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pdwyer wrote: I think its about time the human race woke up and smelled the coffee and acted on this, it's clear the politicians and financial powers that be are not helping the situation!

My brother once said: "Humanity is like someone that jumps from a roof of a skyscraper and on the way down he constantly tells himself: "Until now all went fine."

Thorium wrote:My brother once said: "Humanity is like someone that jumps from a roof of a skyscraper and on the way down he constantly tells himself: "Until now all went fine."

I which I didn't, but I have to agree. The world today is all about quarterly reports, very few seems to have much longer planning in the corporate world and almost all serious politicians can only see the next election - if not tomorrow headlines in the news. As a species we are the only one with the ability to clearly show shame and also the only one who need to.

In the end there are for sure not a single thing/action/invention who will sort out all mess in the world around us. The only thing is to try to do something. Personally I've been involved in CCS theologies in different test plants for the last years. It is yet an other thing that by itself will not save us, but may give us time to organize a better energy base around us.

So for me, I want to bring a parachute while chanting "so fare so good"...

pdwyer wrote:[...]
removes the requirement for exponential growth and that we come to understand that more sustainable living is the only way
to move forward till realistic energy solutions (things like fusion, solar and wind power) are ready to play a bigger part in our society.

Nice article pdwyer, i just want to add some thoughts about the new 'energy solutions'.

I don't think we have solutions for our energy problems. It could even be reverse, the new
so called 'solutions' make new problems:
Everybody in the world thinks now wind energy is a solution. It is called "clean energy".
I think it is a little bit short-sighted. The energy does not come out of nowhere, it is just
converted. So what we actually do is changing the weather on earth. We take the energy
out of the wind and convert it to electric energy to operate our electronic toys.
"Taking the energy out of the wind" is the important thing here. More wind energy farms
all over the world, more changes in weather. Clouds don't move the same if the wind has
less energy, so it affects rain distribution on earth too.

It is the same with geothermal energy. We take geothermal energy for heating and as
geothermal electricity. We take heat out of the earth and bring it to the ground level.

Maybe it is not as worse as burning fossil fuels, but i think geothermal energy exploitation
and wind energy farms are not the final solution. They might seems so good today and
100 or 200 years later we see weird effects we didn't think about before.
Instead backpedal and re-think the situation we invent more and more new technologies
and make more problems for ourselves.

The best solution would be to radically cut down energy consumption, but how many people can live without TV
and smartphones? How many people are willing to give up their comfortable car and ride a bicycle again?

I think we need more changes. Living in smaller communities/villages and plant food locally instead
going to supermarket and buy banana from countries 10.000 kilometers afar.
We need to re-learn to live along with nature, not against it.

Will great ape change by choice and give up on many toys and their standard of living? I doubt it.


EDIT: 2 pictures to visualize why we face those problems today:

To add something to the energy discussion: If sun / wind / thermal energy isn't the solution then it's fusion power!

I am with Danilo on this. I think there is no tech solution for the energy. We just want to much and there is no way to get it without massivly influencing the environment. And thats true for other ressources as well. I dont believe that we will fix this problems. They will fix themselfs when the system is at it's breaking point. Human history shows us that we allways need a bang befor we do something.

The thing is a system does not slowly end to work. It allways has some tolerance and if you get over the tolerance the system will just break in one moment. I think we are much to far to avoid the breaking point, to do so we would need to drasticly change our culture and basicly go back on the trees.

I just found this site today: The Encyclopedia of Earth

The Encyclopedia of Earth (EoE) is an electronic reference about the Earth, its natural environments, and their interaction with society.
The EoE is a free, expert-reviewed collection of content contributed by scholars, professionals, educators, practitioners and other experts
who collaborate and review each other's work.
The content is presented in a style intended to be useful to students, educators, scholars, professionals, as well as to the general public.

Articles:
- Human population explosion
- Ecological footprint

Ecological footprint wrote: The Earth’s biologically productive area is approximately 11.2 billion hectares or 1.8 global hectares per person in 2002
(some of this capacity humanity may want to set aside for wild species).
However, the global Ecological Footprint in 2002 was 13.7 global hectares or 2.2 global hectares per person.
Thus, in 2002, humanity’s Ecological Footprint exceeded global biocapacity by 0.4 global hectares per person, or 23 percent.
This finding implies that the human economy is in ecological overshoot: the planet’s natural resource capital stock is being depleted,
thus eroding future supply of natural resources and operating at risk of environmental collapse.

So we already reached the limit and human population will grow another 20% - 30% to 9 or 10 billions within this century?
And all those people need drinking water, food, and more energy for all the electronic toys etc...

...... The world will never be organised as a single unit and so any necessary measures to save the planet will never be fulfilled. Our only slim chance of future survival would probably be the discovery of another planet that we can inhabit. Snag is, the most suitable ones may already be inhabited, so no doubt mankind's ultimate solution will be a violent one when all is said and done.

