Tuesday, December 14, 2010

海上城市

海上城市﹕我想世界上的人們需要建立幾張非常大的泊在海中的冰台。
這幾大冰台可以泊在赤道。上面會帶城市﹐商業地﹐農村﹐ 娛樂 地﹐什麼的。冰台
周圍的海水里會作海草場跟魚農場。

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Further thoughts on bringing equatorial ice rafts and kelp farming into being: social and political necessities

Further thoughts on how to bring equatorial ice rafts and kelp farming into being.

Initial finance for pumping equipment, compressors, piping, insulation, second-hand nets, cables, building materials, food supplies,   transportation, and so forth, will come from large companies wanting to invest in sequestration so as to ensure their own long term access to carbon credits.

Government of the ice rafts will have to be democratic and also involve citizen/elector equity. Voting must be direct with possibly two aspects of the franchise:
    1/ delegates for equal sized electorates would meet as a parliament and would be elected by means of compulsory, partial preferencial, voting;
    2/ electors themselves would constitute a citizens' house where voting power would be in proportion to the individual's equity in the city.

In effect each ice raft would have to be a type of municipality, a combination of city state, and proprietary company. It will be vitally important to prevent these municipalities spawning [of worse still becoming] entrenched bureaucracies so their constitutions would need to be overtly and unassailably democratic. One good way to bring that about will be to base them first and foremost on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights with an emphasis on the essential need for embodiment of compassion, democracy, ethics and scientific method in the laws, policies, and projects the citizens create.

I think it is not possible to overemphasize the importance of democracy in such an endevour. Karl Popper provided us with the theory to explain why democracies can succeed where dictatorships and authoritarian societies fail. The history of the 20th Century and this early stage of the 21st have shown us clearly that what he said is correct: democracy is a prerequisite for security, social stability and economic growth [and not the other way round]. The problems that have turned up and threatened disaster are more or less all the consequences of attempts at subversion of democracy and suppression of the openness it depends on.