Fly Me To The Moon, Not...

-


OK - two things, both flagged in The New Scientist this week: I'll take the second piece first. Apparently, the Moon is stocked with platinum and other precious metals to the approximate value of $1trn, and that it is therefore ripe for for exploitation from a commercial point of view. The second piece relates to the emission of ancient sequestered carbon from rivers. Apparently a gigatonne of carbon is being released annually from peat bogs and wetlands by the rivers they ultimately feed. This could, and probably is being accelerated by climate change and the actions of mankind [surprise?], alluding to our having disturbed these millennia-long carbon stores directly or indirectly, but definitely by our own hand.

There are two thoughts on these reports going through my mind: one is that we have successfully demonstrated that we are incapable as species of respecting and working with our environment to its and our own long term benefit; choosing instead to value short term economic gain over common sense. So much is obvious, and has been for some time, but flatly ignored by the wealthy and the aspiring-to-be-wealthy, and the politicians who deem it pragmatic to go along with their aspirations to their own benefit. Second is the rather more scary prospect that billionaire speculators should be encouraged to plunder mineral resources off-world in order to further swell their coffers of stagnant cash.

On Earth - our only home, after all, we  have already shat in our nest to the point that our continued existence is starting to actually look pretty tenuous for no more than a few generations hence [not that this worries the über-rich, despite their idiotic aspirations to live forever]. But going off-world to further screw things up? Again, two thoughts: could the release of ancient carbon into the atmosphere, which assists in the whole global warming process, simply be a defence mechanism employed by Gaia to eradicate the threat to the planet [mankind]? Also: what if we do start large-scale mining operations on the Moon - which after all, largely controls the Earth's weather, in tandem with our atmosphere, through the movements of the oceans - and disturb its own delicate orbital balance with the inevitable knock on effects here at home? Food for thought by those that think, eh?   

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Of Feedback & Wobbles

-
Image
Many years ago I came up with an analogy for poorly damped feedback loops. The feedback loop that prompted this frankly tart analogy was indeed a horror. Anyone who remembers shame-faced their first attempts at clutch control resulting in the good old kangaroo launch across the lights only to stall in the middle of the crossroads will have some idea of the kind of data transfer lag involved in said system. The analogy I made was that of a large blancmange. Untouched, a model of stasis and eminently stable and predictable; but prod the bugger and the resultant chaotic behaviour needs a very complex physical model and some very decent computing horsepower to predict its outputs, if at all. The system in question was a large and complex audio-visual display at what eventually became 'The Electric Mountain' in Llanberis. We were ultimately contracted to maintain the thing having been witness to and peripherally involved in its installation. Certainly not involved in its des...
Read more

A Time of Connection

-
Image
I was just reflecting on the vacuum of continuity that's left behind when someone dies: that sudden sense of disjoint, of fracture, in one's personal history that takes one completely by surprise at the oddest moments. These pinch-points in memory can often yield some surprising revelations of fact about periods in one's past. One such occurred to me tonight, tending my rather lazy meal of pizza in its journey from shrink-wrap to mouth via the oven. Al's recent demise still catches me out from time to time: the space he left bounded by forty plus years of friendship. But the thing that struck me tonight was just how much change was happening on a personal and social level in the very early years of our acquaintance. Between moving here from Birmingham in September 1980 and our buying our first proper house eighteen months later, all manner of things occurred that would chart the course of our lives to the present day. At around the time of our meeting Alan & Irene [...
Read more

Messiah Complex

-
Image
A spectre is haunting... America; and it isn't communism. It isn't radical Islamism. It isn't even capitalism itself. It's Christianity. A particularly pernicious, politicised Christianity. 'In God We Trust', One Nation Under God', etc., etc., are the tropes of a 'nation' that is the result of the colonisation of a foreign continent by a motley bunch of assorted European disaffects several hundred years ago. That much is history, and the native peoples of America are still struggling to cling on to what is, after all, their birthright. Whatever good was squeezed from the sour pith of colony in the middle part of the last century: civil rights, racial emancipation and equal rights for women and LGBTQ+ people of all stripes, is not now simply being eroded, but actually bulldozed over the cliff edge that separates human rights & freedoms, and the return of enslavement by difference. Difference of skin colour, race, gender or sexuality: a pick 'n...
Read more