Will Anything Reduce Global Birth Rates and Carbon Emissions Except Fossil Fuel Shortages?

Today the news proclaimed that agreements were made at the G-8 summit in Italy to hold global warming to a maximum of 2 degrees Centrigrade.  It was a very positive step to see that the United States has finally joined most of the rest the world in making a commitment to fighting climate change.  Will people really be able to do this, though?  And aren’t population and energy use just as important if not moreso?

Can a Video Screen Be Painted on Using Nanotechnology?

Combining the ideas of wi-fi, nanotechnology, microtechnology, and optics could produce a video screen that can be painted on a surface in layers that will then self-assemble into operating, light-producing video screens.  Perhaps each pixel could be a tiny nanobot incorporating one or more colors of LED that it can turn on and off.  Energy can be derived from a gel or circulating liquid bath (with the added advantage of cooling the nanobots).  The controls to make each nanobot turn its light sources on and off can be implemented through data-encoded near infrared light so as to be invisible.  Such a light might provide an energy source to the pixelbots as well.  Could a modulated light source transmit enough data to address each nanobot individually  and pass control information quickly enough for the whole screen assembly to produce real-time video?

The “Glide Path” to Sustainability will Raise Recycling to a Large Scale Art

As population declines in the latter half of the 21st century new construction will be cut to a minimum, and renovation and recycling of existing buildings will dominate the construction industry.  Few new buildings will be needed as populstion decreases, growth will no longer be the predominant economic theme, and decreasing tax bases will reduce public funding. People may move out of some neighborhoods and towns and collect in others, probably to live closer to places of employment, education, etc., and reduce their cost of living.  Will smart individuals start working today to build profitable businesses that take advantage of the changes in our future?

I Hate Lawns

Yes, it’s true. I hate lawns. I didn’t always hate them, though I never particularly liked cutting and maintaining them. (It helped when I was a child and was paid to cut them.)

Is Humanity a Blight on the Face of an Otherwise Beautiful Planet?

To answer this question one must step back, perhaps a long way, from the human-centered concepts we’ve been taught all our lives. Certainly it is natural for any species to experience a runaway population when it achieves some level of ascendency in its environment. But we have evolved to a level where we can see and understand that, as well as what we are doing to the rest of the species on the planet, from microbes to other top predators. Are we smart enough to change our ways, curb our birthrate, preserve what is left of our natural world, and achieve (eventually) a sustainable long term situation that lets us live good lives while sustaining the ability of the other species on whom we symbiotically depend to live good lives as well? Only time will tell, but these ideas deserves both thought and action from each of us.

As always, I welcome your comments. – Tim

Will Complicated Economic Cycles Recur and Worsen as Population Explodes?

There are lessons in the current worldwide economic decline as to how the global situation will interact with the population explosion in the coming decades. This recession appears to have been set up and triggered by a range of economic and political factors. A short but fierce spike in oil prices on top of a real estate price bubble combined with an regulatory trend going back decades that not only allowed banks to take on far too much risk, but also promoted a business culture in which debt became the lifeblood of businesses around the world.  Why did businesses take on so much risk?  The short term-focused profit motive, instead of good long term planning, seems to be a root cause.

The Shark Cage is Rusty – How Capitalism and Government Might Change for the Better

Corporations, by their nature, are focused on profits. Unfortunately, this causes them to sub-optimize the overall results for society. This is one of the shortcomings of the current capitalist system. Corporations, in their soulless drive for profits, will take your last dollar if they can, and will influence governments and drive them away from their original purpose, to ensure the common good and the positive evolution of society in ways that reflect the principle that, as they say in business school, “a rising tide lifts all boats.”  I found an interesting and pointed expression of this last year.

A Huge Waste of Internet Resources (and Our Time)

Looking for articles on global warming, and especially for evidence of skepticism, I was surprised to find one of my titles in a list at a site called World News Network and a link beneath the title that appears to attribute the article to the “The Examiner”. Clicking on the title link took me to another World News Network page with no more information than the first – just a snippet of the first paragraph of my entry, and a title link accompanied again by the same apparent attribution, “The Examiner”. Clicking the title link there took me to a page on a website called Examiner.com, again giving little more than the title of my entry. Clicking on the title link there actually does take one to my blog entry. That’s a total of three clicks and a lot of advertising data to get to my own article. It is noteworthy that the World News Network link shows up as the first in a google search, as I have to wonder if someone is paying Google some pretty good money for their page to show up there.

The Dark Planets Conjecture

Why haven’t we detected any evidence of alien intelligences yet? The wallpaper on one of my computers is the composite picture NASA published in 2000 of the entire earth at night. The amount of light visible from space is at once beautiful and intriguing, and it makes me wonder how much energy we waste by unintentionally beaming it into space, whether it is light, infrared radiation (heat), or radio waves. Looking back through human history, it is clear that, as a species, we used comparatively little of our planet’s resources before the industrial revolution, and I suspect the view from space back then showed very little human-made light, if any. Then I contemplate the probability that, in the absence of any great new energy-producing technology (fusion?), we will run down our available fossil fuel sources over the coming decades, driving the price up to the point where fewer and fewer people and organizations can afford to use and waste energy as we do today. In another century or two we may be conserving energy to such an extent that we will have to stop our light, heat, and radio waves from dissipating into space, and the planet may return to the way it appeared before the industrial revolution. This brings up some interesting questions about our universe.

