Rome Collapsed Technologically Starting In 100 CE (Fall of Rome part XI)

In the Fourth Century, Rome became farce and tragedy:

Early in the 4th century, emperor Constantine, inventor of “Orthodox Catholicism” killed all the priests of Egypt… because the existence of the guardians of a religion which was more than 2,000 years old “hurt his feelings“. Christianism was an excellent excuse for the tyranny which ruled Rome to become murderously insane.

The military collapse of Rome can be dated exactly to the invasion of Italy in Spring 395 CE. That was no surprise: in an act of divinely inspired criminal idiocy the Occidental Roman army led by the Frank Arbogastes, had been destroyed in September 394 CE, by fanatical Catholic Theodosius I and his Goths led by their king Alaric. So of course there was no one left to protect the West. On January 17, 395 CE, Theodosius, age 48, dies, and his ally Alaric declares he has no more treaty with the Romans and declares war on Rome and Constantinople, invading Thrace and Greece, including the Peloponnese. Stilicho is a half Vandal who had been nominated protector of the children of Theodosius, and head of the Roman military in Occident. Stilicho counterattacks from Milan, bottles down Alaric…. so Pretorian Prefect Rufinus in Constantinople makes Alaric (!) generallissimo of what he just ravaged and orders Stilicho out. To keep on with the absurdity, Rufinus is assassinated by other Goths, Stilicho executed from jealousy, and Alaric seizes the city of Rome in 410 CE. With the details the situation becomes even more delirious. Emperor Arcadius in 395, formally succeeds is father, but marries Aelia Eudoxa who becomes one of the more powerful empresses, Augusta and dominates her husband. She is the daughter of  Flavius Bauto, a Romanised Frank who served as magister militum in the Western Roman army during the 380s… Who had become Consul, but died, and was succeeded in his military office by Arbogastes… who was claimed by John of Antioch to be Bauto’s son… The late Roman empire was an incomparable mess which makes Game of Thrones look simplistic and much more realistic.

Meanwhile, in 406 CE, the Franks, put in charge of the northern frontier by their enemies the ruling bishops and founding fathers of Catholicism… after successfully raiding the Germans in Germania, got surprised by the suddenly frozen Rhine, and were unable to hold the barbarians who galloped across the Rhine, and flooded Gallia, Iberia and soon after… Africa. The invasion had become a tsunami of Germans and even Iranians (Alans).

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Rome lost control of its destiny by 100 CE:

Indeed, the technical problems of Rome started at least three centuries earlier, when Rome’s metal usage collapsed. That drastic collapse has been known for a while, from lead pollution in Greenland ice. Romans used lead everywhere (in pipes limestone deposits would prevent contamination of the water supply). Now we have similar data, with a much stronger signal, from Mont Blanc ice. Moreover the signal has been extended to Antimony, a semi-metal which makes many metals, including lead and steel, much harder, and was also used by the Romans in glass manufacture (there were claims about unbreakable glass, etc.). The fact that Antimony production went up and down with the lead production shows that indeed Roman manufacture went up and down (other metals show a similar peaking behavior).

Romans used metals for tools, weapons, and construction (ships, roofs and inner structural elements). Metals are no anecdote. By the height of the Roman Empire, metals in use included: silver, zinc, iron, mercury, arsenic, antimony, lead, gold, copper, tin. Subtle alloys were ubiquitous and had very different properties from the pure metals (which the Romans knew how to refine). After a disastrous defeat at Carrhae (53 BCE), the Romans progressively adopted an armored cavalry similar to what the Parthians had… But that meant at lot of metal. At Carrhae, Parthian arrows pierced both Roman shields and the arms holding them. The fabrication of massive quantities of steel required to heat an iron mixture for hours at the temperature of lava… One needed an intense approach to metal works which was starting in Gallic areas (like Noricum/Austria)… But which did not interest the Romans… At least Romans from the Mediterranean…

One of the reason of the ascent of the Franks while the Roman state was sputtering, was the introduction by the Franks of very heavy steel or cast iron ploughs which could work at the depth required the heavy rich soils of the northern European plain, and feed a population explosion… in northern Europe. Thus the Roman tech collapse was both absolute and relative (the north collapsed much less).

Any successful civilization ravages its environment: that’s what success means. To persist, the civilization must develop new technology to change from the old, unsustained and unsustainable environment to a better one in which the new tech will allow it to thrive. 

Emperor Vespasian, who succeeded Nero, is on the record saying that new machines should not be deployed, lest they augment unemployment. Europe and others, in 2024, have been saying the same about AI. Vespasian was followed by his two sons. That Flavian dynasty lasted nearly thirty years, plenty of time to install an anti-tech mood.

To become an industrial, machine based civilization, Rome needed metal, lots of metal… Instead, Rome stayed mostly a slavery based state. However in Gaul, Gallia, the slave employing giant Latifundia were nearly unknown… And this is precisely where the tech driven society arose.

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To make machines Rome needed metals:

The Gauls started to use metals crucially in agriculture with heavy ploughs and mechanical harvesters pushed by domesticated donkeys or oxes. The resulting demographic explosion explains why Gallia/Francia became the successor state of Rome in the West in the Sixth Century…. And one can see it in the lead and antimony production graph. Plutocratically owned immense latifundias with armies of slaves in Italy could not use such technology.

Moreover, Rome ran out of metal, precluding a switch to a more industrial state … to give some perspective, Europe and China got into massive pig iron production by the 12th century (and may have communicated about this through the Silk Roads). Rome metal usage peaked under Trajan and then quickly collapsed. One reason was the invasion of Rio Tinto under Marcus Aurelius. But the collapse started earlier and may have been caused by a lack of interest in metal usage. That theory is indicated by the loss of control of Rio Tinto. Had Rio Tinto been perceived as crucial, control would have been kept… the fact it was not is an indication of a deeper rot… 

By the 7th Century, the dearth of metal was so great that it prevented the fabrication of weapons such as Grecian Fire flame throwers: the roofs of Rome had to be stripped of metal. The emperor came especially from Constantinople to insure that metal procurement from Rome. Then the Muslims surprised and sank the metal carrying fleet….

If the tech does not follow, civilization will collapse so the wisdom has to adapt to a collapsed, nihilistic state of mind: consider Plotin (died 300 CE)… Plotin’s philosophy is all about surrender to anything material, the wish to evanescence…

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EMPIRE Started to COLLAPSE AROUND 100 CE! The graph is from Mont Blanc ice. The results are the same as from the many similar measurements in Greenland. TRA is for Trajan, peak of lead extraction under the Roman fascist empire. The collapse of metal production started at the time of the beginning of the Roman Civil War, when the Gracchi were opposed ferociously by the plutocrats.

Simplicius: Isn’t it true that according to Patrice’s own theory, Rome collapsed first in its democracy, under the madness of the Optimates fighting the Gracchi’s judicious reforms, and then politically, thus intellectually, bringing up then a succession of tyrants, starting with Augustus? What does tech have to do with it?

PA: Right. But remember that Rome beat Carthage by imitating and then overtaking its Punic rival once superior naval tech. Similarly in Gaul with the invention of the “corvus”, which enabled to disable Gallic ocean going ships. However, the situation became hard to reverse when the mental fascism got so great that technological innovation was not sufficient to keep the barbarians out of the gates… As had already happened under Marcus Aurelius. 

So it’s a cascade in authoritative regimes: the mental fascism gets so great that innovation collapses, even in defense.

Simplicius: What about Putin’s Russia?

PA: In 2023, Putin’s Russia grew more economically (GDP) than any G7 nation (with more than 7% of defense GDP according to The Economist Intelligence Unit). So Putin successfully switched to a militarization of society developing new weapons that were highly successful, such as old steel heavy bombs with navigational and gliding kits. It may well be that Putin is aware of the problem described here.

