In a short story a few years ago, my husband coined the term Feffers as a short hand for all the sad mouths who yell “Fix Earth First” every time anyone tries to escape the crab bucket this our native rock.
It is the perfect term, since without the first F it’s a pejorative anyway. And heaven knows, I start using it, in a tone like a spitting cat, when I’m following some cool event or development on X and find myself mired in comment after comment of “We could eliminate poverty” (Spoiler: Poverty always wins wars on poverty.) Or “We have so many problems here on Earth” or similar stupidity.
They are wrong. No, I can’t absolutely prove it for the reason that sociological experiments are really hard to run on an entire society. This could be solved by having a portal that allows us to observe parallel worlds that took alternate paths, but younger son refuses to invent the technology. Out of contrarianess I’m sure.
However we have a similar thing, called history.
The truth is that human societies that don’t move out of their space and colonize and change become stagnant and become stagnant in peculiar ways.
Take Africa — oh, please, for the love of Bob, take Africa. No one sane wants it, as China is finding out. — it’s a collection of the most successful, stable, environment adapted cultures. Not saying they didn’t have inside-continent colonization: Zulus. But by and large, the people who remain in Africa, as natives, (to the extent that they’re not mixed by virtue of colonization from elsewhere) are the descendants of those strong enough and fitting in enough not to be chased, pushed or coventry-ed out.
Those who got pushed out, starting in pre-neolithic days, populated the Earth and came up with endless variations on culture, some of which were so successful they returned to colonize Africa.
The ones who stayed? They were perfectly suited to the environment and strong tribal culture. You could say they were optimized evolutionarily, by pushing out all who don’t fit. And the result is…
Well, you can survive in Africa at a relatively low level of productivity and organization. Which is good, because it is what Africa always devolves to. In the words of my friend Lawdog “Africa always wins.”
How do I know this is cultural and not racial? Well, pre- weaponization of race by shitty Marxists, the Africans who got away voluntarily tended to do very well. Even some of the involuntary ones, once pulled away from the general tribal culture, adapted and were high achieving. But in locus, the culture that never left? “Africa wins” is the saddest term I can think of.
Or if you want to pick on another extreme of culture, by a people that even racists can’t claim suffer from some deficiency in that imperfect (and weird) measurement of “IQ” , let’s take the Chinese. One on one, test on test, the Chinese are the highest scoring humans when it comes to IQ tests.
On the more important side, because IQ is a fickle measurement, Chinese who leave China tend to do very well indeed, particularly if they are ISOLATED and on their own. I.e. away from the culture.
But you can’t read a Chinese history book without getting the impression of a movie stuck on repeat. Great flourishing and advances, then erase it all from history and start again, forever. And the culture has certain limiting blind spots of legalism and worship of the written word that make the whole thing unable to get very far. The result? China has been marinading in tears and wasted potential for thousands of years and imports all important advances from abroad.
I firmly believe this is the result of failing to colonize: Failing to go elsewhere and be challenged by different environments, different interactions, different challenges. Humans, like all animals tend to get too well adapted to their environment, too comfortable in their sameness and routine. And then it becomes codified and an iron crab bucket you cannot break.
Our culture (Western culture in this case, not specifically American) is showing some signs of trying to enter into exactly those cycles of destruction and restarting.
We need to break the bonds. We need to go elsewhere, reach further, challenge ourselves, and let those ideas come back to challenge those who stay at home.
Because comfort and safety are not survival-enhancing characteristics for cultures (or humans) in the long run.
As for fixing all the problems on Earth first, most of those problems are only problems as defined by crazy people.
Stuff like inequality is just a sign of freedom. Free humans are inherently unequal because they value and work towards different things. It’s only slaves who are held to complete equality.
Even poverty is not exactly a problem to be solved. First it depends on what you define as poverty. And second, poverty has been the condition of humanity for most of its existence. Trying to overcome it has propelled some of our greatest triumphs. And trying to fix it for other people has never worked. Never.
Whatever problems we have are more likely to be fixed by going out of the Earth: higher, further, more risky. As far as we can go. To the distant stars.
Because it is there that we’ll find the solution to problems we don’t even know we have. And also from there that will come the leavening and innovation that will renew all of humanity and cause us to survive longer and reach further than we think possible.
