Thoughts and Speculations

It's Now or Never.

Michael Byron — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 21:26:45 GMT

It’s Now or Never!

Remember those cartoons where Wile E. Coyote is chasing the Road Runner and he runs off of a cliff?

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wile_E._Coyote_and_Road_Runner

For a frozen moment he just hangs there in the air looking progressively more surprised and alarmed? Then gravity takes over and it’s down, down, down to a hard landing! I believe that this is a nearly perfect metaphor for the status of our civilization at this exact moment.

We have just experienced about 500 years of explosive growth. From Columbus “discovering” the New World in 1492, through the early colonial world empires, the world economy consistently expanded. It really picked up steam (so to say!) with the beginning of industrialization in the mid 1700’s. By the late 20^th century industrialization had spread across the planet. All of our civilization’s assumptions about reality: political, economic, social, even religious are now predicated upon this most unusual 500 year blip of time—compared to the long ages which preceded it and which are yet to come—being “normal.”

In other words, we’ve just bet absolutely EVERYTHING—our lives, our fortunes, those of our children and of all generations to come, along with the future existence of this planet as a life sustaining abode—on the assumption that since industrial civilization is “normal” we can assume that it will continue indefinitely. Unfortunately, I believe that this assumption is dead WRONG.

Economic expansion has gone on now for so long—about 500 years, that we assume that it MUST always continue. However, close scrutiny of the facts shows that the first 250 years of this period saw economic growth in the “core” European economies because superior technologies were used to subjugate the rest of the planet. The human and material resources of these lands were then plundered with reckless abandon by these Europeans—and their descendants.

Next, with the rise of industrialization concentrated sources of energy—coal first, then oil and other fossil fuels—were utilized to perform far vaster amounts of work than was possible using only human and animal muscle power which had provided an ultimate limiting factor for all previous civilizations. By the 20^th century not even the sky was the limit for our industrial civilization!

All of our present day belief systems—political—economic—social, etc. are based upon the unexamined assumption that this expansive reality we’ve experienced for the past 20 or so human generations, that it IS reality, and so will continue forever. Yet close scrutiny shows this growth to have been based upon first, exploitation of limited human and natural resources, and then based also upon exploitation of finite supplies of energy rich fuel. Only if this exploitation can continue at ever growing rates, utilizing ever growing quantities can this assumption be valid. Do you begin to see the problem here?

All of the money on the planet today is based upon debt. If you buy a house a bank lends you the money—that’s your mortgage. Where does the bank get this money? They create it, quite legally, out of nothing. Your promise to pay in the future is used to justify the creation of money in the present. Since this money must be paid back with interest, there is an assumption that there will exist more money in the future, than existed at the time the mortgage was created. In other words our money can only have value today, if and only if, there will be more money tomorrow than there is today. In other words, the economy must continuously expand if it is not to collapse precipitously. For 20 human generations this assumption has been valid. This is so long a period that we have conflated it with eternity.

Our planet is finite. As such, it possesses only so much in the way of material resources. Moreover, for the past 150 or so years, economic growth has been closely correlated with increasing energy consumption.

Nearly 40% of our planetary energy (well over 90% of our transportation fuel) comes from petroleum. Yet world petroleum production has plateaued since 2004—did you know that? Orthodox economic theory posits that as price (of oil in this case) goes up, supply is maintained, even increased, by entrepreneurial activity finding additional supplies. Yet supply has flatlined for about eight years even though price has been MUCH higher throughout this long period. As substitutes for oil have not been found, it follows that economic assumptions are being violated. In plain English: We’re in deep sh*t!

Source: http://www.countercurrents.org/mearns210911.htm

No amount of technology can intervene to stop oil production’s impending DECLINE. How can I assert this so unequivocally? Because in order to produce oil you must first find it. It takes decades for major oil fields to reach full production moreover. If we look at past oil discoveries, year by year, with respect to oil consumption we see this pattern:

Source: http://scienceblogs.com/casaubonsbook/2010/09/back_to_school_month_peak_ener.php

For every barrel of new oil discovered today, we burn about five barrels of previously discovered oil. If we spent six dollars a day while only earning one dollar per day, we’d go broke sooner, rather than later. It’s just the same with our planetary supply of oil. We are burning through it at a rapid, unsustainable level.

Further, with all of the easy to get oil having already been gotten (the stuff we are burning today), replacement oil is harder to obtain not only in price terms but more significantly, in energy terms. This leads to a concept called EROEI (Energy Returned on Energy Invested). For much of the past century it took, in energy terms about one barrel of oil, to produce one hundred barrels. Now, the stuff we’re getting from below the sea, Polar Regions, Canadian tar sands, etc., requires one barrel to produce about ten barrels. This ratio is declining. So the future is easy to spot: less oil, with less net energy. The graph just below projects where we are going in terms of oil production:

Source: http://www.paulchefurka.ca/Population.html

What about say, the Bakken Shale Deposits in North Dakota? These are getting a lot of hype just now. This stuff is low density kerogen. It’s uncooked oil precursor basically. Tens or hundreds of millions of years in the future, plate tectonics will subduct this stuff deep below the Earth’s surface. This will expose it to great quantities of heat and pressure, which will, ultimately convert it into oil—in a time as far in our future as the dinosaurs are in our past!

To make this conversion happen right away via artificial means, all you have to do is use immense amounts of today’s oil to extract it from the ground. Add further immensities of energy to refine it and process it, and yes, then you have something you can put in your gas tank. What do you think its EROEI is? Low single digits AT BEST. Also immense amounts of water had to be used in the process. This water becomes toxic sludge. What to do with it? What happens if, no when, it contaminates the local ground water supply? Cancer anyone? These oil shale “plays” are pure hype—one last bubble to reflate our bubble addicted economy.

Coal? In EROEI terms we are already at peak coal. Most of the best coal—anthracite—has already been mined and burned. We are substituting less energy rich grades such as lignite. Incidentally, these inferior grades are also much more polluting. Clean coal?? That is a PR campaign, it is not anything that does, or ever will, exist commercially.

Natural gas? Well, there’s “fracking.” Supposedly the “answer” to all of our energy needs.—BS! Commercially obtainable reserves are far less that the hyped figures. Further, well pressures generally fall dramatically within about 12 months making the well useless within a few years. So ever more land needs to be torn up, its water table polluted—over and over again. Also, the mining process generates vast amounts of CO2. Furthermore it CAUSES earthquakes!

The effect of all of this on Earth’s biosphere? Accelerating climate change. Last year was a world record for extreme weather across the planet. Three guesses what this year and each successive year will bring. The atmosphere is being knocked out of its long term “energy balance” as more solar heat remains trapped within it. What we call weather is just nature’s way of redistributing unequal concentrations of heat in accordance with the immutable Laws of Thermodynamics.

What about nuclear energy? Uranium is itself a finite resource. There is not enough of it to power the planet. And then there are certain safety issues—remember Fukishima?

Declining energy, accelerating climate change, accelerating economic collapse, that is our near term future. As climate shifts, agriculture, which is based on our exploitation of long term climatic stability, collapses. Oh, and we won’t have as much gas for the tractors either. Or natural gas to make fertilizer for our industrial scale farms. So agricultural production will decline—while population increases at 70 million people per year.

Less energy ultimately means lowered industrial production as well. In this context, “globalization” is best seen as a desperate attempt to maintain “growth” by means of labor arbitrage. That is, by exploiting substantial differences in wages between national work forces. Substituting a $1.00/hour worker in Shanghai for a $60.00/hour worker in Detroit may temporarily lower overhead, resulting in greater profits—but the cost is the “third worldization” of the USA. Technology is energy dependent, and energy is less available and more expensive, so we are seeing a profound shift away from using technology, and towards pre-industrial exploitation of manual labor. Good bye unions, weekends off, pensions, good bye middle class.

Looking at the USA, our politics is now wholly controlled by money. The Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in the Citizens United v. F.E.C. case effectively made us an oligarchy—rule by the rich. Consequentially, I have reluctantly concluded that there is no longer a meaningful difference between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party here. Both are funded and controlled by oligarchic elites. In the context of a political system in which money is EVERYTHING, neither party can afford to “bite the hand that feeds it.” In plainer terms both parties exist to maintain the current unsustainable status quo. PERIOD. No fundamental change will ever, nor can it ever, arise from the parties.

