Where will food come from in 100 years?

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Electric farming, End of fossil fuel based food, Food is life, Food is stored energy, Future food

The world population clock now reads 7,725,982,777. With population growth, it is predicted to reach about 10 billion in the year 2055. That’s 36 years from now. But there’s a big problem.

Where is the food going to come from to feed all of these people? It takes fertile land to grow food and that now requires fertilizer and that requires energy to manufacture. It requires water to grow crops and that too is becoming a problem and it will require energy to pump water to higher ground. Food will need transportation to where it is eaten and that requires energy. And, in addition to food, which is essential, people need housing, heating, and cooling, and transportation to work and play. These things need energy, too.

Where does energy come from? Most of the energy for these things currently comes from fossil fuels like coal, oil, and gas. But these are one-time use sources of energy, and so people who are presently children by the time they are middle-aged adults will need large supplies of energy coming from some source other than fossil fuels.

The energy source of the future will involve various ways of extracting energy from the sun. Water evaporated from the oceans by the sun, falling onto the land, forming rivers, and the energy of their falling from behind dams through electric turbines and being converted into electricity has been half exploited already. There will be more, but not a much higher percentage of increase from that source.

Wind power, derived ultimately from the sun, and collected with wind turbines will continue to provide more power, but there is a need to convert that electric power into food.

There are solar panels which convert solar light directly into electricity and that is almost economically equal in efficiency to power created by wind. Both of them are feasible and workable, and now being done. But the amount now available falls far short of what is and will be needed to feed the people of the world.

In each of these cases creating energy from sources other than fossil fuels requires electricity. Getting that electricity through the various processes needed to get food to us is doable, but it isn’t easy There is need for the electrical energy in the fields where the food is being grown. Current farming requires many forms of powered machinery, such as plowing the fields, planting the seeds, controlling the watering, harvesting the crops, getting those crops from where they are grown to us. Today that energy is oil and gas, but as those supplies run out over the life expectancy of people living today, they will need to be replaced with something else, and that is probably going to be electric power. It can be done, but it will cost more time, effort, and money to get it done.

It seems impossible today, but as electrically powered farm equipment comes into use the likely ways of providing it in the fields will be overhead wires like those that used to power streetcars and lithium battery-powered farm equipment. Or, sorry folks, human labor. Of course, after a while, much of the work will be done by robotic machinery.

According to a Stanford University study, it would need an equivalent of “about 3.4 billion Nissan Leafs. This would use 32% of the identified resources (all known lithium in the world) or 82% of the reserves (all lithium that is currently economic to produce).” That is a rough estimate of the energy needed to operate the farm machinery to feed the people of the world.

After the major wars are finished trying to sort these things out, the population will likely drop back to 1 AD levels as farming by human physical effort returns. The technology for making an electrically powered farm society will be known. That will take a while to get up and running effectively, and the world population can then expand to that new carrying capacity of the new food supply.

An electric-powered food creation society will be a more stable one than our one-time-use fossil fuel-based one, which will soon end.

Searching for unbounded hopes using attractor goals

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Nonsense on stilts

Hope #27

We seek unbounded hope for our future by doing another unique kind act, and by:

3.  —creating open-ended attractor goals, so you and I and all living beings can have meaningful lives within our personal worlds.

Attractor goals are infinitely tiny points of gravity-like attraction toward which we may move with ever-increasing precision and velocity. However, because they are infinitely tiny, they can never be hit. At the instant of realization, the goal vanishes into the past, and we fly away at great velocity toward some vast field of potential goals.

Being human and having some capacity to think about the future and future goals, it takes but some brief unseen, and probably unseeable, mental tricks to invent out of the fantasies of oblivion some new goal. Once a goal is formed, it takes on qualities that seem like physical entities with physical being and thus understandable qualities. That is a fantasy, of course, made out of vacuous thoughts brought into being by a mind out of nothing. Even the components of the thoughts are made of combinations of previously formed thoughts, every one of which is composed of nothing but a new random assortment of atoms in someone’s mind. Perhaps yours. Perhaps mine.

The point of messaging this potentially sensible nonsense is to clarify that goals are thoughts and the thoughts and goals they create are not real things like the atoms and the arrangements that they are made of. To an outside observer, these arrangements of atoms would appear as random arrangements of electrical charges.

