Actually it may not be as bleak as all that but the problems of our species and planet are pretty dire. We must understand that we ARE now an endangered species. This site is dedicated to exploring what policy shifts we can make to maximise our chances. The good news is that we can be in a much better position 100 years from now if we survive the crisis the right way. We CAN get off the endangered list but not with the status quo.
-:all views expressed on this site are my own and should not be taken to represent any other person or organisation regardless of my relationship to them:-
Though multiply is a great platform, for various reasons I am continuing this discourse at a new venue. Please join me there as we figure out how to save the world.
I think, read and write about the future so much that I tend to forget that it is not obvious why it is this historical 'moment' that is so critical. Many of the ideas on which I and other futurists build are summed up in this short clip. Some, like the scales of civilizations are from Kardeshev and other Russian thinkers. Others like the Von Neumann self replicating machines. The speculations about common language etc are more recent and commonplace but the point about the threat/opportunity our civilization and species faces is well made.
This is a kind of macro-historical view of my main assertion on this blog that humanity is entering a critical phase. It is a phase of history from which we probably have a less than even chance of surviving and the only exit states for say 2100-2200 are extinction or a thriving type one civilization that is expanding into the solar system.
One need not agree with everything Michio Kaku (father of modern string theory and the speaker in this clip) says to understand humanities growing crisis. It helps if one has read some of the resources I list on this blog like Diamond's 'Collapse' and Mason's '2030 Spike' but even without these it is not hard to see the looming crisis or the importance of our species behaviors in weathering it.
What seems to be harder to avoid is the unhelpful and unrealistic polarities of possible responses which as David Suzuki points out, effectively absolve the individual of the need to DO anything. On the one hand some see the magnitude of the crisis, observe the apparent inability of human institutions like nations, politics, religion & business to solve humanities problems or even try. They see that we are creating global environmental, resource, energy and other crises far beyond the historical ones our institutions have 'evolved' to deal with. They see this and despair. Then they go about their lives as if they need not do anything because it is pointless.
On the other hand there is the other extreme who perhaps do not understand or believe that the crises we face really are greater than ever before or who are so impressed with humanities expanded knowledge and power (largely based on fossil fuels) to solve many of the older challenges history has presented us with. These people think that we have all the wherewithal we need or can acquire it quickly without the need for them to warp their lives and lifestyle choices around the effort.
I am with the apparently small group between these, like David Suzuki, Robert Zubrin, Michio Kaku and Al Gore, who believe that the crisis we face is mammoth simple because our power as a species has grown so great that it is now in our hands to threaten our global survival as it never was before. This comes, inevitably as our organizing institutions are not sufficiently developed to handle the power, so we tend to squander much of it and leave the mess as 'someone else's problem'. The visionaries above however also all believe that by making effort, sacrifices and really smart choices we actually can survive this historical/systemic tsunami and in fact thrive in a bright, clean and energy rich future. It is our duty to do this and our privilege to be the ones who can and must. Our descendants, maybe even our children and grandchildren will certainly understand that we were the ones on watch when the critical choices were made. They will hold us responsible because if we make the wrong choices they will be unable to recoup the damage. Do YOU want to explain to them how little we did? With Suzuki I want to be able to tell them 'I did all I could'.
Like Kaku I can stand on the shoulders of giants and sum up the ideas which show us the road out of this dark valley into the bright highlands. The road is not easy or automatic but it is not hopeless either. The major steps involved are as follows:
Take control of the Earths climate and integrate our economy properly and sustainably into the global ecology. This will clearly involve acknowledging the reality and causes of climate change and implementing solutions, including the obsolescence of fossil fuels and the end of our current abuse of the global carbon cycle.
Acquire new clean, plentiful and economic sources of energy and scarce materials.
In the short term this needs to be an eclectic mixture of renewable power sources with ever reducing use of fossil carbon combustion. This will lead into the Hydrogen economy as a way of managing these many sources and integrating our economy more tightly with real-universe energy physics (it is currently distorted by availability of non-renewables). In the long term our savior will almost certainly be Nuclear Fusion reactors with Helium 3 fuel which we will acquire in almost unlimited quantities from our moon and the Gas giants such as Saturn.
