[Strummer]

If we started when Limits To Growth came out, we could've covered the Sahara with solar panels, converted the infrastructure to electricity and be done with it by now. Or deep ocean methane hydrate mining, or whatever. There are a million things we could do right now here on Earth that are a million times more effective, cheaper and easier than this space crap. Want to colonize Mars? Why not colonize all Earth's deserts first? It makes about the same sense.

[dinopello]

I'm an Engineer. We work in applied science. Note that I didn't even capitalize the word, because I don't worship science as do many here.

You did capitalize "Engineer" though. Do you worship yourself ?

[Tanada]

If we started when Limits To Growth came out, we could've covered the Sahara with solar panels, converted the infrastructure to electricity and be done with it by now. Or deep ocean methane hydrate mining, or whatever. There are a million things we could do right now here on Earth that are a million times more effective, cheaper and easier than this space crap. Want to colonize Mars? Why not colonize all Earth's deserts first? It makes about the same sense.

It is even worse than that. In terms of resources available even if we cooked the planet until the oceans were boiling away into vapor it would be easier to survive in balloon habitats floating high in Earths atmosphere than it would be to live on Mars. Don't get me wrong, I think we should be living in space stations and on the moon and on Mars and anywhere else our technology will let us. However in absolute terms of resource availability even a poison Earth is easier for us to survive on with modern technology than any other place we now know of.

[KaiserJeep]

Besides that, who knows what we might find in space. Does anybody remember what the space tug Nostromo was doing when it encountered a distress call (Alien (1979))?

Why, it was towing a huge automated refinery full of oil to Earth:

....en route, the refinery was processing the oil into fuels and petroleum feedstocks.

Just because we run out of native Earth petroleum doesn't mean we have to give up on fossil fuels. There might be hundreds of times more hydrocarbons in the form of comets in our own solar system than there are on Earth, for example.

We might have cheap gasoline for thousands of more years. Maybe the Earth could support 100 billion humans if we find enough dirt cheap forms of carbon to burn. Maybe the next oil boom will be when we mine the rings of Saturn, after discovering that brown color is petroleum....

And if those alien nasties get loose on Earth, why the place was getting overcrowded, anyways.....

.....so you turn the place into a hunting preserve. Always look for the upside!

[KaiserJeep]

I'm an Engineer. We work in applied science. Note that I didn't even capitalize the word, because I don't worship science as do many here.

You did capitalize "Engineer" though. Do you worship yourself ?

No, but I regularly disrespect "Scientists". Let me remind you of our primary problem. The planet is being trashed because MORE THAN SEVEN BILLION PEOPLE live in the space and resources that would support at most ONE BILLION in a sustainable fashion. It's all the fault of you who claim to be enlightened practitioners of Science.

Tell me, when you had your scholarly debate over the writings of Rev. Thomas R. Malthus, just two centuries ago, why it is none of you realized how serious the matter of "population overshoot" was? Why didn't you say something or make a plan that would have avoided the situation we are in? Because had we acted two centuries ago, we would have a steady state population today, with no worries about running out of oil, and no worries about climate change.

But you flaming Science boffins had to screw the world up, with your Chemistry, Medicine, Physics, Mechanized Agriculture, etc. etc. etc. Now there are more than seven billion humans on the Earth, and most of them will starve, shivering in the dark, when fossil fuels become too precious to burn.

Your proposed solution: Stop burning FF right now, before things get any worse. So you tell us how that will change anything? Because if you really and truly think that you can sell us a line such as "Better to starve now than starve later", you are even stupider than those you flippantly brand "deniers".

GET REAL. Go on having your useless conversations. Get on with the hand wringing, and the pious discussions of GHG's, as you drive around in your SUVs, swill imported beer, and munch on cheeses and fruits from the other side of the globe. As flagrant examples of hypocrisy on a global scale, there is nothing to match the AGW or Climate Change fanboys, especially those who call themselves "Scientists".

Because without intensive mechanical agriculture, genetically engineered crops, and fertilizers/pesticides/herbicides made from petroleum and natural gas, and fossil water pumped out of the ground with fossil energy, there isn't enough food. Literally three quarters of the humans on the Earth depend upon cheap and abundant fossil energy to live.

Because you Science boffins made it possible. Before you decided that maybe there was a serious problem with that many people. But don't think that the rest of us will overlook the fact that "Science" put us all on the path to DOOM DOOM DOOM.

If you want to understand why the rest of us won't listen to you now, that's the reason. You have zero credibility because you screwed up the planet. You were the best prepared group of people on the Earth too understand and avoid the mess we are in now, and you totally, completely, and irrevocably screwed the pooch, dooming us all to starvation, disease, war, suffering, and death.

That's the short version of why "Scientists" have zero credibility today.

