At 9:02 PM -0700 10/21/00, petro wrote:
May:
5. Not that this is necessarily the best option. The domes in deep caves are perfectly fine. And there is much to be said for the Pournelle/Hogan solution: put the vitreous beads in concrete-filled drums, load them onto pallets, then park the pallets in neat rows and columns in the center of a 10 km by 10 km fenced area in the Mojave Desert of California. Very little rain (geological records and fossil lakes show this); certainly no significant flash flooding. Then erect signs, in many languages, and with skull-and-crossbones, saying: "This area is poisoned." Even the most bizarre devolution-to-savagery scenarios are unlikely to have wandering savages in the waterless Mojave trying to scavenge stuff out of sealed drums marked with skulls and crossbones!
I've never really understood why we don't just put this stuff in some *really* tough polycarbonate containers aboard "mature" technology rockets and launch it into the biggest heat source in the solar system.
I realize that there is a lot of it, but still.
This is a very old idea, rejected for good cause many, many years ago.
Need I elaborate?
The only things I can think of are: (1) Cost of pushing heavy shit up the gravity slope. (2) Danger of rocket "catastrophically" failing and blowing radioactive material all over hell and gone. (3) Not a chance in hell of selling it to the tree huggers and the ignorant. (1) Is the only one that makes sense, but we should be able to find a cheaper way of getting up there. We should be able to engineer around (2). (3) Is probably the toughest nut to crack. So, I am not asking for much elaboration, just a bit of a clue. -- A quote from Petro's Archives: ********************************************** "We forbid any course that says we restrict free speech." --Dr. Kathleen Dixon, Director of Women s Studies, Bowling Green State University