The Night Sessions

I have just finished reading Ken MacLeod's latest book, The Night Sessions. I really enjoyed Ken's last book, The Execution Channel and I am a great fan of his Fall Revolution series, so I was really looking forward to The Night Sessions. I was not disappointed. Ken revisits some of the themes and technological innovations of the Fall Revolution novels whilst exploring the new area of religious belief and motivation. So we have self conscious machines and artificial intelligences, a 24-7 online society and moves towards expansion of human civilization into space alongside the aftermath of "Faith Wars" and the global marginalisation of religion, creationist exiles from a US civil war conspiring in New Zealand and underground Christian fundamentalists conspiring in a hi-tech Scotland dominated by Russian capitalists, booming green technology and space industries, war weariness and sexually liberated hedonism! The action largely takes place in an Edinburgh at once recognisable and remote and a New Zealand of natural beauty, philosophical absurdity and technological wonder. A key part of the plot is an attempt to "techno-fix" climate change.

Like The Execution Channel, the new book is part detective story, part philosophical enquiry, but it is also a lovingly crafted depiction of a future world shaped by climate change, the aftermath of the "Armageddon" result of current conflicts and developing technologies, seen from the point of view of ordinary and extraordinary people.

As with his dissection of the political life and evolution of left sects and cults in the Fall Revolution series, Ken here looks at the life of churches in decline and the development of fundamentalism, re-occurring just when everyone thinks it has been defeated. This mirrors our modern experience. Religious conflicts, and class or national conflicts filtered through a religious frame had begun to seem very old fashioned and irrelevant even just 15 or 20 years ago. Yet now, by accident or design, religion and fundamentalism are hardly out of the news and are ascribed as causes to many events, even where Occam's Razor would suggest a much more easily understandable and basic causation.

Ken MacLeod again succeeds in bringing us a novel that not only entertains and amuses but asks serious questions of us all, enlightens and educates. I heartily recommend The Night Sessions to lovers of science fiction, politics, detective fiction or just those in search of a good read.

The other good news is that we are promised a new book entitled The Restoration Game in 2009.

The Times No 69460 - Strange Days?

I am not a reader of The Times, being more than a little averse to feeding the coffers of Rupert Murdoch. However, today I decided to have a look, tempted (oh the shame!) by a front page banner of a head of Karl Marx and the Words "The New Kapitalism" and underneath the main story of the day being "The Tories, the oligarch and a £50,000 question". Hence began a strange experience. It was most disconcerting, almost as if I had entered a parallel universe where the journalistic bastion of establishment solidity was suddenly all at sea, thrashing this way and that to get a handle on the changing times, yet still throwing out nuggets of disinformation and smears in the old fashioned way.

Not only has the paper gone big on the linked stories of newly ennobled Government Minister Lord Mandelson and Osborne and Feldman (of David Cameron's opposition Tories) hobnobbing with super-rich members of the global elite in Greece this summer, it has an impressive, industry sponsored pull out on renewable energy (demonstrating the financial clout that industry is beginning to amass); a crass article on the "return of Marx" followed by an odd (but revealing) selection of "Marxist" talking heads and several pieces on UFOs! You have entered the Twilight Zone!

The Corfu summer Brit-political shenanigans appears likely to become serious as there are counter allegations which basically mean someone is lying. After having fun at Mandelson's expense over the last week over his schmoozing the Putin linked oligarch Deripaska on his yacht, the core of the new allegations are that Nathaniel Rothschild says that the Shadow Chancellor, George Osborne (himself a millionaire and Bullingdon Club pal of Rothschild)and Andrew Feldman (Tory Chief Exec. and college buddy of Cameron)spent time at the yacht also - and discussed a donation from Deripaska (illegal under British law)through the medium of one of his British companies (Deripaska currently holds Leyland DAF trucks). Cue furious denials from the Tories and a big bust up. Ho ho ho.

But the weirdness does not end with British politics - the paper's Tom Baldwin in Washington reports the US election and the disconcerting comments of Obama's VP candidate Joe Biden to a fund raiser in Seattle on Sunday night -

"Mark my words, it will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We're about to elect a brilliant 47 year old senator president of the United States of America. Remember I said it standing here...we're gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy"

What the....there's one to make the conspiracy theorists drool!

