SOME WILD IDEAS
I don't remember who said it this past week. It may have been a travel-minded lady on TV recently or there a dozen places in which I might have read it.
She lamented the fact that she had just a few years left in which to spend some time in the romantic and historical City of Venice. She said she was in a hurry to do so, because she wanted to see the city before we it “sank beneath the sea.”
Venice is disappearing but not at the dire rate her urgent wish might indicate. It is a double process, really, which recent studies indicate that the water level of Mediterranean's Sea, and hence of the Adriatic Sea upon which the City of Venice has been located for centuries is showing increasingly higher levels at times. It is not a constant factor, nor even a seasonal problem, but there are growing indications that the foundations of the city are being eroded and have been weakened by excessive immersion in sea water. It may well be, too, that modern maintenance practices are not so “personal” as those those undertaken by people seeking endlessly to maintain their family heritage.
This is no a new problem. I can remember it being discussed at great length many decades ago in magazines such a “Popular Science” magazine. It was urged by that publication that a system of siphons might be installed crossing the Atlas Mountains of Northern Africa which would take Mediterraneans Sea waters into the vast Sahara Desert area where it would create a new inland sea. prevailing winds would carry the moisture northwards and the falling rains along the Atlas Range would feed fresh water to those areas in so much need of it.. .making possible major social and economic improvements for large numbers of deprived people.
A crazy idea? Think about it before you classify it too rigidly.
The second idea which has come up the news this week is that of gravitomagnatism. You have to be a devotee of Dick Tracy comics to recall when that was a favorite subject under discussion and development. I don't recall the trick name of the genius Doctor-Somebody who developed magnetic power to power his fleet of space craft on the Dick Tracy comic strip. We can put a lot of the blame on him if wish to do so or you can get busy right away figuring out how you can reverse a ;Lazar beam focused on a black hole and in some way “pipe” the gravity fed power back to earth. So far all we can get is about ¾ of an inch sideways jiggle out of it. Find a way to tap the radiation at the black holes which seem to be a source of such a such a galactic source of power in tremendous amounts. Rig up things you think might do the job.
Get busy at it as soon as you can or someone else will come across the simple – why-didn't-I-see-that??? - set up that will do it. Get busy with your own untamed ideas. Such wild wish-I-could ideas may well be the basis of our future.
A.L. M. April 29, 2003 [c549wds]
