Africa’s demand for water is set to rise by 300% by 2040
Plans to tow a giant iceberg could provide a year’s worth of water to Cape Town
Israel goes for desalination
These headlines spell out current concerns over climate change. But by 2007 according to Jim Hansen, who blew the whistle on global warming, world leaders had recognized that “we’re not going to make it here on earth”, initiating plans to eventually move populations to space. That same year, The Survival Imperative by William E. Burrows, filled in the details.
Following the 2008 economic meltdown, knowing that the earth is likely to become inhospitable to humans in the near future, the 1% ceased pretending to care about the 99%, quoting Stephan Hawking Stephen Hawking:
“I believe that the long-term future of the human race must be in space. It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster on planet Earth in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand, or million. The human race shouldn’t have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet. Let’s hope we can avoid dropping the basket until we have spread the load.”
“Even if humans manage to avoid a nuclear stand-off over the next thousand years, our fate on this planet is still pretty much certain. University of Sussex astrophysicist Dr. Robert Smith says eventually the aging Sun will accelerate global warming to a point where all of Earth’s water will simply evaporate.”
It was suggested that the reason why the 1% is stashing away as much cash as possible is that space travel will be very expensive. Somehow, I doubt that people used to the ultimate luxuries will be willing to live on the moon — or other barren rock — requiring the construction of sophisticated space modules.
By 2016, and Donald Trump’s defeat of uber Hawk Hillary Clinton, it had become clear, that Washington’s military/industrial/financial complex was/is determined to secure the raw materials that would enable it to extend its control to the entire earth, seeking to isolate and eventually defeat Russia, with its vast mineral wealth.
But that’s only the tip of the ‘iceberg’ – or more accurately, the ‘cauldron’ in which humanity fails to recognize rising temperatures. As oil companies try to obfuscate the truth, and child activists pursue an all-but hopeless campaign to save Mother Earth, the 1% is making plans to save itself. In forums such as the Bilderberg Conference, discussions focus on how the elite can continue to maintain itself on a dying Earth, until it can colonize another planet, as it pursues the identification of a planet capable of supporting human life. Ever more powerful spacecraft are being developed, including by the private sector, which has put out a call for volunteers ready to leave Earth forever.
These calls being in the double digits, it’s clear the 1% is not planning to embark the 99%. This reality was spelled out in Neill Bloomkamp’s 2013 film Elysium, in which the very wealthy live on a pristine man-made space station called Elysium, while the rest remain in overpopulated Earth favelas. (In the seventies, Soylent Green described a world in which the only food was processed from the bodies of humanely killed citizens. Early French futurist Jules Verne imagined traveling Around the World in Eighty Days in 1873, while today’s cinematographers show us humanity’s much bleaker future).
In the nineties, with the creation of the European Union, it was possible to believe that social democracy would provide the highest standard of living ever achieved by humans across the globe. But the model could not be allowed to continue, jeopardizing the liberal model of competition for survival. In 2008, the EU was knocked off its pedestal, Margaret Thatcher’s ‘There is no Alternative’ pointing the way to permanent austerity.
Back then I wrote that “as resistance to austerity grows, the 1% will increasingly turn to fascist methods of control, from listening to our conversations and reading our emails to the militarization of local police forces.” (In Soylent Green, food is distributed by heavily armed police, and in Elysium, they play the role of labor overseers…) Hitler perfected fascism in the name of Lebensraum- room to live — for the German people. Today, from its City on a Hill, liberalism is updating “The Survival of the Fittest”.
If its plan come to fruition, even with two thousands years of ‘civilization’ behind it, will humanity’s chances be much better on a space module?
Deena Stryker is a US-born international expert, author and journalist that lived in Eastern and Western Europe and has been writing about the big picture for 50 years. Over the years she penned a number of books, including Russia’s Americans. Her essays can also be found at Otherjones. Especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.