To return to the starting point, these goals are like strange attractors which energize movements of ideas, but they can’t satisfy any goal because they are simply arrangements of atoms carrying electrical charges. The goals they represent are random fluctuations of atoms that have no possibility of being satisfied.

Goals can not be satisfied they can only be distorted or dissolved.

Lightning gives me a warning.

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Fire hazards., Forest fire hazards, I try and fireproof my house, Lightning hazards

Saturday, a week ago lightning struck fifteen steps from where I was walking, and it hit within a few steps from where I was raking possibly flammable yard debris in my yard. I have been working for over a year to make my house fire-resistant by eliminating as much flammable stuff as possible. The Paradise, California, fire that razed a town that looks much like where I live made it an even more urgent enterprise. We had a rainy spring this year, so we are a little better of than usual, and people are talking about how smoke-free this summer has been. Our rain varies year by year and soon enough we will have a dry year and the forest fire risk will be great again. Today, I took out about an eighth of a Mountain Ash tree, the one the lightning struck, to reduce the fire risk. I’m not an arborist, and at my age, it doesn’t make much sense to be standing on a ladder about eight feet above the ground sawing six-inch thick tree limbs. But I was up there for about an hour.

I have a huge pile of garden debris that I’m watering in an effort to generate some compost for next year’s garden. My house looks stark compared to my neighbors, who are making their homes look very nice.

I have been thinking I have been over-thinking the risk for a forest fire. And then BANG! A bolt from the “blue”. Duh? Even I can learn.

 

I’m feeling a transition

Tags

Fossil fuel equals food, It all begins with food, It all ends with food

The world seems to be at some kind of tipping point. A tipping point is usually defined as an ongoing change that at some seemingly gradual change it suddenly moves over into a totally new state of relationships.

For the last two hundred years, every living adult existed in a new world that was in hindsight clearly changing. It began so slowly that even a keen observer like Thomas Malthus missed its importance in 1803 when he was in the throes of population theory. Behind his mathematical theory, which was faulty, was a principle that was clearly true. Populations of living things reproduce to the carrying capacity of their food supply. The food supply is variable, and as the population is always approaching the carrying capacity, occasionally the population will exceed the food supply and some will starve to death. When the population goes below the carrying capacity, there is apparent abundance for everyone and happy times return and babies are adored as gifts rather than burdens. We have been in that blissful state for over two centuries, actually since about 1625, when the population swooped past half a billion humans.

World population history estimates from the United Nations, Hyde, McEvedy, and Probaway (in black line).

In 1803 Malthus saw the rapid increase in population but couldn’t believe it would last very long and thought there would soon be a collapse. What he didn’t foresee was the fabulous power that fossil fuel would grant to humanity to grow more food. Without fossil fuel to support agriculture, the population would fall back to the level that human-powered and animal-powered farming could supply. That was approximately the population that humanity lived with from 1,000 AD to 1500 AD, and it is the population that humanity will live with again after the end of the fossil-fuel economy. It will probably fall much lower for a while because of the degradation of the soil caused by overuse and by war.

The fossil-fuel economy as we know it will slump over soon. When that soon will be is impossible to predict because it could end today if there is a major war; it could dwindle more slowly as fuel prices slowly rise and supplies become scarcer and people haven’t the means to consume; it could end even more slowly if people somehow break out of nature’s policy of quickly reproducing to the limits of the food supply.

Only when the world population is in stable libration with the food supply will the natural struggle end.

Finding hope in an uncaring Universe.

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Exploring alternate realities, Seeking a Universal hope

In version #27 of Unbounded hope we first read the basic premise …

We seek unbounded hope for our future by doing another unique kind act, and by:

1. —exploring the orderly nature of our bountiful Universe, so we can help ourselves and others benefit from everything that it makes possible.

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The Universe within which we all live is bountiful and complying to our wishes and actions, but we must behave in ways in which it is able to respond to what we seek to do. When we wish for things that are beyond its ability to deliver, it simply doesn’t deliver. It can not deliver because it doesn’t know or care. The Universe has no, as yet, clearly discernible organs of sensation and therefore has no emotional feelings for our preservation or demise. It simply carries forth with the processes that it is capable of at any specific place and moment. Many of those natural universal actions we can discover and we already have discovered. And now we do use many of these wonderful, though obscure, things the Universe can provide in our daily lives, such as our internet.

