One of the most important things to considering when we are going to establish orbital space settlements is how to organize education in a new society. As stated earlier on this site we believe that education has two functions:
We have been arguing against the practice of water chlorination for some time. Though water disinfection is an important tool to promote public health, we do not believe that this is the proper method to do so.
ScienceDaily reports a study by the Boston University School of Medicine: Take-home’ exposure are a public health hazard. To quote from the article:
Workers in many industries inadvertently bring home toxic contaminants, endangering the health of their families.
We have already discussed lead as a cause of diminished general intelligence among the population. However, there are many more substances that have an negative effect on people’s IQ. ScienceDaily has the following report:
Flame retardants and pesticides overtake heavy metals as biggest contributors to IQ loss
We believe that health policy should be focused on prevention or health promotion. This will, in our humble opinion, lead to lower medical expenses in the long run. Like other public policies health promotion consists of many different elements. ScienceDaily reports on one of this building blocks: Continue reading Cycling for live
The following article in the New York Times, American Capitalism Is Brutal, You Can Trace That To The Plantation, describes in an excellent manner how modern management systems have their roots in slavery and plantation economy. A short summary: an efficient plantation required an elaborate bookkeeping to keep track of each slave’s productivity. Hence a multilayered system of supervision of labor was necessitated. Continue reading Slavery and modern management
Casey Schreiber explains in the video below the Garden City concept as envisioned by Ebenezer Howard.
Here is an interesting read by Jean-Yves Tizot on the political theory behind the garden city movement.
We will discuss the topic of garden cities in more detail in a future posts, in relation to, of course, space habitats (O’Neill cylinders in particular), permaculture and land ownership.
As distances within a space habitat will be rather small, only a couple of kilometers in most designs , bicycles will be an excellent mode of transportation for space settlers. Promoting cycling will also have environmental and public health benefits. Continue reading Public bicycle system
The Guardian has a good article about a campaign to make Cleveland, Ohia (USA) a lead-free city. The article also contains a table with some of the negative consequences of lead exposure on the health of children.
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.
