Space/Science — HabitableZone

Space/Science » in reply to re: Terraforming socialistic?

re: Terraforming socialistic?
TB — (archived)

Maybe it would be for the best if the government doesn't decide Mars needs to be terraformed.

The projects you mentioned as examples are instructive. One advantage to private funding of projects is that there is usually a natural upper financial limit to the stupid things you can do. Odds are good that no housing developer would ever have managed to pull together enough investment cash to destroy the Everglades ecosystem, or that no private logging firm would ever be able to scrape up enough money up front to build roads out to the Amazon forests. Governments cheerfully did both.

Don't know about the Netherlands. I think their water control history is impressive, myself, but I have read nothing on whatever environmental damage might have been done. Most of it was accomplished long before someone would stand up and scream about lost wetlands. Back then they were still called swamps.

I do know that if, for some reason, the Netherlands today were still as nature made them, and somebody proposed doing to it what has been done so far, the average environmentalist, on hearing the proposal, would probably spontaneously combust.

We know what was gained in the Netherlands. Whatever was lost was lost long before anybody cared.

It's a bit frightening to look around my country and think of all the great things that have been built that could probably not even be proposed today.

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