Some Knowledge

The weather today has been cool.  It has looked like rain all day.  The sky was full of clouds and there is a slight wind.  It’s just a dismal chilly day.

I found some interesting cars online today.  First, I looked for Chevy Vegas, because I used to have a couple of those.  I read a lot about all the problems Chevrolet had with that model.  You’d think a company would design a car that would hold up to some miles.  Apparently, it’s easier to build a car that falls apart after a short time so people come back and buy a new one.

After reading about the Vega, I looked up my Olds 98.  I found a nice shiny maroon ‘73 98 that was listed online as sold.  The car had a pink steering wheel.  It looked like the boat that car was.  If I ever make millions of dollars I might buy another one of those vehicles and fix it up nice.  Nothing like living like an oil tycoon.

The oil tycoons really must have loved the big cars they made in the early 70’s.  A whole fleet of vehicles sucking down refined petroleum as fast as it can be made.  The oil companies are probably making more money today, with more vehicles on the road and the price of oil all going through the roof.  It’s like people can’t seem to use the stuff up fast enough.  Despite new oil fields being discovered off Brazil, we are just about at the peak of oil right now.  With higher consumption, the price will skyrocket and the supplies will run out sooner.

There’s something to be said for living simply.  Using only the resources you need to survive, a person could have a long happy life without all the comforts we take for granted.  I read a story about some people who live in a village in Costa Rica, I think.  It was an interview with a woman who is 100 years old.  She does not drive anywhere.  She lives in a shack and keeps chickens.  Of course, it is a tropical country and climate and a person does not have to fend off the cold of winter.  Still, people need food to live, clean water, and a place to shelter.  You do not need to drive out to the show in a big Cadillac.

Then, for a while, I read about the petrochemical industry.  They make a lot of stuff out of oil.  Plastics, various chemicals used in cars, just about anything you think of has some petroleum in it.  I read a discussion on a forum about how to produce synthetic petroleum from plant oils.  Forums are strange.  One person introduces a topic, and a hundred people all start talking about something else completely.  There was no real answer to this question.  It’s something I’m sure scientists are working on.  Who wouldn’t want an endless supply of renewable plastic?

As I recall, Henry Ford developed a plastic for his cars made from soybeans.  That was a long time ago.  With all that people have learned in the last 100 years, you’d think there would be all kinds of things we could make out of plants.  So, I read about some of this stuff, but soon got bored.  I read about Richard Branson going to fuel a 747 with biodiesel or something similar.  I guess if you have to fly, you may as well fuel your jet with something renewable.  The thing is, this was supposed to be a test flight, and there would be no passengers.  So, the whole flight is just a big waste of fuel.  How environmentally conscious is that?

The price of all forms of energy is increasing.  Well, all forms except the free.  Sunlight still falls on the earth and costs nothing.  Mostly, all it does is heat up the earth.  Some of it is captured by plants, or by solar cells, but for the most part, sunlight doesn’t do much but heat up the planet.  The sun is not even heating up the environment here today.  It’s all bouncing off the thick layer of clouds and speeding back off into space.

Water is the key to why the earth will even support life.  Most of the surface of the earth is covered by water.  Water is the coolant of this planet, along with the atmosphere.  It is a simple feedback system.  The hotter the earth gets, the more water evaporates from the seas.  The more water that evaporates, the more water that condenses into clouds.  The more clouds there are, the less sunlight reaches the earth.  The less sunlight reaching the earth, the less the earth heats up.  A cooler earth means less water evaporates from the seas.  Less evaporation means less clouds, and more sunlight.  It’s a thermal servo circuit that regulates the temperature of earth to within a hundred degrees or so.  How convenient.

I think a lot about what will happen in the future.  I know people are not stupid.  People can be ignorant of some things however.  People ignore most of the stuff they consume.  We live on a planet where we are programmed from birth by business to consume as much as possible.  We are told in endless commercial advertisements that we will only be happy when we can purchase certain things.  We are sold useless things like diamonds as if these things were necessary to our personal relationships.  Shiny carbon is nice, I guess, but it is in no way something that is necessary to form a pair bond with another person.  We need cars to transport ourselves to jobs that we need so we can afford to buy a car to transport us to our jobs.  We need new clothes so that we will be in fashion, which changes several times each year.

All this consumerism leads to senseless waste.  Should you send your old shoes to the landfill just because they are not the latest style?  Do you need to have plastic packaging surrounding your new widget that will just be thrown away?  When you buy that new car, does the old one just get sent to the junk yard as scrap?  In some areas of the world they still repair things that break.  More and more these days, things are not repairable.  It costs less just to get a new radio than it would cost to fix the old one.  There is a lot of room on this planet for recycling old products.

