James Bowery <jabow...@gmail.com> wrote: Physical reality provides, to first order, a 2 dimensional biosphere of > limited surface area. The 3 dimensional solar system provides a first > order unlimited "pie" but to second order, even it is limited. > > Given the actual behavior of governments and corporations within the > biosphere . . . >
We do not need to depend on the biosphere. We can -- and should -- grow all of our food and extract all of our water outside of the natural biosphere. Food should all be grown indoors under carefully controlled conditions without any need for pesticide, and without wasting any water. Water should all be recycled or extracted from ocean water. This is what Arthur Clarke advocated in his books and essays, and this is when I described in my book. I estimated that we could grow all of the food in North America in land area roughly equivalent to greater New York City, using today's technology. As I've pointed out here before, the Netherlands is now the second largest agricultural exporter in the world, after the US, even though they have very little land. Everyone interested in the future must read Clarke's masterpiece, "Profiles of the Future." No other book comes close to it, even now, 51 years after it was published. As for pollution, it is best defined as "misplaced resources." We should reduce it by a factor of 1000 and later 1 million. There are in fact modern factories that produce a few kilograms of pollution per day where in the past similar factories produced tons. Regarding limitations, Clarke wrote: ". . . 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." He goes on to discuss mining resources from other planets, asteroids and the sun. Yes, the sun. That man had vision. He concludes: "The seas of this planet contain 100,000,000,000,000,000 tons of hydrogen and 20,000,000,000,000 tons of deuterium. Soon we will learn to use these simplest of all atoms to yield unlimited power. Later—perhaps very much later—we will take the next step, and pile our nuclear building blocks on top of each other to create any element we please. When that day comes, the fact that gold, for example, might turn out to be slightly cheaper than lead will be of no particular importance. 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
