Crimes of the Hot: Moving The Earth--Eugenics Style!

I want to take a quick peek at an article that was on the New Scientist Space web site. After the article, I will offer my own unique break down of reading between the lines.

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The clock is ticking inexorably toward doomsday even if we don't kill ourselves by poisoning the environment or overheating the planet. You see, there's a little problem with the Sun.

The Sun is slowly getting warmer as it burns the hydrogen in its core. In about 5 billion years, the Sun will begin evolving into a bloated red giant. Its outer gas shell will swell up, engulfing the Earth by the time it reaches its peak size and brightness 7 billion years from now.

But long before that, in 1.1 billion years, the Sun will grow 11% brighter, raising average terrestrial temperatures to around 50 °C (120 °F). That will warm the oceans so much that they evaporate without boiling, like a pan of water left on a sunny kitchen counter.

Plants and animals will have a very tough time adapting to that hothouse, although some single-celled organisms called Archaea might survive. But only for a while. Once the water vapour is in the atmosphere, ultraviolet light from the Sun will split the water molecules, and the hydrogen needed to build living cells will slowly leak into space. If our descendants – or other intelligent life-forms that follow us – want to survive, they'll have to migrate elsewhere. But where and how?

One approach would be to fire up rockets and move to another planet. Back in 1930, British science-fiction author Olaf Stapledon wrote about a future where our descendants fled to Venus, and later Neptune, when the Earth became uninhabitable. Eminent scientists such as Stephen Hawking have endorsed the idea of establishing colonies on the Moon or other planets so humanity would survive any disaster that wiped out life on Earth.

Yet evacuating all 6.7 billion Earthlings would take the equivalent of a billion space shuttle launches. Even if we could launch 1000 shuttles a day, it would still take 2700 years to move the whole planet's population.

Then there's the matter of taking care of people once they reached their new home. Moving to any other planet would require "terraforming" it to provide food, water and oxygen to support colonists. Why not bring our own planet along with the resources we would need?

Tiny change

Elementary physics tells us that we actually can move the planets. Launching a rocket into space pushes the Earth a bit in the opposite direction, like the recoil from a gun.

Science-fiction author and trained physicist Stanley Schmidt exploited this fact in his novel The Sins of the Fathers, in which aliens built giant rocket engines at the South Pole to move the Earth. (Read about other sci-fi novels and films that have tackled the problem of moving worlds.)

In real life, however, the Earth is so massive that a rocket would have little effect on its motion. Launching a billion 10-tonne rockets in exactly the same direction would change the Earth's velocity by just 20 nanometres per second – peanuts compared to the planet's current speed of 30 kilometres per second.

A few astronomers have tackled the problem of moving planets, but not for dealing with emergencies on human time scales. They're actually devising thought experiments to understand the dynamics of planetary systems, says Greg Laughlin of the University of California, Santa Cruz. So processes that occur on geologic time scales work perfectly well.

Moving out

Planetary dynamics seemed simple and orderly when we knew only our own solar system, but that changed with the discovery of "hot Jupiters" on tight orbits around other stars. The planets couldn't have formed in the scorching regions where they orbit – there was not enough gas and dust there to amass such giant worlds. Instead, they must have migrated there from more distant birthplaces.

To understand how planetary systems might rearrange themselves, Laughlin, his Santa Cruz colleague Don Korycansky, and University of Michigan astronomer Fred Adams posed themselves the problem of how to move the Earth so the warming Sun didn't cook the planet.

For the purposes of their calculation, the three chose the Earth's final destination as an orbit 1.5 times its present distance from the Sun, at what is now the orbit of Mars. In 6.3 billion years, when the Sun is in its red-giant stage and is 2.2 times brighter than today, a planet at that distance will receive about as much sunlight as the Earth receives today.

Moving the Earth to a circular orbit at that distance requires increasing its orbital energy by about 30%. That would be possible, they say, by changing the orbits of icy bodies in the distant solar system so they would pass close to the Earth, transferring some of their orbital energy to the planet.

The objects lie in a ring of icy bodies beyond Neptune called the Kuiper belt and in an even more distant shell of comets called the Oort cloud. Because they are far from the Sun, the objects have relatively low orbital energy, so they could be nudged using methods being developed to deflect asteroids away from the Earth.

