OFF: FLOODS ARE COMING

[M Holmes]

dhuggins writes:

> Hmmm,
>
>         One thing I remember during the days of my youth was being told that
> mankind was polluting the environment, which was going to cloud out the sun
> and cause another ice age.

I had a Canadian teacher in 1968 so I got an early version of the
Greenhouse effect. A little later the second report to the Club of Rome
(Meadows) came out and we all got the Limits to Growth stuff thrown at
us in high school. Alongside all this most of our parents' generation
were telling us that a nuclear war was inevitable and sometime later
they thought up nuclear winter. Then it was ice ages in general. Now
we're back to greenhouses with a little bit of asteroid strike,
supervolcanoe eruption, or 1000 foot Tsunami caused by the collapse of a
volcanic shelf on some piddling island off the Atlantic that I can't
even remember the name of.

For my money we should at least build Spacewatch and research the best
defence against asteroid strike. The reason being that it will
definitely happen sooner or later; it happens more often than we'd like
to think; and doing space stuff is interesting and useful to long term
survival anyway.

I can't see what we could do about supervolcanoes or tsunamis. Nukes
can't be uninvented and so political solutions are needed there; and
there's no point in trashing the world economy (particularly not at the
low point of the K-wave - Bush is correct on that) until we have solid
evidence of a problem and what's causing it.

> So, all in all, I prefer a "Hot" age.  At least
> you can wear shorts.  Think of all the solar power that would be available.
> And all the neat mutations that would occur.  Especially gills for bad
> actors who skim the seas on funky catamarans.

We'd be best not to get into a runaway greenhouse cycle, but we could
almost certainly delay it by banging up large mylar sheets at the
Earth-Sol lagrange points - at least long enough to work on the problem.
Of course that requires better space infrastructure and so back to
Spacewatch.

> But let me make this perfectly clear, I am against pollution.

Pollution is just food for nanocritters. We've just gotta invent the
nanocritters.

Believe it or not though, there's *already* a group protesting nanotech
and incipient AI.

FoFP