Interestingly regarding his comments on Kennedy, Biden will be the first Roman Catholic VP if he is elected.

Biden went on to talk about Russia and the Middle East and the Afghan Pakistan border and then said "He's gonna need help because its not gonna be apparent, initially, that we're right." He then added, (just to add fuel to the fire of speculation!) "I probably shouldn't have said all this because it dawned on me that the press is here"

The bit on Marx was prefaced by some appalling ill-informed journalistic-simplistic dross from Phillip Collins and then soundbites from seven "commentators from the left" - three of whom were from the Living Marxism/Furedi/Institute of Ideas sect, including that group's guru the ex RCP leader Furedi. Of course, Mick Hume is Murdoch's tame "libertarian Marxist" in house and his sect-buddy Claire Fox also gets lots of airtime based on her continuing contrarianism. At least the contribution from Alexei Sayle was amusing. The basic message of Collins was that Marx was wrong on loads of things and no great prophet - so far, so what. Hume, who like a stopped clock is occasionally right, pointed out that it was foolish to treat Marx as some kind of Nostradamus figure.

UFOs figure in an article by Martin Rees (President of the Royal Society - the original clandestine elite club!) who says "ET might be out there" and SETI is a worthwhile gamble, and also in a piece for Times readers' kiddies in Times 2 (Do You Believe in Flying Saucers?) which directs enquirers to the National Archives for the recently released UFO files. Woo hoo - bring back Mulder and Scully!

The Renewable Energy pullout from the BWEA and Provisa is 16 pages long with loads of adverts, but interesting facts and figures on the state of play with renewables in Britain (3.1 GW of installed wind capacity - if all the wind farms in the planning process were approved there would be enough installed capacity to power an extra 5 Million homes etc)

If we wanted to be really creative we could begin to link up these stories like the former Tory grandee Sir Bernard Ingham being both a nuclear industry shill and a leading light in the organisation mobilising for the blocking of onshore wind developments in the UK, or that the Spiked/LM/IofI sect are leading backers of global warming scepticism and were behind the two anti-environmentalist C4 "documentaries" Against Nature and The Great Global Warming Swindle in the UK. Meanwhile Deripaska was :

one of 16 global business leaders who drafted CEO Climate Policy Recommendations to G8 Leaders, a document outlining international business community's proposals to effectively tackle global warming. The proposals were signed by more than 100 of the world's leading corporations and handed to Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda on June 20, 2008. G8 leaders discussed the recommendations during the summit in Japan on July 7-9, 2008. The process was coordinated by the World Economic Forum in collaboration with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development

One of billionaire Deripaska's main sources of wealth and clout is his membership of the Board of Directors of a leading aluminium industry company. And aluminium production is one of the most energy intensive industrial processes on the face of the planet.

This is the Wiki on the Mandelson affair revealed in the papers over the last few weeks -

On October 5 2008, the well informed Mandrake column in the Daily Telegraph disclosed that Peter Mandelson had, while he was the EC Commissioner, availed himself of Deripaska's hospitality aboard his yacht the Queen K while she was anchored off Corfu. Mandelson's spokesman Peter Power downplayed the encounter, saying it was a purely social occasion and that was the extent of Mandelson's links with Deripaska. Subsequently Benjamin Wegg-Prosser, a former employee of Mandelson, appeared to contradict this when he said Mandelson had had a series of dinners earlier with Deripaska. This was of interest to the Conservative Opposition since Mandelson had as EC Commissioner been involved with fixing alumunium tariffs which clearly had an impact on Deripaska's business activities.

However David O'Sullivan, Director-General of the Commission's trade department, denied that Lord Mandelson personally intervened to influence decisions on aluminium import tariffs, Press Association newswire wrote. Mr O'Sullivan, who worked closely with Lord Mandelson during his four years in Brussels, said in an open letter to British newspapers that all relevant decisions had been taken in line with EU law, transparently, and in the interest of EU companies and consumers. The letter declared: "I am very surprised by the allegations in the British Press about Peter Mandelson, Oleg Deripaska and aluminium. He said decisions on tariffs and "anti-dumping" duties on Russian aluminium were "based on sound facts". "Far from receiving favourable treatment from the EU, RUSAL may end up having to pay duties on its exports to the EU", said the Director-General.

