From: Charles Hixson (charleshixsn@earthlink.net)
Date: Fri Feb 14 2003 - 09:14:49 MST
Chuck Kuecker wrote:
> I have seen parking areas with "elevators" that store four or five
> cars vertically, in the space of one vehicle. Not too popular around
> here, and i shudder to think of the lawsuits should one fail and drop
> a vehicle...
>
> The real solution is to move off the planet and build "sensibly"
> elsewhere - leave the Earth for the Luddites, psycho-greens, and PETA
> types.
>
> Just kidding! :)
>
> Chuck Kuecker
> ...
Why? I mean, why "Just kidding!". That it's currently non-feasible
doesn't invalidate it as the better solution in the long term, and in
the short term I don't see *any* viable solution, beyond putting up with
it, and squabbling over the details. (And cars really *are* a detail.
They fill the same niche as the horse did earlier...but most people
didn't own a horse [too expensive, too much upkeep].)
O'Neil's design class decided that a planetary surface was not the
proper place for an expanding industrial civilization. I haven't seen
anything happen since then that invalidates their decision. It's just
that there are a few technical details that need to be solved before
their proposed solution can be implemented.
P.S.: Don't expect space colonies to be libertarian. This strikes me
as quite unlikely. They need to be well managed. But totalitarian also
seems undesireable. They will probably require some new social
organization modeled on a decentralized control system. Probably a
derivitive of a neural net, where people establish their desires via
interaction with governmental surveys on their own computer, and the
government decides how to implement that decision. As to how that
decision and implementation is done ... that rather depends on just how
advanced computer intelligence becomes before space colonies are built.
Elected officials seem to be even more corruptable, and on a larger
scale, than the US constitution writers feared. Possibly some
variation of the Austrailian system (many who are exposed to it in
operation seem to approve of it), combined with instant recall elections
via on-line petition. This should eliminate the more distasteful
candidates before they are ever elected, and if one is elected, a quick
recall threat should keep them at least moderately in line. But a
recall petition should always and automatically be active, and one
should be able to both add and remove one's name from the petition. If
it hits 50%, he's immediately out of office, and there needs to be
another election (so make elections easy and cheap! On-line is the only
real choice here. But use open-source, so everyone has the potential to
determine that it's doing what it claims, and the days equivalant of ssh
and pgp, so that people can sign their votes, verify them, and still
remain anonymous).
This proposal isn't perfect, but it should be relatively cheap, and a
space colony will be relatively small. And if anyone is so unhappy that
they find death better, they have a good chance of being able to take
everyone else with them. So you need to be careful, but still do your
best to keep people happy.
-- -- Charles Hixson Gnu software that is free, The best is yet to be.
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