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This excellent 8 min video was posted recently on the Nature forum. It is how one guy restored a chunk of Texas hill country by sowing native grasses. Amazing.
...........You mention elsewhere that you are getting a well drilled. Do you have any source of running ground water on your property? If you are going to be depending on well water from an aquifer for all your water needs (for you, gardens, livestock) then you'll probably have to forget the whole idea of installing a pond for catfish and crayfish or whatever other fish you had in mind for your food needs. Unless it's something really, really small like a little ornamental wading pond with no other function except to keep a few little goldfish. Those kinds of ponds used for live fish for table food require fairly big ponds (a minimum of one gallon of water for every inch of fish) with abundant ground or artesian spring water that is running or circulating and filtered 24 hours a day. Not pumped well water, unless you have an unlimited amount of well water to drain off and waste as irrigation water. Which, you being in Texas, I'm pretty sure you do not have. Keep in mind that if all you have is well water from an aquifer, then the source of any well water you have access to is probably also being accessed by your neighbours too. So you will have to be frugal and civically responsible with your water if you don't want to get into a water war with your neighbours.
We-ll, the well is drilled and has been in operation for a number of years.
As far as circulation, that is one of the uses for anticipated wind mills. Another use is to torque a super flywheel to be used as the power source for emergency fire pumps for wild fires. I know, more dream than reality at this point, but first there is the thought and then the research to see if it can be done.
As it was, my well drillers suggested to me to use the overflow from the storage tank, when the solar panel has pumped it full, to supply a trough system....so that is where that thought came from.
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......can you explain what your ideas of "planetary colonization" techniques are? I don't know what that means other than how it might apply to dead or non-earth-like planets. I think that none of those kinds of colonization techniques would be applicable to any habitats that already exist on our planet Earth. So I'm a bit confused about what you're talking about..
In short, it is the motivation to develop things without the concern for profit.
For example, one of the things I want to research is a means to really store sunlight for a solar battery/fuel cell. I'm told that someone already has the patent on that, so there is no profit in it for me to research it, but maybe I can do it better.
Who knows that maybe a hundred years from now, deep space missions will be using such a thing where my name is on it somewhere.
For example, one of the things I want to research is a means to really store sunlight for a solar battery/fuel cell. I'm told that someone already has the patent on that, so there is no profit in it for me to research it, but maybe I can do it better.
Who knows that maybe a hundred years from now, deep space missions will be using such a thing where my name is on it somewhere.
Engineers & physicists have been searching for that better battery for a century and a half and still come up short. Henry Ford's first auto was electric. He quickly realized fossil fuel was a more energy dense storage method. Our fossil fuel supply is essentially a battery storing the sunlight of millions of years and we're poised now to deplete it over the course of just a few centuries. Really inefficient.
As a race, we've pretty well screwed up everything natural that we've touched. Do you think expanding our influence to other worlds will change that paradigm? Maybe it's better to just stay put.
Besides the magnitude of the engineering problems involved in such colonization, the economics don't work out too well. When Queen Isabella financed the outfitting of the Nina, Pinta & Santa Maria so Columbus could discover America so there would someday be Ray Charles, it represented a mere drop in the bucket of the wealth of the Spanish Crown. Today's NASA budget, although admittedly a small percentage of our GDP, is still magnitudes larger as a fraction, and it would get much more benefit vs cost if spent in other ways. It took us only 65 yrs to go from Kitty Hawk to the Moon, and now we haven't been back there for 48 yrs. Ever wonder why not?
Restore your corner of TX and leave Mars remain pristine.
Engineers & physicists have been searching for that better battery for a century and a half and still come up short. Henry Ford's first auto was electric. He quickly realized fossil fuel was a more energy dense storage method. Our fossil fuel supply is essentially a battery storing the sunlight of millions of years and we're poised now to deplete it over the course of just a few centuries. Really inefficient.
As a race, we've pretty well screwed up everything natural that we've touched. Do you think expanding our influence to other worlds will change that paradigm? Maybe it's better to just stay put.
Besides the magnitude of the engineering problems involved in such colonization, the economics don't work out too well. When Queen Isabella financed the outfitting of the Nina, Pinta & Santa Maria so Columbus could discover America so there would someday be Ray Charles, it represented a mere drop in the bucket of the wealth of the Spanish Crown. Today's NASA budget, although admittedly a small percentage of our GDP, is still magnitudes larger as a fraction, and it would get much more benefit vs cost if spent in other ways. It took us only 65 yrs to go from Kitty Hawk to the Moon, and now we haven't been back there for 48 yrs. Ever wonder why not?
Restore your corner of TX and leave Mars remain pristine.
Dreams should fail because they don't work out, not because we gave up on them.
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