This will also necessarily mean expanding into and controlling the resources of our solar system. We will certainly need permanent settlements in orbit, on Mars & the Asteroids and eventually around some gas giants. We will need to develop better transport to do this, probably including such infrastructure as Space Elevators.
Integrate our many cultures into a global meta-culture that respects difference yet shares enough common values and institutions to deal with all our current challenges as well as the new ones that will arise as a true type one civilization.
Remember that I am not saying that this will be easy or that we have all the answers yet. However some of us ARE asking the right questions and know where to look for the answers. This will never work until humanity is asking those same questions and looking with us. It is for this reason that I see my current best contribution as promoting those 'right questions' and contributing to the discourse that follows. Yes I strive for carbon neutrality, recycle, compost etc but the most important thing I can do is to talk to YOU about it. The most important thing you can do is to spread the word and join the discourse! We need people power to drive our leaders and to give them permission to make the right choices. If humanity does not understand the situation they will not allow even enlightened leaders to guide our civilisation out of the dark.
Send this to some friends, comment, argue, suggest solutions and defend others. Do it today : )
As I've argued
before, the solutions to most of the worlds problems including the climate
crisis and the eventually inevitable shortages of finite resources such
as minerals, lie in gaining access to both 'clean' energy and more resources.
"Well obviously" you might say. With enough energy and minerals we can create the means to feed almost any
population we have space for and in any case current food shortages are more a
political/distribution problem than a shortage per se. Putting aside for a moment the
political problems of how humanity *should* organise itself to distribute
resources fairly (what ever you think that means) the problems of gaining access
to physical minerals and sufficient energy are the main bottlenecks to be
addressed over the next century. The kicker is that both have to be achieved
without creating environmental impacts we cannot live with.
I think the argument
that continuing our civilization's current carbon based energy regime cannot
meet the environmental restrictions even if (and it is a big if) we can wring
another few decades or a century out of it by using forms such as oil shale, tar
sand etc (see Bjorn Lomborg on how that can be done). It is equally clear that
while the dire predictions of the Club of Rome have not come true as predicted,
we must sooner or later face sever shortages of minerals - raising the price of
some of them beyond what our societies energy regime can afford - eventually
threatening even out globalised society with collapse (as laid out by Jarred
Diamond in his seminal work 'Collapse: How Societies choose to succeed or
fail').
If our society did
collapse, we would have to expect this to occur globally as our now world
spanning economy and political structures fight it out for the resources they
need to sustain themselves just the same way the chiefs did on Easter Island or
the Aztec Nobles and Kings did in Central America. The trouble would be that
with this occurring globally we could expect the collapse to be world wide as
well and our heirs to be unable to rebuild a society like ours for many
centuries (if ever) because we had already exploited all the easily recovered
mineral resources and they would lack the technology or global organisation or
both, to go after the scraps we leave them. The scraps we are increasingly
turning to now ourselves (as recommended by Lomborg). We therefore should equate
such a potential collapse with near extinction of our species (& many
others) for planning purposes. I believe we must plan to avoid it at all
costs.
So we have a knotty
problem, or at least a major crisis of how our society works and collapse within
100 years is a very real possibility, however high on the hog we may seem to be
riding as the West sees it. Part of the solution will surely be utilizing every
'alternative' clean energy source we can. Part or it will be new technologies to
replace minerals we lack with alternatives and better extraction to go after
reserves no-one would have touched previously but this only buys us time as we
tighten our belts and still consume more of the geological legacy the Earths
past has left us - and which can never be replenished (except over Millions of
years) and which we therefore CANNOT use *sustainably*.
This of course leads
us back to my original assertion that we need resources beyond those of the
Earth in order not to face near extinction. We also need energy to be
sufficiently environmentally clean (including greenhouse neutral) plentiful and
affordable to run our ongoing civilization on it. This will be hard enough if we
keep the high standard of living for the current developed West only but China
and India are determined that that will not be how it goes.
This chain of logic
leads us inevitably to off world sources of energy and minerals such as the
Asteroids and Gas Giants (See my resources section on how this can work - I may
also post later on a more detailed plan). The problem comes when we realise that
our only access to such resources is through the technology of rocketry and that
it is just too expensive & dirty to supply what we need in the quantities
we need it. One promising alternative remains however which may get the cost of
raising a kilogram into orbit down by orders of magnitude - a Space Elevator.
