Disposing of the Disposable Society, Part 2 – the Supermarket

One of the major drivers of the trash we create, at great cost, is the things we buy from day to day.  I have marveled, once I started thinking about it, at how much of my groceries, for example, is packaged in individual, small plastic, glass, and paperboard containers.  Every time I toss another plastic bag or container I can’t help but ask myself “Is that another cup of oil going to the landfill?” or “How much electricity (and petroleum) did it take to make that paperboard?”  It also occurs to me that groceries pose an extra problem in the attempt to eliminate wasteful packaging, and that is sanitation.

Certainly adopting more hygienic practices in the production, distribution, and consumption of food items has been a cornerstone of our improved health and longevity.  It makes major news when some part of the system goes wrong, and there is a major e coli contamination of hamburger, for example, but less news when someone suffers from salmonella or any one of the other nasty microorganisms contracted through contaminated food.  Individual packaging of products helps us avoid this, but mostly provides increased convenience in the handling, sale, and storage of what we buy.  So, if we want to reduce packaging in our waste stream, how can we do it?

Will High-Tech Produce a Black Hole in Our History?

I have always written articles on subjects that interested me, observations I have made, etc.  I took a touch-typing class in 10th grade, and got my first typewriter, an Adler Satellite (electric!) when I went to college in 1969.  I started using computers in 1970, and that only made writing easier.  As time has progressed I have written almost constantly, storing my writings on whatever media was current, and that’s where the problem begins.

A couple of times recently I have searched for a series of humorous articles I wrote in the ’90’s, which were last seen on a floppy disk after they were “reaped” from the website (once only a bbs, www.grex.org) where I posted them.  Somewhere in my garage is a large box half-full of mostly 3.5″ floppies, but with some 5 1/4″ disks as well.  I also have several tapes from different mainframes and minicomputers I used in earlier years, containing lots of stuff I wished to save.  Now I am faced with the possibility that I’m already unable to get to much of that information, and my aging laptop will probably be my last chance to recover those articles from the 3.5″ floppy disk containing them.

This is a problem that prompts me to ask the question: how much of our history will we lose to our rapid technological progress?  In twenty years, will we be basically unable to retrieve a major part of our legacy information from the 1970’s forward?

Disposing of the Disposable Society (or at least its trappings)

As we learn how to conserve more, reduce waste, and move towards sustainability, we will need to figure out ways to escape our wasteful “disposable society”.  We can’t keep sending so many pounds of waste per person to the landfills.  It seems amusing that people have built ski resorts around mountains of trash, and the highest point in Florida has been said to be a 150 foot high trash mountain, but the amusement only masks the seriousness of the problem.

It’s the Population Explosion, Stupid!

Allow me to vent a bit of my frustration about a critically important issue which is almost completely absent from popular debate these days: the population explosion.   While it can easily be seen to be at least a key factor at the root of our pollution, climate change, resource shortage, economic, and even political problems, I’ve heard not one political candidate, and not one news report, refer to it, and at some levels I wonder why, while at others I think I understand.  Is it such a troublesome topic that nobody has the guts to touch it?

Immigration

The immigration situation in the US is getting a lot of attention, with more heat than light applied.  While the US already has over 11 million illegal immigrants, a fact which makes ideas about deporting them all patently ridiculous, the number will continue to increase until economic and political situations improve enough in other parts of the world to decrease people’s desire to come t0 the US.  This will happen, inevitably and eventually, until globalization levels the economies of most countries.  In the meantime, much needs to be done to change the popular understanding of the problem and combat the flood of misinformation most US media continues to spew.  And I have a few more thoughts …

More Nano-Thoughts and Nano-Links

Here’s an interesting physicsworld article from 2004 — “Visions of self-replicating nanomachines that could devour the Earth in a “grey goo” are probably wide of the mark …”  link.  The article also points out that, due to physical realities like brownian motion and surface effects (friction or adhesion, for instance), “We should also stop worrying about grey goo, because it is going to be very hard to produce more highly optimized nano-scale organisms than nature has already achieved. “  The author points out that, since nature has optimized so many biological organisms at nano-scale, faster progress in nanotech development may be made in that realm, as opposed to the purely electromechanical.

The Institute for Molecular Manufacturing site at http://www.imm.org/ is also interesting, as is the related Nano-Medicine site at http://www.nanomedicine.com/, which links to a number of scholarly books and other on-line information.

More good info and a flood of links appears to be associated with http://nanularity.com/default.aspx, which I found through http://nanotech.physorg.com/.  There is lots of information there.

I didn’t intend this blog to be only about nanotechnology, so future entries may be on other aspects of the possible future.  Keep thinking, people, and creating — we’ll need a lot more of that in the future.

Nanobot Communications, Power Sources, and Nanotechnology War

In my “Dream of the Future” post I mentioned nanotechnology wars, and I have since decided to start work on this entry giving more ideas around nanotechnology and military implementations as they might work or appear.  Recent developments have been increasingly interesting.

A Dream of the Future

After a lifetime of thinking about the future, often with depressing and disastrous scenarios involved, I awoke from a dream of a brighter future this morning, and felt it was a good starting point for my first blog on the future.  I will do more focused study on this topic in the future, and do more reading of similar blogs as I find them (I have always read books and articles, and been involved in discussions with the smartest people I know, about what the future may hold given what we know today).

Here is the dream, as I recorded it in my planner/journal:  ————————–

Wise me up, please!

I thank WordPress.com for the opportunity to create and publish this blog.

I realize I am far from an expert, but I’m not dumb or without education, and I do have a very good imagination.  These, combined with a lifetime following (and working in) technology related business, and of thinking hard about the past and future of our planet and the life forms on it, gives me reason to blog about the future here.

I welcome your comments – please be professional – and additional information.  I have no expectation this will be a popular blog, by any stretch of the imagination, but it gives me a place to collect my own ideas about the future as well as those of others.

If you choose to add positively to the discussion (so it’s not just me and myself), thank you.