Monthly Archives: May 2005

Welcome to the Future!!!

This could very well be the web site that changes your life. No kidding!

Are you ready for the future? Are you sure? And more importantly, is the future ready for you?

We’re so glad to have you here. You’ve landed on an archive page, so if you want to see what we’ve been up to lately, click here. For a quick dose of good news, visit out sister blog, L2si, where we feature dispatches from a rapidly changing, rapidly improving world. Or you can go here to see what’s happening with both blogs and find links to our podcasts.

So please, make yourselves at home. Have a look around. We’re glad to see you!

Carnival of Tomorrow 3.0

plan9.gifWe begin our collection of futuristic highlights from around the blogosphere with these profound words, penned by legendary filmmaker Ed Wood and given voice by one of the most renowned, er, visionaries of the 20th century, the Amazing Kreskin:

We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember, my friends, future events such as these will affect you…in the future.

The biggest news of the past couple of weeks (not to mention decades) was the announcement that Korean scientists have created individual stem cell lines for patients, usherng in the age of therapeutic cloning. Glenn Reynolds was among the first to link to Ronald Bailey’s TechCentralStation piece that outlined the breakthrough; Glenn also followed up with some additional thoughts here.

Reason from Fight Aging! had some rather pointed comments on the subject of how politics prevents the US from taking the lead in this field, summarized with this money quote:

The bottom line: politicized medical research is slower, less effective, less efficient medical research. The slower it goes, the more likely you are to suffer and die from an age-related condition that might otherwise have been cured.

Another pretty darned good blog had further commentary (here and here).

Meanwhile, Rich at Blinne Blog had a very different take on the matter:

The researcher denies that these are fertilized eggs. Now the question becomes whether blastocysts created by somatic cell nuclear transfer (popularly known as cloning) is life or not. I am now less concerned but the fact that Dolly became a real sheep still troubles me. Reading the reactions that people have to this issue it seems I am the only one on the planet that feels better that this is cloning rather than IVF. This is still an ethical dilemma — just not as profound as when I originally posted this.

Jim Davila had some thoughts on why the MIT Time Traveler Convention had no time travelers…or did they?

Speaking of time travel, and the closely related topic of faster-than-light space travel, Zac Hanley of Ortholog checks in on the disappointing news about wormholes.

FuturePundit had a short piece on a development that sounds ghoulish, but will likely prove imminently practical in an age of implanted nano-scale biosensors — a fuel cell that runs on blood.

Rand Simberg notes an interesting parallel between the end of the age of suspicious wires and the disappearance of the last vestiges of privacy.

Meanwhile, Tim at Hypotheses Non Fingo observes that the right of adults in this country to disappear without telling anyone is still intact — for now — rhetoric concerning the “Runaway Bride” case notwithstanding.

Howard Lovy (with some help from his readers) is doling out advice for those seeking a career in nanotechnology.

Paul Hsieh of GeekPress directs us to the news of the world’s first light gun capabale of firing individual photons. No, it isn’t a weapon; au contraire, it may represent a major breakthrough in communications.

Finally, the past couple of weeks saw the end (or at least so we are told) of the two biggest science fiction movie and television franchises: Star Trek and Star Wars.

James Lileks was one of the few bloggers who thought the passing of Star Trek sufficiently noteworthy to write something about it, providing both an extended Bleat and an article on the subject in (appropriately enough) the American Enterprise Online. Lileks concluded:

I watched the first “Star Trek” episode as it was broadcast, sitting in my grandfather’s living room in Harwood, North Dakota. I will watch the last one in my own home and feel a sense of relief: I don’t have to worry whether it’s good or bad. Now it’s just done.

By way of contrast, there was no shortage of blog entries on the new Star Wars movie (Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith, for anyone just emerging from a very long coma). One reason there was so much splash in the blogosphere is that it would appear that there are two (or more) versions of this film floating around. Will Collier of VodkaPundit saw a movie that was “thoroughly satisfying, credible, and deeply enjoyable.” Mack Zulkifli of Brand New Malaysian, on the other hand, saw a film that “tanked and stank to high heaven.” However, Mack lays some hints that his review may be the product of Jedi mind tricks, so maybe they are the same film after all.

We have no review to offer up, but we did manage to catch a nice still image from the new Star Wars movie…or was it from the final episode of Enterprise? Either way, it follows our plug for the next go-round of the Carnival of Tomorrow.