Meanwhile, Biden's "off-on record" comments come not only from someone who is the prospective VP, but someone who is Chairman of the US Senate's Committee on Foreign Relations

Curiouser and curiouser. Its enough to make you think we are not all getting the full picture or something......

The LHC - Progress, Responsibility and Risk

"The End Of The World - Coming Next Week! (Possibly)" Has been the sort of sensationalist line of the UK media this week when commenting on next week's scheduled switch on of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest particle accelerator complex, buried deep beneath the French-Swiss border.

Beyond the hysteria, the operational stage of the LHC experiment raises serious questions about progress, responsibility and risk. The questions can also be related to the effect of the media frenzy over MMR and the current rise in Measles cases in the UK, and to the treatment of the science of climate change in the UK tabloid and reactionary press.

In the case of the LHC we have a massively expensive and technically difficult engineering project to facilitate an experiment that might seem esoteric and lacking in practical application to the general public. The experiments and observations scheduled at the LHC are designed to look at the building blocks of the universe by recreating on a tiny scale some of the conditions that may have existed at the theorised origins of the universe. Questions around particle physics and such subjects as Higgs boson and dark matter may be illuminated or resolved.

The fears that have been raised by some unconnected with the project and exploited by the media are to do with the creation of micro black holes or alternatively, "strangelets".

The worries expressed in the media and in the law suits raised in the USA and Europe have been that a stable black hole would be produced which would migrate to the centre of the planet and then devour the earth and the solar system, or that strangelets would be produced that would convert all surrounding matter and also result in global destruction. These worries have been dismissed both by the project and those involved in safety enquiries into the projected experiments. The counter arguments are that any tiny black holes produced would be inherently unstable and short lived and that there is no chance of the Strangelet scenario.

It does seem unlikely that anyone involved in the project would continue if they thought that there was any chance at all of their work leading to the destruction of themselves, their families or their planet, let alone larger scale destruction. The doom mongers counter that the vast amounts of money involved, the vested interests, the professional careers and reputations at stake, and "intellectual arrogance" militate against serious questioning of the safety risks involved. This is not too convincing and sounds rather similar to the arguments put forward by climate change deniers as to why the world's scientific and political establishments would "lie" and collude on such a large scale as required by the broad IPCC consensus. It is also reminiscent of the arguments about the safety of the triple MMR vaccination programme, following the now discredited single piece of research that was used by the media and "natural health" campaigners to sow doubts about safety in the minds of parents. In that case the inevitable result is now seen in the steady increase in cases of measles in the UK, with potentially tragic results for some of the parents and children that avoided vaccination. The consequences of the political power of climate change denial could be even more serious given the predicted timescales and what we are told by the majority of experts about the necessary reductions in CO2 emissions.

I believe that there is a middle path to be taken between uncritical techno-utopianism and ill-informed technophobia.

A techno-progressive approach, with a democratic, ecosocialist and humanist grounding would suggest that all technical advances should be held up to scrutiny and debated as openly as possible - with their social and environmental consequences assessed as well as their economic and scientific ones. Whilst a certain suspicion of the distorting potential of the current economic and social systems is reasonable (we only have to look at the massive PR and spin currently around nuclear power and GM foods), reflex anti-scientism and cynicism are not helpful, particularly when they are coupled with a religiously based conservatism or rose-tinted glasses view of history and tradition, as is often the case. (As I have said before on here, these latter objections are my main criticisms of the work of writers such as Schumacher, regardless of their uncriticised popularity amongst some sections of the Green movement.)

All this said, the LHC experiment does raise ethical issues. Whilst defending the right and necessity of scientists exploring blue sky areas of research with no currently appreciable practical application one does feel a little uneasy about the colossal cost and concentration of research effort that has gone into this single project. Let us hope that the "technological/commercial spin offs" which some of those involved in the LHC have suggested give some extra credibility to the project are valuable enough in human terms to justify some of the expense and effort if, as sometimes postulated, the experiments do not yield significant results to add to, or alter, our understanding of the universe.

One of the most convincing criticisms of the whole thing comes from the former UK Government Chief Science Adviser Sir David King, who suggests that in the light of the pressing problems with energy and climate change then expenditure and research effort in the area of renewable energy would be a better use of £500 Million the UK have contributed and the money contributed by other governments. A Guardian article today contrasts the £83 million spent (on average per annum) since 2002 by the UK government on renewable energy sources with the £78 Million (on average per annum since 1995) contribution to CERN, the body responsible for the LHC. This criticism is not so much of the nature or supposed dangers of the project, so much as its' timing.

