Facing recession with foreknowledge

At this time, 2008, facing the onset of economic recession and the possibility that it may be deep is much the same in some ways as the 1929 Stock Market Crash and the Great Depression that followed it, and at the same time, some VERY important differences obtain. This time, there need be no war to go to the Moon.

There are no New Earths on Earth. None of the other planets are good farmland. Stay home even in your dreams.

Differences that can already be readily identified include

1. In 1936, Flight to the Moon was only in the unknown future, and every dynasty since Cheops compelled human beings onward to accomplish that at all cost.

In 2008, flight to the Moon is past accomplishment, and well recorded. If it is not past mastery, that can be attained in 2030 or 2050 if necessary. It won't be never.

Someday the great-grandkids will go to the Moon again if we don't now.

2. Communications is very different now, with solid written information available to anyone anywhere on the earth, in the city or in the country, from anywhere else on earth.

Best information about how to survive and stay healthy and strong as economic times worsen, even if they become very strangely primitive, is quickly assembled and distributed on the Internet. Vitally, people anywhere can search for what they need to know. They do not need to schedule
an expensive trip to a distant county or state courthouse to obtain information. People can and do readily share tips on how to store food, insulate the house, and live more carefully, staying clean at lower cost, and other vital tactics.

At this time, one of the dreams is that people will in fact be able to not only survive, but thrive, while residing in their homes. Presumably, agribusiness scale farming will continue.

Other factors about thriving at home include simply adapting to the practice of considering, as time passes, what to do in the near future - in the next few days, or weeks, or months.

Making these slow decisions was always a part of farm life and it can become a valuable practice of human society throughout large tracts of residential housing.

If the old economic system collapses, it will be because something better looms in the future, perhaps distantly. It is not the goal of housing to evict people from their homes. Houses were build for people to live in them, and people residing in their homes should not be forced or required or tricked into leaving them just because the world economic system collapses. Perhaps the landlords have to take the hit; this would have to be governed civilly, and mercifully, but a landlord might just be out of a job and in the same position as his householders are - in a house and little better.

Perhaps occupying a home would become a matter of proper legal filing, and perhaps a small fee to cover the administration by city, county and state government jurisdictions of who lives in what house.

Perhaps other costs would be utilities - water, electricity, garbage, roads, street assessments, insurance and school levies , but not horribly huge mortgage or rent payments every month.

If that is true, the usual mortgage package - consisting of from an inch to a foot or several feet of papers thick - would have to be redesigned from the ground up by professional information theorists, logicians, and programmers. Housing paperwork by now has centuries of ancient practices that began in feudal times, using phrases that date back to Rome, but they often contain redundant terms and the filing regimes are not coordinated. For instance, the title clerk or homeowner has to write or type his name and address in those documents, and they go to dozens of different offices that provide the doctrine of ownership throughout the land.

Modern logic can simplify the administrative procedures that have been necessary since ancient times - even worse, since the typewriter - greatly. The redesign of housing ownership should be undertaken with great attention to economies of scale, because the ownership or occupancy package will be coordinating information that allocates millions of houses to millions of people in thousands of jurisdictions in thousands of counties and dozens of states. It is not a task that will take only a year or two by some money-balance software manufacturer. It would need to be a major project of government.

As for now, we can face the ensuing recession and the potential for a prolonged depression with the knowledge that we can communicate readily, and we can remember what worked and what failed about the long recovery during the 1930's. This time, there need be no war to go to the Moon.

More importantly, we should abandon the science fiction ideas of going to other planets - "New Earths" - if we run out of resources or ruin this one. There's no chance of it. Only two other objects in the solar system exist with any acreage on which a person can stand up. Neither has enough air to breathe, neither has water in significance except at truly horrendous cost, and neither is as survivable as a house on Earth. No other object in the solar system has the comforts of a house on Earth or the arable crop-yielding capacity of land on Earth.