Now since our rich elite’s wealth comes from the existing political and economic system—our present, planet killing ways of generating wealth—it must follow that they are using their control over our political system to maintain our economic system—which gives them the wealth needed to be in control. So, even though our economy is about to implode as energy and climate constraints slow, then reverse, our five hundred yearlong growth spree, our elite masters, thinking only of the next quarterly statement, order our politicians—themselves thinking only of the next election—to continue with business as usual. And, from their amoral, short-term perspective, why not? The existing “slash and burn” economy has worked out pretty well for these rapacious plunderers in economic terms:

Source: http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2012-01-11/faustian-bargain-modern-economists-never-mention

If this situation continues very much longer I will tell you how it MUST end: In the not too distant future global civilization will collapse in flaming ruins. Billions of people will perish. The planetary biosphere will be devastated. All humans, living in all future ages will look back upon us with eternal contempt, dismay, disbelief, and yes, hatred, for our unbelievable folly, which bequeathed them a plundered, ruined world—unless we act NOW.

The graph just below depicts a projection for human population for the coming decades of this century assuming that we do not fundamentally change our ways. The graph just below that shows that due to our rapacious plundering of the planet in pursuit of short term wealth—nearly all of which will be in the possession of amoral, wealthy elites, by the way—not you or I, the Earth’s ability to support us will be much degraded from its pre-industrial carrying capacity. This ruined, toxic mess of a planet is what we are about to bequeath to posterity. They will NOT appreciate this, nor will they think kindly towards us—nor should they!

Source for above graph: http://www.paulchefurka.ca/Population.html

Source: http://www.paulchefurka.ca/Population.html

Forget the institutionalized political structures, the political parties, the politicians. They will not, they cannot do anything meaningful in the time available to change our planetary course. We OURSELVES must, each of us, act locally and decisively—NOW. Wherever possible, secede from their world killing system. Stop using their power, stop using their food, stop letting them control our very understanding of reality via their unending corporate media propaganda. Stop considering them to have legitimacy. They are the enemy of all life now and in all ages yet to come. WE, the people, are the SOLE and ONLY source of legitimacy. Revolution need not always be violent, but it must always be total if it is to succeed.

Do nothing, remain in a corporate media trance bubble, and billions will die. The planetary future will be diminished irrevocably. Do something, free yourself from slavery to our oligarchic overlords, and new worlds—better worlds—become possible. YOU must be the source of this change. Across the planet the people of Earth are stirring. At some deep, fundamental level, we know what is coming and many are beginning to take actions outside of the useless official channels to avert this hopeless future. Join in!

Dr. Michael P. Byron

Oceanside CA, January 11^th, 2012.

Book Review: A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilization and How to Save It. Written by Nafeez Ahmed.

Michael Byron — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 19:48:00 GMT

This is a VERY insightful book. Though not always an easy read, the effort will be well worth it.

Much of the book consists of a sequential assessment of six existential global crises facing humanity in this century. These crises are placed in a systematic, global context in which each crisis variable affects all of the others.

These crisis variables are: 1) climate change; 2) energy scarcity; 3) food insecurity; 4) economic instability; 5) international terrorism; 6) militarization of domestic and foreign policy in the US and other powerful nations. Variables 5 and 6 above are responses to items 1-4. Crises of climate, energy, food and the economy, lead to resistance (variable #5 above) on the part of exploited populations. This resistance leads, in turn, to repression (variable # 6). These crises, and their analysis from a systemic context, taken sequentially, comprise the initial six chapters of the book.

Two other variables are considered at shorter length. These are demography (population growth, location of population growth, effects of non-uniform population growth) and epidemiology particularly the emergence of new, virulent diseases.

Relating each of these variables into a coherent whole is accomplished by means of using a type of systems theoretical approach derived from neo-Marxism: World Systems Theory. The author’s development of this approach is his own and is not dogmatic. Readers might remember that while history has shown Marx’s ideas to be severely deficient with respect to organizing a society, it has also shown these ideas to represent arguably, the most prescient critique of capitalism as an organized political and economic system ever conceived. Further, an explicit neo-Marxist approach is not really even required to understand the essence of Dr. Ahmed’s argument. I would parse it as follows:

Our world political economy is organized along the lines of neo-liberal finance capitalism. This entails that corporate profit maximization is the fundamental organizing principle of our global political economy. All human and material variables are subject to the logic of this organizational system.

Accordingly, the physical world—both living and non-living equally, is simply an inexhaustible source of raw materials, while also serving as an infinite sink for dumping industrial wastes. Human beings, human nature itself are wholly material commodities. The maximum human “good” is therefore maximization of consumption.

The inner logic of neoliberal finance capitalism is thus the commodification of everything in the context of a market economy in which those who control wealth also exercise oligarchic control over the rules according to which the economy functions. The inescapable logic of profit maximization requires endless economic expansion. This expansion has been underway for centuries. However, it is now confronting absolute limits due to impending decline or exhaustion of material and energy resources, the carrying capacity of the Earth’s biosphere, and on the spiritual, economic, and material stresses which its animating system imposes upon humanity.

The hard wired logic of this system makes it a juggernaut leading humanity, at an ever accelerating pace, to its utter doom. Essentially the animating system of our world is utterly incompatible with reality over the long term. While it can produce benefits for some, for a period of time, it leads inexorably to global collapse over a longer term. That time is fast approaching.

Key insights are that all of the various crises facing humanity spring from a single cause. Piecemeal or ad hoc attempts to deal with one of more of these crises without addressing their fundamental cause are less than useless—they waste time and resources without any possibility of success. It then follows logically from this realization that truly effective change must involve replacing neoliberal finance capitalism as the organizing principle for humanity. Nothing less than this total change in our planetary political economy can produce meaningful results.

Armed with this understanding Dr. Ahmed analyzes the inner logic of this peculiar form of capitalism (it is by no means the only variant of capitalism possible) in very great detail in his seventh chapter entitled: “Diagnosis—Interrogating the Global Political Economy.”

I found this chapter to be brilliant. Up until this point, I had wondered whether the author would be able to make a fundamentally new contribution to this discussion. Many people, Mike Ruppert, John Michael Greer, Carolyn Baker, James Howard Kunstler, even myself, have already weighed in substantively concerning some or all of the topics discussed herein. I should note however, that any reader who is not well versed in these issue areas will find this portion of the book to be a fine introduction to them.

From my perspective at least, it is in this seventh chapter in which the author really adds new insights to the global crises conversation. This insightful chapter, while information rich, is written so that any reasonably intelligent, motivated reader can understand it.

I found it to be personally, very educational, as well as enlightening. By carefully unveiling the core nature of our animating system, it is possible to both understand why such a system cannot be ‘fixed” as well as to begin to grasp the outlines for the system which must replace it. I strongly recommend careful reading of this chapter. In fact, I recommend buying this book because of the chapter. Read it carefully and learn.

The final chapter in the book consists of suggestions for the “Post Carbon Revolution and the Renewal of Civilization.” Here, in addition to the usual ideas often offered: localized production of renewable energy, localization in general, subsidiarity (government decision-making at the lowest possible level), the author really focuses on specific ideas to make money work in favor of advancing sustainable civilization rather than destroying it as is presently the case.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. As to critiques of it, my main criticism is the apparent unfounded, or at least unsubstantiated, optimism of the author regarding humanity’s future prospects. On multiple occasions I suddenly found assertions such as this one: “By the mid-twenty-first century, as global crises and hydrocarbon energy scarcity erode the capacity of states to sustain industrial methods of ‘total war’, those states will find it increasingly difficult to maintain their monopoly of the means of military violence. While this implies a possible proliferation of so called ‘low intensity’ conflicts and even de-industrialized methods of warfare, it also suggests an eventual end to mass casualties from interstate war, and greater opportunities for communities to join together in transnational bonds of peace.” (P. 237). Further at the end of his 3^rd chapter “Food Insecurity” the author seems to imply that given some other organizing principle for the world political economy human populations of 9, 10, even 11 billion could be sustainable (see pages 105-106)! Throughout the book I found statements similar to this one: “By the mid-twenty-first century, as global crises render existing national and international political-economic structures increasingly irrelevant, such alternative structures will become more, rather than less, viable as part of an emerging post-carbon civilization.” (P. 256).

The common theme seems to be that the crises of global civilization weaken the repression exerted on human communities allowing them to develop alternative organizational methodologies locally. These local adaptions link up globally and fundamental change occurs. However, no clear and comprehensive supporting arguments as to why such fortuitous outcomes should occur are presented.

This said; this is an excellent, readable, well-written and well-researched book. Highly reccomended!

