Subject: Viridian Note 00015: Weather Violence Key concepts: Weather Violence, permanent corporate brands, air conditioned clothes, genetic bamboo, reflective algae, orbiting solar mirrors, floating aircraft hubs Attention Conservation Notice: This is highly imaginative, wacky sci-fi speculation. It serenely ignores real-world problems in technical development, such as start-up costs, return on investment, technological lock-in, lawsuits, labor unions, and corporate dominance of the political process. It offers no hard evidence to back its wild claims; there's not so much as a single cocktail-napkin calculation here. Maybe it's irresponsible, but I dote on this kind of thinking, I find it spiritually refreshing. Links: http://www.well.com/user/mgoldh/ Entries in the "Big Mike" Viridian Design Contest: http://www.pinknoiz.com/graphics/bigmike.gif http://www.spaceways.de/BigMike/Mike.html http://weber.u.washington.edu/~r1ddl3r/bigmike.html From: mgoldh@well.com* (Michael Goldhaber) Dear Viridian CEO Bruce, The whole thing is a terrific idea, I certainly hope it keeps going. A few points. The term "Global Warming" needs improvement. "Global warming" sounds much too comfortable. The core demographic of Viridian old people might imagine themselves spared the need to move to Florida. It's not mere "warming." It would be better described as "Global Storming" or perhaps "Violent Weather Crime." In this vein, explicit examples of "Criminal Weather Violence" might help. One small item from the 11/03/98 New York Times: the dense atmospheric smoke from burning rain forests causes more powerful, positively charged lightning, instead of the usual negatively charged variety. This violent lightning can result in more forest fires, hence more smoke. This might create a chain reaction of accelerating Weather Violence. Why get all excited about phantoms like the failure of Social Security in 2030, when all us 30-60 year olds have the exciting prospect of genuine calamity? Why favor evanescent design instead of Permanent Good Things? Corporations believe their brands to be eternal, and like nothing better than the idea of having their brand-name in the landscape forever. Permanent Good Things would definitely have cachet. A diamond is forever, as is a Coach bag, and a Brand X something-or- other. You could count on leaving this brand-named gizmo to your grandchildren because it will keep working so well and use such a tiny amount of energy! Evanescent things require energy to make, and then are gone. Not so cool! Banning the production of dumb books, as an earlier comment suggested, has zero appeal. Converting forest biomass to books is a damn sight better than burning the forest, because it sequesters CO2. Burning books, even ones you don't like, would be very bad. Likewise, plastics are a better use of fossil hydrocarbons than fuel. Here are some suitably far-out Viridian tech suggestions. Genetically engineer bamboo and grow it on-site as walls and supports. Fast-growing vines for roofs. Bioluminescent leaves for light at night. Direct photosynthetic conversion of sunlight into usable energy Sunlight is converted into infrared that is then trapped on our overheating planet. Increasing the earth's reflectance can diminish that problem. Engineer a fast-growing floating alga that would produce white foam over large sections of ocean, for instance. This alga would likely block life-giving light from the ocean depths and starve many surface seabirds, but those might be the least of our problems. You might filter the sun's rays somewhere between earth and sun. A number of sun-shields, each a mere hundred miles in circumference, placed in solar orbit might do the trick. The eventual goal is human ability to control global climate deliberately. Climate control may seen absurd, but climate control is also of course the implicit goal of the Kyoto Accord and Rio treaties. It's probably easier to award government contracts for giant orbital mirrorshades than it is to get everyone to burn less. The most fecund Viridian approaches find ways to gratify our desires with less fuel use. As we are now delighted to carry phones with us, walkman gadgets, portable computers and all the rest, let us go one simple step further and air-condition our clothes. This obviates the need for fuel to heat and cool large volumes of space. Furthermore, everyone can enjoy their favorite temperature without conflict. That leaves lighting and especially transportation as our fuel hogs. The former principle of "Just-in-time production" must be augmented by the proposed Viridian principle of "Where-You-Are production." Make what you want, on the fly, from cheap materials at hand, using general-purpose tools powered by imported recipes and software. We want efficient, elegant means of travel. Aircraft burn most of their fuel during take-off and landing procedures. One way to finesse this is to accelerate and decelerate planes through electromagnetic methods that allow energy recovery upon landing. Or, today's land-based aircraft hub system could be replaced with giant high-altitude (hub) balloons. High- altitude transport craft would dock at these balloons, passengers then moving to specialized departing planes for descent. Giant floating hubs would be far more entertaining than today's mundane airports, especially if they themselves moved, perhaps in a circular route above the landscape. The high-altitude hub crew would of course absorb many x-rays and gamma rays from cosmic radiation. A good reason to cut back on travel. Thanks for your attention, more later. Michael H. Goldhaber (mgoldh@well.com)