Too little, too late

Wanna live on Mars? Not me. It is the most God forsaken place I have ever seen images of. Endless expanses of mountains, rocks and dust and the sound of a lonely wind, moaning into the microphone of a Mars rover.

In 1961, as an 18 year old, I travelled with my dad across the desert between Damascus, Syria and Baghdad, Iraq in a little Opel car totally unsuited to the task. Luckily we managed to team up with a convoy of trucks making the same trip over a roadless landscape.

Travelling side by side with some 50 meters between each vehicle across the gravelly surface, we slowly made our way across another God forsaken land, sometimes traveling across hard baked old lake bed clay pans at much higher speeds.

Yes, there were lakes there a long time ago when the region supported a population of some 35 million people and an agricultural economy.

Historians consider it to be the birthplace of civilization, with empires coming and going over a period of several thousand years.

And look at it now, a Mars like landscape with a few hares jumping around in wetter spots, eking out a life there.

Is that where we are heading, wasting fresh water and energy as if there is no end to their availability at our fingertips? Here in Alberta, using some 60 million litres of fresh water to create one producing oil/gas well?

Does stupidity know no limits?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Premier Jason Kenney's strategy

The (not so) United Conservative Party board did a flip flop on how to conduct the internal leadership question vote a little while ago. Originally planned for a venue capable of dealing with some 2000+ people in attendance, something had to change in order to accommodate 15,000 registrants wanting to vote on whether Kenney should remain party leader. Several options were available to the party board, including the use of The Westerner Park facility in Red Deer. Instead, after many ruminations, the board decided on a mail in vote conducted during April, rather than an in-person vote on April 9, as originally planned. This is where it gets interesting, Kenney has been busy conducting telephone town halls with members of the party (two of which I have participated in with more to come), and also has a one hour phone in show on local radio stations every Saturday morning from 10am to 11am. In other words, he is "blitzing" the electorate with his version of why he should stay in
Read more

The problem with physics

The science we call "Physics" evolved over time to describe patterns observed in the behaviour of physical objects as they interact under the influence of forces acting upon them in the observed environment. We applied measurements of quantity and quality to what was observed by developing instruments that give numerical or categories of "kind" as answers to "how much" and "what". These same instruments have also greatly extended the range of our observations, such as telescopes, microscopes and stethoscopes, for example. In doing so, we are now discovering that the ground rules that we have established for our physics do not apply in the extreme micro and macro worlds of spinning electrons and swirling binary stars. The very idea of such a thing as an "object" does not really apply in highly energetic environments, for example. So, to move on, we have to be prepared to put our sensory derived common cozy conceptions on the shelf and
Read more