（外文电子版资料）Ben Bova - Crazy Ideas.pdfVIP

Crazy Ideas [Editorial]Crazy Ideas [Editorial] Ben Bova ========== During the height of the American involvement in Vietnam, when President Lyndon Johnson had sent half a million American troops to South Vietnam and enough bombs were being dropped to make that whole nation resemble the bottom of a shake-and-bake bag, Senator Barry Goldwater reminded an audience of his ill-fated 1964 campaign. “Remember me?” he asked his listeners. “I’m the nut who wanted to send the Army into Southeast Asia and bomb Hanoi.” Ideas that are first considered eccentric, unacceptable, or even crazy have a way of becoming commonplace, sooner or later. One of the causes of Future Shock is that nowadays, the crazy ideas become Standard Operating Procedure sooner, rather than later. Back when I was a lad (a sure sign of advancing, age, that phrase) nothing was crazier than wanting to fly to the MOON. Well, maybe there were a few things crazier than that: atomic power, death rays, artificial hearts, thinking machines, airplanes that could fly as fast as four hundred miles per hour. Now they’re all as normal and as American as pizza pie. Science fiction, abounds with crazy ideas. Not too long ago, in Analog, Wade Curtis suggested that coastal cities could have plenty of fresh water practically free, if they would just arrange to have an iceberg towed to their shorelines. The average iceberg represents enough fresh water to last a fair-sized city for months. Crazy idea. But the US Army’s Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory, in New Hampshire, in harness with the US Geological Survey’s Ic£ Dynamics Project at the University of Puget Sound, Washington, has produced a report that shows maybe it isn’t so crazy after all. The two authors of the study are Wilford F. Weeks, Army, and William J. Campbell, USGS. They concluded that a ship with approximately two-thirds the propulsive power of the carrier Enterprise could tow from Antarctica to A