Grimer wrote:
Surely, man is part of nature, and the Eifel tower is as natural as an ant hill.
Or do ants consider all those enormous anthills a blot on their landscape?
If those African ants come over here as invasive species and start building their hills everywhere, *I* will consider it an eyesore. I don't care what the ants think. We already have mountains of invasive kudzu.
Speaking as a civil engineer and a christian I'm all for levelling every hill and filling every valley.
Har, har.
After all, it's only in the last hundred years or so that people have fallen in love with mountainous landscapes.
Except in place like Japan where they used to consider Fuji and other mountains sacred, and Israel, and a few other places I can think of. Not nowadays though, I will grant.
Seriously, the tower now being planned in Australia will be 1 km tall and it will take up 10,000 ha on the ground. It will produce 200 MW. Just to generate electricity, the US would need at least 2,500 towers on this scale: several hundred in populated states, dozens in less populated areas. There will be no place left in the US where a tower would not be visible. No child would ever grow up seeing a natural, uncluttered landscape.
If the tower -- or something similar like a space-based power system ground installation -- produced 5,000 MW, that would be a different story.
- Jed
