I sometimes feel as though my dream travel destination reflects my ideal mental landscape. Someone once wrote that traveling is an act of fulfilling a long held fantasy; how true is that?

My ideal landscape consists of sparse snow and an abundance of rocks stretching out desolately as far as the eye can see, bordered by a cloudless blue sky above. Would be psychologists, do take some time to interpret my mental state.
22:50
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When it comes to environmentalism, statistics are extremely telling about how the state of the world will be like a couple of centuries into the future.

In 2006, USA consumed about 12,924 kWh per capita, with a total population of 299 million people. In the same year, China did in 2,179 kWh per capita, and they had a population of 1,312 million people then. Therefore, for China to increase their energy output to the equivalent of USA consumption per capita, they will need to generate 4.39 times the energy of USA, and this means increasing their current energy output by 5.93 times current generation.

In the same year, India, with a population of 1,110 million people, consumed 466 kWh per capita. Assuming if they will be similarly ‘modernised’, they will have to generate 27.7 times the amount of energy they are currently consuming, which is 3.71 times USA energy output.

This is not even taking into account the development of Africa and Southeast Asia infrastructures, as well as the inevitable 2 to 4 % increase every five years in emissions (in other words, in energy consumption) for almost all developed countries including the USA and EU. Looking at things this way, it is hard to see how we might actually survive to witness the onset of the third millennium, should the global warming theorem actually be correct.

At the current rate of consumptions (and rate of increase in consumptions), we will run out of gasoline in maybe 2 centuries, coal in 3 centuries, uranium in 3 and natural gas in about 5 centuries or so. When that time comes, it doesn’t matter how good our technology is; everything will shut down. There is no fuel discovered yet, synthetic or natural, that remotely equals the energy density and inexpensiveness of fossil fuels.

Solar energy is currently too expensive: there is no way to mass produce solar cells, so essentially it is like purchasing home-made clothing versus factory produce. Moreover, without a way to store solar generated electricity, much of the electricity will be wasted in the day time and none will be produced at night, when it is more likely needed. Today, despite the growing popularity of solar power in the West, it makes up only 1% of the US energy market, simply because fossil fuel usage increases far more rapidly.

Nuclear power is the best alternative to fossil fuel, and even though uranium is scheduled to run out in 300 years’ time, there are alternatives to using uranium isotopes, such as strontium. Nuclear generates no carbon and is clean, and it can produce high levels of electricity on a regular basis for prolonged periods of time. The problem comes with warfare: targeting of nuclear installations make for extremely destructive results, often to the detriment of the countryside and its rural inhabitants. There is also a powerful negative sentiment against nuclear fuel, propagated by fears of the nuclear bomb, so politically it will be hard to move opinions towards the uptake of nuclear energy.

When oil finally goes, our computer servers will go down with it, and down goes much of the internet. Vehicles will be restricted to rich people; the rest will go either on foot, bicycles, or slow moving public transportation. Oil will indeed be kept in reserve, but only for military purposes so that when the time comes, it will be a tactical and strategic trump card for victory. Not forgetting trade, air flight will be completely decimated as an industry, and ships will return to the age of sail and wind. It is a powerfully primitive, yet powerfully futuristic and fantasy-like setting, perfect for a potential sci-fi story. This is, assuming, that no one has yet found a fuel source sufficiently powerful and abundant enough to replace fossil fuels, and that we all have not yet died from the effects of global warming.

Finally, global warming: I wonder if global warming is really real, or is it mostly just rhetoric? We read so much about global warming in the newspapers, that excessive electricity usage will one day come back to poke us in the arse, that trees are essential to our survival but forests continue going down… We are being indoctrinated by the media and the governments into taking global warming as a cornerstone of our scientific “truths”, which is, at the very least, being abused politically as a tool to induce fear. I have yet to see a scientific proof of global warming, but I can think of an experiment that can prove it, if only someone were willing to execute it:

In the past, Kristian Birkeland used a magnetised anode globe called terrella and directed cathode rays at it in an attempt to create a theory on how the Northern Lights work. The terrella can today be used in a spherical vacuum within which different gas concentrations can be pumped; infra-red radiation can be directed at the terrella in a controlled environment to test the heat trapping capabilities of the gases. This can provide a platform in which one can measure just how significant the increase in carbon dioxide is in trapping heat from the sun, or if methane is the culprit, along with a whole lot of other gases involved.

The best experiment that I have found thus far simply uses a measure of pure carbon dioxide versus normal air, with both containers placed under lamps. Obviously, pure carbon dioxide shows a marked increase in temperature, but only of four degrees! Can today’s carbon levels alone account for global warming? I think not.

There are currently experiments that claim that variances in the level of cosmic ray emissions from the sun are the reason for global warming and for the ice ages of the past. This path seems more promising especially since the sun, as the sole energy source in the solar system, is the most likely cause of temperature changes on earth. This hypothesis can also be tested by simply placing the terrella sphere in a vacuum box, filling the terrella sphere with air, and bombarding it with protons.

Personally, I believe that global warming rhetoric on saving electricity is pretty much pointless: economics provide a much more powerful psychological factor than the fear of some apocalyptic future that no one will ever live to see. I have no qualms leaving my computer sitting idle for hours, downloading stuff, and wasting power. To all those green wannabes out there, you got to prove global warming to me first, and find scientists confident enough to claim that global warming is 100% true (as opposed to 90% today). Moreover, scientists in general have been proven to be wrong in the past: remember the ether theory? Feed them the wrong paradigms, and you naturally get stunted results that can only be painfully and forcibly interpreted as a partial proof of hypotheses.

The coming end of the oil era is likely to create much more turmoil and worries than does the onset of global warming, simply because oil plays too big a part of our lives. Oil is also proven to be limited as a resource. How civilisation reacts to the coming oil crisis in 200 years’ time will perhaps be the most interesting spectacle for the next millennium or so.
22:11
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