On migration (was Spammer removed)

I initially hoped "Want to migrate..?" was a pitch for moving to an
O'Neill habitat. :-) We'll see SPAM about that someday, I dream. :-)

On migration, I did find of great interest the following linked weblog
post by someone concerned about Peak Oil (and related supposed government
persecution) who tried migrating to Venezuela from the USA (see the essay
"EVOLUTION" here):
http://mikeruppert.blogspot.com/2006_11_01_mikeruppert_archive.html
[Note: for the record, I don't subscribe to the Peak Oil theory in terms
of its implications; like Nazi Germany, the US or China could always use
gassified or liquefied coal at greater environmental cost for centuries,
see for example:
http://cbs2chicago.com/medillnewsservice/local_story_143210425.html ]

From that first (blog) link, Mike Ruppert writes: "Living in Venezuela
has been an amazing, brutal, and illuminating lesson. It is a truly alien
culture that I find simultaneously beautiful, hard, giving, unfamiliar,
uncomfortable and definitely self-protecting to the extreme. That is why I
am confident that Venezuela, and most of Latin America, will survive the
coming crash of Peak Oil better than any other region of the world. I
believe it is already starting to protect itself. It doesnt need me or
any outsider to survive. But as a general rule, only those who are native
here will be protected by its blessings. ... The important distinctions
about adaptivity are not racial at all. US citizens come in all colors.
American culture is the water they have swum in since birth. A native US
citizen of Latin descent who did not (or even did) speak Spanish would
probably feel almost as out of place here as I do. They would look the
same but not feel the same. And when it came time to deal collectively
with a rapidly changing world, a world in turmoil, a native-born
Americans inbred decades of instinctive survival skills might not
harmonize with the skills used by those around him. Another one of my
trademarked lines is that Post Peak survival is not a matter of individual
survival or national survival. It is a matter of cooperative, community
survival. If one is not a fully integrated member of a community when the
challenges come, one might hinder the effectiveness of the entire
community which has unspoken and often consciously unrecognized ways of
adapting. As stresses increase, the gauntlets required to gain acceptance
in strange places will only get tougher. Diversity will become more,
rather than less, rigid and enforced. ... Start building your lifeboats
where you are now. I can see that the lessons I have learned here are
important whether you are thinking of moving from city to countryside,
state to state, or nation to nation. Whatever shortcomings you may think
exist where you live are far outnumbered by the advantages you have where
you are a part of an existing ecosystem that you know and which knows you.
If the time comes when it is necessary to leave that community you will be
better off moving with your tribe rather than moving alone."

[Note: after four months there, he is now in Toronto, Canada. It's a sad
story.]

I think many of his comments are insightful from his first hand
experience, especially his words: "Whatever shortcomings you may think
exist where you live are far outnumbered by the advantages you have where
you are a part of an existing ecosystem that you know and which knows you.".

Still, I disagree with the "lifeboat" emphasis of his thinking. If we
spent all our time thinking about building "lifeboats" we may create the
very crisis that necessitates them. Whereas if we focus on building better
and more sustainable neighborhoods (including ones in space(*)) just
because it is a good thing to do, we may never have such a crisis. Here is
one such positive project:
"RepRap is short for Replicating Rapid-prototyper. It is a practical
self-copying 3D printer developed under the free GPL license"
http://www.reprap.org/
Other links that are part of the solution:
Moving beyond a notion of wage slavery
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
http://www.whywork.org/
http://www.schumachersociety.org/buddhist_economics.html
Sustainable urban housing from over a decade ago
http://www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/popup/hhtoronto/works.htm
Better ways of education
http://www.unschooling.com/
http://www.holtgws.com/whatisunschoolin.html
http://www.albanyfreeschool.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_school
A better philosophy of as gift economy the Americas used to have
http://www.marcinequenzer.com/horn_of_plenty.htm
And this for general inspiration:
_Voyage from Yesteryear_ by James P. Hogan
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/voyage/baen99/titlepage.shtml

Or as I put it in another private forum (merging and rewriting bits from
various posts): Sadly, while average statistics may show higher overall
happiness in many countries for people born and raised there than the USA,
see:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/3157570.stm
http://www.expatica.com/actual/article.asp?subchannel_id=7&story_id773
http://www.worlddatabaseofhappiness.eur.nl/
it is also likely that specific lives often may not be made happier by
moving to statistically happier countries from somewhere else. Because
even if you move somewhere, you will never have been born and raised there.

