From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Wed Sep 26 2001 - 09:01:14 MDT
Jonas Oberg wrote:
> I must say that the the terror attacks agains the US are very tragic and I
> was appalled. However, I don't see that this list should be a discussion
> forum for it, since it's not the aim of this list to discuss such current
> affairs.
Jonas, I don't think the discussion is too much off the mark.
There has been a tragedy prompted by slanted religious memes.
This has been an unextropic event of major proportions that
seems likely to seriously impact the future path of humanity.
How we deal with this event may play a critical role in how
we may have to deal with future events using more advanced
WMD involving bioterrorism or nanoterrorism.
Most of the discussion on how to prevent future occurences like
this and how to combat specific problems has been pretty good.
However, the suggestion under discussion in this thread needs
a reality check.
What was the population of Berlin during the airlift?
A few million? What is the population of Afghanistan?
28 million. That looks something like 28000 *tons* of
food per day. The payload capacity of a C5 is ~92 tons
and the C17 is even less at 77 tons. So you are talking about
something like 300+ air missions per day. The British SkyCat
1000 (dirigible) could handle 1000 tons per mission but it is slower.
You also have a problem of distributing the food to the various
population centers that might require more missions.
I can't easily come up with numbers of how many C5's the U.S.
has but I suspect it isn't enough to supply the amount of
food required. The right way to do this is via a truck
convoy with the obvious problem that you will need to
control the roads over which the trucks travel.
Robert
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