Obama versus Progressives

Michael Byron — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 19:26:00 GMT

Why has Obama’s Presidency proven to be such an utter disappointment to progressives? Given all of the vitriol hurled his way from regressives, such as Beck, Palin, Bachman, Faux News in general, why has Obama time and again chosen to lash out at progressives? He excoriated us for being “purists”, for example, during his December 7^th press conference. Why the anger? Indeed why the anger on both sides?

It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words. Well here are two “pictures”—graphs, actually:

Source: Executive Excess 2006, the 13th Annual CEO Compensation Survey from the Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy.

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/us-wealth-inequality-2010-7#and-income-tax-just-keeps-getting-lower-and-lower-for-the-rich-10

Taken together, these graphs tell a story of ever greater concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer hands. This miniscule group— mainly corporate CEO’s and Wall Street financiers—increasingly is accumulating wealth, not by producing it, but rather by means of exploiting opportunities created by the sequential dismantlement of the New Deal regulatory system.

This has been very much a bipartisan sellout of working class Americans. It began tenuously with Carter, accelerated dramatically under Reagan and G.H.W. Bush, and then accelerated still more under Clinton and G.W. Bush. Obama is merely continuing this process.

Often Democratic presidents have led the charge. Bill Clinton’s elimination of the Glass Steagal Act, on behalf of his paymasters at Goldman Sachs, for example, led directly to the recent global financial meltdown. However, the feeding frenzy which preceded it led to the immense enrichment of our parasitic ruling class. Then under G.W. Bush and Obama, we get bailouts for reckless Wall Street firms because they are “too big to fail.”

The big picture is a very simple one: rapidly increasing concentration of wealth in the US leads inexorably to the subordination of elected politicians to the interests of the plutocracy. Republicans went into political enslavement, for the most part willingly. Unions were progressively undermined—remember PATCO for example—beginning with Reagan. This undercut a critical element of the New Deal coalition. Democrats increasingly began to accept large contributions from large corporations and from Wall Street financiers. The golden rule of politics is simple “who has the gold makes the rules.” Now even a Democratic president, with a Democratic Congress including a 60 vote supermajority, was unable to pass “card check” legislation which would have offered some hope of reversing this trend.

Of course larger forces were operating as well. The end of the Cold War established market capitalism as the sole economic paradigm for the planet. This led to global managed trade under rules specifically negotiated to benefit powerful multinational corporations at the expense of workers and the planetary biosphere. This led to the universalization of the practice of labor arbitrage wherein massive wage differences between richer and poorer nations were amorally exploited to maximize financial return to the corporate stock owning class—primarily, the ruling corporate and financial elite.

The US was deindustrialized. Concomitantly, as high paying unionized manufacturing jobs were exported to the third world, the unionized sector of the US economy shrank precipitously and this vital pillar of support for governmental policies which truly seek to benefit all citizens—as opposed to only the elite few—eroded away. It collapsed during Bill Clinton’s presidency. From NAFTA to the WTO, through the repeal of Glass-Steagal, the Clinton administration eviscerated what remained of the New Deal coalition with respect to the Democratic Party actually representing the interests of organized labor in the American political system.

Obama is merely the inheritor, and willing continuer of this betrayal. For example, his health care legislation was designed from the outset to maximize the financial benefits of our existing predatory health care industry elites. Obama assured these folks that business as usual would prevail. And it did. Now for the first time Americans are required, under penalty of law to pay a “tax” directly to corporations. This is what the health care “mandate” amounts to.

More precisely, this mandated tax that we will pay to profit-making corporations amounts to the difference between the cost of a mandatory private policy and the cost of a government administered plan (the public option that Obama ensured was not made available to us): Consider the cost of a government run plan to be “X”; then the cost of a corresponding private plan is “X + Y” where “Y” is the profit overhead which Americans are now compelled by Obama and the Democrats, under penalty of law, to pay.

The Democrats’ massive 2010 Financial Services Reform Bill spans several thousand pages, yet carefully manages to not reinstate Glass-Steagal.

I could go on and on and on. However, the facts are clear: The Republican Party, the Democratic Party, President Obama, are all in thrall to our ever more powerful elite class. So for that matter is the US Supreme Court, as has just been documented in a study released recently by the Constitutional Accountability Center. Of course, anyone who is aware of the implications of the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Citizen’s United vs. F.E.C. case already knows this.

Taken together, the rapid concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer hands, the disintegration of organized labor as a core element of the Democratic party, the now near total capture of the electoral process and hence Congress and the Presidency, by these elites in conjunction with their indirect capture of the UC Supreme Court (corporatist Justices are put in office by previously bought politicians), these variables produce a positive feedback effect which leads to the transformation of the US into a pure oligarchy. We are no longer a Democracy. We were never a perfect democracy, however, now the last vestiges of popular rule have been extinguished.

Still, Obama has his appointed role, which is to channel the vast discontent which emerged in 2008 as a consequence of the financial crisis away from the elites who rule this country and towards a nebulous ”change” which somehow, never really amounts to real change. However, already Obama has fulfilled his initial mission. We have forgotten our rage against our rapacious financial elites—as was intended.

DADT repeal, START treaty approval, and similar legislation, while important, do not affect the plutocracy’s bottom line. As a result, otherwise corporate-enslaved politicians such as Obama are granted leeway on these issues by their masters, to fight them out on the basis of ideological, as opposed to economic, motivations. The political theater also preserves the illusion that the US actually is a popular democracy, rather than the total oligarchy that it has descended into being.

Now, thanks to Obama’s craven capitulation on an issue on which he campaigned, with tax cuts for the plutocrats firmly in place, along with low inheritance taxes, the political conversation can be steered into a “dialogue” as to how to pay for them. In other words, HOW MUCH will the government “have” to cut Social Security. HOW MUCH will the government “have” to gut Medicare. HOW MUCH will the government “have” to systematically undermine, impoverish, and disempower the once-dominant American middle class.

Indeed, Obama’s tax cut “compromise” contains a dagger aimed straight at the heart of Social Security. Social Security is a pay-as-you-go system. It has been solvent for decades. In the last two years, due to the effects of the Great Recession, it has required some slight drawing from the multi-trillion dollar Social Security Trust Fund. However, by reducing payroll taxes from 6.2% to 4.2%, Obama has now ensured that over the next two years Social Security will go many tens of billions into the red. Result: Just when the budget deficit becomes the most extremely out of balance due to the tax cut extension for the already rich, Social Security will require tens of billions of dollars in new government borrowing to redeem the equivalent amount of bonds from its trust fund. This will make Social Security appear to be a major component of the deficit and hence, something needing slashing.

Heck of a job, errand-boy-for-the-plutocracy-Obama!

We are being led into poverty and serfdom by amoral masters who possess no humanity, and aside from sociopathic ruthlessness, are surprisingly unintelligent. Obama knows that this is exactly where he is intentionally leading us, just as he knows that the last voices speaking out against his rapacious policies are those of the progressives.

Hence Obama’s rage—and ours.

Our Last Chance

Michael Byron — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 05:10:00 GMT

Conventional wisdom holds that the election of Barak Obama over John McCain two years ago has made no significant difference with respect to the trajectory of human civilization towards self-generated apocalyptic crisis. While this assessment may very well turn out to be correct, I believe that due to Obama’s election a final opportunity for a transcendent human future has emerged. I do not believe that Obama himself has any real understanding of this; however, this opportunity is quite real.

If John McCain had been elected, he would, without any doubt whatsoever, have continued his predecessors’ space policy: Politically driven development of costly, inefficient, unreliable space hardware. For Republicans, the space program is another form of corporate welfare. For Democrats, it is a massive jobs program. For neither has it ever been about actually pushing the technological envelope for developing efficient space technology as rapidly as possible. NASA has NEVER really been about space exploration with a view towards advancing the frontiers of human civilization.

It takes no more energy to launch a person into Earth orbit than it does to fly them from New York to Sydney Australia onboard a Boeing 747. Yet vast numbers of people are enduring TSA scans and gropes to fly across the planet while very few are flying upwards to Earth orbit. Why? The answer is simple: cost. It costs thousands of times more, per pound, to fly up than it does to fly horizontally across the planet. Why?

Here the answer is a bit more complicated. Air travel relies upon mature technologies which have approached the theoretical maxim limits of efficiency permitted by the laws of physics.