Whilst I would very much like to believe all the assurances of the LHC scientists and accept that they have to a large extent answered the worries raised in the lawsuits, let us hope that there really are no unforeseen consequences to their experiment. However, when it comes down to it, the odds for survival of intelligent lifeforms on this planet in the long term are very slim (as detailed in Martin Rees's work I have previously referenced) - and without intelligent lifeforms it would seem that the long term survival of any earth-based lifeforms is also limited by the cosmic constraints of the lifetime of our star, and more pressingly the incidence of meteor, asteroid and cometary collisions.

Correspondingly, the ability to leave the confines of this beautiful and delicate, (but ultimately imprisoning and limiting) planet and solar system will depend on continued expansion of knowledge and technical ability for humans and whatever lifeforms may evolve from, or after us. Thus experiments like that at the LHC may on the one hand raise the (allegedly so slim as to be not worth measuring) possibility of our destruction, but may also be one of the only ways in which we can gain the knowledge necessary to ensure survival/continued evolution of humanity and earth-evolved life forms in the long term. In short, we, and the life that has evolved here may perish either way. Life's choices are seldom easy and seldom without risk - those who would seek to minimise some risks may unwittingly (as in the case of MMR vaccination) expose us to other risks of variable magnitude.

Those of us who are able must strive for the utmost transparency and accountability so that risks that we must take are properly assessed and understood. In the end this can only be fully achieved in a society with far more economic and social democracy than we currently experience even in the allegedly most "advanced" parts of the world.

"Emissions Targets Not Good Enough" - Top NASA Scientist

A top climate scientist from NASA has said that the targets set by the European Union (amongst the more ambitious ones currently being aimed for) are insufficient to forestall catastrophic climate change. Dr James Hansen, head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York called for far more stringent targets:

Hansen says the EU target of 550 parts per million of C02 - the most stringent in the world - should be slashed to 350ppm. He argues the cut is needed if "humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilisation developed". A final version of the paper Hansen co-authored with eight other climate scientists, is posted today on the Archive website. Instead of using theoretical models to estimate the sensitivity of the climate, his team turned to evidence from the Earth's history, which they say gives a much more accurate picture.

Debate has ensued upon this, with Leo Hickman at the Guardian somewhat unfairly linking it to James Lovelock's recent "we're all stuffed so we might as well eat, drink and be merry" type arguments. Hansen and the other scientists are hardly arguing from that viewpoint, after all, but merely presenting the science and suggesting the scale of the challenge and the appropriate targets.

Lancaster University Study Debunks Key Climate Sceptic Argument

A major study by Lancaster University Scientists has seriously challenged the contention of Climate Change "Skeptics" regarding the effect of the interaction of solar activity on cosmic ray intensity. A theory around this, based on the work of Danish scientist Henrik Svensmark at the Danish National Space Center (DNSC) formed a centrepiece of the polemical contrarian TV documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle.

According to the BBC :

The research contradicts a favoured theory of climate "sceptics", that changes in cosmic rays coming to Earth determine cloudiness and temperature.

The idea is that variations in solar activity affect cosmic ray intensity.

But Lancaster University scientists found there has been no significant link between them in the last 20 years.

Presenting their findings in the Institute of Physics journal, Environmental Research Letters, the UK team explain that they used three different ways to search for a correlation, and found virtually none.

More from the BBC here.

Weekly Links - 27/01/08

Space

The hot news of the week on space related topics is the probable falling to earth of a US spy satellite reportedly the "size of a bus" in February or March.

Green Politics

Green Party of England and Wales MEP Caroline Lucas has contributed a piece to a book that was published a few days ago called "Do Good Lives Have To Cost The Earth?" the collection of essays is edited by Andrew Simms of the New Economics Foundation and Joe Smith of the Open University.

Derek Wall is spreading the green message on the Socialist Unity Blog and this week posted a downbeat but realistic assessment of the US Presidential Election situation and the evolution of the Green challenge by Todd Chretien who has stood in California for the Senate as a Green candidate.

