Well it looks like Liftport Group, the company dedicated to building a Space Elevator has succumbed to the difficulties of long term finance of a high risk venture. The CEO Michael Laine announced not so long ago that he was stepping down when they could find a suitable replacement but it does not seem to have kept the wolf from the door. This post by Brian Dunbar on the staff blog confirms it. It makes me sad because this project if of historic importance to humanity and yet it languishes in relative obscurity. I even volunteered for their Liftport Ambassador’s program & will be speaking to at least one conference on the subject (Conflux4) this year.
I would not be surprised to see some Liftporters get up again with a different vehicle but for now the main contender is Blackline Ascension who were started by Bradley Edwards (who did the NASA work & wrote the definitive book on the subject) and who were competing with Liftport to get the Space Elevator up first. The Elevator 2010 competition (run by Spaceward Foundation) will continue so the field is not exactly being left bare. I even read in KuiperCliff that Lockheed Martin has claimed a patent on Space Elevators though it is hard to see how anyone could miss the ‘prior art’ on that one!
One way or another I hope and believe that a Space Elevator will still be built in our lifetimes. It is just too important not to. So go Blackline! and anyone else who can make it happen!
So will we ever see it rise? My guess is yes but it is going to take a concerted effort by those who see the possibility, need, benefit etc. It may even take a public campaign & a movie by Al Gore before our governments see through the lens of voter opinion that humanity needs this.
First published at my old blog http://clauswitz.multiply.com/ 07/03/07
I think, read and write about the future so much that I tend to forget that it is not obvious why it is this historical ‘moment’ that is so critical. Many of the ideas on which I and other futurists build are summed up in this short clip. Some, like the scales of civilizations are from Kardeshev and other Russian thinkers. Others like the Von Neumann self replicating machines. The speculations about common language etc are more recent and commonplace but the point about the threat/opportunity our civilization and species faces is well made.
The Future of Civilization – Michio Kaku
This is a kind of macro-historical view of my main assertion on this blog that humanity is entering a critical phase. It is a phase of history from which we probably have a less than even chance of surviving and the only exit states for say 2100-2200 are extinction or a thriving type one civilization that is expanding into the solar system.
One need not agree with everything Michio Kaku (father of modern string theory and the speaker in this clip) says to understand humanities growing crisis. It helps if one has read some of the resources I list on this blog like Diamond’s ‘Collapse’ and Mason’s ‘2030 Spike’ but even without these it is not hard to see the looming crisis or the importance of our species behaviors in weathering it.
What seems to be harder to avoid is the unhelpful and unrealistic polarities of possible responses which as David Suzuki points out, effectively absolve the individual of the need to DO anything. On the one hand some see the magnitude of the crisis, observe the apparent inability of human institutions like nations, politics, religion & business to solve humanities problems or even try. They see that we are creating global environmental, resource, energy and other crises far beyond the historical ones our institutions have ‘evolved’ to deal with. They see this and despair. Then they go about their lives as if they need not do anything because it is pointless.
On the other hand there is the other extreme who perhaps do not understand or believe that the crises we face really are greater than ever before or who are so impressed with humanities expanded knowledge and power (largely based on fossil fuels) to solve many of the older challenges history has presented us with. These people think that we have all the wherewithal we need or can acquire it quickly without the need for them to warp their lives and lifestyle choices around the effort.
I am with the apparently small group between these, like David Suzuki, Robert Zubrin, Michio Kaku and Al Gore, who believe that the crisis we face is mammoth simple because our power as a species has grown so great that it is now in our hands to threaten our global survival as it never was before. This comes, inevitably as our organizing institutions are not sufficiently developed to handle the power, so we tend to squander much of it and leave the mess as ’someone else’s problem’. The visionaries above however also all believe that by making effort, sacrifices and really smart choices we actually can survive this historical/systemic tsunami and in fact thrive in a bright, clean and energy rich future. It is our duty to do this and our privilege to be the ones who can and must. Our descendants, maybe even our children and grandchildren will certainly understand that we were the ones on watch when the critical choices were made. They will hold us responsible because if we make the wrong choices they will be unable to recoup the damage. Do YOU want to explain to them how little we did? With Suzuki I want to be able to tell them ‘I did all I could’.
Like Kaku I can stand on the shoulders of giants and sum up the ideas which show us the road out of this dark valley into the bright highlands. The road is not easy or automatic but it is not hopeless either. The major steps involved are as follows:
Take control of the Earths climate and integrate our economy properly and sustainably into the global ecology. This will clearly involve acknowledging the reality and causes of climate change and implementing solutions, including the obsolescence of fossil fuels and the end of our current abuse of the global carbon cycle.
Acquire new clean, plentiful and economic sources of energy and scarce materials.
