The Omega Expedition Read Online Free PDF

soon, if it was indeed the only practical solution to the Tragedy of the Commons. Many historians, having taken this for granted, have regretted that some such cartel did not emerge a hundred years earlier, while the big corporations had not yet become entitled to such prefixes as mega-and cosmi-. In another place, or another history, some other solution might have been found which did better service to the glorious traditional ideals of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, but in our world no such solution ever succeeded in making itself credible.
    The twentieth century was an era of unprecedented economic growth, based on unprecedented population growth. Production and consumption increased hand in hand, and their increase was exponential. This could not continue indefinitely, because the toll that it was taking on the Earth’s ecosphere could not be sustained. The twenty-first century was bound to see a qualitative change in the pattern, and the momentum of the system ensured that it would begin with a catastrophic Crash. The only issue in doubt was whether the crisis could be moderated in such a way that the world economy could regain a more-or-less stable and sustainable equilibrium, or whether the Crash would be so destructive that a centuries-long period of recovery would be necessary — after which the problem would inevitably recur, and keep on recurring until a sustainable equilibrium could be reached.
    Ecology was an infant discipline in the twentieth century, and its interrelationships with economics were poorly understood by the great majority of practitioners in either field. The fusion of the two disciplines pioneered by Garrett Hardin had yet to win wide acceptance at the beginning of the twenty-first century, partly because there were few individuals or corporations who had anything substantial to gain from accepting it. Men were mortal then, and few had sufficient imagination even to anticipate the changes and challenges they would have to face within a limited lifetime. From its earliest embryonic days, however, the Universal Cartel had every reason to take aboard the crucial lesson set out in the most significant scientific parable of the twentieth century, “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Nobody now remembers who coined the term “Hardinist Cabal” — it was not Adam Zimmerman — but it was a notion whose time had certainly come.
    As soon as its formation was begun, the Universal Cartel had no alternative but to accept as its primary purpose and objective the management and control of the inevitable ecocatastrophic Crash, with a view to steering its course to the only imaginable healthy outcome. Among the many advisers and consultants hired to help them organize and discipline the world economy, Adam Zimmerman was one whose understanding of that necessity, and the means to attain it, stood out very conspicuously. He was, therefore, in exactly the right place at exactly the right time to further their strategy and his own, in near-perfect harmony.

Four
    A dam was not in the least surprised that he became known, in the years before he absented himself from the twenty-first century, as “the man who stole the world.” He did not resent the appellation; indeed, he was very proud of it.
    “The world had to be stolen,” he told me, by way of explanation. “In exactly the same way that the ancient commons of England needed enclosure and usurpation, so the entire surface of the Earth had to be enclosed within tight bonds of ownership, in order that its resources and productivity might be sensibly controlled.”
    “Was there no other way?” I asked.
    “None,” he said, adamantly. “The users of the land could not be allowed to continue exploiting it competitively, each to his individual advantage, and they certainly could not be trusted to exercise restraint within the framework of any voluntary agreement. A firm ruling hand was necessary. The long-term needs of the Commonweal had to be substituted