The following article hit home with me .... -DonW- http://www.coloradoan.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080123/OPINION04/8012 30308
World's changing - as it always does Joseph C. Nemeth One evening, a friend was hanging out at our house, and we were talking about the sad state of the world: peak oil, global warming, terrorism, government-promoted fear of terrorism, all the usual suspects in the unraveling of the world. We were having a fine depress-fest. At about that point, my (then) 19-year-old son walked in to return some DVDs on his way to his apartment, and he lingered to listen to us old curmudgeons trying to decide which monster under the bed would get us first. Finally, he snorted at us - he snorted, the disrespectful young whippersnapper! - and broke in to give us his shockingly optimistic view of the future. His vision was based on almost-free energy and nanotech fabrication, both of which have left the realm of science fiction and have started to move into the laboratory. I don't know if he's right, but this interchange pointed out one thing very clearly: doomsayers take no part in finding solutions. Solutions come from a position of hope. There is right now a company in California printing solar panels on aluminum foil in commercial quantities that provide solar power at one-third the cost of coal: Doomsayers did not invent that. = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = Cold fusion got a bad rap a few years back, but it caught scientists' attention, not because it was "magic" but because it was so extremely plausible as science. It might actually take nothing more than the persistence of an Edison to crack cold fusion. Doomsayers will not be taking on that challenge. Imagine a world in which limitless clean energy is available for cheap, and material goods come out of a fabricator that absorbs unformed raw materials, breaks them down into building blocks, and then builds anything you can design from the molecular level upward. Such a world solves almost all of our known material problems and creates new problems we can't really even imagine - which actually quite accurately describes the world we live in right now, as seen by our grandparents. What's wrong with this country, if anything, is its growing conservatism - probably caused by all of us baby boomers turning into curmudgeons. Conservatism is about conserving, hanging on to what was good in the past. = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = News flash: The only thing in the past is a whole lot of dead people. Living is about change, usually radical change. Twenty-thousand years ago, all of the mammoth-fur coat manufacturers went belly up when the ice retreated. It's hard to guess how many settlements, villages, even civilizations went underwater in that global warming trend. A hundred years ago, buggy whip and carriage manufacturers went belly up when the automobile became affordable. Ten years ago, it was mom-and-pop local bookstores going out of business. A century ago, Fort Collins was a dirt crossroad, and a century from now, it may be completely absorbed into the Front Range Metro area under the North American-Chinese Joint Civicorporate Charter, formed in 2080 after the economic collapse of the Second American Fascist Protectorate. Or some other currently unimaginable future that our great-grandchildren will be living in. I've come around to my son's point of view. The world isn't ending - it's just changing. As it has always done. Joseph C. Nemeth lives in Fort Collins, Colorado USA