Want to participate in the next edition of the Carnival of Tomorrow? Just write to us:

mrstg87 {@ symbol} yahoo {dot} com or
phil {@ symbol} speculist {dot} com

Ready for more futurific content? Check out FastForward Radio.

See you in the future!

And now, the promised screen capture.

The Ulitmate Resource

Wired Magazine reports on the ambitious plans of one John Piña Craven:

ocean1.jpg The key to Craven’s cool world is converting the ocean’s thermal energy. The first step: Sink a pipe at least 3,000 feet deep and start pumping up seawater. The end result: an environmentally sustainable, virtually inexhaustible supply of electricity, freshwater for drinking and irrigation, even air-conditioning.

“What the world doesn’t understand,” says Craven…”is that what we don’t have enough of is cold, not heat.”

Craven is currently using his deep-water engineering to make grapes a Hawaiian cash crop and (more ambitiously) to make an oasis out of the Marianas Islands. He theorizes that the deep-water/shallow-water temperature differential in the world’s oceans holds the key to humanity’s energy problems many times over.

Craven certainly raises an interesting question: why build solar or nuclear power plants to provide energy (or to produce hydrogen to use as fuel) when we already have a natural power plant covering two-thirds of the planet’s surface?

Not only can the temperature difference produce energy, it can be used to “sweat” a limitless supply of fresh water off the pipes transporting the cold water. It can also supply (virtually) free air conditioning. And, intriguingly, Craven believes that cold-water treatment can serve as a means of life extension.

My wife and I had a very pleasant stay in a Japanese-style spa resort a couple of years ago. The only part I didn’t like was the cold water pool. (I think the temperature was about 60 degrees.) However, my wife insisted that I immerse myself in it and stay there so I could “get the benefit.”

Well, maybe she was on to something…

Mimicry

moth small.JPGMy two older boys found this moth this morning on our back porch. Those guys were freaking out. “Mom, Dad, a giant moth is on the back porch.”

“Is it a Luna Moth?” I asked – my oldest caught a Luna last summer.

“No sir. Hurry! It’s huge!”

Well, it IS big. It’s called a Polyphemus Moth. It is said to grow up to a 5 1/2 inch wingspan. This one has a span close to that. Below is another picture with my 8-year-old’s hands in the shot.

“Check out those eyes on its wings, Dad!”

“Yeah, it looks like an owl doesn’t it? A bird comes swooping down thinking its going to get a juicy meal, the moth flaps its wings down and the bird see’s its worst nightmare – an owl face.”

“Cool!” He loved that.

moth hands small.JPGThis is a great example of intelligence in nature. Of course the moth is not aware that it looks like an owl, and it doesn’t try to look like an owl. But the more it looks like an owl, the better its chances of survival. If a moth is born that looks slightly more like an owl than its siblings, it will be slightly more likely to survive to reproduce. This is intelligence built into the system.

While an owl’s face serves this moth very well, there’s a crab that adopted a human face – specifically the face of a Samurai warrior.

On April 24, 1185 there was a decisive naval battle between two groups of Samurai – the Heike and the Genji. The Heike were outnumbered and lost badly. The Heike who survived the battle committed suicide by jumping into the sea.

Upon receiving news of this defeat, the seven-year-old Heike emperor was taken by his caretaker Lady Nii to the ocean where, after prayers to the East and West, they also hurled themselves into the sea with the words, “In the depths of the ocean is our capitol.”

heike crab.jpgFisherman who descended from that royal court came to believe that the Heike warriors still roamed the ocean floor guarding their youthful emperor. When these fisherman caught crabs that resembled a face, it was thrown back into the ocean to commemorate the events of that disastrous battle.

The more the crabs resembled a Heike warrior’s face, the better their chances of survival.

As the generations passed, of crabs and fishermen alike, the crabs with patterns that most resembled a samurai face survived preferentially until eventually there was produced not just a human face, not just a Japanese face, but the visage of a fierce and scowling samurai.

Cool!

New Path to Cancer Drugs Opened

Researchers at Harvard have built a library of genetic information on kinases – enzymes associated with “proteins, lipids, sugars, nucleosides, and other cellular components.” Many different diseases are the result of some malfunction of these enzymes, but most often its cancer.

Greater understanding of the genetic makeup of these enzymes gives drug makers new targets for drug development.

This collection [of genetic information] is unique because clones in the collection represent protein kinases as well as non-protein kinases, are fully sequenced verified, full-length, and can be sub-cloned by recombination based methodologies.

