Let's talk Gaians

[pbrione]

I'm not sure that the whole debate about "rationality" is really acheiving much. Clearly the Gaians themselves are not going to beleive they are irrational and what the rest of the population beleives inRP is fairly irrelevant as, like most people with strongly-held beleifs, the gaians are hardly going to be convinced to abandon their cause by rational debate.

Their actions and beleif system may certainly appear immoral or completely unjustifiable under all our conventional moral systems, which tend generally to focus on helping human life as the prime moral factor, or more generally sentient life at the very most (but still not including barren planets). However, whilst the Gaian mentality may appear absurd to us, it is at least self-consistent and therefore "rational" in the loosest sense of the word. There is nothing about beleiving morality ought to focus on preserving the natural state of the universe that contradicts any of their other beleifs. Mind you, there is nothing contradictory about beleiving life ought to be devoted to the production and worship of papier mache teapots either.

The fact is that most beleif-systems tend to be instilled into people from a young age, and if most gaians today are born and raised on stations, then it is entirely plausable that they should grow up fanatically dedicated to this cause that other people find utterly crazy. This is somewhat religion-like in its fanaticism, though the gaians themselves would not have to view themselves as religious in the slightest.

A beleif that preservation in the universe should take precendent over the human race, however, is not something that people are likely to aquire simply by studying on Planet Cambridge. Concern for the environment, yes, but still primarily human-centric, based on concepts of sustainability of human activites as opposed to the the extreme moral beleifs that Marburg suggests many gaians hold today.

My view is that the gaian movement would have begun with this more moderate environmentalist but still human-centric mentality, which eventually evolved into a hardcore group of fanatics that actively beleive planets matter more than people, though perhaps there are still many more moderate gaians around the fringes of the movement, who do not share this extremist mentality at its heart.

There are probably:
- An elite of fanatical Gaians with the beleifs Marburg has expressed, who beleive any interference in the natural order is immoral
- Fairly large numbers of moderate environmentalists, who aren't so bothered with terraforming barren planets, but still oppose what is (clearly) appalling and unsustainable anti-evironmental activity as has occured in Leeds by BMM, and Planetform work in Edinburgh.
- Some scientists who are fairly recent converts from Cambridge, who worry mainly about Planet Gaia itself as they don't want research opportunities there to be lost.
- A few people who are just pirates and thugs at heart, and only see the enivornment as a pretext for their way of life
- People born among the gaians who simply don't know any other way of life
- Mixtures of the above

They may not always agree with each other, but they would all work together and share similar ways of life, to help themselves acheive their respective goals, and so are all Gaians to an extent.

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Sir Stanley Nelson




<span style="color:#000066">Charles Canning </span><span style="color:#000066"> Foreign Secretary</span>