In the short term this needs to be an eclectic mixture of renewable power sources with ever reducing use of fossil carbon combustion. This will lead into the Hydrogen economy as a way of managing these many sources and integrating our economy more tightly with real-universe energy physics (it is currently distorted by availability of non-renewables). In the long term our savior will almost certainly be Nuclear Fusion reactors with Helium 3 fuel which we will acquire in almost unlimited quantities from our moon and the Gas giants such as Saturn.
This will also necessarily mean expanding into and controlling the resources of our solar system. We will certainly need permanent settlements in orbit, on Mars & the Asteroids and eventually around some gas giants. We will need to develop better transport to do this, probably including such infrastructure as Space Elevators.
Integrate our many cultures into a global meta-culture that respects difference yet shares enough common values and institutions to deal with all our current challenges as well as the new ones that will arise as a true type one civilization.
Remember that I am not saying that this will be easy or that we have all the answers yet. However some of us ARE asking the right questions and know where to look for the answers. This will never work until humanity is asking those same questions and looking with us. It is for this reason that I see my current best contribution as promoting those ‘right questions’ and contributing to the discourse that follows. Yes I strive for carbon neutrality, recycle, compost etc but the most important thing I can do is to talk to YOU about it. The most important thing you can do is to spread the word and join the discourse! We need people power to drive our leaders and to give them permission to make the right choices. If humanity does not understand the situation they will not allow even enlightened leaders to guide our civilisation out of the dark.
Send this to some friends, comment, argue, suggest solutions and defend others. Do it today : )
First published at my old blog http://clauswitz.multiply.com/ 17/01/07
As I’ve argued before, the solutions to most of the worlds problems including the climate crisis and the eventually inevitable shortages of finite resources such as minerals, lie in gaining access to both ‘clean’ energy and more resources. “Well obviously” you might say. With enough energy and minerals we can create the means to feed almost any population we have space for and in any case current food shortages are more a political/distribution problem than a shortage per se. Putting aside for a moment the political problems of how humanity *should* organise itself to distribute resources fairly (what ever you think that means) the problems of gaining access to physical minerals and sufficient energy are the main bottlenecks to be addressed over the next century. The kicker is that both have to be achieved without creating environmental impacts we cannot live with.
I think the argument that continuing our civilization’s current carbon based energy regime cannot meet the environmental restrictions even if (and it is a big if) we can wring another few decades or a century out of it by using forms such as oil shale, tar sand etc (see Bjorn Lomborg on how that can be done). It is equally clear that while the dire predictions of the Club of Rome have not come true as predicted, we must sooner or later face sever shortages of minerals – raising the price of some of them beyond what our societies energy regime can afford – eventually threatening even out globalised society with collapse (as laid out by Jarred Diamond in his seminal work ‘Collapse: How Societies choose to succeed or fail’).
If our society did collapse, we would have to expect this to occur globally as our now world spanning economy and political structures fight it out for the resources they need to sustain themselves just the same way the chiefs did on Easter Island or the Aztec Nobles and Kings did in Central America. The trouble would be that with this occurring globally we could expect the collapse to be world wide as well and our heirs to be unable to rebuild a society like ours for many centuries (if ever) because we had already exploited all the easily recovered mineral resources and they would lack the technology or global organisation or both, to go after the scraps we leave them. The scraps we are increasingly turning to now ourselves (as recommended by Lomborg). We therefore should equate such a potential collapse with near extinction of our species (& many others) for planning purposes. I believe we must plan to avoid it at all costs.
So we have a knotty problem, or at least a major crisis of how our society works and collapse within 100 years is a very real possibility, however high on the hog we may seem to be riding as the West sees it. Part of the solution will surely be utilizing every ‘alternative’ clean energy source we can. Part or it will be new technologies to replace minerals we lack with alternatives and better extraction to go after reserves no-one would have touched previously but this only buys us time as we tighten our belts and still consume more of the geological legacy the Earths past has left us – and which can never be replenished (except over Millions of years) and which we therefore CANNOT use *sustainably*.
This of course leads us back to my original assertion that we need resources beyond those of the Earth in order not to face near extinction. We also need energy to be sufficiently environmentally clean (including greenhouse neutral) plentiful and affordable to run our ongoing civilization on it. This will be hard enough if we keep the high standard of living for the current developed West only but China and India are determined that that will not be how it goes.