These range from the gentle pull of gravity tugs – spacecraft that fly near the object and gravitationally pull them off course – to the stronger push of mass drivers, which dig into and spew out pieces of the icy body, pushing it in the opposite direction.

Their orbits could then be fine-tuned in the inner solar system using jets of ices vaporised from their surfaces by equipment sent there. Nobody's thinking about deploying a future Bruce Willis with a rocket-load of nukes to do the job. "You need very fine-grained control, which a nuclear weapon certainly would not produce!" says Laughlin.

Sterilized Biosphere

About a million such close passes would do the trick. If we spaced them evenly, that would mean about one close pass every 1000 to 6000 years, depending on whether we wanted to reach the orbit of Mars by the time the Sun started to vaporise the ocean, or when it hit its red-giant phase. Luckily, the objects could be re-used if they looped around both Jupiter and the Earth, taking energy from the giant planet and transferring it to Earth.

It would be a big job, and would take plenty of patience to move the Earth consistently outwards as the Sun grew warmer. It also carries a significant risk because the objects would have to pass just 10,000 kilometres above the Earth's surface.

The objects would be much more massive than the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, so one little "oops" could be devastating. Laughlin and colleagues take that very seriously, concluding their paper with the warning: "The collision of a 100-km diameter object with the Earth at cosmic velocity would sterilize the biosphere most effectively, at least to the level of bacteria. This danger cannot be overemphasized."

Push from the Sun

That danger could be avoided by using a giant solar sail, says Colin McInnes, a mechanical engineer at the University of Strathclyde.

Solar sails are thin, mirror-like films that are propelled by the weak pressure of the sunlight that falls on them. McInnes's idea is to put a free-floating solar sail at a point near the Earth where the pressure of solar radiation essentially balances the Earth's gravitational pull.

His analysis shows that the reflection of sunlight from the sail will pull the Earth outwards along with the sail – in physical terms, increasing the Earth's orbital energy and accelerating the centre of mass of the system outwards, away from the Sun.

McInnes calculates that moving the Earth outwards to keep pace with the Sun's warming would require a disc-shaped sail 19.2 times the Earth's diameter. It would have to be tilted at an angle of 35° to the line towards the Sun, and stationed at about five times the Moon's distance from the Earth.

He envisions building it in space by refining the raw materials in a 9-km-wide metal-rich asteroid. Nickel and iron from the asteroid would be made into an 8-micron-thick film for the sail.

Thrown into chaos

The sail would be complex as well as large; it would need active control to maintain the sail's proper shape, particularly in the face of perturbations by the Moon's gravity. But McInnes says it would require moving 10,000 times less mass than slinging objects from the Kuiper belt past Earth.

Geoffrey Landis, a science fiction author and NASA scientist, says the concept is sound. "It looks like the physics is right, but of course there's no technology in existence or currently proposed to make a solar sail 20 times the diameter of the Earth ¡V at the moment, that's science fiction."

McInnes admits that even he doesn't take the idea too seriously: "It's a Friday afternoon problem."

But despite the practical difficulties of these scenarios, computer simulations by Laughlin also point out a real danger of playing with planetary orbits.

Planetary orbits are shaped by the gravitational pulls of their neighbours, so moving the Earth would change the orbits of the other inner planets in unpredictable and potentially dangerous ways.

If the move destabilised Mercury, the entire inner solar system might be thrown into a chaotic mode "that is vastly harder and possibly impossible to control", Laughlin says. That may be the best argument for leaving the planets alone unless we have no alternatives.

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First I have to ask, why trouble society with a story if the sun is not going to go supernova until 5 Billion years from now? Has the science well gone dry so to speak? I seem to remember some sort of "Green Agenda" going on, but that could just be a profiteers ruse, perhaps. I know science writers become "bored" from time to time, maybe their creativity has become stifled a bit repeating all the same nonsense over and over? Though, the "thinkers" they write about do have quite the imagination! But basically the reader is introduced yet one more time with an Apocalyptical scenario to add to the collective shattered/fear-ridden consciousness of Humanity.

