Looking Over the Edge

New Jersey from the ISS.  Very pretty.  But where does the food come from?

In the fantasy land of my own romantic imagination I'm a post-apocalypse kind of gal.  Or  I was until I read The Road.  Or tried to.  Frankly, if I have to choose, I'll take a nice clean asteroid impact anytime, over a wasted planet where we become our own last food supply.  I don't think our prognosis is necessarily terminal, but no pom-poms or snappy cheers from me.  Our response to the unfolding climate disaster, especially, shows that we're collectively not much smarter that those deer I wrote about who yard up and die for lack of critical thinking.  But we might survive what we've done to ourselves. It's possible.

We are developing good technology to solve our energy issues.  We might be able to survive the next couple of centuries' worth of climatic consequences if we move fast enough.  But our core problem is paradoxically the one that's both the easiest and hardest to fix; population growth. I've tried to explore how our energy and population problems are converging. No matter how much sunshine you smoke, it's pretty clear that the rest of this century is liable to be a  horror show. But a lot depends on how fast we can adapt to the end of oil. 

Our brightest hope is hydrogen, the original stuff of the universe. (At least matter-wise.)  This really can be a permanent solution to the energy problem if we get our numbers stabilize at a sustainable level. We just need to find practical technologies for using it.  There's actually a new technology that looks big, as least initially:  nano-porous micro beads.

Cella Energy reportedly has a found a low-cost way to trap hydride compounds inside nano-porous polymer micro beads, thus creating a safe way to store and use hydrogen as safe liquid fuel.

"The hydrogen storage materials are stored at ambient temperatures and pressures, this means that the Cella Energy hydrogen storage materials can be packaged in a regular shaped fuel tank. They do not require the large heavy cylinders designed to withstand high pressures normally associated with hydrogen storage."

Reportedly these micro beads can even be mixed with conventional petroleum fuels and used in existing vehicles with little or no modification.  If this really works and has no unacceptable down-side, this could provide a way to transition off petroleum fuels using existing infrastructure and  resources.  It really could happen, and start happening almost immediately.  Very good news. It could mean we won't have to strip-mine the US and further foul our planetary nest with a massive synthetic fuels program. 

There's still hope for hydrogen fusion, too, although it's hard to be optimistic after 50 years of "just around the corner." 

But we've got to manage our population.  As Issac Asimov and others have pointed out many times, liberty, prosperity, human dignity, and ultimately we ourselves, cannot survive population growth, no matter how slow it may be.  The simple math will kill every last human on earth, just as it did on Easter Island.  For all we know the universe is littered with the ruins of civilizations that did just what we're doing now; ran off the edge of the population cliff at full speed while cutting down every last tree on the island.  Let's hope we can wake up in time. 

San Francisco Bay from the ISS

Be well.  Work for peace.  Keep your powder dry. Don't make babies.   - RS