The Lights of the City Aren’t the Same to Me Any More

As a young man I sometimes drove to a high spot in town after dark, a park from which you could look out over the city, and parked my car to enjoy the twinkling of the city lights spread out before me.  It was a beautiful sight, and I could only marvel at what humanity had created.  I’ve learned a lot and thought a lot since then, however, and it all looks different to me now, or least, it provokes different thoughts and perceptions. 

Is Denying Global Warming Worth the Risk?

While many accept the proclamations by scientists that global warming is a very real risk, there are many, including some scientists, who deny the possibility for an assortment of reasons.  Some of their arguments are quite persuasive, while others are just reactionary conspiracy theories, wacky talk radio lies and spin.  As I read new studies coming out every year, I have to wonder if denying global warming based on some irrational hatred of Al Gore or NASA climate scientist Jim Hansen makes sense.  Associated press ran a pair of articles today that I found particularly interesting (link) (link).   When I think of the consequences of being wrong about global warming, I have to think we should plan accordingly.  While I may be being taken in, I am hedging my bets in the long run.  I will certainly keep my senses alert to further research and continue to learn as much as I can.  I encourage anyone reading this to do the same.

As always, your comments are welcome.  It is only through our thoughtful collaboration that we can mitigate the enormous risks we are facing from overpopulation, resulting climate change and pollution, and the efforts of the greedy, ignorant, and misled.  May we all enjoy an increasingly sustainable, tolerant, healthy, and happy world in the future.  We will have to work for it.

Future Cost Increases for Fossil Fuels Will Change Architecture

My new job puts me in a large windowless warehouse-like building, much of which has been turned into office space, cube farms with offices embedded in the walls nearby.  At any given time nobody inside knows if it is raining or if the sun is shining, if it’s day or night.  As in most commercial buildings, the lights and ventilation fans run almost all the time, which seems costly.  One nearby building has a small wind turbine on it that runs a lot of the time, however, and another I see near work has a solar panel on the roof.   All that has made me consider what the buildings of thirty years from now will be like.  Certainly they will be quite different, and I expect the inevitable rise in the cost of fossil fuels, and all energy sources “in sympathy”, to be an important influence on their architecture.  So what will commercial buildings be like in the future?

We Are Nanotechnology

All life is composed of nanotechnology. From the original molecular structures that developed the ability to replicate themselves a billion or more years ago to the most sophisticated life forms, we all have resulted from an evolutionary process that started with, and uses at every level, nanotechnology concepts.  Life started at nano-scale, and a huge majority of all life forms, the greatest bio-diversity, still exists at nano-scale.

“The Bomb” is Here, But It’s the Population Bomb

My childhood fears of nuclear war have come to pass, but not the way I expected. When I was a kid I had a great fear of nuclear war.  At school we drilled, hiding under our desks, in case Russian missiles with nuclear warheads should wreak terrible, radioactive firestorms on us.  One winter night around the age of 6 I woke up from a dream and looked out the window to see the sky glowing yellow – I was immediately convinced that either a nuclear attack was creating the incredible light in the sky, or that the nearby Fermi nuclear power plant had blown up, and in either case the radiation would soon get us.  As it turned out, it was just a full moon illuminating a light snowfall, but I will never forget the terror of those moments.  These days, with nuclear war seeming to be a much more remote possibility, I don’t even think about it.  The other night, however, I noticed the sky glowing orange most of the way around the horizon, and realized that, if I didn’t know it was street lights illuminating the falling snow, I would have thought a nuclear war had broken out.  The lights were like those of an explosion frozen in time.  Then I realized that this IS an explosion – a population explosion.  This extremely long, slow-motion explosion started over a century ago and the echoes won’t die out for decades, or maybe centuries, to come.  Unfortunately this explosion has consequences potentially more devastating than even a global nuclear war.  So what are we doing about it?  How can we mitigate the effects of this very-slow, long term explosion on ourselves and our descendants?

Will Human Overpopulation Eventually Cause Lemming-like Mass Migrations?

Animal populations migrate to find food or better living conditions, often in huge numbers, when populations become too large for available resources. For the caribou, whales, birds, and other creatures an annual migration is part of their ritual of survival, but some other species, such as lemmings, only migrate when under pressure. Humans have managed to remain more sedentary as we invented shelter, clothing, and technology to keep us comfortable and well fed. How will this change when the cheap energy we use to sustain our food production and comfort becomes too expensive for most people? Will we see larger and larger “migrations” from the poorest and most overpopulated countries to the most developed?  Have the migrations already begun?