"Closing of the American West" won't truly happen for DENIERS until PONTA DO SOL's labour is too expensive & its natural resources too depleted to profitably keep a factory there

    Where the Bejesus, you might well say, is Ponta do Sol in the American West?
    Well perplexed you surely should be - this tiny place is the only sizable community on the island of  Santo Antao, in the tiny African nation of Cape Verde.
   It just happens to be the most western point in the continent of Africa : the truly western-most spot in the American Western frontier ---- for American business anyway.

      Over the centuries, American greedy SOBs have steadily moved their current factories ever westward.
      First they deny that their factories pollute the environment, deplete natural resources and pay low wages & taxes and THEN  they abruptly close the factory and moving on (westward) to ever-newer 'pastures' .
    They are currently finding that the Far East is far too expensive, as even the red commies demand that their citizens receive living wages and living working conditions, at least anytime the media cameras appear.
   Soon the Greed-is-Good variant of the Denier class will be working their offshore factories through the remaining impoverished dictatorships of Africa.
   But after the Cape Verde, where to go next ?
   They have worked their way steadily westward around the globe - the next landfall is Plymouth Rock and they've already been there: too many unions and too many green activists.
   "The American Frontier for business  (but not for farmers and cowboys - that closed a century ago) is truly closed", they will tell Congress. Time to tax the public ,to subsidize our covered Contetoga wagons trains to Mars*.
   Time to cut our losses on Planet Earth - its played out : time to saddle up and move on out......

* Thus opening the so-called "White Wedge on the Red Planet" , a graphic image beloved by generations of art college Spacers ....

"Is that MUSK or just HUBRIS dat I smell ??

             This just in from the 'bang-on' department:

 Elon Musk, CEO of  SPACE X, says that trips to Mars* will be as common as a trip to Europe, in just a few decades.
     This utopian libertarian kool aid drinker was just being his usual optimistic self but , for once,  SVE was forced to admit that Musk was not wrong.

   Yes sirree bob, in a few short decades, when we are busy devoting what little fuel oil we have left to feeding our tractors (and our bellies), trips to Europe will be very scarce indeed.
    As scarce as hen's teeth, or trips to mars....

* The very best place to find syncophantic stories on outer space delusions and fantasies are the computer magazines like PCMAG.com, bastions of the eternal teenage boy.

SVE supports unmanned probes of Mars & Venus: makes our rare EARTH more precious still

     It won't be wise - would it ? - to use the EARTH as a laboratory to prove up the concept of what a runaway greenhouse effect can do to a planet.
   We don't have to - not that the libertarians/deniers/SF fans among us aren't doing their darnedest to try anyway.
    Instead we can just consider the latest science on Venus, a planet somewhat close to us in features, where a classic case of runaway greenhouse gases destroyed any hopes of Life on a planet somewhat similar to ours.

   But in the game of Life, somewhat close isn't even close to being good enough : it is the precise/exact/perfect constellation of a dozen or so features that makes Earth that rare - perhaps even unique - planet in the universe with human-like life upon it.
    Planets close to being like Earth are expected to number in the trillions throughout the entire universe. But if they have human-like beings all watching TV and playing the internet, we haven't yet detected even the faintest whiff of electronic pollution from any of them.
    As Fermi said : if Earth-like planets and Earth-like human beings are so theoretically common : "WHERE ARE THEY ?"
   The latest pictures from Mars, a planet even closer to Earth than Venus, in most features,  reminds us of how hard it is to get the exact/precise/perfect mixture of features right, to make a place inhabitable.
    Without a stable atmosphere and wind currents to even temperatures differences out, Earth would be like Mars - the day side of Earth hot enough to boil all known life - even the most extreme of extreme bacteria -the night side cold enough to freeze all known forms of life - even the bacteria.
  Die by day - die by night - die by day - die by night. On and on.
  Mars has a winter like Earth, as well - and during that period even the low energy (because unmanned) NASA OPPORTUNITY rover now on Mars had to hunker down, conserve energy and wait it out for months.
   It climbed to just the right spot to have its solar panels lined up with the weak low rays of Sun during the long Martian Winter , to give it just enough energy to keep it ticking over.
   If OPPORTUNITY was a fungi or a bacteria,we'd call it a 'spore' .
   Hardly an attractive place for a high maintenance, high energy using being like us Earthlings.
   But for the libertarian Skygods - a paradise - in their dreams anyway.
   There is Life and there is SF (F standing for Fantasy) : let us never mis-confuse the two...

Bugger-off Hippies ! - it was crewcutted NASA types what killed Modernity

    High Modernity was animated by a single generation of scientists,  children born after the invention of the Dynamo and who died before the invention of Disco: roughly after 1870 and before 1970.
   Alfred Newton (Newt) Richards, medical strong man of the famous wartime OSRD R&D outfit, whose dates (1876-1966) span the age almost perfectly, is an example of one such scientist who was influential when young and who continued to be highly influential up to the year he died.
   A lot of important scientific discoveries and technological inventions happened in the 1870s, but there were a few highly influential bloopers as well.

   None more infamous than what followed an announcement in 1877, when Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli (yes his niece Elsa was later even better known than Giovanni - but for her high fashion clothing) thought he found water-filled canals across the face of Mars.
   Mars was a planet seen by most academic scientists as very much like Earth, albeit much more arid but with clearly visible polar caps.
   Proposals to build canals to move water and goods from the wet to the dry areas of Earth were the flavour of the month in the 1870s, so his idea took off in popular science, if not really in academic science.
  It fuelled a slew of fiction and quasi-popular quasi-factual popular science books/films/comics about life on Mars - the literal wet dreams of  High Modernity's cosmic cowboys.
  The idea wasn't firmly quashed for good until July 1965, when Mariner 4 beamed back some actual close up images of Mar's surface -showing it as dead as the Moon.
   Venus's clouds were pierced about the same time by NASA and its Russian counterpart, by flyby space probes, revealing a planet so harsh it made the Moon or Mars look benign by contrast.
   Only by contrast - nothing in our Solar System looked remotely attractive to human life.
    Now SF (Science Fiction) and the wild-eyed utopian end of academic science had to switch to PLAN B - interstellar travel to distant stars with Earth-like planets.
   Stars so far away we were basically imagining their planets to be Earth-like - if our visions of relatively nearby Mars were off base - the attractiveness of these new distant planets could be off by a factor of a million to one or more.
   In addition, Mars et al were at least reachable by our current technology - based upon upgraded technology and science from the late 19th century.
   But the speeds we'd need to obtain, to get to distant planets before the human cargo inside the tin cans died from cosmic radiation poisoning, was simply not in the pipeline yet, so here academic science had to lean hard on the ravings of hardcore SF in its  most Kool-Aid-drinking mode, to sustain the dream.
   (Insert here a big shout out to Freeman Dyson....)
   The original Skygod generation has sustained their vision of being above the Earth's woes by deluding themselves they could always start anew on a nearby human-friendly planet like Venus or Mars.
   NASA's crewcutted pipe-smoking set killed that dream, even before the hippies and students got going on Modernity, in May 1968.
   Ironic isn't it ???