Friday, June 07, 2002
A Note for (Other) Pedants
Yes, I know what "intergalactic" means. But "intragalactic" or, worse, "intrasystemic" wouldn't convey anything to anyone, now would it?
posted by vepxistqaosani 5:31 PM
The Intergalactic Right-Wing Conspiracy
So, it turns out that Hillary was thinking too small (still stuck in the village, I guess). "Vast" is grossly inadequate to describe what Dave Kopel, Glenn Reynolds, and Jonah Goldberg are cooking up.
Like all right-wingers, I'm utterly devoid of prejudice. Heck, some of my best friends are Martians. But I think we might want to slow down the Barsoom bandwagon. There's lots of stuff much closer to home that needs to be tended to.
Global warming, for instance.
Back in the South (well, Florida, actually: so we're talking geography, not culture), where I grew up, old ladies used to have some of the same problems with the Sun that everyone knows we're having now. Their solution was to carry a parasol (umbrella to most of you; UMbrella to us Southerners), which they would deploy whenever their delicate peaches-and-cream complexions were threatened.
Why can't we do the same? A simple disk a few tens of thousands of miles across will drastically reduce the amount of energy the Sun delivers to the Earth. Mind you, there are significant engineering challenges in building something so big that tidal forces have to be taken into account. It would certainly require constant maintenance. But it's not a crazy idea. (OK, it is -- but not that crazy.) And it would take some doing to ensure that it wouldn't cause as many problems as it cures: see this article at SpaceDaily. But perhaps all we have to do is shade the Sahara -- or the Pacific -- to produce a controlled cooling effect.
The point is that there's something we can do -- in space, yet -- that won't destroy advanced economies and further retard the growth of third-world economies.
Which brings me to my other space hobbyhorse: solar power satellites. (Here's a Google search page.) If we embarked on a Manhattan/Apollo-sized effort, we might well be able to supply power to the entire third world (and ourselves) in the most environmentally friendly way possible: Who doesn't like solar power?
The Greens, of course. Solar power is only good if it's small. If it's big -- and, still worse, big enough to help send humans to Mars -- then it must be awful.
posted by vepxistqaosani 5:10 PM