The more things people invent, the more different things people will want.  One new device makes all the old ones obsolete.  More and more, people use something until they replace it with something better.  Things can be made so reliable that they seldom break.  But the lifetime of a product is something that is engineered into it.  Your new computer is only good for as long as it takes for engineers to design something that will make it useless.  Software and hardware work hand in hand to produce this cycle of planned obsolescence.  You buy a new computer.  The software developers design a program that requires a more powerful machine.  If you want to run the new program, you will need to upgrade your hardware.  It’s the way a consumer society works.

Things don’t need to be that way.  With some lack of cutting edge functionality, you can use a computer until it breaks.  There will always be old programs to run.  The advantage to this is that often old software is free.  A person does not need to buy the latest gadget to use a cell phone.  You do not need the latest Blackberry Bold to store your phone numbers.  A pen and pad of paper can do almost the same job.  In the future, when things become more expensive, it may become the style to reuse old equipment.  Then again, we may have a revolution in our social system that allows all the people of the world to be rich.

The resources of the earth are finite.  There is only a certain amount of food that is grown each year.  There are over six billion human beings on the earth that all have to share these resources.  The various governments on the earth were not all founded to be fair systems.  Some people collect far more of the earth’s resources than they can use personally.  Other people have nothing.  Life is in many ways what you make of it, still, there are people who do not have a chance on this planet.  A person needs abilities, and opportunity to use those abilities.  Without knowledge and opportunity, a person is helpless and needs others to take care of him.  There’s really nothing wrong with this.  People like helping each other out, in general, as long as it’s not a huge imposition.

The world runs on money.  This is one of the things that all modern societies have in common, an economic system.  Money is how people apportion goods and services.  Money is how people control other people.  Most people would not want to clean out a sewer system.  The Romans used to force slaves to do this kind of work.  Today, all you have to do is create a job and offer money, and somebody will do this work for you.  The monetary system coexisted with slavery for many years, but has evolved to replace it.  A lot of people with jobs will even think of themselves as slaves to the dollar.  Money is useful for keeping track of transactions for goods and for trading for useful things.  The economic system is also open to the potential abuse of people controlling others for their own gain.  This is what a corporation is, a group of people who control other people for profit.

If I were going to start a company, I’m not sure what I would do.  Living in America is an advantage when it comes to going into business.  This country was founded with the entrepreneur in mind.  Yes, there are taxes.  Yes there are regulations.  Indeed, there are laws that have to be obeyed.  Still, America is the land of opportunity.  All a person needs is a product or service they can sell for a profit and the sky’s the limit.  The government loves business here, because business makes the government a lot of money.  Money is the one thing everybody is taught to want and need.  Without money, a person might not survive.  Business is how people make money.  People survive by selling things to other people for some of their money.  This is the modern world.

Now, look at things from a different perspective, outside of modern society.  The things a person needs to survive are air, water, food, shelter, and heat.  There is no survival value for possessing shiny rocks.  Gold and silver do not sustain life.  What is needed is food and air and water.  Money is an artificial construct that only serves the purpose of trade.  A person can trade without money.  I could trade elk meat for berries.  Modern society is far more complex than primitive culture.  Still, what is necessary for life is the same.  In the old days people did not think of the land as something they owned.  They moved from place to place following the game and the seasons.   People generally live in cities now where they cannot forage for food.  People have houses to maintain and land to tend and things to keep them busy.  It is an easy life in some ways, and a hard life.  You have to play the games of modern man to survive in the big city.

There are still primitive cultures in some places on earth.  Most modern humans would not want to live in these kinds of conditions.  They make TV shows about people who go to live with primitive tribes for a while.  There are many advantages to living in modern society.  Long life is one of these advantages.  Better communications and better diet are other advantages.  Soon, we will have robots to do the truly hard work that people just would rather not do.  The future holds much promise for man.  But the thing that powers all this advancement is energy.  Without energy, the whole thing grinds to a halt and people start dying.

Fusion energy is one of the sources that people have been researching for many years.  Fusion reactors are still off in the future.  There is no reason this technology will not be developed, but there are other ways.  We could derive energy from a fully functional fusion reactor that is 93 million miles away, the sun.  We could do a lot of things with the resources that are available to us.  We could feed all the starving people of the earth with the food that is already available, if only it could be distributed and was not wasted as a source of motor fuel and luxury foods like meat.  We could live in a peaceful world if only governments could find a way to get along.  Wars are very wasteful.  Modern society is very wasteful.  We do not need to throw away our resources just to keep the price of things high.  On the other hand, low prices promote waste.  People need to find a better way of apportioning the resources of earth than a wasteful economic system.  Maybe tomorrow I will think of the answer.