Part 4:

The Ultimate Stakes

We believe that free labor, that free thought, have enslaved the forces of nature, and made them work for man. We make the old attraction of gravitation work for us; we make the lightning do our errands; we make steam hammer and fashion what we need. . . . The wand of progress touches the auction-block, the slave-pen, the whipping-post, and we see homes and firesides and schoolhouses and books, and where all was want and crime and cruelty and fear, we see the faces of the free.

—Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll, Indianapolis speech, 1876

The law of existence prescribes uninterrupted killing, so that the better may live.

—Adolf Hitler, 1941

Will the human future look like Star Trek or Soylent Green? Is the human prospect unlimited or limited? Is our frontier open or closed? Will we see a future where humanity will choose to do away with want and crime and cruelty and fear, or continue with uninterrupted killing?

These are very important questions, and their answers are a matter of great concern, not only for those who live in distant centuries, but for those alive today. Currently, the limited-resource view is most fashionable among futurists. But if they are right, then human freedoms must be curtailed. Furthermore, world war and genocide would be inevitable, for if the belief persists that there is only so much to go around, then the haves and the want-to-haves are going to have to duke it out, the only question being when.

It is notable that the past predictions of resource-depletion theorists have been proven universally wrong. For example, two hundred years ago, the English economist Thomas Malthus set forth the proposition that population growth must always outrun production as a fundamental law of nature. In fact, over the two centuries since, world population has risen sevenfold while inflation-adjusted global gross domestic product per capita has increased by a factor of fifty, and absolute total GDP by a factor of 350.

Contrary to Malthus’s theory, human global well-being has increased with population size, and at an accelerating rate.

Indeed, it is clear that the Malthusian argument is fundamentally false, because resources are a function of technology, and the more people there are, and the higher their living standard, the more inventors, and thus inventions, there will be—and the faster the resource base will expand. Nevertheless, so long as humanity is limited to one planet, the arguments of the Malthusians have the appearance of self-evident truth, and their triumph can only have the most catastrophic results.

Once again, to be clear, the issue is not whether space resources will be made available to Earth in the proximate future. Rather it is how we, in the present, conceive the nature of our situation in the future. Nazi Germany had no need for expanded living space. Germany today is a much smaller country than the Third Reich, with a significantly higher population, yet Germans today live much better than they did when Hitler took power. So in fact, the Nazi attempt to depopulate Eastern Europe was completely insane, from not only a moral, but also a practical standpoint. Yet driven on by their false zero-sum beliefs, they tried anyway.

If it is allowed to prevail in the twenty-first century, it will have even more horrific consequences. For example, there are those who point to the fact that Americans are 4 percent of the world’s population, yet use 25 percent of the world’s oil. If you were a member of the Chinese leadership and you believed in the limited resource view (as many do—witness the brutal one-child policy), what does this imply you should attempt to do to the United States?

On the other hand, there are those in the United States who cry with alarm at the rising economy and concomitant growing resource consumption of China.

There were no valid reasons for the first two World Wars, and there is no valid reason for a third. But there could well be one if zero-sum ideology prevails.

There is no scientific foundation supporting these motives for conflict. On the contrary, it is precisely because of the freedom and affluence of the United States that American citizens have been able to invent most of the technologies that have allowed China and so many other countries to lift themselves out of poverty. And should China (approaching a population of 1.5 billion) develop to the point where its per-capita rate of invention mirrors that of the United States—with 4 percent of the world’s population producing 50 percent of the world’s inventions—the entire human race would benefit enormously. Yet that is not how people see it, or are being led to see it by those who should know better.

Rather, people are being bombarded on all sides with propaganda not only by those seeking trade wars or preparations for resource wars, but by those who, portraying humanity as a horde of vermin endangering the natural order, wish to use Malthusian ideology as justification for suppressing freedom. “The Earth has cancer and the cancer is man,” proclaims the elite Club of Rome in one of its manifestos. This mode of thinking has clear implications. One does not provide liberty to vermin. One does not seek to advance the cause of a cancer.

If the twenty-first century is to be one of peace, prosperity, hope, and freedom, a definitive and massively convincing refutation of these pernicious ideas is called for—one that will forever tear down the walls of the mental prison these ideas would create for humanity.

Ideas have consequences. Humanity today faces a choice between two very different sets of ideas, based on two very different visions of the future. On the one side stands the antihumanist view, which, with complete disregard for its repeated prior refutations, continues to postulate a world of limited supplies, whose fixed constraints demand ever-tighter controls upon human aspirations. On the other side stand those who believe in the power of unfettered creativity to invent unbounded resources and so, rather than regret human freedom, demand it as our birthright. The contest between these two outlooks will determine our fate.

If the idea is accepted that the world’s resources are fixed with only so much to go around, then each new life is unwelcome, each unregulated act or thought is a menace, every person is fundamentally the enemy of every other person, and each race or nation is the enemy of every other race or nation. The ultimate outcome of such a worldview can only be enforced stagnation, tyranny, war, and genocide. Only in a world of unlimited resources can all men be brothers.

On the other hand, if it is understood that unfettered creativity can open unbounded resources, then each new life is a gift, every race or nation is fundamentally the friend of every other race or nation, and the central purpose of government must not be to restrict human freedom, but to defend and enhance it at all costs.

That is why we need to open the space frontier. That is why we must take on the challenge of launching a new, dynamic, pioneering branch of human civilization on Mars—whose optimistic, impossibility-defying spirit will continue to break barriers and point the way to the incredible plentitude of possibilities that urge us to write our daring, brilliant future among the vast reaches of the stars. We need to show for all to see what the great Italian Renaissance humanist Giordano Bruno boldly proclaimed, that “there are no ends, limits, or walls that can bar us or ban us from the infinite multitude of things.”

Bruno was burned at the stake by the Inquisition for his daring, but fortunately others stepped up to carry the banner of reason, freedom, and dignity forward to victory in his day. So we must do in ours.

And that is why we must begin by taking on the challenge of Mars. For in doing so, we make the most forceful statement possible that we are living not at the end of history, but at the beginning of history; that we believe in freedom and not regimentation, in progress and not stasis, in love rather than hate, in life rather than death, and in hope rather than despair.