Simplicius: I am confused by you. Doesn’t that contradict your theory that political fascism brings mental fascism which leads to a lack of innovation?

PA: In general, but not always. If the dictator is really smart, like Caesar or Peter the Great, Or Ivan the Terrible, or the various Kremlin tyrants who fought the Mongols by serving them, a dictator can be civilizationally progressive. Emperor Meiji is an example. Or Queen Bathilde and her outlawing of slavery. Peter the Great for example went to work in Dutch naval shipyards to find out how one made ocean going ships, because he wanted to make Russia into a sea power.

Rome could have survived by maintaining a tech superiority, it din’t. The fascist emperors feared tech change because it brings mental change, hence philosphical change, thus political change, as politics is practical philosophy…

Simplicius: The Franks you are obsessed with do not seem to have such a superiority.

PA: They did. They developed new tech. They kept weapon superiority. The francisque, the two blade throwing ax was a symbol of that. The heavy ploughs were much more important. The Franks were fundamentally peasants (by 600 CE everybody was a Frank). The Franks’ metal usage by 800 CE was equal to Rome’s peak under the Roman Republic. Sure enough, shortly after the metal production in Francia started to exponentiate, Queen Bathilde outlawed slavery, a major break from antiquity.

Simplicius: So you are saying that philosophical, political, economic and technological progress are all related?

PA: Yes, they form a chain: break a link and the chain breaks. One of the failure of Athenian democracy was the horrendous way it could treat adversaries, neutrals (Mellos), allies and even its own heroes (all great Athenian heroes had their names written on ostracizing shards of clay, and most were indeed ostracized or even executed, even the greatest statemen, even the victorious generals and admirals, such as Pericles’ son… for very dubious reasons…)

This Athenian philosophico-ethical failure facilitated military defeat.… And then the collapse of everything. By contrast, Rome was much more careful that way. Caesar was accused of atrocities in Gaul, of all places, and that forced him to cross the Rubicon with a legion… But that unfortunate episode is indicative that ethical treatment of adversaries was a notion in Rome (although it had been violated against Numantia, Carthage, etc.). By the way, Rome used ostracism lightly. Caesar was assassinated by a bunch of ungrateful idiotic plutocratic traitors… Caesar was not ostracized: the people of Rome was all for him. In contrast Athenian democracy ostricized most of its greatest architects… Even Solon left for a decade before he became undesirable (that was two generations before the formal invention of ostracism)…

It’s not just the Romans and Athenians. The Maya, and much of what happened to the Middle Earth, long the forefront of civilization until ecological devastation set in are equally enlightening: tech could have rescued the civilizations but was short of that… The Maya tried to rebound, after a seven centuries hiatus, and then recollapsed, just before the Spaniards showed up… Another drought and no tech to handle it…

Differently from others which, plainly, could not have developed the tech Rome could have made it, transforming itself into an industrial power, if there had been a VERY forceful technological policy in place.

Many of the technologies which were developed massively under the Franks were already available on a small scale, especially in Gaul. However the scale stayed small under Roma enslaving plutocracy. The massive usage of heavy ploughs shifted food production, hence military power, to the north. Neither Rome nor Constantinople were ready to facilitate that with unbounded enthusiasm. And then the outlawing of slavery forced the usage of animals and machines… A fascinating subject to study further is the relationship between the Franks and Constantinople… which lasted more than seven centuries… In the Tenth Century, a military alliance between Constantinople and the Franks extirpated the Muslim piracy state in southern France which was raiding all over Europe….

Simplicius: Lessons for today?

PA: The civilization we have with the present tech, especially of primary energy production, is completely unsustainable. Solar panels can help considerable… But ultimately nuclear technologies have to be developed to the point they can be fully safe and clean. Physics show that it can be done; the rest is technological detail. We need to get really smart. But when a plutocracy start to dominate, its greatest tool is general stupidification. No smarts, no future. An example of this is Europe, which is pushing for extremely stupid policies of “degrowth” and “deindustrialization”… The Roman case study shows that the exact opposite should be done.

Simplicius: And if not? If we are not smart?

PA: Seven billion violently killed. To start with. And, absent easy access to minerals, civilization may well never reappear… Fermi paradox solved…

Simplicius: So what’s the grand conclusion?

PA: That mentalities matter. Mentalities drive civilizations and thus history. With right mentality, the Romans would have pulled hard towards better, and that’s often simply, especially in those times, more powerful tech. Caesar understood this: he even wanted not just to drain the proverbial swamps and the attending malaria, and this he did… Caesar also wanted to divert the Tiber itself…. The port of Rome had to be displaced, so Romans could move mountains… But the Romans had to understand, we all have to understand that the most important mountains are mountains of thoughts….

Patrice Ayme

Cultivating Intellectual Humility Is Not Enough: To Understand More, One Must Demolish Certainty…

In Oneself Or Others… Neurological Demolition Is How Understanding Progresses…

It’s right to be wrong, as long as one is willing to correct and go deeper. What does going deeper mean? It means under-standing at least one axiom used previously, and previously unchallenged, or an emotion used previously, and previously unsuspected.

This is construction, but on the locale of previous constructions which have therefore to be demolished. 

Neurological change requires energy. Literally. 

And energy is the ultimate worth.

One trains for physical activity by practicing the activity. Practice enables one to get more active by reinforcing what ones uses. It is the same with mental activity, on an even greater scale (actually physical activity is part of mental, because it requires motor neurons, and also proprioception and equilibrioception, both senses among the eight senses which the ancient had not discovered…) Flexing neural networks instead of muscles. However, muscles already exist, whereas neural networks are not in general genetically given… Those corresponding to language, science, culture are humanly given. Thus genuine progress in understanding requires new neural networks… created ex-nihilo, or through massive reorganization.

“Debate” means, originally, beating completely. Debate is thrilling, but brutal, and thrilling precisely because it’s so brutal. Kindness or a smile can kill, but only rarely. It’s killing with ideas which is common.

Intellectuals, in an old tradition inherited from the most prestigious among them, deny that any of the preceding is true… Out of self-preservation, no doubt. To admit engaging in creative mental activity as a weapon of mass neurological destruction does not feel like having much of a future!… But that creative destruction is how civilization regenerates.

So, if we want higher knowledge, we require not just humility, but beating up completely… Others too, not just ourselves… And finding pleasure in it.

This goes of course completely against an agenda of behaving like snowflakes, and expecting, even ordering others, to respect every single snowflake.

In particular no ideology should be beyond any suspicion, or beyond debate. Blasphemy, in matters intellectual, and to achieve mental progress, is a moral imperative. 

There is no higher mental activity than the advancement of understanding. But it rests on the destruction of yesterday’s minds. Far from being cuddly and cute, the advancement of understanding requires brutality and arrogance. (The root of arrogantia, ad-roguare, means to ask forcefully… the PIE root being “reg”, straight line…)

Of course one should be as gentle as possible.

However, the core of mental progress is to demolish old neurology and build new ones. Short of outright physically torturing people, that’s as aggressive as it gets.

This implies that, should it impose gentleness as a sine qua non condition, a civilization will not progress in understanding… and thus will collapse because, as the ecology it stands on evolves, any civilization has to progress in its understanding (remember the Mayan civilization which imploded from mismanaging an ecological crisis it had created).

Now of course, change is growing superexponentially. So, then, must understanding, and, thus the demolition of old neurologies. This is why it is unwise, and not even caring, to take care of the sensitivity of others as if that should be mission number one.

Quite the opposite: sensitivity being one of the reasons to shun the progress of understanding, sensitivity should be bulldozed over, not just by necessity, but also as training, and a matter of principle.  

