In a rush to convince the public that natural gas is a key energy solution, even a fuel of the future (or at least a long-term stopgap between dirtier fossil fuels and full-fledged clean energy) the industry cut more than a few corners, we're now finding out. The industry claimed that it contaminated no water supplies with its fracking practices, but this was later proven untrue. They claimed existing regulations on the industry were sound, and its drilling operations were safe -- and then citizens in nearby towns found themselves pouring flammable water out of the tap.
Now, after being roundly criticized for relying too much on industry-friendly consulting services to obtain its information, the U.S. Geological Survey has slashed its estimate for how much natural gas is recoverable in the nation's largest untapped store by 80%. This is sure to send a ripple through the industry, as the purported abundance of the fuel was a key part of its appeal.
Federal geologists published new estimates this week for the amount of natural gas that exists in a giant rock formation known as the Marcellus Shale, which stretches from New York to Virginia. The shale formation has about 84 trillion cubic feet of undiscovered, technically recoverable natural gas, according to the report from the United States Geological Survey. This is drastically lower than the 410 trillion cubic feet that was published earlier this year by the federal Energy Information Administration.
As a result, the Energy Information Administration, which is responsible for quantifying oil and gas supplies, has said it will slash its official estimate for the Marcellus Shale by nearly 80 percent, a move that is likely to generate new questions about how the agency calculates its estimates and why it was so far off in its projections.
This is the latest in a series of blows to the natural gas industry -- it now seems to be the case that it was over-inflating estimates in order to attract investment, and over-stating the reliability of its safety procedures to sell the public on its 'cleaner' image. It should also be noted that the author of this Times piece, Ian Urbina, should be lauded for his diligent work in clearing the air on the nat gas industry's endeavors. Propublica and the Oil Drum have also done good work here, the fruits of which are being felt in the USGS's 'reassessing' its estimates.
I didn’t think it was possible, but my admiration for Martin Luther King, Jr., grew even stronger these past days.
As I headed to jail as part of the first wave of what is turning into the biggest civil disobedience action in the environmental movement for many years, I had the vague idea that I would write something. Not an epic like King's “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” but at least, you know, a blog post. Or a tweet.
But frankly, I wasn’t up to it. The police, surprised by how many people turned out on the first day of two weeks of protests at the White House, decided to teach us a lesson. As they told our legal team, they wanted to deter anyone else from coming -- and so with our first crew they were… kind of harsh.
We spent three days in D.C.’s Central Cell Block, which is exactly as much fun as it sounds like it might be. You lie on a metal rack with no mattress or bedding and sweat in the high heat; the din is incessant; there’s one baloney sandwich with a cup of water every 12 hours.
I didn’t have a pencil -- they wouldn’t even let me keep my wedding ring -- but more important, I didn’t have the peace of mind to write something. It’s only now, out 12 hours and with a good night’s sleep under my belt, that I’m able to think straight. And so, as I said, I’ll go to this weekend’s big celebrations for the opening of the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial on the Washington Mall with even more respect for his calm power.
Preacher, speaker, writer under fire, but also tactician. He really understood the power of nonviolence, a power we’ve experienced in the last few days. When the police cracked down on us, the publicity it produced cemented two of the main purposes of our protest:
First, it made Keystone XL -- the new, 1,700-mile-long pipeline we’re trying to block that will vastly increase the flow of “dirty” tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada, to the Gulf of Mexico -- into a national issue. A few months ago, it was mainly people along the route of the prospective pipeline who were organizing against it. (And with good reason: tar sands mining has already wrecked huge swaths of native land in Alberta, and endangers farms, wild areas, and aquifers all along its prospective route.)
Now, however, people are coming to understand -- as we hoped our demonstrations would highlight -- that it poses a danger to the whole planet as well. After all, it’s the Earth’s second largest pool of carbon, and hence the second-largest potential source of global warming gases after the oil fields of Saudi Arabia. We’ve already plumbed those Saudi deserts. Now the question is: Will we do the same to the boreal forests of Canada. As NASA climatologist James Hansen has made all too clear, if we do so it’s “essentially game over for the climate.” That message is getting through. Witness the incredibly strong New York Times editorial opposing the building of the pipeline that I was handed on our release from jail.
Second, being arrested in front of the White House helped make it clearer that President Obama should be the focus of anti-pipeline activism. For once Congress isn’t in the picture. The situation couldn’t be simpler: the president, and the president alone, has the power either to sign the permit that would take the pipeline through the Midwest and down to Texas (with the usual set of disastrous oil spills to come) or block it.
Barack Obama has the power to stop it and no one in Congress or elsewhere can prevent him from doing so. That means -- and again, it couldn’t be simpler -- that the Keystone XL decision is the biggest environmental test for him between now and the next election. If he decides to stand up to the power of big oil, it will send a jolt through his political base, reminding the presently discouraged exactly why they were so enthused in 2008.
That’s why many of us were wearing our old campaign buttons when we went into the paddy wagon. We’d like to remember -- and like the White House to remember, too -- just why we knocked on all those doors.
But as Dr. King might have predicted, the message went deeper. As people gather in Washington for this weekend’s dedication of his monument, most will be talking about him as a great orator, a great moral leader. And of course he was that, but it’s easily forgotten what a great strategist he was as well, because he understood just how powerful a weapon nonviolence can be.
The police, who trust the logic of force, never quite seem to get this. When they arrested our group of 70 or so on the first day of our demonstrations, they decided to teach us a lesson by keeping us locked up extra long -- strong treatment for a group of people peacefully standing on a sidewalk.
No surprise, it didn’t work. The next day an even bigger crowd showed up -- and now, there are throngs of people who have signed up to be arrested every day until the protests end on September 3rd. Not only that, a judge threw out the charges against our first group, and so the police have backed off. For the moment, anyway, they’re not actually sending more protesters to jail, just booking and fining them.
And so the busload of ranchers coming from Nebraska, and the bio-fueled RV with the giant logo heading in from East Texas, and the flight of grandmothers arriving from Montana, and the tribal chiefs, and union leaders, and everyone else will keep pouring into D.C. We’ll all, I imagine, stop and pay tribute to Dr. King before or after we get arrested; it’s his lead, after all, that we’re following.
Our part in the weekend’s celebration is to act as a kind of living tribute. While people are up on the mall at the monument, we’ll be in the front of the White House, wearing handcuffs, making clear that civil disobedience is not just history in America.
We may not be facing the same dangers Dr. King did, but we’re getting some small sense of the kind of courage he and the rest of the civil rights movement had to display in their day -- the courage to put your body where your beliefs are. It feels good.
SUBHEAD: Most junior investment bankers feel ‘disappointment’ with their measly pay. Ahhh - poor things.
By Max Abelson on 25 August 2011 for Bloomberg News -
(http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-25/most-junior-bankers-feel-disappointment-with-pay-aspire-to-buyout-jobs.html)Image above: Shia LaBeouf Michael Douglas from poster for 2010's "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps". From (http://www.aurstreet.com/aur/movies-box/wall-street-money-sleeps).
Junior investment bankers to Wall Street: Take this job and shove it.
While young bankers said they enjoy their jobs, most are dissatisfied with pay and hope to leave the field, with almost 60 percent saying they want to work in private equity, according to a survey released yesterday by headhunting firm Capstone Partnership.
“It’s been a rough couple of years for them,” Rik Kopelan, managing partner at New York-based Capstone, said in a phone interview. “Fewer and fewer plan on making it a career, because they’re working these long hours and not getting paid as well as they were.”
