bambusoides or vivax?

[foxd]

Matt in TN, depends on what you want the bamboo for.

ShmuBamboo, I still hold out hope for undiscovered physics or clever uses of known physics. For instance we've had relativity for years, but it wasn't until 1959 that Terrell rotation was discovered. And now it has been discovered that General Relativity permits swimming through curved space-time without reaction mass. That certainly has some interesting implications.

BTW, there is a new type of ion engine that makes Mars more doable now.

[dudley]

I'll be staying home.
Bring me back a t-shirt.

[ShmuBamboo]

Your mind is trapped by the current understanding of technology and you can't even think of technology in the distant future.

But our understanding of how the laws of physics work definitely can change.

My mind is trapped? Well, lord help me then. I think I know more about space propulsion systems than 99.999% of the population. I was an engineer at General Dynamics for many years in San Diego. I worked on the Atlas/Centaur launch system, and on the F-16, F-111, B-1, B-2, and several other fighter and bomber jet platforms. Our understanding of nature can and certainly will change, but the laws of physics do not. You are talking about distances and magnitudes that are way beyond our grasp, and physics that are beyond our capacity to deal with. Deep space is a very hostile place. I have analysed things in the lab that have failed in space that defy explaination to this day. You are also talking about amounts of required energy on a scale that dwarfs the available energy in the entire universe, never mind the means to harness and apply them. As a result, I conclude that interstellar space travel by humans will simply never happen. I can say this with great certainty. NASA gave up the ghost on interstellar space travel some time ago. The task is just too daunting. It is a miricle, and I mean a miricle... that we made it to the moon.

As an educated and experienced design and application engineer for 20 some odd years in 'advanced' aerospace and computer technology, I will counter your statement with this one: You are trapped into thinking that technology will save mankind. It will not. The evolutionary and biological forces of human population overshoot will do us in, and within several more generations. Too many vital global resources are on the verge of collapse. We will become extinct long before we can make it out of this solar system, let alone make it to some point of having a distant future technology. And if you have not noticed, this country is in so much debt now that I doubt that we will even make it to Mars. It is simply too expensive to go there.

[foxd]

A lot of our problems now are due to economic and political forces that see creating the problems as a way to more political power. They need exposed and dealt with, otherwise we will be fighting them every step of the way in trying to solve our problems.

Our problems come down to energy. Generating, storing and efficently using it. Solving those will put us a long way to recovery.

Landing on the Moon was in a lot of ways a miracle, but consider they did it with 60's technology. That's a major miracle in of itself.

I tend to think that interstellar travel is technically possible, but may be impossible due to our own incredible stupidity.

[ShmuBamboo]

Our larger problems come down to energy sources (more specifically, cheap fossil fuel energy sources), and population. We can get as efficient and creative in using energy as possible, and we will still run out of energy from too large a population demanding more of everything. At some point the system just breaks. All civilizations (to this point in human history) are or have been based on growth. Lack of growth will create a decline. Declines lead to wars, epidemics, famine, genocide, and dark ages. Expanding into space just uses too much energy that is not available, and too many resources that are not available, and too much technology which we have yet to develop (or may not be feasible or even possible to develop). Deep space is a very hostile place.

My cynicism regarding the potential of manned interstellar spaceflight stems mainly from my personal experience as an engineer, and specifically from my years in the aerospace industry. My cynicism on the future of humanity stems from my research in nuclear (fissionable) fuel about 10 years ago. At that time I inadvertently stumbled into the Club Of Rome, which at the time was more or less defunct. Seemingly of late it is revitalizing. That group was founded in 1968 to research/discuss the future of energy dependance, and the available resources of the planet, and the limits to human growth. The Club of Rome commissioned what has become a series of good books, starting with The Limits of Growth, and later Beyond the Limits, and lastly Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update. There have been several other books along the way.

The original Club of Rome has since evolved into several online discussion groups and some online web sites that follow what is becoming known as peak oil. One online discussion group that is a direct spin-off of this is 'energyresources' on Yahoo. I have been on that group for almost 10 year now (pretty much since it started). That discussion group evolved directly from the web site, dieoff.org. That site is a stark and bleak site that spells out the future of mankind, and the reasons for our demise. It also illustrates the concept of peak oil, and why at the half way point of our using the available obtainable fossil fuel, civilization will go into a decline and population will go into overshoot. As Carnegie said, we either expand, or we contract. There is no steady state in biological systems, or in global economies. At least not in human systems. It is now believed that we reached the point of peak oil in the summer of 2008. If so, we are on the long slippery slope downward in global civilization from this point on.

Now, where were we? Japanese Timber or Vivax? Was that the original question?

