Is there so much data now on the internet that it’s actually becoming harder to find the information you seek? As scientific research continues, the quantity of information (“data glut”) on the internet expands.  Quality of information is another issue.  Will it become increasingly harder to identify and reach the cutting edge in a given field? If the pace of scientific innovation and the accumulation and integration of knowledge continues to accelerate, as Ray Kurzweil suggests, will it reach a point where groups developing different or similar technologies will become incapable of keeping up with each others’ innovations? Will the research efforts of human society become less efficient, with more duplication of efforts, as we go forward? Is this already occurring?

Back in the days of paper-only publication the information flow was held to a manageable pace, and there was less information to manage. As books and journals proliferated over the past few centuries, and given their relatively slow delivery time compared to the internet, the difficulty of keeping up only gradually increased. Since the advent of electronic communications, and especially the internet, not only has the accessibility of information improved, but the total quantity has increased exponentially. Add to that the increased specialization in the sciences and an increase in the number of research programs, and the total information available has exploded. Are widely separate but similar lines of research developing so rapidly as to create a chaotic state in which researchers in a given field fail to connect with a significant number of their peers, resulting in redundant developments? Or has specialization allowed researchers to focus more tightly on the work that parallels their own so that a relatively coherent “cutting edge” persists in the majority of fields?

The internet has created a tradeoff between increased information availability and data overload. When I worked in the development of high speed image processing computers in the early 1980’s, at a time when the internet was nowhere near as useful as it is today, it seems we were no better off, but perhaps no worse off than today. We were unable then also to see a lot of the results of research funded by governments and corporations, and, in addition, had to put up with publication delays that don’t exist on the internet. At the same time, however, we weren’t overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of information as we are today. Our director was responsible for assessing competing organizations doing similar research, and came from an academic environment. Some of the team read related books and papers. As a young prototype builder I was focused on my work, and was not invited to participate in interactions with other organizations, but I did maintain the technical library for the engineers (99% paper, of course).

Today’s internet searches produce overwhelming quantities of results. If you search on any popular scientific topic, like “nanotechnology” (18.2 million finds on google on August 27th, 2008) or “supercomputer development in 2008″ (2.26 million finds on google on September 2nd, 2008), you get an overwhelming number of citations. No person or organization can review all of those finds in a short enough time to keep up with daily additions and developments, and, if Ray Kurzweil is correct, the rate of creation of new information will continue to grow. When language barriers, some governments’ restrictions on internet access, and the secrecy of a lot of the government-funded and corporate-sponsored research are thrown in, to name a few variables, it suggests there already may be considerable redundancy in scientific work worldwide. After all, good ideas often occur to multiple people around the same time in history. Perhaps redundancy doesn’t signify a particularly lower level of overall efficiency when there are so many people and organizations doing the work, and hopefully different groups are discovering different things, so redundant efforts are compensated for by sheer numbers.

Commercialization of search engines affects search results. Search engines have to make money to support the continually expanding demand for their services, enhance their tools, and provide new and higher capacity hardware. One way at least some of them have found to do this is to sell preferred ranking, thus allowing their results to be skewed towards commercial ventures and other interests willing to pay for enhanced visibility. While search engines are the best way to find out what new developments are occurring via the internet, this may make them less than perfect for the job. I wonder how often the information of highest value in an area being researched actually shows up in the first thousand citations.

Are personal contacts and conferences the most effective means of getting to the cutting edge? Personal networking, association with appropriately-selected universities and research labs, and attendance of appropriate conferences still work today, and may still be the best way of reaching the cutting edge in any field of study, but is it an illusion that the internet makes reaching the forefront of a topic easier? I contend that, via the internet, one can only approach currency in a topic, and not get all the way to the cutting edge.

Is the internet data glut severe enough to slow progress or decrease our scientific efficiency as a society? As the internet achieves huge increases in content (as evidenced by search engine results), it only becomes more difficult to find the knowledge we want. As a result, it is possible that research teams in any given field will have increasing trouble connecting with each other. Will the risk that organizations will be unaware of progress by others increase? Will increasing amounts of duplication occur? I wonder if we could see a slowing of scientific progress for the amount of resources being committed, increased blurring of the cutting edge, and a decrease in “scientific efficiency” across human society as a whole.

