Yeah, there are problems, even ones I think you miss, but the gloom and doom seem a bit much. Now my whole schtick is how to solve all those things, but you don't even need to get to my big guns to knock out the surpluses issue. Let's start with energy, resources and then water. As someone else pointed out, we're just at the start of an energy revolution. As it stands now, we're doing pretty good. There is more limitation on infrastructure to distribute wind and solar energy than there is to produce it. We haven't started bringing modern nuclear reactors, thorium or fusion online and may not have reason to if we can get the power distribution fixed up. ... And they get closer and closer to practical superconductors. That will be revolutionary too. Energy, converted to other resources by extraction or processing, creates about 6 times the starting value. That's a lot of wealth and potential for surplus, especially because a lot of wealth seems to be based on intellectual resources more than physical ones - here's looking at you Apple. What wealth will AI create? What need will it fulfill? ... How much water is it going to provide? California is in the middle of a severe drought punctuated apparently by severe flooding. Is there a solution. Is there a solution moving forward or is it as hopeless as you say? In the past couple years a new perspective has been developing. California uses about 30 million acre feet of water a year. They have a huge and hugely expensive resevoir system to bank water, but lately they''ve been coming to realize that there is a lot more potential storage in existing groundwater resevoirs, to the tune of 700 million acre feet. After realizing this, they are just starting to impliment its use by recharging the ground water with any surplus winter water they can get. It's hard to say how much they can bank this year because they've just started doing this, but they are banking quite a bit. Well levels are easy to measure and they are going up where the water is being banked. If they were ready and had the larger plan in place to use this years insane excess, how many hundreds of of millions of acre feet could they have banked? Be sure they will be ready for the next one. Want more water? Let's go to Australia. Desalination takes tremendous amounts of energy and creates environmentally damaging brine. Well these Ausies said let's not spin generators to make electricity to run pumps to push the salt water through the membranes. Let's just use the wave energy directly to push the water through and besides if you are doing that on one of our floating barges, not only are you producing a whole lot of fresh water, but also the brine is naturally diluted. That looks like it has a lot of potential.
In the technical terms of resources, we are at the beginning of this change. Every innovation brings us back from running out of resources. As a biologist, my dream is about those Moroccan algae farms trying to produce biofuels with salt water algae. The potential is unbelievable and if that doesn't pan out, there will be other technologies.
You need to look at it like an onion though. If you solve the resources problems, it's going to reveal another problem, another bottleneck we have to get past in order to thrive instead of going downhill to extinction. Humans face a huge problem, adapting to a changing world. I work to systematically develop an integrated solution to how humans can genetically and strategically adapt to the new ecology we have created when we left the tribal ecology for the farms and cities of civilization. In the decades since I was a teen, I've largely come up with a description of the problems and solutions. I can even say how to get from one ecology to the other, it's largely about techniques and choices. Beyond the physical resources of energy and water and metals and wood and concreate that we need for civilization, we have a great repository of technical knowledge that creates wealth. From my view, we have two other great forms of wealth, the first, strategy, includes that technical knowledge, but goes far beyond it as well. The second great reservoir of wealth I study, genetics, we haven't touched. Oh yes, we are in trouble and danger. More than you know I suspect, but everything we need can be gotten. Most of the strategies we need exist, we just need to understand why to use them. Humanity can achieve the aspirations we have desired since we looked out of the city gates at the brutal condition of man in nature and said "I want to be more".
