If we die, we're taking you with us.

[MisterP]

38. this has been going on for over a century

Wells was the first to say we could just invent our way out of any problem

19th-c. fulfillment of Nature turned to replacement: J.D. Bernal@ wrote in 1929 that scientists would become a separate, emotionless, star-hopping species, leaving the childlike, "larval" rest of us to an unspeakable "Melanesian existence of eating, drinking, friendliness, love-making, dancing and singing." The "humanity that counts ... leav[es] behind in a relatively primitive state those too stupid or too stubborn to change." Once us kine had served their purpose of birthing this corpse-eyed scientist-deity species "There may not be room for both types in the same world ... The better organized beings will be obliged in self-defence to reduce the numbers of the others, until they are no longer seriously inconvenienced by them." The stars "cannot be allowed to continue in their old way" and must be bent to human purpose--until we outstrip God and made Him puny! "At present, I allow, we must have forests, for the atmosphere. Presently we find a chemical substitute. And then, why any natural trees? I foresee nothing but the art tree all over the earth. In fact, we clean the planet."

Crops, infrastructure, and prefab housing could be laid down anywhere, cities and megafarms laid down like sod in desert, tundra, or reef. Detroit and the Dakotas were both productive and controllable, making them the models for Lenin and Nyerere: they meant interchangeable units, fungible deskilled labor, and rigid discipline and schedules.

Their mission is to make the planet Man's property: farms are designed like they're spaceships, trying to substitute ecology outright--cattle stacked six stories indoors, powered by the Atom and shielded by weather control. They're yields, not plants or animals--carpets of crops. Even farm animals are too unruly! We can't possibly be dependent on any environment--just pump more N, P, and K into failing soils and concoct new antibiotics and pesticides if resistance develops; "our transportation crisis will be solved by a bigger plane or a wider road, mental illness with a pill, poverty with a law, slums with a bulldozer."

it's the model not just of "scientific socialism" but any technocracy--Mexico's PRI, India's INC, Dow, Bayer, and Monsanto's "nozzleheads," the Best and the Brightest thinking they could just use enough machines and Vietnam'd be over by Christmas