“There’s a word for people whose atoms have been completely dissociated. It’s called DEAD.”

Exactly the often expressed view of Star Trek’s curmudgeonly Doctor ‘Bones’ ;-)

Yes, we run our society on oil. But there are other energy sources out there– we just need to work on them, make them practical, and build them. It won’t be easy, but I must be an optimist. Maybe some of my grandchildren will be part of the team that makes it happen.

There was a time when the forests of Europe all were cut down for firewood and early mining. Then we learned to use coal. More recently, we switched from coal to oil. (Check out Massie’s “Dreadnought” for the advantages of switching) Now, oil is becoming in shorter suppply. Do you think there’s no answers? Or only one good answer?
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Fabius Maximus replies: Yes, there is one answer: time. Time until peak, time until we start aggresive adaptation programs, time over which production plateaus after peaking, time rate of production decline following the plateau. It is all about time, and how we use it.
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As I mention in “Peak Oil Doomsters debunked, end of civilization called off“, peak oil is a discussion about a transitional period, and where it will come out on the spectur from trivial to very painful. History will eventually forget about this period, as we have forgotten about all those depressions in the late 19th century.

I see a failure of imagination and fact here… projecting human frailties onto other species, for one thing, and failing to realize the hard limits imposed on distance travel by Einstein’s core equation. There could be a mature, thriving, ancient civilization in our galactic center, and they would never find a way to get here physically, because of the mass and energy and speed limits implied by Einstein’s discovery.

In order to write some very good, and very bad, science fiction, authors have posited technologies that overcome this limitation by the use of additional dimensions such as hyperspace or the folding thereof. Given the state of physics and string theory, there may be such dimensions, and such folds may be possible in a physical sense. It may even be possible, let us say, to put some matter into a black hole here, and have it emerge from a quasar there, thousands of light years away, instantaneously.

What is almost certain NOT to be possible is to take living tissue from this biosphere, with its chemical, electrical, and other dependencies and subtleties, and put it literally outside these four dimensions and then retrieve it alive. Those transporters on Star Trek are one of the most laughable devices ever. There’s a word for people whose atoms have been completely dissociated. It’s called DEAD.

Sorry, couldn’t resist…
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Fabius Maxiumus replies: WordPress spell-checker does not check the title — or comments, unfortunately.