Debate Summary - SPS vs. Wind/Solar/Hydrogen

>>First, I think there are many people who now consume less than they did
>>before and are happier for it; often lower consumption means more time
>>for hobbies and family and spiritual development (in part because of
>>less need to work, and in also part from less consumerist distraction
>>and clutter in their lives). See this book for details: _Voluntary
>>Simplicity (rev) : Toward A Way Of Life That
>>Is Outwardly Simple, Inwardly Rich_ by Duane Elgin:
>>http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0688121195?v=glance
>
> Very flowery and feel good, but I am missing the technical signifigance.
> [lots of good points snipped]
> But let me make a suggestion: find an area that most fits in with
> your ideology, and move there for awhile.

I think you make some excellent points (perhaps still disputing whether
TangoMan rebutted my rebuttals enough :-), but here's perhaps where I
haven't been clear. While I take swipes at the current political Power
regimes, I'll readily agree the US has many good aspects and many great
people living in it -- my deeper concern is that Power regimes have over
time helped promote the construction of a world-wide technical
infrastructure which has anti-human tendencies. This is especially
troubling from a democratic point of view since such problems has been
pointed out for decades by people like Amory Lovins and esssentially
ignored or paid lip service in terms of energy production because of
reasons of political (and economic etc.) Power which has trumped the
People's long term interests in that regard IMHO -- and centralization
and monopoly control have been part of the reasons this happened IMHO.
Regardless of regime change, we are still stuck with that infrastructure
worldwide, and it is based in the main on burning oil and using other
industrial processes which are open loop and use ecosphere incompatible
concentrations of toxins etc. (with consequences often ignorable in the
short term because they are done in areas remote to population centers).
Regardless of where I live I can make somewhat better buying decisions,
and those do in a tiny way effect that production system. And the system
is slowly improving --- such as the continued drop in PV prices and
proposals for makign them with less resources etc.

And yes I agree this is due in part to failures of education in critical
thinking, see for example David Goodstein, Vice Provost of CalTech on
the collapse of the PhD pyramid scheme which drives science education in
the USA and stated to fail in the 1970s and, in his words:
http://www.house.gov/science/goodstein_04-01.htm
"The problem, to reiterate, is that science education in America is
designed to select a small group of elite scientists. An unintended but
inevitable side effect is that everyone else is left out. As a
consequence of that, 20,000 American high schools lack a single
qualified physics teacher, half the math classes in American schools are
taught by people who lack the qualifications to teach them, and
companies will increasingly find themselves without the technical
competence they need at all levels from the shop floor to the executive
suite."

The Earth can be seen pretty much as a vast machine these days -- there
really is no where you can go to escape that machine (for example,
nuclear weapons are still a menacing threat everywhere even without the
guaranteed two hour delivery promise.) Realistically, even living in a
remote area, if the nukes go off (or more likely, out of control
bioweapons), we're all in for a lot of unpleasant times, to put it
mildly; short of that, creeping fascism (meaning a merger of business
and government) is also a bad potential worry (and again, being in a
remote area is little protection if you use the internet to communicate
and have gone on record as saying or even copying something even years
back -- I'm sure RIAA SWAT teams will use SUVs :-). Sure people can try
to live alone in a wilderness, but according to an article about one
person who does it, this guy said "it takes a village to live in the
wilderness" as there are very many skills involved and you also need
backup for when you make a mistake or get hurt. And how is that village
going to protect you against genetically engineered air-dispersed
bioweapons (unless it has an advanced technical infrastructure)? So,
we're pretty much kind-of all in this together.

When I was first interested in space habitats I saw that as a potential
escape from the nuclear peril etc. (and still think they might in some
cases serve as refugia) but while war etc. remains an active peril [and
even more so now for anybody living in a country that has declared a
policy of preventive warfare and so essentially has made itself look
politically to the rest of the world like a rabid dog], in general I am
now more concerned now about "The Singularity"
http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~phoenix/vinge/vinge-sing.html
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/kurzweil_singularity/kurzweil_singularity_index.html
and the consequences of singularity type technology overwhelming older
style conventional space habitats (e.g. a small PV powered
self-replicating nanotech weapon offshoot which disperses through the
solar system and destroys all habitats, perhaps as a precursor to a wave
of agressive computationally based life forms derived from DARPA work).
Oh -- maybe that was like a plot of a recent book already (_Prey_)?
http://www.foresight.org/Updates/Update51/Update51.3.html

Obviously one can try to make this into an arms race etc (habitats with
active nanotech defenses against such killer mites etc.) -- but I'd
rather transcend an arms race driven by notions of low productivity and
scarcity -- or at least, keep it from replicating itself in space. So,
I'm trying to help turn a finite game of war playing into an infinite
game of human etc. survival, transcendence, or whatever. I think one of
the best ways for me to prevent all those trillions of beautiful O'Neill
style conventional space habitats from being turned into smart dust
against their wishes is to try preventatively to engage somewhat in
reducing tensions in this world by rethinking the industrial
infrastructure to one more accomodating of human needs for everyone on
this planet. Still, there remains inherent conflicts between people and
even within people -- but we can at least try to reduce them to more
manageable levels. And there will eventually be resource conflicts in
space...

So in that sense, I think the fate of the planet very directly effects
whether we get into space in a sustainable way based on some positive
vision of society vs. a short lived militarized approach that blows
itself up fairly quickly. Luckily, there is no big conflict since the
same sorts of techology that can make life on Earth more pleasant (and
thus in part also reduce tensions that lead people to support or at
least ignore terrorists) can also make space habitats more achievable,
such as our garden simulator (one needs to grow food in space, which
motivated me to work on it, as well as ecological reasons and
decentralization/security reasons),
http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/
(check out the space habitat backdrop in the extras package)
or other ideas:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/

Clearly SPSs is also being billed as being in that direction. In a
peaceful world with a high degree of trust, and used for sending power
nearby to factories, they probably are (for example the big centralized
fusion plant and industrial complex on the ground in Hogan's _Voyage
from Yesteryear_ did not pose a big problem in that culture of freedom).

Still, I've still seen that consuming less can mean less time needs to
be spent working directly for the global machine, which leaves more time
for other (often more pleasant or at least more self directed)
activities hopefully of technical significance... :-) What it comes down
to in a sense is priorities. People can have different and deeper
policies of engagement and related priorities -- I think being an
engineer at STMicroelectronics workign on this PV breakthrough (even if
it meant driving an SUV to work :-) would be a good thing:
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/biztech/10/02/solar.cells.reut/
If I had to do it all over again, I'd be tempted to study materials
science and work on PV etc. to address the issues TangoMan raises.
Problem is most engineers aren't doing stuff like that (yet)...

--Paul Fernhout