Worldwide Spirit of Optimism Over the New Silk Road! - Part 2 | WPN World People News

Then there is the New Eurasian Land-Bridge that goods from Central China are reaching Western Europe in 2 to 3 weeks, rather than 5 weeks by ocean.

There are also several components of the Silk Road that are growing insanely fast.

For Africa, this development is a total novelty, because the banks which China and the BRICS countries founded, were created with the explicit aim of compensating for the lack of investment in infrastructure by the IMF, World Bank, and others over the last decades; these new banks are exclusively for investment in infrastructure, not speculation.

About four weeks ago, Ethiopia’s first railroad—from the capital Addis Ababa to Djibouti—went into operation; it was ready to go last fall, but was then tested and upgraded with security measures. Meanwhile another railroad is under construction, from Rwanda to Uganda to the Congo.

Here is another project, Transaqua, which Lyndon LaRouche and the Schiller Institute have campaigned for, for 40 years. It was originally developed by Italian engineers, and the idea is that man can reverse the drying-up of Lake Chad. Lake Chad has dried up to about 10 percent of its original capacity. You can redirect unused water-flow from the Congo region, at approximately 500 meters altitude—not only the actual waters of the Congo River, but the Congo’s tributaries—through a river and canal system into Lake Chad, and thus create arable production through irrigation for twelve adjacent states, and thereby begin the industrialization of Africa.

This project was recently surveyed for the first time by a Chinese firm, Power China, the same firm that made the Three Gorges Dam a reality. A feasibility study is now under way, and that will lead very soon to allowing 100 billion cubic meters of water to flow into Lake Chad per year.

There is a comprehensive program for South America. The blue line is a program that Lyndon LaRouche proposed in the late 1970s, along with former Mexican President José López Portillo, but it was not carried out because of sabotage by Brazil and Argentina. But now this proposal for a transcontinental “Bioceanic railroad” to Peru is part of the New Silk Road. One positive development is that for the first time, Germany will also participate by investing in the construction of another stretch of the rail in Bolivia. So that is a small glimmer of light.

The whole conception of the New Silk Road has exploded over the last six months. Initially Russia was very skeptical. The Central Asian nations were skeptical, or have argued, Should the rail lines be built from West to East, or East to West—or from North to South? But now everything has been resolved with good will. On September 2 and 3 of last year, the integration of the New Silk Road with the Eurasian Economic Union took place at a huge economic forum in Vladivostok, where Japan also joined in, with huge investments in the Russian Far East. This process advanced at the G20 Summit in Hangzhou at the beginning of September, then advanced further at the ASEAN meeting in Laos.

China clearly took leadership of this process as early as the G20 Summit, at which it said that it wanted to immediately base the world economy on innovation, and to enlist the developing countries in scientific and technological breakthroughs, so that their development will no longer be delayed. China has declared its intention to overcome poverty on the entire planet by the year 2025.

The process advanced further at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting in Lima, Peru in November of last year, and now even some western think tanks have realized that their former negative evaluation is no longer appropriate. For example, PricewaterhouseCoopers produced a comprehensive study in which it said that at present the Chinese economy is the locomotive of the world economy, and will remain so. Forbes Magazine has had about seven relatively objective articles on the range of projects. This is an unstoppable dynamic, it says.

And, as I said, President Trump has invited President Xi Jinping to his estate of Mar-a-Lago in Florida on April 6-7, and there is every indication that the Chinese are prepared to make huge investments in the construction of U.S. infrastructure. There was a conference in Hongkong at which Chinese economists said that America’s infrastructure deficit is not one trillion dollars, but eight trillion. Japan has already said that it wants to participate with $150 billion in the development of American high-speed rail. China has said many times—for example, Deputy Foreign Minister Madame Fu Ying, the most important woman in China, has said it—that the Silk Road can be the bridge between America and the Eurasian Silk Road, through development of American infrastructure.

Thus there are very, very hopeful events in process.

A Question of the Image of Man
Why is this so enormously important?

The entire trans-Atlantic world has been dominated over the last decades by the paradigm of closed systems and zero growth. Take a step back: In the 1950s and 60s, it was perfectly self-evident that poverty in the Third World would be overcome somehow. Then there were the UN Development Decades, in which we would set goals for ten years at a time, then for the next ten years, in order to finally and totally eliminate poverty and underdevelopment on this planet.

But this normal, humanistic orientation was discontinued by a whole array of propaganda measures. Probably the most serious was the publication of the Club of Rome’s book Limits to Growth in 1972. Authors Forrester and Meadows simply determined a desired result, and then programmed their computer model so it came out exactly that way. They used linear equations to get this result, and perpetrated an absolute swindle: They completely left out the idea of scientific and technological progress, and the resulting redefinition of raw materials and production methods.

With great fanfare, this book was translated and distributed in all languages, and presented this basic idea: The world was developing up until 1971, and now we have reached a point of equilibrium; we approached it asymptotically, and now we must be sustainable. Now we must conserve; above all, we must conserve energy, and there will be no more technological progress, but rather “appropriate technology”—which is then translated as no technology.

With this went the idea that we are an Earth-bound system, and that overpopulation is the greatest problem, because people are actually parasites who are a burden on the environment, and the less people, the better.

