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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Grainne who wrote (13332)	10/21/1997 11:33:00 AM
From: Father Terrence	Respond to of 108807

Christine: Either no one here really reads posts, or everyone is suffering from some short-term memory disease. How many times have I mentioned that I own and run 3 companies? I don't know, perhaps a zillion times. I just started my fourth company and am in the process of selling one of the older ones. FT

To: Grainne who wrote (13332)	10/21/1997 12:58:00 PM
From: Jacques Chitte	Respond to of 108807

>>However, I do believe Johnny and FT advocate using the earth's resouces up, and then leaving for outer space. As I recall, they believe technology will solve environmental problems. Now I'm in a bind. I find most of John Galt's credo to be as simplistic and useless as Marxism, because it's based on fabricated premises. But there is one plank of his platform (or is that FT's) which resonates strongly within me . That would be: Reach for the Stars. I believe that people (a selected group, not the whole populace) will establish a toehold, and then a solid grip, on the rest of the solar system. I further believe that this does not contain the implicit necessary consequence that we trash the crib in doing so. Technologies ARE getting cleaner while at the same time becoming more powerful. The passenger plane of today is faster, cleaner and more efficient (in terms of fuel use per passenger mile) than fifty or thirty years ago. The driver for this change is twofold: 1) Economics. Fare pressure selects for efficient turbofan technology. 2) Government, or Regulation. Pollution and noise regulations provide a benchmark of cleanliness which technical advances are allowing us to continually improve. I anticipate that the technology which gets us into space, while horrifically expensive right now, is going to be quite light on its feet environmentally. The Venturestar launcher, Lockheed's successor to the shuttle, burns hydrogen/oxygen. Very clean in its operation; no yucky solid-fuel smoke (full of aluminum and chloride and sulfur) to gung up our lower stratosphere. An effort is under way to clean up orbital operations. Every paint chip or metal filing which drifts from an orbital construction site becomes a potential suit perforator if its orbit is unlucky. We don't yet have a good way to clean up space junk. (but in twenty years, lasers and radar might be good enough that we can nudge all those pesky Russian spysat boosters into a reentry orbit.) On Earth, the Biotech Renaissance is a generation or two away from being the same exponential epiphany as solid-state electronics were from the Sixties thru the present. This means denser crops on better-used land. Specialist organisms which remediate the scars of the Twentieth Century, then disappear without a trace. Picture a bush whose fruit concentrate seleniom or PCBs. That fruit can then be refined or torched or something. This century, and the first decades of the next, will be the crest of the User Era. Consumerism will continue and expand, but our material cycles will get more and more closed. The underlying enabling force will be technology, steered by that dual driver, Economics and Regulation. I posit Regulation as being vital. This is in direct opposition to the more libertarian (?) models we get to read here. That is because I simply don't buy into the idea that untrammeled free commerce will value, and valuate, common-domain assets (like wetlands, and oceans, and air) fairly or quickly enough to use them right. That's just not the way to make more money faster, unless you have a strong hand saying, Drink Slower.