I’m sure your family heard some version of this story back in the days of the first oil shocks of the 1970s. In Pittsburgh, the bad news was that UFOs had landed on Grant Street (where all the city and county offices are). The good news was that the aliens eat bureaucrats and piss gasoline.
As of this morning, I had reached page 43 of the current New York Review, where there is a major article by Freeman Dyson: "The Question of Global Warming." And in Saturday’s New York Times, Joe Nocera refers to the same article, which he was reading on a plane headed for the Exxon-Mobil annual meeting in Dallas. Small world, and warm.
The interesting thing about Dyson is that he thinks global warming is a question. The science is far from settled, he says: looming catastrophe is not necessarily at hand – though the possibility has to be taken seriously – and some of the solutions being touted would be disastrous.
Dyson is no shill for the oil companies. He’s an eminent theoretical physicist and mathematician, an emeritus professor at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies, and a tireless proponent of nuclear disarmament. His interest in climate change is to understand it better and thus to devise realistic solutions. As the ethanol fiasco has demonstrated, the wrong approaches can lead to unintended consequences like sky high food prices and the threat of widespread starvation, without really doing anything to alleviate the energy or climate crises.
Other voices:
A book called What Are You Optimistic About? ( John Brockman, the Edge Foundation, www.edge.org) poses its title question to 145 of our best thinkers. A number of them talk about energy and global warming, and several point out that the sun not only causes global warming, it also gives us 7,000 times as much energy as we’re currently using (including the solar energy locked up in oil and coal).
Every hour, enough clean, green solar energy rains down on earth to supply all our needs for a year. Unlike the plants, we haven’t yet learned to use it efficiently, or we wouldn’t have a greenhouse problem.
There are a number of promising developments making solar collection less expensive and more efficient, but some of the essayists see bigger strides coming; e.g., artificial photosynthesis and polymer solar cells that can be ink-jetted onto plastics by the acre.
Gregory Cochran goes a step further. "Hardly anyone seems to realize it," he says, "but we’re on the threshold of an era of unbelievable abundance." Within a generation, according to Cochran – and sooner if we want it enough – we will be able to make self-replicating machines. Well, why not? That’s what we are.
These would eat dirt, soak up sunshine, and use the resulting minerals and energy to clone or extend themselves as far as we would like. If some of these machines were self-replicating solar panels, they could equal the amount of energy the world is now using by covering two tenths of one percent of the world’s surface – or less if we augment this from the much greater collection area of space.
Dyson sees comparable promise in biotechnology – carbon-eating varieties of trees that would preserve the forest habitats while reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide by half within fifty years.
There you have it. The technological equivalent of aliens who eat bureaucrats and piss gasoline.
Cross posted from
The Horse You Rode In On.