19th September 2005, 8:50 PM
Oh ABF, I just had to say something. Just because there is no other plan doesn't mean that the one someone may be proposing must be chosen. It does mean think tanks need to get to work.
For an example, let us say there is someone dying of a disease we have no cure for at the moment. There is no treatment either. Let us assume no one has a plan on action, except one person. This person suggest something that violates current knowledge and also has no evidence to support it (all it needs if it fails the first test really, and at that point current knowledge is updated). Should that be done simply because there is no other way? I would submit not. Wasting time on a treatment with no chance of success is pointless. It wastes money and is also a shame in the sense that it wastes effort and the patient's mental state.
So, just because there is no alternative plan to eliminate fossil fuels doesn't mean we should embark on whatever plans someone can think of just to say we are doing something. Why not instead get people thinking on a plan that has a real chance to work to say we are doing something?
Basically what I'm saying is I'm sick of hearing about things like the military providing quack treatments as options to it's own soldiers, when that money could be better spent on REAL medicine (or, for example, wasting money researching psychic teleportation instead of using it on something that might actually save a soldier's life).
For an example, let us say there is someone dying of a disease we have no cure for at the moment. There is no treatment either. Let us assume no one has a plan on action, except one person. This person suggest something that violates current knowledge and also has no evidence to support it (all it needs if it fails the first test really, and at that point current knowledge is updated). Should that be done simply because there is no other way? I would submit not. Wasting time on a treatment with no chance of success is pointless. It wastes money and is also a shame in the sense that it wastes effort and the patient's mental state.
So, just because there is no alternative plan to eliminate fossil fuels doesn't mean we should embark on whatever plans someone can think of just to say we are doing something. Why not instead get people thinking on a plan that has a real chance to work to say we are doing something?
Basically what I'm saying is I'm sick of hearing about things like the military providing quack treatments as options to it's own soldiers, when that money could be better spent on REAL medicine (or, for example, wasting money researching psychic teleportation instead of using it on something that might actually save a soldier's life).
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)