LCC Mechanical Systems Drf 211
Gender-Related Influences on Resource Use
and a Critical Path to Cloud Nine
R. Benish(1 )
(1 ) Eugene, Oregon, USA, rjbenish@comcast.net
Abstract. —
By developing an awareness of the destructiveness of prevailing patriarchalmasculine policies of resource use and distribution and consciously transitioning
toward a more matriarchal-feminine perspective, it becomes realistic to conceive
and implement a plan to build highly efficient floating cities.
PACS 04.80.Cc – Experimental tests of gravitational theories.
1. – Introduction
The biggest obstacle to developing a sustainable relationship with Earth’s ecosystem
is humanity’s primitive propensity—out of anger, frustration or the craving for power
and attention—to destroy things. The most prominent and pernicious manifestation of
this behavior is war: the existence and deployment of the world’s military industrial
complexes.
This paper aims, first of all, to explain the origin of our aggressive behavior; i.e., to
spell out the problem. It is straightforward to trace the problem back to the behavior of
primitive males of our species. In modern society males continue to be directly responsible for almost all of the world’s violence and destruction. Whereas the role of women
manifestly tends to be more indirect or benign. In primitive times aggressive behavior
actually had some survival value. But this is certainly no longer as true as it once was,
if it is even true at all anymore.
Our second aim will thus be to show how, with humanity’s evolution and the advance
of technology, our relationship to our global environment absolutely must change. It is
crucial that we make a transition from the continuation of what may be called plundermode to the long overdue symbiosis-mode of existence. Even our primitive ancestors
exhibited the capacity to be either war-like or peaceful. The difference depends largely
on the prevailing levels of stress and fear. Stress and fear in our world are largely due to
inequitable distribution of resources and the prevailing myth that there is “not enough
c Richard Benish 2013
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Fig. 1. – Cover of my well-worn copy of Fuller’s book concerning humanity’s long-term options.
to go around”; i.e, the myth of scarcity. If it were truly a matter of it being either “us or
them”—as was surely sometimes the case in the distant past—violent aggression might
then be excusable. But in our modern, effectively Earth-shrunken world, it is not “us or
them.” It is everybody or nobody—Utopia or Oblivion, as Buckminster Fuller would say.
(See Figure 1.) The obvious option is everybody, utopia, so an essential part of insuring
our survival is to expose the myth of scarcity as being untrue.
Richard Buckminster Fuller was one of the earliest thinkers to perceive that Earth’s
resources are more than adequate to provide comfort and security for everybody, to
perceive the criticality of our present circumstance and the urgency of transcending it.
Among the variety of Fuller’s ideas, discoveries and observations that we will consider,
is one that I propose, finally, as a possible big step toward resolving the problem that
we started with. The idea is to devise a plan to build city-sized dwelling structures that
float in the air, and then to carry out that plan.
2. – Roots of Aggressive Behavior
Before we can see this as a reasonable, reachable, perhaps even important goal, we
need to consider our deepest ancestral roots. A poignant remnant of these roots is revealed by the following incident that I witnessed recently. Three adolescent boys were
playing in a park with a pneumatic rocket launching toy. As I approached from a dis-
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Fig. 2. – Popular video entertainment: If not by the tally of shots fired or explosions detonated
at the hands of men compared with women, then by the explicit words of two of TV’s iconic
heros, the prevalence of male violence is poignantly acknowledged.
tance I saw one successful launch. By the time I got within earshot, the rocket had
been retrieved and preparations for another lift-off were underway. One boy was wildly
pumping to build the needed pressure. Thinking his efforts excessive, one of the others
exclaimed, “Stop! It’s going to explode!” Undeterred, the mad pumper blurted, “That’s
what I want to happen! ”
It is almost inconceivable that the main character in the above incident would have
been a girl. It gets tiresome to repeatedly acknowledge the exceptions, so let us generalize
our way to the big picture.
