[ExI] Terraforming Earth

Wed Sep 6 22:29:46 UTC 2017

my comment at the end  bill w

On Wed, Sep 6, 2017 at 2:24 PM, Tara Maya <tara at taramayastales.com> wrote:

>
> As part of my research for my novels, I watch a lot of YouTube videos
> about “bushcraft” and survival skills, and other fun topics like how to
> build a house for $6000.  While I am very pro-technology, I am leery of any
> form of “Cyber Socialism,” a future in which only a few geniuses will have
> any genuine work to do and everyone else will live off of “Universal
> Income” (as serfs lived off the “charity” of their feudal masters in the
> Dark Ages), distracted by the bread and circuses of Virtual playgrounds. I
> don’t want to live on the charity of a global cyber-ruling class, and I
> doubt that the majority of humanity does either.
>
> I’d rather see technology used to empower individuals, and not just the
> super geniuses, but the ordinary people, even—dare I say it—the kind of
> people who may have voted for Trump. Or Jill Stein. Or whoever you hate,
> but who wouldn’t matter as much if the government combined with huge
> conglomerates didn’t have such power of our lives. People who want to be
> independent and useful, on their own terms.
>
> It seems to me that the only real way to do that is to use technology to
> extend land that families can move onto, develop themselves, in the old
> frontier fashion. Not at a lower technological level, the way most “off the
> grid” types now, but in a way that decentralizes but extends the grid—in a
> high tech way. Cheap, easy to use tech that turns dead land, like tundra,
> desert and empty ocean into territory where people can build houses and
> towns and new states.
>
> Terraforming other planets is still too expensive, but terraforming the
> more alien parts of the earth seems within reach. There’s a few
> organizations out there, like the Sea Steading community, which are
> thinking along the same lines, but I would like to think in terms of
> reclaiming the hottest and coldest lands on Earth as well. If you look at a
> map of the United States at night, there are parts of the West, short of
> the coast, which are almost as dark as North Korea.
>
> Energy and liquid water seem to be the biggest challenges on land. With
> energy you can either cool or heat the worst environment, and either
> collect, store, melt or import water, although the more local you can
> source water, the better, I think. The other kind of tech which would be
> useful would be for intense, efficient local farming, mostly automated.
> While I expect most food production to be dominated by a few huge
> companies, I think that having thousands of tiny, family owned
> farms/gardens, which operate autonomously enough to not be the main
> occupation of the family who owns them, would be fantastic. We already have
> this to some extent, but there’s huge room for improvement.
>
> A century of practice reclaiming deserts and tundras, creating dispersed
> energy grids and autonomous urban farms, would be great practice for the
> skills needed to actually colonize other planets or to live in space. Not
> to mention a bit of elbow room would help quite a bit to ease our current
> problems.
>
> Tara Maya
>
---------------------------------
This sounds wonderful, and I cannot agree more that humans need to work for
various reasons, including self-esteem.  But in the society your describe,
no one really needs to work.  So give a family a piece of land and
equipment so they can farm.  Farming is hard work and often frustrating -
weather, pests, etc.  So I suspect that people will get tired of it rapidly.

Another thing:  how is this different from just giving them toys to play
with, which they can put down when they get tired of playing with them?
Sure, they may produce some specialty foods, and that serves everyone
better than sitting on a couch running up your video games scores.

But in the end it's make-work which might even disrupt economic planning.
You will have to kick people out who are not doing the jobs.  So the
property really does not belong to them, or should not. And people
apparently like to live in big cities where everything is right at hand.

I like the idea a lot but see some real problems with it.
bill w

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