New frontiers to explore. New territories to conquer.
Readership: All
Targeted Readership: Young Men
Theme: Virtue
Author’s Note: Jack contributed some input.
Length: 1,200 words
Reading Time: 7 minutes
Intro
“Washington [D.C.] is not a place to live in. The rents are high, the food is bad, the dust is disgusting and the morals are deplorable. Go West, young man, go West and grow up with the country.”
~ Attributed to Horace Greeley, New-York Daily Tribune (1865/7/13)
“Go West, young man, go West. There is health in the country, and room away from our crowds of idlers and imbeciles.”
~ Horace Greely, according to Josiah Bushnell Grinnell
I’m not sure if the quotes above are real, or accurate, but it doesn’t really matter. The phrase, “Go west, young man”, has taken on a life of its own in American mythology. It represents a time of “Manifest Destiny”.
Manifest Destiny
The catch phrase “Manifest Destiny” was the idea that God Himself had destined Americans to expand westward and conquer a continent. Behind “Manifest Destiny” was a spirit of dominion, of purpose.
That feeling of purpose was particularly crucial on 13 July 1865, when Horace Greeley supposedly coined the phrase, “Go west, young man”. At that time, the nation was shattered from 5 years of Civil War. President Lincoln was assassinated just 3 months before on 14 April 1865. The American Civil War had just ended on 26 May 1865. 650,000 American men — men in their prime — lay dead. Countless others were wounded and maimed, and countless more bore physical, psychological, emotional, and spiritual scars that would never truly heal.
These scars and other visible reminders of the war remained well into the early 20th century, but it was during this same time that “the West was Won”. Many soldiers who had outlived the war used their skills of survival learned in battle to conquer the challenges of pioneering and settling the vast new territories. They also taught these skills to younger men who took that same challenge.
“Manifest Destiny” was exactly what young American men needed at the time. It gave young men a sense of purpose, hope, and optimism in the form of a wild, utterly untamed frontier where literally everything wanted to kill them, and yet, they answered its siren call in droves. Heat, cold, drought, disease, vast expanses of nothingness filled with wild animals and hostile natives predictably took their toll, and yet they kept going west in the hopes of claiming their own little chunk of dominion.
Sounds like fun, doesn’t it?
A New Frontier
Men are just the same now as they were in the late 19th century. Men have always needed a sense of purpose and dominion. It’s what God created us for.
Men feel that need even more acutely when their lives have been turned upside down.
Young men today haven’t fought a Civil war… Yet. Let’s hope they don’t have to. Nevertheless, they still have scars. Their scars are mostly emotional and spiritual, resulting from fatherlessness, social rejection, and having been told their entire lives that they are unnecessary at best, and “toxic” at worst. It’s not so much that their lives have been turned upside-down, it’s more like they were born in the upside-down.
Where can a young man go today to find purpose and dominion?
What frontiers remain to be discovered, explored, and conquered?
Similar to what Horace Greely said in 1865, today we say,
“The West is not a place to live in. The cost of living is high, the women are debased, the Woke are disgusting, and the morals are deplorable. Go UP, young man, go UP and grow up in the breathtakingly vast expanses of space.”
~ After Horace Greeley, New-York Daily Tribune
“Go UP, young man, go UP. There is vast opportunity in space development, and room away from our crowds of feminists, narcissists, and gender nuts.”
~ After Horace Greely, as quoted by Josiah Bushnell Grinnell
Cometh the Hour, Cometh the Man
Despite all the doom-and-gloom on the internet, it’s an exciting time to be alive.
On 13 October 2024, Elon Musk’s SpaceX pulled off yet another in a long list of mind-blowing world records. They landed a reusable rocket the size of a skyscraper by having the launch tower catch it.
Did you notice anything about the crowds of cheering SpaceX employees? There’s a LOT of young men!
For a technical discussion on why we should be excited about this, please read this article from Devon Eriksen, whose subtitle I unintentionally cribbed when I started writing this article. I was going to discuss the technical, but Mr. Eriksen did it better than I could. The bottom line of Mr. Eriksen’s article is that the conquest of the Solar System will be a combination of the Age of Exploration and the Industrial Revolution.
Think about that.
Imagine this. One group of intrepid entrepreneurs stakes claims to asteroids, takes core samples, and sells the claims to the highest bidders based on the valuable materials they contain. Other groups of intrepid entrepreneurs buy the claims, exploit them, and sell the contents to other entrepreneurs who refine the materials, who then sell them to other groups of intrepid entrepreneurs who make them into stuff we all buy. Other entrepreneurs build ships and habitations from materials mined in space — dwellings that will orbit space, never entering the atmosphere of any planet.
SpaceX’s primary delays haven’t been technical, or financial, they’ve been bureaucratic.
“Unfortunately, we continue to be stuck in a reality where it takes longer to do the government paperwork to license a rocket launch than it does to design and build the actual hardware.”
The Department of Justice even sued SpaceX for NOT hiring illegal aliens.
SpaceX won … thereby proving old Otto von Bismarck right yet again.
Consider the alliance between Elon Musk and Donald Trump.
With Trump back in office, the FAA, FCC, EPA, DOJ, and other regulatory agencies will likely clear the onerous hurdles.
And, it’ll continue to get better, because SpaceX’s incredible success has dramatically decreased the cost of lifting stuff into orbit.
As if that wasn’t enough to prove old Otto right, the USA is at the forefront, and the competition is not even close. Until today, no one has surpassed reducing the cost to orbit below that of SpaceX circa 2010 with the Falcon 9, much less the Falcon Heavy, much less whatever it’ll be when Starship’s final form is fully operational.
Epilogue
For the first time since the United States expanded to the Pacific, young men have a hostile, dangerous, unforgiving frontier to conquer. They have a new “Manifest Destiny”.
Just as what happened to the Conquistadores and pioneers, and the brave men who went west after the Civil War, and the settlers who came after them, some will die, some will go broke, and some will become wealthier than King Solomon.
Although wealth will obviously be a major motivating factor, I believe that the primary motivation — whether the men realize it or not — will be man’s need for dominion.
Behold, we are now witnessing the birth of a new exploration — Space! The final frontier!
I don’t know how much of this I’ll live to see, but my 14-year-old son is determined to mine asteroids. I pray he and his peers get to fulfil their dreams on the Moon, Mars, the Belt, and beyond.
Related
- Σ Frame: Forming the Vision of Achieving a Goal (2022/4/6)
- Σ Frame: Meanwhile, in a Parallel Dimension of Time and Space… (2024/9/18)
