Some time ago, (on October 10th, 2006) I attended the physics and astronomy colloquium at Stony Brook. It was by prof. Albert Bartlett from Univ. of Colorado, Boulder. It pretty interesting, and sad.
The main idea of the talk was that we have been very ignorant about the fossil fuel usage and it lifetime. He began his talk by stating that most of the problems we faced come from not understanding a simple mathematical function: the natural exponential growth. I forgot most of the details about it, but he mentioned that the world already crossed the peak of fossil fuel production, and now it is going down. I guess his purpose is to make people realize the seriousness of the issue and consider taking on the problem of developing a new, efficient energy source. I felt pretty bad with my dreams of fame and fortune as a worthless string theorist...
No matter how much oil people could discover, it wont last long. We are increasing the consumption rate each year. So eventually, it will all disappear. My Classical Mechanics professor mentioned that certainly we all will (hopefully) live to experience the crisis. I was still ignorant about it until I realized a small detail that made me feel REALLY worried.
So what if the cars stop, the airplanes, the production lines for food. Transportation of materials will be nearly impossible, in the sense that it could still be done, with more time and money, by the old fashion ways of horses or coal. Communications will fall back 200 years. And then I realized that the Internet will shut down.
!!!
What am I going to do with out the Internet! ;-)
But seriously, the Internet has change things. Think about all the daily transactions that are done over the Internet. All the infrastructure will be useless. We will end up in a huge junkyard. I can see how countries could start wars to get each other resources. I can see how people could start fighting each other just to survive, first with the actual luxuries of water, food and warm; and then just to survive. Of course this commodities are not present in all parts of the world.
We came a long way from the caves. Now we do not know how to live in the forest without being eaten by wild animals, or just even die of dehydration. Well, at least I am not ready for that.
It all sounds very sad. I do not know what to do. I do not think I could help with any physics. At least I will never propose any idea to build another power-sucking accelerator. Hope someone helps. Else, we and our children will live the consequences.
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