The engineering for this has been largely worked out by Bradley Edwards but we need
breakthroughs in material science to make the tether required (basically we need
much longer carbon nanotubes and better ways to weave them) and we need to
develop the cars that can ride such a cable. Currently none of our governments
are putting much behind the push for this other than funding Edwards' research out of the voluminous mixed bag of NASA funding.
There is a private company however-which has been formed to do it www.liftport.com. Liftport is integrating a program of nanotube ans cable manufacture as well as robotics research for the elevator cars. Someone has to do this so thank god someone is!
So whether you are a
committed Green, a space advocate, an economist or an industrialist... or even just want your children to have a future; a Space
Elevator therefore is not some fanciful geek project or just 'one possibility we
must consider'. It may very well be the one critical piece our civilization must
produce in order to survive. If we were playing a simulator like Sid Meyer's
'Civilization' we would be pouring our global resources into it because we would
be thinking (as this blog is set up to do) on a longer scale than the lives of
mere governments or human spans. I therefore call on all reading this to either
get behind the push into space, the construction of the Space Elevator in
particular - or else engage with me on how else our species can have a future.
If you are at all unclear on how we can find what our species needs in our own solar system, or if you think that our problems are not so dire or that other solution hold the
key then say so here - I would welcome it. Until you can make that case though
we need you to start raising awareness in our electorates, our governments and
in our business/investment sectors that the time has come to invest in our
species future.
Build the Elevator -
expand into space - secure the future
It seems that Australia has finally decided that climate really is an electoral issue but according to some of the establishment view, the solution is NOT renewables. It is 'clean' coal and Nuclear Fission. OK granted both of those may have something to offer in the mix but it is hard to say which is the more problematic & high risk technology... the totally unproven one that will take decades to bring into operation & may leak its disposed wastes anyway... or the proven dirty one with the track record of under-performance (that will also take decades for Australia to implement) and may also leak its wastes...
Peter Garrett's take on this at http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2007/01/01/1167500060557 makes some telling points. It is true that Australia is better equipped technologically and industrially to implement renewables than either geo-sequestration or fission. It is also probably (you want to wait for full 'proof') true that we need to move right away to mitigate climate change, not with the glacial speed of industrial convenience but with the most determined and radical steps as we can manage socially.
Yet can we pull it off? We still have to phase out coal fired electricity because solar & wind can only take up part of the slack (not as reliable). Can we phase out our current energy regime, based as it is on coal,
oil and a small amount of 'alternative' fossil fuels like natural gas
and LPG. This will take decades even at our fastest. Is the current targeted 'new' source the right one in any case?
This is where I wander off topic a bit and look further into the future than the mainstream debate. The rub is that our current population and (Western) lifestyle will not be sustainable even if we beat the global warming rap. Even if we went straight to as much renewable energy as possible (not enough to power our civilization in any case) & supplemented it with a smattering of fission, we would only be lengthening the borrowed time we live on.
Isn't that enough though? Won't that buy us time to solve our other problems? Maybe it will but if we keep going as the hand-to-mouth species that just limps along surviving then sooner or later we will trip up ...& not make a hurdle. We need to do better than that. We need to be expanding into the solar system & accessing a thousand resources and lifestyles so that we no longer have all our eggs in one planetary basket.
So how do we do this? Can we do this? We can.
We need more than one planet so that no selfish human minority and no natural catastrophe can wipe out the species. We need near inexhaustible energy supplies. We need the minerals and materials of our whole solar system. Personally I do not care if this is led by Nations, Ideologies or Commerce (ok I have preferences but...) as long as we do it. There are all the minerals we could ever need available in our asteroids and other bodies. There is PRACTICALLY INEXHAUSTIBLE ENERGY for a civilization with nuclear fusion (H-3) on our moon & in the gas giants. There is all the space and all the potential we could need.
...but we need to make space the priority for the next few decades while we have the resources to do it. Can we do it? Is there a program that will result in us being a true type two civilization? There is indeed. Just as Jared Diamond has shown us with 'Collapse' that the way societies respond to environmental challenge generally determines whether they collapse completely or go on to new heights, Zubrin has shown us with 'Entering Space' that there are choices open to us that could secure that survival. In fact our current age of 'shortage' in minerals and energy will be practically a memory once we take control of our own solar system.
