Quote:The future of virtual reality is far more than just video games. Silicon Valley sees the creation of virtual worlds as the ultimate free-market solution to a political problem. In a world of increasing wealth inequality, environmental disaster, and political instability, why not sell everyone a device that whisks them away to a virtual world free of pain and suffering?

Tech billionaires aren’t shy about sharing this. “Some people read this the wrong way and react incorrectly to it. The promise of VR is to make the world you wanted. It is not possible, on Earth, to give everyone all that they would want. Not everyone can have Richard Branson’s private island,” Doom co-creator and former CTO of Oculus John Carmack told Joe Rogan during a 2020 interview. “People react negatively to any talk of economics, but it is resource allocation. You have to make decisions about where things go. Economically, you can deliver a lot more value to a lot of people in the virtual sense.”

Virtual reality is an attractive escape, but it’s not a solution to the world’s ills. The problems of the real world will persist beyond the borders of the metaverse created by companies such as Epic, Valve, and Facebook. Without decisive and radical action, our planet will continue to burn, the gap between the rich and poor will grow, and totalitarian political movements will flourish. All while some of us are plugged into a virtual world.

Worse, the virtual world will be one owned and controlled by the companies that create them. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a Facebook-branded set of VR goggles strapped to an emaciated human face—forever.
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But all these problems can be overcome. As Carmack mentioned in his Rogan interview, tech companies will drive down the cost of the headsets. “Moore's law may be crapping out in terms of absolute performance, but we've still got a lot of price-performance that we can drive out of these things,” he said. “We can have virtual reality devices that can get cheap enough that lots and lots of people will be able to have these.”

Billionaires See VR as a Way to Avoid Radical Social Change

Quote:Carol, tell me how the Institute for Security and Cooperation in Outer Space began.

I formed the institute in 1983 after becoming aware of a few men who intended to escalate the arms race into space. This was before President Reagan announced the Star Wars program. My aim was to educate the public and decision makers about the dangers and alternatives.

I first heard conversations about "seizing the high ground to control earth" when I became the first woman corporate manager of Fairchild Industries, an aerospace defense company.

The late Dr. Werner von Braun, the father of rocketry, advised me to learn about how serious the space weapons game is as I coordinated a youth program and satellite educational programs. Von Braun also urged me to work to transform the game.

Von Braun thought it would be interesting, even funny, if a woman worked to prevent the stationing of weapons in outer space-which he sensed was soon to occur. He believed a woman would be able to get into more doors to discuss the subject. He had worked for Hitler, and understood war and weapons. Being a scientist and engineer, he saw the potential for applying space technology and information services to protecting humanity and the environment.

In 1977, after his death, I was hired as a space and missile defense consultant by such companies as TRW. While working on the MX missile, I learned that the aerospace defense industries were preparing to escalate the arms race into space. The plan is to put hundreds of battle stations in space with thousands of weapons pointed down our throats.

Were you shocked when you first heard about the possibility of weapons in outer space?

I was shocked when von Braun first explained that this was not a game but a dangerous reality that would occur unless someone stopped it and created a new reality. But I was not shocked at all as I got to know the players. It was shocking to have my life threatened by two intelligence agents because I had spoken out publicly about the MX missile.

Fortunately, I have developed a warped sense of humor from appearing on road-tour debates with generals, industry and military reps, and politicians. These include Gen. Daniel Graham, who first introduced the Star Wars program to President Reagan. Graham declared to me, on international CNN-TV, that nuclear weapons and space weapons aren't really so bad. He said that you can walk 4.2 miles from the site of a nuclear blast and be safe if you hide behind a lilac bush!

I am frequently amazed and saddened at the ignorance, closed-mindedness and stubbornness about this subject. I am also disappointed at the lack of nerve among the individuals associated with space and defense programs who agree privately that there should be no weapons in space, but who are afraid to speak out publicly.

I wasn't even shocked that Clinton simply lied about his intention to stop Star Wars. Nor did it surprise me that the Republican majority is committed to deploying space weapons and to ending the ABM Treaty as soon as possible. Or that the "boys" in Washington have renamed the Strategic Defense Initiative; it is now called the Ballistic Missile Defense Program. They don't believe that "Star Wars is dead."

You haven't always been public with your beliefs, have you?

No, I got very quiet after the Gulf War. I was in a 1977 meeting when this war was being planned, and felt devastated when it actually occurred.

What do you mean?

The Gulf War was orchestrated to show why a new phase of weapons in space is necessary. I heard executives say that when there was $25 billion in the space weapons program, making it almost impossible to stop, a war would be fomented in that region to demonstrate why a new phase of weapons [in space] was needed. That's exactly what happened. Patriot missiles knocking down Scuds were used to show why we should advance into space-based weaponry.

I burned out after that experience. However, I am slowly venturing out again because I know we haven't much time to prevent the arming of space. Right now, for example, more plutonium than ever before is scheduled for launch from Florida-enough, if an accident occurs, to give cancer to most of the world's population. I feel a sense of responsibility to sound the alarm and to present an alternative vision.

