According to advocates, such as Princeton professor Gerard O'Neill, such commerce could then provide the economic foundation for the development of large colonies, literally cities in space, in high Earth orbits, and this vision has served to motivate many space entrepreneurs, notably Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos.

Global warming and anthropogenic atmospheric chemistry change are both real. They are not currently a crisis. But they are going to become a crisis, and then a disaster, unless something is done to effectively change the current trajectory of events.

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Thus, the central objection raised against the human settlement and terraforming of Mars: Such projects may be technologically feasible, but there is no possible way that they can be paid for. On the surface, the arguments given supporting this position appear cogent, for Mars is a distant place, difficult to access, and possesses a hostile environment that holds no apparent resources of economic value. These arguments appear ironclad, yet it must be pointed out that they were also presented in the past as convincing reasons for the utter impracticality of the European settlement of North America and Australia.

The moon is a world of rough terrain, with an extent the size of Africa. Such a world cannot be adequately explored on foot, or by ground vehicles. To get around the moon in any serious way, we are going to have to be able to fly. The moon, of course, has no air, so airplanes are out of the question. But by taking advantage of its polar ice to produce hydrogen/ oxygen propellant, we will be able to fly all over the moon using rocket-powered ballistic flight vehicles.

Napoleon, like Musk, was a genuine genius who won repeatedly by defying expectations. Success bred a sense of invincibility. The march on Moscow followed, not from necessity, but from overconfidence, and it ended in catastrophe.

Brilliance does not preclude folly. Indeed, it often invites it. The Moon may yet prove to be Musk’s Moscow.

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Unlike the campaigns against DDT, nuclear power, and genetically modified crops – but very much like the eugenics movement – the global warming cause is universal enough to serve as the basis of a pseudo-religion. This potential is the subject of remarks by the movement's leaders themselves.

When a population of organisms grows in a finite environment, sooner or later it will encounter a resource limit. This phenomenon, described by ecologists as reaching the “carrying capacity” of the environment, applies to bacteria on a culture dish, to fruit flies in a jar of agar, and to buffalo on a prairie. It must also apply to man on this finite planet. JOHN P. HOLDREN and PAUL R. EHRLICH Global Ecology (1971) 1 Here is the difference between the animal and the man. Both the jay-hawk and the man eat chickens, but the more jay-hawks the fewer chickens, while the more men the more chickens. HENRY GEORGE

Perhaps the question was premature in Turner's time, but not now. Currently we see around us an ever more apparent loss of vigor of our society: increasing fixity of the power structure and bureaucratization of all levels of life; impotence of political institutions to carry off great projects; the proliferation of regulations affecting all aspects of public, private, and commercial life; the spread of irrationalism; the banalization of popular culture; the loss of willingness by individuals to take risks, to fend for themselves or think for themselves; economic stagnation and decline; the deceleration of the rate of technological innovation. . . . Everywhere you look, the writing is on the wall. Without

Like all cults, this new one adeptly represses heresy. . . . In defiance of the Western scientific tradition, which maintains that skepticism of inferences drawn from observation is always in order, and that all accepted conclusions are always subject to review and potential overthrow by new data, the climate catastrophists insist that ‘the science is settled’ (science is never ‘settled’) and that therefore no debate, and no new data, can or should be entertained. Those wishing to advance theories or data contrary to the accepted orthodoxy are not merely wrong, but criminal ‘deniers’ who should be silenced, vilified, and if possible, prosecuted.

It is clear that for Gore, global warming agitation is not really about climate change at all. Put simply, it's not about weather, it's about power. The movement is everything, the goal is nothing. It's not about curbing CO2 emissions; it's about creating a mob – a mass cult whose legions empower its shamans, and whose systematic anti-human ideology serves as a basis for reorganizing society along totalitarian lines.

It could be that the climate alarmists have answers to rebut these critics and their data, but if so, they are not showing it. Rather than engaging in scientific debate, they have evaded it, choosing instead to try to stop dissenting publications and cut off the funding of their opponents. That is not the way to do science. That is the way to do fraud.