You know, philosophy and science didn’t end with the American inputs of William James, Robert Pirsig and Ayn Rand. Even though the institutions of our modern society are tempted to think that they are the end of the line and that they must now teach what they have learned to anybody willing to pay them $100 thousand for an education that really it’s the labor unions supporting them that’s talking, again from a long dead philosopher in Karl Marx who is irrelevant to modern thought, because his beliefs were more a wish for the lazy than an observed fact of existence. No, there is a lot more to learn and to think about and as it so happens to be, we are living in the most dynamic time for that kind of thought in the history of the entire world. So if you are like me, which is conducive to the reality of the moment, the old static thoughts of old need to give way to the dynamic intellectualism of the creative moment and for that I’m going to say something very important, something that nobody else will tell you presently on the face of earth, but it is the most solid footing that mankind could hope to have, and that is in the rock, paper, scissor game of human development, the way to determine the value in something is in how we can monetize it, because that determines the value of something. Science by its very nature is needed to study where we’ve been but they cannot be allowed to step in the way of human advancement.

I’m thinking of space and colonizing Mars, the Moon, and several other moons circling the moons of the big gas giants at the center of our solar system. In their natural state they are just there doing nothing waiting for the sun to explode destroying everything in its gravitational pull. Humans have been given a tight window to develop life of just a few million years and we need to take full advantage of it presently. That means that all the scientific protestors like Green Peace and PETA, along with the political protestors such as the Karl Marx inspired ANTIFA must either be destroyed or given a seat at the back of the bus and told to shut up. They may have rights to express themselves under the American Constitution and if other countries want to adopt the philosophy of American thought and create laws based on that, so be it. But soon we are going to be returning to the wild, wild west of space travel and frontier pushing that will last pretty much for the rest of human existence, for many millions of years to come and always there will be a frontier to push. It is the nature of human thought to use the necessity of adventure to advance human needs and desires and the governing practice that keeps everything in check are not the laws of institutional thinking, it is the value of the conduct.

I used to read National Geographic magazines and books voraciously. Going to the museum for me in Washington D.C. was like visiting heaven on earth. But over the years I have grown to understand that they have a very limited perspective on the world and of human existence altogether. What makes human beings so important over other life forms is the creative impulse to see what is around the corner and to use their imaginations to get there. No other animal anywhere does this and it can be argued through applied scientific observation that this is the meaning of life—of all life—to feed this trend in existence. National Geographic still has the progressive vision of its founders, Alexander Graham Bell and many others who weren’t wrong to ask questions about the role science played in human experience, but the value of their work only has relevancy to people. Give a National Geographic magazine to an elk in Alaska or a beaver in Colorado and they’ll just look at it. The animal rights activists that might learn something from reading National Geographic are wrong to assume that they are meant to act on behalf of nature because again the ability to contemplate the “nature” of things is purely human. The forces that made the Rocky Mountains could and would destroy every last human being ever created without giving anything a thought. So the contemplation of value is purely human. When in the very well-produced television series titled Mars, produced by National Geographic the assumption is made that there needs to be a governing body in space just as there is on earth, they’d be incorrect. Value is determined by what humans do with the nature that is around them—at every level. A turtle can’t dig in the ground and pull out raw ore and make something economically valuable about it. Only humans can, and thus on the wild frontier of space where huge companies will set up residence and take over the colonization of Mars and many other planets at a rapid pace, science and conservation must take a back seat. The scientists cannot be allowed to become governing elements in the dynamic need to destroy static assumptions. When we get to Mars and set up huge cities of minors and construction workers, the science of understanding what happened to Mars takes a back seat. The funding for their science comes from business investment and economic expansion, so they need to accept that and get away from assuming that their static reality of observation can be allowed to slow down even a little the curiosity of mankind and its never-ending quest for economic development.

Monetizing a planet, or a moon is not an evil thing, it’s quite the opposite. When something is monetized it is suddenly graced with a value that it didn’t have before. Mars in the state that it is now is just sitting there with all its history. The scientist might find all that fascinating just as they may enjoy watching Humpback wales breeding off the coast of California. So what, when did a whale or a dolphin ever build a space ship to colonize a distant star? The value of existence isn’t just in doing what some version of God started as a pattern of life, to breed, to eat, to reproduce then to die in a long cycle of existence, it is accepting that jump-start into consciousness, then to do something with the intellect that emerges. Death or preparing for death for the rest of our lives as the Buddhists do is not a value conducive to the human experience, nor is living in harmony with nature. The meaning of life as defined by human beings is to accept their role of a dynamic force in a very static universe. It is not for the scientist to sit in the back of a caboose studying history, it is in the entrepreneur at the front of the train, at the cutting edge as Robert Pirsig put it in his work so well, that is where the value for all things are.

At the heart of all this is the debate on gun control. As humans move into the vast frontiers of space away from the governments on earth that central question of who controls who and how and why comes up. In America the right to have guns and to use them has decentralized the process of justice. People can live in the middle of nowhere and not expect to be robbed of their values because they have guns to defend themselves. The same application of order will be used heavily on the far distance bases in orbit around Jupiter or scattered all over Mars as a continuous stream of rockets full of payload travels between the earth and those destinations raising the stakes with each visit as those environments become much more earth like in their living conditions. And as all this happens there will be no room for the nosey scientist or the environmental protestors who assumes that their work is the most important to conduct in the universe. The way to determine that is to measure the value that work has in the scope of human progress. If it isn’t valuable, then it must be discarded for something that is, because it is the tools we come to use as humans that matter as we reach out and expand our curiosity to the next corner of the galaxy. It may be interesting to consider where things have been historically, but what matters is tomorrow, and our always driven yearning to find it. That is the meaning of life.

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.