And as my father, a world traveler as a merchant mariner said, "wherever
you go, you take yourself along". That is also one reason the Dali Lama
suggests people find value in the spiritual traditions they were raised
in, rather than trying to convert to, say, Buddhism -- as he says, as I
recall it, there are a lot of ignorant and ill-tempered Buddhists. (Not
exactly what he said, but that is the spirit of it).

Note this is a very different thing than saying the USA is better than
most other industrialized countries for its citizens, given the USA has
low rated health care for most,
http://www.ihealthbeat.org/index.cfm?Action=dspItem&itemID5260
http://psychservices.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/57/12/1840
looming national debt problems ($80+ trillion in obligations),
http://www.thestreet.com/_dm/markets/economics/10305903.html
long working hours,
http://www.usatoday.com/money/workplace/2003-12-16-hours-cover_x.htm
low press freedom (at the level of Botswana, Tonga, and Croatia),
http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article384
a high prison population,
http://usgovinfo.about.com/cs/censusstatistic/a/aaprisonpop.htm
little formal social support safety nets (besides prison),
http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2005/12/13/biloxi/index.html
is despised by many around the world (even if it is still envied in some
ways),
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/2994924.stm
and so on. Even if a solid 1% or so of US citizens are doing *very* well
financially, for various conventional economic reasons the other 99% can't
realistically aspire to that type of relative financial success (since
such extreme success, including having servants, is by definition built on
the backs of others), but many aspire anyway which keeps the system going,
like a lottery.
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/showthread.php?id=488
Which help explain those lower marks on those general happiness surveys
for the USA than many other industrialized countries, considering how
otherwise one might expect the USA to come out on top.

So I'm not saying the USA is tops. It is just saying that, having been
born and raised here (for good or bad), it is better for almost any US
citizen to stay than to go, and to try to make it better (including by
making things both of value right now and also of value long term to space
settlement, like helping with the RepRap project). And I would very much
dislike to see just the same patterns of thought and action harmign many
in the USA part just be duplicated off into space. :-( So I feel it is
best for most people to try to make the best of it -- including helping
others see how things could improve here, maybe hoping to help avoid the
US going down the same route as, say, pre-WWII Germany (including using
liquefied coal).

And fortunately, we don't have to choose between advancing space
settlement versus advancing sustainable development on Earth, because many
of the tools and community processes needed for either of those two
efforts are the *same*. Things like recycling, alternative energy
production that is safe and reliable, flexible manufacturing or nanotech
matter replicators, self-guiding vehicles for mining or transport,
improved medical procedures like telemedicine or self-applied diagnostics,
collaborative process of engineering using free licenses, thinking about
new forms of social organization at the small scale neighborhood level,
and so on. All ways we can both make the USA or the world a better place,
while also promoting a pro-space agenda. Naturally there won't be total
agreement on all those things or among all the people who pursue them, but
there is a lot of overlap.

Freeman Dyson has said he thinks the first people moving to Space Habitats
will be pretty unusual ones (I am putting this politely. :-) Just consider
what the early pioneers of any country were like, or what many people's
reasons for leaving their homeland might have been (I'm a child of
immigrants to the USA from Holland after WWII, so I saw some of that first
hand). It is quite possible, I think, that only the second or third
generation in any new settlement will be truly happy there (both from the
material success of earlier generations and also because growing up there
it will feel natural).

On the other hand, Space Habitats won't have existing cultures to
assimilate into at first. So that experience may be quite different. and
perhaps the concerns listed above may not apply. Perhaps it is the people
who move to space habitats from Earth only after the habitats have become
well from established who will experience the culture shock that Mike
Ruppert went through, in which case it would be best to be part of the
first wave of migration to them. :-) Are there already any good stories
like that, where the new immigrants leave the space habitat to go back,
not because it is worse, but because it is better in such an alien way? I
vaguely remember one I read somewhere (involving solving a murder?), where
an immigrant couple's children stay behind in the habitats but the parents
return to Earth as one of the couple could not adapt to the new place.

Personally, I think the best reason to build space habitats is not from a
"lifeboat" mentality, but from a "joyous" mentality -- space habitats of
various kinds in various locations could be neat new places to live in and
exciting places to visit, just like Toronto or Tokyo. That's probably the
most positive reason to build any new thing, I feel. I don't think they
need more long term justification than that (short term financing may be a
different story. :-). But it's a big plus that the same ideas used to
build those new communities can likely also be used to make the USA and
the rest of the planet a nicer place to live too, IMHO.

By the way, Mike, thanks for doing such a great job managing the list; a
mostly thankless job I'm sure, but well worth doing.

--Paul Fernhout
(*) Ideally, neighborhoods with style located in self-replicating space
habitats that can duplicate themselves from sunlight and asteroidal ore.