One investment banker who participated in the survey described a breach of the “tacit understanding” that he or she would be well compensated. Considering “the sacrifice I make in my personal life (100-hour work weeks, canceled vacations, etc.), this business has to be more rewarding,” the person said, according to Capstone.
That banker isn’t alone. Of about 2,000 associates and vice presidents in their first three years, 67 percent identified “disappointment with compensation” as one of the biggest reasons to leave the field. Almost the same percentage described their jobs as “satisfactory,” according to Kopelan.
More than 80 percent said they don’t believe that their compensation is mainly predicated on performance. Instead, Kopelan said, young investment bankers worry that it’s “based on the profitability of the firm, based on how powerful the group heads were, based on capricious things.”
Last year, according to New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, Wall Street paid out $20.8 billion in cash bonuses, instead of the $22.5 billion a year earlier.
Kopelan said that his firm has recently placed people at Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Barclays Plc and UBS AG.
Investment Banker BloodbathBy Gavin Finch & Liam Vaughan on 24 August 2011 for Bloomberg -
(http://finance.yahoo.com/news/European-Bank-Job-Bloodbath-bloomberg-2132326180.html)
Swiss bank UBS decision to cut 5 percent of its workforce brings to more than 40,000 the number of jobs cut by European banks in the past month as the region’s worsening sovereign debt crisis crimps trading revenue.
UBS, Switzerland’s biggest bank, said yesterday it will eliminate 3,500 jobs, mainly from its investment bank. It follows HSBC Holdings Plc (HSBA), which announced 30,000 cuts on Aug. 1, Barclays Plc (BARC), which is cutting headcount by 3,000, and Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc (RBS), which is eliminating 2,000 posts. Credit Suisse Group AG (CSGN) announced 2,000 reductions on July 28.
European banks are slashing jobs this year six times faster than their U.S. peers, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, as concerns about the creditworthiness of Italy, Spain and France roil financial markets and reduce income from fixed- income trading, stock and bond underwriting as well as mergers and acquisitions. Financial firms are also cutting costs as regulators force banks to hold more and better quality capital to withstand future shocks.
“It’s a bloodbath, and I expect things to get worse before they get better,” said Jonathan Evans, chairman of executive- search firm Sammons Associates in London. “I cannot see a lot of those who have lost their jobs getting re-employed. Regardless of how good someone is, no one wants to talk about hiring. Life will be very difficult for two or three years.”
The 46-member Bloomberg Europe Banks and Financial Services Index has fallen 31 percent this year. RBS tumbled 47 percent, Barclays 45 percent and France’s Societe Generale (GLE) SA 48 percent.
RBS, Barclays
Credit Suisse and UBS both reported a 71 percent drop in investment-banking earnings in the second quarter. Revenue at Edinburgh-based RBS’s securities unit dropped 35 percent in the period, while London-based Barclays Capital posted a 27 percent decline in pretax profit.
“Some job cuts will be done by all banks” with investment banking units, said Stefano Girola, a fund manager at Albertini Syz & Co. in Milan, who helps manage about 3 billion euros ($4.3 billion). “Business volumes are poor, especially in equity and corporate bonds divisions.”
European banks are cutting jobs at the fastest rate since the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. in 2008, eliminating about 67,000 roles so far this year, according to Bloomberg data. U.K. banks account for about 50,000 of those reductions. U.S. lenders announced about 10,500 cuts in the same period, the data show.
Far Fewer Bankers
A lot of the cuts are likely to be permanent, according to Stephane Rambosson, managing partner at executive search firm Veni Partners in London.
“Returns will continue to fall and costs on revenue have just exploded,” Rambosson said. “Somehow banks have to make the equation work. In the long term, there will be far fewer bankers than there were.”
Banks will be forced to continue to cut costs as they struggle to increase revenue amid tougher regulation, according to an Aug. 17 report by KPMG LLP.
The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision will require lenders to more than triple the core reserves they must hold to protect themselves from insolvency by 2019. Under Basel III, banks will be obliged to hold core Tier 1 capital equivalent to 7 percent of their risk-weighted assets, compared with 2 percent under the previous international rules.
Fundamental Restructuring
“We’re looking at a fundamental restructuring of banking,” said David Sayer, global head of retail banking at KPMG in London. “Banks have to hold far more capital and more of it in liquidity, which doesn’t generate a return. This means the cost of doing business is higher, leading banks to think about where they’ll make money and pulling out of countries and areas where they won’t.”
UniCredit SpA (UCG) this week lowered its growth forecasts for the 17-nation euro region for this year and next. The euro area will expand 1.7 percent this year and 1 percent in 2012, Unicredit chief euro zone economist Marco Valli said in a note yesterday. That compares with a previous prediction of 2.1 percent growth in 2011 and 1.7 percent in 2012.
“The banking industry overall is clearly re-shaping its cost base,” said Andrew Gray, banking leader at accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP in London. “We may well see some further losses of jobs over the course of the second half of 2011. Exactly where is impossible to say, but we will see some further cuts from other institutions.”
The orbiters are silent now, waiting for the last awkward journey that will take them to the museums that will warehouse the grandest of our civilization’s failed dreams. There will be no countdown, no pillar of flame to punch them through the atmosphere and send them whipping around the planet at orbital speeds. All of that is over.
In Houston, the same silence creeps through rooms where technicians once huddled over computer screens as voices from space crackled over loudspeakers. The screens are black now, the mission control rooms empty, and most of the staff have already gotten their pink slips.
On the Florida coast, where rusting gantries creak in the wind and bats flutter in cavernous buildings raised for the sake of a very different kind of flight, another set of lauch pads sinks slowly into their new career as postindustrial ruins.
There are still rockets lifting off elsewhere, to be sure, adding to the globe’s collection of satellites and orbiting space junk. The International Space Station still wheels through the sky, visited at intervals by elderly Soyuz capsules, counting down the days and the missions until its scheduled deorbiting in 2016.
In America, a few big corporations have manned space projects on the drawing boards, angling for whatever federal funding survives the next few rounds of our national bankruptcy proceedings, and a few billionaires here and elsewhere are building hobby spacecraft in roughly the same spirit that inspired their Gilded Age equivalents to maintain luxury yachts and thoroughbred stables.
Still, something has shifted.
A tide that was expected to flow for generations and centuries to come has peaked and begun to ebb. There will still be rockets surging up from their launch pads for years or decades to come, and some few of them will have human beings on board, but the momentum is gone. It’s time to start coming to terms with the winding down of the age of space.
Ironically, one of the best pieces of evidence for that was the shrill reception given to an article in The Economist announcing The End of the Space Age.
The irony was particularly delicious in that The Economist is a British periodical, and Britain has already been through its own retreat from space. During the first half of the 20th century, the British Interplanetary Society was among the most prestigious groups calling for manned space missions, but dreams of a British presence in space collapsed around the same time as Britain’s empire and industrial economy did.
It’s hard to miss the schadenfreude in The Economist’s editorial stance, but it was even harder to overlook the bluster and denial splashed across the blogosphere in its wake.
A little perspective might be useful here. When the space shuttle first came off the drawing boards, the much-repeated theory was that it would be the first of a new breed of spacecraft that would make a flight from Cape Canaveral to orbit as commonplace as a flight from New York to Chicago.
The next generation would swap out the shuttle’s disposable fuel tank and solid-fuel boosters for a fully reusable first stage that would take a shuttle-equivalent most of the way into orbit, then come back to Earth under its own power and get refueled for the next launch.