Industrial

Interesting industrial stories on Labourstart this week include the possible end of the honeymoon period enjoyed by the new Australian Government as regards the unions, increasing friction between public sector unions and government in Germany, and Remploy staff in Liverpool voting for strike action.
One green union story is the exposure of the "green" hypocrisy of currently-job-exporting Cadburys.

Blogs

A very good post over at Climate and Capitalism this week, where Ian Angus has posted the text of his keynote speech at “Smells Like Green Spirit,” a conference sponsored by the University of British Columbia Student Environment Centre, on January 19, 2008. The piece is entitled "How To Avoid Action On Climate Change" and though it deals with the Canadian government, the behaviour it describes is familiar on this side of the Atlantic as well.

Jack Ray lays into the odious Nick Cohen here over the latest red-baiting around the London Mayoral election. The Sunday Times returned to the attack on the Mayor this weekend, dragging in CND, and Andy at Socialist Unity Blog published CND's response.

Jim at The Daily (Maybe)reports this week on Peter Tatchell ambushing the limo of the Dictator of Pakistan, Musharraff; and on the more regrettable story that the Countryside Alliance won the Channel 4 Political Awards.

And finally....as they say on the recently returned News at Ten a cheery little look at the Black Death from Peter at Earthquake Cove.

Weekly Links - 20/01/2008

An eclectic mix this week.

A debate has raged on Comment Is Free after right wing loon David Cox posted an article suggesting that the Russians' active SETI (Search for extra terrestrial intelligence) is a threat to humanity.

Elsewhere on CIF reactionary philosopher John Gray lays into the Greens and suggests we are all (note how we are somehow a homogenous movement and uniform in our beliefs) no different to George Bush. Gray exposes himself as a Lovelock fan, but ignorant and simplistic on the topic he is discussing.

Earlier in the week Gordon Walker of Lancaster University covered the question I raised on my blog this week with regard to the siting of these putative new reactors.

A report on Indymedia of the anti-fascist meeting I blogged about on Friday.

Around the blogs, Jim is talking about Ethics, Derek is discussing biofuels, Louise reviews the new Coen brothers film on the Socialist Unity Blog, and Anton at Enemies of Reason has been looking at New Labour increasing inequality.

Cedar Lounge Revolution has a report on the Irish Greens vote on whether to take sides on the Lisbon Treaty vote (another rightward shift as far as I am concerned, with voters lobbied by unwanted intervention from the sold out, corrupted and decaying ghost of 1968, Cohn Bendit..... grrrr!)

Weekly Links - 30/12/2007

First, let me wish a very happy New Year to all of my readers in this, the last weekly links blog of 2007. Hopefully, tomorrow, I will have a go at the Greenman's Political Awards 2007!

This week the big story has been the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan and the shock waves that this event has caused. I am saved putting up too many links on this by the very hard work of Jim over at Daily (Maybe) who blogged on the subject with a comprehensive range of links on Thursday. Jim is ending the year on a bit of a roll, with a set of blogging resolutions and a review of the year.

Back on the Pakistan situation, Derek Wall yesterday posted an account of events there from the left wing Labour Party Pakistan, part of the All Parties Democratic Movement that is supporting a General Strike against the dictatorship.

An interesting article from the Guardian this week, noting something that I and other Green activists have been aware of as an increasingly common response (in England at least) when out campaigning and leafletting throughout this year - an anti-green backlash. There has of course always been opposition to and questioning (a certain level of questioning is always good) of environmental campaigns, not to mention ridicule and "I'm all right jack" stances. But recently this seems to be acquiring an aggressive and emotional element that was previously rare. A pop cultural manifestation of this is the mass popularity and soaring book sales of all things Top Gear and Clarksonish, and the tendency to still take the self-publicising contrarian Bjorn Lomborg seriously, as noted by Derek this week. Part of this is of course linked to quite rational suspicion of government and greenwash being used to cover shifting burdens onto poorer and middle-income sections of society. Therefore a left and social justice based response to climate change and the environmental crisis remains a high priority.

Many homes round here are still festooned with tacky or "ironic" festive light displays. (Yes, that inflatable Homer Simpson was mildly amusing the first time he appeared) Has anyone noticed how the advent of less energy intensive lights seems to have been taken as an incentive to light up even more by some? World By Storm over at Cedar Lounge Revolution blogged on Light Pollution this week - something I have felt very strongly about for a long time. Not being able to see the stars properly is yet another of those small annoying obstacles limiting our connection to our environment and the wider reality. To me it often seems that the more we are limited down to a synthetic and humanised environment the easier it becomes to ignore the effects that our actions and lifestyles have on other human beings and the natural environment.