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Make no mistake. The preceding is even more important emotionally than logically. I was just dreaming, I don’t remember the overall motive. It was outside in a vehicle, vivid blue sky. Not a cloud in the sky (It’s snowing outside where I am presently, we have not seen the sun for days…). In the distance in that dream a mountain, shaped like a truncated pyramid, with a glacier perched on top. We were going somewhere. Considering the environment resembled the American north-west. While the dream went on it was clearly defined by a powerful emotional aura: the motive, what moved the dream (which I have now forgotten, but which left a trace, no doubt, to be recovered in the appropriate circumstantial configuration… in another dream…). The point is that the now forgotten emotion drove the logic of the dream. So emotions are fully part of our understanding. Emotions are what stands the most under.

Full under-standing then requires emotional change.

So when Galileo pointed at the shadows of mountains on the Moon, experienced church authorities could feel that if the Moon was just another planet, if the planets then were just like Earth, if indeed moons orbit around Jupiter, four of them, no less, then what was viewed as sure and self-obvious for millennia, the Ptolemaic theory, could be completely wrong. The emotion of what was once certainty, now proven thoroughly wrong, would no doubt extend to give a lethal aura to all the impossible statements of the Catholic church, foundation to all what made the lives of these authorities pleasant or even possible.

That’s why the Catholic authorities kidnapped and then tortured Giordano Bruno for seven years before piercing him here and there and burning him alive.

The Catholic plutocrats knew all too well that the shattering of a pseudo-scientific theory would feed from and provide the same emotional aura to demolish their own pseudo-divine status.

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Ah, to finish with a joke. Jokes are mental bulldozers… They torpedo old certainties with new perspectives.

Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, and all the other genders that were made up, are from… the Moon.

In other words, they are lunatics (let’s be all too clear!)

Please don’t restrain the applause while I prepare a few jokes on those who believe in Muhammad flying on some sort of horse from Mecca to Jerusalem. To be shot down by the Israeli Iron Dome, or something…

Patrice Ayme 

Muhammad, Buraq, the winged horse-like creature with “the beautiful face” and Judeo-Christian archangel Gabriel observe “shameless women” being punished in Hell for showing their hair (that’s why they hang from it). Persian 15th c. The emotion conveyed: women without shame should be half undressed, hanged by their hair, and roasted from below. So better be shameful, girls! You may not like it otherwise. And then Muslim “judges” prepared the appropriate logic, namely Sharia laws.

Similar paintings from the same period represent nude roasting women hung by their tongues for having answered their husbands inappropriately. So girls, learn to stay silent…

P/S:

Survival of civilization depends upon technological progress. Respect to those dying for it.

The passengers of the Titan, the submersible visiting the Titanic, died probably because the carbon fiber hull failed. Implosion of such a hull happens at 2400 kilometers an hour, roughly 700 meters per second. However, that doesn’t mean there were no warning signs. Apparently there were, and they would have been probably a significant noise. The rumor has it that the sub dumped its weights. The only way that would be known is if they had informed the surface that they had decided to go for an emergency escape to the surface… No doubt because of loud sounds caused by delamination violently separating the resin-carbon fiber mix into layers…..

Some bemoan the useless loss of life… But it’s not that useless. Let’s call them technology and progress martyrs.

Thus next time someone tries to build a carbon fiber submarine, they, and the authorities, will have to be smarter and more careful about it.

Carbon fiber, if used massively, could help with a sustainable society… Thus save lives, millions of lives, maybe even more.

The problems with carbon fiber  though have been numerous: it tends to delaminate, and be sensitive to salt water or oxygen intrusions. Also it tends to fail catastrophically. The most recent planes are mostly built of carbon fiber, and the tech has required metallic meshes within to resist lightning and inform about cracks. 

SpaceX planned to make giant tanks out of carbon fiber, to use in their giant rocket, but after building a gigantic carbon fiber, they renounced and went back to steel (NASA had the same problem in the past, abandoning their single stage to orbit craft when carbon fiber tanks failed). Also a Falcon 9 was lost when a carbon fiber tank delaminated and had an oxygen intrusion. It exploded instantaneously.  

Some bemoan the cost to society. But the oceans need to be conquered: they make ⅔ of the planet. However, whereas the difference of pressure with the moon is one atmosphere, it’s nearly 400 atmospheres with the wreck of the Titanic. So 400 times harder, in a sense.

Worldwide, hundreds of private subs already operate. Rescue cost was nothing. Even the crew and management of the powerful French Ifremer Atalante, which rushed to the site across the Atlantic, besides the humane factor of maritime solidarity, probably considered this real life exercise to be instructive.

Patrice Ayme

French ship Atalante with its diving robot rushes to the rescue of Titan… It arrived to learn the sub had imploded…

We, And Our Pandora Boxes, Are The Dark Side… That’s What Gods Do! Smile!

ARE CLIMATE CHANGE AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE PANDORA BOXES? OF COURSE. SO WHAT?

Humanity’s most fundamental production has always been Pandora’s boxes: curiosity, disobedience, and unforeseen consequences guaranteed [1]. Pandora, the first woman, driven by curiosity and disobedience, is our business model, humanity’s true Joan of Arc.

Humanity has been shaping Earth for 5 million years. Bipedal locomotion freed our arms and hands, turning them into tools and weapons platforms. Dogs wish they had hands, but they don’t. Raccoons have hands, but their arms can’t swing. Bipedalism also made fast and far locomotion possible out of the ancestral forests chimpanzees are never free of. Exploiting the savannah brought combat to dath with formidable predators, such as giant baboons…ruthless business rivals who were eliminated a million years ago, or so.

Humanity has always opened pandora boxes, that’s what we do, as we progress, and how we progress: Nous sommes une force qui va (V. Hugo redux). God-like powers have come with the Dark Side of extermination and climate change: all the planet’s megafauna was exterminated, tamed, or driven to near extinction… And this process started a long time ago. Example: the Mayas probably collapsed the climate of Yucatan… by destroying the primary forest which kept it moist (and they had known this should be avoided, for a long time, and had a preliminary collpase into drought… However hybris, blossoming demography and war changed this in the Seventh Century…)

10,000 years ago, much of the megafauna’s mass was made of… lions. Lions can eat rabbits, but also elephants. Humans couldn’t milk lions, so they replaced them with methane belching and farting cattle… Cattle became the largest megafauna in mass, producing a lot of methane, which probably changed the climate, prevented another oscillation into another glacial advance (climate models seem to indicate).

Much of the Northern Hemisphere is permafrosted, real deep (up to a mile!). This is going to melt, expelling gigatons of CO2 and CH4, presenting both disaster and opportunity….

CHAT AI, another pandora box, is an immense opportunity. All it does is connect pieces of disparate, often obscure, knowledge and relate them with logic. This is going to enable tremendous scientific advances, and a democratization and tremendous expansion of knowledge.

Applying CHAT AI to permafrost melt will show to the aghast multitudes that there is a danger of world hypoxia (lowering of oxygen level). The writings and the detailed logic (from yours truly) exist, they have been ignored, CHAT AI will find them.   

We, and our pandora boxes, are the dark side… that’s what gods do! Smile! We may as well, when in doubt… L’univers sourit aux audacieux…

Patrice Ayme

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Pandora’s Box containing all the evils and troubles of the world was part of Zeus’ devious schemes: 

Zeus created Pandora, the first woman, as a punishment for Prometheus, who had stolen fire from the gods and given it to humans. (So you see, humans were initially male…) Titan Prometheus was a champion of humans who taught them many important skills, such as agriculture, animal husbandry, metalworking, mathematics, and writing.