Now these were not totally new ideas, because this issue was implicitly the subject of the American Revolution. In 1751 Benjamin Franklin wrote an essay entitled, Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind,5 in which he argued this: The more people there are, the better, because each person brings his own creative potential with him to human society, and thus enriches society overall. Thomas Malthus, who wrote An Essay on the Principle of Population,6 embodied the opposite view; as is well known, he had the idea that the numbers of people increase faster than the improvements in agriculture needed to sustain them, and thus the population must always be reduced. And just like all the other British economists—Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, David Ricardo—he worked for the British East India Company, which earned its riches through trading in slaves and opium.

Therefore, what was really at issue—then, and especially now—is the image of man. Lyndon LaRouche has written a great deal about that. I would like you to read my husband’s articles, because he has worked out in the clearest way where mankind’s creative potential lies. In contrast to all other living species and animals, which are also intelligent, man is the only species which can renew the basis for his existence through scientific and technological progress.

LaRouche has presented the relationship between relative potential population density and specifically, the energy-flux density used in production processes. There one can see clearly that since the time when men were mere hunters and gatherers, and the energy-flux density of his technologies was extremely low (sun and wind energy), man has been able to increase in numbers by many orders of magnitude due to the increase in energy-flux density, and has a much better living standard, a higher life expectancy, and all told, more human potential. And the next step is already within reach, because China has taken the lead in developing the EAST Fusion program, and has the idea of very soon mining the Moon for helium-3 as a raw material for the coming fusion economy on Earth.

Ehricke and the Next Stage in Evolution

What does all this have to do with Krafft Ehricke? Ehricke stated very clearly that the opening up of space and its colonization are the necessary next steps in the evolution of mankind. He developed in a wonderful way how life went from the oceans to the continents with the help of photosynthesis, which he described interestingly as the “first industrial revolution,” which overcame the “limits to growth” of the time. He described how creatures which were higher on the evolutionary scale, whose metabolisms had a higher energy-flux density, developed until finally man appeared.

And man is absolutely different from all previous forms of life because, according to Ehricke, he has something that he calls “information metabolism”—the ability to absorb information, to differentiate different aspects of it through abstraction, then accumulate it and make use of it both with mind and with machines.

He emphasizes that animals are doubtless intelligent, that they can even learn incredible things, such as how to manipulate human beings, which requires a high level of intelligence. But no animal is capable of abstraction, while man can overcome any limitation. His three fundamental laws of astronautics were already mentioned this morning: The first law is that, under the natural law of this universe, nothing and no one imposes any restrictions on man, except man himself.

This is very, very important, for this is the image of man that was once the norm in Europe. This is identical with humanism, with the Classical idea, which is in turn identical with Platonic philosophy and Christianity, which regards man as a boundlessly perfectible being, both with regard to his mental faculties and his character, and with regard to his emotions and his aesthetic development, there are just as few bounds. This was the normal image of Man, and if you read, for example, Plato, Augustine, Nicholas of Cusa, Leibniz, or Kepler, then you will find precisely this image.

Today, unfortunately, it is no longer self-evident, but Krafft Ehricke said that the human mind can ceaselessly metabolize information “from the infinitesimal to the infinite and, on the infrastructure of knowledge, pursues its moral and social aspirations for a larger and better world against many odds. Through intelligences like ourselves, the universe, and we in it, move into the focus of self-recognition; metal ore is turned into information processing computers, satellites and deep-space probes; and atoms are fused as in stars.” And then he says, “I cannot imagine a more foreboding, apocalyptic vision of the future than a mankind endowed with cosmic powers but condemned to solitary confinement on one small planet.” That is very true.

Krafft was inspired as a twelve-year-old boy when he saw Fritz Lang’s film, The Woman on the Moon. He also enormously inspired my husband, who then made another documentary, The Woman on Mars. It was this idea that man can leave the Earth’s surface, travel in space, and settle other heavenly bodies that fascinated him.

It has already been mentioned that he was present in Peenemünde—he was just 25 years old—when the first rocket successfully lifted off from Earth on October 3, 1942, and went into space. He was only a hundred yards away, watching the countdown, the ignition, and then the giant roar as the rocket achieved liftoff. And he said, “This was an indescribable feeling, which we all had, we were absolutely conscious that this was the beginning of a new epoch, the first day of the Space Age, the beginning of a completely new era.”

Krafft Ehricke defined the “extraterrestrial imperative” as the true identity of humanity. He said that the colonization of the Moon is the obvious first step because it is very close, it takes only two or three days to get there, and now it’s even less, and we can essentially practice on the Moon what we will later do on other planets. And what we can do on the Moon, we can do everywhere.

He thought that the colonization of the Moon would take the reverse direction to the evolution on Earth, where the biosphere first developed and then, in a late phase, man had emerged, while on the Moon it would be the other way round: The arrival of man, and then the conditions for his existence. In the first phase, man would bring materials from Earth to the Moon; the second phase would involve the industrialization of the Moon using available resources; and the third would be interplanetary journeys from which new human civilizations would emerge, with completely different characteristics than civilization on Earth.

And he then gave an example of his own “extra-europeanization,” as he called it, to illustrate this difference. He said he grew up in Germany, and received a wonderful Classical education. European culture was what shaped him, and when he then emigrated to the United States with his wife, he met a completely different sort of people there, Americans. His children were quite well Americanized, but still had characteristics of the culture of their parents from Germany, whereas his grandchildren were so Americanized that no difference could be discerned.

And he says the same thing will happen in future civilizations in space: The population on the Moon will have completely different physiological and immunological characteristics than the people on Earth.

Source: Executive Intelligence Review