The World Without Planes
...Without high-flying jet planes, that is.
A few years ago the Discovery Channel broadcast a couple of programs speculating on what things would be like if all humans were somehow to disappear entirely from the planet, right now! The conclusion was that it wouldn't be all bad. In fact, without human suffering to take into account, it would be all to the good, since in the not very long run everything that humans do is beneficial only to themselves and not in even one respect to all the other flora and fauna on the planet, outside of certain kinds of bacteria, rats, and various breeds of dogs.
I just loved those programs, and I look at them again quite often.
Now, with the Eyejoe volcano still breaking wind and spreading a big ash cloud from Iceland -- never a very salutary place anyway; when I was in the military I was told that Iceland absolutely forbade the U.S. from stationing any of its servicemen of my kind of ancestry there -- BBC News has an article speculating on the idea of a world without all the big jet planes that still, about a week after the Eyejoe first exploded, have been forced to stay on the ground. And the conclusion there is that, aside from all the jobs that would be lost in Kenya, which airfreights various kinds of perrishable food to the U.K. every day, most of it on the luxury side, things there would not be all bad either, and in fact the absence of planes would be more to the good than to the bad, all things considered, or at at least from my admittedly jaundiced point of view.
I know I shouldn't be indulging in such infamy, especially because I am an Air Force veteran. But even while I was there, all the planes I worked on were at the time always sitting on the ground, which I thought was by far the best place for them to be. And today the quality of life here would be noticeably improved if the Navy could be prevented from letting its fighter pilots take numerous, low altitude and high decibel, gas-wasting joyrides over what it clearly but mistakenly regards as an completely uninhabited part of Virginia.
Another very interesting article has the president of Iceland informing us that actually Eyejoe is just a small rehearsal for a much larger eruption that has a strong chance of happening soon enough. Mr. Grimeson points out to us that right next to Eyejoe is a second and much larger volcano -- Iceland has 18 of these things (I told you it wasn't a very salutary place) -- called Katla, and every since the Vikings unaccountably started hanging out in those parts, about 1,200 years ago, Katla has erupted pretty regularly every century or so. The last time it did so was in 1918, when, if you can remember, the only airplanes to speak of were the little stick and paper land skimmers that were used mostly in the First World War to do some recon work, drop little bombs on various places, and otherwise allow the pilots to rack up huge and unlikely scores, shooting down each other. There were no big planes of the kind that were used to bring down the World Trade Center towers and that otherwise have to avoid ash clouds like the plague because the ash consists of tiny shards of glass that accumulate and eventually shut down jet engines -- up in the air!
And 1918 is too close to already being a hundred years ago.
A few years ago the Discovery Channel broadcast a couple of programs speculating on what things would be like if all humans were somehow to disappear entirely from the planet, right now! The conclusion was that it wouldn't be all bad. In fact, without human suffering to take into account, it would be all to the good, since in the not very long run everything that humans do is beneficial only to themselves and not in even one respect to all the other flora and fauna on the planet, outside of certain kinds of bacteria, rats, and various breeds of dogs.
I just loved those programs, and I look at them again quite often.
Now, with the Eyejoe volcano still breaking wind and spreading a big ash cloud from Iceland -- never a very salutary place anyway; when I was in the military I was told that Iceland absolutely forbade the U.S. from stationing any of its servicemen of my kind of ancestry there -- BBC News has an article speculating on the idea of a world without all the big jet planes that still, about a week after the Eyejoe first exploded, have been forced to stay on the ground. And the conclusion there is that, aside from all the jobs that would be lost in Kenya, which airfreights various kinds of perrishable food to the U.K. every day, most of it on the luxury side, things there would not be all bad either, and in fact the absence of planes would be more to the good than to the bad, all things considered, or at at least from my admittedly jaundiced point of view.
I know I shouldn't be indulging in such infamy, especially because I am an Air Force veteran. But even while I was there, all the planes I worked on were at the time always sitting on the ground, which I thought was by far the best place for them to be. And today the quality of life here would be noticeably improved if the Navy could be prevented from letting its fighter pilots take numerous, low altitude and high decibel, gas-wasting joyrides over what it clearly but mistakenly regards as an completely uninhabited part of Virginia.
Another very interesting article has the president of Iceland informing us that actually Eyejoe is just a small rehearsal for a much larger eruption that has a strong chance of happening soon enough. Mr. Grimeson points out to us that right next to Eyejoe is a second and much larger volcano -- Iceland has 18 of these things (I told you it wasn't a very salutary place) -- called Katla, and every since the Vikings unaccountably started hanging out in those parts, about 1,200 years ago, Katla has erupted pretty regularly every century or so. The last time it did so was in 1918, when, if you can remember, the only airplanes to speak of were the little stick and paper land skimmers that were used mostly in the First World War to do some recon work, drop little bombs on various places, and otherwise allow the pilots to rack up huge and unlikely scores, shooting down each other. There were no big planes of the kind that were used to bring down the World Trade Center towers and that otherwise have to avoid ash clouds like the plague because the ash consists of tiny shards of glass that accumulate and eventually shut down jet engines -- up in the air!
And 1918 is too close to already being a hundred years ago.
posted by Carl (aka Sofarsogoo) | 4:28 AM
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