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Monday, Stewart Brand(of the WELL, Whole Earth Catalogue, Long Now Foundation) talked at Life about his ideas on the future and humanity. How it might be time to rethink some of the popular stances against genetically modified organisms, nuclear power, urbanization and geoengineering. He intimated that the precautionary principal had gone too far, it wasn’t precaution in the ways of fixing acid rain and banning thalidomide, but anti-progress. Yes we can’t understand all the consequences of a technology, but we can be eternally vigilant.

• GM: mentioning how GM and organic food production should not be anathema, but that green peaces stance aginst GM has been more anti-science than reasoned.
• Nuclear Energy: comparing the effects of Chernobyl and Bhopal, Bhopal was definitely the more damaging to humanity. Chernobyl is now a de-humanised reserve full of plants and animals.  Nuclear is a base load energy producer, so can be controlled as opposed to solar and wind. It is not perfect, will have to be rethought, and he showed a number of smaller, cheaper safer reactors that might be used for local energy production (or even mobile ones). Of interest was Freeman Dyson’s buriable thorium reactor, that dosent need lots of reprocessing  tthat provides steam for energy production. If the US and India and China went down this route, most of the energy needs of the worlds populations would be satisfied. How to get this uptake? Make coal more expensive. On the nuclear waste problem, it is a smaller more controllable problem than the tonnes of CO2 released into the atmosphere. Each human would probably use the energy in a coke can or less to power their life. Some of the other reactors (such as fast breeders) can consume the waste of the other reactors.  An interesting aside was that the us nuclear plants are being powered by reprocessed USSR nukes. My idea was always that nuclear power stations werent viable, because they werent scalable. Each instalation took so much money and time, and ran over budget as they need to be made ensite. The smaller ones have the advantage that they can be fabricated in factories. More playeres than just the big ones (RR, Serco, Westinghouse, Mitsubishi). It might even provide a way out for companies heavily invested in the military uses of nuclear to find another revenue stream.
• Geoengineering : Talk starts with Mt Pinatubo which released 200million tonnes of sulphur dioxide and decreased the earths temperature by 0.6C. Can humans do the same? Should we do the same.  So strange contraptions that release sulphur dioxide in the upper atmosphere might give us a bit of breathing space til we get C)2 under control.
• urbanization: What happens as we reach the point where there is more people in cities than outside, reclamation of natural spaces, leaving areas for more intensive farming. Why are people streaming int the city? For jobs and oportunities Slums are strange places in this, an informal economy that works even though it is por and life is hard. However, it is probaly easer than it was on the land, otherwise they would be back there. So communities are being built in these areas, people are getting together to teach their children, and that is their objective, to never stop teaching.

A lot of this talk came from the idea that the greens have got it wrong, there is no unnature, they are being too romantic, and dramatic(see the book). There is more science needed, but we have been talking about global warming since I was in high schoolin  the early 90’s, and nothing much has been done. Ozone was stabilized, but that was relativly more simple, although the replacement for fluorocarbons are intense greenhouse gasses.

SO why is this post important to me?  If it isn’t already obvious, all of the topic by Steward Brand came with the caveat empor “More science needed” . But where will this science come from? The UK, USA, or China a society directed by engineers.  It also intersects at a strange angle with Fo.AMs “Luminous Green”, bricolabs, peer based learning, citizen science, synthetic biology, P2P production: Knowledge and learning, and making…..

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