Diamonds in the Sewer

Saturday, January 13, 2007

Imagine there's no Asphalt

The first act I'd like anyone who is interested to do is to go to Google Earth, or many other good photo atlasses. If you have been up in a plane, remember looking down.

What do you see?

Imagine if you were a hypothetical space-age Gypsy traveling without asphalt. Imagine a blimp, perhaps. Imagine a technology that literally lived lightly on the earth -- like the turn of the century had in primitive form, like in the fantasies of The Probability Broach http://www.bigheadpress.com/tpb.php or Girl Genius:http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/

Take the bird's eye view and see what there is to be seen.

What you'll see is long, skinny black streaks with human habitation along them -- and little anywhere else. The powers in control say "my way *is* the highway".

Away from the streaks people don't live. It's like the rivers used to be -- only the people couldn't own those, only the ports -- which they did.

One of the advantages of living up here in the Adirondacks is a lot of the usual transportation rules don't apply -- either for long periods of time (say, winter) or at all because people still own private roads and there still are communities accessible through rails, over water, or private airfield.

It's true that America has an oil addiction -- but you're all looking at the wrong one. It's not the oil that goes into your cars that's the problem -- it's literally at and under your feet.

You could get from place to place without oil fuel -- but try to go on your daily travels without contacting a road. Sure, they want us to be thinking about electric cars -- as long as they own the roads.

If you think I'm crazy, take the time to rent a hot air balloon. Check out the collapsing farmhouses and ghost towns -- if the city leaders did not allow government roads the common roads were often broken, sometimes dynamited.

We lucked out up here because we have lots of native stone and we were settled by people who knew a lot about stoneworking, and since we had both the resources and people who already knew how to use them -- we still have plenty of private roads -- no road monopoly here.

So -- if you can travel by any other way than the monopoly -- say, by sending email instead of retarding snail mail -- you're doing something that will change the system of things.

I see a bright future ahead of us because:

"Where we're going we don't need ---------- roads."