So how do we get into space? Where are the minerals? Where is the energy? Give me a little response to this post & I will lay it all out for you.
Every so often one comes upon an idea so breathtaking in its vision that one is either stunned into silence or propelled into print. One such is Tim Flannery's proposal that we build an industrial city in Australia based on geothermal power. While it smacks of the grand energy projects of the past such as the Snowy Hydroelectric scheme.
Australia's prosperity is based largely on its access to abundant mineral wealth & what industry we have is based largely in cheap (coal fired) power. The agriculture we once depended on has become an insignificant economic sector, though it still receives massive concessions economically because of the position it holds in the national psyche. So how can Australia continue to prosper with cheap power and still cut its contribution to global greenhouse emissions? It so happens that we are unusually well set up for geothermal power so we COULD build one or more industrial centres around such sources and lead the world in both clean power technology AND electricity powered industry.
Do I think this is likely? I'm afraid I don't. Visionaries such as Flannery are rare and insufficiently listened to (though Dr Flannery is gaining an audience). Both the incumbent government and the Labour opposition are mired in the issues and ideologies of the past and have trouble even paying sufficient attention to the current concerns of the electorate - let alone the future.
However, I believe the Geothermia proposal deserves development and debate. Some detail may be discovered which would render it unworkable but the more attention it gets, the better the chance it would gain backing if it is as viable as it looks at this point.
If anyone has seen or can point me to such a detailed development of the idea then I would be grateful.
I am certainly not the first to hail this as a very important work. Diamond builds on his socio-historical analysis in 'Guns Germs and Steel' to trace not only the way decisions of past societies determined whether they collapsed or flourished but what principles we can derive from their history.
Policy makers and leaders will ignore the lessons of this book at everyones extreme peril. While he acknowledges and outlines the limitations o analogy with the past, Diamond makes a compelling case that if we face a global crisis, our fate is almost certainly not random. It will be determined by our GLOBAL choices. Since the crisis is for the first time global, global policies must be developed in response.
Is our species up to the challenge? Is our global political system up to it? Time will tell but as Diamond has shown it will be a kind of Satrian bad faith for our species to ever claim that it was not our own shared choices (policies) that sealed our destruction or assured our destiny.
Leaders, policy makers and futurists really must weigh up the contents of Collapse and apply its lessons. While in need (in my opinion) of a little more editing, this book belongs on the shelves and reading stands of all modern thinkers.
This technology could well be the key which gets us affordable access to space and that in turn would eventually solve our energy and resource shortages. While this will not deal with our pollution issues it is the core of a solution to our current global crisis.
Edwards has done a fine job of working out the engineering science required to build the space elevator. It is an old idea in the literature but it has never been worked out so thoroughly before with non-fictional/theoretical materials before. All we need is carbon nannotubes several times as long as we can currently make in industrial quantity. This may seem like it is still an out-of-reach technology but it should be feasible with only a little more time and investment.
This is a blueprint for a workable space elevator. It is no hyperbola to say that building such a structure will be a major milestone in human history.
Excellent work. This should be on every futurists shelf. Investors might want to look at http://www.liftport.com/ for a group trying to apply it.
The issue of climate change as a survival issue for all humanity is seeping out into religious thinkers as well as scientists, economists, business leaders etc. In some countries such as Australia and the USA however, political thought is lagging way behind the curve and the population itself must pick up the issue and lead our leaders. Only now as it becomes a clear electoral issue do either our Liberal (conservative) or Labour (left wing) parties show any dawning realisation that there could be bigger issues than the ones they have been struggling over since the 1920s when their parties were born.
I have been unable to find the text of this open letter online so I have reproduced it below in full. It aptly demonstrates that at least in Australia, non-government thought leaders and the population at large are taking the climate crisis very seriously while both mainstream political parties trail badly and attempt to placate their electorates with half measures. I suspect that this is less true in Europe and possibly Asia as well since those countries have at least (long since) ratified the Kyoto protocol, though action on reducing greenhouse emissions is less clear in some cases.
