The December Musing From Long Hill column from the Greater Sturbridge Town & Country Living Magazine:
The election is over finally and up on Long Hill we are glad of it. As of this writing, it is still being contested. No matter, we can say with confidence, as we do after every quadrennial contest: The good news is one lost, the bad, one of them won.
Enough of such cynicism. Let us discuss more pleasant topics such as climate disaster, again.
It is not that we have not gone over this before. The Green New Deal and our skepticism about it have been written about, but we are always looking for the scary aspect of a looming cataclysm. We have found one.
Think of the Earth as one big Easter Island. Easter Island is a lonely spot in the Pacific where the people who first discovered the place stranded themselves so they could never leave. It was a forested land that if managed well might have seen its expert Polynesian seafarers able to voyage the ocean as they had been doing.
Alas, the people cut down the trees without regard to what life would be like without them and could never leave. They would have to wait for others to find them and bring them diseases and enslave many of them. They did create some intriguing stone statues they are famous for, not that that did them any good.
Well, according to economic researcher Chris Martenson, all the rest of us earthlings are on the same path of resource depletion as the islanders. One might guess that would mean we shall never be able to get off the planet and are stuck where we are as were the Rapanui (i.e. native name of that people).
As I've never been able to get off the planet before, that has not been a worry up on Long Hill. Mr. Martenson has a list of things we should be doing to stave off complete isolation. In truth, a poorer human existence is in order if we do not wisely conserve resources.
On the next page, Chris has more, but as a stipend is required to go further, your columnist decided to practice some resource conservation.
Chris had alluded to peak oil, that is the end of petroleum as we use it up. What to do?
Whenever the topic comes up, someone usually mentions electric cars as a solution. China is big on electric cars. Problem is there is no something for nothing in nature and you have to charge the batteries which means generating electricity and the method China uses for generation is coal because they have a lot of that toxic pollutant, and that too will be used up.
Nothing works perfectly and nuclear as an alternative is feared as the radioactive result lasts much closer to eternity than we do. It will take a while, but the fuel for reactors runs out also. So, it's back to Planet Easter Island.
There is a form of nuclear that does not pollute and "spits out more energy than it consumes" according to an October article in Livescience. It's called fusion and it works by pushing atoms together rather than splitting them apart.
This would be a wonderful development. The Livescience piece says we could be getting fusion electricity by 2025. We're saved!
Fusion is a complicated process that produces teslas. If you're thinking Elon Musk, you know even less science than I do. A tesla is a measurement of a magnetic field, as well as a cute name for a car.
The fusion reactor produces heat that is used to make steam and generate more electricity than current power plants.
There is, however, a small problem. Fusion has been just around the corner since your columnist was a teenager. That was not last week. If your broker calls and says he has a hot fusion stock, don't take out a home equity for a flyer.
We can live in hope, and it might work out. Even if it does, aircraft will still need fossils to fuel them. Airplanes and rockets fly with petroleum products and so far, that's it. The aforementioned Mr. Musk wants to go to Mars with a sizable population eventually. His spacecraft only uses refined crude products, a lot of it. Once it runs out, we'll never see our relatives again on the Red Planet.
Hydrogen is held out as the future fuel, but that, like fusion, is just around that same corner.
There is a way as prompted by our own official think tank, The Long Hill Institute for the Study of Pseudo Science (LHIfCPS for short). What the Institute suggests is that we break the law, i.e. the Law of Gravity.
We are not the first to consider contravening gravity to travel through the air. The idea has a place in literature. The satirical masterpiece, Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift, features it in Part III where Gulliver encounters the floating island of Laputa
It is inhabited by a population of Stephen Hawkings whose heads are literally and figuratively in the clouds.
The island stayed in the air and was able to maneuver by the “magnetic virtue” of certain minerals. Such a realm could only exist due to its defiance of gravity. Alas, it does not happen in reality.
Newspapers are dying unless kept on life support with oligarch money infused (such as The Washington Post and New York Times). It was not always so. Whether or not the Twentieth Century was the greatest age of the broadsheet is open to question, but they were huge. Almost all of them had a comics page. As a boy, your columnist was a fan of many of the strips and loved Dick Tracy by Chester Gould.
Dick Tracy was a hard-boiled detective, but the strip had a sci-fi component. His Two-Way Wrist Radio that evolved into the two-Way Wrist TV and eventually the two-Way Wrist computer foretold the smartphone.
One of Gould's inventions that never came to fruition was the Space Coupe. The Space Coupe was a cylindrical vehicle that had antennae attached that could tap gravity to fly. The Space Coupe voyaged to the moon and found a valley with a salubrious climate supporting human-like life forms.
Fantastic, but fun, gravity propulsion is one Gould speculation that has not happened...yet.
As doubtful as you may be as to our sanity, or for that matter, sobriety, actual real serious people have suggested the possibility of levitation. Roger Babson, famous economic writer, entrepreneur and philanthropist was intrigued by the subject. Babson had said of the stock market, what goes up must come down and he had the concept right, correctly anticipating the crash of 1929. He ended up with a lot of money to fund his ideas.
His interest began when his sister drowned because, as he put it, “She was unable to fight gravity which came up and seized her like a dragon and brought her to the bottom."
Babson further observed: “Gradually I found that ‘old man Gravity’ is not only directly responsible for millions of deaths each year, but also for millions of accidents” ... “Broken hips and other broken bones as well as numerous circulatory, intestinal and other internal troubles are directly due to the people's inability to counteract Gravity at a critical moment.”
The scientific community was not overly excited by what Babson was suggesting. Undaunted, he would found the Gravity Research Foundation in 1947 after another family drowning.
Babson was a serious man, but his gravity shield and other ideas never got traction, maybe because no one would give it a real chance.
Still, the foundation gives out prizes for papers on gravity related subjects, though none of them are regarding the quest for the gravity shield that could take us to the stars. The hope remains forlorn.
But, not for everyone.
The U.S. Navy has been granted a patent for a "Craft using an inertial mass reduction device." which kind of, sort of, means manipulation of magnetic forces and gravity.
Granted, the article reporting the advancement was in Metro, not exactly a science journal, but the link takes you to a google patents page.
Again, as a bastion of crackpot-science, we take hope up on Long Hill on the slimmest of possibilities. The proposed Navy anti-gravity air and watercraft may never come to anything, but it is more fun than contemplating who will be inaugurated in January.
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