Over The Moon

As Britain frets about the possibility that it might become socially and culturally common for 16 and 17-year-olds to consume alcoholic beverages, incorporation into the United States would presumably involve raising Canada’s drinking age to a vigorously enforced 21. That prospect ought to be enough to spur its youth to enlistment followed by valour. And then there is healthcare, both in Canada and in Greenland.

None of Donald Trump’s grandparents was born in the United States, but much of his base identifies its ancestry as American because the ancestors in question left Europe so long ago. Most of those ancestors came from what were now the United Kingdom, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland. Greenland has been Danish since before the American Republic existed. But the American Republic has existed for quite a while now.

Since 1951, the United States has been able to have as many military bases as it pleased in Greenland. There is only one left, but it is the Pituffik Space Base, part of the United States Space Force that Trump created and which is therefore especially close to his heart. A Danish flag is flown there, but Pituffik is 930 miles from Nuuk, with no regular flights and with even the irregular ones taking anything up to four and a half hours, often with stops. Might the US be offered Pituffik, although strictly that and nowhere else such as Qaanaaq, as a sovereign base, perhaps with its name changed to Trump?

After all, no one is all bad. The progress of Artemis II is wonderful. Ours is an improbably dominant species. Something much bigger, and endowed with fangs, or claws, or talons, or venom, or what have you, should have seen us off long you. Yet we are still here, and we alone have been to the Moon. Within two generations of that, though, we are afraid of words. Either we go to back to the Moon, and then to Mars and beyond, or we accept that we have entered our decline, the endpoint of which could only be extinction.

Yet space is being both privatised and militarised, a very common combination but always a lethal one, and that by the country that does not recognise it as a common resource for all humanity. There needs to be a return to President Eisenhower’s proposal, in a speech to the United Nations General Assembly on 22 September 1960, for the principles of the Antarctic Treaty to be extended to Outer Space.

If God had not intended us to be a spacefaring species, then He would never have put anything up there for us to find. People who think that these missions impoverish anyone, even as an initial outlay, do not understand how the money supply works. As a sovereign state with its own free-floating, fiat currency, Britain has as much of that currency as it chooses to issue to itself, with readily available fiscal and monetary means of controlling any inflationary effect.

Why, though, spend that currency on this? Welcome to the Anthropocene, that is why. Life is the geological force that shapes the Earth, and the emergence of human cognition fundamentally transforms the biosphere, not least by the uniquely human phenomenon of economic growth, so that human mastery of nuclear processes is beginning to create resources through the transmutation of elements, enabling us, among other things, to explore space and to exploit the resources of the Solar System. Vladimir Vernadsky and Krafft Ehricke will yet have their day. They may be having it now.

“To increase the power of Man over Nature, and to abolish the power of Man over Man,” said Leon Trotsky. “Dominion,” says the God of the Bible. Dominion over the beasts, thus over the land, and thus over everything on and under the land. Dominion over the fish, thus over the waters, and thus over everything in and under the waters. And dominion over the birds, thus over the sky, and thus over everything in the sky, as far up as the sky goes, and the sky goes up a very long way.

That dominion is entrusted so that we might “be fruitful and multiply”. Entrusted as it is to the whole human race, its purpose is, “To increase the power of Man over Nature, and to abolish the power of Man over Man.” Celebrate the full compatibility between the highest view of human demographic, economic, intellectual and cultural expansion and development, and the most active concern for the conservation of the natural world and of the treasures bequeathed by such expansion and development in the past. That means growth, industry, what someone once nearly called “the white heat of technology”, and the equitable distribution of their fruits among and within the nations of the world, for everyone to enjoy at least the standard of living that we ourselves already enjoyed.