Pandora was given the box as a gift but was told never to open it. However, her curiosity got the better of her, and she opened the box, releasing all the negative forces into the world.

Pandora’s Box represents the concept of unleashing chaos, destruction, and suffering by indulging in curiosity, and disobedience. The myth claims that once such negative forces are unleashed, they cannot be put back.

Metaphorically, Pandora’s Box refers to situations where someone does something seemingly innocuous but ends up causing a lot of damage or problems. It’s a reminder that our actions have consequences, and we should be mindful of the potential repercussions before we act.

North American Arctodus Primus, the huge “short face bear”, could run at 40mph (65 kmh) on its long legs, and was mostly predatory. The idea has been suggested that it long blocked penetration by humans…probably until more advanced hunting techniques such as very fast, efficient poison arrows were invented… Ye spoisoned arrows were another pandora box, but they got rid of most of the dangerous megafaune…. Another North American denizen was Homotherium, a giant saber tooth cat.

In North America, Homotherium first appeared during the Irvingtonian stage, about 1.8 million years ago, and persisted until the end of the Pleistocene, around 10,000 years ago. They were among the largest predators of their time, with an estimated body mass of up to 400 kg (880 lbs). They likely hunted large herbivores such as bison, horses, and camels, and may have also scavenged on the remains of other predators’ kills.

Homotherium is known from numerous fossils found throughout North America. It was clearly eliminated, with most of its prey, which inculded American elephants, by Homo Sapiens…

Progress From Prowess: Flying Boats Fear UFOs

Nowadays, some boats fly out of the ocean. And they fly faster than the first planes did, a bit more than a century ago. Foils located below the boats lift them out of the water, and that, in turn reduce friction considerably. Water is one thousand times denser than air. Kinetic energy is ½ mvv, so the energy imparted by an underwater foil, creating lift, will do so with a much smaller surface than a wing [1].  A drastic problem, though, is UFOs. Flying boats go really fast, they can cruise at twenty meters per second (seventy feet). When they encounter an Unidentified Floating Object, it doesn’t work too well. This problem should be fixed for a variety of reasons, from moral to technological, to economic, to, one should say, spiritual.

Technological progress is important: it is the essence of humanity and gave birth to it through a process of artificially natural self-selection. In particular present humanity, with 7.8 billion individuals, using the technologies it had to use to get to its present situation, has put spaceship Earth on an unsustainable course. 

There are two ways out of this: either a spectacular regression, through war, famine and collapse, or a spectacular progress into new technologies which will make our integration with the biosphere sustainable again. 

Around the World Record Holder: 40 days, 23 hours and 30 minutes. In 2017 [2]. It is presently equipped in 2020 with new foils which enables it to stand more outside of the ocean, just skim the water, and went already half way around the world in less than 20 days

The first around the world sailing record for circumnavigation of the world was the Basque Juan Sebastián Elcano and the remaining members of Ferdinand Magellan‘s crew who completed their journey in 1522…. After nearly three years of navigation (and only one ship left out of five; 35 circumnavigators survived out of an initial 270… Let it not be said that the global world we now enjoy was obtained cheaply. And as far as “colonialism” is concerned… Magellan died because it took part in a local war in the Philippines; the main aim of Magellan’s expedition was to prove one could circumnavigate, and thus obtain spices such as pepper and cloves from the Maluku Islands more cheaply…)

Sailing while flying from and out of water could be a technology of the future even for the most massive transport of goods and people. The technology uses computers, because electronics is faster than neurology. High flying kites dragging a boat could help too…

Trading goods is a global, essential activity that creates much of the world’s pollution as it is, and it is therefore essential to reduce said pollution, without killing trading (We trade your brawn against our brains!)

Some have whined that boats going at 25 meters per second through the ocean could collide with sea mammals, and fast sailing was, therefore, an unethical activity. Actually the problem of UFOs, unidentified Floating Objects is dramatic for flying sail boats. In the present Vendee Globe, several boats were damaged by impacts with UFOs, and had to hobble into port (not necessarily from damage to just the foils: the boats go so fast that they can be damaged anywhere). In early November a catamaran hit a UFO in the Atlantic, and capsized, killing the pilot (others below deck survived). Many of these UFOs are… containers dropped from giant cargo ships.

The impact on and with sea mammals could probably be reduced precisely because the foils make noise, from cavitation, the formation of bubbles, and should warn sea creatures. Maybe studies could be made to generate a clearer warning, or maybe collisions are mostly with man-made oceanic debris, and that, per se, should be an important object of study leading to diminution thereof. A French company is making devices which scan the sea ahead of the boats. Flying maxi trimarans have also to steer around icebergs (from satellite data), and growlers…(by looking out!) 

Other ships collide with sea creatures, but nobody cares as the ships are too large to be affected by the collisions. Hence the high speed collisions of flying maxi-trimarans with UFOs attract attention to this problem, which has been so far ignored. Efforts to avoid collisions, necessary for the maxi flying trimarans, and other flying boats, could then lead to reducing collisions and pollutants in the high seas, both laudable objectives. Thus sailboat flying is morally correct.

So let’s celebrate the efforts to fly on boats around the world in less than 40 days! Such efforts are not just technological and even scientific prowess, but also economic and moral prowess!

Meanwhile Elon Musk’s SpaceX flew its astounding Spaceship, SN8, eight of the name. It landed hard, from low pressure in the “header tank”… and exploded, but the test was nevertheless wildly successful. It demonstrated all sorts of capabilities, including aerosurfaces precision control and the ability to flip the huge vehicle upright just before landing. All this is key to the possibility to use rocketry in all sorts of ways, including going around the world in less than an hour… And we will take off from Mars, after fueling there, because it is apparently possible to make oxygen and methane on the Red Planet, from large quantities of briny water, therein. Why to go there? Will whine the losers… Why to go anywhere?

Some will whine that all these technological prowess, from SpaceX or French flying sailboats, is fundamentally inhuman. Far from it. It is those who condemn technological prowess as both exploit and solution, who have understood nothing to human nature, and are fundamentally inhuman.

Patrice Ayme

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[1] Why planes fly is not very clear(!) There are many effects to consider. Same thing for boats, thus flying boats have many types of foils/wings. 

My own guess is that what is most important is the deflection of energy, in which direction the 1/2mvv can be sent. That explains why under water foils can be so small: if just the Bernoulli Principle applied, foils would have to be as large as 1/1,000 as wings. Besides, the Bernoulli Principle, long considered, I think erroneously, as the main reason why the wings of planes provide lift, does not, cannot apply to sailboat foils; because water is not compressible… (Or, at least, not significantly so!)  , 

Actually the world record holder for going around the world, IDEC Sport, a pretty old boat from 2006, established its record in 2017. Then IDEC was fitted with new, more advanced foils, and immediately beat the record of Tea Route, Hong Kong to London. With its new foils, the main part of IDEC just skims on top of the water, it does not outright lift out of the water as more recent boats do. But that is obviously enough to reduce friction considerably. IDEC can cover more than a thousand miles in 24 hours.  

Those Flying Boats Fight The CO2 Catastrophe

No improved technology, no progress… What those who don’t want to go back to the Moon forget…

***

[2] This boat changed names, not just technologies, a few times, as its (French) sponsors changed. It was known initially as Groupama 3, and had been made for a particular skipper, frank Cammas.

After two abortive attempts ending in 2008 and 2009, Groupama 3 finally took the Jules Verne Trophy in 2010 with a time of 48 days, 7 hours 44 minutes and 52 seconds. Ten years after her record-breaking Transatlantic dash, and now named Idec Sport, the boat again holds the Jules Verne Trophy after Francis Joyon and his crew took her non-stop around the world in 40 days 23 hours, 30 minutes and 30 seconds.

