Raise the Moon to Lower Sea Levels

Morning Journal, Thursday, July 17, 2014

For billions of years the Moon has been drifting away in altitude from Earth by about a half an inch per year. In just 1.26 million years the moon will be 10 miles further away! So what if we gave nature of push of just a few several billion years? We humans have proven our ability and propensity to control nature let's not look away from the Earths' moon to control nature again. 

When sea levels rise to destructive levels at our shores what will we do? We'll move inland. We'll build high to stay near the shore and let the waves wash under our elevated parking garages. We'll have towering residential buildings several stories underwater all along our coasts. Venetian small businesses will sprout up in our coastal cities as the unemployed build gondolas to push us through the streets as the streets will look more like Venice every day.

When Earthlings have had enough and climb out of "future denial" and see the futility of continuing to fight the ocean all over the world to save millions and millions of people, spending trillions of dollars shoring up our homes and businesses, we might then look to this seeming incredible solution: we could send the moon further away, enough to lower world wide sea levels to a far more tolerable level.  

What are Tides (from HiWaay.net) "The Moon and Tides": 

"Tides are created because the Earth and the moon are attracted to each other, just like magnets are attracted to each other. The moon tries to pull at anything on the Earth to bring it closer. But, the Earth is able to hold onto everything except the water. Since the water is always moving, the Earth cannot hold onto it, and the moon is able to pull at it. Each day, there are two high tides and two low tides. The ocean is constantly moving from high tide to low tide, and then back to high tide. There is about 12 hours and 25 minutes between the two high tides." And;  "Tides are the periodic rise and falling of large bodies of water. Winds and currents move the surface water causing waves. The gravitational attraction of the moon causes the oceans to bulge out in the direction of the moon. Another bulge occurs on the opposite side, since the Earth is also being pulled toward the moon (and away from the water on the far side). Ocean levels fluctuate daily as the sun, moon and earth interact. As the moon travels around the earth and as they, together, travel around the sun, the combined gravitational forces cause the world's oceans to rise and fall. Since the earth is rotating while this is happening, two tides occur each day." And;  "Spring Tides: When the moon is full or new, the gravitational pull of the moon and sun are combined. At these times, the high tides are very high and the low tides are very low. This is known as a spring high tide. Spring tides are especially strong tides (they do not have anything to do with the season Spring). They occur when the Earth, the Sun, and the Moon are in a line. The gravitational forces of the Moon and the Sun both contribute to the tides. Spring tides occur during the full moon and the new moon."

Our oceans swell by several feet all over the world and at differing heights of danger, especially during ocean born storms. The frequency and severity of these storms can be expected to increase in coming years where many coastal massive populations are living.  

Gravity between the Earth and moon can be reduced when the moon is pushed, say 100,000 miles further from us. This reduction in gravity due to the increased distance can lower the world's oceans by one to several feet, buying humanity centuries to reverse our atmospheric issue.  

Simplistic? Yes kind of, but consider the simplistic ideas that have created the most wonderful technology and solutions to our problems in our past, and consider this may be one of those types of ideas. A common statement from nearly everyone at one time or another is "It's just amazing to me that our generation had not thought of that simple solution way back then!" 

Some detriments to this project may be: We would be reducing tidal influence every where, causing a loss and a changing of shore ecology including wildlife whose lives are dependent upon the tides. We would be influencing tectonic pressures and placements all over the world. We may experience several volcanoes at once as pressure upon lava lakes and lava streams are released by the of pressure withdrawn by distancing the moon from Earth. But solutions which prevent those things from happening, I am confident, we can create before sending our satellite further out of orbit. 

We may lose the moon if we miscalculate its new distance, and it may return to us in the form of a collision with Earth, which would be a not-so-amusing cosmic irony since the moon was created by the collision of a planetary body into the molten earth more than three billion years ago. 

Ship and boats in harbors around the world may be beached on the rock and on the seabed if not prepared for the change when the moon is sent further away. Surfing will be so many feet of water less challenging and fun. Winds born of ocean waves of high oceans will be reduced, and we will see a reduction in sea-born winds and hurricanes and typhoons. And an idea worth exploring now before great suffering occurs that we could have stopped.  