Space News

It has been a while since I posted on Space related topics (for a run down on the stance of this blog on Space issues see here), but this week there are a number of stories worth reporting.

Spaceguard UK, the organisation working for action on near earth object threats have two interesting news pieces this week -
http://www.spaceguarduk.com/news.htm
Firstly they report a grilling for NASA at the US House of Representatives over funding on addressing the threats from near earth object impacts. Secondly they report on an Italian team's assertion that a lake near the epicentre of the 1908 Tunguska Impact Explosion site in Siberia covers impact evidence from the event.

Also this week, it was reported that the British government had upgraded its' military satellite communications system with a launch of a new satellite from Kourou spaceport in French Guiana. Another satellite was launched in March. The new system will allegedly assist the remote controlled "Predator" drones as well as handling coded communications for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. This particular project of the military industrial complex has a price tag of £3.6 billion. It has been financed through a private company with City money, says the Morning Star. It is the UK's biggest, most expensive space venture to date - a pity, but no surprise, it had to be for warlike purposes. The platform is sinisterly or wittily (depending on your perspective) titled Skynet 5B - Skynet was the computer-based military network home of the evil anti-human artificial intelligence in the Terminator films. However, it has been the name for the British secure military communication
system since 1969 - so perhaps the joke was the other way round!
Brits are notoriously the villains of choice in Hollywood...still, it keeps British actors in work!

Meanwhile, in a historic event, China's first lunar module began orbiting the moon last week. Chinese officials have denied that they are in a "space race" with Japan, who have recently launched a similar module. India is said to be planning a mission for April next year. Meanwhile the Chinese have announced that they are looking at private funding for their space programme -
From Dragon Space -

China will accept private investment to help put a man and a rover on the moon, seeking outside funding for its expanding space ambitions, state media said Thursday. The funding opportunities will be open to "competent institutions and enterprises," the Shanghai Daily quoted a spokesman for the China National Space Administration as saying.

Things get closer to the prophetic Fall Revolution novels of Ken MacLeod every year!

Lastly today, for awe and wonder, some amazing stuff from NASA's Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and Titan can be found here.

Dark Energy

Wow! Was it a bird? Was it a plane? No, it was Dark Energy!

I woke up to a BBC Radio Five piece on this topic this morning - fascinating. The reporter seemed sold on the idea that research and discoveries in this area were the basis for a probable paradigm shift.

More from the Scientific American blog here

Moonbase Alpha? Space and Survival.

The news that NASA are planning to visit the Moon again with a manned mission in 2020 - looking to begin the establishment of a permanent moonbase - is causing some excitement. For those of us who were impressionable kids in the 1970s there are faint echoes of 'Moonbase Alpha', and the Moon inhabitants of the visually exciting, but factually implausable TV series Space 1999.
I even remember my brother having a model of the "Eagle" shuttle which bore some similarity to the real Space Shuttle.

Anyhow NASA are a little vague about the project, but do set out some of the reasoning and rationale on their website. This comes after the recent hoo-ha over Richard Branson's low-orbit 'space tourism' for the super-rich. We can only hope that that project has some useful technological spin offs to partially justify it.

Now Greens tend to be somewhat sniffy about space and space exploration. The classic response from greens and most leftists is to look at the poverty, environmental problems and political injustices in the world and grumble about the "wrong priorities". This has always seemed to me, though understandable, to be a little short-sighted and to appear to confirm some of the prejudices of the libertarian right (generally gung-ho pro-spacers) that greens and the left are anti-technology or regressive. The reason I think it is short-sighted is that a prime motivator for many greens is the desire to preserve life and ecosystems. Just a little thought (and a look at the fossil and geological records) will tell us that even in a politically perfect world, restricting ourselves (and the vast range of organisms and systems we are willing or unwilling stewards of) to Earth alone is condemning our species (and probably all other life forms on this planet) to extinction. This is the view of Martin Rees, author of the sobering book Our Final Century (published as Our Final Hour outside the UK)
Rees outlines the multiple threats - asteroid or cometary impacts, run-away climate change, global epidemics, technological disasters, war - that threaten the continued existence of human civilisation or even life on earth. He concludes that we have a 50-50 chance of surviving the next 100 years and that humanity will either choose to spread out beyond the planet (something that will take unprecedented human unity of purpose) or choose extinction.

