On Sat, Dec 27, 2014 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List < everything-list@googlegroups.com> wrote:
> we burned our planetary surplus up in a fantastically expensive cold war. > What did that get us? We got nuclear weapons which prevented the cold war from turning into a hot war and cause the second half of the 20th century to be much less violent than the first half, in fact per capita the least violent time in human history. If you told me on August 10 1945, the day after the nuclear bomb went off in Nagasaki, that as of December 27 2014 no other nuclear bomb would be set off in anger I would have said you were crazy. Shown what I know. John K Clark > > > > *From:* everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto: > everything-list@googlegroups.com] *On Behalf Of *John Clark > *Sent:* Saturday, December 27, 2014 10:46 AM > *To:* everything-list@googlegroups.com > *Subject:* Re: William Stanley Jevons > > > > On Fri, Dec 26, 2014 at 10:29 PM, Kim Jones <kimjo...@ozemail.com.au> > wrote: > > > > > Tee hee. So you are saying - are you not - that it never makes sense to > worry in any naked sense about our tendency to gobble everything up like > bacteria in a petri dish > > > > The bacteria shouldn't worry if the edge of the petri dish hasn't come > into view even in the largest telescopes the bacteria can build. > > But we live on a biosphere on the watery and rocky floor of the ocean of > air enveloping our planets gravity well. Our planet has 510 million square > kilometers of surface (more than 70% of which is covered by ocean, leaving > under 150 million square kilometers of land surface area). > > By far most of our planet is inaccessible to us, locked up in the mantle > and the core. Our entire recoverable planetary resource base is contained > within the very thin skin of the atmosphere, land surface; the upper crust > we can mine or drill down to and the oceans (to the extent we can). Our > whole resource base is this thin shell at the planetary surface. > > This is not an inexhaustible resource base and to use the petri dish > analogy it most definitely is not beyond the view of our most powerful > telescopes. > > Off planet the universe is infinite; it is just that getting there to this > infinite resources out there is also infinitely hard. I am sure Alpha > Centauri systems have plenty of resources, but they do not count as part of > us earthlings reserves until such time as we can actually go there to > recover them. > > I personally wish that over the last five decades the super powers had > spent more effort in getting off planet than they did in struggling with > each other down here in the trenches on earth. I believe we would have been > in a very different situation if we had already established other resource > bases on the (small gravity wells of) the moon and near earth asteroids. > > But instead we burned our planetary surplus up in a fantastically > expensive cold war. What did that get us? We are here where we now are, > because of past stupid (perhaps inevitable) decisions and a global > misdirection of effort into – non-producing military expenditures as > opposed to building up an orbital infrastructure built using significant > inputs from off world resource bases (such as the moon). > > But we did not do that and by now I doubt if we can; we have become too > impoverished by now and locked into a planetary resource struggle end game. > > -Chris > > John K Clark > > > > > > > > > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
