It’s been over five years since I did an “Odds and Ends” column (Jan/Feb 2004). What prompted me to write one this time was, for the most part, the rapid pace of change in the real world since I penned several of my columns of the past few years.
Over on the Analog forum, one reader wondered about my Jan/Feb 2009 Alternate View (“Energy Crisis Redux: A Polemic”) and whether or not the information there couldn’t have been obtained somewhere else. The answer is that of course it could have been obtained somewhere else. The question is whether or not my readers would have done so, and gotten out of it what I wanted them to.
My Alternate View alternate Dr. Cramer frequently writes about breaking news in physics. In almost all cases, except sometimes when he’s talking about his own research, the Analog readership could go off and read the original papers themselves. But few readers would even know the papers existed, and even fewer would be able to understand them. What Dr. Cramer brings in his columns is both awareness and interpretation.
I seldom cover topics in physics, except for the “out there” ones that interest me, because Dr. Cramer does it very well in his column and Analog doesn’t need both Alternate View columnists to cover the same sort of subject matter. So I, being a gadfly at heart, oftentimes rant on subjects of particular interest to me around deadline time. Yet regardless of topic, I consider each of my columns to be the opening salvo in an exchange with the readership. Sometimes return fire comes by letter to the editor, other times by e-mail, but most often nowadays online at the Analog forum. To be fair to all the readers, I sometimes need to provide some fairly elementary facts in a piece. I leave it to those for whom such information is elementary to either skim over it or just bear with me.
The Jan/Feb column came along when I was paying four dollars a gallon for gasoline. Little did I know that before that column saw print, gasoline would already be on its way down to prices not seen in the States since the 1990s. But falling gasoline prices didn’t change the basis of my argument. Even though gasoline was excessively priced because of speculation rather than any real shortage, it doesn’t change the fact that we can’t keep using it forever. Certainly we don’t want to again become unwilling victims to rampant speculation a few years from now. And it is still true that nuclear power is something we already know how to do and can fill the bill for our future energy needs in ways that supposedly greener alternatives never will.
Also before that column went to print, word came from a company called Hyperion (www.hyperionpowergeneration.com) that in about five years they will have available for purchase compact nuclear power plants “about the size of a hot tub” that will produce around 25 megawatts, enough to power 20,000 typical houses. A unit works for five years before it needs to be refueled at the factory, has no moving parts in the core, doesn’t use water as a coolant, and cannot go supercritical. You bury it underground and don’t see it again until it has to be refurbished. It doesn’t pollute. As the company says, think of it as big battery.
Units like these may be a better nuclear solution to the energy crisis than conventional nuclear power plants. Even as currently designed, they can be ganged together to supply power to larger towns and cities. No doubt if business is good, soon units supplying 50, 100, maybe even 500 megawatts will hit the market. This would allow local areas to take command of their own energy needs, perhaps letting them uncouple entirely from the national grid if that’s what the local voters want.
Being underground, the units would be essentially weather-impervious. No need to cover the countryside with unsightly solar stations and windmills (which I find every bit as ugly at power towers). No fear of snow and ice and rain and dust and thermal cycling damaging the units as will happen with the current crop of greener alternatives. As far as I’m concerned, these units beat the holy hell out of windmills and solar cells!
A few years ago, when NASA put forward its newest grand vision for the future, I asked “Will We Go to the Moon?” (April 2006). I don’t think much of what I said in that column is wrong, but I’m convinced now that it’s almost all moot. The current collapse of the world economy essentially guarantees that we will not spend money on trips to the Moon anytime soon. Even though we have a new president who ostensibly wants to spend money on “investing in the future,” (which more often than not means spending money on trendy things that all right-thinking people just know will work regardless of whether or not there’s any certainty they genuinely will), missions to the Moon are too easy to lampoon as wastes of money.
I have experience from the last time we gave up the Moon. Too many of the public thinks money spent on space projects actually goes into space, as if we loaded up our capsules or shuttles with $50s and $100s and rocketed it off into the deep. That it is spent here and that it goes into developing expertise and training scientists and engineers and all the rest that most Analog readers know so well that they don’t recall when they learned it is wasted on a public that considers rank ignorance in such things a source of pride.
