Globalization has eradicated great power war, dedev reverses
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- Space solves multiple existential threats – the program is key to survival Pelton in ’03
- Space Good Terminals Ext Solves extinction Monga Bay
- Hawking said that humans need to colonize outer space in order avoid extinction
- Sooner or later disasters such as an asteroid collision or a nuclear war could wipe us all out . But
- we could have a permanent base on the moon in 20 years and a colony on Mars in the next 40 years. "Life on
- warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of
- Extinction Spudis, ‘04
- Will the prospect of our extinction harden our resolve to survive, or will it hasten the decay of our culture Without an escape hatch, our children will lose focus
- Returning to the Moon will facilitate that
- Life
- Space solves Militarism, State, Capitlism ( ) Space is a mechanism to de-construct State, Capitalist, and Militaristic violence Collins ‘8
- Consider the example of
- GPS became not just a tool for the
- Nothing
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Capitalism is key to space exploration and development Blundell, director general of the Institute for Economic Affairs, 2004 (John, “Mission to Mars must go private to succeed,” February 2, http://www.iea.org.uk/record.jsp?type=news&ID=166) Bush is not finding the billions himself. Rather the tab will be picked up by US taxpayers in perhaps 20 years’ time. What arrests me is the unchallenged assumption that space exploration must be a nationalised industry. The Soviet effort may be stalled but the Chinese seem committed to joining the race. The European Space Agency is a strange combination of nationalised bodies. NASA is a pure old-fashioned nationalised entity. I argue we should relinquish the expectation that space has to be limited to vast quangos. The mindset we all share is an echo of the rivalry between the evaporated USSR and the still dynamic US. The first bleeps of the Sputnik galvanised the US into accelerating its space effort. What we need is capitalists in space. Capitalism needs property rights, enforcement of contracts and the rule of law. The ideological tussle does not cease once we are beyond the ionosphere. With the exception of Arthur C Clarke, none of us imagined the entertainment potential from satellites. Geostationary lumps of electronic gadgetry beam us our BSkyB television pictures. I remain in awe that Rupert Murdoch can place a device in the skies above Brazil that sends a signal to every home in each hemisphere. Who could have foreseen that mobile phones could keep us chattering without any wiring, or that global position techniques could plot where we all are to within a metre? These are business applications. Business is already in space. Markets detect and apply opportunities that are not envisaged by even the most accomplished technicians. I’m not saying Murdoch has special competences. I imagine he is as baffled by digital miracles as I am. The point is that companies define and refine what public bodies cannot achieve. Lift the veil of course and all those satellite firms are an intricate web of experts supplying ideas and services. We have an infant space market. What use will the Moon be? Is there value on Mars other than the TV rights? The answer is nobody can know. We can only make some guesses. The Spanish ships that set off for the US thought they would get to India. The Portuguese knew they’d reach China. The English followed them westwards seeking gold. In fact, they got tobacco. Events always confound expectations. The arguments for putting men on Mars are expressly vague from President Bush. Perhaps he was really bidding for votes. From my reading the best results may be medical. Zero, or low, gravity techniques may allow therapies of which we are ignorant. It seems facetious to suggest tourism may be a big part of space opportunity but as both the North and South poles are over-populated and there is a queue at the top of Mount Everest, a trip to the Sea of Tranquility may prove a magnet for the wealthy. Instead of NASA’s grotesque bureaucracy it may be Thomas Cook will be a greater force for exploration. NASA could be a procurement body. It need not design and run all space ventures. It could sub-contract far more extensively. Without specialised engineering expertise it is not easy to criticise projects such as the shuttle. It seems to be excessively costly and far too fragile. There are private space entrepreneurs already. They are tiddlers up against the mighty NASA. Yet Dan Goldin, the NASA leader, says he favours the privatisation of space: "We can’t afford to do solar system exploration until we turn these activities over to the cutting edge private sector..."Some may say that commercialising portions of NASA’s functions is heresy. Others may think we are taking a path that will ruin the wonders of space. I believe that when NASA can creatively partner, all of humankind will reap the benefits of access to open space". Is it possible the Moon has a more noble future than merely a branch office of NASA? Is it tolerable that Mars could be a subsidiary