Dr. Robert Duncan-Enzmann, ca. 1980
The technology to build starships is here now and has been for at least twenty years. It has been here since 1945 when the first atom bomb was triggered, perhaps even earlier when Strassman and Hahn discovered fission. Possibly earlier than that with radioactivity and Hasenoehrl’s equation.
The opposition of the so-called establishment toward starships, space in general, and any technological advances at all has been one of implacable opposition. The Orion Concept suffered the naked hostility of the Academic community, which resulted in the cancellation of Orion in 1960, and the cancellation of ANP (aircraft nuclear propulsion). The information moratorium on Orion and ANP, then total cancellation of all nuclear power, was unfortunate.
With the information moratorium, technological moratorium, and all systems development moratorium, library destructions in the ancient world continue today.
Common sense and progress seem to be forced upon the establishment by the Middle Classes, Lower Middle Classes, and Blue-Collar populations. Without exception, unless one searches very hard for an instance, technological progress had been forced upon the establishment by the common man. Without exception, the establishment has been dragged, howling, kicking, and screaming protest every inch of the way, trying at every possibility to obstruct, confuse, and sidetrack matters. On top of this, the so-called liberal establishment has fought tooth and nail to dismantle as much technology as possible, load all efforts with red herrings, give overwhelming publicity to the most improbable and expensive solution to all problems. They worked unremittingly toward lowering humanity’s living standards, education, and health and reducing any opportunity.
Examples of the quite wealthy, liberal wine and cheese kneejerk lovers-of-the-suffering-masses success at spreading misery are startling. Some of the more notorious recent examples include banning DDT resulting in the spread of malaria to hundreds of millions. To suffer from malaria is bitter; personally, it is cruel to one’s children, and it is a burden upon the community.
Imagine a presidential election campaign in which the candidates blither about tax reforms and saving the people from the maw of rapacious energy-producing companies. However, tax laws penalizing marriage are never whispered about.
Behold the liberal Eastern community of geniuses babbling about methods of abolishing municipal sewage systems ‘to save irreplaceable nutrients.’ However, the same beautiful people never mention the European university professors who taught the precepts of technological devolution, abolition of education, and massive population decrease on a global scale as soon as possible.
Consider the implacable hindrance by America and England’s academic elite of the development of cheap power of any sort, ranging through obstruction of hydroelectric power, oil shale, heavy oils, tar sands, nuclear power, breeder reactors, burning of coal, or diesel engines.
Almost to a man, the Liberal community loves unspoiled Nature and primitive man, who naturally lives in perfect balance and harmony with the natural environment. The writer remembers some young teenage Eskimo girls whose fathers and brothers fought with gunfire against the liberal nature-loving Danes who sought to strip them of all modern sacraments of Western technology. Several wept as they chewed seal skins to make them soft enough to wear. These girls knew that their teeth would be worn to stubs level with their gums by the time they were 28. Fortunately, the revolution was a success, and Greenland is now independent.
In the long run, the only limits to the technological growth of society are internal. If internal limits are not self-imposed by a society, growth may continue forever. If internal limits are self-imposed, then the vicious progression of dictatorship over every aspect of life, including education, employment, association, travel, marriage partners, reproduction, and recreation, will continue.
Such dictatorship is inevitably followed by rule through a hereditary intelligentsia which used to be called Nobility or First Estate, with devolution of every aspect of life for the working majority, proletariat, or blue-collar and middle-class. The hardworking people will exist under emergency laws formulated to meet conditions so serious that all normal freedoms have to be abrogated until the currently manufactured crisis is resolved. Resolution usually includes mandatory execution of extended families, social groups, and even nations guilty of or even capable of criminal actions.
The death of such societies is inevitable, either through the execution of most of the population or the execution of its entrenched and merciless government. The entrenchment of such governments is always through the control of information sources, the Fourth Estate, by an entrenched Nobility (currently, they fashionably call themselves the Intelligentsia) acting through a dictator.
However, the average common man, the Archie Bunkers of the world, the working engineers, the housewives have always and will always manage to force technological progress to occur. Sooner rather than later, the media and savants to the Academic Community will be dragged kicking and screaming into stellar exploration even as they were forced into the space age by the common economic horse sense of the world’s average population.
