William K. Hartmann

My grandfather used to tell me storiesabout the Old Days. After the Chineselanded on the Moon, the Americans

started this crash program to go to Mars. Butwhen they started stopping off at asteroids onthe way, they decided that asteroids weremore valuable. They claimed some of themwere made of pure iron. My grandfather wason one of the prospecting crews that flew toone of them, number 3341 he called it. Theythought it had metals, but it turned out to beone of the uninteresting ones. He told me henever went back, but he did spend time at theresearch station on Mars until they closed itdown. In private, he still claimed they hadfound microbes under the permafrost, inspite of the scriptural counter-arguments.

He thought people in his generation wereheading into a golden age, because they weremoving mineral extraction industries intospace and powering them by solar energy,and reducing the levels of twentieth-centurypollution on Earth. He said something aboutcutting the CO2 emissions, which they usedto claim were the cause of the ice caps melt-ing. Of course, as we know today, it was allbased on secular hubris, funded by big gov-ernment programs that used taxes to benefituniversity intellectuals.

The problem was that the scientists andacademics appealed to so-called facts insteadof common sense and faith. They tried toindoctrinate children with godless liberalideas. For example, they claimed that theEarth was 4.5 billion years old, which we nowknow to be a mistake due to trusting isotopesthat were put in the ground by Satan. Theyalso claimed that humans could build intelli-gent machines, that life had been createdbeyond Eden on Mars, and that planets hadbeen discovered around other stars — ideasthat would make Earth and humanity merelya random part of nature, instead of the cen-terpiece of Creation. Fortunately, commonsense began to prevail when the US Senate cutoff the funding for this type of research andremoved these ideas from school curricula.

The cut-off of public funding to secularhumanist universities and science founda-tions proved that those once-coddled insti-tutions couldn’t compete in the modernmarket-place. The resulting tax cuts, and theinstitution of free-enterprise-based fundingof scholars through approved Think Tanks,ushered in our new Fundamentalist Age. Thecorrupting influence of ‘secular science’ hasbeen well documented. For example, there

against the scientific method, we survivorshave gained the Lord’s approval once again.That is why people like my grandfather hadto be sequestered, both for their own goodand for the good of civilization. ■

David (aged 19). Admissions essay for the GeorgeWill Think Tank, 2063.

The paradigm and the pendulumAll hail the new Dark Ages.

futures

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were attempts to redistribute the naturaldiversities in wealth, reduce population,teach children that men were related to apes,and encourage women to participate in pub-lic life. The Lord rendered his judgement onthese evils in the 2050s by sending faminesand plagues. With the world-wide Jihad

The end of the scientific era began in theUnited States around 2000, whenfundamentalist political forces allied

themselves with anti-environmentalistinternational corporate interests, and beganto attain electoral majorities, due to splinter-ing of the political centre. Starting with con-trol of local school districts, they eventuallycaptured the national government. This suc-cess encouraged fundamentalism in Europeand Asia.

All these forces shared a revulsion againstwhat they regarded as the corrupting spreadof humanistic thinking associated with thescientific method, which had promotedunpopular new data about biological evolu-tion, the plurality of worlds, species extinc-tions and global climate change. In variouscountries this political alliance terminatedthe funding of traditional scientific researchand destroyed a number of libraries anddatabases. This, in turn, ended the fledglingefforts to deal with environmental, health,

and population issues, and to establishhuman capability in space.

Since the decline of the fundamentalistmovement, new research has supportedsome of the once-ridiculed twentieth-cen-tury work. Isotopic work at the University ofIceland has reaffirmed the great antiquity ofGreenland rocks and the purported lunarrock samples. Resources of solar-basedenergy and asteroidal metals reported in the2020s, if confirmed, could help to re-estab-lish a vibrant technology-based civilization.

But many scholars argue that it is too late:the destruction of the global scientific infra-structure, coinciding with the near-exhaus-tion of easily accessible terrestrial resourcesin the mid-twenty-first century, effectivelyprohibits humanity from achieving a sec-ond industrial revolution or becoming aninterplanetary culture. In this view, we arenow imprisoned on Earth forever. ■

Report on the New Science, UNESCO IIconference, Spitsbergen, June 2100.

Planetary scientist William K. Hartmann was the first winner of the Carl Sagan Medal of the AmericanAstronomical Society (1998). His current novel, Mars Underground (Saint Martin’s Press), deals withgovernment control of science and is the basis for some of the history described here.

JAC

EY

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