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No More Floods; No More Droughts (Future) Historical fiction (Revisited) As our Congress messes around doing absolutely nothing about improving America's infrastructure, I can't resist pulling up my RBI (Really Big Idea) from 2003.  Put on your "government could really work" rose-colored glasses and read this. May 2020     The Mississippi River is approaching flood stage in Illinois, Indiana and Missouri.  The Corps of Engineers monitors the levees and dikes with the giant web of depth gauges and flow meters.  The U.S. Weather Bureau is predicting major rainstorms in several of the watersheds.  Supercomputers are crunching trillions of numbers and putting options in clear graphical displays in front of Corps decision makers.   The top Corps engineer picks up the Red Phone and calls the White House.  Connections are made and the Secretary of the Interior, the Vice President and The Woman Herself come online and listen to the report. “It’s an e

....Or a Mini Glacier, Maybe I have long been fascinated – what would you expect from a sci-fi fan? – with the megafloods . Catastrophic floods have carved canyons, rivers, lakes and even seas. Imagine the spectacle of billions of gallons of water, acre feet per second, thundering across the landscape with inconceivable force, making tsunamis seem tame. These colossal events have happened at the end of every ice age when giant lakes of melt water are unleashed by the failure of the large ice dams that created them. That is some scientist’s conception of what the ice dam looked like that released the flood that created the Western Washington badlands. Big deal flood. Not as big as the one that created the Mediterranean or the huge one that flushed out the Great Lakes, but pretty darn big. Anyway, fascinating, no? Biblical at least. Now I have my very own ice dam. Hard to photograph, at least for me. B

Lotta Smart People Think It’s Going to Get Dangerous Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Stephan Hawkings, among the Earth’s smartest people, are warning that A.I. has the potential to eat its creators. Sci-fi types (I admit guilt there) have been saying it for decades. Remember HAL-9000’s, “I’m sorry, Dave, I can’t let you do that.”  Then give the A.I. weapons and we have SkyNet, killing off the vermin humans in all the Terminator movies. Grandmaster Isaac Asimov was the center of a cluster of sci-fi authors who recognized the threat back in the ‘40s and before. (Ahead of our time, we are.) Back here in reality, we are already on (or over!) the cusp of giving weapons to A.I.s.  HAROP DRONE AT THE 2013 PARIS AIR SHOW The Harop Drone is a "loitering munition," drone that flies until it finds a specific kind of target, and then turns into a kamikaze missile. Julian Herzog, via Wikimedia Commons,  CC BY 4.0 So what’s a wetware (human) to do???? S

An Old Democrat's Take on "Guaranteed Jobs" and Such MAKE WORK   PUBLIC WORKS Done right (one of my fav sayings) great Public Works can work miracles . The Result of the WPA (Water Project for America) The Mississippi Flood of 2020 (and most other U.S. floods) became the End of Drought.  The solar and wind energy industry joined the oil companies as Majors.  American technology took another great leap. Agricultural subsidy took on an entirely new meaning.  Millions of Americans became owners of a dependable money machine.  Dying aquifers began refilling.  The Presidency regained some of its luster.  And the rest of the world began to emulate a plan that worked. Ok, it's just fiction, but plausible fiction. This is how America used to solve huge problems - like building the Interstate Highway System, or laying railway track over field and mountains. There is a huge difference between "Make Work" and "Public Works."

Oh, Never Mind... Just Wishful Thinking (and that's the last update) UPDATED 1:00 PM (MST) 10/15  Look at the number of times "HURRICANE PROOF" is mentioned below in the "greatness" plan for rebuilding P.R.  I saw today Elon Musk and Governor   Ricardo Rosselló  are talking "all renewable" power sources. Puerto Ricans were already talking about it, but when Elon Musk weighs in, there is a much higher likelihood of something getting done. And it sure as heck could be built to be  "HURRICANE PROOF!" Think about ELIMINATING the old-school high voltage power grid with huge towers and miles of cable, replacing them with "micro grids" that just cover small areas like cities and towns, powered by solar, wind and big storage batteries. Trump doles out vital supplies Never mind the politics....... A HUGE plan is needed Puerto Rico was CRUSHED by Hurricane Maria. The more we learn, the more terrible it looks. Li

Making Liquid Gold Back in October, this blogster offered the BIG FOUR solution package for the pending water crisis. (Put your hand on a water faucet and believe ... because it's true and maybe the scariest result of coming climate change.) In short, those four solutions are: 1. Drip irrigation on a huge scale for agriculture. 2. A national pipeline system for redistributing flood water. 3. Catch and store every drop of rainwater that hits our roofs. 4. Desalination of sea water on a huge scale. This week in the Wall Street Journal was a great article about the technological and financial progress toward large scale desalination . Not "huge" yet, but promising. I like their graphic. (You might conclude this plant is run on pure solar power - it's not, but it should be... plus wind, geothermal and, heck, I'll say it, nuclear*. Anything but hydrocarbon energy.) Ring our sea-to-shining-sea country with bigger and better desalination plants, (sequestering t

THE MOST POSSIBILITIES! The Ongoing Flood of New Science Discoveries Only Bowls Me Over Occasionally.  This Is One of Those Times Our Galaxy Is Almost As Old As The Universe . I know, I know... I don't look that old. The overall universe is about 13.7 billion years old. That long since the Big Bang. Astronomers have known that the Milky Way is among the oldest of galaxies. The new study puts its age at 13.6 billion years. We live in one of the oldest of all galaxies. Think how many civilizations could be started, go for millions of years and die out in 13.6 billion years.  Sci-Fi city! Read a cool version of this story at Space.com

WHAT AM I SEEING IN THIS SATELLITE SHOT? Is It the... Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee "AgArc?"* [Look at Google Maps, click "satellite" and look.] Go ahead, sweep around from east to west to north through these places: ALA: Auburn, Montgomery, Selma, Demopolis, Gainsville, Demopolis MISS: Brooksville, West Point, Okalona, Tupelo, Corinth TENN:  Savannah I see a huge "AgArc" centered on East Point Alabama**, don't you? See the sweeping, circular arc? It's farmland, mostly, but what the......? Zoom in and you'll see the light part that makes the arc visible is FARM LAND. That's why I call it an "AgArc." But at the proper distance - satellite distance - there is clearly a geologic thang that could be the remnants of a vast crater... or maybe a ripple in the rock from an immense shock wave.  WHO KNOWS?  That's a real question, btw.  Seeing What I Wasn't Looking For I was looking for