So call me a "denier". Tell me I wasted my life making it possible for more people to have tech toys, online stores, electronic money, access to knowledge for free, and dirt cheap entertainment. Even though my work was central to the electronic marketplace and PO.com exists because the machines I created enabled the online advertising that pays for all the free Forums.

Understand that there is a probability that is so close to zero that I would have to express it with about ten zeros after the decimal point, that the rest of us will listen to your screeching about GHG's and Climate Change, and then act in ways that would effectively harm our families. But I invite all of you true Climate Change believers to show us the way, remove your "carbon footprints" from our planet, and thereby regain some of your lost credibility.

Not interested? I didn't think so. NONE of you are living a life free of the benefits of fossil fuels. All you are doing is shrieking increasingly shrill demands that the rest of us do so.

Scientists, and those who worship Science, the true killers of our planet. You can't handle the truth, can you?

[dinopello]

Well, KJ I'm a 40 something engineer (although mostly in management these days) without any children so I don't think you are talking to me. Lately, I've been more interested in people than technology so I'm thinking of a career transition except it would necessarily involve a deep cut in cash flow which is tough but actually might be a good thing long term.

How about you - are you also childless or are you adding to the population problem ?

[KaiserJeep]

No, I had one child who is now married, in her mid-30's and childless herself. I am at the end of a long career in electronics and computers. My Engineering degree was taken in 1977 after a short but interesting career as an Electronics Tech during the Vietnam War.

Nowadays I mentor and manage other Engineers, while I myself shuffle papers. I never make it in a lab anymore, I'm sustaining some of the equipment that I designed in prior years. My equipment sits quietly in secret air-conditioned rooms and counts money. If you buy/sell stocks and bonds, fly on an airplane, buy or sell online, use teller machines, cellphones, or mobile devices, or if you have ever read an online ad, then my work product has touched your life.

I'm looking at retirement, and trying to decide where. I have a few years because my wife is a CPA and a few years younger, she is not ready to give up the rat race. I need to sell my house in Silicon Valley and move elsewhere, where life is more relaxed.

[Quinny]

Come clean Gary - you are having a laugh with all this space crap aren't you?

[KaiserJeep]

Come clean Gary - you are having a laugh with all this space crap aren't you?

Nope. I'm not laughing and it's not crap. Like I said, I'm an advocate for the human race, and the human race now has 7+ Billion members. To get much bigger than that, we have to get off of one tiny planet, where all of us will one day perish:


I mean, there probably were some predator dinosaurs - raptors or whatever - that used intelligence to increase hunting efficiency. We know they hunted in packs which makes them at least as smart as canines, and possibly as smart as tool-using hominids in early hunter-gatherer groups. It did not matter one bit when that giant asteroid or comet cashed in all their chips, along with 90+% of all living species on the planet. The monument to their existence - or civilization if they made it that far - is that thin scorched layer we call the K-T boundary layer:


...that separates the Cretaceous fossils from the Tertiary fossils, the dinosaurs from the mammals.

Such impacts happen periodically, there is not much you can do until you conquer space and inhabit the Solar System. Then you either prevent it or re-populate the planet a few thousand years later, with plants and animals from your space habitats:


Meanwhile, there are endless raw materials, endless solar power, all the space you need, and most importantly: an expanding frontier and opportunities that will stimulate the Capitalist machine for tens of thousands of years, until our numbers are counted in Trillions, not Billions.

I'm so certain of this that I can laugh at any of you who don't share this - entirely optimistic - vision. The Earth is still viable today, but 7+ Billion humans are killing the planet with their mere presence. They are not going away, and in their struggle to live, this planet becomes a not-so-desirable neighborhood, possibly one that glows in the dark. Nuclear weapons are not the same as safe and clean nuclear power - and I'm betting that ISIS fanatics possess somewhere between a few dozen and a few hundred within a couple of decades.

Imagine a planet where every city except Mecca is dangerously radioactive. Ready to move to space yet?

[KaiserJeep]

KJ, you need to provide evidence 7 billion is truly the post-peak carrying capacity of earth. We are post-peak (<45 API crude-only), per capita fuel use has decreased world wide (since 1979). Yet all and all things are pretty nice. When will the dieoff actually begin?

I've been reading on this topic for decades, as I said before, I felt despair when the human population exceeded 3 Billion while I was a child. See the K-T boundary layer in my last post above? That band actually took 1000-3000 years to form, even though we think of the impact as a single event.

Now wrap your head around this concept: Human overpopulation is driving the other species on the planet to extinction faster than that giant meteor. WE HUMANS ARE CAUSING THE SIXTH AND THE FASTEST MASS EXTINCTION EVENT. Our human population overshoot, enabled by fossil fuels, is the natural disaster killing the planet.

The topic can be explored in detail from a variety of different directions. The one I favor would be:

How many humans can live on the globe in a sustainable fashion?