Further down the road, but already in the concept phase, were spaceplanes that could take off from an ordinary runway and use standard jet engines to get to 50,000 feet or so, where rocket engines would cut in for the leap to orbit. Single-use rockets? In the minds of the space-savvy, they were already as outdated as Model T Fords.
Yet here we are in 2011, the space shuttle program is over, the replacements weren’t built, and for the five years of scheduled life the International Space Station has left, its crews will be getting there via the 1960s-era technology of Soyuz space capsules atop single-use rockets.
As for the rest of the steps toward space everyone in the 1960s assumed we would have taken by now—the permanent space stations, the base on the Moon, the manned missions to Mars, and the rest of it—only the most hardcore space fans talk about them any more, and let’s not even discuss their chances of getting significant funding this side of the twelfth of never.
Mind you, I’m not cheering. Though I realized some years ago that humanity isn’t going to the stars—not now, not in the lifetime of our species—the end of the shuttle program with no replacement in sight still hit me like a body blow. It’s not just a generational thing, though it’s partly that; another large part of it was growing up where and when I did.
By that I don’t just mean in the United States in the middle decades of the last century, but specifically in the triumphant years between John Glenn’s first orbital flight and Neil Armstrong’s final step onto lunar soil, in a suburb south of Seattle where every third family or so had a father who worked in the aerospace industry.
Yes, I remember exactly where I was sitting and what was happening the moment that Walter Cronkite told the world that Apollo 11 had just landed on the Moon.
You didn’t grow up as a geeky, intellectual kid in that sort of setting without falling in love with space.
Of course it didn’t hurt that the media was filled to the bursting point with space travel—turn on the tube any evening during my childhood, and if you didn’t get Lost In Space or Star Trek you’d probably catch The Invaders or My Favorite Martian—and children’s books were no different; among my favorites early on was Ronnie Rocket and Suzie Saucer, and I went from there to The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet, The Spaceship Under the Apple Tree—well, you get the picture. (I won’t even get into science fiction here; that’s a subject that deserves an entire post to itself.)
Toys?
The G.I. Joe accessory I treasured most in those days was a plastic Mercury space capsule with space suit to match; I also played with Major Matt Mason, Man In Space, and plenty of less efficiently marketed toys as well.
The future that most people imagined in those days had plenty of options primed to catch a young boy’s imagination, to be sure. Sealab—does anybody remember Sealab these days?—was the Navy’s attempt to compete with the romance of space, complete with breathless National Geographic articles about "a new world of limitless resources beneath the sea." (Ahem.)
For a while, I followed Sealab as passionately as I did the space program, and yes, my G.I. Joe also had a wetsuit and scuba gear.
That was common enough, and so were my less scientific fixations of the time, the monster lore and paranormal phenomena and the like; when you’re stuck growing up in suburbia in a disintegrating family and the only source of hope you can come up with is the prospect that the world isn’t as tepidly one-dimensional as everyone around you insists it has to be, you take encouragement where you find it.
You might think that a kid who was an expert on werewolf trivia at age ten would have gone in for the wildest of space fantasies, but I didn’t. Star Trek always seemed hokey to me.
I figured out early on that Star Trek was a transparent pastiche of mid-1960s US foreign policy, with the Klingons as Russia, the Vulcans as Japan, the Romulans as Red China, and Captain Kirk as a wish-fulfillment fantasy version of Gen. William Westmoreland who always successfully pacified his extraterrestrial Vietnams.
Quite the contrary; my favorite spacecraft model kit, which hung from a length of thread in my bedroom for years, was called the Pilgrim Observer: some bright kit designer’s vision of one of the workhorse craft of solar system exploration in the late 20th century.
Dilithium crystals, warp drives, and similar improbabilities had no place in the Pilgrim Observer.
Instead, it had big tanks for hydrogen fuel, a heavily shielded nuclear engine on a long boom aft, an engagingly clunky command module up front bristling with telescopes and dish antennas—well, here again, you get the picture; if you know your way around 1970s space nonfiction, you know the kit. It came with a little booklet outlining the Pilgrim I’s initial flyby missions to Mars and Venus, all of it entirely plausible by the standards the time.
That was what delighted me. Transporter beams and faster-than-light starflight, those were fantasy, but I expected to watch something not too far from Pilgrim I lifting off from Cape Canaveral within my lifetime.
That didn’t happen, and it’s not going to happen. That was a difficult realization for me to reach, back in the day, and it’s one a great many Americans are doing their level best to avoid right now.
There are two solid reasons why the future in space so many of us thought we were going to get never arrived, and each one provides its own reasons for evasion. We’ve talked about both of them in this blog at various times, and there’s more than the obvious reason to review them now.
The first, simply put, is that the United States has lost the space race.
Now of course it was less a single race than a whole track and field competition, with the first event, the satellite shot-put contest (winner: Russia, with Sputnik I), followed by the single-orbit dash (winner: Russia, with Vostok I) and a variety of longer sprints (winner: much more often than not, Russia).
The run to the Moon was the first real US gold medal—we did half a dozen victory laps back out there just to celebrate—and we also scored big in the planetary probe toss competition, with a series of successful Mariner and Voyager missions that mostly showed us just how stunningly inhospitable the rest of the solar system was.
The race that ultimately counted, though, was the marathon, and Russia’s won that one hands down; they’re still in space, and we aren’t.
Behind that unwelcome news is the great geopolitical fact of the early 21st century, the decline and imminent fall of the American empire.
Like any number of empires before us, we’ve gotten ourselves wedged tightly into the predictable downside of hegemony—the stage at which the costs of maintaining the economic imbalances that channel wealth from empire to imperial state outstrip the flow of wealth those imbalances are meant to produce.
Once that stage arrives, the replacement of the failing empire by some new distribution of power is a foregone conclusion; the only question is how long the process will take and how brutal the final cost to the imperial state will turn out to be.
The Cold War competition between the United States and the Soviet Union was a standard contest to see which empire would outlast the other. The irony, and it’s a rich one, is that the loser of that contest was pretty much guaranteed to be the winner in a broader sense.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia had an empire wrenched out of its hands, and as a result it was forced to give up the struggle to sustain the unsustainable. The United States kept its empire intact, and as a result it has continued that futile but obsessive fight, stripping its national economy to the bare walls in order to prop up a global military presence that will sooner or later bankrupt it completely.
That’s why Russia still has a functioning space program, while the United States may have trouble finding the money to launch cheap fireworks by the time its empire finally slips from its fingers.
It’s our decidedly mixed luck, as discussed here more than once in the past, that America is entering on the downslope of its imperial decline just as a much vaster curve has peaked and begun to arc in the same direction.
That’s the second reason that the space age is ending, not just for us but for humanity. In the final analysis, space travel was simply the furthest and most characteristic offshoot of industrial civilization, and depended—as all of industrial civilization depends—on vast quantities of cheap, highly concentrated, readily accessible energy. That basic condition is coming to an end around us right now.
Petroleum has already reached its global production peak as depletion rates shoot past the rate at which new fields can be found and brought on line; natural gas and coal are not far behind—the current bubble in shale gas will be over in five or, just possibly, ten years—and despite decades of animated handwaving, no other energy source has proven to yield anything close to the same abundance and concentration of energy at anything like the same cost.
That means, as I’ve shown in detail in past posts here, that industrial civilization will be a short-lived and self-terminating phenomenon. It doesn’t mean, or at least doesn’t have to mean, that future civilizations will have to make do with an equivalent of the much simpler technological suites that civilizations used before the industrial age;
I’ve argued at some length here and elsewhere that an ecotechnic society—a civilization that supports a relatively advanced technology on a modest scale using the diffuse and limited energy provided by sustainable sources, without wrecking the planet—is a live option, if not in the immediate future, then after the dark age the misguided choices of the recent past have prepared for us.
