Craig Venter speaks at San Francisco Long Now Foundation.

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biology, Craig Venter, disaster, lectures, reviews, Venter

Two days ago I missed Craig Venter speaking on Cal Berkeley campus, because there was no space to get into the auditorium. Today he appeared live in an online broadcast from the Herbst Theater in San Francisco where he was giving a presentation to The Long Now Foundation. I watched it and so can you. After his talk there was a half hour interview with Stewart Brand which fielded a few questions from the audience.

Craig Venter and Stewart Brand conversing after Craig gave his hour long presentation.

What caught my eye was that even this biologist had a slide about solar energy, and discussed briefly wind as long term sources of power. He claimed that the all of the human power needs could be met with only 1% efficiency of energy derived from the sun falling on an area the size of Nevada.

He didn’t say it directly, but I think he meant to use that source of power to convert CO2 to a sequestered form, and to forms which are potential sources of portable stored energy.

Craig is one of my heroes because he is one of the few people who is working at a basic enough level to truly make an improvement in the long term human condition. In this talk he acknowledged the human population problem, but didn’t even imply that there needed to be a reduction of the geometrically increasing growth. As a biologist he is totally aware of those kinds of growth patterns, and how they quickly reach some kind of lethal limit. So, I thought it remiss of him not to make some note of caution.

I have been feeling a bit blitzed since making that calculation about overpopulation a few days ago, and how there are more than a thousand times too many people at present. That figure is so outrageous I don’t know what to suggest. I have been thinking about working out some scenarios for various levels of the imminent disasters. DISS~10, DISS~11, DISS~12, DISS~13, DISS~14, and what might be done now to help those who do survive the collapse. It doesn’t seem to me that I can do much for the 6.7 billion members of humanity the way it is going at present, although I have some ideas about how to move doomsday back a bit. But, the aftermath might be more tractable.