The limitations of science (The limitations of science)

by David Turell , Monday, September 13, 2010, 04:59 (5187 days ago) @ xeno6696


> Remember, with me you're dealing with an engineer: How do we understand something without trying it? 
> 
> To me, the river project you discuss is exactly the kind of thing that we can only learn by doing, there's no way, we could have figured out the importance of that river to the everglades if we hadn't f***ed it up. 
> 
> A mistake is worth a hundredfold of a success.-Screw up parts of the world so we can learn? Isn't the world screwed up enough? And now we have a giant dam on the Bio Bio in southern Chile, right smack dab in an earthquake zone. One hellava disaster waiting to happen. Use nuclear power, not hydrologic. Dams have a rated lifetime, because every dam built is silting up at various rates. Did you ever hear the story how the Glen Canyon dam almost failed becasue the snowpack runoff was miscalculated. I can give references.- Engineer what you can understand and acurately predict.