A great many Analog readers grew up as self-educating individuals. We didn’t wait for teachers to teach us—we were already interested in the world and how it works and the wonders of science, and we went to the library and found books and we learned about these things. If you’re my age you grew up reading Asimov’s nonfiction books, you watched the Apollo landings in rapt amazement, and looked forward to what the future would bring.
But this experience, shared by so many in the Analog readership, is as alien to the average voter as are little green men. Don’t get me wrong—I’m all in favor of the simple wisdom of the common man—most of them understand how the ordinary world really works a heckuva lot better than the average Harvard Ph.D. But space is a special topic, by definition unearthly, and the typical man finds it unfathomable because he has never tried to fathom it and has no interest in trying, either.
Go out and find the man in the street and ask him to draw you a rough sketch of our Solar System, and for over half of them you’ll first have to explain to him what the Solar System is. You’ll probably have to explain the difference between a star and a planet, too. By the time you’ve finished doing that, you’ll likely decide there is no longer much point in having him sketch the Solar System.
I wrote that Moon column right after the Katrina debacle, when some politicians were suggesting the president was responsible for hurricanes and that NASA could be eliminated to help pay for the clean up. What I said then was that “this acrimonious, short-sighted, partisan, self-serving fault-finding during a crisis is exactly the kind of knee-jerk, counter-productive, self-absorbed, cover-your-ass, anti-survival, behavioral bullshit up with which we can not afford to put if we’re ever going to go into space to stay.” Well, what with the financial crisis, now we’ve got an even bigger mess to clean up than a hurricane. Expect more of the above, squared.
In my November 2008 column, “Turnings,” I discussed the book The Fourth Turning by William Strauss and Neil Howe. By way of brief review, let me repeat and requote from one section of that column:
“Strauss and Howe see the US as cycling through four similar turnings, or eras, again and again. It’s fair enough to ask why not five or six or three, but the pattern they see fits well with four.
The authors summarize these four kinds of turnings starting on page 2 in chapter one:
In fact, at the core of modern history lies this remarkable pattern: Over the past five centuries, Anglo-American society has entered a new era—a new turning—every two decades or so. At the start of each turning, people change how they feel about themselves, the culture, the nation, and the future. Turnings come in cycles of four. Each cycle spans the length of a long human life, roughly eighty to one hundred years, a unit of time the ancients called the saeculum. Together, the four turnings of the saeculum comprise history’s seasonal rhythm of growth, maturation, entropy, and destruction:
The First Turning is a High, an upbeat era of strengthening institutions and weakening individualism, when a new civic order implants and the old values regime decays.
The Second Turning is an Awakening, a passionate era of spiritual upheaval, when the civic order comes under attack from a new values regime.
The Third Turning is an Unraveling, a downcast era of strengthening individualism and weakening institutions, when the old civic order decays and the new values regime implants.
The Fourth Turning is a Crisis, a decisive era of secular upheaval, when the values regime propels the replacement of the old civic order with the new one.
Each turning comes with its own identifiable mood. Always, these mood shifts catch people by surprise.
This last point is an important one, the mood shifts coming as a surprise. Linear extrapolations from the recent past into even the near-term future can be far off the mark.”
The authors contend we are finishing out a period of unraveling, and about to enter a Fourth Turning period of crisis. Since the book came out in 1997, if the author’s thesis is correct, then that Turning should be upon us.
What I also noted in my column was: “. . . it is now 2008 and I still don’t see that any corner has been turned.” I also urged you readers to keep an eye out for some event that History would mark as the beginning of the Fourth Turning.
I think we’ve seen it.
Certainly the previous 15 years or so have been an age of individualism, though not of the rugged, go-it-alone-in-the-mountains variety. Rather, it has been a narcissistic individualism, no better exemplified than by the explosion in the number of people doing body modification. As I write this, the world has entered an economic crisis the likes of which it hasn’t seen since the Great Depression. And right now, some poor fool with a thousand dollars worth of tattoos on his arms is waking up the day after losing his job, and realizing that those tattoos cannot be sold for a dime’s worth of food.
If Strauss and Howe are correct, that sort of realization, multiplied billions of times across the globe, should be just the thing to change the thinking, and the character, of this generation into the next one. If we don’t see that happening (perhaps already having started by the time you read this) in the next couple years, then I contend that Strauss and Howes’ thesis will have been falsified.
We’ll also be even more screwed than we already are, but that’s a topic for another column.
