First Novel in 10 Years
State of Fear, by Michael Crichton
I have just finished the first novel I have read in…in I don’t know how long. In ten years or so. I generally just stick to non-fiction. Good books are hard to come by in The Philippines. Sure there are some good book stores in Manila, but there is no Barnes & Nobles, no Borders Books in Cagayan de Oro. I order my books about a dozen at a time from Amazon and then wait about 6 weeks for them to arrive. Some of my friends tell me I have a very impressive collection of books. I wish I had brought more from my State-side collection.
State of Fear, by Michael Crichton, is an unusually down to earth and factual book (for him) that centers around the issue of “Global Warming”, but contains an exciting plot and I just could not put the book down for the last couple of hundred pages, I would recommend this book to anyone who is concerned about Global Warming and man-made increases in carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere and how we are desecrating our planet.
I would bet you Michael Crichton came close to fainting or having a heart attack, or at least shed some tears of ironic agony when Al Gore won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his stance on Climate Change and Global Warming.
State of Fear demeans what virtually everyone believes in, Global Warming, to be nothing more than fear-mongering and population control. The Earth is 5 billion years old and has been changing constantly all that time, colder, warmer, colder, warmer. I had to use a magnifying glass to read some of his footnotes (I need some new lenses for my glasses), but all significant points are well documented.
I disagree on two points he made in his “Author’s Message” or prologue at the end of the book. First he seems to think there will be less people living on this planet 100 years from now than there are today, and I think there will be 4 to 10 times as many people living on this planet 100 years from now (that’s 24 to 60 billion people). The second point is he seems to think people will use 2 to 3 times as much energy 100 years from now as they do today, and I think they will use 100 to 1000 times as much energy as they do today. That means we’ll need between 400 and 100,000 times as much energy as we use today. Where will that come from?
I believe that in the next twenty to thirty years we will be able to master fusion, and the concern for renewable, and non-polluting energy sources will go away, and that we’ll be producing tons of kilograms of anti-matter per year. That within 50 years you’ll be able to buy an anti-matter fuel cell, no bigger than C sized cell battery, that you can put in your personal transportation vehicle and it will power it for 10 to 20 years, or even take you to The Moon or To Mars and back to visit your auntie. The trip to Mars would only take a couple of days if you accelerated at 1.0 G for half the trip and decelerated by 1.0 G for the 2nd half of the trip. You could visit the moon for a business meeting and be back the same day.
I also think that when nearly unlimited power becomes available through fusion and the creation of anti-matter that humans will quickly colonize Mars and the asteroid belt that lies between Mars and Jupiter. There’s about one Earth mass there, all accessible, whereas on Earth, mankind, on average uses less than one meter of the surface. That means there’s about a million times as many materials available and accessible in the asteroid belt as there are currently on this planet. There’s also approximately one Earth mass at both the leading and trailing Lagrange points of Jupiter. That means that the asteroid belt and the Lagrange points of Jupiter will be able to support 2.4 trillion to 6 trillion people, at a minimum.
I believe that within 150 years from now more people will be born off this planet than have ever been born on this planet through all time.
The important part of studying our environment here today on Earth is not to conserve it as it is but to be able to create sustainable Earth-like environments for space colonies. Some colonies may be water rich with islands and white-sanded beaches. Others might be garden like. But no matter what form they take, we do need to study our environment here on Earth, not to protect it, because to think that we can control the Earth’s climate is currently beyond our ability and a fallacy, but we can shape our immediate environment, and we have been doing this for at least 10,000 years, and we need to learn how to create space colonies that are environmentally sound, before we can begin launching them to other stars, for some of those trips may take decades, or centuries.
I also expect that in the next 50 years life expectancy will begin to increase at a faster rate than we age and that some people will cease to die. Of course there will always be accidents where people are killed, but barring such, people will develop the technology to regenerate ourselves through nano-technology and through genetic engineering, and that with the combined technologies of fusion, and advances in life expectancy, the people in self-sustainable space colonies that set out for other stars, where large planets are detected and large asteroid fields are expected to lie, that within 10,000 years humanity will expand to occupy the entire Milkyway Galaxy, and I also think that some of the youngest people alive today will live to see that day.
