How long do the wild geese fly?

 

Rockingham is a quiet beech suburb in southern Perth, Western Australia. Garden Island shields the beach from the surf of the open ocean. There is bulk cargo port a few km to the North, but the shallow water off Rockingham restricts these waters to small craft. And yet, this quiet, ordinary beach was the site of one of Australia’s most outrageous maritime escapades.

In April of 1876, six Fenians- Irish Nationalists imprisoned for resisting the British Empire- escaped the nearby Freemantle Gaol and rowed a longboat from the wharf to the whaling ship Catalpa, which was waiting off-shore in international waters. They and the whalers then sailed to New York City, and freedom. None of the six ever made it back to Ireland, where they were first arrested in the 1860’s. But James Wilson lived to a ripe old age of 85, and missed seeing the establishment of Free State by only a year. He died a free man after living in Rhode Island for almost 50 years.

 

It’s interesting that a jailbreak against the government has such a large and conspicuous memorial, dedicated by none other than the pandemic era Premier, Mark McGowan. In New Bedford, where the voyage started, there is just a simple plaque. New Bedford is a down-on-its-luck old whaling down in southern Massachusetts. It is about halfway between where I went to university and where I spent most of my childhood summer holidays. It is a very long way from Australia. So in a way, it makes me homesick in 4 dimensions. It is literally on the other side of the globe. But additionally, 1876 seems to be particularly far away in time at present. This was an age when American citizens, using ingenuity and courage, could crowdsource a plan that spanned the global ocean to embarrass the mightiest empire on the planet. And this space, standing on that quiet beach, the country of my birth becomes even more remote than the vast distance across the waves. In a sense, the land I grew up in seems as far removed as the age of brigantines and whalers.

Obviously, it would be easy to be nostalgic for the 1990s, or even 2002, the last time I lived in my homeland. But nostalgia misses the point. And in a sense, nostalgia is unamerican. The whole point of the American Dream is to create a better future. The past is not to be idolized; it is to be surpassed. And yet, all across the English-speaking world, there seems to be a timidity about building a better world.

The Fenians had no such qualms when they agitated for a Free Ireland, against one of the most prosperous countries in Europe. Our American Forefathers did much the same thing. A century earlier, casting off the colonial rule to become the greatest country ever. But recently the imagination required to seek out a better future seems to have eluded us. Where would the wild geese of today fly, and how high would they have to soar to get there?

 

The overlords of the anti-renewable invasion

 Anyone who so much as drives between Australian cities these years will notice that an infestation of anti-renewable ideas has taken hold in pockets of the Australian bush. Alien hate and extremism has infected soils throughout our wide brown land, sprouting from ruined earth on signs and banners of slogans and lies. There is no question that these are the fruits of foreign spores being beamed in from space. But is it just Sky News, or is there something more nefarious, vast, and sinister at play?

The traditional explanation is that the leaders of fossil fuel companies have been spreading misinformation. This is disingenuous. Fossil fuel executives are very smart men, and they employ some of the best geoscientists on Earth. Exxon figured our global warming before the rest of the scientific community combined, way back in the 80s, as a side project while they were saving the world economy from OPEC by applying the newly discovered theory of plate tectonics to their vast in-house quantity of geophysical data.

The point is, these people know exactly how dangerous sudden increases in carbon dioxide are to multicellular biomes. They know that if the trilobites- who had been around for 290 million years at the time- were unable to find a refuge to wait out the Siberian Flood Basalts, we would be unlikely to do the same here and now if we wrecked the climate by releasing CO2 even faster. And while their feeble-minded critics like to chant stale slogans, like, “There is no planet B,” I really doubt many of those critics have traveled the local arm of the Milky Way enough to actually know what’s out there.

The Galaxy is full of intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, who regard the Earth with envious eyes. And the plans that they slowly draw up against us aren’t about to be spoiled by a bunch of ex-hippy entrepreneurs and their wind farms.

The exact relationship between the anti-renewable shills and their alien overlords is not entirely clear. But then, neither is the ownership structure of most of their influencing operations. All that really matters is the shared purpose; stick it to the greenies, bask in the endorphin rush of winning a fight, and then shrugging off any responsibility for the consequences (which will be disastrous to everyone reading this essay). And the aliens need to prevent the widespread adoption of renewable energy because renewable energy infrastructure is really, really problematic for flying saucer invasions.

Firstly, the electrical infrastructure which distributes energy around a renewable project, and then exports it to the grid, disrupts space-based geophysical mapping, making targeting difficult from the inbound invasion fleet. Alien invasions only really took off in the post-war era, when the rapid industrialization of agriculture created fields large enough for their giant intergalactic space ships to land in. Before that, Earth simply had too many trees to be invaded anywhere other than uninhabitable scorching deserts or frozen tundra. It was the industrialization of agriculture that opened our planet up to them, which is why they first started showing up in the quiet night skies over mid-century American farms.

And if our planet was protected for millions of years by forests of 25 meter trees, you can imagine the issues with 250 meter wind turbines? Trying to squeeze into a landing spot between spinning death machines while transporting millions of alien troopers is much more difficult than spreading rumours about sleep loss or pastoral outlook. As long as these energy projects are easily cancelled and delayed, this approach is a no-brainer for the invasion fleet.

This is important because there is actually quite a lot of electricity in these installations. Modern turbines produce 6 megawatts of power. Each. Industrial solar farms run at quite high voltages. The effect of the huge power surges on the nanoscale circuitry of the UFOs would be catastrophic. So it is definitely in the interests of all alien life forms that our fields be kept clear of protective energy infrastructure.

Of course, in most instances the alien overlords of the anti-renewable lobbies operate at tentacle’s length. In space, no-one can hear you lobby. They don’t want to be heard until they break the sound barrier on re-entry. They don’t want to be seen until their heat shield glow and ablate. Most of the people amplifying concerns about headaches or unhealthy living simply parrot the lines they are fed from the sketchiest corners of the internet. But there is one group who sadly may have been tempted with much more intimate contact.

I mean, look. I know that Australian dairy farmers have had it tough the last few decades. The supermarket milk wars pushed their margins to unsustainable levels. Many farmers have left the business, and even before the fuel crisis, inflation and the cost of deferred maintenance put pressure on every possible part of the budget. But still. We all know that cows have to get pregnant and give birth for their milk to come in. But we also all know that it doesn’t really matter what sort of creature they give birth to. So please, no matter how hard things get, please, please, please don’t save on studding fees by pimping your cows out to the stars. Those sorts of aliens have no business here. No legitimate business, anyway. Practice good animal husbandry. Protect your livestock. Build windmills and put up panels.

But no matter if it is power line blockades, or turbine hoaxes, or solar panel visual pollution complaints, these various tactics all lead back to the same strategy: Keeping the world’s huge agricultural fields open and available for landing giant flying saucers full of alien invasion troops. So even if these aliens aren’t lizard people better adapted to a warmer, wetter world than we are, it is in our interests to thwart their cosmic beachheads with solar and wind generation.