Er…okay. Suffice it to say that this is valuable information that drug manufacturers didn’t have before. Harvard accomplished this work by “mining public databases,” using “high-throughput cloning” methods, and “automation.” My translation: they used the Internet, fast computation, and robots.

All of these tools are on “Mr. Spock’s chessboard” – all are subject to exponential improvement over time.

The Age of Therapeutic Cloning

Ronald Bailey at TechCentralStation summarizes the huge breakthrough in Korea:

Siegel and Perry are hailing the announcement today in Science by Korean researchers that they have created eleven cloned human embryonic stem cell lines that are matched to eleven individual patients. This achievement comes only 14 months after the same team of Korean researchers led by Woo Suk Hwang created the first cloned human embryo.

The researchers used somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) to create these cloned human embryonic stem cell lines. They began with 185 eggs donated by 18 women who produced about 10 eggs per induced superovulation cycle. The researchers removed the nuclei from each egg and inserted skin cell nuclei from each patient into the enucleated eggs. From these 185 eggs, 129 successfully fused with the skin cell nuclei and 31 developed into blastocysts. Eleven different patient matched human embryonic stem cell lines were successfully derived from the 31 blastocysts. The stem cell lines were derived for both males and females and from patients suffering from juvenile diabetes, congenital immunodeficiency disease and spinal cord injuries.

One might wonder why these breakthroughs always seem to come from Korea? Korea has had the lead in stem cell and therapeutic cloning research for some time now. Apparently there is no debate there equivalent to the ongoing ethical struggle that the US is having with this issue. Europe is in much the same boat as the US, with strong government opposition to therapeutic cloning being the norm. In the US, the source of the opposition is primarily religious in nature; in Europe the opposition is more green/Luddite.

Glenn Reynolds has an interesting observation on the potential political fallout, which may apply to leaders in Europe as well as to both political parties in the US (although Glenn mentions the Republicans by name):

The bind for the Republicans is that if stem cell research creates promising treatments or cures, they’ll look like they held them back. And if it doesn’t do so, they’ll be blamed for preventing it.

Reason from Fight Aging! takes a somewhat more pointed approach:

Some of the most promising research into cures for age-related conditions has been held back and underfunded for years in the US. But regular readers know this already; much of the recent news regarding stem cell research has been nothing but politics. It is a great pity that we live in a society that places so little value on individual responsibility, freedom and choice, especially in those areas of human endeavor where the most good could be accomplished. Centralization and socialization of medicine are terrible things; why do we allow the uninformed and unskilled to squander resources and hold life and death decisions over our heads?

The bottom line: politicized medical research is slower, less effective, less efficient medical research. The slower it goes, the more likely you are to suffer and die from an age-related condition that might otherwise have been cured. The slower it goes, the less likely we are to make serious progress towards a cure for the aging process itself. Politicians can do nothing but destroy and delay; they should leave well alone – let those who are willing to work put their talents, unhindered, towards creating longer, healthier lives for all.

If therapeutic cloning is able to deliver on even a small portion of its promised benefits, it’s difficult for me to believe that it won’t become available somewehere (most likely Korea) in the very near future. And I suspect it will eventually be available in Europe and the US as well.

An important confrontation (it’s much more than a debate) lies ahead.

UPDATE: MORE THOUGHTS FROM STEPHEN:

South Korea Does It Again

We learned yesterday that South Korea has taken another giant leap forward in the field of therapeutic cloning. They have produced 11 new stem cell lines, which is a wonderful thing in itself, but these stem cell lines are exact genetic matches for patients who need them.

If you need stem cell therapy – this, currently, is the only way to get exact genetically matching omni-potent stem cells. THE only way. And you’d have to go to South Korea for the treatment.

The South Korean lab that keeps shocking the world with these breakthroughs is manned by brilliant, hard-working scientists. These guys are said to work every day of the year. No breaks…ever. That’s an impressive commitment, but the man-hours that these few scientists can devote to this field – even working every day – is nothing compared to the man-hours the United States could throw at these same problems. If, that is, we made it a priority.

The fact that therapeutic cloning is not a priority in this country can be blamed in large measure on The President’s Council of Bioethics. Not happy that his influence doesn’t extend as far as South Korea, the Council Chair Leon Kass had this to say:

Whatever its technical merit, this research is morally troubling: it creates human embryos solely for research, makes it much easier to produce cloned babies, and exploits women as egg donors not for their benefit.

Kass’ first point: that this development “creates human embryos solely for research” is actually his best argument. Kass’ position that embryos should not be used in research is, no doubt, a product of the belief that human life begins at conception.

