world be a better place if we were living off off the land as the Native Americans, Africans and Aboriginal people have
They only managed because there were relatively few of them. There is no way the current world population could exist living off the land in the same way.
In agreement to
dunkemhigh's reply above, I would add: these days we have more who use single variable thinking instead of thinking dynamically with multiple variable
s.
A simple illustration of single variable thinking: Just prior to 2000, there was an increase in tax large luxury yachts. Politicians were thinking, well, we are collecting 2% tax and we are getting X, if we increase it to 6%, we have 3X the income... They never consider the fact that at 6%, far fewer people would buy luxury yachts. The luxury yacht business was dead in a year. Took years for that business to recover. Single variable thinking at work.
The whole thing about living off the land is another such single variable thinking. A recent example being former Zimbabwe, in around 1990's, the commercial farms were destroyed, broken up and turned into family farms eating what you grow. The productivity just isn't the same
[1]. Before that,
they were a food exporter to other nations, after the land redistribution,
they became a net food importer with food shortages. To their credit, they saw the light - in 2006, they started inviting the commercial farmers back with free 99 years land leases to rebuilt a commercial farming industry. But of course with the infrastructure already destroyed, it will take them a while to debug the process and make it work. Just back in March 2021, banks refused to accept leases as collateral, arguing that land still belongs to the State
[2]. Businesses can't work well when bank wont make loan. So, the process debugging continues.
Reference:
[1] CNN: How Robert Mugabe killed one of Africa's richest economies
https://money.cnn.com/2017/11/15/news/economy/zimbabwe-economy-robert-mugabe-history/index.html[2] Commercial Farmers’ Union of Zimbabwe: Zimbabwe banks declare 99-year leases worthless
http://www.cfuzim.com/2021/03/19/zimbabwe-banks-declare-99-year-leases-worthless/Spinlauch is exactly the same "single variable thinking" is at work. This faulty thinking was pointed out by
CatalinaWOW in this earlier reply:
There are tons of second order problems to solve also. You can get a glimpse with a much simpler concept. Large rockets burn huge amounts of fuel in the first few meters of flight. The Saturn V burned roughly 35,000 kg of fuel in the first 10 meters of motion and is still only going roughly 20 meters/second at that time. If you just mounted the whole rocket on a hydraulic piston and shoved it the first ten meters you would save all that mass with corresponding improvements in downstream performance.
BUT, to save that fuel you have to light the fires after the piston initiates it's motion. And in the case of a misfire you have a giant rocket heading into the air and at least partially on fire with an impact zone a few meters from the launch platform. Space flight is exciting enough without problems like that.
Spin launches are an approach to taking the weight of initial velocity production out of the rocket, but this one seems most efficient at rearranging the location of cash.
As long as we do not think about the other variables, a lot of things seem to make sense, but once we put those other variables in play, the whole thing collapsed. I am afraid Spinlaunch, and many other fads of day such as "we can all bike to work to save the environment", are merely a black hole for money and productivity leaving us worst off, and disfunctional.