June 28, 2015
Word
We've arranged a civilization
in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and
technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one
understands science and technology. This is a prescription for
disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or
later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going
to blow up in our faces. -- Carl Sagan
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It already has. There should be a crash program with an empowered honcho like Rickover to put nuclear fusion power plants on line within ten years. Let's end the use of oil, coal, natural gas and fissionables for power generation and transportation within 15 years. It can be done. It must be done. But the fossil fuel corporations are in charge, not us, thanks to SCOTUS, so it won't be done.
With practically unlimited power, an infrastructure can be created to radiate excess heat into space at night. A fusion stardrive can take robots to the nearest possibly habitable planets and back in a few years. If they exceed the speed of light relative to the earth they will travel into the past. As they decelerate they will come back to our present. That effect must cancel out, Relativity means that not particle can be accelerated to greater than light speed. It does not mean that no spaceship can accelerate itself to greater than light speed--whatever speed means when you are moving back through time--relative to the earth.
That kind of power empowers humans to live without sunlight. We could make our own. There's plenty of hydrogen.
But it can't happen, and it won't happen, thanks to greed, corruption, SCOTUS, and the ignorance that Sagan spoke of.
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