So the day before yesterday I posted about some unforgivably stupid rubbish some twit wrote about how space colonization is an evil product of evil male privilege, or some such gibbering nonsense. Well, the editorial I complained about finally hit Fark.com. And even in that wretched hive of leftist scum and villainy, the views expressed by the writer of the anti-space colonization piece were just too much to bear. And the result is a series of astoundingly quotable bits of snark. There’s some stuff here that requires memorization and re-iteration at the appropriate times.

The first thing I noticed was a meme someone had slapped together. A bit of research indicates that it is sort of a bit of fan fiction, a crossover of “Warhammer 40K” and the movie “Avatar.” But had this bit of exposition actually appeared on “Avatar,” it would have turned that bizarre bit of blue-tinged hippie fluff into Pure Awesome:

“Spare us your pity, alien. You gush about your connection with nature, your primal wisdom, but what has it brought you?

“Where are your marvels of engineering? Your voyages of discovery? Your great insight into the nature of the universe? Even at our basest, when we dressed as you do, dwelt as you do, hunted as you do, lived as you do, we did more than merely survive. We built wonders. We made great journeys. We forged epics. You have not.

“You speak so proudly of the plugs dangling from your skulls, little realizing that they are but strings and you puppets. What little you have accomplished you attribute to the wisdom of your goddess, who is nothing but the voices of your dead echoing for all eternity. She moors you to the past, serving as a leash that keeps you as little better than apes, sad parodies of civilization that lack that special spark to become something more.

“We have come to your world in search of resources. Whether your actions drive us back or we take what we want and move on, the outcome is the same. We will depart from your wretched planet, leaving you behind. And in a thousand years, you will not have changed from this contact with another world. You will remain in your trees, hunting your prey, communing with your goddess, until your sun burns out and your world dies.

“And above your tomb, the stars will belong to us…“

As is The Way Of The Internet, this led me HERE, which deserves a good reading. Especially the bit about humanity in Star Trek. Snerk.

And…

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“Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love – they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”  — Orson Welles, as Harry Lime in The Third Man.

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There’s nothing worse than an empty mind with a deadline

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“They build too low, who build beneath the stars.” – Edward Young 1681-1765

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Pretty much everything humanity has achieved has its origins in mens’ desire to get laid.

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What the sweet jibbering fark did I just read?

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There’s one undeniably good thing about reading a piece of raging idiocy pretending to be important thinking: it can spur the creation, or at least quotation, of something far better.

All the things these anti-testoterone whackos yammer on about have led humanity from the muck and mire to the edges of the ocean of space itself. We have gone from a few million especially bright apes to now over eight *billion* people, a sizable fraction of whom live lives of comfort and health undreamed of in ages past. We are no longer threatened by the wolf or the lion. A scratch is now so rarely a cause of death that when it happens it makes the nightly news. We are not even troubled by the darkness that comes when the sun goes down; we casually flip a switch and go on reading or playing or working or fighting.  This is due to not only the desire to conquer and colonize, but to tinker, to puzzle things out, and to turn a profit. Those urges that feminist killjoys and their intellectually lethargic kiss-asses disparage are the ones that have made life *good* for billions of people. Those same urges will, if allowed to express themsevlves, lead mankind outwards, and will turn dead worlds like Mars into living worlds like Earth. We will turn cold sand and rust and a thin envelope of unbreathable carbon dioxide into oceans and forests and meadows and lakes and streams and great herds of beasts. We will turn the sterile asteroids into a billion habitats, each the size of a small nation, each boasting a thriving ecosystem and biosphere. We will turn the Oort cloud into cheesy theme parks and rest stops and gas stations, footsteps on the paths to the farther stars, where we will turn yet more dead worlds into living ones. We will conquer and colonize the universe and bring it to life. In much less than geological timescales, astronomers will  be able to look at distant stars and see the reflected spectra indicating water and free oxygen and chlorophyll, the results of terraformed planets and engineered structures on a scale we can not currently easily comprehend.

The drive to colonize, to reach out towards something distant and say “mine,” will turn the universe green with life.

And what will the likes of Marcie Bianco do in the meantime? Complain. What will they build? Nothing. How will they be remembered? They won’t. There will be no place for them on the great monuments to the early colonists in the Alpha Centauri system. No great statues of them will be built in the Magellanic Clouds. Great nebulae will not be sculpted in their likeness. Their existence will be recorded, if at all, merely as footnotes in the great archives of all knowledge. Notes that will go millions of years without being referenced by historians, no more remembered or celebrated than the names of those early humans who decided that standing up to the sabertooth was too much effort.