As always, I welcome your comments. – Tim

Interesting reading:

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn, 1964

Self-assembling materials may require new directions in materials development. One of the most amazing advancements in nanotechnology is the ability to engineer materials to self-assemble into new materials or add new attributes.  The ability of certain molecules to bond in planned ways with others and produce new materials is at the cutting edge of nanotechnology product development, and will probably remain there for some time to come.

One-by-one assembly of nano-scale devices is practically useless for most applications. The assembly of nano-scale devices on a one-by-one basis yields so few of the devices that it has little practical use except in research.  To make practical use of nanotechnology devices it is necessary to make them in enormous numbers and, so far, self-assembly seems the only option.  Inventing new materials with applications in self assembly could be one of the next big directions in science.

A key direction for advancement is in the mastery of self assembly at larger scales. While nanotechnology products are currently limited mostly to coatings and special materials, the promise of micro-scale and larger devices being produced by self assembly is great.  After all, every living thing is an instance of self assembly.  While we are a long way from creating life forms, this hints at amazing advances in functionality for the devices we will create.

New materials that can be used in self-assembly processes could gain major importance. Materials that previously had no useful application may turn out to have potential as catalysts of self assembly, or as supporting materials in self assembly processes.  Devices larger than nano scale might be self-assembled in fluid suspensions, and the fluids involved may be new to us, for example.  Chemistry and physics will be key disciplines in the pursuit of commercial viable self assembly processes, and the results will be exciting.

As always, I welcome your comments.  – Tim

Interesting Information:
Self Assembly and Nanotechnology,  George M. Whitesides, Department of Chemistry, Harvard University

Economic recessions create bursts of economic and cultural change. Did the buggy and coach business just fade away?  Or did those companies die most quickly in the Panic of 1907-1908 and the Post-WWI Recession, only to be replaced by rapidly expanding businesses involved with motor vehicles, and a rising economic tide to lift them?  What new inventions attained increasingly levels of acceptance and use as people struggled for every advantage to dig themselves out of the recessionary problems of the Great Depression?  Were businesses developing lighter construction materials, alternative energy systems, and fuel conservation technologies some of the positive outcomes of the Oil Crisis and recession of 1973-1975?

Why is an economic recession a good time to start a new company? Economic recession, when many companies contract and spill out employees onto the street, is the perfect time for the emergence of new economic paradigms.  The old companies don’t recover, or survive in greatly reduced size and importance, while some of those out-of-work people create new companies, developing new ideas for processes, products, and markets that didn’t exist before.  Some of those new ideas will become the mainstays of the economy in the future.  In this way, recession accelerates and enables change that was needed anyway.  In fact, it may be possible that part of the reason for a recession was the failure of existing paradigms and businesses to address changing economic conditions and technologies.

Starting a new company in a recession may seem like the hard way to go. After all, why would anyone buy a new product when they can’t afford to buy anything?.  Actually, a new product that provides value and cost savings that weren’t available before can be especially attractive during a recession, and may spawn an entirely new market.  It would be interesting to research the major inventions we use daily to see how many of them emerged or achieved big increases in popularity in conjunction with economic recessions.

There are other characteristics of recessions that favor new business startups. When unemployment is high, there are many good candidates not only ready to fill your company’s requirements on an immediate basis, but they are not expecting especially high pay, and are grateful to have a job.  If the recession is accompanied by a real estate value decline and/or a lot of commercial vacancy, space for your company can be had at a discount, thus keeping your costs low.  Suppliers in almost any industry will be hungry for business and willing to give discounts, especially for any long term agreement you might want to make with them.

Recession weakens the ability of established corporations to suppress competitors. During good times, corporations naturally take anti-competitive measures to prevent new companies and ideas from eating into their market shares and profits.  Large corporations buy up smaller competitors, sometimes to acquire new technologies, but sometimes just to hold off the adoption of newer and cheaper substitutes for their mainstream products.  When recession cuts their financial power, however, they have less ability to stifle competition, and smaller, more agile and creative companies can step in and provide us new products and services we otherwise might not have had for years more.

While recession may be tough, it presents a great opportunity for rapid progress. The conversion of the economy from one primary base to another, such as from horse-drawn buggy and wagon manufacturing to automobile and truck manufacturing, or from internet email to the World Wide Web, is enabled and helped along by recession.  Indeed, recession and shifts in economic activity, actual advancements in society, may be inextricably intertwined.  Recession may be a sign that times are changing more quickly, and may represent a more efficient way for an economy to advance.

