Letters to the Editor
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"The real threat, to my mind, is not that there won't be progress, but that we will screw up in some appalling, catastrophic way as we rush to apply our new powers."
You sound like Bill Joy:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html
Krugman, uber-Statist, if an all-powerful Government can't do it, nothing can.
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Running out
Yes but. You don't see too much real improvement resulting from Technology. Take flying. It actually takes very much longer to fly between two cities in the US now than it did 20 years ago. Planes actually fly slower! Am I really better off if I can order what I can't afford over the computer as opposed to when it was over the phone? Might we be seeing a change without an improvement? Yes, maybe I get a better price by not paying sales tax, but is that an improvement? Yes cable is digital making all TVs obsolete and MS Word has a nice blue back ground, but so what? What good is 80 channels of Republican TV? In the past real people owned things, now just Republican supporting corporations do. An old boss of mine once made the observation that computers made it possible for us to do better what we never had to do before. I fear that Paul is all too correct.
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It's not just energy...
The world is not running out of oil... It's just reflecting it's true market price. But our problems are not just energy... our food and water sources are at risk (our fisheries are being depleted). The easiest solution is to simply cut our waste of the world's natural resources. We need to be less liberal and more conservative in our lives and not compete with the Chinese for profligacy.
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Our energy dilemma could be solved in ten years, if...
...a tenth of what this nation spends on war were instead spent on updating our infrastructure and developing a hydrogen based energy grid.
But that would force out the old moneyed interests, so firmly entrenched in the war industries, and allow far too many newcomers to share in their power.
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Taxol, Titanium joints, 3-D color MRI's, gene therapy
Non ferromagnetic aircraft engine parts, Kevlar, bloostream cameras, synthetic blood, tunneling electron microscopes, whole earth weather simulation computers, carbon nanotubes, fiber optic cables, DNA sequencing, cloning, manmade diamonds, GPS.
Gee I could on. Yeah I guess nothing's happened in the last 50 years. You're right.
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Never any shortage of breathless techno-hubris.
"But I also think Krugman is underestimating the likely consequences of the incredible advances that scientists have made in just the last ten or fifteen years in understanding and manipulating the building blocks of both matter and life itself. Synthetic biology and nanotechnology, alone, will offer humanity almost unlimited power to rebuild nature and the physical world."
Nuclear power will be too cheap to meter!
You'll be taking vacations on the Moon!
There is a Flying Car in your future!
Robots and automation will produce the twenty-hour work week!
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Fund Research
People often talk about "scientific progress" as if it falls from the sky. Progress in science requires long term funding. It requires hiring scientists and paying them to work on the problem over years. It doesn't just "appear".
Unfortunately, we're not that great at funding science. Even when we have federally funded research, it's often short term - if it doesn't show results in a year or two, it's yanked away and given to someone else. A lot of research requires long term commitments. Companies used to do more long term research, but now it's all about short term profits, raising the stock price. It's just not profitable to invest in long term research that might or might not pay off.
(And I'll briefly mention the myth that Americans don't study science. There are lots of American scientists, but a lot of them are giving up, because they're tired of being laid off so often.)
If we want scientific progress, we've got to fund it.
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Limits and opportunities
There is lots of room for technological change and improvement-- from computers to biotech to new materials, things are and will continue to be different. But there are limits-- the basics of energy sources are not going to change, anymore than we're going to re-write the laws of thermodynamics. Faster aircraft are just not efficient(the sweet spot for speed, size and altitude was known a long time ago and the aerodynamics haven't changed). No energy source we've found matches conventional oil for ease of shipment, energy density and ER/EI.
The big improvements tend to be in areas we don't anticipate-- it's easy to imagine bigger, faster cars and planes (even flying cars), large-scale space travel and cheaper and cheaper energy (fusion power)-- none of which we have or, it seems, ever will have. But no-one (not even figures in the industry) anticipated personal computing or the net or easy sequencing and alteration of DNA. So will we have great advances? Almost for certain. But will they solve our basic problems of energy supply and climate change? Very doubtful-- and relying on magical new sources of energy to power a hydrogen energy system is dreaming in technicolor.
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Not sure "short of tricks" is the problem
I remember reading an article a couple years back (in Wired, I think) about the coming energy crisis, and how the big problem was that there wasn't any source of energy that could do all of what oil is doing for us now. I remember thinking at the time, "So what? If we get all the needs covered using multiple sources, rather than just one, that works, too." We already know that some areas are better than others for solar, hydro, and wind power. Fine. We can use those where they work, and, uh, something else where they don't.
The main problem, as I see it, is that we're not taking it seriously as far as investment is concerned. Over time, the capacity of solar cells has increased, making them workable in places they weren't before, and increasing their benefits in places they were in use already. And this is just with the piddling investment from government and private industry.
Believe it or not, you can solve some problems by throwing money at them. It's hard to say what we'd come up with, and how fast, if we started putting serious R&D money into alternative fuels research. Fact is, if I were the CEO of Exxon (which I'm sooooo not), I'd be pouring money into researching hydrogen, or anything else that looks promising. Why? They already have the gas stations and other infrastructure. If they develop the technology, they can license it to other companies. They can convert gradually (gas station > gas/hydro station > hydro station). Besides, think about what happens to companies when their main product becomes obsolete. The ones that live on embrace the new technology (think Sony) and survive. The others fade into oblivion (think railroads).