News / Brèves BRICS Silk Road / Route de la soie Back to previous selection / Retour à la sélection précédente The World Land-Bridge 11 January 2010 World Land-Bridge (1) Introduction Today, many of us have become accustomed to building windmills or motorway tunnels for frogs. It is time we asked ourselves seriously: what is infrastructure? Why, as we shall see, is it imperative to think about increasing the energy-flux-density employed by society? And therefore, is it enough simply to slap some project out in the wilderness, for it to be infrastructure in any useful sense of the term? Indeed, the IMF has driven many third world countries into debt-slavery using this very method! So, why don’t we go about really developing the world rigorously, such that 7 billion people and far beyond can live in dignity! Just think: Did mankind ever not use any technology or infrastructure at all? Have we humans not always made discoveries of the principles of nature and the universe, and put those to work in revolutionizing society? Daniel Grasenack-Tente presents this new video on the World Landbridge program. World Land-Bridge (2) Man and the Biosphere "The face of the Earth, its image in the cosmos as seen from outside, from the depths of infinite celestial space, seems to us absolutely unique, inimitable and distinct from all other heavenly bodies. The face of the Earth exhibits the surface of our planet, its biosphere — its outer domain separating it from its cosmic surroundings." (Vladimir Vernadsky, 1926) On the planet we currently call home, the Earth, life slowly started to emerge. The earliest life forms were single-celled organisms with a simple internal structure. In these days, the Earth’s atmosphere consisted mostly of the mixture of gases similar to what we know from volcanic activity — somewhat unfriendly conditions, by today’s standards. Such factors as the Solar System’s path through the galaxy, and the Earth’s changing orbit in the Solar System, gave rise to great changes in climate, such as tremendous global warming and global cooling. Eight hundred million years ago, the planet was frigid, and glaciers reached as far as the equator. During the following hundreds of million years, there were great changes in temperature, geography and ocean currents. Continents broke apart and reformed. Higher forms of life developed: simple animals, which developed nervous systems and brains. Plant life developed and spread onto land, as did animals. The land-based plants expanded the activity of chlorophyll, creating an ever greater circulation of oxygen and water. This process, called photosynthesis, created an oxygen-rich atmosphere, which in turn created the protective ozone layer, allowing for the further evolution of life on Earth. Thus, life did not develop out of a chaotic heap of random local events. Rather, life shows everywhere an intention: a guided capability to sort unorganized chemical elements into concentrated forms, and to thereby bring about an increase in density of energy. Although the totality of living matter exists in a minute layer of the troposphere, over the entire surface of the planet, and although it comprises but a tiny part of the Earth’s mass, life is a powerful geological force. The development of the biosphere towards ever more complex organisms, finally created the conditions for an even higher form of life; a unique species, that is able to discover the active principles of the universe wilfully and consciously - a species, that is itself able to harness and employ the anti-entropic powers of these processes: cognitive mankind. World Land-Bridge (3) Birth of the World Landbridge The idea of a World Land-Bridge first arose 20 years ago. When the Berlin Wall fell, Helga Zepp-LaRouche was the only political figure in Germany prepared for it. As Lyndon LaRouche had forecast the collapse of the COMECON block and had declared in October of 1988 that the reunification of Germany was an immediate prospect, both LaRouches were clear that a new order of peace, based on mutual economic development of the East and the West, would become possible.When the peaceful revolution of 1989 had successfully brought brought down the Wall, Zepp-LaRouche declared that an unmatched sublime hour of mankind had struck. While the West European governments were surprised and without contingency plans of action, already in January of 1990, the Schiller Institute published a pamphlet entitled "The Productive Triangle Paris-Berlin-Vienna - Locomotive for the World Economy". Zepp-LaRouche sent German Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl an in-depth study of this proposal, along with a personal letter. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Schiller Institute, through the leadership of Helga Zepp-LaRouche, expanded its development program eastward. Thus was created The Eurasian Land-Bridge. Over the following years, she organized hundreds of conferences worldwide and work groups, which brought together high-level participants from all continents, and especially from the nations of the strategic Four Power Alliance comprising the United States, Russia, China and India. World Land-Bridge (4) Bering Strait & Siberia With the very intitiation of NAWAPA in North America, politically and economically, the land connection of the continents of America and Eurasia is placed on the agenda. The connection via the Bering Strait, a project that was first proposed in the middle of the 19th century, would lead highways and rail track