It is a privilege to open one’s eyes and watch unrepentant arrogance resolve itself under focus into proper pride. There is nothing that I could wish more than to see the Rose Wilder Lane thing through and avenge the fall of America with the establishment of a literally universal civilisation. I can has Vega?

Of course, nuclear terraforming fleets are not allowed to land on developed planets. The Death Star however is perfectly safe to have around because it’s staffed not by barbarians but by educated civil servants devoted to the public welfare.

Yes. Apologies. It’s been a busy week.

Charles-

“Rational modes of production begin at home….”

Does this line of reasoning lead to taking away my toys? If so, I respectfully move to evade the issue.

“I have no hope at all for any global or national systems to change. But I do have a lot of hope for changing things by getting out of global or national systems. And, perhaps, for helping others along the way to doing the same.”

And I would wish your revolution well, if I thought that those like you were likely to be the major influences on the character of the society that will follow the collapse of the current economic model. I think it’s much more likely that we’ll crash back to patriarchal feudalism; liberal democracy is in a frighteningly precarious shape today even without the ‘long emergency’ which will be by far the most likely result of the environmental crises. It might be worth investing in preparations if they could make a significant difference towards sustaining the open society. But there’s nothing you can do to prevent the impoverishing and decivilising effects of a global loss of travel and trade. The shock to humanity’s collective self-esteem alone will be enough to repeat the effect of the First World War on the ‘Western’ psyche. And it seems inevitably that Promethean values will with too much justice take the blame for the crash. I can’t survive in a society whose degree of liberality retreats even one generation. I’ve lived under closed society conditions and I will do anything necessary to avoid returning to them. So I’ll make the best I can with the current order. And I like this world.

May I ask how long you give the corporate/state bourgeoisie? 2033?

Actually I think you mean Kevin’s second book, Organization Theory. (A rather trivial response to your comment, I know, but I’m in the middle of grading stacks of exams.)

The gas giants are actually mostly hydrogen (included the isotope deuterium, which is another ingredient in fusion) along with helium, methane and some water vapor. There’s no real point in burning hydrogen when you have the ingredients for fusion instead. Fusion ion rockets will likely be the primary form of propulsion that far away from the sun. It should look something like Serenity.

Other than that, most of the moons and asteroids contain large amounts of frozen water. Silicates, volatiles, various kinds of metals . . . pretty much everything in the solar system will be able to exploited profitably and pay for itself, once certain broad prerequisite technologies are there. Cheap solar, 2H/He3 fusion reactors, and more efficient methods of manufacturing carbon nanotubes.

Oh, and it would help if the governments of the world need to stop acting like idiots and stifling this process at every turn. With present technologies, you could conceivable reduce launch costs by 96% by constructing a space elevator. It will cost about 10 billion dollars. Only 6 billion of that is actual construction costs, the other 4 billion will be spent just complying with international regulations.

Once all that bullshit’s out of the way, the process should look something like this:

10 years
- Permanent moon base(s). Start refining He3 from lunar regolith for experiment in new fusion reactor design. Assuming solar displaces other sources of power, including fission, this will supplant deuterium/tritium reactors as the primary focus of fusion research.

REAL WORLD update: A permanent moon base is looking much more practical now the the Indian space probe Chandrayan 1 discovered vast amounts of water ice all over the surface (actually NASA discovered it back in the 1970′s and just forgot to pay attention).

- Exploration and mining of near-earth asteroids, primarily for metals.
- Maybe explore the upper atmosphere of Venus.

20 years
- More asteroid mining.
- Construct long-term floating habitat in the upper atmosphere of Venus. Test sustainability of the internal environment, production of food, production of carbon nanotubes from the atmosphere and the construction of new materials, and test the use of solar sails for return trip to Earth.

30 years
- Expansion and connection of Venusian habitats. Mass colonization, mass production of carbon nanotubes. Stronger than diamond, more flexible than steel, and with properties as a semiconductor, Earth now has a replacement source for FUCKING EVERYTHING! From tiny supercomputers to even tinier, super-efficient batteries, to more efficient solar panels to paper-thin materials that can stop a bullet, to the cables used to construct space elevators, shoes that never wear out, toaster coils that toast the bread perfectly, TV remotes where the numbers don’t wear off the buttons, ceiling fans that don’t vibrate . . . carbon nanotubes fucking solve it all!

- Exploration of Mars and Mercury.

50 years
- Colonization of Mercury. Think of it as a big asteroid, with a silicate surface and iron core. Profitable mining ventures. There’s ice water at the poles, hidden in craters that are permanently shielded from the sun. Permanent settlements are possible, and they could serve as bases for temporary mining excursions at night (which on Mercury lasts 143 days).

- Serious exploration and mining of the asteroid belt. Asteroids can be pull out of their normal orbit and placed in orbit around Venus or Mercury for more efficient mining. Unlike Earth, it won’t make much of a difference if you accidentally drop it on the surface. That could even be done deliberately to facilitate surface mining, or keep the useless rocky junk in orbit and use it to tether a skyhook to reduce launch costs, just as space elevators do on Earth.