of the USA? Could it be nominally a further state of the union? These are not silly questions. In time space will be defined by lawyers and accountants as property rights will need to be deliberated. One possibility may be that both environments are so hostile that Mars and the Moon will never be more than token pockets for humanity. On the evidence so far it is the orbiting satellites that have made us see the Earth through new eyes. We can survey and explore the planet better from 200 miles up than stomping on the surface. The emerging commercial body of space law is derived from telecommunications law. It is perplexing and contrary to our immediate senses. How can you own or exchange something as intangible as digital messages bouncing off satellites? Yet we all pay our mobile phone bills. Many of the business results of space exploration are unintended consequences of NASA’s early adventures. Computer development would probably have been slower but for the need for instrumentation for Apollo. Are there prospects for Scottish firms in space? The prizes will not go to only the mega corporations. Perhaps Dobbies, the Edinburgh garden centre group, can create new roses by placing pots beyond gravity. Edinburgh University laboratories, or rather their commercial spin offs, could patent new medicines. Is it possible the genetic magicians at the Bush could hitch a ride into space and extend their discoveries? NASA is a monopolist. All monopolies are bad for business. They only stunt opportunities. They blunt alternatives. By opening space to entrepreneurship we will be starting on what FA Hayek memorably describes as "a discovery procedure". Science is an open system. So is capitalism. Space solves multiple existential threats – the program is key to survival Pelton in ’03 (Joseph, Director of the Space and Advanced Communications Research institute at George Washington University and Executive Director of the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation, “COMMENTARY: Why Space? The Top 10 Reasons”, September 23, http://www.space.com/news/commentary_top10_030912.html) Actually the lack of a space program could get us all killed. I dont mean you or me or my wife or children. I mean that Homo sapiens as a species are actually endangered. Surprising to some, a well conceived space program may well be our only hope for long-term survival. The right or wrong decisions about space research and exploration may be key to the futures of our grandchildren or great-grandchildren or those that follow. Arthur C. Clarke, the author and screenplay writer for 2001: A Space Odyssey, put the issue rather starkly some years back when he said: The dinosaurs are not around today because they did not have a space program. He was, of course, referring to the fact that we now know a quite largish meteor crashed into the earth, released poisonous Iridium chemicals into our atmosphere and created a killer cloud above the Earth that blocked out the sun for a prolonged period of time. This could have been foreseen and averted with a sufficiently advanced space program. But this is only one example of how space programs, such as NASAs Spaceguard program, help protect our fragile planet. Without a space program we would not know about the large ozone hole in our atmosphere, the hazards of solar radiation, the path of killer hurricanes or many other environmental dangers. But this is only a fraction of the ways that space programs are crucial to our future. He Continues… Protection against catastrophic planetary accidents: It is easy to assume that an erratic meteor or comet will not bring destruction to the Earth because the probabilities are low. The truth is we are bombarded from space daily. The dangers are greatest not from a cataclysmic collision, but from not knowing enough about solar storms, cosmic radiation and the ozone layer. An enhanced Spaceguard Program is actually a prudent course that could save our species in time. Space Good Terminals Ext Solves extinction Monga Bay, 11/30/2006. Environmental science and conservation news site. "To avoid extinction humans must colonize space says Hawking," http://news.mongabay.com/2006/1130-hawking.html-http://news.mongabay.com/2006/1130-hawking.html. As he was awarded the most prestigious prize in science, British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking said that humans need to colonize outer space in order avoid extinction. Hawking, who was presented Thursday with the Copley medal from Britain's Royal Society, told BBC Radio that humanity faces extinction if it confines itself to Earth. "The long-term survival of the human race is at risk as long as it is confined to a single planet," Hawking said. "Sooner or later disasters such as an asteroid collision or a nuclear war could wipe us all out. But once we spread out into space and establish independent colonies, our future should be safe." Hawking said that improvements in technology could make space travel for feasible in the future. "Science fiction has developed the idea of warp drive, which takes you instantly to your destination. Unfortunately, this would violate the scientific law which says that