We see life through moments rather than eons, leaving us unschooled if we do not possess an information storage system. Capitalizing on assets has led us to great heights in material civilization as the product of our amazing information and retrieval systems, the spectacular economic setups that enable the creation of architecture and distribution systems that will sustain an ever growing population….so what is wrong about this picture? It is that we have unprecedented control over our physical environment in a short term as we approach the end of the mining era and the beginning of the recycling era that will ensure the survivability of some portion of the population in this finite world.
Our current technology does not save us from being beholden to the same forces that have ruled last populations through potentially deadly climatic and resource availability changes. Our mining has exacerbated a climate shift towards the warmer in many areas of the world, such that permafrost is melting and the Antarctic is calving icebergs at a high rate as compared to other times. Listen that this climate change is not uniform throughout the Earth. We do have the ability to lessen our influence on the climate voluntarily or will eventually be forced to disengage this behavior when petroleum mining lacks success.
Let us hope the new energy technology will be less obtrusive to our environment by not poisoning us as well as continuing to bestow the wonderful benefits of cheap energy. It has been thus far easier to discover new mines than to reuse, but that has already been changing since the 1960s when scrapyards became respectable. The market for scrap steel is lucrative for somebody and cornering the market might make more money than the metal items produced. Saving on raw materials is the wave of the future and will be required when the population reaches saturation in terms of numbers related to the use of raw materials and produced food resources. It comes a time when impoverishment is related to the number of humans per unit of sustainability or societal adjustments will occur where a few control resources for the many while skimming a good living off the top for themselves.
A new source for energy must be developed or our civilization I hold in such high regard will perish. We cannot continue to see life in moments. We must do long term planning and immediate research. Government and private money must fund research and must not neglect researching social issues related to overpopulation and resource waste patterns and the avenues to the goal of less consumption per individual as the number of individuals rises.
So harvest with solar rolling threshers and plant with solar plows and utilize more hand labor, reversing a trend of fewer hands for more work begun in the machine age drawing to a close if alternative energy sources or locations are not successful. How cheap could items be made in free fall? Why should delivery be instant, instead drifting in a long spiron to Earth during a weeks long trip in a collapsible container that can be reorbited and reused? Just think of the raw materials, intense solar and plenty silica to build housing and hydroponics to feed the teeming Earth. How about small atomic power plants for launchers and personal transportation?
Why not fund research into atomic energy? Why not work together to achieve science and free fall business and an international city on the moon? Why all these wars instead of cooperation for the good of all? Remember Nero fiddling while Rome burned? Are we that foolish?
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