Okay, so I read a lot of books and I’m an optimist, and a Fermi Paradoxalist. I may be “un poquito loco” (a little bit crazy) but i am not stupid. For 200 years the Malthusians have been claiming we are running out of resources and woe be unto us, and I think anyone who boards that Malthusian train are either stupid or chronic pessimists. The World is only getting better, not in spite of humans but because of humans. Sure, we’ve made some minor mistakes, like banning foreign aid to countries that used DDT, which resulted in over 50 million deaths as a result of malaria, more people than Hitler killed, but we are getting better at science, not worse.
I am a believer in the Technological Singularity. If you are over 60, don’t worry about it, it probably will not effect your life much, but if you are 25 years old or younger, you should begin to think of your life is as one that may last forever. If you embrace this idea, then very likely it will come true.
March 28th, 2008 at 11:36
Interesting read, especially that the articles I’ve been working on the past weeks have been about the eco-friendly initiatives of multinational companies.
Yes, I completely agree with you that our energy demands in the future will lessen drastically; huge strides have been made by science and even consumers are starting to feel the effects. (One example, albeit minuscule in the grand scheme of things, is Intel’s Core 2 Duos — these CPU’s consumer 40% less power than the processors two years back.)
I also read that there are 45nm processor in the works (one has already been tested by a PC hardware site) so I think that yes, in the future, energy consumption WILL decrease. Either that, or God help us.
On the pessimistic side, I still wonder what will happen when fossil fuel runs out — the Middle East will lose its most valuable commodity and given the state that some factions in that region are hostile to the US (and most of the world), I don’t know. The whole scenario reminds me of the plot of a near-future-themed videogame.
Live forever? I’ll pass. Even the elves of Tolkien’s Eressea get tired and take a Hawaiian vacation in the Halls of Mandos and get away from mortal life for a time. Hard business, being an elf.
Good article! I enjoyed reading it. I’ll be visiting the links presented when I have more free time.
March 28th, 2008 at 12:20
While I appreciate the feedback, our energy demands will do nothing but skyrocket. 20,000 years ago, humans only used the energy of what they could consume and burn in their bodies. Then along came the metal ages and, the bronze and iron ages and fuel consumption, in the civilized world went ballistic.
Sure, the power per processor power has gone down but that’s because of scale. The fastest processor would be nearly invisible, would use hardly any energy and would be many times more powerful in computation as anything we have today. That’s not the energy I’m talking about. Today, people use jets to fly around the World. More and more people every year. There are more and more personal vehicles on the road each year. I don’t think we’ll run out of fossil fuels, just like we haven’t run out of whale oil, but like whale oil, fossil fuels will become a thing of the past. We know the physics of fusion. Containment, catalyst, and fuel. If we have to build a facility the size of Rhode Island to do it, then we will. But to transport the energy, we need to convert it to anti-matter.
I see the day when a person might consume 10 Giga-watts just to go visit his auntie on the moon for the weekend, and think nothing of it.
Energy consumption per individual is on an exponential scale. The sooner this happens and we can shut down the oil wells of the mid-East, the sooner peace will come to this World.
As for living forever, I think yes, we may all get tired of life at some point, but I think there’lll come a point where we’ll be able to say, I’m currently bored with all my friends, put me in storage and wake me in 10 years, so that I can awake to a very different and more exciting world.
March 28th, 2008 at 14:07
“and I think they will use 100 to 1000 times as much energy as they do today”
I missed reading that.
The wonders of coffee.
Technology rapidly overtaking the need for oil >>> very nice comforting thought. I never thought of that. Difficult but in no way impossible.
About the last paragraph in your reply, I have two words: Vanilla Sky. I don’t know if you will like it, but it’s very similar to your vision of the future.
March 31st, 2008 at 10:01
Nearly 50 years ago, in 1959, Freeman Dyson speculated in “Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infra-Red Radiation” that a really advanced civilization would surround their own sun with a sphere in order to capture all the energy of their sun, because their energy needs would become so great. SETI has actually looked for signature radiation that such spheres would radiate.
Actually, I believe that as the human population rises into the hundreds of billions, and human evolution accelerates; as nano-technology develops and man and machine, man and computer, begin to merge, that we will within just a few hundred years become creatures that are no longer human.
That is, if we survive our own technology, and don’t create a barren world and wipe ourselves out, that we will merge with our technology and cease to be human anyway.