[ExI] extropy-chat Digest, Vol 75, Issue 2

[Emlyn]

2009/12/2 Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com>:
> On Tue, Dec 1, 2009 at 2:16 PM,  Max More <max at maxmore.com> wrote:
>
> snip
>>
>> I'm feeling pretty lonely on this issue. Just about everyone on all
>> sides of the issue seem to be very certain of what's going on.
>> Despite considerable reading of clashing sources (or because of it),
>> I remain highly unsure.
>
> I am irritated by the whole thing.
>
> What we have is people endlessly arguing about the ship rusting or not
> and if this will sink it in 50 to 100 years in the future.  Meanwhile
> there is a torpedo in the water headed for the ship.
>
> Running out of cheap energy is a far more serious matter than climate
> change and will happen sooner.  That has to be solved to avert famines
> and resource wars.
>
> There are no long term solutions to this problem that involves
> endlessly putting carbon in the air so any solution to the problem
> must involve displacing fossil fuel with some less expensive source of
> energy.
>
> Nuclear, SBSP, or some new method, however we solve the energy
> problem, we also solve the climate problem to whatever extent it is
> real and to whatever extent the problem is caused by humans.  If CO2
> is a problem in 30-40 years, we can pull it out of the atmosphere to
> any degree we want (300 TW years will take out 100 ppm).
>
> I.e., it doesn't matter a bit if the data has been fudged or not.
>
> Keith

If this was facebook, I could press the "like" button. Consider it
pressed, anyway.

Also, from a positive angle, really interesting things happen if we
get cheap renewable energy, stuff that extropians would like, and we
wont get it from sticking with the current situation which appears to
be on the decline. There's a giant fusion reactor *right there in the
sky* out your window, and we don't really harness it.

Properly cheap renewable energy (ie: catching a tiny sliver of the
waste energy coming out of the sun) solves all water, food, and other
resource problems.

I think there are many more cool graphs that trend exponentially
upward in our future, once we get serious about cheap renewable
energy.

-- 
Emlyn

http://emlyntech.wordpress.com - coding related
http://point7.wordpress.com - ranting
http://emlynoregan.com - main site