The female character of Scully in the TV show, The X-Files did exactly this in a dialog
with her male partner, Mulder, in an episode called First-Person Shooter. (See Figure
2.) The FBI agents investigate a 3D video game run amok. The game requires players
to battle the software with very lifelike weapons. In defiance of the disgust expressed
by Scully, Mulder voices his approval of the game because of the release it provides for
males who have few such outlets to vent their genetic predisposition in civilized society.
Scully replies, “Well, that must be why men feel the great need to blast the crap out of
stuff.”
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Fig. 3. – Vroom! Smash! Bam! Kapow!
Though a prevailing sociological school of thought would have us think that these
real and fictional behavior patterns are taught (as “nurture”), an overwhelming body of
evidence from evolutionary psychology and elsewhere indicates that it is at least partly
hardwired. Cultural circumstances and learning by example contribute, no doubt, but
the evidence and the logic of the biological hard-wiring argument seems too convincing
to dismiss. This evidence involves demonstrating the survival value for primitive males
to control and display their resources, to exhibit dominance, to exhibit the propensity for
taking risks, to prove one’s dominance by behaving violently, and, as seen in the above
examples, to “get off,” as it were, on high speed motion and destructive power. (See
Figures 3–7.)
Why are boys like this? As you surely must have guessed, the answer is, girls! In the
context of evolutionary psychology, all these behaviors fall under the general category of
Fig. 4. – Kapow! Vroom! Smash! Bam!
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Fig. 5. – Look Ma, no steroids. Yeah, right!
“mating strategies.” Time and space do not permit giving detailed evidence. So I will
present only the summary conclusions, based on this evidence, reached by evolutionary
psychologist, David Buss and others.
Based on a wide range of examples Buss concludes that,
Men. . . go to great lengths to display their resources to attract mates.
The elaborate plumage, heavy horns, and conspicuous displays of many species
seem costly in the currency of survival. However, these displays increase success in
mating contexts and so evolve despite their costs.
Fig. 6. – “Men go to great lengths to display their resources,” even when those resources are
used to plunder the Earth and spew poison into the atmosphere. Ironically, it was a woman
who invented the first circular saw.
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Fig. 7. – The idea being to scare off competitors, weapons are one of men’s favorite things to
display. Sometimes even women and holy people go to great lengths to display such resources,
even when they are only good for mass destruction on unimaginably horrific scales. The woman
depicted here evidently thinks that the construction and display of H-bombs “is neat.” (Kudos
to the photographer and graphic artists at Discover for their subtle, surreal, yet tasteful way of
making these folks look completely insane.)
In ancestral times, the great reproductive gains that risk-taking men generally
achieved and the reproductive oblivion that usually awaited more cautious men
have selected for traits that yielded success in competition among males at the
expense of success at longevity.
A startling consequence of sexual strategies . . . is that men’s dominant control of
resources worldwide can be traced, in part, to women’s preferences in choosing a
mate. . . . Modern men have inherited from their ancestors psychological mechanisms
that not only give priority to resources and status but also lead men to take risks
to attain resources and status. [1, 2]
Especially when we combine these conclusions with the results of many sociological stud-
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Fig. 8. – The threat of nuclear holocaust has entertainment value, too.
ies across many cultures, we get the distinct impression that men are primarily responsible
for acting out the risk-taking behaviors, including violent aggression; and that women—
though often the victims—are to some extent responsible (subconsciously or otherwise)
for encouraging it. (See Figures 7–9.) For many thousands of years women have been
choosing as mates those strong and often violent men who would provide physical and
material protection for them and their offspring.
Back in the days when the Earth was unimaginably large and harsh and a very scary
Fig. 9. – Vroom! Smash! Bam! Kapow! Even modern physicists are caught up in the game. The
contraption shown here is the business end of a 16 mile circumference, mega-billion dollar device
used for blasting the crap out of tiny bits of matter. Known as the Large Hadron Collider, it
has no known survival value. Its purpose is benign, but its operation requires as much electrical
power as a small town (between about 50 and 180 MW).
