Can't all space nerds get along?

Joe,

Regarding risk aversion, you might enjoy State of Fear by Michael
Crichton, since that modern tendency is one of the targets of the
fiction work. Besides that, there is an excellent bibliography.
Although I wish the characterization were a little less predictable,
he has really nailed the modernist take on the future, of
the "amputate our desires" variety. Actually, according to
Chrichton, it's amputate everybody else's desires, not those of the
environmental in-crowd. (The focus of the work is the really bad
science but really big business of the catastrophe industry.)

Jan Baker

--- In spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com, joe@... wrote:
>
> On Aug 11, 2007, at 14:18 UTC, Xenophile wrote:
>
> > NO NO NO!
> >
> > Where would aviation be today if they had decided that the best
thing
> > to do was to "tolerate more explosions at the airport?"
>
> Xeno, that IS how early aviation was! It was a deadly activity,
and
> both pilots and passengers were lost at what would be considered an
> appalling rate today.
>
> A better question would be: where would aviation be today if they
had
> been as risk-averse then as we are now, and the government had
stepped
> in with harsh regulations attempting to ensure that nobody got
hurt?