Shut up Feffers. The rest of us are going to the stars.
According To Hoyt 
In general, I’m against just about any “We have to do X before we can do Y,” with the obvious exceptions of things with clear cause and effect. “We have invent something that can get us out of Earth orbit before we go to Mars,” yes, “We have to get the entire world to sing in perfect harmony before anyone is allowed to play the violin,” no.
I actually ran across this at church this weekend. My pastor (who’s normally pretty sensible, maybe this thought just sounded better in her head) was talking about how the people within the church needed to learn to love each other and resolve our own conflicts before we could go out and try to love our enemies. I couldn’t help thinking, “A church that’s not going to take on any outside problems until every single one of its members gets along with every single other one is a church that’s never going to do anything!”
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Yep.
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we have to provide upper middle class lifestyles to all the HR ladies by paying them large amounts of money for very little work all paid for by the taxpayer, who is never to know about it. That’s “our democracy”
getting to space can take the money that’s left after the thousands of consultants are paid, the environmental impact studies are replicated and paid for, and the lawyers in The inevitable lawsuits run out of billable hours, which means never.
It’s been a bit of an adjustment to realize that it’s all just a rice bowl. I gave some on the left — and right — credit for being sincere in their beliefs, insane, but sincere, but no, it’s all a grift.
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Yep.
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The SPLC, USAid and…. sigh.
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I watched the Apollo 11 launch from my father’s lap. I’ve been reading science fiction since I could read. I’ve been space happy at least that long.
Humans are explorers. We have an inherent need to “explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no man has gone before!”
In the future, I believe the human race will be divided into two groups. Those who went to the stars and progressed, and those who stayed behind and regressed.
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But but…
We shouldn’t take our EVIL off Earth! [Sarcastic Grin]
Seriously, I get the idea that some of the Feffers actually believe the above statement. [Frown]
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I talked to one of them like that. Until humans get our act together and behave like sand grown-ups and take care of each other and restore the planet, we have no, 0, business going other places and ruining them too.
The lady was kind, very well meaning, and sounded a little sad. I’m not sure if it was an act (the sad part), or if she really was interested in space stuff, but felt that “taking care of the planet” came first as a duty. I suspect she was sincere, since we’d been talking sci-fi, and she was very up on space science and science fiction things.
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She’s been sold a bill of goods and BOUGHT it. G-d bless your Odds and Stuborn cusses who will not be shamed! Please and Amen.
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We’re bought and sold, for English gold
Such a parcel of rogues in a nation.
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The people who would be happiest if the entire planet were a designated Primitive Nature Preserve should want people and industry to leave as fast as possible.
Those who throw up obstacles to expansion into space are similar to “environmentalists” who argue against nuclear power – they don’t want solutions, they really just want punishment imposed.
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C.S. Lewis believed we’re in spiritual quarantine. Out of the Silent Planet has a debate between the “imperialist/scientific,” men who kidnapped Ransom and Ransom, held before the guiding angel (eldil) of Mars, and it’s a perfect encapsulation of, “We ruin everything we touch.”
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Anti-colonization – as in complaints about what Europe did to less developed countries in order to obtain their raw materials – talk has been extended by some to future Mars colonies. This is despite the fact that there’s no indigenous Martian population to exploit.
(Marvin and J’onn J’onnz could not be reached for comment)
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In every nonwestern story or history or supposition I have read, the ones who explore and invent and strive….are justly beaten down, reviled, and otherwise held up as a bad example. Moses and Jesus and all in between those two were treated like that because they were destroying the status quo.
People hate that. I hate that the home town I loved and grew up in…..is gone in most of the details that matter. I hate that the area where we raised our kids is now a haven for low trust rentoids and the shopping malls and cinema complexes are figuratively (and literally in one case) ghost towns.
No good restaurants or fast food, new cars suck except they are better than ever (Pinto anyone?), and our govt subsidized old poor person apartment is the best and most comfortable home we ever lived in. I hate change. I hate new…but I read the old and remember what was, where men my age(66) were broken and in horrible health, their wives little better.
We are so rich that our Civilization, our country, has been looted and undermined to drag the rest of the world up to levels they never dreamed…..and we can still beat them senseless with one hand bound and the other semiparalyzed.
They hate us and want us to make a better crab bucket for them all at the same time.
