Re: One Europe will never develop as such but many alliances and a new sense of urgency and co operation is developing between the many individual countries....eh.
As I said, Europe's institutional model is the UN... The EU should actually be renamed UNE for United Nations of Europe:
Message 18348213
The UNE still lags the UN on two points: unlike the UN, it doesn't have a figurehead (a Kofi Anan) to provide Europe with "a single voice" at the highest executive level, and it lacks a written constitution or anything resembling the UN Charter...
As for the Euro, I guess it's the only, frail thread that still keeps Europe together --so long as one Euro trades for more than one dollar, Europeans (especially Germans, Dutch, Belgians, Austrians) will feel comfortable and reassure themselves that they enjoy living standards on a par with Americans... I'm afraid they're in for a painful wakeup call.
All this brought me to meditate on the notion of "decline" or "decadence".... I'm of the opinion that macroeconomic decline is a tricky phenomenon, I mean, any historical (that is, technological/economic/cultural) decline is not so much an absolute regression as it is a standstill... That is, the declining civilization has just stopped moving while other civilizations keep moving on. Hence the (self-)delusion of the declining civilization: Europeans still enjoy the comfort, the perks and all the niceties of the technologies (be it computers, telecoms, foodstuffs, healthcare,....) that were developed up to the late 1990s. Yet, they're surreptitiously and increasingly missing the next ones. For instance, Europe used to be the world leader in pharmaceuticals --ain't no more since the late 1990s, displaced by the US. Agro-luddism is hindering Europe's biotech research... Already major telecom standards have been developed in Asia or the US instead of Europe (CDMA and imode vs GSM & WAP).
As far as space exploration is concerned, ESA (European Space Agency) has miserably failed to achieve what the US has already achieved in 1976 (Viking I & II probes): to land a probe on Mars.... Actually, the year 2003 will probably make History as the pivotal year that marked China's coming of space age: the year started with the failure of Europe's Ariane V jumbo-rocket (*), then went on with the tragic loss of the shuttle Columbia, and ended with China's successful orbiting of a manned capsule and catching-up with Russia and the US....
Gus
(*) New Ariane Ten Ton Truck Fails On First Launch
by Annick Chapoy
Kourou (AFP) Dec 11, 2002
The much-awaited maiden flight of a new heavyweight European space rocket failed Wednesday just three minutes after what seemed a normal takeoff, the director general of Arianespace said.
The failure came as a severe blow to Arianespace. It was the second takeoff attempt, as the maiden launch was scrubbed on November 28 in the final seconds.
An hour after the incident, technicians had no news about the causes or the nature of the accident and Arianespace head Jean Yves Le Gall told journalists there would be no information before Thursday.
"Three minutes after takeoff, a malfunction appeared and the mission ended prematurely," he said. "Analyses will be carried out all night to find the reasons for this failure."
Le Gall apologized to customers for the failure of the Ariane rocket, which was carrying two satellites: a Hotbird TM7 for the European telecoms consortium Eutelsat and Stentor, an experimental communications satellite for the French space research institute CNES.
The incident occurred after a perfect takeoff when the rocket reached 120 kilometres (75 miles) altitude and the booster fell into the Atlantic, Le Gall said.
"From the moment when the launcher left its trajectory, it is clear that the failsafe mechanism had to do its work," he said.
"It's a serious setback. Our job is difficult, it's at moments like this we are cruelly reminded of it," he said at the base at Kourou in the French south American territory of Guiana. "We have already known failures, we will know more."
"It's normal that people should be disconcerted after such a failure," he went on, "but it is quite normal, in my position, that one looks to the future.
"We will understand, analyse, and we shall take flight again as we have done after our previous failures."
Le Gall noted that there was an Ariane 4 launch due next week "and there is nothing to put it in doubt."
The Arianespace chief was unable to give details of the cost of the failed mission.
Wednesday's flop could jeopardize Arianespace's dominant position on the commercial satellites market. The Ariane 5-ESCA is the European consortium's latest weapon in its battle with Boeing and Lockheed Martin of the United States for domination of the world satellite launch market.
Ariane 5-ESCA is a modified version of the Ariane 5 which began commercial operations in 1999.
The rocket's original capacity has been boosted from 5.9 tonnes to a massive 10 tonnes, enabling it to accommodate larger satellites and combine several of them in a single launch to slash costs.
[...]
spacedaily.com |