Its great to be having this conversation on a technical forum, anywhere else and you'd be harrased as a doomsayer! (hope I didn't steal the thread direction, but this IS the future as far as I see it )

I was reading about Fusion the other day, it's likely to be a major part of our energy mix in the future but it's still in experimental stages, they don't even know how to turn the reaction into energy yet and have only theories on how to use it for heat to run a steam turbine. This is decades away from a pilot plant and further still before it's ready for corporations to deploy. Look how long solar has been around in a theoretical sense before getting as mature as it is today!

In 2006, Simmons & Company International, an investment banking firm focused on energy, estimated that if solar power capacity grew at the incredibly high rate of 25 percent per year over the next 14 years (from 2006 to 2020), it would provide roughly 1 percent of global electricity demand

In spite of the doom and gloom, I think this is still a fair way off (10 years+) and hopefully the current economic turmoil is due to wall street shenanigans entirely and not because dips in energy are putting downward pressure on the system. If we take some of the pressure off the situation... govt to reduce taxes on where they want people to go with this, even if it's cleaner diesel engines, natural gas cars etc it could push d-day back a bit. (not seeing it though)

< rant >
I still want Greece to default though (techincally they've defaulted already). Partly for the greek peoples sake and partly to put a nail in the coffin of this ugly financial system. The bailouts aren't even going to the greek people, money comes in and goes to creditors, and in return what do the greek people get? their bank appointed leader signs them up for more poverty! . It's easy for people to say "They did it to themselves! they made their bed and now they have to sleep in it!" but when someone lends a poor credit risk money and they can't pay it back, the debtor isn't supposed to become a slave to the creditor! collateral is taken, credit ratings drop and the person has to live within their means till someone decides to take a risk on them again. Iceland just had it's rating lifted after it's default a while back. The greeks don't seem to be allowed to default! apparently the top 5 US banks are holding 97% of the credit default swaps (all held off balance sheet with other derivitives so the auditors can't see it) so if it's an official default, guess who gets the tab? Its enough to make them all insolvent! thats 5 x AIG in the middle of an election year, no wonder the greeks are being sold down the river. A third bail out on printed money later in the year? sure, whatever it takes!
< / rant>

The market is more machine than man now, twisted and evil

(added)
Just remembered some interesting trivia I read recently

1 barrel of oil does the equivellent amount of work as one man working 40hrs a day for 12 years!
and costs only $100
A super tanker carries the same 'work' as all 7 billion people on the planet working for 14 hours!

I dont see it as doomsday. Conditions will just change. The planet has regenerated from much worse in the past and also humanty isnt that easy to wipe out. One time humanty was allready at the brink of extinction. At one point in history the population of humanty was down to ca. 10k.

Its not that easy to get rid of us.
Even if conditions get realy bad, humans can adapt because of there intelligence.

True, I'm sure humans will survive too.

thats not quite the same as the world we live in now though
It's a big change

Some ecologists are already working on "transition". See there : http://www.transitionnetwork.org/suppor ... initiative
It needs a good environmental and social sensibility, but it's promising ! Yes, we can live with a lot less oil

The initial rant was mainly about the future softwarewise. I really think the PC is an increasingly
unimportant platform to target if you want to develop for a mass market.

Apologies for the hijack, back on topic...

In the business desktop space the direction now looks to be VDI, windows PCs, terminal servers or citrix, that are virtuallised and managed centrally with thin clients (Sun rays, IPads, clean laptops (even mac air books) ). It give the same functionality, makes it easy to work remote, and keeps sensitive data in the datacenter rather than on portable devices where information can leak.

These days business continuity is a big deal too so if PCs are virtual and part of the disaster recovery model does that change things as to fat vs thin on the desktop?

Virtual Desktops can be close to their data sources for performance reasons and distribution of software controlled ealiser.

For this reason, the idea of a browser as a front end might be less necessary.

The question I have though, are businesses hoping one front end will do more for their applications needs or do they want to distribute and have more variety? I like one app that does one job well and if VDI makes this possible I'm happy. But, I'm usually in a minority

(FYI, my job is IT infrastructure for finance and professional service companies so my viewpoint is skewed toward supportability rather than functionality)

Thorium wrote:...After all we had it that way right on the begining of computer history with the mainframes and terminals. There was a reason we moved away from that.

We're moving back to it - the *cloud* = mainframe and iphones / SmartTVs / Tablets = terminals, data and processing is being re-centralised, the terminals are smarter but all the smarts are in the GUI

and yet the phones are getting smarter!

I think we are going to see a better balance of "Distributed" for better redundnancy and performance and "centralised" for better management and control of the increased complexity.

If you've ever managed multiple vmware clusters in different countries similtaneously from a central vCenter mgmt tool, this is the sort of thing I'm talking about.