Colonization All Over. So Why So Bad?

It goes without saying that colonization was a terrible thing, whine those who want to look good to themselves and other whiners. Colonization was a crime, they insist. At least that’s what PC people howl on every roof, as part of their unwitting campaign of rage against civilization. Because civilization, which was not civilized, caused colonization, this evil of evils, they crowe. Right.

We the descendants of the colonized shall howl from every roof what victims we are.

We the descendants of the colonizers, shall howl on every roof what criminals we are.

We the bipolar paranoid schizophrenic stand as accused, and may as well be mowed down by Islam driving SUVs, trucks, jumbo jets, and non sense, all over us.

***

Indeed, ladies and gentlemen, who does not descend from colonialists and colonizers?

All the Americas were colonized.

All of Oceania was colonized (twice at least).

Was the colonization of Australia by aborigines (who are part Denisovans), 50,000 years ago, a bad thing? It killed a lot of marsupials!

Sénégal: Organized, unified, but never really colonized! A very rare case!

Japan was colonized (twice at least). Japanese civilization started for real, when the archipelago was colonized. By the Chinese.

Some will say China was never colonized. Well, there used to be 100 nations with 100 languages in China, as recently as three centuries ago (the emperor himself recognized then, in a very sophisticated intellectual exchange with the Jesuits; and he expressed both his will to respect that, and his incapacity to do otherwise). However, nowadays, Mandarin (just one language) is taking over, all over. And all Chinese are forced to assimilate with the Borg in Beijing. That’s colonization therein. Is it bad? My daughter is learning Chinese, or, more exactly, Mandarin. She will be able to talk all over.

Madagascar was colonized (thrice; from Indonesia, Africa, France). Even Greenland was conquered by the Inuits, who pushed away the Vikings… (On their way, the Inuits had annihilated previous denizens in the northern Canada archipelago…)

Most of Africa was colonized multiple times. By descendants of Neanderthals (!), Bantus, Phoenicians, Greco-Romans, Arabs, etc.

All of Russia is a huge colony, all the way to Kamchatka. “Russ” initially means Eastern Swedes.  The Eastern Swedes, Viking style, invaded the huge placid rivers of Eastern Europe, all the way down to the Black Sea (where they could trade with the Romans). In the Tenth Century, Vladimir of Kiev conquered Crimea from the local Khan (Mongols who had themselves conquered centuries earlier the Greeks, who had conquered a millennium prior, etc.)  

Even China was momentarily (a few centuries here and there) conquered by Buddhists, Tibetans, Mongols, Mandchous…

Arabia was greatly colonized by Persia, much later Turkey (Ottomans) for centuries.

Europe?

Europe, shortly before Rome rose, was invaded by the Celto-Germans, who covered up the entire continent, all the way to Anatolia. When Caesar invaded, Gaul (“Gallia”) was made of 60 nation-states.

Much of India was invaded, colonized by white men coming from the north, central Asia, four thousand years ago, or more. That’s why India and Europe enjoy the same Indo-European language family.

Egypt was invaded by the Arabs, more exactly by Caliph Omar’s army. Never recovered (whereas Egypt had recovered from colonization by Black Pharaohs, Nubians, Sea People, Libyans, Greeks and Romans). Egyptians themselves had to decolonize the Sahara desert and concentrate on the Nile Valley and adjoining oases.

***

A real question is: which places in the world were not colonized?

Paradoxically, much of West Africa is one of the most pristine, uncolonized places.

West Africa is generally viewed as having been a French, British, Portuguese colony, and that’s superficially true.

West Africa also exported a lot of slaves (to the Americas).

However, West Africa was one of the much untouched places. (Contrarily to whiny repute!)

Not like Europe: all old European languages were wiped out by the Indo-European, Celto-German invasion (or close to it: Basque is a tiny remnant of what once was.)

And don’t brandish southern Europeans as old stock: the Middle Easterners came from the Fertile Crescent, with their futuristic crops (wheat, etc.) and their genes, 9,000 years ago. Another invasion to run over the many Sapiens invasions all over Europe, in the last 100,000 years. Neanderthals made it to North Africa, big time, and their genes to South Africa, but apparently not to West Africa.

***

A real question: when is colonization good, when is it bad?

From the point of view of the invaded, one will guess that colonization is often bad. Yes, but not always. The invasion of Gallia by Caesar would end up creating the strongest part of the Roman empire, Francia, and the Birth of the West. Viewed that way, it was a good thing. And it sure is a good thing if there was no other way to get that good thing. Was it? We don’t know. Was Caesar innocent of the invasion? We don’t really know.

***

“Colonization” in West Africa was mostly a joke, or more exactly, civilizing: ten French officers ordered around 5,000 Senegalese soldiers who, truly, conquered Sénégal. So, in truth, Senegal conquered Senegal under French management. In truth, there were basically no colons in Senegal: the land stayed property of the Senegalese (compare with the USA, where Indian lands were nearly completely distributed by the colonial government in Washington to the European colons!)

A big argument for the “colonization” of Africa was the eradication of slavery, which was endemic, pandemic, chronic, extensive and ubiquitous in Africa (the globalization of African slavery to the Americas, escaping the long arm of European law, has not been properly characterized…)

Here are the national languages of Senegal:

Balanta-Ganja Hassaniya Arabic Jola-Fonyi Mandinka Mandjak Mankanya Noon Pulaar Serer Soninke Wolof

Some of these languages are tonal, some are not (making them a different as latin and Chinese!) It goes without saying that packing such different nations in so tight a space (less than 200,000 square kilometers), result in mayhem, just to keep the population stable. So Senegal has, rightly so, just one national language.

***

Colonization is good when it brings lots of progress, and less mayhem:

This should go without saying. However, the usual interpretation of (hard) multiculturalism is that all cultures are equally worth of respect. This thesis implies that progress does not exist. So we may as well regress, and have plutocracy.

So we see who these proponents of hard multiculturalism were trying to seduce: the powers that be.

By refusing to see when, how colonization has been, and could be, good, they refuse to bring reason to judge destiny. A silly attitude, considering how fast destiny moves these days.

But of course fundamentally hypocritical.

At least, nobody can accuse me to be a hypocrite. I don’t under (hypo) criticize. It’s much more fun, to over-criticize… And criticize all over… Colonization: assess, but don’t deny, its crimes, just as its merits. And remember the fine lines between colonization and immigration.

Patrice Ayme’

How Did EUROPE Become So SUPERIOR?

MGRA: Make Great Reason Again!

Europe is an emerging phenomenon, now towering over the entire planet, from her possessions, colonies (Africa, Americas, Oceania, much of Eurasia), culture and mental grip (world culture, United Nations, etc.) Hey, don’t flaunt European colonization of the entire planet too loud, that’s not PC! Instead watch with glee the Islamists being crushed in Iraq and Syria by European proxies…

Europe was initially named from a Phoenician princess. (That, per se, is revealing: Europe came from the Middle Earth!) Europe, as a cultural phenomenon articulated by progress, is thousands of years old.

The Romans had long been technology dependent upon the Celts for metallic military equipment (a domination which was to last 3,000 years). When Caesar invaded “Long Haired Gaul”, and reached the Atlantic, he was stunned by the thousands of tall, ocean-going warships that the combined Celtic Navy had mustered (Roman ingenuity devised a specific device, the Corvus to turn the superiority of Celtic tall ships into a way to defeat them). 

Circus Maximus, 20 centuries ago. Still the World’s Largest Stadium, More than 600 meters long. On the left side, the Imperial palace on the Palatine Hill (significantly larger than all the palaces of all present Western leaders combined!)