There are other things that appear to be impossible, such as moving faster than the speed of light and moving objects at a distance by moving a linked object nearby. Some people I have encountered claim they can do these things through mental processes, but they can’t do so consistently. However, my decades-long friend Paul Sirag, back in the 1960-70s, was working with UC Berkeley physics department, and they did consistently move quantumly entangled tiny things remotely in hyperspace.

These two methods appear at first glance to be similar, but one doesn’t work and the other one does.

This afternoon I attended a memorial service held at the First Presbyterian Church. The memorial was about a wonderful life of a caring man I knew only a little, but the religious songs and mental constructs of the clergy delineating the service around him bothered me. They consistently presupposed a caring loving Universe directed by a loving God who created absolutely everything and then called it “very good.”

For me, these kinds of statements are stepping beyond what the Universe can deliver. Where they do have coherence, meaning, and power is in their ability to generate the cohesion that our natural brotherly love makes possible to humans.

I have been seeking ways of finding hope in an uncaring Universe that is more founded in a reality that it can legitimately deliver.

How to fix the unfixable.

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Broken eyeglass frames, Fixing eye glasses, Fun creating solutions

This morning I wore my last week’s invention of eyeglass frames to the Commons coffee shop here in Bend, Oregon. A couple of my retired professional artist friends were going to be there and I thought they would like to see them.

These frames were made to replace the hingeless eyeglass frames that broke several months ago and that I had glued back together with ShoeGoo. That worked okay from the wearing and vision point of view, but they looked weird with a large glop of solidified glue grabbing onto the glass and onto an inch of the wireframe. Then a week later, in addition to that ugly solution to the right side earpiece, the nose wire broke. That fix required another glop of ShoeGoo, but all too obviously that glob, when solidified, was right in the middle of my face.

About that time I decided to get a new pair of glasses using the replacement guarantee that had cost $40 on the couple of hundred dollar pair of prescription glasses. It was the expected hassle, but after a few weeks the new ones, identical to the now doubly broken ones, appeared. I suppose most people would have simply thrown the perfectly fine lenses away, but not me. I sent away for some cheap glasses online with what appeared to be the same attachment between the glass lenses, and the metal parts. Unfortunately, these new reading glasses were too good to strip apart, so instead I cleaned the ShoeGoo off the ones with the broken frames, and purchased some Soft Brass Wire 16 gauge (1.3mm) that would fit the pairs of holes on each side of each glass, and fussed around for an hour or two trying to make some adequate ear frame supports.

My solution actually works well, looks better, and functions better, than the expensive hingeless eyeglass frames you often see nowadays on celebrities and politicians.

My artist’s buddies were very impressed, with the glasses, but not with me as they already expected something fantastic.

If not today then tomorrow, the readiness is all.

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Creating hope, Growing kindness, Kindness brings hope, Soul survival, Unbinding hope, Unbounded hope, Unlimited hope

Which of the currently # numbered 28 life orientations for achieving unlimited hope is the right one? Quite obviously none of them, because they all have flaws, often tragic flaws, along with their promise of a hopefully positive outcome. The unbounded hope chart #28 greedy individual was based on a personally selfish approach to life,  and #27 was based on expanding the self to everything over which the individual has even a tiny influence. The unbounded hope #27 of a kind person is expanding his propinquity of self-identification as far as he can stretch it. But he also hopes to stay within the limits of the possible, even at the very extremities of his boundaries of caring kindness. His hope includes consistently achieving success within the personally close realms of his close-in propinquity.

The problem for all of us, even the most selfish of us, is that often we do things that are helpful to others. The problem compounds because acts of kindness rebound to the actor and to others around all of those affected. This applies to unkind actions as well. But the costly problem is that both kind and unkind actions have a personal cost in time, energy, and the stored public energy that is money. Everything we do consumes our resources.

