Navel gazing
Posted By Sika on July 30, 2007
In some ways I feel like I am back in the end of high school or beginning of college. Getting away from my routine and into a job that has a definite end date–not to mention all the scholarships I can get with Peace Corps Fellows which fixes a number of problems with going back to school–I have that feeling of every life path being open to me again.
I’m still thinking of doing that project that I was talking about in the vaguest terms a couple of years ago. And since I’m still thinking about doing it, I’m not going to be any less evasive about talking about it than I was then.
In the editorial in the Mother Jones I read today, the editor proposed that we need a center for climate engineering to really buckle down and figure out what sacrifices we can make and which we won’t and what the overall effects would be and all that stuff. And I got really excited by the idea of being one of the people on the frontline of changing the world in a way that it desperately needs to be changed.
And then just looking at Lana Šlezi?’s photos, I was completely overcome with this urge to really do something with my photography and my writing–to really learn how to cross that line from the decent amateur to the artist. Even though I will be more stable than I was when I finished high school or college, the idea of exploring paths that are not practical and stable gives me hives, so we’ll see how I do in indulging the flighty artist that lives deep deep (very very deep) inside me.
It’s more than a little exciting, though, to have the time and the space to just let these ideas flit around and to see what takes root and how I might accomplish goals I didn’t even know I had.
Wow. “Center for climate engineering”. It makes a remarkable amount of sense! I love the idea.
I find this post so inspirational. Now I don’t want to go pack my Mom up for her move, I want to stay home and work on my dreams. hee hee.
I know, isn’t it totally AWESOME? I haven’t yet figured out what multitude of classes I’d need to take to be a part of the hypothetical center. Or how to start a non-hypothetical center for climate engineering. If you’ve got any ideas, let me know.
Well, you’d need geologists, meteorologists, astrophysicists, economists, sociologists, political scientists… uhh… really, just about everything would have to be represented if you were going to do a properly holistic study of the background material. Once that’s done, your actual engineering stuff could be handled by a team with more pure engineering and science specialists, but you’d still need backup from the “soft science” folks.
Then you wanna be scoring some fat DARPA dollars. Tell them your climate engineering project has military applications (because it does) and then rake in the cash. You will go through a period when you will not be able to share much of your information with the world, but when DARPA finally realizes what a black hole cash sink you’ve become, they’ll pull their funding and their security requirements, and then you can peddle your techniques to whatever governments, corporations and NGOs you like.