The asteroid or near-space object threat is something that Rees has worked to make people take seriously, along with the 'maverick' Liberal Democrat MP Lembit Opik, whose father was a distinguished Estonian astronomer. The Spaceguard project exists to work on this issue.

The modern Green movement grew in the 1960s and 70s inspired by a new global awareness, an awareness in part stimulated by those beautiful early pictures of our blue-green planet from space, and the movement of various oppressed groups to break free from the physical and mental restrictions of rigidly traditionalist religious and political systems. It has always been a struggle between reactionary romantic elements dreaming of their rural idylls and those on the more progressive green wing keen to embrace new technologies that minimise human impact on ecosystems and social systems that increase human freedom rather than retreat into insularity and xenophobia. This is typified by the contrast between deep ecologists and "bright greens" and in the opposition between conservative greens and social ecologists or ecosocialists. These lines are not always clear, and some individuals and groups hold combinations of ideas from different currents, but this dynamic is internal - the green movement is not either some monolithic reactionary force or red conspiracy as various elements of the dogmatic left or conspiracist right are apt to suggest.

Fellow Green blogger Daniel Ketelby on his blog Metaphysics as a guide to lunch has written of his liking for the work of political science fiction writer Ken MacLeod, which I share. But I agree that MacLeod offers a challenge to Greens that should be heard - can we create a movement that is progressive and open minded, that actually helps preserve life on this planet for future generations long enough to give those future generations a fighting chance of existing through the necessary "spreading out" that Rees suggests?
MacLeod has a Marxist background and his characters often have either a Marxist/Trotskyist or right libertarian/libertarian capitalist viewpoint. His greens of the future have degenerated from Arne Naess-worship into eco-fascism and primitivism. In the Star Fraction his main character Moh Kohn is scathing about the rural idyll of the primitivist greens -

“Protection. Conservation. Restriction. Deep ecology. Give me deep technology any day. They don't scare me. I'm damned if I'll crawl, my children's children crawl on the earth in some kind a fuckin' harmony with the environment. Yeah, till the next ice age or the next asteroid impact.”

I recommend MacLeods books as a useful mental exercise for more unreflective greens.

We should not be starry-eyed about space programmes - at the moment they are heavily influenced by the military-industrial complex and competing national capitals, with the free-market 'space tourists' coming up on the wings. But if progressives continue to ignore the current situation - which looks to me like a possibly quite tight window of historical opportunity, then not only will the above remain true, but the necessary urgent push for space colonisation will be muted, and largely dominated by the libertarian right. IF as a global movement we feel we can turn the tide and save the planet from ecocide, then surely we have the potential strength to affect the direction and priorities of space programmes - now not restricted to the USA and former USSR but increasingly encompassing China, Japan and Europe. Because in the longer term, saving the planet is a little self defeating if we then sit on it like sitting ducks waiting for the next extinction level event....

Various information is out there - there are even organisations like the long standing British Interplanetary Society (associated with the Science Fiction writer and visionary Arthur C. Clarke)and the grandly named "Alliance to Rescue Civilisation" - about which I know little, but appears to mirror the aims of some of the groups and individuals in MacLeod's Fall Revolution novels.

I may, at the moment, plough a lonely furrow as a red-green spacer, but I will continue to argue that the green movement will only succeed if it wears its' humanist and progressive colours on its sleeve. A rural idyll or aiming for "self realisation" or "oneness with nature" is not enough to motivate sufficient numbers of people to make the kinds of efforts that are now required for our, and all other, planetary species. Frightening people about disasters is always a problematic strategy too. What is needed is to marry together the positive, forward-looking aspirations for progress (with the motivating dream of space exploration) with those desires to protect the earth (and our own DNA) that are so deeply ingrained as to be recorded as the ancient prime directive to "Go forth and multiply" and the latest understanding of evolutionary genetics.

If there is to be faith, let it not be in a deified nature or the wisdom of the holy market, but in the capacity of human beings to co-operate - to preserve and extend life to the stars......