Carol Rosin on World Law and Peace in Space

Quote:Between 1952 and 1954 Wernher von Braun, the German–American rocket engineer, was the key participant in one of the most influential campaigns to sell spaceflight ever attempted, a series of articles in Collier’s magazine. The subsequent literature on the history of spaceflight, much of it written by von Braun enthusiasts or influenced by their accounts, has depicted this campaign mostly as a forerunner to later programs for the peaceful and scientific exploration of space [1]. Yet the centerpiece of von Braun’s plan for space travel, which he had been developing since at least 1946, was a manned space station which would not only serve as a base for further exploration, but also as an orbiting reconnaissance platform and battle station for achieving "space superiority" over the USSR. One its roles could be the launching of nuclear missiles. When challenged as to the station’s defensibility, von Braun even posited pre-emptive atomic strikes from space as a response to the development of a hostile anti-satellite capability. For von Braun, the space station was the "ultimate weapon" which could impose a pax Americana on the USSR (Fig. 1) [2].

Von Braun may in fact have been the first person to use the term ‘‘space superiority’’ in print, although the absence of any historical literature about pre-Sputnik conceptions and fantasies of space warfare makes it impossible to say for sure. Obviously derived from "air superiority", an air-power concept popularized in World War II, space superiority is now a normal term-of-art among the advocates of "space power" and "space control" centered on the US Air Force (USAF). Ironically, that makes Wernher von Braun a forgotten forerunner to space power theory—ironic because the Army-affiliated von Braun believed that his nuclear-armed space stations would make Air Force strategic bombers obsolete, much to the irritation of that service.



After the US Army transferred his German-led rocket-engineering organization in Huntsville, AL to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 1959/60, his focus shifted from weapons to peaceful space exploration. His early cold war past was sanitized by omission, just as was his Nazi one, as it conflicted with his public image and that of NASA. Only in recent years, as historians and political scientists went back and actually read von Braun’s publications of 1952–53, have they begun to take notice of the military and cold war theme, but except for Rainer Eisfeld’s and Johannes Weyer’s short books in German, these works do not mention pre-emptive strikes or the centrality of the military space station to von Braun’s early postwar spaceflight conceptions [4]. What has been lacking, in either English or German, is deep primary research into Wernher von Braun’s original correspondence and papers, which reveal the character and course of that campaign and its origins in earlier space advocacy [5]. This article attempts to redress that balance.

Quote:In response to reader enquiries, he [Hermann Oberth, a Transylvanian Saxon physicist and engineer] also discussed the possibility of intercontinental rockets with poison-gas warheads in his 1929 book Wege zur Raumschiffahrt (Paths to Spaceflight) [6].

That same year, 1929, a book called Das Problem der Befahrung des Weltraums: Der Raketenmotor (The Problem of Space Travel: The Rocket Motor) appeared under the mysterious pseudonym Hermann Noordung. Noordung was actually Herman Potocnik, a former Austro-Hungarian officer who died about the time the book was published. His book offered no new military ideas beyond what Oberth had discussed in 1923, but it did provide an elaborate description of an inflatable, wheel-shaped space station that used a solar concentrator mirror to generate electricity. Although there is no explicit evidence that the then 17-year-old Wernher von Braun read Noordung’s book, in 1929/30 he wrote a plotless short story, ‘‘Lunetta,’’ about a trip to the space station that sounds very much like Noordung’s. Moreover, the similarity between von Braun’s post-World War II space stations and that of Noordung is too great to be coincidental. A further influence on von Braun may have been Weimar science fiction novels that depicted the space mirror and rocket as superweapons, although this is difficult to prove as he later spoke only in generalities about what fictional works he had read [7].

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The key to victory, after "the motorized forces of the Western Allies had ground to a solid stop in the vastness of the steppes of Asia," in "the dread winter of 1974/1975" had been the space station "Lunetta"—the name he still treasured from his teenage short-story of 1930. It had served as a battle station for dominating Earth, dropping atomic missiles on Soviet industrial and military facilities until the USSR collapsed [15].

This piece of cold war wishful thinking was rooted in von Braun’s conservative anti-communism, which had only been strengthened by the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, the Berlin Blockade and the ordeal of his parents and other relatives in communist hands. The German catastrophe had
forced him to abandon the German nationalist parts of a conservative world-view he had inherited from his father, but he remained conservative by instinct, now transferring his allegiance to the USA as the "bulwark" of Western culture [16].

In the Preface to the novel, von Braun wrote regarding the military implications of rocket development: "My most earnest hope is that the world may be spared another conflict, but if such a conflict should be inevitable, as appears at times, I want the homeland of my free choice, America, to hold the weapon of rocketry against her adversaries, whoever they may be." [17].

It is interesting that, while von Braun could be a visionary in technologies he really cared about—basically spaceflight—with others he was no more farsighted than anyone else. He did not foresee thermonuclear weapons and the resultant escalation of destructive power to levels suicidal for the human race. Nor did he anticipate the age of ICBMs.

"Space superiority": Wernher von Braun’s campaign for a nuclear-armed space station, 1946–1956 (PDF) by Michael J. Neufeld.