'Unlimited' Energy..........
I believe we should use as much energy as we like.The way I'd plan things we could use as much as we wanted WITHOUT destroying our planet AND have fantastic life styles with all our needs AND physical material wants met.
A few decades ago everybody was worried about population growth.
Then we discovered we could grow enough food to feed everybody - even with a population growing by BILLIONS!!!!!!!!!!
Think about the basic premises of Economics:
'Limited resources but with unlimited wants'
Is the above really true.
I DO NOT BELIEVE I HAVE UNLIMITED WANTS.
Take cars for example. I do not want to own 1,000 cars; heck - I can only drive one car at a time. What's the point of owning a fantastic car if when you take it out for a drive you are caught in gridlock?
What's the point of owning five different homes if you can only live in one at a time?
Ok, so we can feed a huge population.
I say it'd be better to have a smaller population, not worry about economic growth but develop technology so we don't need to employ young people to look after the growing percentage of 'oldies'.
So - I'd prefer a half-naked beautiful female servant to bathe my old rusty bits, but if it meant a better quality of life for everybody I'd be happy to use a robot to bathe me - as long as it wasn't programmed to take away too many layers of skin when giving me a quick scrub!
In an ideal world we'd be able to use what energy arrived on the planet without having to find extra energy from elsewhere.
'X' billion people consume way too much energy in my opinion. Look at it this way, if there were only 10 people on the planet we'd never have to worry about running out of fuel, would we?
What we need to do is to plan our population so that we have enough people to produce all the goodies we'd like to consume but no more than that minimum and also be able efficiently recycle 'stuff' so we won't need to travel so far.
How large is the minimum 99% self-sufficent community. I have no idea, but I'd guess you'd need at least 30,000 people to produce all the food and services you'd want to fulfill all your material needs and desires - from food, to housing to manufactured goods to entertainment etc.
WHAT DO YOU THINK?
Comments (1)
Energy can't be created or destroyed, so all you really need are more energy harnessing devices.
The two problems we have are that we are dependant on oil that will run out eventually. If right now we had no oil, vehicles wouldn't work. The country would totally collapse, people would starve because of no way to transport food, no way to defend our sky, all the machines that run on oil would stop. In my opinion, oil was a good reason to go war over.
Your senario would be good to cover needs, but never enough to cover desires. Suppose you have a community and all is good and running, then another community produces something amazing. Now all those other communities want that product, now that nice and perfect community is lacking in a product and isnt' quite as nice anymore.