Radical hope in a doomsday scenario

Our human species has had a remarkable ride over the last 10,000 years. We have gone from a group of scattered hunter gatherers, we have discovered agriculture, moved from a religious, mystical phase to an age of reason and science to industrialization and technology to our present era of a new and evolving digital world.

Water, the key to our future

Those who have studied water are seeing signs everywhere of an impending climate catastrophe.

First, some places have too much water. Because global warming has raised the temperature of the oceans, there is now more energy to fuel hurricanes and typhons. Recently in the Gulf of Mexico a category 4 hurricane, Ida, formed. It was so powerful that it rampaged through the entire east coast of the United States. Even in the northeastern states, the "tail" of Ida dumped record levels of rainfall in a very short time. These rainfalls were so unexpected that 50 people died trapped in their own homes and in cars on the road. Extreme rainfalls are now a global phenomenon, as seen in Germany and other countries.

Letter to a friend: Fusion energy -- I would love to be proven wrong, but I fear I may be correct

A good friend sent me a YouTube clip about a global quest to produce non-polluting energy.  

I responded as follows...

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Hi John,

 

Interesting indeed. A fine example of the hope that "technology will save us". Nuclear fusion is definitely the supreme hope of these attempts. In theory, it is very appealing, but in practice it is most likely not achievable.

 

As a technologist myself, it is not easy to say that technology will NOT save us here. Why?