I believe Bishop Brownings letter to be an excellent round up of the issue from Australian & USA viewpoint and worthy of attention in its own right. There are however some philosophical points which merit comment as those who do not share his christian world view may be tempted to dismiss his words or give them insufficient weight.
The first is that fact that he admittedly writes from a christian faith based position and reiterates his belief in a loving creator who cares for us and our situation. He does not however imply that we can expect a rescue however. Those of us who have a scientific rationalist world view will find all of his conclusions entirely supportable and compatible with the best scholarship worldwide. One should not therefore be blinded by his ecclesiastical affiliation into thinking this is anything less than a well reasoned manifesto the broader society can support and coalesce a movement around.
Secondly, although Browning presents this as a cleric will, as a moral issue, it is also an ethical one. That is to say we do not need a mandate from any deity to say this is 'right' or 'wrong'. It affects the survival of many of the humans on the planet and a great many other species as well so if we measure our idea of 'good' against either our own good, that of people generally or against biodiversity etc we will come to the same ethical decision with or without god. That is; this ia a survival issue or at least one supportable out of pure self interest or any other common ethical criterion. It may not be in the apparent interest of the short term democratic government of the day but that makes it all the more imperative that we the voters must make it in their interest by voting with a longer term view than the parties take themselves.
Lastly it is refreshing to see it so plainly stated that this is not an issue for the left or the right only. It is an imperative for all humans who expect a viable future for themselves and their descendent's. Only the most extreme millenialist, fundamentalist positions will be excluded from this. Certainly no mainstream position should not acknowledge it as a core issue.
It is heartening to see that the realisation that we are in crisis as a civilization is spreading and more than that our choices in the next 50 years are more crucial to our species and civilization than ever before.
As he says, lost time must be made up for, we have the power in our hands for very great good or ill. It is up to us with any voice or influence to shape the future by shaping the actions of our governments now. None of us want to fail his 'talk out our choices with a child' test either now or when our grand children ask us where we were back when something could still be done.
____________________________________________________________________________ Right Reverend (Bishop) George Browning, Diocese of Canberra and Goulburn (Australia) Text of an open letter written to the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition in October 2006:
“I do not believe an Australian citizen can morally vote for a party at the forthcoming Federal election which does not have a comprehensive Climate Change Policy.
This is the most serious issue facing global humanity. The debate is over. Serious science is no longer in dispute. The only matter that can be debated is the seriousness and the speed of the consequences.
The debate is not about left or right. It is not really about who is to blame. The real business is about life and living sustainably - and the next 50 years are earth shatteringly vital. We desperately need leaders who can act on this imperative with courage, vision, and passion. It is morally unacceptable for our national leadership to ignore what is at stake and fail to accept its present responsibilities. Lost time must be made up.
May I be bold enough to suggest a simple test? Sit face to face with a child - any child, anywhere - and looking them in the eye, say plainly: “I am doing everything in my power to safeguard your future and life with this earth.” May I be doubly bold to say that at this moment, you cannot truthfully speak this way to any person, let alone to the child.
I write out of my deep Christian conviction. The universe is biased for life; our belief is that God the Creator sustains all that is; all that we have is a gift. We now know that what we are doing is harming the earth; our living is tilting the balance against life with catastrophic and immediate consequences. We have no mandate to ruin what does not belong to us and our actions are nothing short of apocalyptic.
The current drought is a wonderful opportunity to harness a fresh imagination. Droughts are a part of our country’s natural cycle, but now more than ever the present heat and dryness helps us see what the future could be like. Money must rightly be spent now on helping farmers. But more importantly, money must be spent on the fundamentals that make it possible to live with less water, more heat, less energy and clean energy. We expect of our national leaders to have vision and passion. It is easy to create policies around what we want. It takes real leadership to direct us into what we need.
It is totally unacceptable for a senior politician to trot out the tired information that our contribution to global emission is less than 2%. True, but irrelevant. A more relevant statistic is that per capita we are in the top three polluters in the world. This is disgraceful! The reality is we are prosperous, we have the technical knowledge, we claim to be a leader in the world community; we should be pushing the bar higher not dragging it down. Financially and intellectually Australia is well placed to be a leader and to help other less fortunate countries. We are squandering this opportunity.
