The Return of Soviet Astrobiology

Soviet science has long been the object of scorn and derision among the Western scientific elite. No word communicates pseudoscience better than the accusation of "Lysenkoism." Lysenko's name alone functions as proof that the way we "do science" is decisively superior to a system that judges scientific theories by whether they're bourgeois or proletarian. Just mention his name, and you've singlehandedly disproven the notion of manmade climate change.

But Lysenko, who has returned to the scene in the science of epigenetics, isn't the only Soviet scientist winning his triumph over Western minds.

The Soviet astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev proposed a simple scale for measuring the scientific progress of civilizations. Kardashev wasn't evidently a proletarian theorist of the stripe of Lysenko: he didn't derive genetics from Marxist-Leninist doctrine. But his theories were part and parcel of Soviet science in a different way. They were part of Soviet social science or political science—an extension of the Soviet philosophy of history to a ranking of the future scientific development of civilization.

The Kardashev scale divides civilizations into types 1, 2, & 3. Type 1 civilizations produce and consume energy roughly at the high level of modern civilization. Earth as a whole would become type 1 when all countries successfully modernized. Type 2 civilizations harness all the energy available from their local star, while type 3 civilizations harness all the energy available in their local galaxy.

Enter Michio Kaku. Kaku has speculated that human civilization will become type 1 within the next hundred or two hundred years, type 2 within the next thousand, and type 3 within the next hundred thousand years. Kaku's interpretation of Kardashev has now begun to draw the attention of transhumanists.

What better way to fuel your prophecy of technological development than a good old-fashioned philosophy of history?

Dream up what you want the future to be, and then punch out a sequential list of civilizational types. Voilà. It's science! And because you haven't said anything stupid about hard winter wheat, you'll never be called a Lysenko.

For just that reason, our own technoprophets are even worse than the recently rehabilitated Lysenko. Our ascent up the Kardashev scale depends on technology, technology comes from science, and you can't argue with that. Every advance in our energy productivity proves we're on the way up.

This development suggests a strange possibility. Lysenko's rehabilitation has come through epigenetics—the science of gene switching due to environmental (and thus also cultural) factors. "Grandma's Experiences Leave a Mark on Your Genes," says Discover Magazine. The iniquity of the fathers is visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation, someone once said. So too their blessing.

What, then, are the epigenetic consequences of listening to the prophecies of today's technoprogressives?

By the time we can answer that question, the hour will be too late. We thought we were listening to the best minds of Western science, free from the pseudoscience which plagued Christianity and communism alike.

But the reality is that Michio Kaku and our technoprophets are nothing more than screevers, conjuring images of the future no better, and no more creative than spray-painted images gazed at by tourists.

Maybe it's not the images that intoxicate us, but instead the fumes.

Now that capitalism has begun to show its inner similarity to the dreams of communism, it's worth saying one thing on behalf of the communist system. At least it failed to achieve its goals.