Contrarily to the usual myth, European superiority did not start with English superiority in the 1700s (that was mostly the fruit of English and Dutch conspiracies which turned out well, while the female Prime Minister of France overturned all the alliances, insuring French defeat in a seven-year world war!)

But Europe did not emerge by accident, but from culturally inherited moods, thus epigenetics, more than 100,000 years old. Yes, the climate, and the geography played a role, lighted the fire, and keep re-lighting it, from Enlightenment to Enlightenment. The fire of progress.

Unsurprisingly, regressive potentates put into question “Occidental values”, suggesting they are yesterday’s intrinsic evil. Sergey Lavrov, the powerful, long-standing Russian foreign minister declared in February 2017, that the time had come for a “post-Occidental world order”. According to Lavrov, one should wipe up all international institutions and replace them, Trump-like, by negotiations, state to state (as Russia is by far the world’s largest state, with the largest nuclear force, one can see how it would profit from it! The same holds for the USA.) This cannot end well. Russia is fundamentally a European colony (as the USA is). It should not forget how Europe got so rich. It happened through the universalization of advanced values.

Ah yes, because Europe is rich: In territory, Europe, through its (“ex”) colonies, owns much of the world: the Americas, Oceania, and all of North Eurasia are European colonies. Civilizationally, legislatively, Europe owns the world, with the possible exception of North Korea, and the irritant of a few (partly) Muslim Fundamentalist states.

Let me rephrase this, lest it gets misunderstood: the United Nations Charter is basically an improved rewriting of the Declaration des Droits de l’Homme of 1789. In turn, the French Revolution basic constitution was a writing of practiced established by the Franks, a full millennium earlier (including the outlawing of slavery, mandatory education, and the subservience of religion to state).

How did this happen? How did Europe achieve supremacy?

***

Did the “Protestant Ethics” Make Europe Rich?

This is an opinion Anglo-Saxon supremacists love to claim. It’s mostly BS. First, the “Protestants” introduced only a minority of the inventions which made Europe strong and innovative.

Second, the presence of the easiest to exploit, richest coal beds in the world surfacing in England and North West Germany have nothing to do with “Protestant ethics”, but everything to do with steam-powered industrialization.

Third, one would have to define “Protestant”. Hint: it’s a French word. The “Protestant” movement started shortly after the fascist Christian church tried an encore with the First Crusade (after having nearly collapsed civilization in the Fourth Century already). Thus, the Protestant attitude and ethics is very old, and a reaction to Roman and Christian fascism… but not at all what Anglo-Saxon superiority maniacs have in mind.

The Greco-Romans were number one in trade and work ethics. 10,000 cargo ships plied the waves of the Mediterranean, every day. Later Italian and Alpine republics under the protective umbrella of the Frankish Roman empire invented most of the present “capitalist” set-up, complete with state bonds to finance Florentine armies, etc.  

***

Did Colonialism and Slavery Made Civilization Rich As The Haters Of Progress Claim?

The traditional Politically Correct, Europhobic, European hating point of view is that slavery and colonialism made Europe rich: This is, erroneous, even ridiculous, on the face of it: the region of the world, Europe,  which outlawed slavery within, 13 centuries ago, would have been made rich from slavery.

However, in energy usage, per capita, Europe was the richest in the world, by 1000 CE. Actually some of the richest parts of Europe had no contact whatsoever with slavery and colonialism, for example, Switzerland (and many parts of France, Germany, italy).

The truth is much simpler, much more human: the exponential of understanding in Europe, and its subsequent mastery of nature, was the engine of European wealth. Europe succeeded better, because it was the part of the world where the essence of humanity, understanding and mastering nature, was able to express itself better.

***

EUROPE BECAME RICHER IN THE LAST MILLENNIUM, BECAUSE EUROPE WAS SMARTER. Institutionally. Spiritually. Thus, Epigenetically:

It started with smarter laws, and the mentality of respecting them (“Dura Lex, Sed Lex” said the Romans; Law Hard, But [it’s the] Law). So institutions and moods were in place for European supremacy, 25 centuries ago. Those characters were the direct cause of the astonishing ascent of the Roman Republic.  

Rome got blocked in its eastward expansion by the Greco-Persian empire in the Iranian plateau. Factors in Rome’s failure to conquer Persia: Caesar was killed, the Republic caged (by Augustus and the plutocracy he headed). More importantly, Persia was part of the West, in the deepest sense. Babylonian kings (Hammurabi!) had imposed the notion of universal (republican) law, a full millennium before Roma became a village. Also Mesopotamia had invented and used much of the fundamental alphabet, science and mathematics, which spread westward.  

Rome itself was a baby fed, and educated by colonialists: the Etruscans, who had last come from present-day Syria, and the Greeks, who had colonized south Italy, including Naples (a deformation of the term New Town in Greek: Neo-Polis).

Not that all of the inventive mentality of the Occident started only around the Mediterranean, its Fertile Crescent and Egypt: the Indo-European colonizations started from Central Asia, targeting both Europe and India. The Amazons, a most anti-sexist civilization, was part of it, way back (more than 4,000 years ago), and we inherited some of this anti-sexist mentality (which may well have influenced anti-sexist Crete, as Crete was in trade with the Northern Black Sea region, where the Amazons thrived.

India played the crucial role in inventing the modern numeration system. Meanwhile, in the West, the drive to ever more powerful technology had ruled for at least 100,000 years: Neanderthals and Denisovans could only survive in north Eurasia through extensive technology. So they invented pants, dogs, and the usage of fossil fuels (already 80,000 years ago).

***

European Progress Mentality Is At Least 100,000 Years Old:

Cro Magnon men lived in present day France, then a tundra which was fully surrounded by enormous glaciers, and the icy sea. Cro Magnons survived in the same way Neanderthals and Denisovans did before: using the maximal high-tech they could develop. They may have inherited few Neanderthal genes, but they inherited in full the mentality of the Neanderthals.

This is an important point: mentalities, even culture, can pass down the generations, even when genes do not. In particular, the importance given to culture, progress, understanding can live in a landscape, partly from the landscape itself.

The mentality of progress, with the advent of agriculture, became ever more crucial, as the ecologies got ruined, and new ones had to be manufactured.

It is the gigantic scale of severe, yet profligate Eurasia, a demanding, yet technologically rewarding environment, which made the evolution of superlative ideas possible, more than anywhere else, by constant interbreeding of exotic facts and logics.   

It is western Eurasia, North Africa, and the Middle Earth (all the way to India) which provided the best, largest incubator. Therein the Occident, but it is nothing without the mood of progress at nearly any cost.

That mood barely survived Christian fascism. Yet, the Franks were able to found civilization again, on a better basis, within two centuries of the Roman collapse, using superior ideas (no slavery, mandatory education, the church as a tool of the state, elections, etc.)

This was the first Enlightenment, post-Greco-Romans. That superior institutional set-up made the “West’ by the year 1,000 CE, not only richer than Rome, but richer in energy use by inhabitant, than any other place in the world. By then European technology and science was leading (even the invention of “black powder” was a complicated story, where Mongols and Europeans, not just the Chinese, played a role). As Europe became ever more technology dependent, the urge to understand things for sure (“science”) became ever more important.

A succession of “Enlightenments” went on… to this day. The acceleration after 1500 CE was just part of the singularity of understanding we all share into today. in many ways, it just repeated, and re-imposed, constitutional reforms which were made first in the Seventh and Eighth centuries, by the Imperium Francorum (soon to be relabelled “Renovatio Imperium Romanum”).

***

PC Is The Perfect Con Against Humanity:

Right now the core of the machinery of what made civilization progress and be ever more superior is threatened. Friends have told me Trump threatened “reason”. Well, their reason (they tend to be in the 1% or serving the 1%, those “friends” of mine). There are many facts and possible logics to animate them, out there.

