[ExI] A spacefaring hydraulic civilization

Bryan Bishop kanzure at gmail.com
Mon Mar 22 23:33:42 UTC 2010


A spacefaring hydraulic civilization
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1590/1

by Taylor Dinerman
Monday, March 22, 2010

"""
Among the German scientists, scholars, and artists who fled Hitler’s
Germany in the 1930s and came to America, was an ex-Communist
authority on Chinese history and society named Karl Wittfogel
(1896–1988). A survivor of both World War I and a short stint in a
Nazi concentration camp, his close—not to say obsessive—reading of
Marx and of Max Weber led him to develop a set of ideas about what he
termed “Hydraulic Civilization”. He held that the societal mechanisms
needed for the control of water, especially for irrigation and flood
control purposes, leads to a complex bureaucratic state. This
centralized power leads to what he termed “Oriental Despotism”, which
was the title of his 1957 monumental work subtitled “A Comparative
Study of Total Power”.

   "On or off Earth, the way any society distributes and uses water
determines its ultimate destiny."

Now that scientists have found huge deposits of water ice on the Moon,
the question arises of who will control these “hydraulic resources”
and under what authority? Wittfogel thought that in societies like
China, ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Russia, there emerged a “class
in a society whose leaders are the holders of despotic state power and
not private owners and entrepreneurs” and that “in hydraulic society
there exists a bureaucratic landlordism, a bureaucratic capitalism,
and a bureaucratic gentry.” His vocabulary may seem a bit archaic in
2010, but the danger he described is all too real.

The size of the water find on the Moon, estimated at 600 million
metric tons in the Moon’s north polar region alone, may seem like a
lot, but it is roughly the equivalent of the annual output of six
mid-sized desalinization plants. Because of its location it may end up
being very valuable indeed. It is also an indication that water may be
common throughout the solar system.

On or off Earth, the way any society distributes and uses water
determines its ultimate destiny. This is obvious not only to any
farmer or rancher, but to anyone living in or near a flood zone, or to
any politician looking at what happened to George W. Bush’s presidency
after Hurricane Katarina. Under normal circumstances people in the
developed world expect to turn on the tap and have clean water come
out. They seldom think about the amazingly complex system responsible
for that result.

In space, water is even more precious than on Earth. Onboard the
International Space Station (ISS) the efforts made to recycle every
molecule of moisture are well known. Yet water is still going to be
one of the most important items to be delivered to the station by the
various cargo carrying vehicles built by Russia, Europe, Japan, and by
NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation System. Since the ISS
partnership is well established and runs fairly smoothly, there have
been no significant disagreements over the use of these water
resources.

Once the water on the Moon or Mars or the asteroids becomes accessible
to humanity, the ownership and control of it will determine which
nations or peoples will truly be able to profit from space resources.
The unratified Moon Treaty may have its fans, but once the value of
the Moon’s water becomes evident, particularly the possibility of
using it to produce liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen for rocket fuel,
it will become just another irrelevant scrap of paper. Peacefully or
otherwise, the major spacefaring powers will come to an agreement
giving “squatters rights” to whoever first occupies and claims a given
bit of the icy Moon.

    "There are plenty of institutions, and people who run them, who
would be all too happy to take control of the solar system’s water
resources. One can be certain that they will claim to be doing so with
the best of motives."

The challenges involved in mining the deep craters of the lunar poles
are gigantic. Yet on Earth we see that huge deep-sea oil drilling
platforms are able to search for oil kilometers under the seabed. As
long as the prize is of sufficient value there is no reason to think
that human ingenuity will be diminished any time soon. Yet it the very
size of this challenge that may lead to a kind of interplanetary
hydraulic despotism. If the organization and technology needed to
extract water from the Moon and from other celestial bodies is even
more complex and expensive (on a relative basis) than that used to
irrigate and regulate the great river valleys of China, then the
prospect for the future of liberal capitalism in the solar system may
be pretty dim.

If, however, the technology is fairly compact and easy to use, then a
whole new tribe of ice-seeking entrepreneurs and partnerships will
spring up and go to work. For this to happen, a safe legal environment
will have to be in place to allow them secure property rights over
what they find. This means that the US, as the world’s leading liberal
democracy, will have to find a way to be present on the Moon or
someplace else where there are large accessible supplies of water, and
set a legal precedent.

There are plenty of institutions, and people who run them, who would
be all too happy to take control of the solar system’s water
resources. One can be certain that they will claim to be doing so with
the best of motives. Yet, as Wittfogel pointed out, “the hydraulic
state prevents the nongovernmental forces of society from
crystallizing into independent bodies strong enough to counterbalance
and control the political machine.”

If, in the course of humanity’s expansion into the solar system, such
a controlling authority were to be installed, it would freeze any hope
for a spacefaring civilization made up of free and independent men and
women. The control of water would lead to the control of other vital
space-based resources. In time the institution’s power would grow
until it would be able to have a stranglehold on the flow of off-Earth
resources down to the surface of this planet.

For many, in America and elsewhere, this is not a happy thought.
"""

I'll patiently be waiting to see how well Paul can blast the property
rights idea out of the (I am so sorry) water.

- Bryan
http://heybryan.org/
1 512 203 0507




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