What counts most for generating positive outcomes is the aspect of the wisdom of their experience that every individual brings to a new situation, and every situation is a new one. The wisdom must be quick and functional. Unfortunately, thinking over what is the best thing to do takes time, and usually, that isn’t available. What is available for almost instantaneous action is learned habits of behavior, and that includes verbal behavior. Thus, it is crucial that a person who wishes to have available unbounded hope must be willing, ready and able to be instantly kind as a routine habit. The only way to acquire that is to practice it as much as possible, and especially to practice it in the most difficult circumstances.

The way to gain unbounded hope is to watch carefully for opportunities to see what another person needs and provide it to them reflexively.

A more meaningful day for me.

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An ordinary day not, Dog park conversations, I survived a near miss lightning bolt, Lightning strike

I have been tracking my blood pressure with a recently purchased OMRON system ever since I had an unexpected spike. Having made over a hundred independent readings, it became apparent that my systolic blood pressure is in the mid 115s at 3 PM and goes to the mid 150s about midnight and apparently remains there until I get up in the morning about 8 AM. But that earlier morning and this morning it was more like 180, so both times I went over to the VA clinic to have it checked. They were unimpressed because by then it was 135, and they never saw the 180, and even said not to worry about that unless I had symptoms, like chest pain, sweating, loss of muscle strength.

I’ve been experimenting with different things to lower blood pressure, like apple cider vinegar, chocolate, cayenne, and garlic. All without any perceptible improvement. I gave blood to the VA in preparation for my annual medical assessment next week and some for the Lyme disease test, which I’m taking because of a target that formed around a bug bite.

Just after noon lunch, I met with J, a friend who’s been out of town for several weeks. And, while that was progressing nicely, three other friends came in to preview the movie that is being made about me and two of them turning eighty years old. It is being professionally done and covers seven years of our life experiences. The opening scenes which set the whole movie up are exciting and remarkably bizarre for some small city old folks. If the whole movie is as good as the scenes we were shown, which the director claims it is, then it will be viewed widely. It is spectacular and quirky.

Debbie and I went home, ate our midday meal, and then I gardened for two hours, mostly working on pulling weeds and creating a monster eye-level pile weighted down with concrete paving squares and water, which is intended to become compost for next year’s soil. Then, just as got I settled into some deep reading, Debbie announced that I was a half-hour late to my Humanist group meeting, which is a fifteen-minute drive away. We already were meeting another friend at the dog park in an hour, so there was a conflict. So, after an instant discussion and agreement, I dropped everything and headed to my Humanist meeting, and she would go to the dogs in half an hour.

My meeting was scheduled for an hour and a half, and it was half-way through when I got there. “You’re late Charles!” “No, I’m Charles, and I’m not the ‘late’ Charles.” It went on like that for a while. Then we got into some really deep stuff, like the book that most of us had read, The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells. I told those people who hadn’t read it not to read it, unless they were ready to be depressed for a month. Those who had read it said the others must read it, but expect to be bummed out for a month or more. I agreed with their assessment.

After that meeting, I drove over to the dog park because I knew that Debbie would still be there talking with our dog-loving friends. I was paying more attention to the dogs than the people, but at one point the four of them were talking rather excitedly about the brief but fierce thunderstorm a couple of days ago. They said there were five or fewer ground lightning strikes, but that they were exceptionally loud and that it was the first one that was the loudest. That’s the bolt that I later counted to have hit about fifteen steps from where I had been standing, and almost exactly where I had been raking yard litter with an aluminum rake less than a minute earlier. I had set the rake against the fence because it had started to rain, and I was hurrying over to close the garden gate and was heading back to the house’s back door when the bolt hit. I had a sharp pain in my left leg, and a minute later was showing the strange dent in my left shin where the pain occurred that shocking instant. I’ve neither had a dent like that one, nor a sharp pain the instant a lightning bolt struck anywhere nearby. I thought I had hit my leg on something, but when I walked the path later there wasn’t anything to have hit me. Thinking back, it had been more like a muscle cramp but much quicker coming and going.

I invented a couple of things today, an app for backtracking one’s life, and a way to secure my eyeglasses more comfortably and securely to my head. I’m wearing the glasses now, but the app will take some time.

It was a day.