Your climate change policy will be scrutinised thoroughly and critically . There is much rhetoric about the cost of acting to combat climate change, much pontificating about the complexity of externalities. The cost and complexity of extreme climate change and its impacts on civilisation are what should be occupying our minds. Some commentators have been heard to say that clean energy is so much more expensive than continuing to supply coal to fuel power stations. It is time for the costs of mounting damage be tallied; it is time for the costs of inaction to be weighed; it is time to invest rationally in our future. Spending money is not a policy. As commendable as recent project announcements have been, please do not think the wider community will be fooled into accepting them as a policy.
A policy must include:
• A signing of the Kyoto Protocol. Of course Kyoto is not the answer and we need to go far beyond it. But it is currently what we have and it is an immense stepping stone - already the Clean Development Mechanism is engaging developing countries in far-reaching projects to curb greenhouse gas emissions while pulling their citizens out of poverty. As an Australian citizen I feel ashamed that I am not numbered with the international community in a common endeavour. Instead I am numbered with the largest industrialised country, the single greatest polluter as well as the worst polluter per head of population. It is simply not enough to say we are meeting our obligations anyway. The moral responsibility of standing with the rest of the world is overwhelming. • Carbon must be priced. I am invited to speak in the company of scientists, economists and business leaders. I know the business community is expecting and indeed wanting the announcement of a price. Business will then invest and get on with its work. Pricing will obviously make renewables far more competitive. Let the market do its work. • Renewables must be mandated on an increasing scale. Of course no renewable business will invest without some sort of guarantee. At present their leadership and their technologies are undermined by polluters who reap a profit from the collateral damage they create . • There must be a comprehensive and detailed water policy. There is no reason why cities cannot be given a time-frame in which they are required to collect and recycle their water. It remains a scandal that private citizens can put down a bore to draw from an aquifer as if it is their right simply because they have freehold title to a few square metres above it. Water below the ground has perhaps less right to be privatised than water above the ground. • Nuclear energy will be part of a comprehensive policy. The detail will be extremely carefully read. It is simply not true that renewables cannot bear some of the base load. If nuclear energy is given the go-ahead in Australia it must be carefully argued that it is the least of several evils. Let the argument be transparent and very persuasive. • There must be a detailed account of how it is planned to invest in research in the immediate, medium and long-term futures.
I look forward to the release of your comprehensive policy. I will be using whatever influence I have to encourage voters, from moral persuasion, that a vote should not be cast for a party that lacks such a policy.
With warmest good wishes for your responsibility in leadership.”
As the planning for future Mars missions gets more serious, radiation is emerging as a serious obstacle. Unlike astronauts going to the moon, who are only exposed to radiation risk for a few days, those headed for Mars will be exposed for months. While we don't know very much about the specific health risks this will entail (most of our knowledge of radiation health risks come from short term, intense atomic bomb exposures though we know long term exposures can also be lethal, as Marie Curie found) no-one is relaxed about ignoring the problem. Especially since Mars' thin atmosphere and reduced magnetic field don't promise much more protection for astronauts working on the surface either. The main difficulty is that shielding from radiation is mostly a matter of placing mass between yourself and the source. In a space launch mass is just what you can't have, so making concrete bunkers part of any craft lifted out of Earth's gravity well is just not an option.
Putting aside for a moment the idea of small 'storm shelters' as part of the spacecraft, as used in Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars book, there seem to be two main candidates for providing adequate shielding en-route. The first is the idea is to get shielding en-route from an asteroid on a similar orbit. This would mean finding a suitable asteroid that would be going by on an orbit between Earth and Mars for a start. Many problems are yet to be solved about exactly how to use such shielding even if we can find such a convenient rock. Even if feasible this solution is never going to be a long term one for significant traffic so we need other approaches as well.
The second possibility is to generate a moving plasma bubble around the craft that can help by deflecting or redirecting at least the charged particle portion of the radiation. While this has obvious technical merit and light weight as well, it is hard to see how this would help much against the electromagnetic radiation (such as Gamma rays that so hurt hiroshima victims and which are known cancer triggers) or against uncharged particles such as Neutrons (which are part of the damaging radiation from nuclear reactors and presumably the solar wind as well).
