On Wed, Feb 13, 2008 at 04:51:29PM +0530, Deepa Mohan wrote: > Small wonder Janszen dismisses my challenge on his iTulip.com Web > site, claiming I have "no idea how the economy actually works." And > yet, since my days at Morgan Stanley, I've seen many other theories > that undercut this bizarre idea of a "perpetual bubble-blowing > machine" which is predicated on a weak assumption: That the planet has > an inexhaustible supply of oil and other natural resources.
This is based on the questionable assumption is that it's oil you want. You don't want oil (remember the first oil crisis -- the whale oil crisis?), you want to live comfortably. Atoms are not consumed (but diluted, and rearranged in new molecules) and all energy ultimatively comes from the stars, especially the Sun. These are good for gigayears of more. The solar constant is 1.3 kW/m^2. If you do the math, even for Earth surface, even for Earth surface covered with only houses, you'll notice we don't have an energy problem. We have an antenna problem. That is easily remedied with approaches like http://nanosolar.com (This doesn't mean we're safe already. We've been living on borrowed time since 1970s (arguably, since late 1800s), and if we continue to idly sit on our main asse(t)s we can easily cook our collective goose). When you have energy, you can enrich what was previously diluted. Of course, the smart idea to copy closed-loop material flows from biology. This, also, takes a lot of time, and can't be conjured at the drop of a hat at need. Our only problem is that we only move when we smell our singed fur. That is way too late. -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org";>leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