Hope to influence future events

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#27 kind, #28 greedy, Comparing greed with hope

When comparing Unbounded hope-#28, greed-based on an individual’s aspirations for immediate personal control of pleasure, to unbounded hope-#27, based on an individual’s potentially kind social instincts for overall well-being of the self and the social group within which their being is immersed, it appears that the timing of the personal control is the issue between the two approaches to life.

It is a contest between an individual maximizing the power of control in the moment to achieve a quick success versus one using the power available in the now to seek a long-term dynamic stability and the good health of and for a living dynamic group. For the #28 greedy individual there is no long-term success if there isn’t success in the short term and those who strive for immediate success are more likely to achieve it than those aiming for long-term stability. Greed, even outright theft, works in the short run most of the time, but that kind of behavior sets the individual up to be ostracized from the seekers of a more overall group cohesion. And, in a legal system organized by the seekers of long-term security, the people living by excess greed and theft will be prosecuted. They will be the losers in the long run because they will not have as much access to the benefits of a stable society.

If we consistently don’t succeed in the short run we wither and die, but if we are too greedy in the short run we tend to fall into isolation and eventual despair and wither and die. The individual who associates well with type #27 kindly people will more often prosper and thrive emotionally than type #28 greedy people who are totally self-centered. And, in both styles, suggestion #27-2 and #28-2 is functional because being accepted into different isolated living places gives that person or the group an alternate place to thrive when things fail where they are presently located. That happens more often with #28 greedy people, so it is more important for them to have alternate residences.

As individuals, we must succeed in the living moment, but as a society, we must succeed in the forever oncoming tomorrows.

A test of using I instead of We when seeking unbounded hope. – #28

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#28, Hedonism, Infinite kindness, Stoicism, Unbounded hope

The previous 27 versions of Unbounded hope have been using the first-person plural “we” as the default point of view as is shown just below. Below that #27 will be version #28 using first-person singular “I” as the point of view.

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This version, #27, is revealed to me at this time as …

We seek unbounded hope for our future by doing another unique kind act, and by:

1. —exploring the orderly nature of our bountiful Universe, so we can help ourselves and others benefit from everything that it makes possible.

2. —striving to physically survive as individuals and as a species by seeking opportunities to live and participate in every favorable place.

3. —creating open-ended attractor goals, so you and I and all living beings can have meaningful lives within our personal worlds.

4. —becoming known to everyone as dedicating our wisdom and energy to alleviating the suffering of all beings.

5. —helping everyone to find meaning in their lives by helping them to find a personal path to kind acts and thus to unbounded hope.

6. —making a habit of giving our attention to individuals and acknowledging their wisdom and kind acts within our shared Universe.

7. —appreciating that we as people expressing diverse views to one another are more likely to discover the bounty of our Universe and the beautiful new ways we may choose to live our lives.

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Below is the “I” version of Unbounded hope:

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This version, #28, is revealed to me at this time as …

I seek unbounded hope for my future by doing another unique kind act for myself, and by:

1. —exploring the orderly nature of my bountiful Universe, so I can help myself to benefit from everything that it makes possible.

2. —striving to physically survive as an individual by seeking opportunities to exploit every favorable place and thing.

3. —creating open-ended attractor goals, so I can have a meaningful life within my own personal world.

4. —becoming known to everyone as dedicating my wisdom and energy to alleviating my suffering by indulging in my pleasures.

5. —helping me to find meaning in my life by helping the various aspects of my personality to find a path to unbounded pleasure.

6. —making a habit of giving my attention to my various selves and acknowledging their wisdom within my inner Universe.

7. —appreciating that I as a complex personality expressing diverse views to myself is more likely to discover the bounty of my Universe and the pleasurable new ways I may choose to live my life.

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As this self-centered “I” version was being written out, it became clear that this new version #28 was similar to Classical Epicurean philosophy, which is finding happiness by exploiting short term pleasures. Epicurus himself proposed a much milder version of hedonism which is loosely freedom from fear and limiting one’s desires to easily attainable mild real-world opportunities. Modern hedonists aim to absolutely maximize pleasure by any means possible and are known as sybarites. Unfortunately, for these people, their extreme behaviors often end in disaster.

Version #27 is closer to the Stoic philosophical world view.