As Paul Craig Roberts wrote earlier this year, "Only in science fiction can humans escape the consequences of destroying their own habitat." Unable to deal with the glaring contradictions of capitalism and a healthy planet, our capitalist masters are forced by their addiction to power and profits to engage in fantasy. Here Roberts, while borrowing from Heinlein, describes what I think is the ultimate capitalist fantasy and its consequences:
In Robert A. Heinlein’s Time Enough For Love, the “Great Diaspora of the Human Race” began “more than two millennia ago” and has spread to more than “two thousand colonized planets.” The once “lovely green planet” Earth is a slum planet barely able to support life where only the poorest live, Earth’s natural capital having been consumed over two thousand years ago. Humans have found the ability to rejuvenate themselves and to live almost endless lives, but they are unable to rejuvenate the planets whose natural capital they devour. Humans have not encountered “one race as mean, as nasty, as deadly as our own.” As homo sapiens use up the environments of colonized planets, “human intergalactic colony ships are already headed out into the Endless Deeps,” leaving their ruins behind them.