Brin-l Digest, Vol 391, Issue 5

[hkhenson]

At 12:00 PM 7/25/2008, Bruce Bostwick wrote:

>On Jul 24, 2008, at 2:27 PM, hkhenson wrote:
>
>>At 12:00 PM 7/23/2008, Bruce Bostwick wrote:
>>
>>>Pretty sure we're headed for a population crash at least that drastic
>>>regardless.  it's obvious to me that the earth cannot support 6-7
>>>billion sustainably no matter what we do.
>>
>>With a lot of low cost, low environmental damage energy the earth
>>could support somewhat more than the current population--in style.
>
>That's been obvious enough to me that it's the premise of at least one
>book I'm working on.  Energy is everything -- without it, we can't
>produce food (on anything like the scale it's being produced on now,
>at least), we can't get to and from work or do most of the kinds of
>work we do, we can't transport goods from where they're made to where
>they're needed, etc.  With more of it, with lower cost and less to
>zero environmental impact, yes, we could make Earth look like
>Coruscant and sustain it indefinitely.
>
>(Tangential: That was one of the things that always bugged me the most
>about the Star Wars movies .. the enormous amount of energy obviously
>being consumed with no explanation as to the energy sources, other
>than they obviously had nearly limitless supplies of it.. :)
>
>But the "if that energy source exists" is a BIG if.  I'm hoping it's
>found very soon.

It comes up every morning.  Gravity confinement fusion 
generator.  Good for another few billion years.  The trick is to 
collect the radiation in space at $800 a kW or less.

snip

>>This would worry me more except I think the age of genes is about
>>over.
>
>Eh?

Extropian dream, or perhaps nightmare.  When I started laying out a 
post singularity novel it dawned on me that the most likely human 
population for 2100 was zero.  Had to cheat to get a story with 
characters.  http://www.terasemjournals.org/GN0202/henson2.html

(The footnotes were the editor's idea.)

Keith