Still, of the thousands of potential technological projects that might appeal to the limited ambitions and even more strictly limited resources of some future ecotechnic society, space travel will rank very, very low.
It’s possible that the thing will be done, perhaps in the same spirit that motivated China a little while back to carry out a couple of crisp, technically capable manned orbital flights; ten thousand years from now, putting a human being into orbit will still probably be the most unanswerable way for a civilization to announce that it’s arrived.
There are also useful things to be gained by lofting satellites for communication and observation purposes, and it’s not at all impossible that now and then, over the centuries and millennia to come, the occasional satellite will pop up into orbit for a while, and more space junk will be added to the collection already in place.
Image above: Rusting gantry of an abandoned rocket program at Cape Canaveral on 14 July 1969 sketched by Juan Wilson two days before the Apollo 16 launch to the moon.
That’s not the vision that fired a generation with enthusiasm for space, though. It’s not the dream that made Konstantin Tsiolkovsky envision Earth as humanity’s cradle, that set Robert Goddard launching rockets in a Massachusetts farmyard and hurled Yuri Gagarin into orbit aboard Vostok I.
Of all people, it was historical theorist Oswald Spengler who characterized that dream most precisely, anatomizing the central metaphor of what he called Faustian civilization—yes, that’s us—as an eternal outward surge into an emptiness without limit.
That it did indeed turn out to be our final frontier, the one from which we fell back at last in disarray and frustration, simply adds a mordant note to the tale.
It’s crucial to realize that the fact that a dream is entrancing and appeals to our core cultural prejudices is no guarantee that it will come true, or even that it can.
There will no doubt be any number of attempts during the twilight years of American empire to convince Americans to fling some part of the energies and resources that remain to them into a misguided attempt to relive the dream and claim some supposed destiny among the stars.
That’s not a useful choice at this stage of the game. Especially but not only in America, any response to the crisis of our time that doesn’t start by using much less in the way of energy and resources simply isn’t serious.
The only viable way ahead for now, and for lifetimes to come, involves learning to live well within our ecological limits; it might also help if we were to get it through our heads that the Earth is not humanity’s cradle, or even its home, but rather the whole of which each of us, and our species, is an inextricable part.
That being said, it is far from inappropriate to honor the failed dream that will shortly be gathering dust in museums and rusting in the winds that blow over Cape Canaveral.
Every civilization has some sprawling vision of the future that’s destined never to be fulfilled, and the dream of infinite expansion into space was ours. The fact that it didn’t happen, and arguably never could have happened, takes nothing away from the grandeur of its conception, the passion, genius, and hard work that went into its pursuit, or the sacrifices made on its behalf.
Some future poet or composer, perhaps, will someday gather it all up in the language of verse or music, and offer a fitting elegy to the age of space.
Meanwhile, some 240,000 miles from the room where I write this, a spidery metallic shape lightly sprinkled with meteoritic dust sits alone in the lunar night on the airless sweep of Mare Tranquillitatis.
On it is a plaque which reads WE CAME IN PEACE FOR ALL MANKIND.
Even if no other human eyes ever read that plaque again, as seems likely, it’s a proud thing to have been able to say, and a proud thing to have done. I can only hope that the remembrance that our species once managed the thing offers some consolation during the bitter years ahead of us.
Video above: Slow-motion take-off of Apollo 11 on 16 July 1969 on its way ti the first manned moon landing. From (http://youtu.be/3mt9znatmyQ).
Image above: Detail of ad with Steve Jobs and the "Think Different" slogan he used after his return to Apple in 1996. From (http://modernbusinesslife.com/?p=49).
I was standing right next to Steve Jobs in 1989 and it was the closest thing I ever felt to being gay. The guy was incredibly wealthy, good looking enough to get any girl, a nerd super-rockstar who had just convinced my school to buy a bunch of NeXT machines (which, btw, were in fact the best machines to program on at the time) and I just wanted to be him. I wanted to be him ever since I had the Apple II+ as a kid. Ever since I shoplifted Ultima II, Castle Wolfenstein, and half a dozen other games that my friends and I would then rip from each other and pretend to be sick so we could stay home and play all day.
I don't care about Apple stock. (Well, I do think it will be the first trillion dollar company). Or about his business successes. That's boring. The only thing that matters to me is how Steve Jobs became the greatest artist that ever lived. You only get to be an artist like that by turning everything in your life upside down, by making horrible, ugly, mistakes, by doing things so differently that people will never be able to figure you out. By failing, cheating, lying, having everyone hate you, and coming out the other side with a little bit more wisdom than the rest.
So, 10 unusual things you didn't know about Steve Jobs.
1) Nature versus Nurture.
is sister is Mona Simpson but he didn't know it until he was an adult. Mona Simpson was one of my favorite novelists from the late 80s. Her first novel, Anywhere but Here, was about her relationship with her parents. Which, ironically, were Steve Jobs parents. But since Steve Jobs was adopted (see below) they didn't know they were brother-sister until the 90s when he tracked her down. It's proof (to an extent) of the nature versus nurture argument. Two kids, without knowing they were brother and sister, both having a unique sensibility of life on this planet to become among the best artists in the world in completely different endeavors. And, to me it was great that I was a fan of both without realizing (even before they realized) that they were related.
2) His father's name is Abdulfattah Jandali.
If you had to ask me what Steve Job's father's name was I never in one zillion years would've guessed that and that Steve Jobs biologically was half Syrian Muslim. For some reason I thought he was Jewish. Maybe its because I wanted to be him so I projected my own background onto him. His parents were two graduate students who I guess weren't sure if they were ready for a kid so put him up for adoption and then a few years later had another kid (see above). So I didn't know he was adopted.
The one requirement his biological parents had was that he be adopted by two college educated people. But the couple that adopted him lied at first and turned out not to be college educated (the mom was not a high school graduate) so the deal almost fell through until they promised to send Steve to college. A promise they couldn't keep (see below). So despite many layers of lies and promises broken, it all worked out in the end. People can save a lot of hassle by not having such high expectations and overly ambitious worries in the first place.
3) He made the game "Breakout".
If there was one thing I loved almost as much as the games on the Apple II+ it was playing Breakout on my first-generation Atari (I can't remember, was that the Atari 2600?) And then breakout on every version of my Blackberry since 2000. If he had never done anything else in life and I had met him and he said, "I'm the guy who made Breakout", I would've said, "you are the greatest genius of the past 100 years." Funny how things turn out. He went on from Atari to form Apple. Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari, went to form the greatest restaurant chain in the history of mankind: Chuck E. Cheese.
4) He denied paternity on his first child, He claimed he was sterile. The other had to initially raise the kid using welfare checks. I have no judgment on this at all. Raising kids is hard. And when you have a kid you feel like this enormous energy and creativity you have for the world is going to get misdirected into a ... little baby (Jobs' parents must've felt that way as well. Like father, like son). Heck, I originally wanted my first kid to be aborted. But people change, mature, grow up. Eventually Jobs became a good father. And that's what counts in the end. Much worse if it was the reverse. I didn't know this either: that the Lisa computer (the "Apple III") was named after this first child.
5) He's a pescetarian.
