[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
But "stunting children's imagination"? I don't think so.
You don't think so? Frankly, I consider that another symptom of our debased civilization. People in Japan do not think there is anything wrong with children growing up never seeing a firefly or a clear stream of potable water. Do you really think it is okay to surround people with an artificial environment every minute of their lives, always within sight of some man-made structure? I suppose it would be unavoidable on the moon, but I do not think we should live that way here on earth.
There is a famous children's song ("Takibi") about how jolly it is to gather your friends and make a bonfire with the autumn leaves. They still sing that song in school I expect, but if a group of kids in Japan tried to make a bonfire now the police and fire department would show up in five minutes and the kids would be expelled from school. Heck, I expect they would end up on the seven o'clock news. Chris Tinsley is to say that if a modern-day Tom Sawyer tried to drift down the Mississippi he would be arrested in no time. It is even worse in Japan.
I will only reiterate that constructing thousands of mile-high solar towers all over the U.S. should not be compared to that of viewing thousands of McDonald restaurants.
Frankly it would be worse. I personally do not have to look at the damned McDonald's -- or eat there! -- but I could not escape the towers. It would be as bad as the highway system.
Also, it seems likely to me that Solar Towers could end up freeing a considerable amount of real estate that otherwise would have been tied up in concrete and other ugly man-made structures.
Why would it do that?!? I do not see how it would free up a single hectare. We will still need as many highways and fast food joints as we now have. The towers would take up far more ground level space than present-day coal gas and nuclear power plants do.
Wind towers would also be a very significant aesthetic problem if millions of them were constructed. At least they would not be quite so high in the sky, and they would take up less ground space. Robin van Spaandonk suggested that most wind farms would be offshore. It is true that offshore wind is more powerful, and steady, and offshore wind turbines are more economical, but in the US most of our population is too far from the ocean to use offshore wind. (In Northern Europe, Ireland and the UK, offshore wind could supply just about everyone.)
Actually, most of the U.S. population is too far from any significant source of wind power. As I have noted before, the only practical way to generate all of our energy from wind would be to convert the energy to hydrogen and ship it in pipelines to population centers. Most of the wind farms would be located mainly in the Dakotas, where I hope they would cause less environmental destruction than present-day fossil fuel extraction does.
- Jed