This chain of logic leads us inevitably to off world sources of energy and minerals such as the Asteroids and Gas Giants (See my resources section on how this can work – I may also post later on a more detailed plan). The problem comes when we realise that our only access to such resources is through the technology of rocketry and that it is just too expensive & dirty to supply what we need in the quantities we need it. One promising alternative remains however which may get the cost of raising a kilogram into orbit down by orders of magnitude – a Space Elevator. The engineering for this has been largely worked out by Bradley Edwards but we need breakthroughs in material science to make the tether required (basically we need much longer carbon nanotubes and better ways to weave them) and we need to develop the cars that can ride such a cable. Currently none of our governments are putting much behind the push for this other than funding Edwards’ research out of the voluminous mixed bag of NASA funding. There is a private company however-which has been formed to do it www.liftport.com. Liftport is integrating a program of nanotube ans cable manufacture as well as robotics research for the elevator cars. Someone has to do this so thank god someone is!
So whether you are a committed Green, a space advocate, an economist or an industrialist… or even just want your children to have a future; a Space Elevator therefore is not some fanciful geek project or just ‘one possibility we must consider’. It may very well be the one critical piece our civilization must produce in order to survive. If we were playing a simulator like Sid Meyer’s ‘Civilization’ we would be pouring our global resources into it because we would be thinking (as this blog is set up to do) on a longer scale than the lives of mere governments or human spans. I therefore call on all reading this to either get behind the push into space, the construction of the Space Elevator in particular – or else engage with me on how else our species can have a future. If you are at all unclear on how we can find what our species needs in our own solar system, or if you think that our problems are not so dire or that other solution hold the key then say so here – I would welcome it. Until you can make that case though we need you to start raising awareness in our electorates, our governments and in our business/investment sectors that the time has come to invest in our species future.
Build the Elevator – expand into space – secure the future
Below is an excerpt from The Hydrogen Economy by Jeremy Rifkin. It eloquently describes the way I see our point in history. We face the kind of threat the Romans did right before they collapsed. I say this because we, like they, are moving into the ending of the energy regime which made our society work. Theirs was fueled in large part on new conquests & their economy bouyed by influxes of plunder. In our case we have plundered the wealth left by previous geological eras in the form of oil and coal and while we are not running out just yet we must wean ourselves off all carbon based energy sources to avoid possibly catastrophic climate damage. We cannot blame our forebears for this use as they had no idea how it could affect the climate. As our ignorance shrinks though we are left without such an excuse.
It is becoming increasingly clear that we face a series of crises in the next few decades far greater than any we have faced before. In this blog I plan to concentrate on what humanity can do to meet these challenges and help those interested in the problem to find information on it. Please jump in and ask for clarification at any point where you believe I have not made the case fully enough or if you have something constructive to add (or ask).
“It has become increasingly apparent in recent years that the fossil-fuel age has a Janus face. The extraordinary benefits of utilizing coal, oil, and natural gas are too many to recite. Suffice it to say that eight to ten generations of human beings—those living between the time of the first widespread application of coal and steam technology and today—in Europe, North America, Japan, and elsewhere reaped unprecedented gains from the exploitation of these unique, non-renewable resources. We exhumed the organic remains of an earlier geological era and basked in a material cornucopia made possible by the energy we took up. Now, a number of forces are converging to create a watershed event of great historic proportions, We have reached the critical moment that many great civilizations in the past have confronted, some successfully, others not. That is the point at which the energy used to maintain the workings of the civilization becomes more scarce and expensive, and the accumulated waste and externalities built up from past activity become more costly to absorb. When that juncture is crossed, countries experience a lessening of the energy flow-through, a slowing of the performance of the many subsystems that make up the society, and a weakening of the institutional, economic, and social fabric, making the overall operational structure more vulnerable to external threats and internal collapse.
The choices that a civilization makes at the “turning point” in its existing energy regime determines whether or not it will be successful in reorganizing its systems and enjoy renewal, or face a steady deterioration and devolution of its infrastructure and eventual death and decomposition of the society. The oil-based civilization, the most successful energy regime in all of human history, is just a few short years away from the turning point. The paths of three defining forces are quickly converging, forcing society to make decisions about what steps to take to ensure the future. The interplay between the imminent peak of global oil production, the increasing concentration of the remaining oil reserves in the Middle East (the most politically and socially unstable region of the world), and the steady heating up of the world’s atmosphere from the spent energy—or entropy—accumulated over the course of the Industrial Age make for a volatile and dangerous world game, one whose outcome at this stage remains very much in doubt.
Fossil-fuel civilization is under siege. How well we respond to the triple threat at our front gates depends, in part, on how vulnerable our existing infrastructure is to attack, disruption, and disrepair. On this score, the prospects are poor. The complex, centralized infrastructure we have created to manage a high-energy, fossil-fuel economy—once our greatest asset—is fast becoming our biggest liability. We are increasingly vulnerable to threats and disruptions from without and within, making this moment in post-industrial history the most precarious in memory.”
-:all views expressed on this site are my own and should not be taken to represent any other person or organisation regardless of my relationship to them:-
