Slashdot Mirror

This reminds me of all types of mining, where first people discover the big nuggets, then the small nuggets, then pan for specks, then go after good high grade ore, then the 30...20...10..1% ore. Until we're blowing up mountains chasing 0.001% stuff like they are doing for gold. Getting an ounce for every one of those humoungous trucks. I think when the Alaska gold rush started, accounts said miners were literally scooping out $2,000 a shovelful.

Same goes with oil. Super rich easy to get to oil just blasting out of the ground.... and as time goes on, we have to drill, needle and prod to get the stuff.

It's all EROEI. Energy returned on energy invested. Makes absolute sense for science as well.

I would say the scientific future isn't dim though, just that with current tech, there isn't much to discover in, say, theoretical physics, until we seriously start space exploring, because are limited on experiment we can run on earth. Just like we can't really take off on nanomedicine until reliable nanorobots are in place for scientists to test out their theories on. To put it another way, ships were of a limited design until steam engines came into place. Then ship designers could go crazy again. And then the nuclear engine came into play and military ship designers could go crazy again. Sometime until the pieces fall into place, the rest cannot go forward.

http://www.peakprosperity.com/...

The entire sequestration issue is nothing but a political red herring. Of course NASA must shrink.

If you believe in Peak Oil this seems to be a logical partner:

http://www.peakprosperity.com/blog/acknowledging-arrival-peak-government-part-1/75356

I think this graph summarizes it well: http://media.peakprosperity.com/images/A-brief-history-oi-humans.jpg

The people who do the math come up with numbers around 1.5 to 4 or so billions of humans by the end of the century, simply based on the available resources like energy and raw materials by then. How we get there is left as an exercise to the reader.

They don't work with dollar bills and coins, they work with bonds.

http://www.peakprosperity.com/crashcourse/chapter-8-fed-money-creation

We're pretty much at peak point now. Actually, the most oil pumped was 2005 iirc. So the price will just continue to climb and the supply will continue to dwindle down. More and and more consumers will demand better mpg anyway. There are even reports that car sales are declining everywhere but China:
http://www.peakprosperity.com/blog/79493/demise-car

Similar to Prof. Albert Bartlett's lecture on exponential growth (above), Chris Martenson's Crash Course is an expansion on the same theme which ties it all together with the debt-money system, peak oil, etc.. Well worth the time.