On the other hand, space travel is in its technological infancy. Existing launch systems are derived from the Nazi V-2 rocket that was designed not for efficiency, but for terror. The Saturn 5 rocket, which hurled the Apollo capsule to the moon, was built by Werner von Braun—chief designer of the V-2, the first ballistic missile. Mercury and Gemini astronauts rode their tiny capsules to orbit atop slightly modified ICBMs. These rockets were not developed with cost efficient space transportation goals in mind—they were developed to hurl thermonuclear warheads out of the sky upon the heads of the Soviets. The Soviet space program was itself the mirror image of ours, using big military rockets that were originally designed to rain terror down on us as well.

Even when a technological advance towards greater efficiency was attempted—such as was the case for the space shuttle program—it was a halfhearted effort due to the political constraints imposed on the program. The result, predictably, was an even more expensive piece of space transportation hardware, which was even less reliable than the ICBM derived rockets which it was intended to replace. This result was, from the perverse point of view of US space policy, good. Even more taxpayer dollars would be funneled to aerospace corporations and their subcontractors, while simultaneously, larger armies of public and private workers were required for each infrequent launch. Mission accomplished! Obviously, such a “space” program was not ever going to go anywhere. It was simply not designed to do so.

This is where Obama’s election has been decisive. Obama scrapped the old paradigm for NASA. The costly and ineffective Constellation program to build an Apollo-like successor to the space shuttle fleet has been eliminated in Congress. Instead NASA is providing subsidies to entrepreneurial startup firms such as SpaceX to develop much cheaper, more efficient, and cost-effective vehicles to transport NASA astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS). Using SpaceX’s Dragon space capsules and the already-flight-tested Falcon-9 rocket, these launches will begin in two to three years’ time. The initial orbital test of the complete system, including re-entry and soft landing of the capsule is set for December 2010. An unmanned version of this system will begin bringing cargo to the ISS in 2011. NASA will guarantee a base market to SpaceX and later to its entrepreneurial competitors.

Already, SpaceX’s launch costs for customers are down to only about 25 percent of those charged for equivalent services by the big aerospace corporations.

This however, is only the beginning. As most readers are only too well aware, vast amounts of wealth have been appropriated into too few hands. Inequality of wealth distribution is at levels not seen since the Middle Ages. Most of this wealth is being abused for fraudulent “financial masturbation” schemes, which appear to produce greater return on investment, rather than being utilized productively in the real-world economy where it is needed.

Enter the space industry.

Billionaire Robert Bigelow and his corporation, Bigelow Aerospace, plan to launch and assemble an orbiting space hotel in 2014 using SpaceX’s Falcon 9 heavy lift rocket. Bigelow has financed the development of large inflatable, pressurized Kevlar modules which can be joined together to create a space station of any desired size quickly. A prototype for these modules has already been built and flight tested in Earth orbit. Beginning in 2015, Bigelow will begin receiving paying passengers. This is just over FOUR years from now!

This development will jump start an explosive development of space tourism for the ultra-rich. While some may consider this to be the ultimate display of unproductive waste of monies stolen from the mass of humanity by corporatist predators, I assert that the opposite is true: Creation of an economically lucrative mass space tourism industry will accelerate the rapid development of more efficient and reliable space transportation hardware (these super-rich folks understandably don’t want to risk getting killed in their joyrides, after all).

Finally, the same virtuous circle of demand-driven technological improvement, that previously transformed heavier-than-air aircraft from dangerous, expensive toys, into a global industry, will come into play. Costs for traveling to orbit will drop dramatically. Reliability, efficiency, and safety will rise dramatically. All of this will occur in the next two decades.

In energy terms, once you are in Earth orbit, you are halfway to anywhere in the solar system. Realize that in space there exists a resource base greater than a thousand Earths could provide. Realize too that in space vast amounts of sunlight can be captured and beamed down to a power-hungry Earth via microwave beams. The one constraint which has made the use of these nearly limitless energy and material resource bases impossible has been the high cost of reaching space with the current expensive and unreliable technologies. Once this constraint is removed there shall be such an explosion of human civilization as exists only in the wildest dreams of wild-eyed cornucopians.

Consider that just as it is becoming possible to exploit these resources, energy and material resources on Earth will be peaking and going into terminal decline. At this same historical moment, human-caused environmental problems will be rapidly making life as usual on Earth impossible. The net effect will be to create a once-in-a-species-lifetime moment of profound existential crisis. At this very moment, the very corporatist forces which created the crisis will inadvertently generate its potential solution.

Planets are where civilizations must be born and nurtured. When they reach an industrial level of development, they must either transcend their planetary origins, or perish due to resource exhaustion and environmental catastrophe. If such a civilization perishes, it can never rise again due to the exhaustion of easily available sources of energy such as coal and oil.

Industrial civilization is a one-time affair. If it falls, it is gone forever. However, each such civilization has a very narrow window of opportunity to transcend its limits.

It could be that our species’ rapacious damage to its environment due to immaturity and selfish shortsightedness will doom civilization itself and confine all its survivors to this ravaged planet.

But by fundamentally altering the US space policy, President Obama, probably inadvertently, has opened a window of opportunity for humanity. The time it will remain open is short and the path through it is very narrow. But, as of right now, it is POSSIBLE that we shall transcend time and eternity. Our descendants may live in a vast universe of infinite possibilities.

Unrestrained Capitalism Can’t Solve Our Problems

Michael Byron — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 16:47:00 GMT

Conventional wisdom holds that the existential challenges of the new century will be met almost effortlessly, if only we simply stand back and let the “magic” of the market operate. For example, declining availability of petroleum will lead to higher prices, which creates enhanced incentives to explore for additional oil leading to greater supply. If this enhanced supply is not forthcoming, or is not available at a reasonable price, then the market finds a substitute for it—ethanol perhaps. Certainly given profit incentives, the “invisible hand” of the market will conjure up some kind of cheap “unobtanium” to substitute for petroleum. All that is needed is for government’s “heavy hand” to be deregulated out of the otherwise free market and presto, voila, we’re saved!

We, citizen-consumers need do nothing, except perhaps join the Tea Party to force government off the back of industry so that all of this can actually happen. Magic “power words”, all animated by Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” are ritually invoked to explain all of this: “incentive”, “substitutability”, “deregulation”. So relax, vote corporatist, and have another bag of chemical-laden cheese puffs. The future is in good, if invisible, hands—right?

Err….well…no. Actually the relatively near future will be unbelievably awful. It is a future of collapsing ecosystems, evaporating economies, and gyrating weather. Worse, the longer we remain lulled into a false sense of security, the more probable this terrifying future becomes, and the more the possibility of averting it-or at least mitigating it—recedes. Why?

The world economy and population have been expanding for about 500 years—from Columbus to the present era of globalization. Initially this process of expansion placed only local burdens on the Earth’s carrying capacity. Now this burden is planetary. It exceeds our biosphere’s adaptive capacity. Species are becoming extinct at a rate unseen since the dinosaurs perished 65 million years ago.

Our entire planetary economy is based on one assumption: oil will always be cheap and plentiful. A corollary to this is that if it was not cheap and plentiful, market forces would effortlessly find a substitute for it. Yet this is nonsense. Oil exists in finite quantities, at some point its production must begin to decline inexorably. Its price must concomitantly, rise equally inexorably. Burning coal reserves might provide a brief respite at the cost of tipping the planet into a hothouse equilibrium 10 or more, degrees, Fahrenheit, warmer. Goodbye to coastal cities, reliable climate for agriculture, reliable rainfall for drinking etc. Then coal goes into decline.

As you can see from the above graph, global oil production has flat-lined since 2004. We are now at “peak oil.” Even prices near $150.00 per barrel in 2008 could not significantly increase production. Clearly, market forces cannot increase production. They cannot minimize prices except by means of allowing high prices to trigger long term recessions which themselves reduce demand.

No near-term substitutes for oil are on offer. This is because the universal laws of physics do not answer to the human invented “laws” of economics. There is no adequate substitute for petroleum in a gas-powered civilization. Substitutability has its limits. These are defined not by the "laws” of economics, but rather, by the iron laws of physics—the cold, hard equations which govern the physical universe.

It gets worse. Our economy grows by borrowing. Money for growth is ultimately backed up by the belief that more wealth will exist in the future, than exists at present. So long as this is the case, then gimmicks such as fractional reserve banking—wherein much more money is loaned out by financial institution than is actually available on reserve at the institution—can usually work. Sure, the loaned money does not really exist, but it will—in the future. Without future economic growth, this is no longer the case.

Without growth in the energy supply, future economic growth cannot occur. Also, environmental limits such as climate change would constrain future growth because of its impact on the food supply. Infinite material economic growth on a planet of finite resources is simply not possible due to energy constraints, resource constraints, and environmental constraints.