You also see the method of thinking--Eugenicist style thinking--that landed Humanity in the predicament it's in right now, where the writer states how bothersome, expensive, and time consuming it would be to move all 6.7 Billion of Earth's inhabitants. Yet he didn't even include animals. [*sighs*] Good old Eugenics and inbred blue bloods, we have them to "thank" for the most excellent "mess" Humanity now wallows within. Before I go any further, I do want to state that Eugenics will ultimately be the most significant reason for the downfall of the planet. All you need to do is some investigative reporter style research into the subject and ask those pertinent questions your "intuition" or "gut" tells you too. Here is an excerpt from "Eugenics: The Second Wave" so you can get a "feel" for their method of thinking, mind you, its a method of madness:

Eugenics never died after its failed implementation during the
early portion of the 20th Century. It has merely been lying
dormant until the social conditions for its deployment
were more hospitable. Why would it disappear? Eugenics is
a perfect complement to the capitalist political-economic
imperative of authoritarian control through increased
rationalization of culture. Why should the body or the
gene pool be sacrosanct? Like a city, a factory, or any other
construction of culture, these phenomena can be molded,
enhanced, and directed to fit the dominant values of a
culture, so that they might efficiently progress into the
future. Eugenics, however, is still waiting on the margins of
the social, partly because the first wave had a conspirato-
rial aura about it. Once eugenics was associated with
Nazi social policy, it was perceived as a top-down manifestation
of social intervention and control that reflected
the values of a fascist ruling class, and which negated
democratic principles of choice. Eugenics is also still
waiting in the wings because medical science did not
have the methods and technology to efficiently implement
eugenic policy during its first wave (eugenic policy
could only be carried out by mandatory sterilization,
selective breeding, and genocide). Not until medical
science began to radically improve its interventionist
practices (particularly on the microlevel) after World
War II did all the various sectors of culture face a crisis
concerning the limits of organic intervention. While
the public could accept intervention in the process of
dying, intervention in the process of birth was suspect.
To inscribe the body as a machinic system that could be
repaired or maintained through medical and scientific
tinkering was (and is) perfectly fine, as long as medical
science does not attempt to appropriate the role of
creator. For example, to biologically support the immune
system through vaccinations that strengthen the
organic system can only be perceived as desirable and
well worth voluntarily acquiring in a secular society,
while creating a new and improved immune system
through genetic intervention is not so desirable (at least
not yet). The goals for eugenicists thus became finding a
way to import the spirit of voluntarism associated with
interventions designed to maintain life into those used to
create it; and, discovering how to construct the perception
that the body, as a machanic system that can be repaired,
maintained, and purified through medical intervention,
can also be improved through genetic intervention.


The eugenic visionary Frederick Osborn already had the
answer to these questions as early as the 1930s when he was
the director of the Carnegie Institute. Osborn argued that
the public would never accept eugenics under militarized
directives; rather, time must be allowed for eugenic consciousness
to develop in the population. The population
would have to come to eugenics rather than vice versa.
Further, eugenic consciousness did not have to be aggressively
and intentionally micro-manufactured; instead, it
would develop as an emergent property as capitalist
economy increased in complexity. All that was needed was
to simply wait until a specific set of social structures
developed to a point of dominance within capitalist culture.
Once these structures matured, people would act
eugenically without a second thought. Eugenic activity,
instead of being an immediately identifiable, monstrous
activity, would become one of the invisible taken-for granted
activities of everyday life (much like getting a
vaccination).


The set of social structures that Osborn believed had to
become dominant were consumer economy and what is
now known as the nuclear family. To be sure, both of these
social tendencies have come to pass, and are providing the
foundation for a more clandestine second wave of eugenic
practice. Consumer economy is a necessary foundational
component for two reasons. First, if the question of production
is solved, and needed goods (water, food, shelter) are
generally taken for granted, citizens of the economy of
surplus accept all remaining legitimized goods and services
as mere purchasable commodities to be chosen or refused.

