How far off do you think the main event of 2001: A Space Odyssey will turn out to be? I don’t mean alien contact. That’s completely too random. I just mean a manned mission to Jupiter. Think of how little we’ve achieved out of the milestones depicted in that film. Moon base. Passenger travel to orbit. A space station with artificial gravity. To consider visiting Jupiter, we would have to first successfully visit Mars and the asteroid belt.

I think we’d also probably expect to have more robotic missions to the outer and inner planets, and perhaps permanent satellites around both Mars and Jupiter.
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Here is a video, in parts, which explains the massive implications of exponential growth. The kind which populations, and supposedly healthy economies, experience. It is an attempt by a college professor at University of Colorado (Boulder) to help people to acquire a better intuition for numbers like “7% growth per year”. The mathematics are very simple–it’s all in the charts, really. But what is most significant about this lecture is what it points out about the dangers inherent in not understanding the implications, and the alarming fact that almost no one in power does understand them (hence, the danger we will all face very soon). This is Malthusianism updated for the twenty-first century.

Please visit Arithmetic, Population and Energy | Integral Visioning. You have a responsibility to be informed. I found this link through KunstlerCast.com forums, a web discussion forum for Kunstler Cast, a weekly audio podcast about issues relating to suburban sprawl and peak oil.

Not a new observation, but gaining traction, though most people are still resolutely ignoring the reality of it: Peak Oil. Also see Life after the oil crash for the most succinct and convincing arguments about the looming energy crisis.

In brief, oil is finite, in fact, it’s running out. However, the world’s appetite for it is still growing—exponentially. The oil wells aren’t literally drying out, but their are emptying. The less they have in them, the harder it is to get it out. No major new oil finds have happened in decades, and the smaller finds are more expensive to tap.

Alternative energy sources combined can probably only provide between 10 and 25 per cent of the energy we currently derive from oil, but most of them will not even work for transportation, which is the leading consumer of energy. Even if we could convert our infrastructure and manufacturing and transportation to other forms of energy, there will still be other shortages: plastics and fertilizer, which come from petroleum, and minerals and metals used in alternative energy technology, and, finally, land. Many alternative technologies (wind, solar, bio-fuels) are land-use intensive. And then there’s coal.

Some people believe that the oil production peak has already happened. Others that it is as close as three years or as far as twenty-five. But it’s within your lifetime, probably, and your children’s, definitely. The world’s standard of living is going to drop (if you use contemporary industrial lifestyle as your measure of standard of living).

Personally, the great, sad realization is not the loss of refrigerators, the Internet, cheap holidays or the like, but the certain end of space exploration and the relegation of the human race to stagnation and decline on this single lump of rock to which we cling precariously. Knowledge and discovery will slow and finally stop, and we will enter a new “dark” age. The window hasn’t completely closed, but it’s closing fast. Only the most outrageous science fiction ideas can possibly save us: self-replicating robots loosed into the solar system that can assemble factories and equipment from the asteroid belt, slowly, and return raw materials back to earth orbit, coupled with draconian measures of resource conservation and a complete restructuring of the human economy: replacing our current free market, growth-based system with one that is static and heavily planned and controlled.

Personally, I’m happy to go back to reading books, limited rail travel, buying locally: in effect, a return to the eighteenth century, technologically speaking, for the bulk of daily life and work. It would be better than another world war being fought over oil and the freedom to waste it on Karaoke and Dodge Vipers.

Addendum: The one beacon of hope that I’ve found goes by a number of names, and is in fact a very old idea: concentrated solar power (CSP). Here is an article at The Oil Drum. Another nice thing about CSP is that it can counteract the greenhouse effect by capturing solar energy that would otherwise be absorbed by the ground and then radiate as infrared (heat), which is what is principally absorbed by the CO2 in the atmosphere. It could also possibly offset the loss of reflectivity due to melting polar ice (though there’s still the problem of the polar oceans absorbing heat directly).

However, the economy shake-up cannot be avoided by CSP alone; even if CSP could satisfy our energy hunger, it can’t give us the fuel we depend on for transportation, which gobbles up 70% of oil production. You can’t fly jets with batteries! If CSP can be utilized to produce hydrogen, we may be able to use that as a portable fuel, but there are still concerns, such as volatility and evaporation. Possibly we can forgo most jet travel and switch to dirigibles (blimps) and electric trains.