In other words, he eats fish but no other meat. And he eats anything else a vegetarian eats (including eggs and dairy). I think from now on I'm going to be a pescetarian, just because Steve Jobs is one. Except when I'm in Argentina. In Argentina you have to eat steak. Ted Danson and Mary Tyler Moore consider themselves pescetarians. Somehow, even the world "pescetarian" seems like it was invented in California.
6) He doesn't give any money to charity.
And when he became Apple's CEO he stopped all of their philanthropic programs. He said, "wait until we are profitable". Now they are profitable, and sitting on $40b cash, and still not corporate philanthropy. I actually think Jobs is probably the most charitable guy on the planet. Rather than focus on which mosquitoes to kill in Africa (Bill Gates is already focusing on that), Jobs has put his energy into massively improving quality of life with all of his inventions. People think that entrepreneurs have to some day "give back". This is not true. They already gave at the office. Look at the entire iPod/Mac/iPhone/Disney ecosystem and ask how many lives have benefited directly (because they've been hired) or indirectly (because they use the products to improve their quality of life). As far as I know, Jobs has never even commented about his thoughts on charity. Good for him. As one CEO of a (currently) Fortune 10 company once told me when I had my hand out for a charitable website, "Screw charity!"
7) He lied to Steve Wozniak. When they made Breakout for Atari, Wozniak and Jobs were going to split the pay 50-50. Atari gave Jobs $5000 to do the job. He told Wozniak he got $700 so Wozniak took home $350. Again, no judgment. Young people do things. Show me someone who says he's been honest from the day he was born and I'll show you a liar. Its by making mistakes, having fights, finding out where your real boundaries in life are, that allow you to truly know where the boundaries are.
8) He's a Zen Buddhist.
He even thought about joining a monastery and becoming a monk. His guru, a Zen monk, married him and his wife. When I was going through some of my hardest times my only relief was sitting with a Zen group. Trying to quiet the mind to deal with the onrush of non-stop pain that was trying to invade there. The interesting thing about Jobs being a a Zen Buddhist is that most people would think that serious Buddhism and being one of the wealthiest people in the world come into conflict with each other. Isn't Buddhism about non-attachment? Didn't Buddha himself leave his riches and family behind?
But the answer is "no". Its normal to pursue passions and outcomes, but just not to become overly attached to those outcomes. Being happy regardless of the outcome. A great story is the Zen master and his student walking by a river. A prostitute was there and needed to be carried over the river. The Zen master picked her up and carried her across the river and then put her down. Then the master and student kept walking. A few hours later the student was so agitated he finally had to ask, "Master, how could you touch and help that prostitute! That's against what we believe in!" And the Master said, "I left her by the river. Why are you still carrying her?"
9) He didn't go to college.
I actually didn't know this initially. Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg are the famous college dropouts that I knew about. But apparently Steve Jobs went to Reed College for one semester and then dropped out. I guess you don't need college to program computers, make computers, build businesses, make movies, manage people, etc. (Of course, you can see all my other posts on why kids should not go to college.)
10) Psychedelics.
Steve Jobs used LSD at least once when he was younger. In fact, he said about the experience, it was "one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life." Apple's slogan for many years was "Think Different". Maybe using a drug which tore him from the normal frame of reference taught him how to look at problems from such a unique perspective. I don't think LSD is for everyone, but when you combine it with the innate genius the man had, plus the many ups and downs that he experienced, plus the Zen Buddhism and all of the other things above, its quite possible it all adds up to the many inventions he's been able to produce.
Steve Jobs' story is filled with nuance and ambiguity. People study Steve Jobs by looking at his straightforward business successes. Yes, he started Apple in a garage. Yes, he started Pixar and almost went broke with it. Yes, he started and sold Next and he was fired as CEO of Apple, and blah blah blah. But none of that will ever explain the man behind the genius. None of that will explain all the products he invented that we use today. None of that will tell us about the iPad, Toy Story, the MacBook Air, the Apple II+, etc. A man's successes can be truly understood only if we can count his tears. And unfortunately in the case of Steve Jobs, that is one task that's impossible. .
Newly released neutron data from three University of California San Diego scientists confirms Fairewinds' April analysis that the nuclear core at Fukushima Daiichi turned on and off after TEPCO claimed its reactors had been shutdown. This periodic nuclear chain reaction (inadvertent criticality) continued to contaminate the surrounding environment and upper atmosphere with large doses of radioactivity.
In a second area of concern, Fairewinds disagrees the NRC's latest report claiming that all Fukushima spent fuel pools had no problems following the earthquake. In a new revelation, the NRC claims that the plutonium found more than 1 mile offsite actually came from inside the nuclear reactors. If such a statement were true, it indicates that the nuclear power plant containments failed and were breached with debris landing far from the power plants themselves. Such a failure of the containment system certainly necessitates a complete review of all US reactor containment design and industry assurances that containments will hold in radioactivity in the event of a nuclear accident. The evidence Fairewinds reviewed to date continues to support its April analysis that the detonation in the Unit 3 Spent Fuel pool was the cause of plutonium found off site.
Third, the burning of radioactive materials (building materials, trees, lawn grass, rice straw) by the Japanese government will cause radioactive Cesium to spread even further into areas within Japan that have been previously clean, and across the Pacific Ocean to North America.
And finally, the Japanese government has yet to grasp the severity of the contamination within Japan, and therefore has not developed a coherent plan mitigate the accident and remediate the environment. Without a cohesive plan to deal with this ongoing problem of large scale radioactive contamination, the radioactivity will continue to spread throughout Japan and around the globe further exacerbating the problem and raising costs astronomically.
Video above: Arne Gundersen presentation. From original article. Available at (http://vimeo.com/28014740).
Transcript of video presentation.
There are a couple of things today that I would like to share with you since we last posted. The first is a comment that was out on Russia Today and several other internet blogs, discussing the possibility of cracks and smoke and steam coming out of the ground at Fukushima. What they are claiming to have had occurred is that the nuclear core has melted through the containment and is now in the groundwater. I was asked by Russia Today to comment on that and I declined. I just do not think there is enough good solid engineering data to either support or refute it. It may be happening, but I did not think there was enough engineering data yet to make any conclusive remarks about it.
But it is interesting, the sensational issue of steam coming out of the ground has actually clouded much more important issues which can be substantiated.
The first of those was another report that came out last week from California. A group of scientists detected radioactive Sulfur 35 in the atmosphere. It occurred back in March, about two weeks after the Fukushima accident began. The press focussed on the fact that radioactive sulfur was detected in California, but the report held something that was much more important than that, that did not make the news. And that is, how did that sulfur get created? Let's go back across the Pacific to Fukushima. When salt water is hit by neutrons, it creates sulfur. On the nucleus of a sodium atom in salt water hits a neutron, and it becomes a different atom called sulfur. That is the mechanics of it. But what the report showed is that 400 billion neutrons in a square meter were required in order to make the amount of sulfur that was detected in California. That is an enormous number of neutrons. No one asked, where did they come from?
I think the report from last week substantiates what I told you back on April 3rd. Way back then, there was enough evidence to indicate that the reactors had not really completely shut down at Fukushima.
Remember, when the tsunami hit, the reactors had been shut down for about an hour. The control rods had fallen into them and shut down all of the chain reactions. But it seemed as if there were recurring chain reactions after that. I think this new data from California substantiates what I had been telling you back in April: There were ongoing criticalities after the unit shut down.
