Will Culturally Inappropriate Prosperity Doom Us All?

[james_davis_nicoll]

As pointed out in email

Spun right, this could a population bomb for the 21st century:

The basic story is: growth, but not evenly distributed growth. Developed countries are expected to plateau in population and energy demand, but developing countries are expected to grow like gangbusters:
[snip]
What kind of energy will satisfy all that new demand? While renewables and natural gas are expected to grow faster than ever before, and oil and coal are expected to substantially slow their growth, there will nonetheless be more oil and coal burned in 2030 than in 2011:

[Poll #1754119]

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Send the developed world back to a preindustrial tech level to compensate?

[debgeisler.livejournal.com]

Of course, rather than *developing* the new energy source, it would be easier to steal it from mean aliens or to be gifted it by benevolent aliens. But aliens need to figure in there somewhere.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

Let the OECD nations Transcend into non-corporeal forms in a Vingean Singularity through special ablative birthinghel crematoria.

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

Send them back to their place as cheap labor for the developed world.

Coffee plantations everywhere, say I! Banana, tea, and opium are also acceptable.

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

Commercialise a way to turn baby seals into a biofuel source. All that high-calorie blubber... and 100% green, too!

-- Steve thinks it's reasonable to see the developing world leapfrog over the nasty bits of the power-generating learning curve, as they did with telecommunications.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I've got my Nike Windrunners on and I'm waiting for the comet!

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

I'm a science fiction fan; how can I possibly be expected to resist Dark Matter windmills?

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Yes, learning from our mistakes (or just experience; to be a "mistake" the consequences needed to be forseeable and the alternatives needed to exist at the time the decision was made) would be a good thing for others to do. Even for us to do, really.

[jeffreyab.livejournal.com]

Also this: Encourage more efficient use of conventional energy sources in the developed world

[anzhalyumitethe.livejournal.com]

You may need to move those into the purely science fantasy realm from the hard scifi section. There may be no stinkin dark matter. ;)

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/26912/

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

I LOLed.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Since you insist on using radio buttons rather than ticky boxes, I will have to insert (X)CATS! into the comments.

[maruad.livejournal.com]

I know! That's what sold me on that option. I have no idea what they are but they sound so cool.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

If those results stand up, either it'll re-open the questions that "called dark matter into existence" (as a theory, I mean) in the first place, or else cast doubt on what we think we know about how dark matter would behave. Not my field, but both ends seem relatively new and not heavily confirmed yet; could go either way, or some unexpected direction entirely.

[redbird]

s/developing/developed for choice 3 and maybe 2: I like my comfort, but who is going to accept "stop developing so we can keep our much lifestyle which is much nicer than we're asking you to stop at"?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

That has got to involve certain assumptions about how dark matter particles interact. All the models have in common is that they have mass and aren't just baryonic matter.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

People living thousands of miles away across water, without access to modern weapons, might end up de-facto accepting it.

I do not urge this as ethical behavior, of course.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Anyone who says "Dark Energy windmills" gets my stern disapproval.

[anzhalyumitethe.livejournal.com]

There are massive amounts of assumptions that go into dark matter's existence and behavior.

That it doesn't seem to interact with gamma rays is...interesting.

[jamiam.livejournal.com]

DARK MATTER WINDMILLS.

....Dude, I'm sitting in Germany right now, and it's raining. It was raining yesterday; it rained the day before that; it will rain tomorrow and likely the day after that. If GERMANY can make solar power work, practically anybody can.

[dcseain.livejournal.com]

I selected 2 because it's most expedient, but would have chosen 4 also with checkboxes.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Awww; that was going to be my backup plan.

What about DarkVoltaic panels, then?

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

Waly waly! Next comes the foldin' o' the arms!

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Off the top of my head, to do electron/positron-style annhilation into gamma rays you need electric charge. Other kinds of particles might well give off gamma rays as secondary products, but WIMP-style dark matter is usually assumed to have weak or no interaction with any of the particles we know of by nongravitational means.

There's just not a lot known. But I see a lot of people jumping from this to the conclusion that dark matter is obviously bogus and astrophysicists are just being stupid (I used to hear the same thing about quarks), and the fact is, it's really hard to reproduce the astronomical and cosmological observations from anything other than dark matter, some of which has to be nonbaryonic. MOND models were a good rough sketch of an alternate theory but they have worse problems than dark matter models.

(Granted, I even get defensive about this kind of argument concerning stuff that's known not to exist. Pet peeves of mine are claims that the luminiferous aether and phlogiston were obviously dumb ideas, based on a litany of their supposedly absurd properties.)

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Anyway, such weakly interacting particles would probably be hopeless as winds for windmills.