Individuals can come out ahead by capitalizing on the more rapid changes brought about by recessions. During recessions I always find myself encouraging my friends and family to think ahead and aim their careers and investments at emerging technologies.  Recession, tough as it may be, is the ideal time to seek new education, especially if one is out of work, and new employment opportunities in new and growing industries.  In all of my careers, the most fun I had was when working for startup companies, though those assignments tended to be shorter than my jobs with big corporations.  I will always be looking for involvement with startup companies, both in employment and investment, as they are the future. The many and striking changes, along with the economic volatility and recessions, we can expect as population hits an unsustainable peak in the next fifty years, will provide some amazing opportunities.

Post note: A technology fund I invested in the Fall of 2008, as that particular recession was hitting hardest, doubled in the following 12 months.  Some smart fund managers obviously share my love of recessions as big opportunities for new business development and improved profits.

Interesting information:
History of U.S. Recessions,

Big corporations are like big sharks.  They’re not evil.  They’re just eating. I read this clever observation several years ago on CDBaby, and had the immediate realization that WE have to swim with those sharks, and our shark cage (government) just isn’t protecting us like it once did.  On this, the eve of release of Michael Moore’s new movie “Capitalism: A Love Story“, I just have to write about the impact of capitalism on our future, and how we might possibly avoid sliding into an almost feudal state where a tiny upper class of owners dominates a huge but painfully poor mass of wage slaves. 

An unregulated business environment is “dog eat dog”, and the individual has no chance against huge corporate “dogs”. The capitalistic assumption developed in the 19th century that corporations are on a par with individuals makes less and less sense in our era of global-sized corporations, when there are hundreds of corporations with more financial resources than all but a handful of the very largest countries.  Recent U.S. government bail-outs of giant banking and insurance firms brought the phrase “too big to fail” to prominence.  It is a failure of government to allow any privately held organization to become “too big to fail”, and the results have been disastrous for huge segments of the population.  In the future, our government representatives need to understand that, for the good of the global economy, “too big to fail” is the same as “too big to be privately held”, and regulations need to be crafted to prevent corporations from ever being able to assert this condition again.

The simple truth is that business entities are directed at only one goal: making money. In a capitalistic economy, where businesses are in direct competition with similar entities and short term thinking predominates, it is difficult if not impossible for them to consider long term social needs even though, in the end, those needs may define their long term survival.  In the highly competitive modern business environment, however, the need for short term profitability almost completely buries the need and resources for any long term planning, let alone actions.  Like an elected politician, businesses respond primarily to their stockholders/owners, and secondarily to members of their core markets and sometimes to members of market(s) targeted for expansion.  Those are the people responsible for company profits, and their continued business is critical to profitability.  As the population explodes, too, businesses may more successfully pursue the old fashioned model of extracting the most profit possible from each customer, without concern that they might not come back.   This is a short-term way of thinking that smarter businesses transcend, for as W. Edwards Deming taught us, repeat customers are the essence of lasting business success.

Naturally, business entities are narrowly focused on their own markets. Unfortunately, this sub-optimizes the benefit the business provides to society as a whole.    It is this sub-optimization of benefits, along with short term thinking, that creates the need for an over-arching body, a government, hopefully elected by the general public so its members have incentives to ensure the common good, which can regulate business in a way that mitigates the natural tendency to work in ways not benefiting society as a whole or harming it.  In my experience, every major economic upheaval has been preceded by lax regulation of at least one sector of the business economy, and economic interest has been detectable as a motivator of virtually every political upheaval (including wars) as well.  For this reason I see well-balanced, well-considered government regulation, applied by a democratic system, a prerequisite for a stable and sustainable economy, and a relatively stable and peaceful political situation in the future.

The core infrastructure of an economy must be regulated for the common good. The regulation of the energy and banking industries will be required to ensure anything approaching general prosperity and peace.  These economic infrastructures form the platform for the success of all other economic activities.  It is unfortunate that profit is the basic charter of corporations, and that only particularly savvy top management can impose additional strategy so that these organizations will behave with some social responsibility. Banks and other financial corporate entities can create huge crises in the unthinking pursuit of profits, and energy companies, destined for ever greater power unless and until steps are taken to favor more distributed “back yard” energy generation, will likely be more influential in our economic and political spheres over the next few decades.

