Space Exploration as an Antidote to Anti-Human “Green” Ideology
Schiller Institute president Helga Zepp-LaRouche gave a widely acclaimed lecture at the 7-9 July Space Renaissance Art & Science Festival in Berlin. The organizer of the event was Space Renaissance International, an organization to promote the expansion of civilization into space, the building of a space age philosophy and culture, and a space humanist network.
Helga Zepp-LaRouche spoke of the timeliness of the vision of Krafft Ehricke (1917-1984), whom she described as a great visionary who understood the identity of mankind as a space species, and whose creativity and optimism corresponded to that of a truly great genius. She had the privilege of accompanying Ehricke on some of his lecture tours, and he himself served as advisor to the Schiller Institute Board of Directors in the early 1980s until his death in 1984. She described some of the stages of his life, especially his collaboration with rocket engineer Walter Thiel and with Wernher von Braun in Peenemünde, and his later accomplishments in the United States, such as the construction of the Centaur rocket and its importance for the Apollo program.
Above all, Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche focused on the intellectual greatness of Krafft Ehricke and quoted from his paper Anthropology of Astronautics in which he set forth his “Three Fundamental Laws Of Astronautics”, namely: “1 Nobody and nothing under the natural laws of this universe impose any limitations on man except man himself. 2 Not only the Earth, but the entire Solar system, and as much of the universe as he can reach under the laws of nature, are man’s rightful field of activity. 3 By expanding through the Universe, man fulfills his destiny as an element of life, endowed with the power of reason and the wisdom of the moral law within himself.”
Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche promoted a revival of Krafft Ehricke’s ideas to counter the self-destructive “green zeitgeist” of today: “Krafft’s far-sighted and unblocked thinking should be an inspiration. From this standpoint of limitless perfectibility of human creativity in an anti-entropically developing universe, Krafft naturally recognized the terrible implications of the emerging zero growth ideology as it appeared in the beginning of the 1970s with the Club of Rome and the resulting Green Ecology Movement.”
In response to a subsequent question from Professor Bernard Foing, who conducts space and lunar-Mars research, about what the next steps of development are in Ehricke’s vision, Zepp-LaRouche said: “Given the fact that the Hubble telescope has discovered two trillion galaxies for mankind to occupy boggles your mind, but that is a good thing. I think we are not limited, and the fantastic thing about space is that it completely rejects the green ideology, because we are not living in a closed system, but in a system, as Krafft Ehricke had correctly pointed out, in which man’s creativity can overcome any challenge. That optimism is what is lacking today. The Europeans will soon be fossils in a museum of people who didn’t make it if we don’t go back to the ideas of Krafft Ehricke.”