60 years
- Start terraforming Mars. Nanites or bacteria are convert compounds on the ground into CFC’s and Nitrogen to thicken the atmosphere and cause a runaway greenhouse effect. CO2 ice sublimates and the feedback loop accelerates. This process could be expedited with the selective use of nuclear weapons to quickly sublimate ice at the poles.

As temperature and pressure rise, water ice is able to become liquid. Oceans form. At this point we’ll need to have some kind of giant shading mirror placed between Mars and the sun to substitute for the planet’s lack of a proper magnetosphere, otherwise solar winds will erode the atmosphere and ionize the water.

To complete the process, insert hardy plant life to convert excess CO2 to oxygen. 50-70 years after the process begins, humans can move in. It will be just like Earth, except colder, with a thinner atmosphere and about a third of the gravity. Plus it’ll be a frontier, so you any punk-ass bitch that crosses ya and afterwords enjoy a nice sex worker and some whiskey.

Yeah, but couldn’t environmental solutions be integrated into that cynical process?

Obama’s solution to the health care crisis played out as a candy grab for insurance companies. Couldn’t a similar strategy be taken with energy companies looking to cash in on a publicly-funded solar project, or that want strict environmental regulations designed to actually save the earth and that have the “side effect” of crippling upstart competitors?

For years, ethanol was touted as a safer and more practical alternative to gasoline. It was promoted by the US government mainly because they figures how to turn it into quarterly profits for some agribusiness giant. It was wasteful, inefficient and did nothing but hurt the poor by contributing to rising food prices, but it’s a fine example of how businesses and government can use the standard wheel-greasing scamolas for environmentalist ends.

It’s a well known fact that global warming proponents tend to accuse the skeptics of being pawns for the oil industry. It’s not so well known that the skeptics often accuse the believers of being funded by the nuclear industry. A strident AWG-skeptic that I once knew (Objectivist, btw) once told me that the reason most American news networks exhibit much more pro-AGW bias than FOX is because the same conglomerates that own them also own companies that receive a lot of government funding for “alternative energy development”, and therefore have just as much at stake in the debate as the oil and gas companies do. Regardless of who’s right in this, AGW proponents are wrong to think that no one on their side has dirty hands, or that big business has nothing to gain from national or global environmental solutions.

And if they can force us to overpay insurance companies for coverage we don’t want, I’m sure they’ll eventually figure out a way to use tax money to overpay GE for constructing and maintaining some wind farms that kill birds and wouldn’t pay for themselves if they were made out of cardboard. All the while making sure that the regulatory regime surrounding this process works to lock in the existing companies, keeps all their patents secure, stifles innovation and looks to everyone like the best possible alternative. That’s not a great solution, for lots of reasons, but it should buy us some time from incinerating ourselves until . . . ya know, we win.

Well, maybe not, but if you’re worried about this, why not work on building an alternative for yourself and your neighbors, to the extent that you can under current conditions? I don’t know how the cost of the components varies in New Zealand, but in the U.S., you can get the basics for building out a partial off-the-grid home power system (which can be expanded out on the margin, to take over more and more capacity, as you get the money and the experience with the system) for a few hundreds of US$, and can set it all up with off-the-shelf parts with the help of a DIY manual or two. (I can point you to some resources, if you’re curious. The notion that off-the-grid home power systems cost tens of thousands of dollars is the result of the Green State trying to insist on all-at-once rather than piecemeal solutions, and, especially, on sending people to professional “certified installers” who charge thousands of dollars for the labor.)

Of course, getting up your own home energy production won’t solve the big problem just on its own. But if you’re worried about losing electricity, it will solve that part of your little end of the problem, and that’s something.

I have no hope at all for any global or national systems to change. But I do have a lot of hope for changing things by getting out of global or national systems. And, perhaps, for helping others along the way to doing the same.

Rational modes of production begin at home….

I broadly agree with most everything you suggest. Generally speaking, with or without technological leaps in green energy, I definitely think it’s the case that decentralizing power production is both do-able for a surprising number of people under present circumstances. And that it’s certainly the best way by far to address peak-oil related concerns.

Soviet Onion: I imagine they’ll like that solution much better than the current environmentalist fixations which, among other things, include glorifying AIDS and pesticide-ban enabled malaria epidemics as forms of “natural population control”

I don’t think it’s fair to describe this kind of anthropocidal stuff as “current environmentalist fixations.” Any more than it would be fair to describe a Ra’s al-Ghul scale mass die-off of humanity as a “current Anarchist fixation,” even though I can think of some doofs who published calls for that sort of thing in Earth First! and other deep-ecology journals while self-identifying as Anarchists. The movement has a lot of different facets and shouldn’t simply be defined by its worst exponents.

Soviet: We’ve only got about a half-billion years before the sun boils the oceans and turns “Mother Earth” back into the lifeless rock she used to be.

Fortunately we apparently only need about 1,000,000 more years before we can all relocate to the Vorlon homeworld, anyway.