Conflict of interest is the common factor that we all must be alert to, and work to eradicate. The conflicts of interest that come with the need for profit present problems that our governments will have to continue to address.  Ecological responsibility will increasingly become a theme of our lives, and corporations are not necessarily going to understand the value of social responsibility to their future profitability, so it must be pushed into laws and regulations, and that requires each of us take action.  Corporations, with their great financial and political power, will fight back, unfortunately, but each of us has a voice in a democratic system, and it is up to us to constantly use our voices, and to learn and work to more effectively be heard by government decision makers.  I urge everyone to use the internet to connect with those interests of greatest importance to you, and push for regulations that optimize the good of all instead of the profits of a few.

As always, I welcome your comments.

Things never change so much as they stay the same. That’s the saying, anyway, and I figure I’ll see how things balance out if I stick around long enough.  I expect that there will be surprises, and some advances people expect won’t happen, or will be disappointing, while other inventions will become mainstays of our civilization.  Inevitably, the deciding factor behind the decision to discard or keep something involves money, and I believe that will extend to our energy infrastructure.

Fundamental infrastructure tends to persist. For example, you may have heard the idea that modern roads and the width of railroad tracks derive from horse-drawn wagons, which were dimensioned to be just as wide as two horses pulling them.  Similarly, our current energy supplies such as gasoline, diesel fuel, and natural gas have proven to be extremely cheap to ship in bulk, and the systems of pipelines, storage facilities, and other infrastructure developed for them will likely persist, but could be adapted to new liquid bulk products, a category that could continue to be dominated by fuels .  There may be a few decades to research alternative energy sources before fossil fuel sources will become too short and expensive  to support the kind of use patterns we enjoy now, but an earlier need for liquid or gaseous forms of alternative energy would make the use of current infrastructure all the more imperative.

As energy becomes cheaper, more loss can be justified in its conversion. An exceptionally cheap form of energy, electricity from fusion reactions, for example, could justify storing the energy in other forms such as liquid hydrogen.  There would be a huge loss of efficiency in the conversion process, but the loss could be overcome by the low cost of the source.  Such a fuel could then use existing pipeline and storage infrastructure to reach the points of use.

Work is proceeding on alternative energy sources. While the United States is apparently not investing in fusion research, probably due to the inordinately strong influence of existing energy suppliers on the government, the Europeans are proceeding with a program that could produce extremely low cost electricity within 30 to 50 years.  While their technology aims to design huge and extremely expensive reactors that will produce large quantities of electricity, other simpler, smaller, and far cheaper concepts for fusion power are being worked on with a lot less publicity.  Hopefully fusion power in one of these forms will become a reality before the global economy is crippled by dwindling and ever more expensive fossil fuel supplies.

Other technologies for new sources of energy are possible. Tomorrow’s great ideas always seem crazy today, I have long said, or we’d already be using them.  Humans have amazing imagination, ingenuity, and energy, especially in the face of necessity, and it is hard to imagine what is to come.  My hope is that we’ll see our current energy per capita rate flatten and eventually fall, and then the global energy use, though the latter will probably not occur until the global population peaks and begins to decline.  I also hope that new energy sources will satisfy increasing proportions of our total needs, and that the curves will all cross in such a way as to minimize crises and general negative impacts on humanity and all life on the planet.

Chicken Little had an important job. While one’s first impulse might be to put down those who predict doom and gloom, it is those people who sound the early alarm that gets us moving in better directions as a civilization.  I would personally like to be able to look back, thirty years from now, and say that the doomsayers were wrong, but in reality it is the alarmists that get the rest of us motivated to mitigate our problems before they become catastrophically severe.  I consider what the “chicken little’s” say, and understand their place in the way civilization works and progresses.

We are not powerless, and it is our duty to life on the planet to learn and contribute what we can. One of the ways we can help is to make our wishes known to our elected representatives.  While powerful corporate entities are focused only on making money, and usually pay little heed to individual citizens, our elected officials have to have votes to keep their positions, and their staff members keep tallies of the opinions they hear from constituents.  Communicate with your representatives and ask for more research into alternative energies and conservation.  Ask them why no funds are being committed to fusion research, while Europe is pulling away from us in developing this promising technology.  Thank them for serving their constituents instead of big, wealthy corporations.  If enough of us take on this important responsibility we have a chance to speed our progress towards a sustainable future with a minimum of crises along the way.