All things considered this is a problem that needs a better solution than we have now if we are to get out into space in person. It may push us to continuing to explore with increasingly sophisticated robots as we do currently but time will tell.
How does Mars fit with solving Humanity's energy and environment problems? Find out in future posts.
One of the issues we face in changing our civilisation's energy regime is replacing our gas guzzling personal transport with clean, no-fossil equivalents. These vehicles are already appearing but having the infrastructure to make them convenient while also allowing for our expanding and complexifying power generation and distribution needs is another.
This is almost certainly the way we will do things at some point in the coming decades. Add to this smart metering and distributed power to supplement the big power stations and we have a ballgame.
It doesn't take too long when examining the issues facing the world in the near future to conclude that the very structure of our civilisation is a part of the problem. This is not obvious at first sight however, especially to those who would see themselves as politically 'conservative'. However it should be noted that the politically conservative in the Soviet Union thought they would be able to solve the required problems and pull through.
You hear it in a hundred conversations "oh we have always solved them before and we have evolved structures and institutions to do it - they work, don't sweat". However in practically every society which has collapsed from Rome to Easter Island they thought the same thing as far as we can tell. It puts one in mind of a wonderful Douglas Adams story about a puddle who woke up having formed one morning and deduced that the hollow it was in was SO close fitting that it had to have been MADE for it and that its continuance must therefore be intended and guaranteed. It wasn't and nor is our civilization's.
With that in mind one becomes more interested in some of the relatively radical suggestions about what we might need to do to ensure our species continues to prosper. One such position is that while Capitalism proved fitter in the contest than Communism did (ignoring the circularity of the fitness argument for a moment) that is no guarantee it is as good as it could be - or needs to be...
With this in mind it may be worth giving more than a hostile half ear (the best tradition permits) to those who want to renovate our civilisation.
This book contains an excellent round up of the factors which are converging toward an acute crisis somewhere in the next few decades - around 2030. The factors Mason lays out include energy, population, climate, food, water and disease.
While his analysis of the problem is spot on and worth the price of the book alone, his offered solutions vary from the brilliant to the pipe dream - in spite of his own axiom that... "If proposed solutions don't take the lowest common denominator of human nature realistically into account, they will not work."
What is worse he makes the error of dismissing some of the longer term solutions such as Fusion outright and lumping space exploration in with military expenditure as almost complete waste spending. While Fusion and space development may not get us through the coming crisis at first they WILL make the difference between our civilisation going into permanent brownout and decline and recovering from a deep crisis and going on to a bright future.
Worth a read and very well informed in many areas. However I believe the concentration on only short and medium term problems represents a deep flaw. However he presents a fine list of thought provoking possibilities worthy of examination and debate.
The full answer to the way through the coming crisis remains mysterious - however Mason does establish the reality of the crisis.
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we
created them."
Albert Einstien
As with most people and groups, our worst problems are always the results of our worst blind spots. This is what makes them so hard to solve. In a sense we cannot see them which is why they grew in the first place. it will take courage, humility and maybe a touch of genius for Humanity to come out of the next century in better shape than we went in. Are we up to it?
I believe we may be. If you want to take part in that then join me in envisaging our species future and mapping solutions to the barriers to getting there.
An excellent resource on how Hydrogen fits into any possible solution, negotiating the coming energy crisis. More than that it contains a first rate description of history from an energy point of view, including why our whole civilization should be seen as entering a serious crisis as so many have before. For this it deserves to sit beside Diamond's "Guns Germs and Steel" as models of the past which help us understand contemporary and near future history. Without such interpretive models we will be unable to break out of our current self defeating mindsets.
More than that, this is a fine book on what the Hydrogen economy is and could be. Rifkin is perhaps a little idealistic and starry eyes about how much Hydrogen could or is likely to do for us but he certainly makes the case that this MUST be the core of our civilizations energy regime - or else we will certainly fail as the combustion era ends!