Consider Brexit logic: it is sheer madness, the madness of rage unbound. As in Trumphobia, Europhobia is motivated by a deep pain which arose from earlier events. (Clinton fanatics hate Trump because of the pain Clinton, Bill, Bush, and Obama, inflicted on them.)

An Arabic scholar wrote to me, saying there was no reason for progress (yes there is, just as on a bicycle). A Jewish (real) friend pointed out that many of the attacks against Europe also stealthily promoted the annihilation of Israel (correct).

The rabid, hateful, anti-European logics out there have doubled as outright attacks against honorable reason. Accusations of racism have been hurled, just to avoid debates (both Trump and your truly were subjected to this; many attacks against me were made snapchat way: erasing the fighting words full of hatred within minutes, after they were widely distributed, a method to practice defamation… without being able to prove it).

All we need to know is that never before in the history of the biosphere has the potential be greater for extreme catastrophe. Or extreme progress towards more mastery of nature by life. In any case, superior reason will adjudicate.

Patrice Ayme’

No Philosophy, No Progress, No Civilization

Progress is necessary: all ecologies, and thus technologies, get exhausted, or exhausting. Civilization rides a bicycle, and cannot long stop anywhere.

Progress does not happen out of the blue. It is instigated by the love of wisdom (philosophy). The progress of humanity is propelled by exerting a mind, one mind, at the highest level, first, and find a new idea, or emotion. And then to make that new wisdom blossom, and propagate throughout society. How exactly this happened can help figure out how it may happen again.

The explosion of philosophy in Ancient Greece was not sparked by Socrates (contrarily to legend). The reason for the veneration of the trio constituted by Socrates, his student Plato, and  Aristotle, student of the latter, is rather sinister. Socrates launched a weasel denunciation of Direct Democracy. demolishing it because of technicalities. That turned into the Politically Correct justification of more than 20 centuries of fascism (“monarchies”) from Eire to India.

Thus Socrates was a sort of famous counter-revolutionary. He helped demolish what he profited from, Athenian civilization (Aristotle did much worse, he demolished democratic civilization itself, promoting instead a fascist plutocracy led by his most intimate friends). The ascent of wisdom and progress was fully evident by the age of Pericles, decades before. Pericles’ top advisers, including his wife, were top philosophers. They promoted the concept of “Open Society“ (lauded in Pericles’ Funeral Oration). Arguably, the concept of Open Society, and the progress of mind it brought, was important than the entire work of Socrates.

But to understand the rise of wisdom in Greece, one has to go much earlier than Pericles’ generation. The great legislator Solon, a bit more than a century before Pericles, replaced the draconian Draco style of legislation with the opposite orientation. 

On The Left, Representation Of Solon In The US House Of Representatives. On the right, a statue of Solon.

Solon was born around 638 BCE. He was also a poet and war leader (he secured to Athens the possession of the island of Salamis through battle and Sparta’s arbitrage). Solon replaced systematic execution for any crime, by subtle and appropriate laws. More controversially, he erased debts (the ones in the know, his friends, profited from it).

Solon launched Athens into that Open Society managed around ideas and progress. Solon was a great traveller, and left Athens for more than a decade. Even earlier, Homer played an important role, with his tales of how the deepest emotions mess up with the world, or lift it beyond heavens. 

So why was Greece so wise? Because that’s how it rose to prominence. 

Similarly, the renewed rise of wisdom in the European Middle Ages did not happen just in the famed “renaissance” around 1450 CE. It had started much earlier. A full millennium earlier, when the Franks founded their civilization on tolerance. By 650 CE, the Merovingian Franks, by then the great power of Europe, thanks to their control of Gallia and Germania, outlawed slavery (under Bathilde, the slave who became queen). That was followed by nationalization of the Catholic church, fighting off three massive Islamist invasions, mandatory education, total religious tolerance, and a “renovation of the Roman empire”. By then all religious establishment had to teach everybody secularly, founding the university system. 

The Economist wrote a critique of “The Dream of Enlightenment” (by Anthony Gottlieb) “on some of the great Enlightenment thinkers, including Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, Hume, Rousseau and Voltaire…

They were freelance philosophers working independently of the universities, criticising mainstream views and liberating thought from its academic straitjacket and neo-Aristotelian dogmatism. They were dangerous thinkers all, one publication away from exile, imprisonment or worse for their radical views on religion, politics and morality. Spinoza was the subject of a cherem, the equivalent of excommunication from the Amsterdam Sephardic synagogue; Locke disguised his authorship… spent a number of years in self-imposed exile; Hume chose to publish his “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion” posthumously; and Rousseau fled to England when persecuted in mainland Europe”. 

One cannot underestimate the terror generating new thinking brings. Most of the top thinkers where on the run, or in terrible trouble, fleeing here and there, from Giordano Bruno to Kepler, Galileo,  to Descartes, Hobbes, etc. In “What is Enlightenment?” (1784), Immanuel Kant used the motto Sapere aude (“Dare to know”) 

This all started five centuries earlier. By 1100 CE, the great philosopher, lover and songwriter Abelard was called “our Aristotle” by Peter the Venerable, head of Cluny (the largest religious establishment). Abelard fought Saint Bernard. Cathars and later Vaudois appeared in short order. Abelard got excommunicated, then readmitted to the Church (?), etc. 

It was even worse under Islam. A bit after the war between Abelard and Saint Bernard, the famous Ibn Rushd (“Averroes” in Western historiography), an Islamist judge, philosopher and doctor to Caliph (of Spain) was banned, and his books destroyed for writing “The Incoherence of the Incoherence” against a religious fanatic who had attacked philosophy in The Incoherence of the Philosophers  (Ibn Rushd got rehabilitated, shortly before his death, after a great victory of Caliph Al Mansour). 

In the next five centuries, many thinkers would be legally executed. Executed for offenses such as printing books; the Sultan Francois Premier of France (soon imitated by the Sultan of Turkey) outlawed printing for a while, under the penalty of death, some of Rabelais’s friends and printers were burned alive; Rabelais himself, a well-connected top doctor, was not touched, but implicitly threatened. This courage is what the Enlightenment was built on.

Bringing people together on yesterday’s consensus is easy. Politicians love to do that. Philosophers, the real ones, do the opposite: they bring people asunder, down to the bottom of their souls, to establish tomorrow’s consensus, with superior, yet unborn ideas. The greatest leaders were definitively either advised by philosophers (for example, Charlemagne, and the US Founding Fathers) or philosophers themselves (Cicero, Caesar, Clovis, Solon, Pericles, Queen Bathilde, etc.)

We are the thinking species. Yet thinking means creation, anew. And creation means destruction, at least neurologically speaking. Loving is giving, yet the gift of really truly new thinking, is a gift of destruction. This is definitively a paradox, common people have a hard time embracing the concept and the mood behind it, as they rather embrace the mood that being a sheep in the flock is much safer.

No wonder humanity is ambivalent about real philosophers, except when they are safely dead already. 

Patrice Ayme’

FREE TRADE FALLACY

We have just one civilization today: everybody, among common folks know what everybody else thinks. Yet, as resources previously used, such as fossil fuels, falter, civilization and the understanding of the universe which makes it possible in its present state, have to progress (not enough scientific and technological progress as needed, was the proximal cause of Rome’s failure). So it is crucial that really new, and correct, ideas be introduced (and not just in science).

If Those Are Best Friends Who, What Is The Enemy? Cockroaches? Those Among We The People Who Are Viewed As Cockroaches?