As always, I welcome your comments.   – Tim

Will fear and media continue to combine as a powerful political tool? It has been very interesting to see how the use of fear resurfaces as a tool for political and economic manipulation through the media.  Media has become so pervasive in (invasive of) our lives in this era of ever-expanding technologies that it is interesting to speculate on how much farther it can go.  Cellphone-computers in our pockets and cars and the internet everywhere in most of our personal and work lives suggests that we won’t be moving away from the media, but rather closer to them.  This is a particular concern as ever more advanced marketing uses this media to manipulate us into buying, voting, or otherwise behaving as someone else wishes.

Media motivators are more powerful as they use more visceral, more gut-level hooks into our minds. Fear is handled at such a low level in the human mind-body system that it has amazing power to motivate and control.  This makes the use of fear by special interests (commercial or political) a serious concern.

Future technological developments will probably connect us more closely into the media. Back in the 1970’s, when I first began using the internet for email and then file sharing, I felt that a “terminal implant” would be desirable.  “Terminal” referred to the computer terminals we all used to access computers when mainframes the size of houses were the only computing facilities available.  I imagined that someday we would have an implant placed in the back of our necks, interfaced directly into our nervous systems, that would allow us to exchange messages, audio, and video by merely thinking about it.  Even then some science fiction authors conjectured on the possibility of mass mind control or a “hive-mind” being created among humanity, but the notion has remained in the realm of science fiction.  Now that I have seen more of what the media can do with fear, I am not so fond of the notion of the “terminal implant”.

People and corporations will inevitably maximize their use of what works. The use of fear will inevitably continue, as humans will always strive to get what they want even if it means having to manipulate others.  Some individuals will always fail to learn the principles of good behavior, or to have the logical skills to derive them, and will drive for power and influence out of their own insecurities and mental illness.  Such unscrupulous people will do whatever they can to control and manipulate others, and the media, augmented by ever-advancing technology, will give them increasing power to achieve their ends.

There’s no going back, and the challenge is in controlling our futures. I don’t plan to become a luddite and eschew technology altogether.  I’ve been far too addicted to it, for far too long.  I enjoy a lot of it and use it to stay in touch with the world as well as friends and family, and I use it to express myself through many different avenues and in many different ways.  It is a caution, however, that the media has such power for both good and evil, that so many people seem to understand so little about the power of the media and techn0logy, and how fear, among other forces, can be and is being used to manipulate us.  We all need to be very careful of taking what we read, hear, and see too seriously, and separating truth from fiction is difficult even for the most educated among us.

Parallels in the use of fear: Near the end of the 19th century there was much outcry about “yellow journalism”, the sensationalistic news coverage of major newspapers.  A huge flap about the sudden sinking of the U.S. battleship Maine in Havana harbor was used to incite public concern and outrage against Spain, who then held Cuba as a colony.  The Maine added fuel to a media firestorm that was eventually responsible for the Spanish-American war, even though, to this day, there is significant evidence to suggest that the Maine sank due to a boiler explosion and not an attack of some sort.  Even if the Maine was blown up by explosives or a torpedo, there is no evidence to prove that Spain was behind the act, and it might have been an act by American political interests, as far as anyone knows.  The use of fear by the U.S. media and political interests, however, was key.

Both wars based on false pretenses and the blockage of universal health care have occurred repeatedly. The creation of an all-inclusive public health care system was tried several times in the past century, but each time was put down by special interest groups who incited fear in the public via the media, publicizing statements that the Kaiser’s armies (or the Red Army in the post-WWII period) would soon be marching in the streets of the United States.  The same reprehensible tactics are being deployed against the people again today, at a time when our health care system (and especially our health insurance system) is in the worst condition we’ve seen in decades.

Media power has only increased since the advent of newspapers. As technology has developed, however, the media have become ever more pervasive in our lives, and now penetrate most people’s consciousness almost any time except when they are asleep.  Is this just a feature of human nature that will continue to repeat itself ad infinitum into the future?  I think so.   Our only protection is in acquiring knowledge and exercising critical thinking, and we need to promote these skills in our youth as well as in ourselves.