through a tunnel underneath the icy ocean waters, and would include a gas pipeline, as well as power transmission and communications lines. Construction of the Bering Strait Tunnel is an active agenda of many of the most important nations in that region. One of the international specialists on planning and constructing infrastructure projects of this scale and kind, is Dr. Hal Cooper. Dr. Cooper has inspired and performed extensive feasibility studies on the rail and tunnel project for the Bering Strait, the rail connections within Alaska and Canada, as well as numerous other projects. Dr. Sergei Cherkasov is a further international specialist for such projects. Cherkasov works at the State Geological Vernadsky Museum in Moscow, which is part of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He is a leading expert on questions of raw materials in the scientific tradition of Vladimir Vernadsky and Dmitri Mendeleyev, and is active in several international working groups on surveying undiscovered mineral deposits. World Land-Bridge (5) - Development Corridors from Acapulco to Mumbai The development of large land-areas must be based on a crash program, establishing a sufficient density of basic economic infrastructure. The routes on the map of the World Landbridge are development corridors: about 100 km wide zones with high-speed transportation, roads and railway lines, canals and water management systems, irrigation, power generation and distribution based on the new generation of nuclear power plants, fuel pipelines, fibre optic cables, new agricultural and industrial zones with mining and manufacturing of goods, and new cities and universities. The spine of these development routes is an efficient transportation system, capable of quickly moving materials from and to the industries at a low physical cost. Roads are inefficient and easily get jammed up. Transportation on water is slow. Air is expensive. Already, rail is, by far, the best option, and with the implementation of a principle on a higher platform than the wheel, namely magnetic levitation, transportation will enter a new era. Let us say that we wanted to travel from Acapulco on the west coast of Mexico, to Mumbai in India. We can do it by ship, or — within the newly built worldwide transportation network — we could start our journey from Acapulco’s newly built maglev terminal. World Land-Bridge (6) - Vostochny Cosmodrome In close proximity to the main trunk of the Eurasian Landbridge, Russia is constructing a new space center called "Vostochny," which will play an important role in future exploration and colonization of space by man. As part of the Eurasian Landbridge, this cosmodrome will become an international nexus for space flight. World Land-Bridge (7) - The Oasis Plan for Southwest Asia Continuing along the Eurasian Land-Bridge, we come to South-West Asia, a hub between Eurasia and Africa, where the impact of the Four Power Alliance (between the USA, Russia, China and India) will completely change the life of the people. As this development-driven political shift makes geopolitical manipulations of the British Empire obsolete, the fuel for conflict in this region disappears. The in-depth economic cooperation will make a Dialogue of Cultures the basis for diplomacy. This spells doom for the ideologies of Globalization and Samuel Huntington’s "Clash of Civilzations." The Oasis Plan was presented by Lyndon LaRouche to leaders of Southwest Asia, Arab as well as Israelis, as a basis for peace based on economic development already in the first half of the 1970s. This idea not only brings economic development to the nations of the region, but also peace to this very sensitive part of the world strategic situation. Hussein Askary is a long-time collaborator of Lyndon LaRouche in Sweden. Over the last decades, he has worked intensely on the strategic situation in Southwest Asia and he heads the Arabic Desk of Executive Intelligence Review (EIR) magazine. World Land-Bridge (8) - Transaqua for Lake Chad in Africa The infrastructural development of Africa is not only a great challenge technically, but it will be the lithmus test, whether humanity is morally capable of surviving. Africa shouldn’t have to take all the steps of 150 years of industrialization that Europe undertook, but should immediately be given access to the most modern technologies, which human genius, labor and engineering have created. Jacques Cheminade is the head of the French political party "Solidarité et Progrès", which works in close collaboration with the wordwide LaRouche movement. Beginning especially with his official campaign for President of France in 1995, he has become well known as a political figure in France and in many other countries. At that time, basing himself on LaRouche’s famous forecast of 1994, Cheminade warned against the coming collapse of the derivative bubble. Cheminade has been a proponent of ending colonialism in Africa for many years. This colonialism exists today in the form of the British Empire’s system of globalization, manifesting itself in brutal exploitation and the imposition of so-called "Wildlife Reserves", in order to prevent Africa from opening up its own natural resources for development. Today, Cheminade has announced is candidacy for the French presidential elections in 2012. In this part of "The World Landbridge", Jacques Cheminade discusses the Transaqua Project for not only refilling Lake Chad to its 1964 water levels, but for revitalizing and developing the whole region.