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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One. Down here on planet Earth, we are running out. Space. Energy. Food. Materials. Money. Patience. Purpose. Creativity. Challenges. You name it, the supply is dwindling.

One planet is too little room.

I hate listening to people who think space exploration is a waste of time and money. The people who think that investing in space vehicles, exploration and colonization is a waste are smoking crack. It’s all there is! It’s not the wrong choice–it’s the only choice. If I could fool myself, like these activist idiots, that human nature could ever be satisfied with what it had, I’d be happy to put all my energy into seeing to the needs of of people here and now, into creative solutions, into doing more with less. You name it. Because, ironically, I can be satisfied. I’m a socialist and a minimalist anti-materialist. Things–objects, possessions–annoy me. I like ideas. Knowledge. But only good ideas. Only true knowledge. No fairy tale delusions posing as good ideas. No wishes posing as truth.

Societies, like all things organic, do either of two things: grow or die. There is nowhere else to grow down here. Earth is full. Past full. Overloaded. If we keep on this course–wasting what little is left on toys and lawn furniture, watching TV, trusting the market to solve our problems–we are screwed five ways from Sunday.

I don’t think it’s going to come to that. We will figure it out. By which I mean, someone in charge will figure it out and make it happen. The question is only how long we sit around with our thumbs up our collective asses worrying about interest rates and unemployment statistics, research polls and retirement plans.

There is no future here. Not worth having. We have no frontiers. We have no challenges. Social justice is not on the agenda. People are greedy and selfish. The only way to get them to stop stealing from each other is to point out to them a bigger, shinier thing that they can covet.

If we don’t get in gear, pretty soon people will have to resort to eating each other. Figuratively, of course.

Two. What else is there?

Exactly what do you have to hope for in your life? And who are you? Maybe you’re satisfied with a few short steps up the ladder. Or maybe you like it just where you are. There are six and a half billion people on this planet. Do you think that they’re satisfied with where they are? I mean, people have needs, and much more than just material. More than social, too. They need to feel purpose, and for some, that means more than just making a living. They might not know it. Although, from what I hear, they do know it. People are listless. Depressed. Detached. And these are people in the “developed” world. The “rich” countries.

Some people will tell you that these people need God. Lies. They need God like they need mercury poisoning. Like they need a dose of methadone. Like they need a pat on the back and a hole in the head.

People need a challenge! They need a purpose. A direction. A reason. A goal. If they can’t find a challenge in their environment, they will, mostly, look for it in competing with other people. They’ll gamble. In casinos or on the stock market. Or they’ll find pointless games to play and meaningless risks to take. They will, in short, waste their lives for lack of a sense of where their horizons are. Because, since the Earth is a sphere, and has few secrets left, every horizon leads right back to where you started.

The only other direction to go now is…

UP.

Why can’t you idiots admit it? By which I mean, you smart people.

This is the responsibility of the smart. Smart people have given the rest of humanity fire, the wheel, moveable type, air conditioning, electric toothbrushes and the Internet. Probably a tenth of one percent of human beings are responsible for the ideas, the science and the technology that drives the world forward. The rest just get their paycheque, spend it on stuff, and eat it up. I’m just talking in terms of the economics, here. Their appetite just keeps growing. Every day they want more, but every day, we get closer to running out.

And when it finally dawns of Joe Average, when he gets laid off from his job bolting tires on Priuses or digging turnips out of some exhausted field, he’s going to look at all the stupid crap we wasted our time on, and he’s going to blame the smart idiots who invented all of it and ignored everything important. What does Joe Average know? He knows what’s in front of him. He’s got his everyday wisdom. It’s not his place to figure it all out. It’s the smart people who are letting us down. Who only know just enough to make their Googles and their Enrons and their Mortgage Trusts.

Well, you smug bastards, eventually you’re going to wake up and realize what a bunch of idiots you’ve been, when you have to face all of time you’ve been wasting, and it will be too late… for you, and Joe, and everyone else who’s going to get screwed.

Time is running out. And knowing we got the kerning just right on the signs that point to Hell is not going to make it OK when we get there.

World Energy and Population, that is. By Paul Chefurka.

What intrigues me about energy use per capita, as with most economic analyses, is the apparently necessary assumption that we buy things with “money”, and that “money” is somehow a real good with intrinsic value. But, of course, it is not. Any currency can be devalued at any time, if the economic entity (country) which underwrites its value becomes drastically less capable of honouring the original evaluation of its currency. So how does a country underwrite its currency? Through its ability to convert raw materials into useful stuff that keeps people alive, secure and happy.

Discussions of energy treat various energy “sources” as though they are goods. To a certain extent they are, however their value is dependent on industrial capacity to extract energy from these sources and convert it to some form of work, typically in the form of machines. Before the industrial revolution, the only ways to procure energy from an energy source were a) to eat it (or feed it to a work animal), and, b) to burn it. To this day, most non-renewable energy sources provide their energy by combustion. Hydro-electric dams and other sources are exceptions. Even eating is akin burning, in that it is ultimately a chemical reaction.

The kind of complex work human beings do in advanced industrialized countries is to find new and novel ways to combine raw materials, including structural and fuel materials, into useful tools and goods like buildings, clothing, cars, books, computers and such. We work with our hands and our minds to do this work.

Money, then, does not represent the goods which we produce, but the capacity to produce them. Money, therefore, is just a means to represent energy, including the energy needed to train people in the knowledge of how to run complex industrial and information economies. That is, the energy is the money, or at least part of it: energy is currency, in its natural form. So if you don’t have energy, you can’t buy it—in fact, to talk of buying energy is in some sense ridiculous. As the saying goes, it takes energy to make energy.

Another interesting thing about energy, if you know any physics, is that it can’t be created nor destroyed, but only moved around. Generally, it is the dispersal of high concentrations of captured energy, such as the energy inherent in chemical bonds formed over aeons getting dispersed, ultimately, into heat and noise in engines, which is important, not the energy itself. That dispersal process, which is going on all the time, anyway, we merely harness in order to direct a portion of it in some useful direction, like turning wheels or stimulating electrons, instead of just rotting or breaking down in some other manner, like getting trapped in bogs or at the bottom of the sea. And the real trick is that the dispersal has to happen quickly, in the scale of seconds, instead of the usual days, months, years or what-have-you for most natural chemical processes.

What we’re really looking for, then is an idea for a new process that will allow us to do what happens naturally—the conversion of raw materials into interesting things like life forms and refrigerators through the capture and absorption of solar energy—and make it happen more quickly, by focussing it, either mechanically or chemically or biologically. But more importantly, we need to be able to capture more solar energy per unit time. The energy is there. It’s just not in a form that we can exploit easily. We know how, but we just aren’t making the investment, because it would mean sacrificing things like blockbuster movies, advertorials, pet toys, pornography, SUVs, iPods, and all the other useless junk we mistaken consider so important because it gives us a synthetic sense of our own importance. And we’re going to learn this the hard way in the next few decades; self-deception is only self-destructive in the long term.