As always, I welcome your comments.

Interesting reading:

Bill Moyers’ Journal, July 31, 2009, including interview with Wendell Potter

Fossil fuel prices will rise. There’s no doubting that, in the absence of any other supply of cheap, high volume energy, fossil fuel supplies will decline, and prices will rise as population continues to explode.  It is interesting to examine who is most likely to feel the effects of the change, as I don’t think many people, at least in North America where I live, are thinking about it.  In the end, it appears that the middle classes in the most developed countries and in the temperate climates will feel the effects the most.

The simplest answer to the title question is … me. I am a middle class worker with a house, a car, and a job 25 miles away.  The wealthy will notice the change, but will be able to afford the higher prices for a time, so they won’t be affected too severely in their personal lives.  The middle classes, especially in North America, will be much more affected, as the long distances many commute to work will become increasingly expensive, and the cost of heating and cooling their homes will impact their overall quality of life.  The lower classes will also be unable to afford to travel as far for work as before, and transportation, heating and cooling will become increasingly larger proportions of their personal expenses as well.  When energy prices become sufficiently high people will be forced to move nearer to their work, causing significant shifts in property values and development patterns.  While this is all likely for the developed countries, the poorer countries will see a different scenario.

In the poorer countries the effects will be felt in a slowing of economic development as developing new industrial businesses will become increasingly expensive.   Where the lower economic classes are not using much fossil fuel yet, they will avoid the direct cost increases, and the middle classes that have been developing at an increasing rate in recent times will be more affected than the poor as they will have already acquired vehicles, jobs, and homes that need a lot more energy.  Where there is only a very small middle class, or where the middle class hasn’t risen to adopt the western model of high energy consumption living, the rise in fossil fuel prices will be felt in a decreased availability of foreign goods.  Basically, if you don’t have a car and live in an unheated hut in the tropics, the cost of fossil fuels will be felt only in the foreign goods you buy.

At first the negative effects of globalization will combine with those of increased fossil fuels, but then globalization will slow, stop, and possibly reverse. Just as with globalization, where the “leveling of the playing field” from the movement of low cost goods around the globe is felt most by workers in the most wealthy economies, the rise of fossil fuel costs will also most affect those working people because they are most dependent on mass quantities of energy in their daily lives.  While globalization has already lowered wages, taken away jobs, and decimated manufacturing industries, that trend will reverse after energy prices no longer justify mass importation of goods from “low cost countries”. Some manufacturing is already returning to North America, for instance, as even the small energy price rises of the past decade have decreased or eliminated the profitability of importing some goods.

The climate will play a part in determining who is most affected by fossil fuel price increases. The richest countries are mostly in the temperate zones of the globe, which drives a lot of energy consumption for heating, cooling, and infrastructure maintenance in the face of harsh winters.  As a result, the working classes in the developed countries will be  hit with a double whammy of decreasing wages and job availability (which is already in progress) at the same time that their costs rise due to fossil fuel price increases.  As prices rise and drive transportation costs higher, however, globalization will slow and then reverse.  Goods with low profit margins will no longer be able to show profits due to increasing shipping costs, and “lowest cost country” manufacturing plans will fall by the wayside, bringing lost manufacturing back to the developed countries.  The return will be slow and uneven, however, as fossil fuel prices inevitably rise in spurts with declines in between.  Short term economic troubles will be inevitable, but economies will adjust.

In the end, it will be the working classes of North America, currently the biggest energy users in the world, who will feel the pinch of rising fossil fuel prices the most. These are people who typically travel a greater distance to work than could be practically overcome with walking or cycling.  The public transport systems that would help to control their transportation costs are not designed to provide the capacities that will be needed.  In many cases mass transport systems are practically unavailable where the masses of people live.  This could result in a lot of middle and lower class people leaving the suburban and rural areas and moving to the cities to be near their work.  These are also people who have large homes that use a lot of energy for heating, cooling, lighting, cooking, entertainment systems, and water supply and removal, so they will inevitably suffer the most.