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place to try to make a living, and the behavior of humans in one corner of the world had
zero effect on any other corner, this pattern was clearly a biological success. It has been
instrumental in bringing about our present expansive existence. Compared to the length
of time over which this pattern has evolved, the technological advances of humanity since
the Industrial Revolution or even since ancient Greek civilization, is but the blink of an
eye. We have therefore inherited the same genetic predispositions. Figures 2–8 display
some of these displays of resources; they display one side of our present state of evolution.
Impressive, or not?
Since this (at least partly) hardwired strategy of risk-taking and resource display for
gaining and keeping mates is often correlated with violent behavior, it is not surprising
that it also correlates with the emotion of anger. Daniel Fessler, an anthropologist from
UCLA asserts that
The species-typical propensity to experience anger could only have evolved and
been maintained if, in ancestral populations, possessing this attribute enhanced the
probability of individual survival and reproduction. Note that this does not suppose
that anger continues to have such effects today—due to changes in our social and
ecological environments, features that increased survival and reproduction in the
world of our ancestors can now have the opposite effect. [3]
Various behavioral studies indicate that, though women experience anger about as often
as men, their expression of it is rarely so violent. Not surprisingly then, Buss concludes:
An especially pernicious manifestation of conflict between members of the same sex
is warfare, which has been a recurrent activity throughout human history. Given
men’s tendency to take physical risks in their pursuit of the resources needed for
success at mating, it comes as no surprise that warfare is almost exclusively a male
activity. [4]
It should be noted that evolutionary psychology is not the only theory of human and
male violence. Other theories and schools of thought do not always agree with the
conclusions of Buss and other evolutionary psychologists. For example Paciotti and
Richerson [5] argue that culture plays an important role. Such findings do not, in my
opinion, contradict the findings of Buss, et al, but mostly reinforce them. As far as I can
tell, many cultural traditions appear to co-evolve with genetic predispositions. Dominant
male behavior (overt patriarchy) is thereby often justified and perpetuated as explicitly
learned traditions that are generally consistent with deeper subconscious drives. And of
course, many examples exist of cultural attempts to curtail violent behavior by appeal
to laws, codes of ethics or religion.
3. – Buckminster Fuller’s Vision
One of the things that makes the human animal so special is that, by perceiving
that the behavior described above has utterly lost its survival value, we can decide to
behave differently. We have the capacity to adapt—not by random mutation or with
blind ignorance of what we are doing, but by conscious choice. There are many examples
of human beings who have perceived the need to make this adaptation: Jesus Christ,
Mahatma Ghandi, Mother Theresa, Martin Luther King, and the Dalai Lama, to name
a few. My favorite example is Buckminster Fuller, because he expressed the need in the
most practical terms and explained in detail how very possible it is. (See Figure 10.)
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Fig. 10. – US postage stamps were also made from this illustration.
What may be called Fuller’s mission statement is found on the inside jacket of the latest
edition of his groundbreaking work, Operation Manual for Spaceship Earth: “To make
the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous
cooperation without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.” [6]
Recognizing that fulfilling this mission—by application of a wide variety of technological developments—has only become realistic within the last few decades, Fuller explains
that
It is a matter of converting the high technology from weaponry to livingry. The
essence of livingry is human life advantaging and environment controlling. With the
highest aeronautical engineering facilities of the world redirected from weaponry to
livingry production, all humanity would have the option of becoming enduringly
successful.
