<Victory From Space

By Robert Zubrin

How can America's space program contribute to victory? There are a number of obvious ways. Our reconnaissance satellites will spot the terrorist encampments, our navigation satellites will guide us to them, and our communication satellites will allow us to coordinate our forces to assure that they prevail in combat.

To previous invaders, Afghanistan was a maze of death. Because of our spacecraft, however, we will be able to view the maze from above, rather than within. These are critical capabilities. They will provide the essential margin needed to eliminate Bid Laden's guerillas before they can strike too many more and deadlier blows.

Unfortunately, however, the enemy is not just a few thousand cultists. It is a cult. To defeat the enemy, we must not only destroy its current forces, we must discredit the ideology that allows it to recruit.

We are not at war with a handful of savages. We are at war with an idea.

The Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon signaled the beginning of a war by fundamentalist Islam against the West. Why does fundamentalist Islam hate the West? it hates the West because of its core beliefs.

The central idea behind western civilization is the radical proposition advanced by the Greek philosopher Socrates that there is an innate faculty of the human mind capable of distinguishing right from wrong, justice from injustice, truth from untruth.

This idea was embraced by early Christianity as the basis of the concept of the conscience, which thereupon became the axiomatic foundation of western morality. It is also the basis of our highest notions of law ("We hold these truths to be self evident ...") and science, man's search for universal truth through the tools of reason.

Fundamentalist Islam denies all of this. It denies the existence or deserved authority of the conscience. Instead, right and wrong can only be known through the Koran, as interpreted by fundamentalist mullahs.

It denies moral responsibility further because it denies the existence of free will. It denies reasoned investigation of nature completely because it denies the idea of causality. Instead, it argues that the universe is created and destroyed repeatedly in every succeeding instant by the will of Allah. Thus scientific activity is useless, and in fact is proscribed.

It should thus be clear why fundamentalist Islam is at war with the West. But the West has not been its first target. Its first victim was rationalist Islam.

In the Islamic world, the fundamentalists have not always been on top.

In its formative period, Islamic society included a strong rationalist current led by the Mu'tazilites, who believed in the parity of reason and revelation, and produced many profound philosophers such as Al Farabi, Averroes (Ibn Rushd), and Avicenna (Ibn Sina).

A thousand years ago, it was not the West, but Islam, that had the broadest intellectual horizons. Islamic thinkers created algebra and radically advanced astronomy and medicine. At a time when there were no colleges in Europe, the Islamic world had hundreds. At a time when the largest European libraries contained a few hundred volumes, there were Islamic libraries with hundreds of thousands.

But then the fundamentalists took over. The philosophers were made into fugitives. Scientific inquiry was banned. Libraries that were found to contain scientific works were burned.

Printing, which appeared briefly in the Islamic world several hundred years before its advent in Europe, was banned, and did not reappear until its reintroduction by American missionaries in the 1830s.

The colleges were turned from centers of inquiry into mental slaughterhouses where generation after generation of the brightest youth were made to memorize the Koran by rote.

With the fundamentalist takeover, the most glorious civilization humanity had ever known was turned into a dung heap of misery, mental slavery, degradation and ignorance. A quarter of the world was turned into a graveyard of the mind, which for the past 700 years has not produced a single significant scientific advance.

It is thus ironic to hear the arguments of the apologists for Fundamentalist terror who claim that the terrorist actions are some kind of counterattack against the maceration of the Islamic world supposedly caused by the West, or even more absurdly, the minute state of Israel.

In fact, it is the internal combustion engines invented and manufactured in the West that have for the better part of the past century supplied the Islamic world with its only significant source of wealth. No, the poverty and degradation of the Islamic world has been caused solely by the fact that those within it who would use reason to advance its condition have been suppressed by fundamentalism.

I believe we need to use science to defeat not only the fundamentalists, but fundamentalism itself. A grand work of reason is not simply an object of utility, but a celebration of the human spirit. This is nowhere more true than when man looks out into space to attempt to comprehend the universe itself.

As the Renaissance scientist Johannes Kepler, the discoverer of the laws of planetary motion, put it, “Geometry is one and eternal, a reflection out of the mind of God. That mankind shares in it is one reason to call man the image of God.”

There it is. The human mind, because it is the image of God, is able to understand the laws of the universe. It was the forceful demonstration of this proposition by Kepler, Galileo, and others that let loose the scientific revolution in the West.

But works of reason can be more than contemplative; they can be creative. Consider the object of the terrorists rage; the World Trade Center. A triumph of the human mind, the WTC was the most recent of the series of astonishing feats of civil engineering New York City has shown the world over the past 118 years.

These architectural marvels have their uses, but their value goes much deeper. The creator of the first of them, Johann Roebling, designer of the Brooklyn Bridge, said it well; “No one will be able to look at it and not feel prouder to be a man.”

Prouder, indeed. Roebling's bridge doesn't just have Gothic arches, it is a Gothic cathedral, whose unprecedented span and poetic form constitute a soaring salute to the power of the human mind. But some people have not gotten the message yet. So I propose we hit harder. Let's build a gothic cathedral whose significance no one can miss. Kepler et al showed that we could understand the heavens.

Let's drive the point home by using our space program to show that we can navigate them, or better yet, take possession.

There are those who, panic-stricken in the current crisis, would gut our space exploration programs. This makes no more sense than a decision to tear down our skyscrapers. In fact, it is worse, because it would undermine our war effort.

To defeat fundamentalism we need to do more than hunt down its current batch of expendable pawns. We need to utterly humiliate the doctrine itself by demonstrating for all to see the sublime and infinite power of human reason. So let's send probes to Europa and humans to Mars. Better yet, let's settle on Mars, and bring the dead planet to life.

Let's show that we can not only understand creation, but continue its process, by transforming barren worlds into new homes for life and civilization.

This is no time for science to retreat; it must attack.

Let's launch an offensive to free forever the minds of men from fundamentalist tyranny.

A universe open to humanity would be a hymn to reason written large across the firmament. It would be the key to true victory. Because no one will be able to look upon it and not feel prouder to be human.



* * *

My take on this: he's right. Your take?