed what appeared to be the air conditioning ducts. Seeing that these pipes run across the entire store, we hope this is not your idea of hydroponics or aquaponics. May I suggest experimenting with Aeroponics on your visit into space.

Returning back to the classroom, professor turned off the lights and an image popped on the projection screen. He asked us to describe it.

It was a grotesque image of what appeared to be a human with deformations and exaggerated features; swollen eyes and mouth on an enlarged head, no neck, attached to an enlarged body with what looked like dangling limbs. This, he said, is what some scientists see the human of the future. Needless, to say, I have been unable to forget it.

Demonstration was a clever stunt to get students’ attention. Well, it worked. He had mine. Yes, but we all got to eat.

Humans, are WE what WE eat? My professor would likely say yes.  So, why don’t we question what we eat? Because that would mean questioning ourselves.

EarthSpace Odyssey 2000: “All food will be completely synthetic…”

“A Look at the Future…Man becomes a pure appearance, a kaleidoscope of external shapes, an abstraction in a milieu that is frighteningly concrete-an abstraction armed with all the sovereign signs of Jupiter the Thunderer.” -Jacques Ellul

We are told that America and its Constitution was an experiment. In the spirit of experiments, lets look at Jacques Ellul’s prescient words from his 1964 book, “The Technological Society.”

Ellul foresees “All food will be completely synthetic….Sea water and ordinary rocks will yield all the necessary metal…there will be universal hygienic inspection and control….”

Experimentation by governments appears to have served multiple purposes:  Astronauts and Scientists missions into space created the use of a lot of our dry food products. Also experimenting with plants, organs and liquids suspended in gravity appears to be the actual intent of missions.

Global warming’s decades accumulated effect has come to fruition. Farmers and society are facing the consequences. Ellul warned, “How and where shall we relocate a billion and a half persons who today make their livings from agriculture and who, in the promised ultrarapid conversion of the next forty years, will become completely useless as cultivators of soil?”

Solutions?  Colonizing planets, some have purposed, including those who think themselves “space cowboys” when in actuality they are simply businessmen with a lot of “green” bills.

Of course, one can always find the biggest salesman at a fair parking lot selling food, a flea market of vendors and a drive in movie theatre. Or an e-commerce platform with all three. Yep, a little digital can remove a lot of street dirt from markets.

Musk and Bezos views of colonizing space? “Crazy” says the engineer and inventor James Lovelock. No Mr. Lovelock, I find for these businessmen it is simply in their nature, and have sold themselves their own idea.

Yes, but Lovelock also adds, “We’ll never get there because we would have destroyed our base.” So, salesmen, could this be a warning of your dark victory where the failure may not be in the launch but in the return to earth?

In any case, the “space cowboy” and grotesque aliens feared by humans appear to be one and the same, at least from our EarthSpace satellites.