Technologically we now have four billion billionaires on board Spaceship Earth who
are entirely unaware of their good fortune. Unbeknownst to them their legacy is
being held in probate by general ignorance, fear, selfishness, and a myriad of paralyzing professional, licensing, zoning, building laws and the like, as bureaucratically
maintained by the incumbent power structures.[6]
Fuller was an extremely radical, yet patently peaceful and practical thinker. The most
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famous result of his thinking is the geodesic dome. Perceiving the many advantages
of sphere-shaped rather than block-shaped building structures, his analysis sometimes
resulted in harsh criticism of conventional building methods. Considering the primitive
foundations of these methods, Fuller wrote that the
. . . truly ignorant premise [of traditional] . . . over-all housing thinking . . . derives from
the superficially stationary aspect of housing structures. This illusory stationary
aspect happened to coincide with the gravitational effect demonstrated by stones
accidentally recumbent in a pile. [7]
Concerning the modern preoccupation with skyscrapers, Fuller wrote:
Tall slab buildings and vertical square-sectioned tubular-tower skyscrapers have the
maximum possible energy-losing capacity. . . (as heat or cooling). [8]
Fuller was under no illusion as to who and what he was up against with regard to
convincing others of the truth and importance of his message. Fuller traces the modern
incarnation of the club-wielding caveman through to the plundering exploits of England’s
great pirates (with their infamous naval prowess); then to the ruthless industrialists of
the early 20th century; up to the “legally-piggily” pursuits of modern large oil companies,
who, Fuller ominously observed, “control it all.” [8]
In terms of evolutionary psychology, oil and the other fossil fuels have been a masculine
fantasy come true. The power that oil provides by burning and exploding it and the other
products obtained by distilling it have rapidly accelerated the conversion of Earth’s vast
natural resources into technological resources that have the function and capacity to
provide many basic human needs. Men have gotten to blast the crap out of stuff and
provide for their families at the same time. (See Figure 11.)
Unanticipated or ignored especially in the early days of this windfall, however, was the
finiteness of the supply and the damage caused by ever-increasing consumption. Among
Fig. 11. – Though oil company executives like to give the impression that they are the good
guys, for providing needed resources, in recent times many analysts besides Buckminster Fuller
have come to recognize the behaviors of the oil companies as being largely destructive.
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Fig. 12. – Top: The USA (biggest bully on the playground?) displays more resources devoted
to destruction than the rest of the world combined. Bottom: The cost of this for each and every
US citizen is $4000 per year.
other things, what we’ve been blasting the crap out of is our fossil-fuel energy savings
account, as Fuller called it. We’re burning the walls to heat the house. This monstrous
oil-greased burning machine Fuller perceived as being staffed by greedy lawyer capitalists,
whose dictates are carried out not only by engineers and technicians, but by overt and
covert brute force armies. (See Figure 12.) Fuller referred to the CIA as Capitalism’s
Invisible Army. The stress and fear produced by these institutions are the enemies of
peace and sustainability.
4. – Critical Path to the Moon
In Fuller’s last book, Critical Path, he proposed a general strategy for transitioning
from our present suicidal course to a sustainable one. The Apollo moon mission serves
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as an inspiring example. Fuller explains that the task of putting humans on the Moon
could be regarded as having taken 2 million steps. Prior to the decision to embark on
the mission, humanity had already taken the first 1 million steps. From the invention
of language, the wheel and the printing press, steam engines and radio, we’ve come a
long way (a million steps or so) just by more or less haphazardly discovering one thing
after another. But for the mission to succeed in a reasonable time, the next 1 million
steps had to be carefully identified and carried out in a well-defined order. An intensely
focused and purposeful level of consciousness was essential. This step-by-step plan to get
to the Moon and back Fuller referred to as a critical path.
According to Fuller, one of the first steps needed to “make the world work” is to see
Earth as a finite spaceship unto itself. At every opportunity, for example, his involvement with Expo 67 in Montreal, Fuller emphasized that his domes were but one small
contribution to the larger task at hand. (See Figure 13.) Since 1967 the state of our
ecosystem and our participation in it has become even more precarious. The task of
devising a workable critical path whose purpose is to insure the long-term survival of
humanity has become all the more imperative. Since Fuller’s death in 1983 both high
and low levels of consciousness—i.e., developments in both weaponry and livingry—have
reached new extremes. As technology has continued to advance, many humans have
emphasized the importance of establishing harmony with Earth’s ecosystem, minimizing
humanity’s destructive behaviors, setting up a world government, and seeking and implementing sustainable strategies to move forward. But the insidious forces of destruction
yet prevail. We continue warring. The most powerful global businesses are intent on not
only continuing to burn and explode, and blast the crap out of stuff, but to take away
our most basic constitutional freedoms and to intentionally clog up our communications
channels with fear-inducing falsity and propaganda. The data presented in Figure 11
reveals that the military industrial complex has hoodwinked the American public into
thinking we need more and more weapons for our so-called security.