Hey let's give it a try because it may be worth the risk in sheer numbers of lives and untold amounts of energy and money.  

Copyright Reserved: James G. Mason, July, 2014. JamesGMason.com

The Moon and Tides:

http://home.hiwaay.net/~krcool/Astro/moon/moontides/ 

Taking Responsibility for the Bad Stuff in Society

There is a visible distinction between some people who tend to feel responsible, or who feel a shared responsibility, for the world’s, the nation’s or their community’s bad stuff that happens. From gun violence, to global climate change, to endemic chronic diabetes and obesity, some people want to continue with their lives with no guilt and thusly no responsibility. Those who read my blog know; here comes another difference between Liberals and Conservatives opinion!
 

Those not feeling responsible tend to attack the determinations of the cause by the other side. Perhaps there is no better current example of this than the wordy battle over global climate change. The opposition to the very premise that global warming and its associated climate change is caused by mankind’s carbon and other gases output, likes to state that the “jury is still out (on man made global warming).” Although essentially 98% of all scientific, peer reviewed articles, having to do with the subject agree that global warming is a man made phenomena. It could very well be that the opposition does not want to take shared responsibility, does not want to share one inkling of guilt for having polluted all their lives.

Were those who deny responsibility punished too harshly as children? Developmental psychologist Erik Erickson may have something to say about this behavior using his classic theory. Operant Conditioning is a form of learning in which the consequences of behavior produce changes in the probability that the behavior will occur, and occur again given similarities in circumstance. Similarities like taking responsibility, sharing responsibility for what effects us all.

 

This same opposition doesn’t want take responsibility for obesity or diabetes. “Its their own damn fault, not mine!” But if their child’s high school has high fructose corn syrup soda machines in its cafeteria, that’s not their fault. “Hey other parents can tell their kids to stay away, that’s all, its that simple, its not my fault, sugar Nazis!”

Gun control is another clearly defined issue which separates those willing to take responsibility for all our behavior and all of our problem, and those who want to ignore their guilt, shun their responsibility and cast blame on a different causality. Tell a gun owner he should put trigger locks on his handguns at home and he’ll tell you “I teach my kids how to shoot, they are responsible with our guns, they don’t need trigger locks!” This brilliant response both takes away responsibility and places it firmly on the shoulders of his children and attacks the causality of gun violence in the home by suggesting that it is caused, somehow, by children who have not learned “gun safety,” from their parents (“gun safety” is the code for teaching your family how to shoot the shit out of a “target.”)

The gun owner, rather than agree to most sensible suggestions of control over firearms sales and shipping, will attack using a new root cause. A favorite target is the courts and law enforcement who don’t keep criminals locked up long enough, or don’t enact the death penalty with wild abandon to scare off the criminal element. Its as if the only answer that won’t cause their guilt, won’t cause them to have to share some responsibility is to do away with justice and law and order almost completely, or change it into some kind of draconian Dark Ages justice.

Examine where your (usually) conservative opposition gets his or her causality for problems, and their reasoning for solutions (or lack of), for opposing a fix, or ignoring a problem. Notice the words form a meaning that says “no responsibility for me, no guilt. Dammit Liberal I’m sleeping good tonight!”

Also read my earlier related article titled Cognitive Dissonance Around 9/11 Questions is Understandable.

Living with Heat In . . .We May Have to . .

There are billions of miles of black asphalt roadways on Earth, okay maybe 50 million miles. Would you believe 5 million? These roads of fossil fuel as tar and crushed rock both absorb the energy of light from the sun and retain and radiate that energy back upwards as heat, heating up our liveable lower atmosphere and that heat is also wasting a lot of energy as hot road beds, hot roadsides, and hot road kill. White Roads would make a significant difference if industrialized nations would just do it. But besides those evil roads, there are a lot of sources of heat where there wouldn’t not be if it were not for our human existence.

