The Source of the West's Totally Wrong Radical Thought

First, take a scroll through the following photos. My writing resumes.

( The photos are of contemporary Chinese cities and infrastructure. )

What values lead to creating such a complex and technologically advanced environment? Implied by roads and high-rise residences, what kind of economy creates a massive amount of relatively wealthy people? 

I am not going to answer those questions, but I am going to answer with what doesn't.

What doesn't create these scenes is the shaming of wealth and the shaming of material things.  I am not villifying an individualistic pursuit of a simple life, but on a mass scale and baked into policy decision-making this is toxic and leads to a society that correctly can be called simpletons and will be servants for a more enterprising society.

If we look a bit wider at the philosophy Jesus preaches I think we'll see he favored the poor, and he preached the dangers of seeking wealth. This is his overwhelming message in the gospels.

…but the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches and the desires for other things enter in and choke the Word, and it proves unfruitful.

Mark 4: 19    
 
17      And as he was setting out on his journey, a man ran up and knelt before him and asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” 
18      And Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone. 
19      You know the commandments: ‘Do not murder,’ ‘Do not commit adultery,’ ‘Do not steal,’ ‘Do not bear false witness,’ ‘Do not defraud,’ ‘Honor your father and mother’.” 
20      And he said to him, “Teacher, all these I have kept from my youth.” 
21      And Jesus, looking at him, loved him, and said to him, “You lack one thing: go, sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.”
22      Disheartened by the saying, he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions.

Mark 10: 17-22 (similar story in Matthew 19: 16-22) 
“Give to anyone who asks of you…”

Matthew 5: 42

 

19      “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, 
20      but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. 
21      For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

24      …You cannot serve God and money.

Matthew 6: 19-21, 24    
 

17      And Jesus said to his disciples, “Truly, I say to you, only with difficulty will a rich person enter the kingdom of heaven. 
18      Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.”

Matthew 19: 23-24    

Mary’s Song of Praise (The Magnificat):

51      He has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts;
52      He has brought down the mighty from their thrones
and exalted those of humble estate;
53      He has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich He has sent away empty.

Luke 1: 51-53




27      After this he went out and saw a tax collector named Levi, sitting at the tax booth. And he said to him, “Follow me.” 
28      And leaving everything, he rose and followed him.
29      And Levi made him a great feast in his house, and there was a large company of tax collectors and others reclining at table with them. 
30      And the Pharisees and their scribes grumbled at his disciples, saying, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?” 
31      And Jesus answered them, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. 
32      I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.”

Luke 5: 27-32  

  
“When you give a dinner or a banquet, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors… But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind…”

Luke 14: 12-13
__________

“You cannot serve God and money.” 

Luke 16: 13
__________

 

15      Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. 

16      For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life—is not from the Father but is from the world.

1 John 2: 15-16

Freeman Dyson: Biological Engineering for Space Colonization

THE WORLD, THE FLESH, AND THE DEVIL

Freeman J. Dyson

Institute for Advanced Study

Princeton, New Jersey

IV.  Big Trees

I have spoken about the two first steps of biological engineering.  

The first will transform our industry and the second will transform

our earth-bound ecology.  It is now time to speak of the third step,

which is the colonization of space.  I believe in fact that biological

engineering is the essential tool which will make Bernal's dream of

the expansion of mankind in space a practical possibility.  

First I have to clear away a few popular misconcpetions about space

as a habitat.  It is generally considered that planets are important.  

Except for Earth, they are not.  Mars is waterless, and the others are

for various reasons basically inhospitable to man.  It is generally

considered that beyond the sun's family of planets there is absolute

emptiness extending for light years until you come to another star.  