We find ourselves living at that point at which these constraints are reached. Researcher Robert Hirsch in his new book The Impending World Energy Mess calculates that global oil production will begin its inexorable decline from its present plateau in 2-5 years. This estimate is consistent with that of many others. At that point when decline manifests, we can expect mass panic.

Once we drop off of the petroleum-supply plateau, the economy will implode as investment capital—based on the assumption of future growth and wealth—vaporizes. Unfortunately, rather than facing reality squarely, we can also expect instead crash programs to liquefy coal as a gasoline substitute, like Germany did in WWII, simply to buy a few more years of the status quo. Burning more coal will drive global warming into overdrive, creating, among a multitude of intensifying problems, the conditions for crop failure, and leading to mass famine. It will have done nothing whatsoever to address the underlying, fundamental problem of hydrocarbon energy depletion.

Once Americans lose their relative material comfort all hell will break loose. Neo-fascism is likely to emerge rapidly, beginning with a search for scapegoats: Moslems, liberals, unions, gays, feminists, Democrats etc. All of these will be said to have somehow traitorously sabotaged the economy. Next, the national government itself will soon fragment as the chaos accelerates and the lack of available energy reduces the government’s ability to maintain its control over large regions.

Internationally, global war is the nearly certain result, as existing great powers seeing their impending doom and use their military assets to preserve their access to oil. Of course, this will further destroy and expend irreplaceable material and energy assets, while wasting the last remaining time available to work constructively for solutions to our multitude of intensifying problems.

Somehow, the much worshipped “invisible hand” will have failed to rouse itself and “save” us. The few rich (those favored by the invisible hand) are rapidly getting ever richer while the rest of us…well you know about this side of the equation don’t you? The rest of us get backhanded by the invisible hand.

Viewed in the bigger picture, this looming civilizational collapse is likely a...well if not exactly a good thing, then at least a necessary and even a liberating event. We are about to be liberated from ever-intensifying national and global tyranny. The planetary biosphere is about to be liberated from the prospect of unrecoverable devastation. Not because we successfully opposed the market-worshipping cult, but rather because the cult’s own internal illogic of endless growth amid finite resources was self-dooming.

Of course, even as our self-inflicted collapse approaches, our market-worshiping overlords, and their deluded Beck-ite minions will chant “incentive”, “substitutability”, “deregulation” even more frantically. Alas, these incantations to their golden calf of false assumptions about unrestrained capitalism won’t bring back their vanished wealth.

Collapse is what inevitably happens when false gods are worshipped. Unrestrained capitalism is a delusional human belief system. Reality is not.

Prepare for the storm! Prepare also for liberation. Next time we won’t get fooled again—right?

The Future of the Past

Michael Byron — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 04:42:00 GMT

Occasionally I come across ideas so profoundly shocking, that I would simply reject them as being batshit craziness, except that due to their rigorously scientific, falsifiable nature, and due to the academic reputation of the researchers involved, I can’t. Perhaps the most intuitively ‘obvious” notion that most people possess is that time flows from past to future. The arrow of causality inexorably flows in one direction only: From past to future.

The April 2010 edition of Discover magazine contains an article summarizing what may be among the most profound research ever undertaken into the ultimate nature of reality. Entitled: “Back From the Future” the article summarizes recent research in quantum physics which appears to demonstrate conclusively that the future influences the past. The arrow of causality points BOTH directions: from past to future AND from future to past! [i] [ii] [iii]

On considering this possibility, I do believe that the long established principle of quantum entanglement, most probably entails this dual arrow of causality. Experiments have demonstrated that when two or more elementary particles such as photons become entangled, any change to one particle, such as measuring its previously undetermined spin, causes an instant corresponding change in this property for the other particle—even if they were separated by light years. This effect propagates far faster than the speed of light. It appears to propagate instantaneously across any distance. Entanglement is telling us something deep and fundamental about the nature of our universe—but what? The answer seems to be that time and space are not the absolutes which they appear to us to be.

In retrospect, this really is not too surprising. The universe is unimaginably vast and complex. Living organisms, existing in a given location, at a particular moment in time, need to, quite literally, focus only on that small restricted subset of all information which imparts immediate survival value to them.

Sight is obvious. The Earth’s atmosphere is transparent to solar radiation—light—at one narrow bandwidth:

Hearing is also obvious. Given the density of our atmosphere, motion in it will produce compression and expansion of the local atmosphere—“sound”. This can provide a great deal of information about our environment. Molecules will float in this atmosphere. Detecting them tells us about whatever emitted them. Is it something we might wish to eat—or is it something which might wish to eat us? Thus smell and its closely related sense of taste have survival value. Similarly with the sense of touch which allows us to be aware of whatever is directly interacting with our bodies.

With these senses, living organisms create a “lifeworld” containing survival relevant information. Within this lifeworld, simple notions of causality possess great survival value: “If I climb the tree BEFORE the bear—which I see, hear and smell, and so reasonably can assume is there—gets here, I will not get eaten, otherwise, I will get eaten” When it comes to survival, timing is everything. I once expressed this idea as a poem:

Reality

All that we unquestioningly think that we know,

does ultimately, from five fallible senses grow,

our reality is thus naught but a fragile web, wrought,

of disparate strands woven together, like as not,

with chords of reflexive, unreasoned, presumption,

so that, that which we upon first thought,

believe to be so, is only Mind's tentative assumption.

Time, in a universal context, might behave in a more esoteric manner; however, in terms of survival, awareness of this reality is likely both unnecessary and detrimental to the central task of survival. And so we would not naturally be aware of such things. Yet, this does not mean that a more complex reality, as evidenced by the experiments, I am writing about, does not exist. A good summary of the experiment is as follows:

The experiment consisted of measuring the spin of a large number of elementary
particles at 2:00 pm, 2:30 pm and sometimes measuring them also at 3:00 pm.
They used a very imprecise weak measuring technique which "mostly" ensured
that the spin was not changed by the measurement, while producing great
uncertainty about whether they had measured the actual spin accurately. The
question explored was how the imprecisely measured statistical spin would change
from 2:00 pm to 2:30 pm in the presence of a further measurement at 3:00pm
and in its absence. The difference in the change of spin between these
two experiments leads them to conclude that measuring at 3:00pm impacted
upon the results observed at 2:30pm.

They also explored the question of whether this implied that one could
predict the future from the results observed at 2:30pm... i.e. would these
results oblige them to test or not test again at 3:00pm. What would
happen if they exercised free will in not complying with the statistical
observations suggesting that they had or had not measured spins at 3:00pm.
Though the math isn't given the suggestion is that free will is nor
compromised by the observed results. The results at 2:30pm might suggest
that one was going to measure again at 3:00pm but the confidence level that
one will is so low, that if one doesn't the results can then be explained
as caused by the innate uncertainty inherent in the weak measurements
performed, which while in this case would be anomalous, are not statistically
significant.

The article stresses that the experiment is essentially statistical in
nature. There is no suggestion of anything definitive been possible to
say about the spin of any one photon, as consequence of a future
measurement. However, there was noticeable and repeatable difference in
results measured at 2:30pm, under the two experimental conditions of
again measuring or not measuring at 3:00pm.[iv]

All in all, these results are counterintuitive! The statistically clear result is that decisions made in the future change results obtained in the past. Yet this casual effect is statistically weak. Only by combining a large number of measurements does the effect become more probable than the margin of error. According to one of the researchers, Chapman University physicist Jeff Tollaksen, this observation is telling us something very profound about the deep nature of the universe:

…In other words, you can see the effect of the future on the past only after carrying out millions of repeat experiments and tallying up the results to produce a meaningful pattern. Focus on any single one of them and try to cheat it, and you are left with a very strange looking result—an amplification with no cause—but its meaning vanishes. You simply have to put it down to a random error in your apparatus. You win back your free will in the sense that if you actually attempt to defy the future, you will find that it can never force you to carry out post selection experiments against your wishes. The math, Tollaksen says, backs him on this interpretation: The error range in single intermediate weak measurements that are not followed up by the required postselection will always be just enough to dismiss the bizarre results as a mistake. Tollaksen sums up this confounding argument with one of his favorite quotes from the ancient Jewish sage Rabbi Akiva: “all is foreseen; but freedom of choice is given.” Or as Tollaksen puts it: I can have my cake and eat it too.” He laughs….[v]

An insert to this Discover article, entitled: “Does the Universe Have a Destiny?” explores the topic of whether these new findings, in the context of other quantum physical and cosmological findings, imply that the universe actually has a “destiny” a final state, which because in some sense it already exists, is reaching backwards through time (from our limited perspective) to change reality, such that it becomes consistent with that ultimate final state of the universe.