Yes, the world is going to change dramatically, but it will only turn out good if we actually make the decisions and follow up with effort. Don’t just wait for the scientists, corporations and governments to solve the problems that YOU helped to create. Demand that your governments fund alternative technology and plan for the long term, not just the next election. Make the next election depend upon the long term.

According to a Globe and Mail story:

New polls show that a larger share of Americans - 53 per cent - believe in evolution than do Ontario residents, only 51 per cent of whom believe that “human beings evolved from less advanced life forms over millions of years.”

Over all, 59 per cent of Canadians said they believe in evolution, according to the Angus Reid poll of 1,088 adults conducted June 12-13. Twenty-two per cent agreed that “God created human beings in their present form within the last 10,000 years,” and 19 per cent told pollsters they weren’t sure.

Even those who say they believe in evolution may be confused about what that means exactly. The poll found 42 per cent of Canadians agree that dinosaurs and humans co-existed on earth - but evolutionary theory says non-avian dinosaurs died out about 60 million years before humans evolved in their current form.

And we used to push our cars around with our feet, too.

This is really basic stuff. Do people simply hate to know anything? Do they despise learning? I almost blame the sheep less than I do their opportunistic and expediency-dependent shepherds. Is it human nature to simply believe everything you’re told? Are people so naive, so hopelessly illogical, so desperate that they’ll trust anyone who gives them a smile? Is the average person simply incapable of basic reasoning? Or does he simply not care? Satisfy his appetites, make him feel safe and secure with a job and a warm place to live; who could ask for more? Isn’t humble, honest living enough?

It would be, if it were remotely honest. In actual fact, it’s a numbers game. People gamble that their world will be reliable, dependable and safe for long enough for them to reproduce and see their progeny meet or exceed their own material comfort level. Never mind that such docility and passiveness leaves the unscrupulous the freedom to plan their wars and conquests, using the rest of us as disposable appliances of productivity. Repent and educate yourself. Stop whoring yourself for false confidence and imaginary security. Consume and be consumed. You live and die by your ignorance.

The Church of Reality has this to say:

The Church of Reality is a religion based on the practice of Realism, believing in everything that is real. Our motto is, “If it’s real, we believe in it.” Since no one knows all of reality, the Church of Reality is really a religious commitment to the pursuit of reality the way it really is. We think about thinking. We wonder about wondering. We try to understand the understanding of understanding. We are Explorers not followers. The phrase “What is Real?” is our Sacred Question and the word “Reality” is our Sacred Message. We talk about reality, think about reality, and make reality more important in society.

I think that is excellent. Some more, from their Sacred Principles:

• The Principle of Positive Evolution
  

  Positive evolution isn’t just a belief that we are evolving forward. It is a personal commitment that realists make to ensure that we evolve forward. There is nothing that protects us from extinction except our effort to make sure the human race doesn’t do something stupid and destroy itself.

• The Principle of Curiosity
  

  The Principle of Exploration is the about actual exploration, curiosity is the desire to explore. It is the lust for knowledge. It is the need to know everything.

• The Principle of Honesty and Integrity
  

  Reality is about truth. It’s about being intellectually honest. It’s about putting your personal positions aside to accept what is real.

• The Principle of Scrutiny and Doubt
  

  The Church of Reality is a doubt based religion as opposed to a (blind) faith based religion. Realists are required to doubt everything and to continually test both old and new ideas to verify that they are still true. Blind faith is irresponsible and bypasses accountability. We doubt everything because we care about reality. By doubting we accept responsibility for preserving the integrity of the truth.

  There are two kinds of people in the world, those who don’t know and those who don’t know that they don’t know. Let us never become the latter.

Checked out Blamblog (I know I don’t keep up very much with anyone anymore … I’m possibly antisocial. He linked to some dude’s video on YouTube.

Whoever that atheist was, whatever point he was trying to make—something about “Atheists are people, too”—was lost on me. I was just appalled by his abuse of the word “believe”. It’s not atypical, unfortunately. Nor is it isolated in its clear ignorance of language and how to use it to communicate.

Have you never noticed that one of the first things that surfaces in any kind of debate is the underlying disagreement on the meanings of words? How many arguments descend quickly into a need to ensure coherent and compatible definitions? Only those had between intelligent people whose goal is to communicate ideas. What you find, however, is that most people trying to argue something are simply not interested in ideas, be they facts, interpretations, analyses or even their worthless opinions. They just want attention. The need for attention is the driver in so many cases.

