All posts by Mordanicus

Space advocate, author, classical republican, classical liberal, religious humanist, religious naturalist.
society, space colonization, technology, Waste management

Recycled water

Leave a comment

In orbital space settlements water recycling is essential. So it is quite worrisome when we read the following article on ScienceDaily:

Get over it? When it comes to recycled water, consumers won’t

To cite from this article (my emphasis):

If people are educated on recycled water, they may come to agree it’s perfectly safe and tastes as good — or better — than their drinking water. They may even agree it’s an answer to the critical water imbalance in California. But that doesn’t mean they’re going to use recycled water — and it sure doesn’t mean they’ll drink it.

The problem is that educated people are disgusted to use a perfectly safe product that is necessary for staying alive. Perhaps people should not think too much about the origin of their tap water – if education is apparently not sufficient in this case.

crime, society

Wealth, poverty and crime

3 Comments

Though it is often said that crime is caused by poverty, there is little to no evidence to actually back up this claim. On the contrary it seems the more affluent people are more likely to commit property crimes. The Guardian has a nice article about this strange phenomenon:

Rich robbers: why do wealthy people shoplift?

Continue reading Wealth, poverty and crime →

Housing, Science, society

Urban design & public health

3 Comments

Creating an optimal living climate is one of the Four Goals formulated by Gerard O’Neil. This means that urban planners should take public health into account.

We found an important study at ScienceDaily:

Adults in lower walkability neighborhoods found to have a higher predicted cardiovascular risk

Continue reading Urban design & public health →

animals

One step forward…

Leave a comment

ScienceDaily has the following report:

Scientists invent animal-free testing of lethal neurotoxins

We applaud every technology that will reduce the need for animal testing. The more alternatives there are available, the greater the pressure will be to abolish animal testing all together. Though we will still have a long way to go, but every single step counts.

Miscellaneous

New Site Update

2 Comments

As some of our regular readers might know, we intend to move to a new website. We have decided that WordPress is not suited to our needs. We are still considering several alternatives to WP.

As the main author of this site, I have good experience in working with Pelican for building websites for my own business. So I seriously considering this as an option for the new site. Though our original plan to move to Django CMS is still a viable option as well.

We will give further updates, when they are due.

society

The history of human expansion

4 Comments

In the video below the folks of RealLifeLore give a short summary of the history of the territorial expansion of mankind.

Given our nature as an expansionist species it seems to be inevitable we will eventually settle the world’s oceans, Antarctica and, of course, Outer Space.

On a loosely related notice, Margaret Kohn and Kavita Reddy have written an article on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on the historical attempts to justify colonialism. They also spend some time explaining the difference between colonialism and imperialism.