“We are possibly going to someday be facing with a meteorite or comet. For whatever reasons, no one is for sure what happened, but by the fossil trails, five times on Earth all higher forms of life have disappeared, the last being about 60-70 million years ago with the dinosaurs.
“Now we’ve been around evolving about 2 million years, so I’m hoping that we get 200 million years like the dinosaurs, before our turn.
“But I consider philosophically, we’ve been given divine providence. We uniquely are the first creatures that could plant this race elsewhere, someday.
“Right now we do not have the capability to do probably much more than go in our own Solar System, to Mars.”
Fred Haise, the astronaut who was to pilot the Lunar Module on the 1970 Apollo 13 mission
A Note To Readers
Yes, it is the astronauts who often are the best at putting forth the highest idea of what it really means to be human. The rest of the interview with Fred Haise from which the excerpt above is from, can be found in this week’s Feature, below. More generally, the Feature this week contrasts the optimistic idea of human progress and humanity’s unlimited potential to the Extinction Rebellion, which, established by a couple of psychiatrists, is attempting to unleash a wave of terroristic actions to shutdown industrial civilization.
In This Week’s Report
Just to keep a little focus on the drought situation, we begin with the U.S. Drought Monitor for Washington State, since it is really the only area of the country now experiencing drought.
Reporting on the state of California’s plans and policies on the question of water can sometimes be exasperating. No more so than reading the “Roadmap for Water Resources Sustainability” released this week. The article on it is a couple hundred words used to say nothing. It were better if at least the state water officials had a little vision and some guts to propose and fight for big ideas, like the North American Water and Power Alliance.
Groundwater, that is water in aquifers that is pumped to the surface for human use, does require some knowledge. A couple of articles in this section provide some background.
Building new water storage infrastructure in California is like waiting for Godot. A bus that never seems to arrive, and never even leaves the station. Three major projects are on the agenda, but are going nowhere.
A changing climate and warmer temperatures do increase the destructive intensity of wildfires. That is one factor of why such fires are larger and more destructive in recent years. A new study examines this question.
Megadroughts lasting a century or more occurred in the western states during the Medieval period. Even noting that fact, the author of an article on a new study of the potential for a return of such droughts in the West posits the future potential of such as something new. The alarmists, it seems, do not even know of what they write.
Under the title of The Frontiers of Science it is noted that the Apollo Project unleashed the most rapid growth of technological innovation in history. So too, today, a crash program for fusion power development and the Artemis project of the Trump administration to put a man and woman astronauts on the Moon by 2024, can unleash a new burst of real human progress. Fusion and fission are reported on here.
Then we note with a couple of articles on global warming an idea contrary to the “accepted idea.”
The Feature then follows.
