Dengl 26 A Use for So-Called Space Travel: The Geostationary Parasol

Mary Wakefield has written a "boys toys" encomium about space traffic.
http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-magazine/features/5186153/the-space-age-isnt-over-it-hasnt-yet-begun.thtml

It is, for the most part, unconvincing. I am sure the views for Richard Branson's 3, 000 millionaire travellers will be amazing and their after dinner conversations on return much enhanced; but they will in no manner be "new astronauts" (astro means a star and they will not have gone significantly nearer any stars than I will have done; we should have a further contempt for the term 'cosmonaut', as nobody, even if they venture to Mars, will have been anywhere near the cosmos which begins at the nearest star - is that Alpha Centauri - four light years away ...). Many of the recently developed applications of spacecraft have been useful, though we could have managed without and quite probably spent the money better on earth.

There are at least two potentially earth-saving applications for which we do have to reach out into the solar system. One, which Wakefield does mention, though without discussing it enough, is the need for a giant device which will not just detect a possible cometary collision with earth, but actually somehow ward it off.

A second device which Wakefield also mentions, but without identifying how it might best be used, consists of panels to collect solar energy and in her version beam it back to earth. She does not say where the beam will fall, whether it may do significant damage on the way, or whether the track of the beam will be precisely controllable, and how the energy will be collected, but no doubt these difficulties can be overcome.

Surely, though, what would be useful, if we are not yet wholly convinced by the non-global-warming lobby, is a means by which to cast large shadows, in a controlled manner, upon earth; a Geostationary Parasol. The object would be to lessen the warming which we have stumbled into by reducing earth's reflective heat loss. I have no knowledge of astrophysics but my question is, whether a huge solar panel much further away from the moon (and thus closer to the sun? – but thereby casting a wider shadow), and between sun and earth like an eclipse, could be constructed to collect enough solar energy to transform into stabilising propulsion for itself, while casting a substantial cooling shadow on earth.

Who would finance and build such a device? Who would control its shade? These challenges in socio political "engineering" are perhaps as intractable as the engineering ones involved in setting forth and physically controlling such a device. I do not believe we should hope that such truly useful applications will arise serendipitously on the back of funfairs in the sky.

Dengl 25 New Circenses

I was very pleased to have had the opportunity to attend a seminar yesterday, on the Internet. (It was at the House of Commons Grand Committee Room!).
I fear I ended among a minority who, by show of hands at the end, indicated we did not see it as a democratic panacea. I thanked the organiser, saying:

I am (not hugely) hard of hearing and sport an aid in one ear; however, I sat just next to an air conditioner vent (most welcome on that boiling day, especially after I had cycled 5 miles warmly to be present) and the wretched aid magnified the whirr of the air vent's motor making it very difficult to hear some panel speakers. Quite clearly, Grant Shaps, MP (one of the speakers) needs no microphone and I heard him well. Would that all speakers (I am not commenting about content) spoke as clearly as he did. It was next to impossible to hear most of the questions from the floor. I realise that many people have acute hearing but this is not so common among the older generation and fairly soon we will be joined by a mass of recruits who will have damaged their hearing by immersion in what is now termed "music" in clubs or via ipods etc. When that blessed day comes, it will be more usual for panel events to emphasise to speakers that they MUST talk into their microphones (and that, not too closely) and not, however intimate it makes the event seem, talk aside to their neighbours (Paul Staines, famous as a "blogger" Guido Fawkes, http://order-order.com/ did this); also, it would help if the chairman or person who is asked a question repeated (also to verify that s/he had taken it on board validly) what the question was. As things are, people like me have to try and work out what the question was, by inference from the heard-part of the answers given.

It was very instructive - negatively for me, I fear - to have the screen at the front carrying the "twitters" (is this london's substitute, now that all the sparrows have gone, for a beguiling, let alone an instructive discourse - I might well prefer to have the sparrows back instead) . This could be held to be distracting from the discussion among the "speakers" . It would be instructive to see a content analysis of the twits (is that the right word?) including such categories as: memorable poetic/haiku ..sharply pointed information, sharply pointed question, sharply pointed opinion ... all the way down to ... dispensable rubbish (sometimes insulting). I fear that a substantial proportion I saw on the screen were of the last category - they constitute not just clutter but damaging distraction from the development of some meaningful and informed public discourse.

In all, I am very graeful for the chance to have been there, and not a little concerned that even among what must have been quite an elite group of informed people there is a strong tendency to conflate the ideas of demotic with democratic. I was reminded of my idea of what some gladiators must have felt, in the colosseum, on seeing a forest of downward thumbs, that these people probably do not know what they are doing ...