The next thing that is important also occurred about two weeks ago. There was a meeting at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, where the NRC staff briefed the commissioners about what had gone on at Fukushima. We have posted the link to that on the side of the video here. What the NRC staff told them in about the first 60 pages of transcript, is that the nuclear fuel pools at Fukushima had not experienced much of a problem. Someone called in, there was a call-in line, and asked a very important question and I would like to read that to you now. The person was Mr. Ray Shadis from the New England Coalition. And he said this: “I was surprised to hear you say that the fuel in the spent fuel pool was not damaged. Press reports indicate that fuel particles up to a centimeter or more in size, have been found a mile or more from the spent fuel pools. And that is my question. Can you address the disparity?” So what Mr. Shadis was suggesting is, if the fuel pools were in good shape and plutonium is discovered a mile or two away, how could that happen?
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission's response was troubling, to say the least. They said, Mr. Grove, again, on p. 61 of the transcript says, “Most of the deposition that has reported to date, appears to have come from inside the reactors.” And then two pages later on p. 63, a Mr. Hallahan says, “ascribing these dispersed radioactive materials in various forms on site, you know, it is most likely they were from the reactor cores rather from the spent fuel pool.” To my mind, that is more troubling than the hypothesis that the nuclear fuel pools released as plutonium.
You will recall back on April 26th, I postulated that there was a prompt criticality in the Unit 3 fuel pool and there is a lot of data to support that: the flame was on that side of the building, the height of the explosion. I postulated that that is what deposited the plutonium a mile or two off site. What the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is saying is much worse than that.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is saying that the reactors have breeched, and the containments have breeched, and liberated this plutonium, which has gone off site. I do not understand their position. Frankly, I do not think it is right. I still believe that it is the fuel pools that caused the plutonium to be deposited. But if I am wrong and it is not the fuel pools, in fact, the position of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is much worse. If the reactors have failed and the containments have failed causing this, we really need to seriously look at American reactor design.
The next thing I would like to talk about just briefly is that a tent is almost ready to be built over Unit 1 at Fukushima. That is not going to solve a lot of problems, but it is going to solve two problems. The purpose of the tent is to reduce the amount of radiation on site. The radiation inside that tent is still going to have to go somewhere, or else it is going to build up and become lethal.
So what is going to have to happen to that radiation, is it is going to be exhausted up the stack. That is good for the workers, because it gets that radiation airborne at a much higher elevation and it is good for the surrounding communities. But it does not solve the problem of radiation releases from Fukushima. I wanted you to know that, when you see this tent that is being built over Fukushima 1, it does not solve the problem. It pushes the Cesium deposition further away from the site. It is important for the workers that they get less Cesium, but it is not, on a global basis, reducing the amount of Cesium that we are all receiving.
And that brings me to my final point. The deposition of Cesium throughout northern Japan is extensive. The Japanese are allowing that material to be burned if the concentration of radioactivity on anything that is radioactive is less than 8,000 becquerels per kilogram. What that means is that two pounds, about a kilogram, can be disintegrating at 8,000 disintegrations every second and the Japanese are allowing that to be burned. Here in the United States, that would be considered radioactive waste, and would have to be disposed of underground for thousands of years.
But as long as it is less than 8,000 disintegrations per second, the Japanese are allowing that to be burned. Not only that, and this is actually more disconcerting, they are allowing blending. So if one sample had 24,000 disintegrations per second, and another two had none, they combine those, so that the three on average have 8,000 disintegrations per second and they are allowed to be burned. That has lots of serious ramifications. First, it is basically the material that has already come out of Fukushima and is on the ground, is now going airborne again. Deliberately.
So the towns around, and the areas around schools, school playgrounds that have been cleaned up from Fukushima, are now getting Cesium redeposited on them by the burning of the material. So the clouds of radiation from the different areas that are having fires in Japan right now, are re-contaminating areas that have been sampled as clean or low. And in fact now will see higher radiation. It does not stop just at the Japanese border, but of course continues across the Pacific into the Pacific Northwest as well.
So by allowing the burning of material, we are basically recreating Fukushima all over again. We are sending into the air that which has been deposited on the ground. There is also some data that the ground deposition is running out into rivers and now into the ocean, relatively far from Fukushima. So while the focus has been on just the Fukushima site, in fact now, we are seeing radioactive rivers further away which are also contaminating the ocean.
apan has a problem, a tough problem. But in order to solve the tough problem, first you have to recognize there is a tough problem. And this constant ignoring of the significance of the problem by the Japanese government is, in fact, making the problem longer, and eventually more costly, than doing it right the first time.
I think the Japanese need to recognize that they have a problem. And it is serious and they have to recognize that it is going to cost a lot of money to fix. But it is fixable if it begins with the concept that there is a serious problem that needs to be solved.
Conventional wisdom says a few sticky, fat fingers control a disproportionate slice of the world economy’s pie. A new analysis suggests that the conventional wisdom is right on the money.
Diagramming the relationships between more than 43,000 corporations reveals a tightly connected core of top economic actors. In 2007, a mere 147 companies controlled nearly 40 percent of the monetary value of all transnational corporations, researchers report in a paper published online July 28 at (http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.5728v1).
“This is empirical evidence of what’s been understood anecdotally for years,” says information theorist Brandy Aven of the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh.
The analysis is a first effort to document the international web of relationships among companies and to examine who owns shares — and how many — in whom. Tapping into the financial information database Orbis, scientists from ETH Zurich in Switzerland examined transnational companies, which they defined as having at least 10 percent of their holdings in more than one country. Then the team looked at upstream and downstream connections, yielding a network of 600,508 economic actors connected through more than a million ownership ties.
This network takes on a bowtie shape, with a large number of diffuse actors in the wings and a few major players tangled up in the tie’s knot. So while it’s true that ownership of publicly held corporations is broadly distributed, says complex systems scientist James Glattfelder, a coauthor of the new work, “take a step back and it’s all flowing into the same few hands.”
While any man on the street may have predicted this outcome, the economic literature portrays markets as so dynamic that they lack hot spots of control, Glattfelder says.
Researchers aren’t sure what to make of the core’s interconnectedness. On the one hand, it could expose the whole network to risk.
“Imagine a disease spreading,” says Aven. “If you have a high school where everyone’s sleeping together and one person gets syphilis, then everyone gets syphilis.”
But on the flip side, she notes, interconnectedness can lead to better self-policing and positive behaviors, such as fair labor practices or environmentally friendly policies. Image above: Overview of "PowerBall" diagram connections from original study. For PDF file (http://arxiv.org/pdf/1107.5728v1).
And even though the status of many players in the analysis has changed drastically since 2007 (now-defunct Lehman Brothers is a key element of the core), the analysis shows that ownership is becoming increasingly concentrated and increasingly transnational, says Gerald Davis of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Because interpreting and analyzing these kinds of data is difficult, he says, the analysis serves more as “an impression of the moon’s surface you get with a telescope. It’s not a street map.”
Ownership can be difficult to study internationally because holding shares in a mutual fund doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing in the U.S. as it does in communist China. And even within a single country ownership can be hard to tease out, says economist Matthew Jackson of Stanford University. For example, when an individual invests in a mutual fund or even purchases shares through an institution like Merrill Lynch, the firm is often still the official owner of the assets. And even when shareholders do have voting rights, they may not exercise them.
“This becomes worrisome if everyone is like me and says I’ll let Vanguard do the voting,” says Jackson. “Maybe we should be a little bit worried. I don’t know if we should be.”
Image above: Logo developed forMaya Archaeology Initiative. From original article.
Kellogg Coroporation is asking a group working to defend Mayan culture to reconsider its logo, saying consumers can confuse it with Toucan Sam, the mascot of its Froot Loops cereal.