It has become increasingly apparent in recent years that the fossil-fuel age has a Janus face. The extraordinary benefits of utilizing coal, oil, and natural gas are too many to recite. Suffice it to say that eight to ten generations of human beings—those living between the time of the first widespread application of coal and steam technology and today—in Europe, North America, Japan, and elsewhere reaped unprecedented gains from the exploitation of these unique, non-renewable resources. We exhumed the organic remains of an earlier geological era and basked in a material cornucopia made possible by the energy we took up. Now, a number of forces are converging to create a watershed event of great historic proportions, We have reached the critical moment that many great civilizations in the past have confronted, some successfully, others not. That is the point at which the energy used to maintain the workings of the civilization becomes more scarce and expensive, and the accumulated waste and externalities built up from past activity become more costly to absorb. When that juncture is crossed, countries experience a lessening of the energy flow-through, a slowing of the performance of the many subsystems that make up the society, and a weakening of the institutional, economic, and social fabric, making the overall operational structure more vulnerable to external threats and internal collapse.
The choices that a civilization makes at the "turning point" in its existing energy regime determines whether or not it will be successful in reorganizing its systems and enjoy renewal, or face a steady deterioration and devolution of its infrastructure and eventual death and decomposition of the society. The oil-based civilization, the most successful energy regime in all of human history, is just a few short years away from the turning point. The paths of three defining forces are quickly converging, forcing society to make decisions about what steps to take to ensure the future. The interplay between the imminent peak of global oil production, the increasing concentration of the remaining oil reserves in the Middle East (the most politically and socially unstable region of the world), and the steady heating up of the world's atmosphere from the spent energy—or entropy—accumulated over the course of the Industrial Age make for a volatile and dangerous world game, one whose outcome at this stage remains very much in doubt.
Fossil-fuel civilization is under siege. How well we respond to the triple threat at our front gates depends, in part, on how vulnerable our existing infrastructure is to attack, disruption, and disrepair. On this score, the prospects are poor. The complex, centralized infrastructure we have created to manage a high-energy, fossil-fuel economy—once our greatest asset—is fast becoming our biggest liability. We are increasingly vulnerable to threats and disruptions from without and within, making this moment in post-industrial history the most precarious in memory.
This is a must for any futurist library. Zubrin concentrates on Mars and why it needs to be humanities next major objective. Not the Moon or world peace or hegemony etc. He also explains exactly how we can do it with todays technology and an affordable price tag.
Zubrin believes we should study and settle Mars because we can and because we need the resources. He explains how it is the key to our control of the Solar System because it has all the resources we need to support itself and other bases with a shallow gravity well - which Earth lacks. Earth (humans) need the energy and minerals to be found in the Asteroids and Gas Giant systems if we are not going to stagnate and fail both economically and culturally (See Jarod Diamond's "Collapse - Why Societies choose to fail"). We need Mars to support the effort of our expansion into space. He also shows how.
This is a tightly written and scholarly work rounding up the current state of Astrobiology (or Xenobiology as it should be more correctly known).
Darling discusses all the serious topics around life's nature and probable abundance, alternative chemistries and structures. I would recommend this to anyone who was serious about alien life study (as opposed to dreaming about SF aliens and first contact scenarios).
This classic of space advocacy is a must have but comes with a reality check warning. O'Neil argued for power satellites in the Seventies and worked out all the nuts and bolts of how it could be done. He accumulated a substantial following of folk who believed in the vision of colonies at L5 and the moon, mining, mass drivers and giant photovoltaic arrays in Low Earth Orbit beaming microwave power to the groundhogs below.
It is a beautiful vision and produced some of the best designs for orbital habitats we have yet. Unfortunately it was all based on producing power cheap enough to have a market. It did not add up though and the power profits would never be there. In fact the power would be gar dearer than then, now or the foreseeable future.
In the end O'Neil probably just increased the resistance to space ventures in the popular mind and in policy making circles.
This is a good round up of the argument for returning to the moon. However I do not think Wingos strength is economics or mathematics as he consistently overestimates revenues and benefits (to Earth) of possible moon industries and underestimates costs of maintaining a presence there.
The most telling arguments for the Moon remain Helium-3 for fusion power, to be mined from the topsoil until we can access the Gas Giants and the observatory potential of the far side. He does say robots would be a big part of that but probably plays up how many humans (if any) would be called for.
Basically I ended up with the impression that it may or may not be worth serious Moon colonisation with robots but human settlement is pointless. Worse it may distract from the effort required to go for Mars and the asteroids.
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