Terry Blanton wrote:
The world is full of contrarians and fear mongers. They will be used by the fossil fuel industries to slow the progress of any replacement source.
No doubt this is true. I discussed this in my book. However, in the case of the first generators made by BLP, the contrarian corps will be in a pickle, because most of them are scientists who adamantly assert that the Mills effect cannot possibly exist.
What can they say if the gadget starts producing electricity? "I was wrong. Hydrinos are real. They might be dangerous." I cannot imagine any academic skeptic or someone such as Zimmerman saying this. They could not bring themselves to say it! They would wave their hands and say that there must be a secret source of natural gas or some other conventional explanation. This stalemate would go on for months or years, long enough to prove that the gadget is safe. Or, alternatively, if hydrinos are not safe, it would go on until people start collapsing and dying, at which point everyone would believe hydrinos are real.
People usually find out things are dangerous by accidentally hurting someone. This is true even today, despite our overprotective society. This is a gruesome story, but when x-rays were first discovered they were soon used in medical diagnosis. People did not know they cause harm, and one patient with an elusive problem was subjected to massive amounts of x-rays which killed him, as I recall. The same thing happened with radium. Mme. Curie killed herself with the stuff.
To take a more modern and subtle example, due to modern overprotective hysteria, at many schools children are no longer allowed to play rough games and all forms of teasing are prohibited. Anyone familiar with primate behavior knows that teasing is inherent, and absolutely essential to normal social development and behavior. It is seen in most mammals, and developed to a high art by primates. Games, of course, are essential to the development of all intelligent species. By eliminating these things we will raise a generation of stunted, unhealthy children who have no idea how to interact with one another and who are incapable of simple acts such as walking on uneven surfaces, or cutting watermelons. These latter examples are actual observations of mine. I have seen urban children in Atlanta who could not walk across stones, mud and rocks on the shore of a creek, and a 12-year old girl who had never used a carving knife and had no idea how to slice a melon. She would have cut herself if I had not taken it away from her.
Here is a good article about teasing: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/07/magazine/07teasing-t.html - Jed
