Letters to the Editor

• It's a bit simplistic, but could be true nonetheless...

  [Read the article: Peak oil explains lack of UFOs]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  Many years ago, when I was a young engineering student, and reading books by the futurists - Timothy Leary, Robert Anton Wilson, etc, my favorite for a time was Buckminster Fuller. Now, he had some wacked out ideas, like the one that homo sapiens actually evolved in Asia, with dolphin-like sea mammals as ancestors. Or the fact that he ate steak almost every dinner - as he put it, cows were put there to take all that grain and vegetable matter, and condense it into a high protein concentrate for people to eat. Given the things we've figured out since the 60's... errr, No.

  But, one thing he did say that I've always thought was quite brilliant, is that the earth is basically a womb for the human race. Our society is developing here, in a tiny little sliver of atmosphere and earth (the earth is 4000 miles in diameter covered with an atmosphere about 100 miles thick, we can basically live from around 1 mile down to about 2 miles high) with all the things we need to survive, grow, and learn to fend for ourselves. There are (were?) more than enough of all the fundamental elements for us to learn everything we need to know about chemistry and materials science, there is (was?) more than enough energy concentrated over millions of years and made easily available to us while we grow up, and there is a complex (but not too complex) solar system around us, so that we can look out from our womb and figure out all the basic building blocks of physics that we need to know in order to take our first steps away from home.

  But the key point here is that it's just a temporary home... just enough resources for an intelligent species to get on its feat and then step out into the universe. Once you take that step, well, consider that the entire earth is about .00001% of the mass (and energy) of the solar system. And our solar system circles one of billions of stars in our galaxy. One of Fuller's biggest fears is that we would waste our limited gestation period by fighting endless wars and burning through all the easy to reach materials and energy we had available without taking the steps to ensure our continued survival. In these days, not just of peak oil, but also of increasingly scarce resources like water, copper (all the base metals, really), and possibly even food, his words are looking more and more prescient. Fuller was a big believer in the idea that design and technology could always do more with less, but even he knew that we would eventually reach a point where our growing demands would be too much for the narrow little slice of heaven where we were born.

  Maybe the reason there is no one else around is that all the other intelligent life that has developed has been just as short sighted as we are. Maybe it's a huge trick of evolution... any force that selects for short term reproduction and survivability creates beings that are, as a society, incapable of the long term planning it takes to expand out into the universe.

  I'm hoping we can buck that trend, but the things I see on the television or read in the papers don't make me optimistic.

  Permalink Tuesday, May 6, 2008 03:42 PM