David L Babcock <[email protected]> wrote: Now the oil is no longer cheap and the whole structure built on it will > subside or even collapse, later or sooner. >
Not with cold fusion, obviously. That will accelerate the trend. People two centuries from now may be far wealthier than we are, just as we control unimaginably more energy, material goods and information than people did in 1800. There are no technical limitations that would prevent this. Only politics, stupidity and greed. As Henry Adams wrote in 1905: ". . . For this new creation, born since 1900, a historian asked no longer to be teacher or even friend; he asked only to be a pupil, and promised to be docile, for once, even though trodden under foot; for he could see that the new American -- the child of incalculable coal-power, chemical power, electric power, and radiating energy, as well as of new forces yet undetermined -- must be a sort of God compared with any former creation of nature. At the rate of progress since 1800, every American who lived into the year 2000 would know how to control unlimited power. He would think in complexities unimaginable to an earlier mind. He would deal with problems altogether beyond the range of earlier society. To him the nineteenth century would stand on the same plane with the fourth -- equally childlike -- and he would only wonder how both of them, knowing so little, and so weak in force, should have done so much. . . ." "The Education of Henry Adams" > Cold Fusion -I think it's real- will slow this down, probably reverse the > decline for awhile . . . > Why do you say "awhile"? Assuming it uses deuterium cold fusion will last longer than the sun. If it uses hydrogen, far longer. Once you have unlimited energy you can get any material goods and any elements you want in unlimited quantities, by recycling or by exploiting new sources in the solar system. Even if we are stuck on earth for the next few hundred years there is plenty of raw material in our landfills. Recycling with high energy techniques can recover anything. Once we escape from earth we can give every person a hundred times more material wealth than we now have, or a thousand times, or a million times. The limits are a matter of taste: we stop when ostentatious become boring. We might eventually capture all of the energy the sun produces. With a population of 6 billion that would give every individual roughly 4,000 times more energy than the entire human race now consumes. If the human race survives for a million years into the future, who is to say we will not be capable of harnessing the sun, mining Jupiter, or transmuting hydrogen into any element we want? . . . but the mindset that we learned on the way up (that all we find is > ours to exploit, without limit) will drive us back all the way down. > Because a *lot* of things are running out, not just oil. This is a > dilemma. The only possible answers involve changing human nature. Don't > hold your breath. > Human nature is highly malleable. There have been vastly different human cultures. Some cultures have changed practically overnight in response to outside influence or stress. The most striking example is Japan in 1868 and 1945. The limits of human nature are not known, but in any case, I am confident that our nature can adjust to any opportunity technology provides us. > Most of the radical new discoveries of the Industrial Revolution were the > results of cheap energy, made possible by cheap energy, and they indeed > came along "every few years", easy pickings. This does not argue for the > existence of an inevitable stream of discoveries (guaranteed by some > benevolent God?) that will continue the great upward march forever. > There is no guarantee of that! As Martin said: "“People do not want progress. It makes them uncomfortable. They don’t want it, and they shan’t have it.” He could be right. People can make things worse. Civilizations often degenerate. Arthur Clarke got it right in "Profiles" (1963): ". . . For terrestrial projects, it does not greatly matter whether or not the universe contains unknown and untapped energy sources. The heavy hydrogen in the seas can drive all our machines, heat all our cities, for as far ahead as we can imagine. If, as is perfectly possible, we are short of energy two generations from now, it will be through our own incompetence. We will be like Stone age men freezing to death on top of a coal bed. . . . This survey should be enough to indicate -- though not to prove -- that there need never be any permanent shortage of raw materials. Yet Sir George Darwin's prediction that ours would be a golden age compared with the aeons of poverty to follow, may well be perfectly correct. In this inconceivably enormous universe, we can never run out of energy or matter. But we can all too easily run out of brains." - Jed