The cost of food produced using fossil fuel will be another factor changing the cost of living in the developed world, but with potentially more severe impact in the developing world. Another area where cost will rise is in the cost of food, most of which is raised with energy-intensive fertilizers, insecticides, and equipment, or which is shipped long distances, especially important in the temperate climates during the winter months.  Fortunately there is already a growing movement towards locally produced and organically or naturally grown foods in the developed countries, though it is in its infancy and still hindered by the widespread availability of cheap imported or energy intensive foods.   In the poorer countries that have been forced by an exploding population to depend on huge quantities of imported staples, the rise in both fuel and food costs could cause serious problems extending even to major shortages and resulting political and civil unrest.

In summary, it appears that the working classes in the developed countries, especially in temperate climates, will feel the pinch of rising fossil fuel costs the most.  The poorest in the world, interestingly, may feel the effects of rising fossil fuel energy costs the least except where they are already dependent on imported food.  The needed technological changes may be more expensive for the developed world, where existing infrastructure will need to be converted or replaced.  New, highly efficient technologies such as cellphones and solar and wind power systems are being installed in the poorest countries as their first implementation of modern technologies, while the more developed countries are finding themselves burdened with low efficiency, wasteful infrastructure and systems that will cost a great deal to change.

Personally, I am trying to conserve, but I have no clear path to reduce my energy consumption to the levels that will most likely be necessary in the coming decades, and cost is and will be an issue.  It is possible that in a few decades the affordable energy per capita for the middle classes will be perhaps a fifth or less of what we use today, and I will have great difficulty affording both transportation to my current job (25 miles away) and the heating and cooling of my home (averaging currently USD$200 per month or more).

What we need, today and going forward, is a great deal more funding applied to energy research, both in the production and conservation areas. Unless we can find ways to reduce our per capita energy use by up to 80% in the next few decades we will inevitably see some very hard times and a great decline in standard of living for those of us in the lower classes of the major developed countries.  To help reduce the decline we should each be contacting our elected representatives frequently to emphasize to them the importance of education, research into alternative energy sources, policies that enable both energy conservation and the adoption of alternative energy sources, and more effective regulations.

As always, I welcome your comments.  – Tim

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?

In North America, perhaps as much or more than anywhere else, it is hard to see evidence of any commitment by the general populace to take serious action to reduce carbon emissions.  Corporations, of course, are extremely unlikely to do anything to help until there is an increase in profit attached, and I personally don’t see where that will come from.  Individuals are buying hybrid vehicles in greater numbers than ever, and the clean diesels are becoming more popular as well, but manufacturers don’t seem to have made a lot more of these vehicles available, possibly in a marketing move to drive up prices.  Fortunately or unfortunately, gasoline prices are staying a good deal lower than at this time a year ago in 2008.  While there isn’t a mass movement in evidence, at least the more educated people are showing signs of increased consciousness.

In the past I wrote that scarcity- and cost-driven decreases in energy use would curb both carbon emissions and population growth in tandem.  My expectation was that since much of our food would be impossible to produce without a large investment of fossil fuels, rising prices of petroleum would inhibit food production and the poorest countries could see population-limiting famine.  I also thought that it would take a bit increase in fossil fuel prices to cut down on usage rates and, correspondingly, carbon emissions.  I have also questioned whether, as a species, we are intelligent or can become intelligent enough to limit our own numbers as well as our energy use and production of pollution before we do too much harm to ourselves.  We only have a couple of decades to make serious steps in turning around some very powerful current trends, but are we seeing glimmers of hope that this could possibly happen?

Separately, the most recent UN World Population Report suggests that birth rates will fall next in developing countries, leaving the bulk of the increases required to reach 9.5 billion people by 2050 to occur in the poorest countries, where birthrates will fall, but more slowly.  Though I have only read the highlights of the report (it is in multiple volumes) I am puzzled that I found no mention of the impact of declining fossil fuel supplies.  Without due consideration of the impact of increasing cost of these critical resources I am not sure a good picture of future population changes can be defined.

So, while there are some signs of hope in the UN projections, and some signs of increasing consciousness of the issues of population, energy over-consumption, and pollution (including carbon emissions and projected resulting global climate change), there are still few signs that corporate interests, who are the source of most of the pollution and the consumers of the bulk of energy resources, are even considering changing their behaviors.   In fact, since corporations really have no goal except to make money, and have powerful short term incentives to promote unregulated growth, it is hard to see the potential for any positive changes in their behavior in the foreseeable future.  Hopefully these mixed signs will continue to move in hopeful directions, and we will see the human species “wise up” sooner than later.