An attorney for the world's largest cereal maker has sent a letter to the nonprofit Maya Archaeology Initiative saying Kellogg opposes the group's bid to trademark its logo. The attorney suggests a settlement that would limit the group's use of the image.
The Maya Archaeology Initiative, based in San Ramon, says there is little similarity. It says its logo is based upon a realistic toucan native to Mesoamerica, while Toucan Sam is a cartoon character with the coloring of Froot Loops.
The organization says that it hopes can resolve the matter with Kellogg, which is based in Battle Creek, Michigan.
Every journey starts with the destination. You need to know where you are going before you start working out the trip to get there. Even if the goal is simply to have new experiences you still have something in mind when you set out. This is as true for a journey of the mind as for the body. And it is just as true for the journey of humanity through evolution. Where are we going?
This will be the first in a series of blogs on the consequences of our rapidly changing world with regard to the future of humanity. We are entering a period of dramatic change. Our relation with the environment, the climate, and our access to high-powered fuels is undergoing radical reorganization. Everything about our current civilization is going to radically change as a result. This series is aimed at first establishing a vision of a sustainable future situation for some form of humanity and then providing some travel tips for how to get to that future. It will be an arduous journey for mankind. We will be facing terra incognita. No one has ever been in this environment before. So the uncertainties are legion. All we can do is keep a destination in mind and look for the signs along the way that suggest we are getting to where we want to go.
In this post I want to outline some ideas on where that destination might be. I base these ideas on several factors that are observable about our species today and the emerging clarity we have regarding the environment that is evolving around us.
In fact this is the point. The environment is evolving, to a large extent due to our activities over the last ten to twenty thousand years. A changing environment means that we have to evolve in order to remain fit to exist in whatever that environment turns into.
Given the kinds of environments which have existed in the distant past we know that however radical the near future environment will be (e.g. higher sea levels, warmer average temperatures, biodiversity destruction, etc.) life itself will endure in some forms. These will be the seed for distant future speciation and a new efflorescence of the tree of life. That some form of future hominid, derived from genus Homo will exist I take as a given. But it also depends on how the current species of sapiens manages to survive the transition. It is to that issue that I turn.
My starting point is the end point. My inquiry begins with the question about what kind of life should humans expect to have even in a radically changed world. One early vision of the state of humankind subsequent to the depletion of fossil fuels was the Olduvai Theory of Richard C. Duncan, in the early to mid 1990s. Duncan envisioned a reversal of civilization and reversion of humans to the status of primitive humans whose remains are found in Olduvai Gorge in Africa.
Aside from being a catchy title, the theory suggests that humanity will regress, possibly even evolutionarily, to a form that can succeed in the more primitive environment with only real-time solar energy to support it.
In other words, our civilization and the species we have become, are mere flashes in geological time. And now, as Richard Heinberg puts it, “The Party Is Over”.
In spite of agreeing with the Malthusian analysis inherent in peak fossil energy, population overshoot, and Homo sapiens' minimal average sapience, and all that those entail for the future of civilization, I am not inclined to think humanity is destined for the Hobbesian view of the human condition as “...nasty, brutish, and short.”ere are two basic reasons for my perverse long-term optimism in spite of my short-term pessimism (of course I would call it realism, but others disagree!) First, we humans have learned one hell of a lot about how things in the world work. Granted we are not good at learning how we ourselves work (mentally). But we have amassed a tremendous amount of knowledge in the sciences and engineering and much of it might be applicable even in a low-power energy future.
Our knowledge of systems science and systems ecology alone may make living feasible regardless of what the future world is like (within reason of course, we probably couldn't survive in a runaway warming that would lead to a Venusian climate!).
There can be a technological civilization in the future but one that is not driven by frenetic needs to run as fast as we can run. Second, and most basic of all, is evolution. Along with our knowledge of how the world works we also understand the process of change itself. Of course devolution is possible, I don't deny that, but I also don't see it as inevitable. Our understanding of evolution, genetics, and especially the emerging field of Evo-Devo provides us with the potential to become intentional actors in the evolutionary process itself.
We are already unintentional actors. We shaped the environment we live in and set in motion the forces that will shape the future environment. We have been embedded in a process of co-evolution, us and our cultures, that has continued to modify our genetics right up to the present. Indeed there is some evidence that our co-evolutionary process is accelerating, not abating. The Homo sapiens sapiens of today is not really the exact same species it was even 10,000 years ago.
Humans can abide as the Earth abides. But it will only be with understanding and intention. The very first question we have to ask has to address what a future human living condition will be like. Will we devolve to Olduvai status, or become something more than we are now?
What Does It Mean To Be Human?
The field of positive psychology is relatively young, focusing on what it means for humans to thrive, be happy, or feel fulfilled. One popular concept in this arena is self actualization, especially as developed in Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs theory. Maslow posited that humans are motivated by a set of needs that arc from the most basic biological (food, warmth) to social (love, esteem), to a higher self fulfillment or actualization, which includes mental states that permit higher thoughts and concepts, such as love of humanity as opposed to love of self.
Several psychologists have considered versions of this sort of needs/drives architecture and a very full literature on subjects like creativity and success (e.g. ‘Flow’ in psychology). The general understanding in Maslow's theory is that as lower level needs are met and remain unthreatened (one has enough food and feels loved) the individual naturally moves into the mental space of actualization where they can be creative and develop positive attitudes toward others and themselves.
What this set of theories tell us about human beings is that they have the mental capacity to be marvelous beings given that their basic needs are being met. My own reading suggests that the happiest people are actually those who are actively participating in meeting their own needs. They are not necessarily individualists, but more generally are being productive members of a group effort that collectively provides for every one's needs in the group (and presumably for the few misfortunates who cannot directly contribute, and for children not yet ready to contribute).
In the modern industrialized/informationalized civilization where one would think all of our basic needs are being taken care of, it is hard to understand why so many people are unhappy and why we have become so unsapient. But the problem is that our materialistic views of what civilization should mean has done a pretty good job of taking care of needs at the lowest levels of the hierarchy (food, shelter, etc.) but has actually been contrary to the middle needs (sexually suggestive advertising and explicit sex scenes in movies are not substitutions for love).
Our education and enterprise processes, designed to maximally take care of those material needs, does not address our self esteem needs. We try to compensate by telling our young kids what a great job they did on that drawing, or that they are special, or through grade inflation (don't get me started!) But we run people through the education mill in order that they have the requisite job skills to keep the machinery of commerce going. In my view this is the antithesis of self actualization. The only real higher needs we are supporting is the need for the psychopathic rich to get richer. I take solace in knowing that many of them are still not happy, really.
The bottom line is that humans, in general, really don't need the kind of materialistic world that our high powered energy and lack of wisdom has created to be happy or have the opportunity to self actualize. I think I understand how we got here.
Once agriculture was swinging into full gear our societies became focused on managing everything to ensure maximum yield, usually against a very uncertain climate. We worked so hard at producing the basics that we sort of forgot that there is more to life than making a buck. Some so-called primitive tribes, the few left in this world, haven't forgotten, those that have been lucky enough to live in climates that provide the rich biological and hydrological resources they need. But we modern humans have forgotten. In fact, we perversely think that our McMansions and smart phones are the very definition of happiness.
The vast majority of people in the modern world do not seem to be able to grasp the essential difference between being glad to have the latest iPad and being self actualized. The former lets you get the latest updates on gossip, the latter lets you create something of value (even if you do it on an iPad!) I think one of the reasons that we have gotten to this point is that, as I mentioned above, evolution hasn't stopped. As a population we have been co-evolving with our materialistic cultures. We have created those cultures (but recognize that the actual acts of creation are done by very, very few people!)