Yes even countries such as Saudi Arabia are part of this global civilization. And Saudi Arabia is fully part of the debate of what civilization means, and what it will have to consist of, looking forward. Watch France give the Legion d’Honneur to the heir of Saudi Arabia, and its Interior Minister, arguably the principal ideologue of the hardening of the Saudi line, inside out. So, in other words, while France fights the Islamist State (“Daesh”), France gives the nod to the hardening of the Wahhabist doctrine of Saudi Arabia (which, historically, was very minor in Islam), the ideology of ISIL. The results are increasingly strange: Salafist/Wahhabist terrorists attacked police and soldiers in Tunisia today. The security forces fought back. The coordinated assaults were shown, live, on the Internet. One could see young passersbys applauding the security forces in full combat (at least 28 terrorists got killed, plus seventeen fighting police and civilians who applauded the police).

Such contradictions are rife, all over the world. Look at “free trade”.

Globalization Of Trade Without Globalization Of Law Results In Plutocratization. This Is Exactly What Happened To The Roman Republic, & Why It Faltered

Free trade, well done, is indeed excellent. However, the West has been exporting science, technology and know-how, while not investing in a way commensurate to making this sort of export sustainable.

In other words, here is civilization’s problem: the learning, teaching, and research functions have been starved, relative to what the (critical) situation requires.

The result has been a collapse of manufacturing and related high worth employment in the countries who recently led progress in science and understanding (with the result that, like Republican Rome, the knowledge and wisdom of the most advanced countries is increasing faltering relatively to the flow of new ideas which civilization need to survive).

To make matters worse, said “free trade” has happened in the shadows. So-called high-tech companies have made fortunes, while paying no taxes: France just hit Google with a 1.6 billion Euro tax bill. Such companies and their principal owners had found ways to escape most taxes, thus starving the governments, hence the fundamental research their trade rests on.

So free trade can work, but only if it’s fair. As it is, most money flows are hidden (in so-called “Dark Money” and “Dark Pools”), and the owners are also hidden (thus escaping taxation and corruption charges, not just against them, but also against the politicians they influence).

Last week European Commissioners were caught promising ExxonMobil that the Transatlantic Trade Pact under negotiation with Obama would allow companies such as ExxonMobil to escape local legislation, including labor, taxation and pollution laws.

So the Republicans may be lunatics. But, in a world already ruled by lunatics, they are no doubt welcome.

Fair, just, and profitable  international trade requires a registry of all ownership and detailed trading activity, worldwide. Otherwise the sort of Republic we enjoy worldwide (as institutionalized by the United Nations) will know the same fate as the Roman Republic: an increasing sinking in the turbid waters of mindless will to power and tyranny.

Patrice Ayme’

[P/S: A shorter, trade only version of the preceding essay was selected as a New York Times’ “Pick”. Since I have complained stridently about NYT’s censorship, I have to be fair and to recognize appreciation too!]

Solar Roads

Solar Roads Versus Objection Mars:

Long ago, when the sun had not set yet on the will of the West to progress, a poet was visiting my home. He read some of his poetry. Humanity had just reached the Moon. The poet loftily declared that we did not need the Moon, we needed to fight hunger.

Later, the malaria parasite mutated, becoming resistant to standard treatment. Now it kills more than 1.2 million people a year. A typical objection to colonizing the Solar System is this:

“as I see it – Scott’s movie (even if I’m a sci-fi fan and I love some movies of him as well: Blade Runner is definitely a masterpiece) is a mere conservative propaganda aiming for people to agree that these extremely expensive missions to Mars are more important than saving African children from ebola, helping Syrian refugees, letting Europe be democratic yet or supporting laws against free guns in the US … Save the “american” astronaut, guys!” The answer is crushing, it holds in one picture:

French Truck On Solar Photo-Voltaic Road: the Future Has Arrived

There is nothing “conservative” about missions to Mars. Quite the opposite: such missions are fully progressive. They force humanity to progress.

Disease in Africa has to do with lack of governance. Lack of hospital has to do with lack of governance. In the Ebola epidemic, the countries that were struck were struck from lack of organized health care.

Senegal got one, just one, imported Ebola case. The patient got cured, and that was it. Even Mali, with better governance, in spite of a Jihadist invasion, was able to contain a few imported cases. Meanwhile, several countries next door, which are intrinsically much richer (Sierra Leone, Guinea. Liberia) saw thousands of deaths, and containment came from the efforts of NGOs, France and the USA (mostly).

When France pulled out of Africa, some particularly smart critic told a senior French government minister that the argument of “freeing” Africa from alleged colonialism made no humanitarian sense: there was no “colonialism” to speak of, and who was going to pay for one hospital every 100 kilometers in the world’s second largest continent? The minister smiled, and said: “this is precisely the point, we will not incur that expense anymore.”

Two capabilities save children in general: a) good governance. b) science.

When considering a Mars mission in this connection, one has to answer if the Mars mission will improve governance and science. Governance itself is a science. A mission to Mars is “expensive”. How much? 100 million dollars? 200 millions? How much would a Mars colonization program cost to launch? Two trillion dollars?

According to the International Monetary Fund, subsidies for fossil fuels are more than 5.5 trillion dollars a year. Enough to set-up a village on Mars, with existing technology.

Now going to Mars would force drastic progress in, say, fuel cells. The technology of fuel cells was invented for the Moon mission. After Obama became president, the research funding on this field was yanked out (probably to send money to businessmen such as Elon Musk).

Mars colonization would force enormously innovative research in energy technology, for example fuel cells, and nuclear energy (both fission and fusion).

Nothing else will.

Syrian refugees? Mars will not save Syrians? Nothing is more removed from the truth. Mars, the god of war, is what is needed in Syria, fighting for Goodness, instead of having Mars fight in the name of the devil Assad, as was mostly done so far.

The 300,000 dead in Syria, the eleven million refugees, have been caused by the rule of a single, cornered man, Assad, son of Assad, and the clique surrounding him. To solve the Syrian refugees crisis, Assad’s rule ought to be terminated, so that he could be replaced by generals open to enough democracy to keep Syrians in Syria.

Unfortunately the Franco-American decapitation strike against Assad was called off by Obama, for reasons so far unexplained. So the massacre keeps on going, with forces under the orders of Assad killing at least ten times as much what the Islamist State kills.

Fossil fuels consumption, should it go on for a few more decades, will bring the global temperature up five degrees Celsius, and massacre the biosphere. It has to stop, but can be stopped only with plentiful, cheap, new energy sources.

That, or massive war (killing billions).

How? Science to the rescue. Without evoking the spectrum of nuclear energy (fission and fusion), Solar Photo-Voltaic (SPV) is here. Normal solar panels were developed for space missions. Without space colonization, they would not have been developed. Yet, solar panels are fragile. Or, more exactly, were fragile until now.

A giant French construction company (Bouygues) deposed patents to cover-up solar cells with various materials to make them tough. Glass can be made as hard as steel. Then Bouygues engineers drove more than a million vehicles above the toughened-up panels in a few test cities (Chambery, Grenoble). Now the first solar road is under construction. Four meters of said road can satisfy a house’s needs. 100 square meters (twenty meters of the linear road depicted) are enough to drive 100,000 kilometers with an electric vehicle. If 25% of French roads were covered, 100% of French electric needs would be covered.

The future, the good future, is here: it’s enough to let science roll. But science needs challenges. Such as Mars colonization. If (very serious) scientists and mathematicians need bananas, such as the Fields Medal and the Nobel Prize, certainly humanity needs bigger motivation, and bigger prizes than that!

You want morality? More morality? Then you need a bigger science. And the way to get a better science is by setting higher objectives, greater passions, more exacting thoughts. Progress, the Will to Progress, is a mood. It cannot be confined to moral progress, because the universe juggles with evil. Moral progress means technological progress.  Mars colonization is no moral objection. Objective Mars is a moral imperative.

Patrice Ayme’