Health care is just another service to be acquired. It
becomes neither an unexpected luxury, nor a human right,
but just another business component of the economy.
Regular medical intervention in everyday life becomes a
desirable taken-for-granted service. If eugenic practices
are offered as just another commodity under the legitimized
authority of medical institutions, as Osborn predicted
they would, they too will be taken for granted.

The second foundational characteristic that consumer
economy offers is purchase strategies that are based on
desire. Consumer economy provides an unending stream
of goods, such that a consumer can always desire more.
While the wealthiest class can take full advantage of the
surplus, and wander into territories of profound waste,
uselessness, and excess, the middle class is also offered
limited participation. Participation in the rituals of surplus
becomes a status symbol, a marker of prestige, a goal-laden
value, if not the reason for existence itself. When this
economic situation develops in tandem with the rise of the
nuclear family, the perception of reproduction begins to
significantly change.

It is very clear that the extreme reduction of the family unit
is a necessary development in late capitalist economy. The
extended family, which functions so well in agrarian-based
economies, becomes an anachronism in an economy with
a capacity for industrial farming. The situation becomes
worse when the extended family is placed in the context of
national/global economy; then it actually stops functioning
efficiently from the perspective of power vectors, and
becomes a detriment to corporate goals. Allowing the
extended family to continue offers individuals participating
in that institution a social and economic power base
which gives them the opportunity to refuse corporate
culture. In addition, it creates a social process that has the
potential to be more satisfying than participation in consumption
processes. Individual loyalty to an institution
(i.e., the extended family) that potentially contradicts or
negates capitalist imperatives of production and consumption
is simply not a possibility that can be allowed to
continue. In an effort to eliminate this social possibility,
capitalist economy has configured itself to make entrance
to or maintenance of middle-class status dependent upon
accepting the nuclear family as the model of choice.
People are financially rewarded for showing an allegiance
to participation in the production and
consumption processes, over and above participation in
extended family processes.

The process of socializing individuals into nuclear units
begins with the education process. Children are immediately
taught that “success” in life depends on a division of
labor, and on separation from other family members; i.e.,
the adults work, while the children train in school to enter
the workforce. At the end of secondary education, they are
fully adjusted to the idea that it is time to leave home to
join the workforce, or to attend university. In the US, this
process of separation begins almost immediately, because
over the past 30 years, production rates have increasingly
intensified, while real wages have decreased, thus requiring
both parents to work if they want to maintain
middle-class status. Children are placed in daycare until
it is time for them to attend school. Hence, domestic
togetherness in the middle-class family has nearly ceased,
and children spend more time with their socializers—
education services and mass media—than with
“significant others.”
The reward for power vectors in promoting this variety of
family structure is twofold: First, since people are generally
denied social possibilities outside of rationalized contexts,
a profound alienation emerges. The only cures offered by
capitalist society for this condition are “satisfaction”
through success at work, or through acquisition of consumer
goods. Second, the geographic mobility necessary
for the efficient deployment of the upper echelons of the
workforce is assured. People go where their employers send
them without a second thought. Whether individuals are
near their family or friends is of secondary importance;
maintaining class rank (and more and more, simply to
remain employed) is of primary importance.

If your scratching your head now, wondering how a scientific story about moving the planet lead to Eugenics, then you need to start fine tuning your "pattern recognition" and "symbol literacy" skills a bit. Reading the meaning behind the meaning in mainstream "medes" stories is pertinent to understanding whats really the motives. I think this story was introduced as another distraction method to introduce another apocalypse scenario as I stated earlier, to hijack your consciousness energy, to place your subconscious focus on something other than yourself. Hey, I do realize the Earth is in a mess right now, but instead of pointing fingers at each other, why don't we agree to agree ousting the Eugenicist/Singularity/Transhumanist movement that is in charge right now, and then tear down the Socially Engineered structures in place thats causing all this animosity to begin with? If these "fools" would have put as much time, money, and energy into finding solutions instead of creating the problems, Society as a whole would not be in the mess it is in. If you need to dig deeper, I have further posts on Eugenics here at T.H.A. and there are other bloggers out there paving the way to breaking down the social structures, start at the right hand side and work your way through the blog sphere. Best thing to do, follow your intuition!

Have peace all, be joyful,
and remember to play nice with your towel!