nothing can travel faster than light," he added "but matter/antimatter annihilation" could make it possible to travel at speeds just below the speed of light. "My next goal is to go into space," he said. Hawking, who has long pushed for space exploration and has performed groundbreaking research on black holes and the origins of the universe, believes that we could have a permanent base on the moon in 20 years and a colony on Mars in the next 40 years. "Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of," he said this summer at a news conference in Hong Kong. The Copley medal is the world's oldest award for scientific achievement. First awarded in 1731, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Louis Pasteur and Sir James Cook have been recipients the award. Extinction Spudis, ‘04 (Paul, Principal Investigator in the Planetary Geology Program of the NASA Office of Space Science, Solar System Exploration Division and Senior Professional Staff, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, August 4, http://www.spudislunarresources.com/Opinion_Editorial/The%20Space%20Program%20and%20the%20Meaning%20of%20Life.htm) The race to the Moon did more than prove American technical skill and the power of a free society. The real lesson and gift from Apollo was a wholly unexpected glimpse into our future. From both the chemical and physical evidence of impact (which we learned from the record of the lunar rocks) and the fossil record, we discovered that large body collisions had occurred in our past and will occur again in our future. Such catastrophes resulted in the widespread destruction of life, in some cases instantaneously eliminating more than 90% of all living species. In short, we discovered that ultimately, life on Earth is doomed. Our new understanding of impact as a fundamental geological force, leaves us only with the question of when, not if, the next large collision will occur. And ‘when’ is something we cannot predict. Human civilization is cumulative. Our culture provides positive and beautiful things through music, art and knowledge – it embodies the wisdom of all who have gone before us. With that wisdom, we have rejected the evil doctrines of slavery, Nazism and communism. People live longer, happier and more productive lives as time goes on. So one must ask, are we here for a reason and if so, to what purpose? Before passing the torch to their children, humans feel the need to create something of long-term value – something that will exist long after their time here on Earth. Be it a garden or a cure for cancer, we want to leave this world a little bit better than we found it. Will the prospect of our extinction harden our resolve to survive, or will it hasten the decay of our culture? Without an escape hatch, our children will lose focus - lose sight of goals and grand visions. The President’s Vision for Space directs us to extend human reach by developing new capabilities in space travel. Returning to the Moon will facilitate that goal. There we will gain technical ability and learn how to use the abundant energy and material resources waiting on other worlds. With the knowledge of how to “live off the land” in space, we can move out into the universe – populating one world after another. We must not die out here on Earth. Our values, culture and ability to leave this planet set us apart as a species. We have looked into the past and have seen the future of our world. Life here on Earth is destined for extinction. By venturing forth beyond Earth, we can ensure our survival. To extend and preserve humanity and human achievement, we must advance new capabilities in space travel. The President has asked for $1 Billion (about 0.0004 of the Federal budget) spread over the next four years, to begin this journey. As we acquire capability with resources derived from the Moon and elsewhere, we will create a spacefaring infrastructure. Space solves Militarism, State, Capitlism ( ) Space is a mechanism to de-construct State, Capitalist, and Militaristic violence Collins ‘8 Martin Collins is a curator at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland and is the author/editor of several books on space history and on science, technology, and society in the twentieth century, including Space Race: The US-USSR Competition to Reach the Moon (1999). A Chapter in the Book: Remembering the Space Age – Chapter 11 “A Second Nature rising: Spaceflight in an era of Representation” – http://www.nss.org/resources/library/spacepolicy/Remembering_the_Space_Age.pdf Let’s shake this mix of semiotics, capitalism, spaceflight, the global and the local, and consider a couple of examples. In public discourse on globalization, capitalism—restless, u.S. and european-centric, with asia on the rise—has drawn the most attention. But the u.S. military, as already inferred, has played an essential part, creating seemingly strange linkages between national security and a rampant transnational consumer culture. Consider the example of the global positioning System (GPS), a network of satellites designed and operated by the u.S. air Force (uSaF). Conceived in the early 1970s and only becoming fully