Again, one hesitates at the seeming counter-intuitiveness of this; however the principle researcher profiled is Paul Davies, a world renowned cosmologist at Arizona State University. Davies possesses considerable credibility.

Years ago Frank Tippler, a physicist at Tulane University wrote about something like this in his book The Physics of Immortality. That work, unlike Davies current research was not well received by the scientific community, apparently because Tippler attempted to relate the ultimate state of the universe, which he called “the Omega Point,” with God.

Davies, wisely for a practicing scientist, simply hypothesizes that the universe’s ultimate state (which he does not seek to characterize) is influencing the historical evolution of the universe. This is posited as being the solution to the anthropic principle, which seeks to explain why the universe we live in is so improbably hospitable towards life. The apparent answer is that life existing far in the future of the universe is causing (has caused?) the universe’s fundamental properties to become self-consistent with its existence in the far future.

If so, this means that life, intelligent life, is not a cosmological aberration in an otherwise dead universe. Life’s existence is central, indeed causative, to the existence of our particular universe. Since everything in our universe became quantum entangled at the instant of the Big Bang, instantaneous causation, without regard to what we think of as “time” and “space” this actually makes sense. In one timeless, quantum entangled, “eternity”, the self-conscious universe is self-creating/has self created/will self-create.

Even while the apparent ultimate destiny of our universe—the victory of Life over entropy—is set, we each possess free will to determine the exact details as to how this occurred/will occur—and to determine what our individual roles in this cosmic victory will be/are.

My own take on all of this is that unknowably far in the future of the Cosmos, Life, in the form of the ultimate civilization, manifesting the ultimate degree of emergence, encompassed everything. The victory of consciousness over matter, and its quantum foam underpinnings, was then complete.

I conclude from all of this that, as bleak as our present sometimes seems to be, as bleak as events in our near future will likely be, we should always go forward trying to do what we believe to be right. Those actions which are supportive of Life—all life, not just human life—those actions which are supportive of fairness, justice, equality, contribute towards the consolidation of a deep emergence which will win out against entropy, decay, dissolution, death, in the end. We just don’t know how, or when—nor would we want to know, as that would negate free will.

Alternatively, this knowledge should not lead us to become complacent. The Universe, or more likely, the Multiverse [vi], is vast beyond human imagining. Knowing that Life somewhere, somewhen, was ultimately successful, does not tell us anything at all about the fate of our particular world, and our species. If we, ourselves, are to play a role in the creation of this living future, then we must do something, rather than nothing, in our here and now.

In conclusion: Don’t despair—act. We can have an integral role in the self-creation of our universe, and in the ultimate victory of conscious Life, over formless chaos and entropy.

[i] See http://www.rochester.edu/news/show.php?id=3220

[ii] See: http://iopscience.iop.org/1367-2630/12/1/013023/fulltext

[iii] See: http://www.fqxi.org/tools/download/__details/Tollaksen%20Azores%20Tal...

[iv] http://groups.google.com/group/soc.religion.quaker/browse_thread/thread/45c1e2e645aed766/72a6dee97e671d35?lnk=raot

[v] Discover, April 2010, pp 44, http://discover.coverleaf.com/discovermagazine/201004/#pg46

[vi] The multiverse is a hard concept to visualize. For visualizations, art & diagrams of it see: http://www.google.com/images?q=multiverse&rls=com.microsoft:en-us:IE-SearchBox&oe=UTF-8&rlz=1I7ADBR_en&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=univ&ei=kgEYTM_iKZHuNOqcgLUL&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=4&ved=0CDIQsAQwAw

Beyond Adolescence—a Positive Human Future

Michael Byron — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 15:57:00 GMT

One of the most interesting aspects of writing and posting an article is reading and responding to the commentary about it submitted by readers. This was certainly true for my recent essay “In Defense of Civilization” posted on OpEdNews.com. One reader, Daniel Geary, made the very good point that to effectively discuss “civilization” it needs to be defined. What, precisely, does the author mean by “civilization?” Mr. Geary noted that this term is about as loosely defined as is, say, “God.”

One web definition of the term is “Civilization is the process of civilizing or becoming civil. A civilized society is often characterized by advanced agriculture, long-distance trade, occupational specialization, and urbanism. ...”[i]

However, this is not the exact definition which I would use. My definition is as follows:

Civilization is socially organized complexity, intersubjectively negotiated among self-conscious entities, and characterized by substantial differentiation of occupational specialty. These characteristics must be sufficiently developed to allow for a significant enough degree of emergence for the social system as a whole, to grant it noticeably greater survival advantage than that possessed by groups which lack sufficient complexity for emergence to be a significant factor with respect to their individual or group survival.

The advantage of civilization, seen from this viewpoint is that it fully utilizes the scientific miracle of emergence. The properties of the whole system are greater than the sum of its constituent parts. This allows for not only more of whatever the constituent parts possess, but, more significantly, for wholly new properties to emerge at the systemic level. Hydrogen and oxygen atoms combined, allow for the property of “wetness’ to emerge from their close interaction to form a molecule. Wetness is not reducible to the properties of its constituent atoms. It “emerges” from the organized complexity of its constituent parts.

In the case of human civilization, emergent properties include science, art, philosophy, mathematics, high technology, sophisticated culture in general. Such phenomena are non-existent, or exist in only rudimentary form among non-civilized humans.

True, our Upper Paleolithic ancestors created magnificent cave art. They possessed a variety of manufactured tools and undoubtedly, a complex culture as well. However, they never understood what the stars were. They knew nothing about quarks, and sub-atomic structure. Algebra, trigonometry, calculus were beyond their wildest conceptualizations. Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony was an impossibility for them, as were the plays of Sophocles and Shakespeare.

Complex thought requires a critical mass of human interactivity to emerge. That critical mass simply does not occur at the hunter-gatherer level of organization. I think of this stage of humanity’s history as being our species’ childhood. (The Lower and Middle Paleolithic, before language was fully developed, would correspond with our species’ infancy.)

Spiritually, I’m sure that our long ago ancestors felt a great and wholesome sense of connectedness with nature. Since civilization arose, we’ve progressively lost that. It is essential for us, for our entire civilization, for our survival, to regain it.

Humans possess self-consciousness, the ability to reason and to understand the universe within which we exist. Those forms of human organization which maximize our intellectual abilities maximize our ability to be human. Civilization is that form of human organization which most greatly maximizes our intellectual potentiality. Still, something very fundamental is lacking in our present day form of civilization.

The deep problem with civilization appears to lie in its removing us from direct contact with the natural world within which we evolved, and upon which we depend for our very existence. Blinded by materialism, by desire for material affluence, surrounded by our created artifacts, we come to view nature as an externality. It becomes an infinite sink for all of our wastes, while simultaneously serving, supposedly, as an infinite cornucopia of natural wealth. Here, our hunter-gatherer ancestors knew better than us. They depended entirely upon their surrounding environment for their sustenance. If they over-hunted or over-populated, they starved.

Nature has limits. We can’t take resources faster than they can be regenerated without eventually dooming ourselves.

What is essential for us, for humanity, is to re-imagine ourselves and our civilization. We must understand that our civilization and our economy are entirely nested within nature. We, no more than our distant ancestors, can take more from the Earth than it can give. Energy production, food production, industrial production, all must be reorganized to be sustainable within the carrying capacity of the Earth’s biosphere.

Of course, even though many millions of people around the world realize this and are taking steps to bring the sustainable future about, it seems fairly certain that business as usual will continue until global civilization slams into inviolable environmental, energy and resource constraints. Our societal inertial is just too great. Multinational corporations, whose only goal is profit maximization in the shortest possible time, have gained nearly total control over the major national governments—including the American government—of the world.

However, there is a silver lining in all of this. Existential crisis offers an opportunity for fundamental, transformative restructuring of society. Once the old paradigm has failed and we are in a crisis of existence, a desperate struggle to survive, then a new paradigm, a new configuration for civilization can be rapidly put into place.

Each of us has a common general understanding of what the causes of our current civilization’s amplifying crises are. Each of us understands, broadly, what needs to be done to restructure civilization so that it can continue sustainably into the future. Many readers likely believe that there will be or can be a gradual transition from old to new. There will not be. The old order simply possesses too much inertia; its control is not only over our governments, but also via the corporate consolidated mass media, over the minds, the very understanding of reality, of most citizens. Fundamental crisis is now certain—the existing order is facing collapse in the near future.

