I’m posting this on BW because it’s a great example of the danger to our society posed by eggheads in modern educational systems. The video is a publication from the British Royal Institution. This is how a professor of particle physics gets his idiotic social concepts into the brains of his students, and anyone else that doesn’t know better.
It’s nearly an hour long lecture that I enjoyed the bulk of until this Professor went from brilliant to stupid in the span of a sentence. If you’re not into astrophysics you can just take my word for it and stipulate he knows what he’s talking about in that area of study. Then skip to the 53 minute mark to see what I’m talking about.
Great lecture, right up to the 53 minute mark. After that it’s nonsense and simply proves that particle physicists are not sociologists nor economists and should stick to their own field. Where they have competence. To thus avoid making appealing but absurd comments in areas in which they have no competence at all.
Professor Beacham goes through his lecture on physics at several points demanding that evidence must support theory. Yet when he gets to his musings on society and the future he presents no evidence supporting the pursuit of his starry-eyed, inviting, idyllic but impossibly naïve utopia.
It takes wealth to build a society bigger and better. There is no other way to get sufficient participation and cooperation from human beings than the application and manipulation of wealth. All other schemes have failed and will continue to fail as long as they neglect to take human nature into account as a prime driver. Humankind would have to become something completely other than what we are before that could even hold the slightest possibility of something remotely resembling the scantest likelihood.
It is the creation of wealth that has made the world we know today possible. Today there is more wealth represented in a single city like Los Angeles, London, New York or Tokyo than existed on all of planet Earth three hundred years ago. It took enormous wealth to build the society we have today and we all, to greater or lesser degrees, benefit from that wealth. We live in an embarrassment of riches and many people don’t seem to realize that. Professor Beacham is one of those people.
There is wealth to build a civilization we cannot today comprehend floating around the rest of our solar system waiting to be utilized for the good of mankind. Yet …
Professor Beacham rails against the evils of (GASP!) “exploitation and extraction” of solar system resources. He doesn’t want us harvesting wealth from anywhere off of our own planet to improve the lot of we who tread the Earth. He’s serious, he even used his “exploitation and extraction” mantra more than once. Yet …
This professor wants a particle collider built around the circumference of the moon. So clearly if we’re not to be permitted to mine asteroids and the moon to supply the materials for his collider — Then they must come from Earth. Thus it’s OK by ol’ James Beacham if we deplete our planet by sending resources off of Earth to give him the toys he wants. LOTS of resources. Because …
A particle collider the circumference of the moon would be an expenditure of wealth another order of magnitude (or more) beyond what can be created as surplus above survival needs today. With the resources available to us on planet Earth. So where do we get those resources if not from other solar system assets?
I can’t help but wonder in Jimmy Beacham’s utopia how many people will starve to death to pay for his lunar collider? What price in human suffering and death is considered justifiable for Jimmy Beacham to get his gadgets and gee-gaws? Because if mankind is to limit ourselves to only the resources on our own planet and forego the ripe riches waiting to be harvested off world then Jimmy Beacham plays a zero sum losing game.
Professor Beacham wants his toys, his instruments for scientific discovery, but will countenance no reasonable means to create the wealth that pays for them in the social future he dreams of.
Therefore those things will never exist.
Indeed, if you, like Professor Beacham want such miracles of science any demand for an utopian fallacy is probably the surest way to guarantee no one will ever achieve them. History and the simple observation of human endeavor proves that to be true.
Yet here we see Professor Beacham clearly endorsing his own logical discontinuity. This kind of thing is why your kids aren’t getting educated in the fashion that they should. Because they’re listening to people like Jimmy Beacham squandering his credibility by speaking things about which he has no clue. Who has complete disregard for the results of his preposterous Pollyanna Policies. People like Professor James Beacham are teaching our kids magical thinking while vanquishing any question of credulity by weight of their own intellectual scholarly positions.
To put that last bit more simply, they’re relying on their expert status in one field to lend them expert status they do not merit in another field. It’s the “This guy is so smart he has to be right” fallacy.
Stop and consider this for a minute … Without “exploitation, extraction and profit” just who do you suppose Jimmy Beacham thinks is going to provide the resources in materials and funding for his moon-girdling collider? Taxes? What’s to tax if the materials have to be mined on Earth? Taxes don’t pay for mines, they make money off of what has been mined and converted to a useful form. Far, far less money than a finished product like a collider. Scholastic educational fees? If he thinks that, then he thinks that universities are high profit propositions indeed. So much for “free education”. Does he believe that the labor force necessary to build his collider will be transported up from Earth, housed, fed and supplied with air and water by magic? Who pays for that supply system? Who pays that workforce? Because if they don’t get paid, if there is no material gain to them, then they’re just slaves in spacesuits. If they are not conscripted no one is going to build his collider, who wants to be a spacesuit clad slave in one of the most hazardous environments ever faced by human beings? Raise your hand if that appeals to you.
Jimmy Beacham makes things sound very rosey when the fact is he’ll never get his toys if they have to be gotten from the society he advocates.
So … Want to bet that if you point all this out to him as a student in one of his classes you get a failing grade no matter how good your grasp and application of particle physics is?