-PJ
Posted on 11/20/2006 7:58:13 PM PST by chemical_boy
And if they had the proper parabolic curvature, they could be used for (ahem!) "heating" certain smallish areas of the earth's surface. Let he who hath ears to hear....
oh but embryonic stem cells will cure all of that in a month or two. Montana surely has some cures forthcoming.
Maybe we could shoot a bunch of stem cells into the air to solve global warming as well?
The problem was that it was IN the atmosphere, rahter than above it.
Just think of the money Jersy Democraps & union thugs could get out of this by sending up the garbage. NOBODY could find the landfill bodies then.
If we had had the good sense to do what Dr Gerard K. O'Neill et al suggested around the time of the U.S. Bicentennial we would RIGHT NOW have a large scale orbital manufacturing infrastructure supported by lunar resource bases already building L5 colonies and solar power satellites...and IF so-called 'global warming' turned out to be a REAL problem it would be little trouble to retask the manufacturing efforts from building more L5 colonies to building additional solar power satellites @ Lagrange 1 where they could not only be used to reduce insolation, which would help any global warming effects if any REGARDLESS of whether such are natural or human origin as presently hotly debated, but would also be able to generate enormous amounts of extra energy as a result...yes we might have to delay moving humanity off the planet [which is the REAL solution to any human caused global 'environmental' problems] for a few extra decades but we'd have enormous amounts of extra energy [and therefore vast surplus industrial capacity if we planned it right] when we did.
Instead we didnt bother to TCB for the Future's sake so now IF there is global warming [and not merely microclimate warming from increased urbanization] then regardless of whether it's man made or natural [insolation variance or other] we don't have the extraplanetary assets to do much about it...
...but hey we've got laptop computers and Tivos and Playstations and cellphones in 2006 instead of L5, SPS, Helium-3 fusion and microgravity manufacturing...
...brilliant choices there Homo sapiens...posthumous Darwin award coming?
"something of such a scale is only imagined....
never to be???"
...said the mud hut builder to the pyramid engineer...
Fortunately the pyramid engineers didnt live in the 1970s and Pharoah hadn't been conned by "Limits To Growth".
-PJ
Subterranean colonies are just as important and maybe cheaper and easier to get to. It should be possible to build a colony deep underground that gets all its energy from the Earth's nuclear powered molten core and not have any cares about the surface.
Wait till all the lawyers get a hold of this one. All the people who were getting an advantage from a warming earth would sue the he** out of NASA!
it depends on how quickly you 'need' to do it...that's where the Hollyweird movies like Armageddon get it wrong; they postulate an incoming big rock so close it would have to be deflected in such a short time it would be practically impossible for us to deflect it even with nukes [Sorry Bruce]...but if you are dealing with a rock far enough out that you have plenty of time then even a small nudge would be sufficient to either stop it from hitting Earth or conceivably make it do so eh? less specific impulse but for a much longer time works when the required degree of deflection is much smaller eh?
In which case stationing a mass driver on the asteroid could do it...
Though I think whacking the earth with another dino-killer would be a worse 'cure' than the 'disease' of global warming could ever be...however the same techniques could be used to move a near earth object...say one of the apollo asteroids?...into earth orbit for use as (a) life support resources to support large numbers of people in orbital operations [if a carbonaceous chondrite type] or (b) for metals for orbital industrialization [if a nickel-iron type] or better yet (c) both types for both purposes...and those would then also make a nice counterweight for building a synchronous skyhook [space elevator] as well as the cc typoe supplying the carbon to build the nanotube ribbon from orbit to the surface [nanobot manufactured down to the surface in one continuous piece to get around the recent join strength concerns perhaps?].
I think it was the plot of the last Highlander movie, too.
Remember when eco-wackies warned against the dire effects of nuclear winter? Now they might almost think it was a good thing. Perhaps this explains why the left wants Iran to have nuclear weapons.
Don't overlook all the heat created to LAUNCH this monstrosity. A million cows mulching a million munches of methane would do less harm, moothinks.
Oops. Methinks.
No, moothinks, after all.
I wish I had that shot from Apollo 13, where Tom Hanks blocks out the moon with his thumb (while somewhat drunk on champagne).
Sure would be - but then that idea is 30 years old and TPB didnt want it then even at the height of the [phony] "energy crisis"...hmmmmm...
And you'd have received less irradiation flying in a jet through a solar powersat microwave beaming megawatts of perfectly 'green' power to it's Earthbound rectenna station than people living in Denver or next to a powerline or than we find acceptable from cellphones...oh wait the "nervous nellies" get scared of those last two too...
Hmmmmmm. I think any detrimental impact on our polar ice caps would be worth the tradeoff in preserving Liberty, so where's the Monty Python trebuchet now that we need it?
That's what these morons don't seem to consider. Global warming? Bring it on. You can't grow crops in the snow.
(touch typing)...
Hey, it works! ...you blotted out the sun!
Waitaminute... MY EYES!!!!!
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