[ExI] Africa wants to double in size

[spike at rainier66.com]

-----Original Message-----
From: extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat
Sent: Tuesday, 2 September, 2025 10:26 AM
To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Cc: Adrian Tymes <atymes at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [ExI] Africa wants to double in size

On Tue, Sep 2, 2025 at 1:02 PM spike jones via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> BillK, I have long been aware of not just the relative size of Africa with respect to Russia (and everywhere else) but also that its natural resources are more abundant and easier to get to than anywhere.  I am astonished the locals haven't set up more industry analogous to what was done in Europe, Asia and the Americas.  They have energy, lotsa solar, plenty of people, plenty of everything.  We could turn that place into the new center of the world, lotsa tall beautiful buildings everywhere, cities, productive mechanized farms, money waaay up the kazoo everywhere, transcontinental freeways, oh the works.  We could turn Africa into Gotham City, the swingin place to be, Batman!
>
> Instead, most of it is just savanna, nothing, vast wasteland, boring, lions, tigers, chimps, the world's game reserve.  Get those damn beasts to the zoo and let's get going, fix this place up, put in some CIVILIZATION!  Africa needs a VISION!

A large part of the problem has been, ironically, people wanting to do this for or to them, with...
* A minor or completely absent "with them" component.
* No controls to keep things from going broken or corrupt.
* In many cases, no intention to keep things from going corrupt.

>...Whether paying one tribe to turn other tribes into slaves, setting up colonies for resource extraction, or just seeing every success cannibalized by a people long used to having to cannibalize to survive (and encouraged to do this by outside parties, who continue to basically treat them as wealth extraction colonies), "put in some CIVILIZATION" in Africa is not so simple as it seems - even if you start from those parts where there is civilization.  (Nigeria, for instance, is the 6th most populous country in the world.  You might start by considering Nigeria, Egypt, Kenya, and/or South Africa.)

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Well, OK there is that.

Adrian, what we need to do is get them to build freeways and cars, lotsa cool hot cars.  That gets the younger guys revved up, wanting to hop them up and race, stuff like we used to do when we were their age, the stuff that made America great to start with.  Cars, freedom, they already have guns there, get them some good rock and roll going, radio stations, move in with the kinds of technologies we used to get to here and now.

All these things but most of all... cars, good fast ones.  They have oil in Africa.  They aren't pumping much of it yet, but it is there.  We help them set up the oil wells, get paid in uranium, we go off and do our nuke thing, they do the Africa version of our 1950s, oh we make a buttload and they end up with much better lives.  Everyone wins.

Well, OK not everyone.  The lions and wildebeests and such will need to move over, and of course there will be the stodgy old conservatives who like the old ways better, but we had those here too when rock and roll came along, and we dealt with it (the stodgy conservatives I mean (not the wildebeests (I don't know what a wildebeest is (but I kinda like the sound of it (I'll nickname my motorcycle the WILDEBEEST.)))))

Africa has plenty of everything except ambition.  I can't detect genuine ambition in that place.  They have everything else they need, plenty of it and more.  Africa needs capitalist vision and AMBITION!

spike