Month: July 2005

The X Prize

abrupt July 20, 2005

I found myself reading about the X Prize (now the Ansari X Prize). This is the competition behind last year’s private space flight. Reading their history and mission pages is interesting. They’ve modeled the prize on the aviation prizes of the early 20th Century, which effectively drove the innovation leading to today’s aerospace industry.

These people are using the same model to drive the development of private space flight, and a number of other innovations. It’s really just quite cool.

“The mission of the X PRIZE Foundation is to cause radical breakthroughs in space and other technologies for the benefit of humanity.”

Their motto: Evolution through competition.

And from their Fact Sheet:

Why space?
Space offers adventure
Space provides freedom- a frontier literally without end.
Space can save the Earth

A tiny fraction of the abundant solar energy that flows past the Earth could provide all of our planet’s power needs without greenhouse gasses or nuclear residue-forever. Beyond energy, space offers us unlimited access to the metals and minerals needed for technological expansion and new worlds for our use in developing future societies.

Space flight offers the ultimate personal challenge

Every one of the 500 men and women who have flown in space has said that it was the adventure of a lifetime. They report that viewing the world from higher than the highest mountain is a universally mind-altering experience.

The Oil Endgame

abrupt July 8, 2005

A friend turned me on to The Oil Endgame. You can download the full PDF for free.

I’ve only read the introductory quotes and Executive Summary so far, but this has proven an antidote to my stewing anxiety and anger over what I presumed was a thoroughly-entrenched cultural and economic addiction to oil. The truth is, the economy seeks profit and growth, and the “captains of industry” know better than anyone that oil will increasingly be a losing proposition. Shell and BP may not be pushing energy alternatives out of a deepfelt connection with the planet — but they don't have to. All they have to do is recognize that the successful energy company of the future will manage a diversity of hydrocarbon and increasingly non-hydrocarbon supply chains.

Look, no one is in business in order to pollute; it's just been cheaper historically not to worry about it. No one in the oil business believes oil will last forever; they’re not in denial. The question is who will successfully combine leading-edge technologies with a functional business model, in order to grow themselves out of the oil well?

I don’t believe the transition will be smooth and pretty. But I have full conviction that we’re not going to just watch the oil drain away until the lights go out and society collapses. There are alternatives now and they will have their day, less or more bloodshed later.

The Extropian in me says “Hi”

abrupt July 6, 2005

But maybe the goal of “sustainability” is misleading — methadone for an oil-addicted world. “Sustainability” in the context of energy means we don’t eat ourselves out of existence, but as a vision for a future humanity it has the suggestion of a plateau, stability, leveling off, maintenance.

As essential as it is for our species to survive the end of oil, the human future — at least on this planet — is not a descent into well-mannered predictability. We are riding the lightning bolt of evolution, and we are neither its final culmination nor a done deal. We point the way, and as History accelerates, more and more of the creative energy of the universe is being focused on this planet. There will be no plateau, no Millennium of peace, as long as Humanity occupies this planet.

These musings (by no means new to me) force me to consider that this planet and even the human body are transitional artifacts. Like the placental sac discarded or consumed at birth, perhaps gross animal nature is the nutritive husk to be cast off by the children of Humanity as they expand into the cosmos.

Part of me rejects this vision. The earth is the Mother, the body the Temple, to be cherished and respected. Yes. And I don’t posit their obsolescence as a condemnation or dismissal. The question is, how much are we willing to give up? Not for economic or political gain, but to realize the full creative potential of the Cosmos?

  • Your body is a boat to lay aside when you reach the far shore.
    Or sell it if you can find a fool, it’s full of holes, it’s full of holes.

    –William Burroughs, The Western Lands

Chicken Little whispered this in my ear

abrupt July 5, 2005

An oft-quoted Saudi proverb haunts me: “My father rode a camel, I drive a car, my son rides in a jet airplane. His son will ride a camel.”

Underneath the clicks and squeaks of everyday life a drum is pounding, deep and relentless. I've always had an ear for the apocalyptic, but lately the beat seems louder, the rhythm more defined. Global warming, peak oil, the end of the American Century… Sure, it’s probably amplified by seeing War of the Worlds tonight — a masterpiece of apocalyptic horror — but we are naive if we think the world is not undergoing radical and accelerating change.

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As the world comes apart

abrupt July 2, 2005

Eyes gleam in darkness want to kill us
To pierce our air-conditioned haze
Our false bubble
To let the world in, sweating and congested

Fingers feel for our weakness
Always creeping back though smashed
And smashed with force
Without a center
Without remorse

The scramble to survive:
All life washing in a tide
Against the stanchions of America
Almost sinking this fragile boat
As history rages stronger