[dudley]

yikes!
I prefer to think we'll live.
civilizations may fall but civilization does not.
thats why today there is a civilization where ancient rome fell.(really, the same spot)
back then it took a hundred years for people to embrace a new theory or even discover one.
now it only takes a generation. or less.
earthship style homes or small efficient above ground homes.
solar will become a viable option to being" on the grid".
telecommuting and shopping.
reforestation, xeriscaping. even global warming will open more land to agriculture.
people will have small families. churches will help the sick and poor instead of buy real estate.
we will embrace natural processes and reject the unnatural.
we will use down-lighting when possible
vegas will be lit by LEDs.
no turf grasses no lawnmowers.
cisterns and rain barrels
sustainable fisheries.
tilapia not swordfish.
people will be appalled by the idea of all you can eat lobster.
bio-fuel (from algae not corn)
local foods and farms
respect. manners and be a good neighbor
i could go on but the dog wants out...

[Matt in TN]

I think very highly of you from the little I know from your postings here, shmubamboo, so please don't take this personally - I understand where you are coming from and in many ways agree with you.

However, when I hear people speak of population control it sets of warning alarms. People controlling their own footprint and affect on the earth is admirable, and I think through education and self-reliability/responsibility (and teaching by EXAMPLE) we can make a large difference. When people start controlling others due to "what they think is best" is when I start to bow up and get defensive. How many times throughout history have we as people caused more harm than good to the environment, simply by doing what we egotistically thought "was best?" On a much smaller scale this comes out to even us as individuals on this site - trying to "out think" the bamboo and prune and cultivate it when the bamboo knows all by itself exactly how many culms and rhizomes it needs. It is really very egotistical of us to think we "know better" than nature. This gets to the extreme of extremes when you start telling people how many children they can have, or how long you think they should continue holding on late in life.

That being said - when the population control crowd gets starts spewing their rhetoric I have one simple response: "Great - start by offing yourself."

[ShmuBamboo]

Well, when it comes to being green, not having kids is the greenest thing that you can do. I do not have any kids myself. Never wanted any, so its not a big deal for me. However, and I mean a big HOWEVER, there is simply no option to averting a future global disater, and even human extinction without some kind of leveling off or reduction in human population. No amount of conservation, reduced energy consumption, or revised technological advancement will replace fossil fuel in terms of raw energy required to sustain the population at its current size. And we are still expanding. We are somewhere between 6 and 7 billion people now. Even if the current existing population only have 2 kids per family, the population will increase to over 10 billion people. That size population is simply not suatainable. No matter what stores of energy we find, or what types of programs we implement, or how much we want to think otherwise; at some point we will simply outgrow the sources of energy required to feed ourselves. We are already at the point now where if we use corn to supplement oil for gasoline production, we impact the global food supply. So tough decisions are being made and policies implemented already that cause the poorer people in the world to starve. Mainy in the form of higher prices for food and energy. The poor simply cannot afford the price of gas and food on today's markets. The USA is also no longer a net food exporter either. Sometime in the past 10 years or so, we slipped from being a net farm producer to a net farm consumer. We cannot feed the starving people of the world any more, like we have so many times in the recent past.

Like it or not, all the energy forums and energy awareness political groups have boiled down to one premise; that we at least try to stop the expansion of human population, or even try to lower it. Like you say, that brings up Draconian visions of the future and issues that people simply refuse to discuss. However, if we cannot at least discuss this concept, we are doomed. Yes, population control goes against the grain of every religion out there. It goes against every political system we have used, save for post-revolutionary China and maybe the Nazi regime in Germany. It also goes against every biological system that we have observed. It goes against the grain of human evolution, culture and biological programming. And it certainly goes against raging teenage hormones. Indeed, this message is not a happy one, or even one that most people want to even contemplate. Most just ignore it. Not unlike global warming, it is just not what people want to hear. We seem to want to go along on our marry way of mass consumption and mass increase in population.

If we as humans refuse to deal with population control, nature will take care of things for us. That is the nature of nature, and of population systems that grow exponentially and strip resources. We are already going into what is defined as population overshoot. That means that we will have more people than we have food and energy to sustain. While energy levels decline and consequently food resources decline, the population will continue to rise. At some point the system will collapse. A drought or flood will cause a massive famine. Some large source of food like ocean fisheries will fail. Or some disease like SARS or Swine Flu will go on the rampage and wipe out huge numbers of people. Or we will revert to our great human invention; war. It is inevitable. The price of energy will continue to increase as the availability of energy decreases. Again, the poor people of the world will not be able to afford to eat at some point. Already in Africa and Asia they are on the teetering point.

These things will happen in our lifetime. Education is just way too slow to avert the coming crises. Human culture and religions are too slow to react to one generation changes. We cannot even agree that there is a looming problem on the horizon, let alone grasp the consequenses of things to come. Global warming is a good example of that. No one wants to believe it until it is too late. I was made keenly aware of the energy issues to come during the 1972 gas crisis. The lessons from that time are all but forgotten now. While that energy crisis was an artificial one in terms of global oil availability and created by the Arab oil embargo, it was at the very point that the US reached peak oil production. From that point on we have declined as an energy producer. We now comsume way more energy than we produce. That is simply not sustainable, and we are going into massive debt in the US as a direct result of our excessive consumption. But no one wants to talk about that either.

So, you may or may not agree with me, and you may choose to ignore the issue entirely. However, in our lifetimes, that is if you are about 50 or under, these issues will become more and more prevalent in the years to come. Like global warming, there is no stopping it. In the meantime, enjoy the peak, people. This is it. The peak of civilization is happening right now. We are at the peak of global energy production and consumption here and now. It will not get any better than this for the majority of people on earth.