The fact that you are reading this suggests you are more a part of the solution than the problem, and we need a lot more people to reach this position.  You can certainly help in the move towards a sustainable world by not only taking personal steps in the direction of reduced energy use and birthrate reduction, but by contacting your government representatives and corporate contacts on a frequent basis and letting them know what you think their priorities should be if they want your support.  This is more and more easy to do as we improve our use of our electronic communication networks and the internet, and I encourage you to do whatever you can to ensure a sustainable future for us and our descendants.

As always, I welcome your comments.  – Tim

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?

Lets review some simple math.   Data throughput needed equals the number of pixelbots (number of cells in array = horizontal pixels X vertical rows) X number of colors (4) X refresh rate (30 Hz minimum). 1080 vertical lines X 1920 horizontal pixels X 4 colors (3 + brightness) X refresh rate (30 Hz) = 248,832,000 bytes of data per second.  I believe there are technologies available today that support such data rates and, if not, they will exist soon.

Addressing overhead depends on the size of the address.  If it’s just the pixel addresses, that’s 2,073,600 addresses, which would require almost 24 bits (3 bytes equivalent) to effectively address.  That adds 2,073,600 X 3 bytes of data per second, taking the total data rate required to 255052800 bytes/sec.  I believe there are technologies available today that support such data rates and, if not, they will exist soon.

256 Mb/sec is a lot of data to move in a second, but there are ways to compress or otherwise encode the data to reduce the amount.  Splitting up the task by using separate light data transmitters to address specific sections of the screen reduces the data to be transmitted.  If the screen is divided into 16 segments, for example, the data rate drops to 15,940,800 bytes per second.  Alternatively, multiple frequencies of light can be used for data transmission and control.

Pixelbots could potentiallly receive their instructions from any direction or angle, since it would be sent at non-visible wavelengths, while they beam light out the front of the panel.  If the addressing scheme and communication system are up to it, the data and control source might be elsewhere in the room, just in sight of the screen.

The result of these concepts might be the purchase of a big screen TV in the form of one or more buckets of paint and a small control box to hold any connectors needed for equipment that doesn’t have optical network capability.

New technologies are coming, and will be driven by our dreams, desires, and needs.  As always, I welcome your comments.

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?

Reclamation and recycling of existing buildings, especially in the big cities will become the bulk of construction business. When many structures fall into disuse, many will eventually become dangerous. Such buildings will have to be removed, but it is possible that rising material costs and decreasing labor costs due to the population boom will make it increasingly economical to disassemble and recycle the building materials. Demolition and large scale recycling of steel and other building materials could become big business, and parts of cities and towns may be “mined” for materials where it is m ost economical to do so.

Rises in fossil fuel costs will make transporting and processing a lot of raw materials prohibitively expensive. This will increase the economic viability of recycling.  Since building materials will be most needed in the population centers, it makes sense that materials reclaimed in or near those areas will be the cheapest to get and use.  The business of building portable equipment to help in processing of reclaimed construction materials may boom.

Inevitably, large urban areas built in the 20th and 21st centuries may be abandoned for lack of ability to do anything else with them.  Over a century or two the abandoned areas will decay into ruins, but the areas where population concentrates will remain vital.  The decrease in the distribution of populations will allow more efficient rail transportation to take a bigger role in interstate and international commerce.  There will be too little tax money to permit maintenance of many roads and highways, so only the roads serving the most populated areas will be maintained.  Public transportation may become much more prevalent as well, and there may be light rail lines that don’t exist today, built during the tail end of the population boom which the U.N. has said is expected to occur between now and 2050.

Is it possible to think ahead about what investments and businesses will do best over the coming decades? I believe it is not only possible, but a very good idea to think ahead to the long term.  A company that develops recycling and reclamation technologies that don’t require fossil fuels today may survive the next few decades reasonbly well only to see a huge boom in business when fossil fuel sources run down and population declines.  I hope there are people taking the long view and working on new technologies today that will become increasingly important over the next century.  The act of thinking and planning far ahead has great potential for creating industries that will retain growth potential even as the general economy is declining, and those who pursue such a course will ensure a better future for themselves, their descendants, and potentially everyone else.

As always, I welcome your comments.  – Tim