LIFE is rarest thing in Universe, not some obscure precious metal

So why was Thirties humanity so eager to destroy 99.99% of it, in an act of collective plenticide that would have dwarfed the Nazi genocide of Jews and Romas ?

For in virtually all the illustrated fantasies about future life spawned by a raft of interwar era popular science magazines, humanity is seen as living inside an man-made plastic bubble on stark rock planets.

Inside the bubble, we humans are using some futuristic form of atomic energy to turn the bare rock into synthetic versions of all the things humans need to survive.

LIFE (other life anyway) was clearly 'not wanted on this future voyage'.

Today's children might innocently think 1930s humanity would instead cherish every last example of LIFE, from invisible bacteria to blue whale, if only as companions to share humans' otherwise incredibly lonely existence on a vast totally empty and hostile Universe.

But instead educated humanity during the Great Depression sought, via Eugenics, to eliminate every example of humanity that didn't fit their concepts of perfection and normality.

And the educated's casual acceptance of over-fishing and over-hunting, combined with scientific humanity's enormous research into various lethal forms of pesticides, suggested that the 1930s thought they could get along, quite nicely thank you, without other lifeforms competing for Earth's supposedly limited non-biological resources.

But LIFE is actually far more unstable than even the most unstable metallic element.

And no, lifeforms can't really survive by taking in each other's laundry.

Lifeforms can only flourish and reproduce by recycling each other's poop, because LIFE actually makes use of very little of the rock that makes up almost all of this planet.

Instead, we earthlings live out our entire lives on the Earth's surface , surviving off of and in the debris LIFE itself has created over four billion years.

We living beings ceaselessly recycle each other's waste products or decaying dead bodies, constantly re-creating the humus of LIFE.

Remember, all the oxygen we humans need to survive is just a waste product to the plants and microbes that need to throw it off if they too are to survive.

Meanwhile many of the microbes, in turn, only survive by consuming the dead bodies of other life - humans among that number.

LIFE only comes as one complete - indivisible - package and this package currently seems to be unique to this single tiny little planet in all the vast Universe.

So, no The Sixth Extinction and Plenticide isn't murder : its murder-suicide ....

RIO+20 celebrate ! Western MINERALS all gone ; Western NATIVES still there

     In the early 1950s, the conventional opinion of the proto-denier class was that the various "western" Frontiers (Alaska, the Canadian and American Wests, Australia, South Africa, Argentina et al) would always have lots of mineral wealth but that their natives/aboriginals were on the inevitable path to total extinction.
   Sixty years on, at the cusp of the disappointing Rio+20 Conference, let us pause in our lamenting to celebrate a small victory over the forces of greed and hubris.

   The best, most profitable, mineral deposits in these various "Wild Wests" are gone and now we're expensively shifting millions of tons of overlay to get at mere tonnes of metals.
   By contrast the natives are not dead and gone - in fact they are well and truly out-breeding the Angry White Guys (AWGs) who predicted (and plotted) their rapid extermination.
   In response, the cut'n'runner AWGs are falling back on Planet "B" --- the latest 'western" Frontier is the Asteroid Belt and Mars & Venus where they claim there is immense mineral wealth (but without providing us any firm ROI figures, of course - these are bull-shit-prone deniers after all.)
   One of the biggest advantages of this latest in a long line of "Big Sky Countries" is the fact that none of these places seem to have any pesky natives - or government taxes and regulations, or school marms and settlers.
   Don't believe the deniers are planning to leave the 99% behind?
   One only has to regularly read Google News to see all over the world private companies talking up their space ventures.
   Soon they will abandon us earthling ground-pounders stuck down in 'the lower 48' at the bottom of Earth's deep gravity well.
  They'll be heading to the utimate in the High Frontier, higher even than Alaska, where one can live a live of libertarian bliss, in a time and space devoid of government regulations but awash in indirect government subsidies.
   Paid for by the tax-dollars of  space-struck environmentalists down here at Base Zero.
  I'd like to say that one can't believe in both Mars Colonies and Environmental efforts to save the Earth but that is not true - billions of people hold both positions - mixing oil and water with chalk and cheese.
   But I will say a true green environmentalist group will purge its membership of all those who hold these views.
   One must decide whether one favours Peter Ward's theory of a possibly unique , truly "RARE EARTH" and thus focus all of your energies on saving the only lifeboat we have got.
    Or you give a little energy to saving the earth but hedge your bets by believing (and funding) Frank Drake's "MANY EARTHS" theory (that there are probably billions of Earths out there we can always move to if and when we deplete this particular Earth of everything profitable).
   This blog is definitely in the first camp, the Earthling camp.
    And it holds that anyone in the second camp is both a proto-denier and a Skygod : because what deniers really deny is not climate change but rather : any limits on the ability of humanity to spoil natural habitats and then move on, care-free, to new natural habitats to spoil.....