It is at that future moment—the moment of supreme material and spiritual crisis—that people around the world, possessing a common inter-subjective understanding of reality, can replace the old maladaptive societal organizational memes, with our much more adaptive societal organizational memes. A phase transition from an unsustainable state to a sustainable state will occur. One civilizational order will die so that another, more adaptive one, can, through its collapse, be born.

In saying this I do not mean that we should cease in our efforts to affect events in the here and now. Such efforts will likely have some effect in minimizing the worst outcomes. At least we can try. That said, we must be ready to join together to act at once. Most of the rest of humanity will be desperate for a new vision of reality. Around the world, we can offer that vision. We can act as the catalytic agents for societal transformation.

Hopefully, if this is accomplished, humanity will leave its troubled adolescence behind and enter maturity. Here we will reconcile the understanding of our place in nature we achieved in our species’ childhood 50,000 to 10,000 years ago, with our intellectual accomplishments over the past 10,000 years.

Only then will we become fully human. Only then will our civilization become not just technologically powerful, but also humane. Only then will civilization become sustainably viable for ages to come. If we can accomplish this transformation, then who knows what wonders will be in the ages yet to come?

We can do this!

[i] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization

In Defense of Civilization.

Michael Byron — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 23:08:00 GMT

In recent times I have found there to be a profound sense of disillusionment with civilization among a small but growing cohort of the educated population. I do not mean that this group is disaffected with WESTERN civilization, or any other specific form of civilization. Rather, I mean that they are disaffected with the very idea of human civilization at all.

The single most prominent advocate of this view is writer Derrick Jensen. In his recent books Endgame Volume 1: The Problem of Civilization and its follow-up Endgame Volume 2: Resistance, Jensen lays out the argument that civilization, any and all civilizations, are inherently destructive of the biosphere and dehumanizing to boot. He goes on to call for the deliberate “taking down” of global civilization. I find these ideas to be both muddled, and potentially quite dangerous. I actually read through all 500 pages of his first book. I declined to read the 430 page second volume.

In a nutshell, Jensen observes, correctly, that our present oil-fueled civilization is rapaciously destroying our planet’s ecosystem while inflicting vast misery upon much of the world’s human population. However, his is not just a critique of our present civilizational order; rather it is a much deeper polemic about civilization itself.

All civilizations are inherently destructive and self-limiting, Jensen writes. This is because concentrated human populations living in cities—an essential feature of civilization—exploits surrounding lands for agriculture and for resources. Eventually both the soil and the resource base are exhausted, leading to environmental devastation and civilizational collapse. In the meantime, while civilization endures, it inherently produces inequalities of wealth among humans: many poor subjugated by a few of the rich. For most persons civilized life is unpleasant and dehumanizing. Everything humanity has done, from the agrarian revolution around 10 millennia ago and onwards, has been a mistake according to Jensen. We need to go back to our “natural” condition of being bands of contented, relatively equal, free, hunter-gatherers, spread very thinly upon the land, according to Jensen’s view.

What is wrong with this viewpoint? Well nearly everything, in my estimation. Anthropological research has shown that hunter gathers in New Guinea, Southern Africa or elsewhere, engage in continuous low-intensity warfare. The probability of violent death for any individual hunter-gatherer in any given year is about two percent. If these figures were to be applied to the human population of Earth throughout the entire 20^th century, they would result in SIX BILLION violent deaths during the century.[i] The 20th century was indeed violent; however it was nowhere near that violent. Why? Civilization is why. Civilized humans are much less violent per capita than non-civilized humans. Jensen is simply wrong if he truly believes that hunter-gatherers are somehow better off than civilized humans. They are not.

Civilization actually exploits one of the fundamental properties of our universe: emergence. Emergence occurs when a group of elements are combined together into an interacting system whose properties and behaviors are different from, and not reducible to, the properties of its constituent parts. The whole becomes greater than the sum of its constituent parts. For example, water has the property of wetness that is not reducible to its constituent hydrogen and oxygen atoms, but is an emergent property of that molecular system. Similarly, conscious awareness is not reducible to any individual neurons in a human brain, but is a collective property of the brain as a whole. Emergence is one of the great miracles of nature.

Humans were not the first creatures on Earth to discover and exploit emergence. The social insects, the ants, bees and wasps did so beginning perhaps 130 million years ago. For example, an individual ant is nearly brainless and has little individual capacity to survive. A colony of ants however, behaves like an eerily intelligent super-organism. These sophisticated, seemingly intelligent and purposive, diversified behaviors arise from interactions among many essentially mindless individual ants. To exploit emergence ants naturally had to come together in “cities” which is effectively what an ant nest is. Certain ant species farm crops (fungi), raise livestock (aphids), exploit all available resources in their territory. They fight wars over control of resources with other ant “cities.” Ants are highly stratified into occupational classes and castes. In summary, their organization closely parallels human civilization.

Humans, of course, are not ants. Unlike an ant, an individual human is self-conscious, possessing a sense of individuality. Having individuality as well as collectivity, humans living in dense urban settlements—cities—obtained the serendipitous effect of emergence. By doing so, humans have been able to produce much greater wealth than could be produced individually. Culture, the arts, sciences, music, etc. exploded, once civilization began. Like the ants specialized roles are essential to maximize the net emergence of the group: Weavers, metal smiths, warriors, farmers, etc. Occupational specialization is an essential prerequisite for maximizing emergence. It’s not a “bug” as Jensen would have us believe, it’s a feature. Complexity requires diversity.

Does this need for occupational specialization inevitably lead to inequality? Does it inherently doom most humans to poverty and subjugation? Jensen argues that it does. I answer: Certainly not! Our culture, in conjunction with our own level of consciousness, determines this. These variables are, well, variable. Change towards greater equality is indeed possible among humans.

For any successful society it is necessary for the needs of individuals to be balanced with the needs of the group. No individuals should be left destitute, nor be deprived of critical opportunities for education, health care, etc.

Incentive and support for artists, scholars, inventors, and entrepreneurs who productively innovate is socially useful. Rewarding innovators does result in inequality of wealth and social status. Incentive—including financial reward—is a powerful force, and potentially, a powerful force for the good of all.

At the same time, accumulated gross inequalities of wealth are inherently destabilizing to the social order and must be prevented. This is a hard problem to work out but that does not make it impossible. One way of looking at the entire six thousand year history of civilization is to see it as a painful, slow, incremental learning process. The rapidly approaching crises of our civilization—energy depletion, climate change, overpopulation, vast inequality within and between nations, are going to provide us with enormous selection pressure to innovate towards sustainability, and away from selfishness, in the context of social, material, environmental and energy parameters of civilization, or to perish in self-inflicted flames. Existential crisis, while not to be wished for, does provide us with a great learning opportunity.

Ants have emergently exploited their landscape since the dinosaurs were newly evolved. They are still here, as is their environment. Their total weight exceeds that of all humans. They, like us, must eat, yet they do so sustainably. Their “cities” are environmentally sustainable. There is nothing inherently impossible in an environmental sense, about organized complexity, whether that of ants or of humans.

Sustainable agriculture is possible. Permaculture is an alternative to traditional agriculture. For example, my wife and I now have created about 1,000 square feet of terra preta gardens. These need much less fertilizer than normal gardens do. They are significantly more productive as well.[ii]

Human civilization has continuously existed and intensified over time across the millennia. Areas such as China have maintained continuous civilizations for many thousands of years, despite invasions and other disruptions. Civilization is resilient. It should be, since it taps into one of nature’s most fundamental principles—emergence. Consider that the dinosaurs, sort of early “hunter gatherers” are long extinct. However, the ants, the first to exploit emergence, are not only still around, they are thriving all around the world.

Human civilization is indeed self-threatened, but it is capable of getting its act together. If it doesn’t, then Jensen will get his wish. Global civilization will collapse and the few survivors will likely find themselves reduced to a hunter-gatherer level of existence. They will not like it!

Civilization is NOT inherently doomed as a mode of human organization. At least it is not if, in this impending age of existential crisis, we can change ourselves to become more, well, more civilized.

You and I hold the future of civilization in our collective hands. Let’s get to work!

[i] See The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution. By Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending. Available from Amazon.com at: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465002218/ref=oss_product

[ii] See my wife Ramona’s articles at: http://www.opednews.com/articles/Making-Terra-Preta-Soil-R-by-Ramona-Byron-080821-153.html and also at: http://www.opednews.com/articles/Yes-We-Canned-by-Ramona-Byron-090827-346.html for details.