If you really believe that the handful of undifferentiated cells in the petri dish is a human, then there is no justification for sacrificing one human to help another human. This position becomes hard to swallow if the human in need is standing next to you begging you to help him, but if you accept that conception marks the arrival of a human, complete in rights if not in form, where none existed the moment before, then the position is at least, logical.

Those who have argued that life begins at conception often point to the fact that conception is the first appearance of the DNA blueprint that will be used to make an individual human. In fact conception does produce DNA that is distinct from the parents, but it is not necessarily the DNA that will go on to make an individual human.

The key battleground is where society says that human life begins.

Clearly, both the sperm and egg are [living human cells] and they have the potential of being part of a new human, but few would offer legal protection to gametes. The crude and hilarious “Every Sperm is Sacred” song is effective satire because almost nobody would adopt that thinking…

Before differentiation a fertilized egg might fail to develop (as occurs when the fertilized egg is unsuccessful in attaching to the uterine wall – this happens about half of the time). Or the fertilized egg might become a single human. It could become two humans in the case of identical twins (natural clones). A fertilized egg might even become part of a human in the rare case of a chimera – where two fertilized eggs develop together into a single embryo.

If a fertilized egg has the potential in nature of being no human, part of a human, one human, or two humans, the destiny of a fertilized egg is objectively undetermined – much like the undetermined nature of the gametes that formed it.

After differentiation, an embryo has crossed an objective medical threshold. The individual that the embryo will develop into is now determined. The same thing cannot be said of the moment of conception.

Differentiation occurs very early in a pregnancy – at about ten days. This is a much more conservative definition of the beginning of human life than abortion-rights advocates would be willing to accept.

A person who accepts differentiation as the beginning of human life can be pro-life (anti-abortion) without the practical inconsistency of being against the research that could save countless other lives. This is not mere situational ethics. This is the sort of critical reexamination of ethics that new technology forces upon us. It should be of no consequence that Kass and company are unhappy with the arrival of this technology. The technology is here and we are going to have to deal with it.

Kass’ second point, that this technology “makes it much easier to produce cloned babies,” is just silly. The automobile made drive-by shootings possible too. The fact that something bad might be done with a technology is an insufficient reason to ban the technology. Particularly where, as here, the potential benefits are so great.

“The South Korean government, which paid for the new study, has made it a criminal offense to implant a cloned embryo into a woman’s uterus,” Dr. Hwang [the head of South Korean group] said. “It should be banned throughout the world,” he added.

I’d have no problem with that. One of me is plenty. Reproductive cloning would presently be unsafe for the child. The risk of birth defects is much too high. Even if that problem were solved, there is the question of why a person would want a clone – organ harvesting perhaps?

Kass’ third point, that this technology “exploits women as egg donors not for their benefit” is also without merit. This argument makes no sense, of course, in those cases where the egg donor is also the beneficiary of the stem cell line. But the argument is worthless in any case.

I’m sure Kass would like to make an analogy between egg donation and prostitution, but you might as well say the same thing of blood donation. If Kass’ problem with egg donation is the pain of the procedure, bone marrow donation is very painful as well. Yet good people donate bone marrow to complete strangers all the time.

Technology will soon render any concern with egg donation moot anyway. Artificial eggs could soon be used in this procedure.

Obviously, the ethical issue involved here could not be more important – the respect for human life. But our respect for human life shouldn’t end at birth. Our society has a duty to the sick and suffering to do all it can for them as long as doing so will not sacrifice human dignity.

South Korea’s accomplishment will enhance human dignity.

Swarming Robots

Via Kurzweil AI:

swarm.gifUniversity of Wyoming researchers have received a $100,000 National Science Foundation grant to further develop swarm of tiny robots that could help clean up oil spills or respond to a terrorist attack.

A swarm of small robots would cover a larger area more quickly than a single robot, and if one failed, the others could take up the slack. Eventually they hope to develop robots that could fly or swim.

(Read the original article.)

Such swarms will have many applications. They could help out quite a bit in firefighting and search-and-rescue scenarios. Imagine a sufficiently large (and sufficiently dispersed) robot swarm hovering around the US-Mexico border, programmed to report any movement where no movement should be. Such a swarm would be more effective in sealing the border than any number of Minutemen (or National Guard troops) could ever dream of being.