The answers I believe after thinking about this topic a lot are:

Lower bound is 125 Million people. This assumes current agrarian methods, and the appropriate lifestyle changes for all of us the world over.

Upper Bound is around 1 Billion people, assuming tech not presently available, but a logical extrapolation of what we do know.

The problem is of course that we presently number at least 7X the sustainable figure, and the species die-off is still accelerating.

To read more about this, start with these sites:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/population-and-sustainability/

https://www.populationinstitute.org/programs/gpso/gpsor/

http://www.malthusia.com/index.php

...then chart your own course from there, there is a huge amount of information on the Web.

As I have said before, the only problem we really have is the overshoot population. Peak everything is just the symptoms of that one huge problem.

[KaiserJeep]

Ringworld is Sci-Fi. The Fi stands for FICTION.



People don't actually live there. lol

Although I did enjoy those novels, I was never under any delusions about humans building a ringworld. Larry Niven's work spawned a years-long discussion and the math didn't work out, even if you accepted his assumptions about incredibly advanced materials like scrith (the basic ringworld building material) and the room temperature semiconductors that controlled the shadow squares and the star output.

It was a good read, though.

The O'Neill space cylinders are sound Physics that does not assume any tech we don't have. My third picture above is actually an early conceptual drawing for the type of ring-shaped space habitat seen in the 2013 Matt Damon movie Elysium. In case you are wondering, that space station would have to be a lot bigger than shown in the movie before the math works. Entertaining film, however.

[Keith_McClary]

That will buy us the time to spread throughout space in the next generation of Capitalist Splendor.

I'm an Engineer. We work in applied science. Note that I didn't even capitalize the word, because I don't worship science as do many here. In fact, it's fairly easy to establish that most of the scientists are wrong most of the time.

Nor do I worship an economic system or a deservedly obscure 19th century economist. In fact I don't worship anything I'm aware of, including the global ecology.

Do you work in the applying the science of the wrong scientists or the right scientists? How do you tell which are right? Do your Capitalist bosses tell you?

Maybe you meant Engineering Splendor, which you seem to worship.

[Quinny]

After some thought I think it's the Worlds Food needs!


http://zemonster.tripod.com/cheesy.html

[Withnail]

As another poster said, this is just a plot device of the sci fi film 'Moon'.

Nonsense and balderdash.

[KaiserJeep]

As another poster said, this is just a plot device of the sci fi film 'Moon'.

Nonsense and balderdash.

That's amusing, actually. I was the one that pointed that out. But the movie script was written 20+ years after the He-3 was discovered in the Apollo moon samples, and 10+ years after the micro-scale He-3/Dueterium laser fusion experiments were completed, and 5+ years after NASA formally proposed mining the Lunar surface for He-3.

Yet I would be willing to bet that half or more of the science fanboys here at PO.com have never heard of this entirely serious proposal. NASA has dozens of such proposals published every year.

Ever hear of the NASA proposal to provide nighttime city lighting from orbital mirrors reflecting sunlight onto the darkside of Earth? How about orbital powerplants that beam energy to Earth on microwave beams? (The Japanese have proposed a pilot-scale demonstration of that last in the IEEE publications.)

[Timo]

KJ, it doesn't happen very often her at PO, but on this one, i'm with you. I readily acknowledge that there are technologies that can sustain us in the here and now of 21st Century Planet Earth, but actually implementing those technologies on a world-wide scale will never, ever happen. Should we? Yes. Will we? Nope. Unfortunately, this means that the Earth's carrying capacity will continue to be compromised, meaning that mid-century, as we approach the 9 billion pop threshold, the Earth's ability to sustain us will be even less than it is today. Humans are not wired for collective survival. It's all about me, don't you know. As long as i survive, i couldn't care less about you.

Now, us humans do have some pretty good technologies that we are in the process of using, and that's very good. The more of those we can get into use, the better. But, our attempts at retrofitting our ways of life are pretty half-assed, meaning too little too late. The planet, and everything on it, does not have the luxury of time to spend while we finally figure out how to save ourselves. We do need these technologies, and full speed ahead in getting them put into use. But, we also need to expand our resources because #1, if we don't, we're screwed; and #2, as we humans look to the future, we'd be utterly stupid if we did not pursue and all of the above strategy for researching and developing sources of energy. Granted, humans are pretty stupid to begin with, on a generalized level, anyway, but there are some absolutely brilliant examples of scientists (and enginners, no caps) among us (i'm not one!) who we we do collectively look to to help us figure things out. To rule out using the moon's He3 for r&d on a future fuel for mankind is thinking very small. Not pursuing all means available is collective suicide. Your grandchildren, and your great grandchildren will die, in part because of your refusal to project and act for their needs. He3 may not be the answer that solves all of our energy problems, but those answers that we may one day discover will be built on that r&d that we develop today.