Fig. 13. – Buckminster Fuller with his Biodome (at Montreal’s Expo 67) in the background.
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5. – Critical Path to Cloud Nine
Since Fuller’s stated mission of finding a sustainable way to operate Spaceship Earth
poses such a high and distant target, I want to propose a project that embraces his
overarching goal, but is more specific and so more reachable. Representing one concrete
step of a long journey, the project bears some resemblance to the Apollo Mission, but
differs, first of all, by its focus on our home base, our local nest, instead of the Moon.
The idea is to embark on the task of building dwelling structures that Fuller conceived,
but were never materialized. The structures are city-sized spheres that would float in
the air. Fuller called them Cloud Nines. See Figure 14.
The first physical facts to consider when assessing the feasibility of floating cities are
the weight and density of air in relation to the weight and density of heavily anchored
buildings. Skyscrapers are extremely heavy, yet their densities, i.e., total mass divided
by total enclosed volume, are about the same as styrofoam. The density of styrofoam is
about 25 times that of air. This means that if we could puff up a skyscraper to take up
25 times its initial volume, the thing would float like a bubble. Exhaust some of the air
by heating it a little and it will rise like a helium balloon. It means that we need to build
a structure whose efficiency in terms of mass is somewhat more than 25 times that of a
skyscraper. This is a reasonable goal, which gets easier, in principle, the larger and the
more spherical we make it.
Just as with the Apollo mission, many intermediate steps need to be taken, many
technologies will have to emerge or be developed further than they have been so far. If
it takes 4 million steps to build a Cloud Nine, then perhaps 2 million steps have already
been taken. We need to devise a comprehensive plan for the next 2 million steps: the
critical path to Cloud Nine. Presumably many of these steps will involve bio-mimicry
of high order. Nature employs spherical structures for their inherent strength in the
form of eggs, seed pods, shells and other forms; natural floating bodies are often lacy
Fig. 14. – Cloud Nines over the mountains.
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Fig. 15. – Radiolaria: tiny floating spheroids.
filamentary structures or spores that carry reproductive information great distances. In
aqueous environments spherical organisms that float in equilibrium with the fluid include
radiolaria, whose form closely resembles Fuller’s geodesic domes. See Figure 15.
One of the key characteristics of all life is the use of intricate hydraulic systems. For
example, human muscles are about 75% water. Although the details of the mechanism
are very complex, the end result is the forceful and controlled redistribution of watersaturated filaments and membranes. Heavy materials typically used to build mechanical
Fig. 16. – The possiblities of BuckyTube technology, as they say, are endless.
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systems clearly need to be minimized to meet our density goal. Conventional hydraulic
“muscles” would likely sink our Cloud. Therefore, successfully mimicking biological machinery may be an important preliminary step.
Happily, a new material is presently being developed that offers at least two ways
to mimic human muscle. The immediate precursor of this material, perhaps not too
ironically, often goes by the name of Buckyball. That’s because of two things: 1)
Buckminster Fuller often went by the nickname, Bucky. And 2) It is a spherically
shaped molecule of pure carbon whose geometrical structure is essentially the same as
Fuller’s geodesic domes. The official name is buckminsterfullerene. The second of the
new so-called allotropes of carbon discovered around the same time is sometimes called
a Buckytube (or carbon nanotube). These spherical and tubular molecules—together
known as fullerenes—were discovered in soot. (See Figures 16–20.) Intense efforts are
presently underway to isolate the especially useful tubular molecules in large quantities.
Variously sized nanotubes could perhaps be clustered and serve as hydraulic lines
whose assemblies would operate like muscles. A less speculative method that has recently been developed at MIT would be to employ their amazing torsional and electrical
properties. When subject to an electric current the tubes can be made to rotate with
1000 times more force than any previous attempt to construct artificial muscles.