Of course, there’s got to be a downside. What about the government using robot swarms to control us? What about robot swarms gone bad, evolving their own intelligence and sense of purpose competitive with our own? If you’re interested in that kind of thing, Michael Crichton published a novel a couple of years ago about a robot swarm with marked gray-goo tendencies that causes all kinds of problems. An interesting page-turner, but the consensus these days is that the gray-goo scenario is imminently avoidable.

Crichton’s robots were microscopic in size. The smaller we make the individual robots that make up the swarm, the more we’ll be able to do with them. Eventually, swarms of nano-scale robots will be released inside our bodies to ward off the effects of disease and aging. And one day, we’ll have swarms of nanobots acting in concert to create what will be the most useful product ever invented: Josh Hall’s utility fog.

As Josh explains it:

Nanotechnology is based on the concept of tiny, self-replicating robots. The Utility Fog is a very simple extension of the idea: Suppose, instead of building the object you want atom by atom, the tiny robots linked their arms together to form a solid mass in the shape of the object you wanted? Then, when you got tired of that avant-garde coffeetable, the robots could simply shift around a little and you’d have an elegant Queen Anne piece instead.

You may as well make your car of Utility Fog, too; then you can have a “new” one every day. But better than that, the *interior* of the car is filled with robots as well as its shell. You’ll need to wear holographic “eyephones” to see, but the Fog will hold them up in front of your eyes and they’ll feel and look as if they weren’t there. Although heavier than air, the Fog is programmed to simulate its physical properties, so you can’t feel it: when you move your arm, it flows out of the way. Except when there’s a crash! Then it forms an instant form-fitting “seatbelt” protecting every inch of your body. You can take a 100-mph impact without messing your hair.

Dang. I have got to get me some of that stuff.

There's More Than One Way To Skin A Bacterium

A year and a half ago Glenn Reynolds reported on research to use peptide nanotubes to:

“…kill bacteria by punching holes in the bacteria’s membrane.” You might think of these as a sort of mechanical antibiotic….”By controlling the type of peptides used to build the rings, scientists are able to design nanotubes that selectively perforate bacterial membranes without harming the cells of the host… In theory, these nano-bio agents should be far less prone than existing antibiotics to the development of bacterial resistance.”

It is hard to imagine a genetic mutation that would allow bacteria to survive a punctured cell membrane.

Today, Wired News reports that Oculus Innovative Sciences is now producing a liquid called Microcyn that kills even drug resistant bacteria.

According to Hoji Alimi, founder and president of Oculus, the ion-hungry water creates an osmotic potential that ruptures the cell walls of single-celled organisms, and out leaks the cell’s cytoplasm. Because multicellular organisms — people, animals, plants — are tightly bound, the water is prevented from surrounding the cells, and there is no negative impact.

Though I’m not sure why, Microcyn also is effective against viruses and spores. And unlike with nanotubes, there is no concern with environmental impact.

This is not a pie in the sky development. Oculus has announced FDA 510K clearance of Microcyn technology.

Dermacynâ„¢ Wound Care, the first Microcynâ„¢ Technology product for human use in the United States, will be available to physicians in June 2005 by phoning 1(800) 759-9305.

IMPORTANT UPDATE: Derek Lowe emailed Glenn Reynolds the following:

Had a look at that Speculist/Wired News piece, followed by a perusal of the Oculus web site. Not too many details there for a chemist, so I searched for their IP, and found their patent WO03048421, which shows up assigned to Oculus in its European filing. That gave me more to go on.

I’m not all that impressed. This seems to have very little relation to the nanotube punctures that you wrote about a few months ago, despite the Speculist lead-in, and the Oculus PR doesn’t make much sense, either. Their statement in the Wired article is:

the ion-hungry water creates an osmotic potential that ruptures the cell walls of single-celled organisms, and out leaks the cell’s cytoplasm. Because multicellular organisms — people, animals, plants — are tightly bound, the water is prevented from surrounding the cells, and there is no negative impact

Which is semi-gibberish. Talking about “ion-hungry” water that kills through osmosis makes it sound like it’s some sort of ultrapure stuff, but their water has plenty of ions in it, since the electrolysis that produces it makes hypochlorous acid, hydrochloric acid, and so on. Those are surely the source of its bacteria-killing properties, which would then be done through good ol’ toxic chemistry. And that “tightly bound” stuff isn’t too compelling, either – so it’ll just mess up your cells that it can get to, is my take on that, and won’t touch bacteria that are embedded in a matrix or biofilm.

And the possibility for dosing this stuff in vivo is zero, by the way, for those same reasons.