In fact it is likely that space around the solar system is populated

by huge numbers of comets, small worlds a few miles in diameter, rich

in water and the other chemicals essential to life.  We see one of

these comets only when it happens to suffer a random perturbation of

its orbit which sends it plunging close to the sun.  It seems that

roughly one comet per year is captured into the region near the sun,

where it eventually evaporates and disintegrates.  If we assume that

the supply of distant comets is sufficient to sustain this process

over the thousands of millions of years that the solar system has

existed, then the total population of comets loosely attached to the

sun must be numbered in the thousands of millions.  The combined

surface area of these comets is then a thousand or ten thousand times

that of Earth.  I conclude from these facts that comets, not planets,

are the major potential habitat of life in space.  If it were true

that other stars have as many comets as the sun, it then would follow

that comets pervade our entire Galaxy.  We have no evidence either

supporting or contradicting this hypothesis.  If true, it implies

that our Galaxy is a much friendlier place for interstellar travelers

than it is popularly supposed to be.  The average distance between

habitable oases in the desert of space is not measured in light years,

but is of the order of a light day or less.  

I propose to you then an optimistic view of the Galaxy an an abode of

life.  Countless millions of comets are out there, amply supplied with

water, carbon, and nitrogen, the basic constituents of living cells.  

We see when they fall close to the sun that they contain all the

common elements necessary to our existence.  They lack only two

essential requirements for human settlement, namely warmth and air.  

And now biological engineering will come to our rescue.  We shall

learn how to grow trees on comets.  

To make a tree grow in airless space by the light of a distant sun is

basically a problem of redesigning the skin of its leaves.  In every

organism the skin is the crucial part which must be most delicately

tailored to the demands of the environment.  The skin of a leaf in

space must satisfy four requirements.  It must be opaque to far-

ultraviolet radiation to protect the vital tissues from radiation

damage.  It must be impervious to water.  It must transmit visible

light to the organs of photosynthesis.  It must have extremely low

emissivity for far-infrared radiation, so that it can limit loss of

heat and keep itself from freezing.  A tree whose leaves possess such

a skin should be able to take root and flourish upon any comet as near

to the sun as the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn.  Farther out than

Saturn the sunlight is too feeble to keep a simple leaf warm, but

trees can grow at far greater distances if they provide themselves with

compound leaves.  A compound leaf would consist of a photosynthetic

part which is able to keep itself warm, together with a convex mirror

part which itself remains cold but focuses concentrated sunlight upon

the photosynthetic part.  It should be possible to program the genetic

instructions of a tree to produce such leaves and orient them correctly

toward the sun.  Many existing plants possess structures more

complicated than this.  

Once leaves can be made to function in space, the remaining parts

of a tree -- trunk, branches, and roots -- do not present any great

problems.  The branches must not freeze, and therefore the bark must

be a superior heat insulator.  The roots will penetrate and gradually

melt the frozen interior of the comet, and the tree will build its

substance from the materials that the roots find there.  The oxygen

which the leaves manufacture must not be exhaled into space; instead

it will be transported down to the roots and released into the regions

where men will live and take their ease among the tree trunks.  One

question still remains.  How high can a tree on a comet grow?  The

answer is surprising.  On any celestial body whose diameter is of the

order of ten miles or less, the force of gravity is so weak that a

tree can grow infinitely high.  Ordinary wood is strong enough to lift

its own weight to an arbitrary distance from the center of gravity.  

This means that from a comet of ten-mile diameter, trees can grow out

for hundreds of miles, collecting the energy of sunlight from an area

thousands of times as large as the area of the comet itself.  Seen

from far away, the comet will look like a small potato sprouting an

immense growth of stems and foliage.  When man comes to live on the

comets, he will find himself returning to the arboreal existence of

his ancestors.  

We shall bring to the comets not only trees but a great variety of

other flora and fauna to create for ourselves an environment as

beautiful as ever existed on Earth.  Perhaps we shall teach our

plants to make seeds which will sail out across the ocean of space to

propagate life upon comets still unvisited by man.  Perhaps we shall

start a wave of life which will spread from comet to comet without end

until we have achieved the greening of the Galaxy.  That may be an end

or a beginning, as Bernal said, but from here it is out of sight