Driving from Alaska to Siberia 183
Pelerin writes "The team from the
Ice Challenger project are driving from
Alaska to Provodanya, in Siberia; across the
56-mile field of ice floes that each winter
"joins" America
and Russia. At the last minute the Russian
authorities
have denied the entry permit but the
crew says they're on track to reach the Big
Diomedes islands, which lie across the date
line, thereby proving it's possible to do this.
This feat
is not as easy as it sounds due to the
harsh Artic winter conditions, and the fact
that the ice floes themselves are drifting
at a pretty good clip. It takes
a specially built vehicle
to tackle this adventure. Geek quotient: pretty
high :)" If you just want to drive to Alaska, you might go with Philip Greenspun. And if these guys don't make the trip to Russia this year, they might not get a chance. Update: 04/08 12:21 GMT by T : DrShrink adds to the story: "The two made it to Siberia, however were turned back due to not gaining permission to enter Russian territory."
"Driving"? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not saying that this isn't an amazing feat; on the contrary, I think the term makes it seem like what they're doing is easy, and we may all be able to do it soon enough. I'm still waiting for word on when that giant bridge is gonna go up.
Driving from America to Asia (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a shame they couldn't make a permanant roadway (I know, I know, it's 56 miles, but it'd still be cool.
Re:Downplayed link at the bottom of the article (Score:1, Insightful)
That having been said, what we do about this `unspoken challenge' seems to be the nub of the matter. Personally, I'm all for tech. I just think it could be approached differently. It's much easier for media and environmentalist groups to trace the symptom of ecological devastation to tech and industry, but that's just another symptom.
The real killer here is that there is so much tech and industry. There has to be, to fulfill society's collective demand. There wouldn't be so much demand if there weren't so much society. There's too many people, people! How much more simple could it be? People write it off as an insoluble problem so easily, and then turn around and do work like this on human cloning [slashdot.org], conveniently forgetting and contributing the problem they'd written off as supposedly insoluble.
Fact is, it isn't insoluble. It'll be solved, if nothing else, when we grow to the planet's limit, pushing out every species `useless' to us in the process, and face starvation in the midst of an ecological backlash. So the problem will be solved sooner or later; the only thing we get to choose is how.
Stop breeding! Would it really be so bad, a few generations where two people get together and produce a total of one offspring? Every time a suburban couple gets together and says to one another, "How many children do you want, dear? Six? Seven?" what they're really saying is, "It doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things how many children we produce. It's a decision we can base purely on our individual preference. It'll just mean bulldozing a few more acres of rainforest somewhere, that's all. And we can do as we like with them, they do belong to mankind after all." More specious Manifest Destiny reasoning. These are the people who believe that life survives by going to the supermarket. Just because we've taken to living in large boxes and don't have to look at it doesn't mean we aren't part of the food chain. Not that there's much of one left, as we're destroying biodiversity at an alarming pace, meaning that when the climate does shift as it's doing there won't be enough species able to cope or adapt to continue a viable natural food chain. So many millions of years of natural selection, gone in just a few thousand years. But that's okay, because in the meantime we can breed without a second thought, carry our toolbox PC's to LAN parties, and hovercraft across the Northwest Passage area when it melts in a few years. I'm sorry, but if you want my participation in such massive devastation I'd need a much better bribe than that. Honestly, most of the people in our society aren't even happy with the lives they have from such destruction. Hardly seems worth it, does it?
For an extremely insightful look at our society's mindset, and an examination of how it impacts the world, I highly recommend Ishmael [amazon.com] by Daniel Quinn. Life-changing stuff.
Re:Downplayed link at the bottom of the article (Score:4, Insightful)
The article runs: Scientists are chatting up the elders of this ancient people to better understand how warm weather is destroying 2500 years of tradition; but, wait, at least on the Siberian side of things, the Soviets got there first, and all the elders that actually knew anything about hunting are all dead; the current batch has only been going at this hunting thing since the death of the Soviet Union; oh, and a few centuries back the Artic was waaay warmer than it was until recently, and the climate swing killed a bunch of guys then, too; but it's all really sad and stuff that more scientists aren't willing to forsake their precious 'facts and figures' to really *talk* to these wonderful, hardy, precious little men and women.
*Bleech*. Yet another make-work puff-piece assignment for a journalist who apparently knows that any contradiction can make sense if you tart it up in the right sort of narrative.
I could go on. However, I'll close with one final question: Why in God's name do Americans still refer to the Inuit as 'Eskimos'? It shows all the social sensitivity of 'negro' or 'indian'.