I like some attention. But not too much. What I like is a good argument, whereby “good” I mean well thought out: clear, concise, well supported with factual information, and including honest admission of bias and subjective opinion where it exists and isn’t already obvious. And ultimately, with a point. All communication really ought to have a point.

The point of this communication is that I’m tired of people trying to get attention without earning it through hard work. Mr. Atheist is using a common device: be provocative (versus original) and incite-ful (versus insightful). To even begin to say anything truly meaningful, you have to start with a shared body of concepts. Those concepts are built, by and large, out of language. You cannot communicate if you do not speak the same language. The irony is that I’m not using “language” very clearly, since there seems not to be a good word for what I’m attempting to elucidate. Perhaps a better word is “dialect”. Then again, it’s not even about having a compatible meaning for the same words. It’s about one person using the same word consistently to mean the same thing, instead of numerous different, even contradictory things.

It’s a fact that most people are lazy, especially intellectually. They would rather say that they’re just not that smart, but most supposedly smart people distinguish themselves not by being gifted (though they may be), but by being disciplined and thorough. Intelligence is significant, but intelligence, like belief, means many different things, many of them, if not strictly contradictory, are what mathematicians would call “orthogonal”. They have nothing to do with one another (conceptually—it may be that the biological root of intelligence is shared amongst various different types of intelligence or intellectual ability). You can be exceptionally good at memorizing things and still extremely poor at logical argument, for example. Intelligence is generally much less important in most areas of thinking than honesty and conscientiousness.

But as to the word “belief”: what do people mean when they use it, or particularly the form “I believe in”? There are two major forms. One is the belief in something’s existence, despite lack of evidence or perhaps evidence to the contrary—”I believe in God,” or, “I believe in flying saucers.” At other times, they mean, “I think something has merit”—”I believe in capital punishment.”

They might also use “belief” when they mean “like”. “I believe in tolerance.” There’s a hint of the second form above (merit), but it’s usually subsumed by a general warm fuzziness. The subtle difference is that one thing might require some kind of argument, by social convention, usually because there’s wide disagreement. But the fuzzy stuff no one (aside from shit disturbers like me) will be likely to question. So it just kind of festers as a general indication of sympathy with some person, group, or attitude.

And that brings me to “I believe in love.” This is one of the most empty, pointless sentences a person can utter. Partly because the word “love” suffers from the same kind of abuse as “believe” and “intelligence”. “I believe in love” is one of countless such vacuous statements that one encounters every day if one is paying any kind of attention, but it is by far the most egregiously cloying and meaningless. Second, and closely related, might be “I love love”. That one reveals for all to see the abuse of the word “love” twice: “love” meaning once to “really, really like” something, and second, nothing much at all, except maybe “love other people have for me” where the recursive definition there might be “show that they like me”, usually by generosity or sympathy or something. Which means they are probably just stating the obvious, which is, “I like me, and, by association, people who like me.” And I’m a self-hating misanthropist. I believe it was lovely to meet you.

Overall, I’m pointing out a general tendency in English usage to deviate from specific meanings towards very general, even vague, meanings for words. Perhaps this is not a new thing, but I’m specifically hearing it from people who consider themselves generally “intelligent” and probably well educated. (Another example of this tendency is the technique of saying something twice in an effort to be more specific. The classic case is to say “car car” to differentiate from a truck, but it happens constantly, and in more and more cases, it does not, in fact, reduce the ambiguity of what is being said.)

All this notwithstanding, I am not simply making an argument for people to use a greater variety of words. Expanding your vocabulary is the worst thing you can do if you can’t even master the words that you already know. Compulsive vocabulary enhancers sound desperate as well as lazy. It just exaggerates the impression of ignorance by attempting to cover it up.

No, my only point here is: say what you mean, by which I mean, be specific in what you say, and if you can’t, then don’t speak, because it’s likely that you aren’t saying what you think you’re saying, and you may not be saying much of anything at all.

Actually, I do have a secondary point, which I will make explicit. If all you want is attention, find a more appropriate way to attract it. Tell a joke. Sing a song. Draw a picture. Dance. Don’t speak nonsense. It’s harmful to everyone because it increases the amount of noise, from which it becomes that much harder to find anything worth listening to. If you really have little or nothing to say (and expressing your opinions, let alone your completely uninteresting emotions and feelings, does not count), then do everyone a favour and shut up.

The Orion Nebula (including link to original image).