Not to be overly defensive, but the title to this post is “More Than One Way To Skin A Bacterium.” Of course there is no relation to what Glenn reported in 2003 and Microcyn, EXCEPT that both developments would work by breaching the cell membranes of bacteria while leave the cells of the body untouched. Literally two methods to skin a bacterium. Get it?
:-)

What is curious about the Oculus claim (and this should have raised some doubt with me earlier) is that this fluid is said to be effective against viruses. Okay, but by what mechanism? Viruses don’t have cell casings.

I’m not ready to write off the Oculus fluid as snake oil yet. But I’ll be careful in my enthusiasm.

Bigger Than Oil

Late last month columnist Michael Ventura wrote a remarkable horror story about America’s future for the Austin Chronicle.

oil-rigsmall.gifApparently America is doomed because of rising oil prices. Nice of Ventura to let us know. Gives us a chance to plan for the whole mediocrity gig. Ventura’s article is well written, logical….and quite wrong. I invite you to read the whole thing and return here for the pep talk you’ll need after reading it.

Ventura has decided, with some relish it seems, that America will cease to be a superpower. I don’t disagree with his outline of our challenges. While his timetable seems accelerated, I don’t doubt that the price of petroleum is going to skyrocket in the coming years. Output has probably peaked, while our demand in this country continues to climb. And the colossus developing economies in China and India will soon be competing for a larger share of this resource.

Ventura’s logic fails in two respects. First, he is considering America’s challenges without also considering what we have going for us. Also, Ventura is working from the hypothesis that the U.S rose to power solely because of oil. By gobbling up this resource, this thinking is, the United States became a hyperpower. Of course petroleum did fuel our rise to dominance, but petroleum is a world resource. Our country was able to demand a lion’s share of this resource because we were already set up to succeed and other societies were set up to fail.

In 1998 Ralph Peters wrote, “National success is eccentric. But national failure is programmed and predictable.” He then outlined seven “failure factors” – the reasons why societies fail. They are:

  • Restrictions on the free flow of information.

  • The subjugation of women.
  • Inability to accept responsibility for individual or collective failure.
  • The extended family or clan as the basic unit of social organization. (rather than being able to hire the best person for the job, the job must go to never-do-well second cousin Herb)
  • Domination by a restrictive religion.
  • A low valuation of education, and
  • Low prestige assigned to work.

A country will suffer if any of these factors become part of its culture. If the culture is able to self-correct, it will improve its chances for success – every time. But often societies are ideologically committed to a failure factor – as China is to the restriction of information and the Islamic world is to…all of these factors. Societies burdened with failure factors have an impossible time keeping pace with countries that aren’t.

The failure factors are sliding scales. If we were to assign “10″ as the perfect score for each category, the United States would not score 70. But historically we have valued liberty for individuals and accountability in leadership. It was thought that such a system would maximize individual happiness. It has certainly done that, but it has also produced a remarkably powerful country. Right makes might.

The United States is also the beneficiary of remarkable network strength. Of course there’s the country itself. The United States is a huge free trade zone dominated by a single language and few barriers to commerce. Canada and Mexico were brought into this network with NAFTA. And soon, Central America will be brought into the economic network with CAFTA. And America’s social and economic sphere of influence is global.

But let’s assume that Ventura is right about petroleum slipping away. It won’t be gone so much as prohibitively priced – priced to the point that we have to limit our energy consumption or find a new source of energy.

I’m betting on the new source of energy.

This is not just blind optimism. There’s accelerating development in every field of human knowledge. Moore’s law keeps delivering faster processors, which provide us the power to accomplish more intellectually in a shorter period of time than ever before.

Speaking of network strength, the Internet isn’t going away. The Internet provides a way for knowledge workers to work anywhere – even in those suburbs and rural areas that Ventura thinks are going to become backwater ghettos. Telecommuting has been limited to a great extent because people are still expected to come into an office. Expectations may change with $6.00 per gallon gas.

The Internet also provides instant and universal access to the world of knowledge. It will be instrumental in helping scientists find a petroleum replacement.

What will replace petroleum? Hydrogen suffered a set-back recently when the National Academy of Engineering concluded that, if achievable, a hydrogen economy is “several decades” away.

“Several decades” has a way of becoming one decade if sufficient resources are devoted to the problem. Our mild flirtation with this research would become a committed love affair if petroleum prices skyrocket. But hydrogen isn’t even my favorite energy alternative. Our country should explore the possibility of clean nuclear energy produced from helium-3.

UPDATE: Here’s another energy idea.