operational in 1995, gpS’s history straddled the Cold War and its market-oriented aftermath. the system provided a soldier, ship, airplane, or missile with information on their exact position anyplace on the planet via signals encoded with highly accurate time data, its profound effects symbolized by its use in guiding “smart” bombs and missiles with deadly, precise accuracy in the post-September 11 conflicts in afghanistan and Iraq.26 In recent years, satellite photographic images of these “smart” actions have been a staple of television news and are widely available on the Internet.27 In the 1990s, though, GPS became not just a tool for the u.S. military, but for anyone, anywhere in the world—for a hiker in the rocky Mountains, for mom and dad driving the family car, as well as for past and present adversaries such as a Chinese soldier or a terrorist. In its posture toward users, the system became egalitarian in the extreme. Not surprisingly, in the go-go market-driven post-Cold War world, business and consumer use of gpS vastly outstripped that of the military. Imagine a use for location, tracking, or accurate time information and one found gpS there, often in the intimate contours of daily life— say, tracking a spouse suspected of having an affair. Indeed, one can “google” a phrase such as “cheater tracker” and find gpS products marketed for that purpose. Combined with a geographic information system (such as satellite-based google maps), one can track and visualize the itinerary of an errant mate.28 Such uses are not just confined to the u.S.: as the New York Times observed, “the world has incorporated our gpS into its daily life as rapidly as americans took up the atM banking network.”29 Nothing, perhaps, speaks more to the distinctive conjunction between production and semiotics in the global era, to the total, actual, not merely metaphorical, planetary scale of this conjunction, than GPS, its radio signals equally available to friends and foes, to weapons in flight, and to off-the-shelf products offering to meet every consumer need. the gpS story is not the same as that by-gosh, by-golly story of the origins of the Internet—of “isn’t it strange that a research project into maintaining command and control during a nuclear holocaust gave us this wildly diverse, unpredictable, electronic social universe.” It is different and more revealing of the transformation in the world order since the early 1970s. It still is, in essence, controlled by the u.S. military, and in a way unprecedented in u.S. history unites a classic function of empire—controlling and maintaining its perimeters—with the churning demands of capital and consumer appetites. and not just those based in united States, but everywhere. gpS has become a military-consumerist hybrid, in which each political-cultural domain has continually redefined the other. We—a transnational we—know the precision bomb blast from afghanistan or Iraq and the “cheater tracker” originate in and depend on the same system of production, yet in our everyday cultural frame of semiotics, we allow them to maintain their separateness. It is tensions such as these that continually redefine the global and the local, geographically and in time, and keep the united States—and its preeminence and exploitation of spaceflight— in the center of this dialectic. Consider another example, drawn from my current research that tracks Boorstin’s concern about semiotics and the structuring of our sense of the real. Like gpS, Iridium was and is a satellite constellation that completely embraces the planet—but with a different purpose, to provide telephony and data services, and with a different institutional actor in the lead, a multinational corporation. Conceived in 1987 at Motorola, a Fortune 500 company and a leading firm in cellular phone equipment and systems business and in semiconductors, the Iridium satellite project seemed to epitomize the historical moment: as the Cold War waned and collapsed, markets rather than government would lead into a techno-democratic future, and corporations rather than nations would articulate the pathways through which the local and the global took shape. the largest privately-financed technology project ever undertaken, and with an array of international investors, including the newly constituted russian Federation and the people’s republic of China, Iridium stood as symbol of this fusion of technology, corporations, markets, and international politics. In 1998, as the system neared completion, Wired magazine proclaimed, “It’s a bird, it’s a phone, it’s the world’s first pan-national corporation able to leap geo-political barriers in a single bound. part of my challenge in untangling this story has been to understand the varied ways in which semiotics functioned in a multinational corporation (MNC). You might expect that a MNC, deep-pocketed, well-connected politically, at home and internationally, with tens of factory and sales sites around the world would be an instrumental historical actor extraordinaire, a big “them” guy able to exert power in ways unavailable to all the little “us” guys. and, of course, that crude truth is there. But so is