Nothing on Earth Can Save Us

Michael Byron — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 18:26:00 GMT

June 4^th, 2010 may someday be remembered as being the day that the future changed. On this date, the privately built and financed Falcon-9 rocket was launched from Cape Canaveral. Why is event of such great significance?

To understand this we first need to consider where we—human civilization—are at as of mid-2010. Our global political economy is based upon hydrocarbon energy: coal, natural gas, and most especially, oil. Yet oil planetary production has likely peaked. Oil discoveries peaked in the mid-1960’s, and discoveries of new oil have declined precipitously since then. Despite use of more sophisticated technology, future production must decline. Current production has been flat for six years now:

There are only a handful of coal exporting countries—principally the U.S., Australia and Russia. The quality of coal being mined now is decreasing. High grade, high energy content anthracite coal seams are being replaced by lower-quality, lower energy and more polluting, bituminous and sub-bituminous coals as anthracite deposits are exhausted. As a consequence of this the net energy produced by coal mining per year may already have peaked. Each succeeding year, less and less net energy will be gained from these inferior, energy-deficient coals, even though the total tons of mined coal will rise for several decades to come.

Natural gas is difficult to transport, creating mostly regional, pipeline based markets. For North America, maintaining current supplies requires use of resource-intensive (particularly water) and environmentally-damaging technologies, principally hydraulic fracturing, or “fraking” as it is commonly referred to. And supplies of this resource will inevitably begin to decline too.

The bottom line is simple: Future growth of the global economy, including maintaining the rapid development of China and India, cannot be sustained. Consequences of hydrocarbon use, principally rapid climate changes as heat builds up in the atmosphere and the oceans, will knock the Earth’s climate out of energy balance.

Agriculture is a bet that we understand long-term weather well enough to reliably grow crops. This assumption is violated as the planet slips out of energy balance. Further, each calorie of food grown using “modern” agriculture requires input of about 10 calories of, ever scarcer, ever more expensive, hydrocarbon energy.

Worse yet, the entire global economy consists of debt-based money. Such money only has “value” if future economic growth can be reasonably anticipated to pay it back. Without this assumption the world economy must collapse.

Nothing on Earth, not nuclear, not solar, or wind, or tidal energy can fill the looming energy deficit. We appear to be doomed to civilizational collapse given that nothing on Earth can save us at this late hour.

Nothing on Earth…

That’s where the space launch of the Falcon-9 rocket comes in. It was developed using private financing by a startup company, completely unaffiliated with the existing big aerospace sector. Elon Musk, co-founder of Pay Pal, sold his share of that internet company in order to self-finance the start-up of Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or “SpaceX” as it is generally called, with $100 million of his own money back in 2002.[i] Musk’s vision was to reduce the cost of access to space by a factor of 10 while simultaneously increasing safety and reliability by a factor of 10. All indications are that he is succeeding brilliantly.

SpaceX’s smaller cargo rocket, the Falcon-1, was successfully test launched into orbit on July 14^th, 2009. Now SpaceX has a $1.6 billion contract from NASA to resupply the International Space Station beginning next year, following the retirement of the space shuttles. This resupply will be accomplished by means of the Dragon reusable spacecraft. This was launched as a prototype, atop the Falcon-9 rocket on June 4^th, 2010. The Dragon payload capsule can also be configured to carry a crew of up to 7 astronauts to and from the International Space Station. It is anticipated that the Obama Administration will award SpaceX with a contract to transport US astronauts to and from the Space Station beginning in about 2012/2013.

How does this relate to our looming earthbound catastrophe? Consider that solar and wind energy is diffuse and also intermittent. Additionally, there is no effective way to store large amounts of energy indefinitely until it is needed. Batteries are inefficient and energy and resource intensive to fabricate anyway; pumping water uphill to be used to turn generators loses much of the original energy, etc. Finally, there is no existing way to move electricity around the world. There are only regional grids.

Back in the 1980’s a study conducted by the US Department of Energy (DOE) found that power could be easily beamed, safely and efficiently from space in the form of microwaves. Power sent from a satellite in geosynchronous orbit can be beamed as microwaves to Earth with about 85% efficiency.[ii] What the study envisioned was actually collecting the power in space and sending it to a receiving station on the ground. This is pretty complex—although a California company founded in 2001, Solaren Corporation[iii], has signed a contract with California utility PG&E to do just that starting in 2016.[iv]

However, a simpler task would be to deploy a series of microwave reflectors to encircle the Earth in geosynchronous orbits. A single reflector could be deployed from a single Falcon-9 heavy lift rocket, which is able to hoist about 43,000 pounds of anything into that orbit. The reflector would be gossamer thin and would fold out from the payload shroud. Because it only needs to be reflective to microwaves—wire mesh basically—it could be invisible to the human eye by the way. Station keeping could be maintained essentially forever using an ion technology; such engines have already been developed and deployed for commercial satellite station keeping.[v] Even more efficient ion engines will soon be attached to the Space Station to maintain its altitude against orbital decay.[vi] These will then become available for space based power generation station keeping purposes. Ad Astra Rocket Company, founded in 2006 by astronaut Franklin Chang Diaz (who flew a record seven space shuttle missions), is actively developing this technology under contract from NASA.

I believe that solar, wind, tidal, hydro and geothermal energy can be captured wherever they are, fed into a local grid, and then relayed to another destination through an orbiting microwave reflector. The net efficiency of energy transmission from source to destination would be .85 (up to orbit) times .85 (down to Earth), or 72.25 percent efficiency. This wireless global power transmission grid would be accomplished without new power lines.

Wind energy from the sleeping night side of the planet can be instantly relayed into the regional wired power grids on the active day side. Energy from remote planetary locations can be effortlessly relayed to inhabited areas. By making renewable energy more available, it becomes both more efficient and more affordable. A geosynchronous orbit based global grid reduces or eliminates the energy storage problem, since energy can be used anywhere around the world that it is most needed instantly.

As this energy system comes into operation, it can be supplemented with actual space-based solar power production. The technology for all of this has already been created or, it is in the hands of entrepreneurs who will have it deployable within this decade. The 1980’s DOE study found that as little of the microwave energy is absorbed by the atmosphere heating and other environmental effects are nil.

We need to understand how these powerful new technologies fit into the hydrocarbon resource constrained world of today. We need to understand how each individual technology relates to other technologies with respect to the goal of limitless energy production. I also note that all of the private entrepreneurial companies I’ve mentioned—SpaceX, Ad Astra Rocket Company, and Solaren Corporation, are all recent entrepreneurial start-ups. They are not (yet, at least) part of the world-wrecking corporatocracy. This means that they have no stake in maintaining the world-dooming status quo. They represent a real potential for sudden and fundamental paradigm change. By developing technologies to exploit new economic niches, they offer the possibility of undercutting the existing world-devastating corporate oligopolies. Put more simply, they offer the possibility of making obsolete forever the heavy-risk-taking oil-drillers like BP, and others. Just think of a time when we would no longer have to worry about oil spills just before hurricane season …

Under the condition of deepening existential crisis which I believe will accelerate in the next few years, a coherent vision which takes into account recently-created technological capabilities to exploit space for energy transmission and then generation purposes, could still, at this extreme hour, alter our civilization’s historical trajectory decisively. I hope we will take advantage of this potential. If not, then within a few years, civilizational collapse will indeed become irreversible.

And even if collapse does occur, once the microwave reflectors are in orbit, they will be able to support power-sharing for centuries to come without maintenance, which will facilitate civilization’s recovery. We would have an asset going into collapse which would allow for far flung survival communities to support one another via energy sharing, maximizing the chances of survival for all despite their geographic separation.

If civilization collapses without any ability to recover, all of the easily obtained concentrated energy sources needed to develop the high technology required to get there will be forever gone. In the ages that follow this catastrophe, space will remain forever out of reach. Our descendents will look at the stars from the ground, and from up there among them. If they ever learn how badly, and foolishly, and UNECESSARILY we threw our future away, they will curse us until the end of time.

It’s still not too late—act! Make this dream a reality.

Nothing on EARTH can save us. However, something OFF of it just might!

[i] http://www.spacex.com/index.php

[ii] See discussion at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-based_solar_power

[iii] http://www.solarenspace.com/ See also: http://www.alternative-energy-news.info/solaren-corp-to-launch-solar-panels-into-orbit/

[iv] http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30198977/

[v] http://www.boeing.com/defense-space/space/bss/factsheets/xips/xips.html

[vi] http://www.adastrarocket.com/aarc/