Today I was reading about a Stanford University professor called Robert Laughlin who thinks that, in a thousand years, all the carbon that we are mining today will be in the ocean. We will either have mined all the available carbon energy sources or we will have decided to leave them alone. The excess carbon dioxide will have been removed and we will have a society based on nuclear energy (fast breeder probably) and solar energy (which is also nuclear energy). Batteries for cars are too polluting as they are today and they will be replaced by something else. People will still have cars and fly in planes and use electricity. Presumably we will all speak in Californian accents too.
What this guy is missing is complexity. Anyone who works in a medium to large company nowadays is overwhelmed by complexity. Every time an issue comes up, it is solved by adding complexity to the system. Companies are a microcosm of what is happening on a larger scale in society. Everywhere complexity is increasing. This is what messed the Roman Empire up and, quite possibly, other civilisations too. Excessive complexity will also destroy our current world society. This is already happening with complex debt, complex financial systems and complex government. No-one really understands what is going on anymore. We are heading towards a total breakdown in our civilisation, which will not happen overnight but will take a long time, just as the Roman Empire slowly declined and disappeared.
Rather than listen to Robert Laughlin, I favour James Lovelock’s vision of the future where he envisages mass mortality, population collapse and mass migration due to climate change. You can’t just skip the next thousand years as Laughlin does. We are in for a rough millennium until our society is replaced by something new.
Liam Mor's Blog