This one was merely nightmare fuel, as I said. The theory’s specific predictions are falsified by the simple fact that we are not over the cliff of any crash as yet. And I absolutely agree with you that too many environmental writers show plague spots of wanting the crash to happen, with the wanting an epiphenomenon of a moral distaste for human ambition and human desire. They are attracted to inconvenient truths because they with to see Faustian liberated humanity inconvenienced. I merely wish to point out that the typical libertarian response amounts to a willful blindness to inconvenient facts, something which should alarm anyone with respect for reason and science.

As I’ve mentioned previously I have a suspicion that the environmental crises are actually the götterdämmerung of Atlas Shrugged in disguise. The Objectivists are correct when they claim that our available pool of resources expands as human knowledge and technological capacity improve. A commitment to an industrial society is inevitably a matter of trying to stay on top of a wave- one must discover new resources at a pace equal to one’s use of existing resources. So when I look at the current problems of sustainability and carrying capacity I suspect the problem is that the creative element of the creative-destruction cycle is failing to keep pace. An ecological collapse is not a sign of our failure to be humble before nature but of our failure to be rational in regards to nature’s reality. Failing societies lose the capacity to produce to match their habitual levels of consumption, and the process of trying to hold on to effects without causes sets everything afire with debt and inflation. But this time, the civilisation burning its way out is global, and the consumption could tear through not a national treasury but the biosphere.

I agree intensely that the only way out is forward. Humanity needs to work smarter increase its demands and standards by an order of magnitude if it it going to get past this nasty bottleneck. But I look at the mentality of the social classes who make the relevant decisions and I tremble. The modern corporation has locked itself into a pervasive business model which demands absolute shortsightedness; the culture of management is one which rewards one’s ability to play social games with little regard for competence or anything beyond a narrow instrumental rationality. The ruling class symbolised by Bush, Blair, and Obama, is floating out of touch, and quite willing and able to gamble the world’s future for the sake of staying in the game for one more financial quarter or election cycle. It’s not a matter of individual evil but of a self-referential system of murderously senseless incentives stuck in the position depicted on the first editions of Studies in Mutualist Political Economy.

One could hope that the system will change when it realise that its disfunctionality will come at the cost of its own survival. But I’m not placing my chips on the numbers in accordance with hope, and I don’t think one needs hope to pursue happiness. Interesting times may be a curse but they’re none the less terribly fascinating, and if you’re going over a cliff there’s no reason not to enjoy the free-fall… all… the… way… down. And Hegel was right that it’s only at the end of the cycle that you get to a place with the grand view.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Akoukq5DvAE&feature=PlayList&p=9ACB959B4DF2084A&index=0&playnext=1

~~~~~~

So what other shiny valuables besides He-3 lie beyond the crystal sphere?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYW50F42ss8

As Julian Simon would point out, everything in the universe is a potential resource; the only question is one of discovery. Saepere Aude.

This theory sounds plausible . . . if you assume continued reliance on the same finite sources of fuel from now till eternity. Kind of like the Malthusian/Ehrlichian fore warnings of population crash that assume sustainable grain production per acre never changes. For evidence that contradicts these implicit assertions, see history.

A more likely scenario predicts the rising prices of increasingly scarce, finite resources will shift the comparative advantage to alternative fuel sources already in development, the most practical being the one that lets you mooch juice off that big fusion reactor in the sky. You know, that thing that powers NATURE. Environmentals shouldn’t have a problem with that strategy, however much they disapprove of nuclear reactors being build on earth (even though there’s been a grand total of One large scale nuclear plant disaster in history, and which was more a result of the kind of political and economic systems that people like Jared Diamond are likely to advocate).

Recent developments toward that goal include solar panels incorporating multi-crystalline silicon to reduce cost, and a new ceramic sodium-sulfur battery from MIT that will decrease cost and increase longevity over the existing lead-acid batteries by several orders of magnitude. The latter are set to begin commercial testing in 2011, btw.

In other words, the scientists have finally pulled their heads out of their collective asses and started to seriously consider marketability. Which is good, because in that case they might actually be able to beat the crash to the punch, so that we don’t to suffer declining standards of living for several generations before regaining stride. I figure once household-scale solar setups drop into the single digit thousands, they’ll have no trouble out competing natural gas and liquid dinosaurs. Solar will be especially appealing to the developing world, because societies that don’t already have fully-constructed electricity grids won’t have to incur the additional cost of building ones.

You like economic growth that allows people, especially women, to kick the traditional elites to the curb and seek their own independent lives? This will accelerate the process, and the people in those societies will not be forced to choose between industrializing or sustainability. I imagine they’ll like that solution much better than the current environmentalist fixations which, among other things, include glorifying AIDS and pesticide-ban enabled malaria epidemics as forms of “natural population control”. Seriously, look it up.

Of course, this isn’t a fully sustainable solution either. We’ve only got about a half-billion years before the sun boils the oceans and turns “Mother Earth” back into the lifeless rock she used to be. Long before that happens, though, most of human civilization will have floated out past the asteroid belt in their fleet of O’Neill cylinders on a quest to steal sweet He-3 candy from Roman gods and feed it to their pet stars.

Now this is just nightmare fuel.