How’s about you take a look at what all Buckminster Fuller came up with? Houses for less than $20/sq foot, a car which in the 1930s got 30 MPG and seated 11, and a whole design philosophy which was predicated on doing more with less. Now ask yourself, “Why the hell hasn’t anybody done these things that he’s been talking about?” Let’s throw in square foot gardening to help solve hunger problems, and air wells for folks in drought stricken areas. There’s plenty of solutions to the world’s problems out there, the real problem is that no one’s willing to use them! NASA gets $15 billion a year from the Federal government, HUD gets $30 billion. You’d think that with the money HUD gets they’d be able to take one of Bucky’s designs and build houses for everyone, but they can’t. Why? I don’t know.
Oh, and Bucky Fuller’s the guy who coined the phrase “Spaceship Earth.” He was a big proponent of humanity moving into space.
We know what will happen if humanity stays on Earth forever: Extinction. We don’t know what will happen if we move out into space, humanity still might go extinct, or it might not. I’ll take the slim chance of our species surviving over the certainty of it not.
That’s nothing new. That kind of pie-in-the-sky stuff has been advanced for decades by wide-eyed futurists. I recall when those hacks told us nuclear power would make electricity too cheap to meter. Damnation, they’ve had to put ball bearings in those meters.
Yeah, but did any of those hacks actually build the stuff? Bucky’s car is real. So’s the house. Some of Bucky’s ideas certainly are“pie in the sky,” but a good number of them have been built and tested and found to work exactly as he said. Square foot gardening works, air wells work, they’re just not in common use.
I’ve heard about all of that, and I agree fully. I don’t see why the gov’t doens’t take more “wild” ideas like that and conduct a few experiments on a large scale. Other countries do, with mixed success and failure, but at least they’ve tried.
The companies certainly aren’t bending over backwards, because it means less profit for a lot of industries. See, there’s the catch. It is all BS. It needs to be profitable for it to be done.
Nah. We need a visionary willing to take risks. The current leaders are just pathetic.
It isn’t that simple. The lumber, oil, construction, etc industries have powerful lobbies. There’s a lot of money in things like expensive housing and crappy automobiles. :-p
So appeal to their seedier nature. When I wrote to my representative (a Democrat) to encourage him to support Bush’s space iniative, I suggested that he push things farther along, seeing as how it was JFK who really got NASA rolling, it wouldn’t do for Bush to ride on JFKs coattails.
And if you start writing them letters saying, “I’m not going to buy your crappy product unless you make some changes to it.” you’ll get their attention. If they know that they’re losing money because of what they’re doing, they’ll make some changes.
Well, if you’re working on it with the same kind of pessimistic attitude you’ve got towards our government and industry, you’ll die of old age before you ever get out of here.
I fail to see how the greening of the African Desert has anything to do with terraforming the low-gravity permafrost on Mars. They’re not comparable at all. Both the scenarios you mention involve moving liquid water from nearby places where it’s already plentiful to places where it isn’t. You don’t have that option on Mars. Sure, there might be ice under the frozen desert, but you have no guarantees of using it for irrigation.
If we can set up a self-sustaining agricutlural operation on the Moon, however, Mars should be a piece of cake.
Except that we don’t need to develop those kinds of plants, they already exist. Ever heard of cactus? Reversing desertification isn’t simply a matter of getting plants to grow in the desert, especially when human activity (deforestation, etc.) is responsible for the growth of the desert to begin with.
Well, you’re the eternal pessimist, so I don’t get rolleyes.
Why? You won’t be impressed.
Nothing, except that it was created by the US government (started out as a thing called DARPAnet) and then exploded once private industry got their grubby little mitts on it. You had no faith in government or industry being able to produce anything valuable or remarkable, I pointed out something that they both did which is generally accepted as being valuable and remarkable, with the comment that such an accomplishment would probably be greeted with a “Meh” response. Seems I was right.
OK, you go colonize Mars without ecologists, biologists, etc and current technology.
You’d be surprised.
I never said that gov’t and industry never produced anything valuable and remarkable. I said they never did it unless it was profitable; ie, not for the common good. The Internet was most decidedly done for rather “greedy” purposes by all involved.
Huh? That makes no sense whatsoever. You made the claim that we’d somehow need to develop superplants to reverse desertification, I point out that it’s not necessary, and you tell me to colonize Mars with nothing. Tell you what, you give me $100 million, and I’ll use current technology to reverse desertification. Heck, I’ll even give you change from that $100 million.
Pardon me if I don’t hold my breath.
And no good’s come out of it at all, huh? And Social Security, Welfare, Medicare, and HUD are all done for “greedy” purposes. What a depressing world you must live in.
Well, you’re the one who believes that ordinary plants can’t be used to reverse desertification, so obviously it would take some kind of superplant.
At the moment, caffiene and nicotine, perhaps later I’ll get into some of my bourbon.
Except that’s not the way it’s worded, and we don’t need to develop them, we already have them.
Show me where one government dollar in a social program was cut in order to pay Mr. Spock or Captain Kirk’s salary. Or that the government has always spent it’s money on social programs and not on things like the military.