Homestead mailing list

[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

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