New NASA report is blatant politics

Published 10:47 pm Thursday, March 20, 2014

We pay NASA to make science fiction into reality. We don’t pay NASA to turn history into liberal fantasy.

But that’s what the space agency has done with a new report, which warns that if Americans don’t redistribute the country’s wealth right now, we will go the way of the Romans and the Mesopotamians.

“Two important features seem to appear across societies that have collapsed,” the study claims. “The stretching of resources due to the strain placed on the ecological carrying capacity and the economic stratification of society into Elites and Masses.”

That’s not hard science; that’s leftist doctrine. No wonder, because according to the (London) Guardian newspaper, the study “is based on a new cross-disciplinary ‘Human And Nature Dynamical’ (HANDY) model, led by applied mathematician Safa Motesharrei of the U.S. National Science Foundation-supported National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, in association with a team of natural and social scientists.”

The National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center attempts to blend the hard sciences with the softer sort, with predictable results. This report seems typical of the Center’s work. The study begins with the obvious and objective, and veers into the subjective and political.

“The fall of the Roman Empire, and the equally (if not more) advanced Han, Mauryan, and Gupta Empires, as well as so many advanced Mesopotamian Empires, are all testimony to the fact that advanced, sophisticated, complex, and creative civilizations can be both fragile and impermanent,” it says.

Well, sure. That’s what the history books tell us — because that’s what happened to those empires. That’s the objective fact. The subjective conclusion, however, is on shakier ground.

“Collapse can be avoided and population can reach equilibrium if the per capita rate of depletion of nature is reduced to a sustainable level, and if resources are distributed in a reasonably equitable fashion,” the report warns.

But that conclusion is wrong because the analogy is false. The reasons Rome fell are many and various, and have been the subject of endless discussion throughout the ages. Barbarians kicked in the gates, citizens relied upon slave labor, Christianity overthrew the old pantheon.

Any claim of a real similarity between Rome (or the Han dynasty or India’s Gupta empires) and the U.S. is a stretch, because of slavery. Those societies depended on slave labor controlled by force. What America offers that Rome never did was freedom, the rule of law, and economic mobility.

As for resource depletion, the hard scientists involved with the study should have pointed out that technological advances allow us all to produce more and consume fewer resources than ever. Like the “peak oil” theory, resource depletion warnings talk about a catastrophe that’s further and further away.

The truth is that societies that are the most redistributive do the worst job of maximizing resources, distributing needed goods — and surviving. Where’s the Soviet Union today?

Those societies also prove to be the most stratified between elites and the masses. Look at the opulent Castro and Chavez palaces.

The study, funded through NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, was a clear misuse of the science agency’s resources.