Problems in our control:

• Urban Heat Islands, From the FY 2003 Report on NASA's Earth Science Enterprise (ESE): “NASA’s Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment (SORCE) was successfully launched in January 2003. SORCE is studying the Sun’s influence on Earth and will measure how the Sun affects the Earth’s ozone layer, atmospheric circulation, clouds, and oceans . . . . New evidence from NASA Earth observation systems and Earth science models reveals how urban areas, with their asphalt, buildings, and aerosols, are impacting local and possibly global climate processes . . .”
• 5 million cattle walking around eating and mooing, maintaining a temperature while outdoors (you try doing that naked!), farting methane gas, crapping pies in the fields that stay nice and warm for about a half hour – hey its just a guess. The gas does not break down in the atmosphere to be recycled as carbon dioxide and so contributes to the dense layer of “undigested” complex gases we call “greenhouse.”
• Cars burning fossil fuels. Engine blocks reaching 300 degrees Fahrenheit on hot days or cold days. In America there are at least 2 motor vehicles registered for every driving aged person.
• Household heat: Everything from water heaters which inefficiently leak heat, to boilers which throw at least %70 of their heat into a chimney flu and up, to black asphalt roofing tiles, black tar driveways, plumbing vents which channel hot water steam and its associated heat up and out the roofs of each home, and channel methane gas from the human occupants upward and out as well.
• That darn NASA sending rockets into orbit all the time (it seems). Did you ever see the flames on those things? Man!

Benefits of White Road:

This is all a picture of a large footprint of impact on the planet, and the footprint can be made by one person in one day. But he might not eat a whole cow in one day, unless he’s American. He or she can reduce each part of this footprint, each day. And in many cases, the whole thing. Personally, I would prefer life in a jungle hut, with women, scratch that – one nice woman, and smoking dynamite weed, and having a very tiny ecological footprint.

But White Roads (WR) would be an excellent economic advancement. The scale of the projects in the industrialized world would employ, and re-employ tens of millions, much like the Eisenhower revitalization of the Roosevelt Highway initiative post World War II, had done for work starved veterans. Employment would be needed for the tire manufacturing as all new tires would have to be made of white rubber through and through as to not mark up the new roads. Motor oil would have to be clear or white to avoid those ugly stains.

For safety we’ll all realize that the roads should have been bright white to begin with. A WR would be more visible, as its sides, and its horizon image would jump out at a dreary driver, or a rain storm driver watching through windshield wipers. Exits two or three miles ahead would be visible to any driver with half a brain and eyeballs. Bumps absent of brightness would demarcate the center of every road. Gone are the expensive reflective ceramic roadway markers that have marked roads for so long, i.e. the Dobson’s Bumps of the California Transportation System.

Finally, not so much cooling. But an absence of intense heating via a product we can control and change by our own doing. Have you ever walked on a black-top barefoot? Hurts does it not? A normally 115 dg. road might be only 90 dg. midday.

From around the blogs on this subject:

At Half Baked.Com

“Ice also melts faster on black roads. Would white roads then require lots more rock salt, leading to faster car corrosion, big changes in local water chemistry, airborne pollution from rock salt manufacture/transport, &c.? Would the white roads themselves require more (or less) energy- intensive manufacturing and maintenance? How would they affect accident rates (daytime vs. night-time, of course)?”

“There's a stretch of I-40 in North Carolina that's very light gray with both black and white lane markings (black for day, white reflective for night). Kind of a prototype... croissant.”

“If we paint the roads white by using spray cans, does it all cancel out?”

“I'm voting against the idea because it's incredibly racist.”

“White roads would reflect light as light. Black roads reflect (re-emit) light as heat. (Infra red.) Greenhouse gases trap heat (IR), not light. White roads would cool Earth.”

“The light deflected off the planet would also make Earth quite a good space lighthouse when star-travel moves into full swing.”

“Black absorbs heat. Roads are black. Roads absorb heat. Lots of roads absorb lots of heat. Lots of roads criss-cross Earth.”

“White deflects heat. Roads are white. Roads deflect heat. Lots of roads deflect lots of heat. Lots of roads criss-cross Earth . . .”

“Also many people, more born every second. Hair scatters light--no good. Mandatory baldness, and heads painted white. Much better! Everyone squinting all the time. And writing in short sentences too.”