Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

Today, Earth Day 2017, thousands of people without a clue about what the scientific method is are “Marching for Science!” with picket signs reading, “THERE IS NO PLANET B.”

The Washington Post Health and Science: Why people are marching for science: ‘There is no Planet B’

It’s a clever pun on “Plan B”—a back-up plan.

Earthrise

These signs are being carried by people who are aware of an obvious truth and a less-obvious lie.

Here’s the obvious truth: Earth is a wonderful planet, home to the human race.

Here’s the less-obvious lie: Earth is both the cradle and the grave of the human race.

“There is no Planet B” is a phrase that could only be uttered by a “mundane” too flat-headed even to have taken seriously an episode of Star Trek, much less have read a science-fiction novel by Robert A. Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, or Isaac Asimov.

It’s a political slogan engineered by plutocratic liars (who won’t even admit that Pluto is a planet) to promote the pseudo- science of man-made climate change to scam people who don’t understand that the ecology of Planet Earth is based on carbon dioxide being converted by chlorophyll-based plant life into oxygen breathed by animals, who then exhale carbon-dioxide that goes back to the plants.

And around and around and around she goes.

These scientific-illiterates call carbon dioxide “pollution” and spread the propaganda that carbon dioxide is a “greenhouse gas”—which would only be true if earth was a greenhouse without chlorophyll-based plant life like our neighboring planet, Venus.

Not A Greenhouse

On yesterday’s Real Time With Bill Maher the scientifically illiterate / imagination-challenged Bill Maher did a rant against those visionary businessmen who want to establish a human colony on Mars. “Fuck Mars!” the scientifically-illiterate / imagination-challenged Bill Maher said to wild applause from the scientifically-illiterate imagination-challenged mundanes in his studio audience.

Here’s a word for you, Bill Maher: terraforming. I won’t make you go to the brain-straining effort of looking it up in a dictionary. It means “earth shaping.” This is a word long-known to people who read books—you know, smart people. Terraforming means using science and engineering to take someplace dead and unfriendly to life and making it alive and friendly to life—literally making more Earths.

Here’s another word for you, Bill Maher: Panspermia. It’s the hypothesis that life didn’t originate on Earth but is widespread throughout the universe and came here from somewhere else.

Maybe even Mars.

But it doesn’t stop there. If Bill Maher has ever read a book written by anyone who can see farther than their own hood he’d have learned that scientists and engineers—people he’s never read nor apparently ever talked to—consider it not only possible but necessary to create space-based human habitats and industry to gather additional resources—including minerals and solar energy unfiltered by the earth’s atmosphere—to maintain the long-term ecological health of the Earth and preserve its life.

Wikipedia: “physicist Gerard K. O’Neill in his 1976 book The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space proposed the colonization of space for the 21st century, using materials extracted from the Moon and later from asteroids.”

O’Neill Colony

You might start your education with Jerry Pournelle, PhD’s book A Step Farther Out.

There’s not only a “Planet B” but an alphabet soup of planets, not just in this solar system but around stars just being looked at for the first time by telescopes scientists and engineers have launched to look from orbits above the earth’s atmosphere … and by probes that have taken closer looks at the other planets, moons, asteroids, and comets in our own solar system.

You live in Beverly Hills, Bill Maher. That’s a short drive to Caltech/NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. You might have the show you produce Vice take you on a visit.

Or you might just take a look at the lovely photo of Planet Earth that accompanies this article. It was taken by humans who flew a rocket to outer space.

Note: I have just purchased the domains PlanetBSociety—org, com, net, and info as a site to encourage human exploration, colonization, and industrialization outside the Earth’s atmosphere, including a near-future human homestake on Mars.

I’m looking to hand the creation of the Planet B Society and development and management of these domains to someone robustly committed to this goal, and in particular as a repudiation to those mundane custardheads demonstrating today for this planet, as wonderful as it is, to be the cemetery for the human species.

J Neil Schulman

Reprinted from J. Neil Schulman @ Agorist.com.
© 2017 The J. Neil Schulman Living Trust. All rights reserved. Web and email links with attribution permitted and encouraged. Other reprints permitted only with prior permission of the author.