George Manbiot has an interesting opinion piece in The Guardian: Lab-grown food will soon destroy farming – and save the planet. To quote him:
It’s a primordial soup of bacteria, taken from the soil and multiplied in the laboratory, using hydrogen extracted from water as its energy source. When the froth was siphoned through a tangle of pipes and squirted on to heated rollers, it turned into a rich yellow flour. Continue reading Future Food: Ferming
We already discussed the relation between air pollution and dementia. Now scientists believe that childhood exposure to air pollution is also related to schizophrenia. This is just one more reason to push for clean air legislation.
Some parts of the world already live in 2020, while others have to wait for another few hours. Anyway, we wish everyone a happy new year!
This will be an import year. In the summer I hope to migrate to a new, non-WordPress site. However, simultaneously I will be busy setting up my own IT Security business. So new content will be sparse the coming months.
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
Recently we discussed the intercropping of coffee and bananas, though this is far from the only possible combination. Here are a few links to other examples of polyculture:
According to the first link the combination of rubber and lemons were never profitable. This because of the low price of lemons. However, this might (or not) be different if the peels would be used to produce textiles.
The second article states that not only does the combination of coffee and macadamia result in much larger yields but also improves soil fertility.
Space colonization will only be viable if we are able to launch stuff into outer space at reasonable cost. Currently spaceflight depends on chemical rockets to reach orbit. However, chemical rockets suffer from a severe bottleneck. Continue reading Laser beam propulsion
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.
The video below provides an excellent view of what a O’Neill Cylinder would look like.
Technological progress and innovation are by no doubt important issues for the success of the humanization of outer space. Hence we need to consider the role patents will have to play in the society and economy of future space settlements. Continue reading On Patent Reform
We are great fans of permaculture, as it perfectly fits into to the second of the Four Goals as formulated by O’Neil:
There should be found an optimal living climate for the entire world population
But what is permaculture? In the video below the principles of permaculture are explained.
One type of permaculture is the food forest and this is explained in the video below:
Food forest are nice way to realize to vision O’Neill had for the design of the interior of the O’Neill cylinder: villages separated by forests. And additionally it combines goal #2 with #1, to eradication of hunger and poverty.
