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  • From: Clansgian AT wmconnect.com
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Homestead] Something awesome this way comes
  • Date: Mon, 5 Jan 2009 08:15:34 EST

In a message dated 1/4/2009 11:30:54 PM Eastern Standard Time,
erthnsky AT bellsouth.net writes:


> >1. Bucky paper (Buckminister Fuller)
> http://globaldialoguecenter.blogs.com/jbgoodnews/2008/12/1-buckypaper-super-s
> trong-and-super-light.html
> http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/10/17/buckypaper-material.html
> This stuff will replace steel..no more mining, smelting, etc.
>

Bev, you really have to consider the source of your late night entertainment.
None of the five things you list have any of the rosy prospects the websites
mentioned paint for them. You don't have time to read what I'd say about all
five of them, but let me take the first one as an example.

The stuff mentioned is Carbon NanoTube material (CNT). Sure it's super light
and super strong ... but it is also super expensive and energy intensive to
make. The fibers are deemed toxic. By the bye, Buckminster Fuller had
nothing
to do with developing it, it's just named after him.

Each of those things mentioned sound good, as long as you don't consider the
prohibitive aspects of them. Run your tractor from algae in the homestead
pond? Sure, so long as the pond is about ten acres.

Most such "Jesus on a Bicycle" solutions one hears on Coast to Coast would be
like announcing that you had discovered the perfect fertilizer for growing
corn, it's lobsters! Just bury a lobster in each corn hill and production
goes
up dramatically. Of course, what you don't emphasize is that all you have to
do is figure out a way to produce billions of lobsters at nearly no cost, but
hey, that's a trifle we can work out later!

Some new innovations do come up from time to time that change things quite
dramatically. Fiber optics allowed us to use glass as a conductor instead of
copper to transmit electronic signals. Much of our hyper-communication now
of
days would have been throttled for lack of copper had this not been
developed.
But for every one such idea that pans out, there are three hundred that one
hears from such sources as Coast to Coast.

Says I, when an idea like this comes up, put it all on the table. No one has
ever made a gallon of biodiesel from algae. A few drams have been made in
laboratory conditions that consumed more energy than was yielded in oil.
Again,
such limitations are tossed off as trifles that can be worked out in the
future.

Those are brilliant ideas. And as anyone who has looked into the creative
process knows, for every brilliant idea that has proven useful, the creative
mind comes up with 2000 that are useless and 200 of those down right
ridiculous.
A person appears to be a genius when he has the knack of keeping all those
ideas to himself but the feasible ones. A person appears to be a nut-case
when
he can't .... although the effective difference between genius and nut-case
is
in this instance not really important.

I remember a Mad Magazine spoof on commerative stamps, one dedicated to the
late Nellie Splinfz, the inventor of the first unsuccessful concrete life
preserver. The devil is in the details!

James




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