Good comments. One quibble. Everything is a gift. The environment, the sun, the water, the air.
Whether we use it with intelligence and respect is the question. Whether it's dead and an object or alive and a learning organization that has to be related to. The earth gives freely. The sun gives freely. Everything is given freely, even the death of the plants and animals and ourselves for food. That we are uncomfortable with who we are and what our intent is in this life gives rise to pathologies that causes us to demean and destroy the web of existence and to objectify everything. Thus we have to create stories about why we do it and how we are OK for doing it. Agriculture did not create a better human but created the rise of disease. The industrial era was a cancer on the face of both human competence and the earth. If we had chosen the way of respect and careful integrated growth rather than the windigo wildness of the woods, we might have built a great civilization made up of cultural modules and all of the life forms. Instead we chose the way of war and the way of war will destroy us. From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Keith Hudson Sent: Monday, November 15, 2010 4:13 AM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, , EDUCATION Subject: [Futurework] The working world of tomorrow The human race, so far, has been through two almighty revolutions -- agriculture and industry. They both involved access to an entirely new form of solar energy, whether contemporary or fossilized. This is the only "free lunch" we have. Everything else has to be worked for. However, it must be said straight away that, although economists are prolific in reminding us that there are no free lunches, they themselves seldom think about energy per se. In their training, student economists never learn about the basic necessity of energy and that it permeates everything we do -- in peacetime or wartime, for goods production or the supply of services. Because energy, and its sister subject, thermodynamics, is taught to all student scientists as the very core of their various disciplines then, for the time being, the subject of economics will continue to dangle in the air, neither a science nor an arts subject. However, economists in, say, a couple of centuries' time, might well see energy in an entirely different light (solar!) because, by then, fossil fuel energy will be exorbitantly expensive and we will almost certainly be accessing the bulk of our basic energy in an entirely different way. It will be by the production of hydrogen. Unlike coal, oil or gas which brings up underground radioactivity and scatters it everywhere on the surface, damaging the DNA of life-forms, including ourselves, hydrogen will be the perfect non-polluting fuel. It will only be derived as part of the natural organic recycling processes which already takes place on the surface. The total amount of energy that will be able to be derived from solar power, via bacterial hydrogen, is prodigious -- at least several hundred times greater than all the energy that we presently produce from fossil fuels and other minor contributing technologies such as solar cells, wind power or nuclear power (which all have to be subsidized by governments for cost reasons -- and probably always will be). The commercial prospects are so enormous that, in America, Craig Venter's Institute and many other teams in academe and the US Department of Energy, as well as many other teams in England, Germany, China and Singapore are seeking a bacterium of minimal genetic size which will produce hydrogen as its main by-product (along with daughter-cells, of course!). A custom-made bacterium, fed with water, a few trace minerals and energized by sunlight would be able to make hydrogen all day long -- that is, all daylight day long! Because the commercial, as well as the humanistic, benefits of hydrogen are so fantastic then you can be sure that the search for the bacterium with the right blend of genes is already intensive. It isn't easy, however. Although there are many hundreds of different types of naturally occurring bacteria which already produce hydrogen for their own internal processes there are none as yet which, as it were, produce hydrogen free to air. One approach is to take an existing natural bacterium and trim its genes away one by one until all it can do is to produce hydrogen (and daughter cells from time to time!). The problem with this is that genes never act on their own but only in association with others. If an apparently unnecessary gene is trimmed away it might also stop another vital process. Another, entirely opposite, approach is to find a natural bacterium with the smallest number of genes and then to add new ones. But, once again, the addition of a new hydrogen-producing gene might also cause other gene associations which will do something quite different and will absorb all the energy received from the sun and crowd out the hydrogen production. Complex though the problem is, the hydrogen-seeking geneticists are aided by a major fact of evolution. All the genes in a hydrogen-producing bacterium are found in all other life-forms (together with many more genes, of course). Thus there are hundreds more teams of research biologists which are also researching the same genes, albeit incidentally and in different contexts. There is constant feedback between all researchers in genetics. A discovery of one particular gene made by a "hydrogen team" in a lab on side part of the world might supply a vital piece of knowledge required by a team researching a human cancer on the opposite side. As a layman who takes an interest in genetics I can't possibly give an informed opinion of when the first hydrogen-producing bacterium will be realized. But the general tenor of opinion among biologists is that it cannot be far away, despite the complexities that are involved. It might be anytime from now onwards. I would guess that it is highly likely to be achieved within 10 years and certainly within 50. Just like agriculture 10,000 years ago or industrialization 300 or so years ago the new biological era of energy will not come overnight, despite its overwhelming advantages. And, like the previous two eras, it will in due course probably bring about the most radical transformation in the way we work and live. My breakfast is calling me urgently so I won't attempt to try and discuss this further here. Suffice it to say, however, that because energy will be able to be produced anywhere on earth with a respectable amount of sunshine, then the new energy technology is likely, in my view, to cause a long-term dispersal of habitations and work places out of the concentrated urban settings we have today and towards smaller communities again. Keith
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