July 23, 2019
Nobabies.net
Scientific American
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Sir:
Sarah Scoles “The Good Kind of Crazy” Scientific American vol. 321 no. 2 August 2019 page 58, The work of Woodward and Fearn sounds like of couple of inventions by Cyrano among his ways to get to the moon. At the time Rostand wrote the play it was an absolute paradox not to be resolved until Einstein restored the conservation of momentum. My own interest is in the dependence of fertility on kinship and how this may lead to a zero human birth rate by century’s end since we all outbreed so it’s outside my comfort zone, although I suspect relativity will prevail in the end.
I think there may actually be a work around. This is partly my own idea and partly that of David Jones, prior columnist for Nature, and I should not give it without permission. Otherwise I’d consider giving it to the world along with a device to produce cheap, clean, light, safe power in the prodigious quantities that would be needed. But people would only use it to drive themselves to extinction faster.
Neither has been tested, and I am not disposed to try. Recruiting the talent and raising the funds would, I think, be impossible. It’s the wrong kind of crazy.
Sincerely,
M. Linton Herbert MD