World's not gonna end just yet, Chicxulub willing...

I loved P.J. O'Rourke's book All the Trouble in the World , and this Wired article is more in that same vein:

Religious zealots hardly have a monopoly on apocalyptic thinking. Consider
some of the environmental cataclysms that so many experts promised were
inevitable. Best-selling economist Robert Heilbroner in 1974: “The outlook for
man, I believe, is painful, difficult, perhaps desperate, and the hope that can
be held out for his future prospects seem to be very slim indeed.” Or
best-selling ecologist Paul Ehrlich in 1968: “The battle to feed all of humanity
is over. In the 1970s ["and 1980s" was added in a later edition] the world will
undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in
spite of any crash programs embarked on now … nothing can prevent a substantial
increase in the world death rate.” Or Jimmy Carter in a televised speech in
1977: “We could use up all of the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by
the end of the next decade.”

Predictions of global famine and the end of oil in the 1970s proved
just as wrong as end-of-the-world forecasts from millennialist priests. Yet
there is no sign that experts are becoming more cautious about apocalyptic
promises. If anything, the rhetoric has ramped up in recent years. Echoing the
Mayan calendar folk, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved its Doomsday
Clock one minute closer to midnight at the start of 2012, commenting: “The
global community may be near a point of no return in efforts to prevent
catastrophe from changes in Earth’s atmosphere.”

I particularly like Ridley's description of humanity as a "moving target" and strongly encourage you to read the whole article.

A lack of historical (even recent) perspective bedevils efforts to compete with the hectoring Luddites who would hold us back. The "climate change" crowd for example will ignore all "inconvenient" information which would detract from their agenda of dismantling our technological society. Points of No Return are routinely passed without undue incident, increasingly destructive weather events are taken out of context of the development which has occur ed in that area since the last "worst" hurricane, flood, tornado, etc.

I'm picking on the Warmists again, but in this case it's because they encompass all of the goals of Greenpeace, The Club of Rome and all the rest of them, e.g. there are too many people, and bundle that with the dogma of CO2 as the worst thing since dioxin. The problem with all of these people is that they only have influence in First World countries, places where the birth rate has already plummeted, in most cases below replacement rate and what industry that remains has cleaned up far past where it was even during the Acid Rain era of the 1980s.

The hope of this planet to absorb the ongoing population growth of the Third world and the pollution of the Second is the technological base of the First. Technological advances require prosperity, prosperity requires not being straightjacketed by red tape and excessive taxation. If the world does end due to something less catastrophic than the sun exploding, it will probably be something that sufficiently advanced tech and production capacity could have at least mitigated.

There are PLENTY of "world-ending" bolide (asteroid) impact examples to choose from, so let's take the Cretaceous dinosaur killer as a case study. As things stand, one of these comes our way we're fucked; what could change the odds? Enter Planetary Resources, or other private sector asteroid mining outfit. Yay! Capitalism will save us all out of the goodness of its' altruism, right?

Of course not. What they would however do in their self interest is develop the means to get to asteroids whipping around our system and then take them apart. The tech to do that will also include a highly motivated system to find and track NEOs, the essential first step in averting a bolide catastrophe. In warfare it's "Find, fix, strike" and the principles apply here too.

It is an inescapable fact that motivated people accomplish much more than plodding clock punchers, and the best way to motivate most people is money. Making money off of asteroid mining will require the same tech that one would need to have a chance of averting a major asteroid strike. It may also require large thermonuclear devices, currently held as a monopoly by governments, so there is certainly room for Public and Private to work together here.

None of this matters to the malcontent misanthropes who would have us all living in huts, and then complain about all of the trees we cut down to build and heat them. Well fuck them; the rest of us would like to avoid the "nasty brutish and short" lives of our ancestors and we need to fight those idiots to keep things moving forward. After all, if Mankind is to survive

For all but a brief moment near the dawn of history, the word 'ship'
will mean simply - 'spaceship.' (Arthur C. Clarke)

Earthquakes and Tyrants and Leaks, oh my!

I was on vacation last week which you'd think would have been a great chance for me to lay into all of the juicy world events of late (for the record: the 9.0 earthquake in northern Japan with ensuing tsunami on 11 March, and the UN actually approving force against Qaddafi in Libya on 18 March). You'd be correct, but several factors caused me to hold off:

• I was on vacation, after all;


• events were in a state of flux and analysis would be better served waiting for facts, and;


• I got Strategic Command WW1 and had to run that through its' paces.

So where are we on 21 March 2011? The main title link to the Register link talks about the overblown panic about the nuclear accident at the Fukushima reactors. The short version is that even after a 9.0 magnitude earthquake which moved the Japanese islands several feet and the ensuing tsunami which killed an estimated 18,000 Japanese, these 40-year-old reactors have not melted down.

Yes, there have been some hydrogen explosions and a bit more than background radiation has been detected, but it's not and cannot become another Chernobyl. The reactors are compromised by the seawater they had to pump in to cool them and will never operate again, but they have exceeded their design specs and prevented a nuclear catastrophe on top of a natural one. My takeaway is that with what we have learned from this, any new plants can be designed to survive anything which is likely to happen. Let's face it; anything much worse than what happened that day would likely swallow or vaporize a nuclear plant (or anything else for that matter).

Welcome to Nature, people. Terrestrial processes, to say nothing of those of the Universe as a whole, operate on scales we can scarcely comprehend let alone engineer against. People on the other hand are quite manageable, but some effort is still required. That brings us to Libya. Qaddafi has been marshaling his forces and taking towns back from the rebels, and it was the French, of all people to drop the first bombs to slow his progress.

It of course makes sense that the Europeans have much more of an interest in the stability of Libya, if for no other reason than millions of Africans could come drifting to their shores. And oh yes, the oil too, but the immigration problem is much larger; there are other sources of oil. American leadership on this is still lacking, but that will persist until Obama is replaced.

I still don't know what we want to see in Libya, at least of the available options. That I will think about some more and come back to in the next post.