another one, one in which Motorola regarded the semiotic realm as real, a reality that required substantive corporate responses that intermingled culture, politics, and identity. as a literally planetary project, incorporating flesh-and-blood actors from around the world, Iridium dramatically highlighted the problem of semiotics—local, global, multiple, contesting, and not readily controlled—and the need for solutions. the Motorola’s response to this condition can be glimpsed in a 1998 book entitled Uncompromising Integrity: Motorola’s Global Challenge.31 the concept of culture stood as organizing precept. the narrative provided definitions of culture and related concepts that showed it as a structure, but varied in place and time, and as a process—national culture, subculture, host culture, enculturation, and transcultural. two key additional notions situated the discussion in the corporate context: “Motorola culture” and “home culture.” the first made clear that the organization had a semiotic sphere, derived from its own history and as a U.S. - centered capitalist institution. the second that that sphere was permeable and in flux because employees hailed from many localities around the world and because, as a multinational, the corporation always was operating in someone else’s backyard. Culture was something around which a company had to define itself (Motorola culture). Yet, in the global age, “home” was complex and mobile, reflective of the world’s many diasporas—of people, individually and en masse, following the flow lines of capital. home inhered in individuals even as they moved (with Motorola employees themselves an example) and in those places from which they came. Motorola and home cultures were oppositional and profoundly interpenetrating.32 Uncompromising Integrity’s preoccupation with culture—perceived as variegated and everywhere, in specific geographical places, in institutions (including Motorola), in individuals, and pulsing through the many channels of the media—had a corporate history. It encapsulated more than 15 years of high-level managerial attention to the global. It led executives in the late 1980s to create a hybrid academic-corporate institution—Motorola university—to engage and comprehend the fauna and flora of culture-world. this book was a product of that—a Motorola university press publication! Lest this example seem quirky and isolated, note that it exemplified a larger trend: over a decade, from the mid 1980s to mid 1990s, more than a thousand corporate universities were created in the united States—all of which were a response, in one fashion or another, to the perceived challenge of culture and semiotics to transnational business practice.33 the biography of the lead author—r. S. Moorthy—makes concrete some of the issues of identity and politics embedded in these developments. Born into an Indian family and raised in poverty in Malay, as a young man he found work in a Motorola facility in that country. his professional life at Motorola became one of reconciling his origins in a place with a specific history, one tied to colonialism and the new globalism, with the purposes and outlooks of a multinational firm. he found a way to marry his interests with Motorola’s culture preoccupation and he came to play a major role in establishing Motorola university, creating a subunit of that enterprise, the Center for Culture and technology. this vignette only is meant to suggest the complicated and non-obvious ways in which social boundaries got created and negotiated and how semiotics constrained and enabled this process at different levels of corporate activity. as one instance, consider this graphic (see figure) outlining the manufacturing flow for the Iridium project, one that required a transnational “virtual factory”— Motorola’s own phrase. In the lower right corner, we find included in the virtual factory Baikonaur, Kazakhstan and taiyuan, China. that Kazakhstan and China could be integral, functioning elements of a u.S.-based business project made sense only in the context of this belief in the everywhere-ness of culture and the reality of semiotic structures—whether in dealing with transnational elites or with questions of politics and identity in specific geographic locales. But as the project moved from planning and manufacturing execution to marketing, the instrumental view—think the way I, Iridium, want you to think, buy my phone—comes to the fore and you find a different way of presenting geographical specificity and cultural accommodation, bleached and abstracted back to the aims of the corporation and neo-liberal capitalism, and using enlightenment universals to facilitate those aims.34 Directory: file -> view view -> Western Europe after wwii view -> Author study: paul fleischman view -> Qpa1 7ela study Guide view -> Arctic Oil/Gas Neg view -> November 1970 Approximately 150,000-500,000 deaths Bhola Cyclone Bangladesh view -> Grade Level: 6 Unit of Study: Caribbean glce view -> Citation: Duffield, Katy view -> Table of Contents Lesson # view -> Chinese Wind Energy Disad Download 1.56 Mb. Share with your friends:
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