On Fri, Jul 20, 2012 at 5:51 PM, MarkI-ZeroPoint <[email protected]>wrote:
When you consider all the political and economic power-centers in the > world, and the alliances or lack thereof, and the dire financial > circumstances all over the planet, trying to make any predictions with that > level of uncertainty/complexity is foolish. Anyone who thinks they can > provide a reasonable estimate as to how this revolution will unfold is > deluded… > LENR is a black swan. Assuming it can be commercialized, we have only the vaguest sense of what it portends. I like the sober tone of some of the recent posts. Eventually one imagines that the sheer ability to move stuff around that LENR offers will bring a higher standard of living to within reach of a lot of people. But the prognosis for the short or medium term is less clear. I imagine it would be pretty easy to think up some fairly dystopian scenarios, although I haven't tried. Note that the modern world has gone through several other very disruptive transitions, which can give a sense of what might be expected. We've lived through the industrial revolution, for example, and more recently we've seen the development and wide-scale use of the Internet. Both of these developments have had profound effects on human society. And the scale of either probably was or is lost on us from day to day. I first started really using the Internet in 1994. After about five years, I completely took it for granted. Now I see how Twitter and Facebook are enabling people to organize in new ways and are having a destabilizing effect, but the novelty of the Internet as a technology has long worn off. Eric