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If we start to move mining and refining operations out into space, we can stop digging huge holes in the ground and spreading pollution around down here. The sun provides a near-infinite source of free energy; just concentrate it with mirrors and you can melt whole asteroids.
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Ahhhh, but then how could the Marxists use “climate change” to try and beat us into submission? ;)
(Of course, that is beginning to fail bigly, and even some marxists have begun to notice.)
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They always find something. Asimov had a short story in which a politician rose to power by claiming that rocket launches, which in the story relied heavily on water, were taking all of Earth’s water into outer space. The fact that nearly all of the water then fell back to Earth (as noted by another politician, who realized that pointing it out would be career suicide) was irrelevant. As a result, the politician claims that all of the spacers (working asteroids in the inner solar system) need to be brought home, and rocket launches curtailed.
The spacers respond by quietly heading out to Saturn, finding a *massive* chunk of ice, and bringing it back to Earth Orbit, where they offer to sell Earth any water it might need.
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IIRC it was titled “The Martian Way”.
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And this story is at least semi-dated, as far as “Mars is short of water” — because there are now strong indications (ground-penetrating orbital radar) there are entire glaciers of water ice on Mars, once you get outside the immediate “topics” around the equator. (And also lots of glacial-looking terrain there too, but we won’t know “for sure” until we get there and drill into the buried glaciers.)
People are already talking about using “Rodriguez wells” like at the South Pole (and North Pole ice once upon a time). Drill a hole, send down hot water, get back up (more) cold water, recycle as needed up to your desire or supply of “waste” heat (which is not often a waste).
Of course, as usual, the “mainstream” media are the very last to know.
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Unless you have a modular nuke reactor to cool.
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And if the Earth Pigs continue to annoy us, we’ll deliver the water to them for free. All at once. At terminal velocity.
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And there are so many resources in space that you could effectively devalue every single non-orgamic raw material we’ve found to date.
There’s a game in Early Access on Steam called Solar Expanse that I’ve been messing around with. It’s about building up a solar system wide infrastructure and logistics. One of the things players do is take parts of Jupiter’s atmosphere to terraform other planets, such as Mars.
There’s just an insane amount of material out there compared to what we have now.
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“Perfection is the enemy of the good.”
Because perfection cannot be achieved in this life, and trying to force it leads, as you so eloquently put it, to stagnation in bizarre ways. Not to mention mass atrocities…
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Yes. Which is much of the source of my irritation with a certain group of Feffer-adjacent space non-advocates. They’re not against space per se, not Fix Earth Firsters; they “only” want to make sure that we’ve Solved Everything (Perfectly) First, before going Out There in any numbers. As a leading (and probably, best-case) example, see the “space bastards” (their own term, mind you!) who wrote the still-highly-promoted “A City On Mars?” — the “Wienersmiths.”
Seffers, maybe?
It’s annoying not just because this sort of spotlighted pessimism (“anything needs to be proved do-able before we try it”) sounds subversively more reasonable than an outright “no!” — it’s also because at least the better class of them (unlike many/most Fix Earth Firsters) have the analysis and research skills to look at such things in considerable objective detail.
And they do — through a lens of pessimism and “have we thought this through” — which might be a useful alternative to the go-go boosters who don’t sweat the details at all, except so much of this stuff is promoted as a “be realistic” bucketful of cold water on any idea of really doing anything, “just wait another generation or two and then…”
To the tune of a certain well-known show tune: “Tomorrow! Tomorrow! It’s always tomorrow, it’s always a day away!” (Or a year or a generation or a century or…) Pfui. ‘Nuff of that, already.
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“Have we thought this through?”
Asking this question is much of why NCOs exist.
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Define “perfection”.
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Earth first! We can strip mine the rest of the planets later!
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”Oh Noes! Think of the environmental impact on the Moon! And pristine Ceres! Waaaah!”
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NASA’s Office of Planetary Protection, “protecting lifeless worlds from life for fifty years”, could not be reached for comment on this rant.
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🤣
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🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
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Saw that as a bumper sticker on a rural truck in Flyover Falls. The second sentence was in much smaller print, and as I got close enough to read it, the owner came from the store. We had a chuckle…
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Somehow something tells me “Effin’ Feffers!” is about to join the company of go-to pejorative epithets (colorful phrases a-la Star Trek).