Aeronautical engineer Ivan Bekey anticipated widespread use of buckytubes in future
spacecraft design, writing that “Spacecraft that now weigh 2500–5000 kg will weigh 25–50
kg as essentially all their components can be made from Buckytubes.”[10] If a skyscraper
were made of Buckytubes it would weigh 1/100 as much and would float to the upper
atmosphere. Buckytubes can potentially provide a lot more than a weight reduction for
rigid construction members. Hydraulic muscular bio-mimicry and perhaps even chemically conveyed channeling/flow instructions may be feasible design goals made possible
by these wonder molecules. Work toward at least some of these kinds of technologies is
Fig. 17. – The space-faring technology discussed in Ivan Bekey’s book applies also to the design
of Cloud Nines. Curiously, the lowest price given by Amazon.com for this book is $450! Why
so much?
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Fig. 18. – The real-world manifestation of these marvelous molecules was first discovered in soot.
already underway. It is safe to guess that if this research were incorporated as part of
a larger globally concerted effort to build houses in the clouds, progress would be much
faster.
Before expounding on how all of the above coheres to suggest a radically new view
of the world, I will point out a specific one of the many intriguing and eminently useful
properties of Buckytubes. Their high thermal conductivity applies only to their axial
Fig. 19. – Buckminsterfullerene muscle motor: A key structural component of Cloud Nines?
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Fig. 20. – A hybrid of Buckytubes and Buckyballs aptly named nanobuds. Molecules imitate
life. Life imitates molecules. Architects could do both, and much more.
direction. This means that the sensation we’d get from touching the end of a cleanly
cut room temperature cable of Buckytubes will be very cold (an exaggeration of the
effect of a metal) as it sucks the heat out of our body. But touching the same cable on
its sides would give a temperature sensation more like wood. Lengthwise Buckytubes
conduct heat; sideways they insulate. It is not hard to imagine applying this property
in practice. As some region of the Cloud Nine environment changes due to weather
conditions or Earth’s rotation, it will be advantageous to conduct for given circumstances,
and to insulate for others. An array of Buckytube material could be automated to rotate
accordingly, to obtain maximum energy efficiency.
Development of these technologies with the goal of advancing not weaponry, but
livingry, could result in the most magnificent dwellings—floating spheres that resemble
some of Nature’s most plentiful, symmetrical, and beautiful molecules and organisms.
6. – Implications
We’ve barely scratched the surface of an enormously beneficial, enormously inspiring project, whose feasibility I hope is now at least vaguely evident. Recalling where
we started, the biggest obstacle to progress is humanity’s resistance to change, which
is defended in destructive and violent ways by the veritable “powers that be.” Big Oil,
Lawyer Capitalism, and the Military Industrial Complex are beasts that thrive on fear
and conflict. The primary instigators of conflict on Earth are human males. But even
males will act peacefully when they are not unduly stressed and frightened. The easiest
way to achieve a state of peace and cooperation is to make sure that Earth’s bountiful resources are wisely and equitably distributed. Among the many authoritative echos of this
observation is the succinct expression of it by the University of Wyoming anthropologist,
Robert L. Kelly: “War and homicide are linked to issues of resource imbalance.” [11]
In a talk given a few weeks ago at the University of Oregon, the anti-sexist activist
Jackson Katz expressed the importance of being clear about the damaging effects of
violence. (See Figure 21.) In extreme contrast to the behavior of our own government
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and countless examples in popular media, Katz spoke of the message he felt it necessary
to convey to his 11-year old son: Every instance of hurtful violence represents a failure
of human civilization. Success is a measure of whether or not we’ve found a peaceful
solution to any problem.
Retired US Army Lt. Colonel Dave Grossman and retired US Army Major Richard
J. Hughbank reinforce the point:
It has become increasingly obvious that each act of violence breeds ever-greater levels of violence . . . Every destructive act gnaws away at the restraint of human beings.
