Thread by @GeorgeMonbiot

There are few fantasies as stupid and destructive as space colonisation.

https://twitter.com/DoubleDownNews/status/1419985920485470218

Jeff Bezos comes as close as any real person I've seen to a genuine James Bond villain. The megalomaniac fantasies, the maniacal laugh, the sense of something unfulfilled, unsettled, out of joint with himself, that drives him to such excesses of greed and display.
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But far from calling out this cackling maniac, drowning under his own hat, much of the world's media  - even those he doesn't own - grovel before him. Governments give him everything he asks for. In the real world, Bond would work for Blofeld.

The fantasy of space colonisation is almost exclusively male. In the form Bezos proposes, it is impossible, for a number of sound physical reasons. But this doesn't stop millions of men from wistfully imagining the delightful orbiting prison colony they might one day inhabit.

What appears to be an imaginative exercise in fact betrays a profound lack of imagination: a failure to imagine the power relations, confinement and extreme constraint involved, were this fantasy magically to materialise.

If you were to suggest to these people that they should never be allowed to leave their homes, on pain of death, they would be outraged. But this is what they wish on themselves. It's a bizarre and highly destructive fantasy, and it's time we all grew out of it.

We are blessed to live on the planet on which we evolved, with its oxygen, radiation screening, atmospheric pressure and 1g of gravity. Even if we found another planet capable of supporting life, we'll never find one so perfectly suited to *human* life.

Yet the attempts to realise this juvenile, preposterous boy's own fantasy, with the massive quantities of materials and fuel they require, further threaten the only habitable planet we have.

We have barely begun to understand the wonders of nature on this astonishing planet. The more we discover, the more mind-blowing life turns out to be. Yet some people would swap it for .... nothing. Literally, nothing. They are dead to the world.