Loco

So after doing some further research into airships following my last post, I realised that I provided a link to a load of people who want to colonise space! Ha. Whilst colonising space may be an option given how royally we seem to be f**king this planet, I don’t know whether aligning myself with these people is such a great idea.

In case you were wondering, the people I’m talking about have plans for airships that involve decking them out with photovoltaic cells so that they don’t rely on fuel to propel them forward (so far so good), then putting a load of them in the upper atmosphere and beaming down really fast broadband signals (no odder than satellites), and then using them as a base to first of all colonise the moon and Mars, followed by the rest of our solar system (where we consciously and deliberately alter the climates of other planets to accommodate our darling race). OK, so it got weird.

You can find out about each step in full here (although no-one has written the wiki pages for ‘Avalon’ – “A program of extraterrestrial surface settlement concurrent to Asgard and starting with the Moon and Mars. Based on pressurized habitat development dominated by excavated subterranean structures of arcology scale” – and beyond. Hmm, I wonder why).

So after realising that I sound mad as a ruddy hatter banging on about the future of transport in such a fanciful fashion, I was glad to come across some slightly more realistic ‘futurists’, such as Jamais Cascio. Jamais is the co-founder of excellent site Worldchanging.com which I came across some time ago as a great resource for finding out what’s going on in terms of constructive efforts to do something about the challenges we face. Much as Americans can be mighty annoying with their full-of-sunshine-and-glitter accents, they certainly know how to phrase things in a way that make you feel engaged and empowered, unlike the often moany contingent of environmentalists on this side of the Atlantic.

On 20th December, I’m going to engage in a ‘Webinar’ (words like this are another example of the bad sides of Americanism) where Jamais is speaking, along with people from Natural Logic. The cynical British part of me (I’m an internationalist so there’s parts of every nation in me, honest) thinks that there will be a lot of excitement about how great they are doing, whilst in actuality their approach will be more geared towards corporate interest than to carbon literacy, but I’m willing to give it a chance. If it’s crap, I can always revert to the Mars-colonisers.

Photo & post thumbnail: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

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