Each act of violence eats away at the fabric of our society like a cancer, spreading
and reproducing itself in ever-expanding cycles of horror and destruction. [12]
By contrast to this one-way path to global suicide, acts of compassion and creation—
though just as contagious—open endless doors to yet further growth and higher levels of
consciousness.
The feminist author Patsy Hallen has observed that, by contrast with traits typically regarded as masculine, a feminine perspective tends rather toward “more sensual,
relational, intimate and caring” modes of thought. Continuing, she writes: “Ecology’s
wholsesomeness . . . is linked in a profound way to the absence of a need to dominate.”[13]
This is borne out by many sociological studies and is fairly obvious from everyday experience. Therefore, we may describe efforts toward making the world work—by their
essentially domestic, nurturing character—as leaning toward these wholesome feminine
traits. A male’s tendency to take risks and display resources need not be directed toward
dominance and destruction. They simply need to be redirected—from selfish power craving toward the benefit and protection of all humanity. Ultimately, this too, is an act of
self-preservation; but one that regards the “self”—by virtue of its many interdependent
relations—as extending to all other sentient, and perhaps even non-sentient beings.
Fig. 21. – Dr. Katz is often invited by the US Armed Forces and professional sports organizations
to communicate the need for our warriors and athletes to leave their violence on the field and
to be kind to everybody else.
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Fig. 22. – The big question.
The Apollo Mission illustrates this beautifully. The idea was to build a transportable
womb that would sustain a crew of organisms across the cold harsh void of space to
the nearest heavenly body and safely back to Earth. The level of coordination and
cooperation needed to accomplish this was unprecedented. This was mostly the work of
men. Happily, the percentage of women involved in space technology and exploration has
increased since the 1960s. The truth remains, however, that the field is still dominated
by men.
Many of the technological advances borne of NASA’s space missions have trickled
their way into our lives. (Velcro, for example.) Now suppose we re-focus our efforts to
a mission that requires no high-velocity transport. Instead the priority is to increase
the life support capacity of a mostly stationary “vehicle,” to provide for the immediate
needs of thousands of occupants while having minimal impact on the base below. By
accomplishing this mission we would ease the burden on the mother ship by making
the most effective use of materials and technology to build a dwelling whose physical
footprint on the Earth is literally zero. The resulting satellite would hover as a kind
of womb within a womb that sustains itself mostly by absorbing a maximum amount
of energy from the Sun and the wind. By figuring out how to sustain life over Earth’s
surface, we will maximize our ability to sustain life on the surface all around the globe.
All of the many innovative technologies presented in this course (Mechanical Systems,
with emphasis on sustainable practices) are obviously to be encouraged and developed
further. They are certainly steps toward a sustainable future. But by themselves they
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will not suffice as long as we maintain our militaristic ways. Heavy slab buildings can be
tweaked toward greater efficiency than buildings of old, but the progress will most likely
remain incremental because of their great weight. Though these efforts should continue
crawling along, what we need even more is a giant leap in the same direction. The
greatest potential for facilitating such a leap comes from the inherently light technology
and engineering of the aeronautics and space industries, whose future is, as we have seen,
to be propelled significantly forward by advances in nano-technology. It is by merging
these industries with the housing industry that we will at last learn to float, as shown
in Figure 22. We live on a spaceship. It’s high time that we faced the fact and started
behaving accordingly.
REFERENCES
[1] Buss, David M., The Evolution of Desire, Strategies of Human Mating, (BasicBooks, New
York, 1994) pp. 99, 201, 212.
[2] Buss, David M., The Evolution of Human Intrasexual Competition: Tactics of Mate
Attraction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54 (1988) p. 616.
[3] Fessler, Daniel, M. T., ‘Madmen: An Evolutionary Perspective on Anger and Men’s
Violent Responses to Transgression,’ in International Handbook of Anger, edited by
Potegal, M. et al (Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, 2010) p. 361.
[4] Buss, David, M., The Evolution of Desire, Strategies of Human Mating, (BasicBooks,
New York, 1994) p. 219.
[5] Paciotti, Brian M. and Richerson, Peter J., Incorporating a Theory of Cultural
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