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or ‘M-Feffers!’ 😛
They can go join the Flerfers for all I care.
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Wasn’t it Larry Niven that wrote “A close Earth approach by a comet or asteroid is natures way of asking “How’s that space program coming along”?
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Insty asks that question for every notable close approach of the kinetic kind.
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On the Chinese Choice, notably the Mongols, after conquering China, continued on their merry way and conquered pretty much everyone else they could ride over until they finally ran into some particularly obstinate Europeans (note they tried Japan as well but a Typhoon intervened, divine wind v1.0 – the one that worked). This proves it was possible for the Chinese who subsequently overthrew the Mongols to similarly proceed along the same lines if they chose to be expansionist.
And other more ancient societies had similar potential. It’s an open question how far Alexander would have gone with the resources of Persia and then the Indian kingdoms at his disposal had he not had such an enormous drinking problem.
And Gaius Iulius, when Senator Brutus and Colleagues got all stabby on him, was about a day away from leaving with his legions to go start in on the Parthians, with an acknowledged eye toward Alexander’s campaigns continuing further east. One wonders why the conspirators didn’t just let him leave town.
And the argument is defensible that Rome really started it’s fall just a few years later when, after the Teutoburg disaster, they collectively decided the Rhine was far enough for the Imperial border forever – Rome was structurally configured to be expansionist, and once it stopped there were inherent flaws that only grew.
In modern times look at the place where Great Britain used to be – deciding “good enough” and giving up expansion seems to guarantee decline into whatever the heck is going on over there today.
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Well if people start living on other bodies in space how is anyone left here going to collect the taxes?
It’s hard enough to gouge, I mean, tax people who have skedadled off to Florida and Texas from points communist. How do you expect the IRS to be able to be force space goers to pay their Fair Share if they manage to “slip the surly bonds of earth”?
Think of all the Deputy Assistants to the Second Under-Secretary of Paperwork Fullfillment Offices who may have to get real jobs at minimum wage if the revenue syream dries up!
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I never did understand why anyone in “Farmer’s in the Sky”, who emigrated from Earth to Titan, didn’t spend all the money they had left (after the selection process), for the, er, “benefit” of the colony. I mean seriously. They had to pay to use the equipment, get supplies, why not “bank” prepaid, like proving land, for items the colony needed? Not like they could use the money on Titan itself. Nor were they returning (in general). Etc.
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Innapropriate perhaps, but I’ve had the old bugs bunny hasenpfeffer episode stuck in my head since I read this along with the recipe instruction: “first, catch your rabbit.”
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If I didn’t know this was Hasenpfeffer, I’d sweat it was carrots.
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First thing I looked for on seeing this post was a quick clip of the King(?) declaring “Hassenpfeffer!?**”, but could only find extended clips.
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LOL! I’m late to the party on reading this one. I was busy typing this post. I do love Dan’s term, Feffers. Ad astra per aspera!
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I left a comment on your blog. It is in moderation (Go figure! Right?)
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Sorry, I get so few comments that the first comment from someone always goes to moderation. After a couple of years of posting, I have to get used to seeing some actual readers I guess. :)
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I figured. Still fun to blame WP …
Hey. Link it here. I’ll probably go read it!
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It’s https://frank-hood.com. If you click on my name, it takes you to my Gravatar profile that has links to my blog and my Amazon author’s page.
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I read your tech stuff. Bought the book. I even understood it all. Even though some of it was before my time (in IT/software development). As in, “Yea. Um. No.” (Teletype Basic was too much for me in ’77. Let alone anything before. OTOH Basic, RPG, COBOL, Fortran, etc. (C/C++/C#), on Apple IIe, or even mainframes (I hate mainframes), with screens, in ’83 and beyond, no problem.)
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I only used a mainframe in school at SDSU. It was a Cyber mainframe IIRC. I hear it was even water-cooled, not that we lowly TAs were ever allowed to see it. But I did use the infamous 300 baud dial-up modem. For a long time my programming was on so-called mini-compters. A little later the Apple Lisa came out. Did have a teletype that I had to interface with for the Navy. I forget which ship had it. The simulator also had a literal wall of switches, the big toggle ones like you see in the Frankenstein movie.
Glad you enjoyed the book, a relic from a bygone era–like me. :)
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