Pills and Apologies

05/28/03 00:00:00    

By Michael Mealling

The latest Spacefaring Web article from John Carter McKnight is entitled The Blue Pill Choice. John applies the pop psychology of the Matrix plus a little dojo wisdom to the current state of space advocacy. He suggests that most space advocates (indeed, most of America) has happily opted for accepting the Matrix as is by taking the blue pill while the realists have opted for the hard work, sacrifice, and eventual success of the red pill.

I'm normally not one to talk about some other volunteer's efforts since I've been involved with volunteer organizations for a long time (I was an LP activist for years) and I know how much damage just a little of John's opinion can do to a volunteer. But there's a difference between something like the LP and an organization like the Artemis Society, namely that Artemis has a very clearly defined economic goal and the means to get there. We're not the least bit delusional about the hard work it takes to do it. Its building businesses and markets from the ground up. And that takes time, sweat, pain and money. Something like the LP is pure politics and thus is very much served by its grassroots, voluteer base.

I was definitely struck by the red pill vs blue pill view this past weekend. Many of the prototypical NSS members were definitely blue pill type people. There were notable exceptions, of course. But just about all of the participants in the Enterprise Track had become addicted to the red pills. People like Peter Diamandis and the XCOR guys probably have it fed in from a main line.

But I do have to take issue with one thing John discusses: whether or not property rights issues are red pill or blue pill. What brought the discussion home to me was the discussion with Loretta Hidalgo (Yuri's Night) during the banquet Sunday night. Her background is with NASA and the Space Generation Foundation is very much aligned with the United Nations. As we've all observed, the UN has a dim view of property rights in space. So while I agree that predicating your property rights discussion with “assuming we're all already in orbit making millions” is probably a blue-pill type discussion, ignoring the issue completely and leaving it to the policy wonks at the UN to define those issues before we even get into orbit is taking a blue pill when it comes to international politics. I would certainly hope those discussing space property rights would at least be a little more 'reality' based. Making a claim to the State Department for one of the asteroids based on the idea that “posession is nine tenths of the law so what's that last one tenth?” is not going to be helpful. Having a cogent legal discussion among property rights lawyers in law reviews is probably much more productive. But ignoring the issue completely is also just as bad.

My main challenge back to John is that the issue is not the large numbers of blue-pill people but that we have done a poor job of attracting the types of people who are naturally attracted to the red pills. If you remember the first movie, once someone takes the blue pill they never get offered the red pill again. Red pill people need to be shown the reward for their sweat equity. So far we haven't shown that…

Authors Note: Thanks for the apology, John. We plan on policing releases that mention us a bit closer than we did before. Bad press isn't better than no press…