[foxd]

To me it looks like we chose to put ourselves in this position by not acting sooner and listening to a bunch of deniers who secretly knew the science behind Global Warming was good, but views the destruction it will cause as a really good idea because it puts wealth and power into their hands.

Technically we can solve the problems we face, but the longer we delay the more draconian the solutions are going to be. Despite what many people think, you can't out stubborn physics.

[ShmuBamboo]

Technically we have been able to solve most (but not all) problems. Politically though? It is impossible. That is something I learned from my political science teacher in college, who was a professor at the College of War at the NPS school in Monterey, CA. That was at the time of the African famines in Ethiopia. His analysis was that we could have easily solved the famine and sent in food to the starving throngs of people there. However, as soon as we tried to do that, the truck drivers all went on strike, the price of a truck tripled in value, gas prices soared, and the food was tied up for months in depots, stolen, and sold off. Politically it was just unsolvable. Not unlike now; we in 'the have' will continue to use energy and eat while the cost of energy will cause the poor populations to starve. A form of continual political and cultural genocide, based on our capitalist values system and political and religious beliefs.

I am amused with the previous administrations attempt to bury global warming. Even Newt Gingrich agrees that global warming is an issue. Seemingly the damage from global warming will be so catastrophic that no one can say what the final outcome will be. While I believe that it will be secondary to our own undoing from population overshoot, it certainly will play a role in our demise. It also seems that the prospects of global warming are so controversial, and have such a great impact in the capital flow of corporate profits, that the large industrial powers of the world have sent legions of lobbyists to Washington to bury the obvious and 'inconvenient' truth. The average Joe American is still in doubt that it is real, and many vehemently believe that it is a complete farce. I find that amazing, really. The amount of evidence is massive. CO2 levels are higher than they have bean in the last several millions of years. Completely off the charts. We are approaching levels of CO2 that the greenhouse effects are going to be secondary to the direct adverse health effects of the CO2 gas that we breathe. Sigh...

Well, maybe. I mean, climate change is not really happening, is it? This is all a cooked up scheme of Al Gore and the radical left. Just like the Holocaust was not real, according to the Iranian government. Seems that we can make up whatever we want to be real, and blindly go off the evolutionary cliff of extinction with manifest destiny and the industrial conglomerates leading the way.

[Mackel in DFW]

To Schmu,

(My father went to NPS in Monterey in the early seventies.)

If you're really worried about mass extinction, get some religion or head to the hills and learn to become self sufficient. Avoid the heavy metal fallout, because imo it is much more likely nuclear war will do far more damage to the population long before carbon based fuels, and therefore the peak of co2 levels, run out.

In addition, grow more bamboo than the next guy, partially burn it, and dump it into the soil. Excellent soil amendment. There's plenty of room to get rid of carbon, it's right beneath our feet.

I am a biologist by training myself, and am not buying the catastrophism due to co2 levels theory so much. There are several things that will do us in that concern me much more. Like fanaticism, totalitarianism, eugenics, elitism. A country boy can survive, as they say.


Mackel in DFW

[foxd]

ShmuBamboo, I agree with you about politics making a problem, otherwise easily solvable, impossible to solve. It doesn't help that I have seen people who create a problem just so they can solve it in order to gain political power. Of course they usually fall down on the solving part, but they hang onto the political power they acquired.

At present the reality of global warming is outpacing the projections and is going to be a lot worse than we are expecting. Of course the deniers spin this into "Scientists wrong about global warming!"

The discovery of global warming is based on some basic physics that has been known for about a century. When deniers deny the reality of global warming they are denying some pretty basic physics. Trying to out stubborn the laws of physics does not end well. However it does get downright surreal!

Don't let THEM immanentize the eschaton!

[Mackel in DFW]

To Foxd,

Nobody who calls themself a scientist can deny "climate change". But the very act of "solving it" imo wil result in a massive, global conflict that man may not be able to survive in itself. For example, the haves vs. the have nots. Again, I suggest anyone who stays up at night worrying about mass extinction of man should find religion or head to the hills. Existential angst is simply that, and no one makes it out of here alive. If we all die at the same time, what is the difference. Of course man will eventually face catastrophe, the history of evolution is demarcated very nicely by this continuous and episodic phenomenon. In the meantime, do what is in your heart and be a conscientious steward of the earth. It's not worth your mental health. Ride a bike, grow bamboo, and thank your lucky stars, the chances of your very existence was infinitely small in the first place, and the imortality of your kind, smaller. Me, I will follow the Lord's teachings, whether there is such an entity or not. Such as, be a good steward of nature, love thy neighbor, turn the other cheek, etc., etc. All you need is love, baby.

Mackel in DFW

[needmore]

You guys are killing me...get a room...find a conspiracy theory chat site...lets talk about bamboo eh?

[Mackel in DFW]

Sorry Needmore,

Just trying to have a little fun with the subject.

Regards to Everybody,
Mackel in DFW