If we're going to get to Mars, we're going to have to clear the maps. The dragons, cyclops, and other monsters of the mind must be killed, and the si… - Robert Zubrin

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.

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 opular culture; the loss of willingness by individuals to take risks, to fend for themselves or think for themselves; economic stagnation and decline, the decleration of the rate of technological innovation...Everywhere you look, the writing is on the wall.

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.