And in turn those cultures have selected for those who only want what those cultures offer - more materialism. And, as I have written before, this latter effect is what has helped select against higher sapience. One does not succeed in this world (either in monetary terms or in procreation) by being wise, only aggressive or lazy. Smarts help some to succeed monetarily, but it really doesn't take smarts to operate a refrigerator (to see a darkly humorous logical extreme watch the movie: “Ideocracy”)
The selection pressure of high powered industrial civilization has, unfortunately, tended to favor lower sapience. I think this also means it has disfavored the drive to self actualization. At the same time, paradoxically, it has provided a platform for the few bright people to discover new knowledge and produce amazing technologies. This was possible because the non-actualized masses provided a demand (as long as energy was available) and an impetus for novelty. It is ironic that, to paraphrase Dickens, ‘the best of times (knowledge) was made possible by the worst of times (unthinking consumption)’.
But there you have it. The question is, now that the world is changing and the loss of energy will completely alter the consumption side of the equation, where do we go from here? Can we focus on the fact that some human beings, and especially those that seem to be more sapient than most, do self actualize in spite of the culture we live in? Can we use this knowledge to address the question of what would we like a future to look like given that we will not have the high powered energy sources of today? I think we can. The Destination If we start from the premise that what it means to be human is that each individual has the capacity and the opportunity to achieve higher states of awareness and understanding of the world, to become self actualized, then our destination has to be some kind of living condition in which that is made possible. I started writing about a ‘feasible’ living situation starting in Feb. of 2010. The series can be found here:
In this series I explored what kind of social structure and physical infrastructure would be necessary to provide a group of highly sapient individuals with a reasonable means of living sustainably and that would allow all members of that society to achieve some level of self actualization. I provided some basic ideas about what kind of land might be required under reasonable assumptions about the climate situation several hundred years from now. I have not seen any evidence that would alter my conclusions from that analysis, which are unhappy for the current population.
The projected carrying capacity of the planet under extremely modest assumptions about consumption patterns of a sapient society is radically smaller than seven to ten billion people as currently projected by the UN through 2100. Given the reduced biodiversity of the near-term future (say the next 100,000 years or more) that carrying capacity will be greatly reduced even from what we currently project based on, say, ecological footprint analysis. It could be in the low tens of millions world wide.
Thus we are looking at a picture in which a few climatically stable pockets support a few villages containing a psychologically optimal number of individuals each. These might be in communication, even have trade with each other, but nothing like the inter-community commerce we see today. Life will revolve around the education and food growing systems, with construction and its support services on an as needed basis.
People will basically do those things that satisfy the spirit. They will, of course, primarily be concerned with raising food. If done right they will have ample time for enjoyable times with family and friends. They will pursue their education, both in how to improve their living skills and how to better understand the world around them and their past. These need not and should not be peasants living just at subsistence. If that were the only option then would it really be worth there being a human species?
Humans are capable of growing mentally long after they finish growing physically. A society, careful to control its population size, can still grow in knowledge even though it is not growing economically (in the way we think of it now). The destination is self actualization for all. If we cannot find a pathway from where we are now to that destination then I'm not sure it is worth even stepping outside to start the journey. On the other hand, I strongly feel there is enough sapience in some members of the current species to find the path.
I have always had an adventurous spirit. And I think that it is likely that humanity will come out of the transition as a better species, that is wiser in the ways to live in balance with the Ecos. With that belief I'm game to explore some possible paths. I hope I don't have to go alone, because then, again, it isn't worth the effort. The future success of humanity will be based, as it always was in the past, on a collective effort of a group. We shall see what develops. The First Step - Sacrifice in the Now
It is hard to contemplate doing something so radically different tomorrow, given that today things in the world seem almost normal. It is very difficult for anyone, even a very sapient person, to consider going and learning to live off the land with only real-time solar energy inputs while it is still possible to get in your car and run to the grocery store for a loaf of bread and gallon of milk. The question is, do we start now to learn to live more balanced lives, or do we wait until the fan is on high and the fecal pellets are flying to make the move?
The problem with the latter is that we are in a relatively slow transition at present. The fan isn't blowing at maximum and the fecal matter is in such small quantities as to be nearly indiscernible. The danger with waiting is that we have been in an exponential growth mode for so long. The problem with exponential growth is that you can feel like everything is just fine until the crash comes. It is like walking toward a cliff in a pea soup dense fog. You're OK until you step off the edge. And then it is too late. It does no good to wish you had turned right or left instead of going straight while you are hurling toward the bottom.
We are in completely unknown territory now. We know with fairly high certainty that our energy flow is going to be diminished. And unless someone very quickly pulls a massive energy replacement rabbit out of the thermodynamic hat, nothing else we have on the shelf right now can scale up quickly and broadly enough to keep there from being a catastrophic loss when, for example, the oil stops flowing because the producers can no longer make profits, and then the coal stops flowing because it takes a lot of diesel fuel to get coal.
Natural gas is still a big question as to the volume we might have to work with, but even with NG there are infrastructure conversion issues that will keep it from being an immediate substitute. The whole problem revolves around the fact that we just do not know how much net energy we have to work with from fossil fuels, but especially oil. If we are, as I have suggested based on my computer modelling, past the peak of net energy production, then we are already screwed.
And here is the main point. We don't know where we are relative to net energy. We can only make educated guesses, but they are still just guesses. If we are past the point of no return, how would be know it?
As one of my favorite Brandi Carlile songs says “...there are no warnings, only signs.”
Since I advocate that only the highly sapient need apply, perhaps this provides a means for testing sapience potential without some of the genetic testing I've written about. Only the really sapient will see the practicality of sacrificing a few more years of the comfortable consumer lifestyle to start preparing now.
I admit it is a sacrifice. It means finding a location with all the right attributes (you can't just start a permaculture farm nearby where you happen to live if the climate is unstable). It means cashing out your assets to trade for land and off-the-grid capabilities. And, by the way, this does not mean buying solar panels that you will be stuck with in twenty years, not able to get replacements or repairs! It means giving up what you are used to having now without really knowing for certain that this is the best thing to do.
Nor can you do anything like this alone. It will take a community. So not only do you have to make the decision to self-sacrifice now, but you have to convince others that they should do the same. Again this is a test of sapience. If any of your friends balk it probably means they wouldn't be great contributors to the situation anyway.
I see this process as one of self-organization rather than engineering a social group. The sufficiently sapient will recognize the signs and begin to take action, not waiting for warnings (at least from the official powers that be). They will find ways to find one another, especially in these days of social networking media. No one could orchestrate a successful transition. No one could dictate it or ‘run’ the community. It will have to come from a democratic and egalitarian process. It will necessarily be at the only scale in which such a process could ever succeed, a face-to-face community.
Other sacrifices are in the wings. Even if sapient communities become established they will need to be prepared for what will transpire in the rest of civilization. I will save this for another time, however. In the near future I will return to the physical aspects of a feasible living situation and try to explain better why so much land per individual is needed to establish a truly sustainable life.
And then we can talk about how to establish it (like financing) and protect it once things start to come unglued. In the mean time it would be nice to know if any of this is helping anyone. I have received a few nice e-mails from folk saying that they get what I am talking about and would like more ideas put out there. This blog is a response to those. But I don't know if my thoughts are really helping.
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Image above: Extent of Marcellus Shale is centered over much of Pennsylvania and surrounding states. From (http://www.physorg.com/news205508090.html).
