We are going to run out of oil.  Before that happens, we are going to run out of cheap energy.  When that happens, there’s going to be starvation, civil unrest, warfare and the collapse of civilization – maybe even the end of humanity if the wars get too far out of hand.

This isn’t a disaster that’s just going to fall on America, or only on the industrialized parts of the world:  This is going to affect every human being on the planet, except perhaps jungle dwellers and aborigines who are largely independent of civilization.  If the downfall of civilization results in nuclear warfare, however, even those hapless tribes will not be unscathed.

When is this horrible disaster going to befall us?  That’s hard to say because the estimates of how much oil is left are just that – estimates – and the numbers being touted by various groups vary wildly.  The most optimistic predictions tell us there are reserves for 150 years, pessimists predict a tenth of that time.  In any case, as we get closer to the bottom of the barrel, the cost of retrieving the oil is going to skyrocket which will signal the beginning of the end.  Many of the projections assume that oil consumption is going to level out, or even decline.  Neither of those conditions is going to occur:  More people are using more oil every day, and as long as there is oil available, that’s not going to change.

Modern civilization is totally dependent on oil:  Huge amounts are burned up every day in our transportation systems, to provide heat, and to generate electricity.  In addition, nearly everything made out of plastic started out as oil.  Plastic is being used for everything – containers, plumbing, vinyl siding, cell phones, car bodies, etc., etc.  I would be very surprised to meet anyone living in the civilized world who didn’t own anything made of plastic – and most of us have lots of things that are.  As we raise the standard of living for everyone on the planet, the demand for more plastic – and more oil for fuel – is just going to go up.

Eventually the current demand for oil and oil products is going to exceed the total production capacity.  When that happens, civilization will start to collapse.

There is a way to avert this disaster – but the window of opportunity is rapidly passing by.  The death of civilization can be avoided, but only by developing a replacement energy supply.  Doing so is going to take a tremendous investment of effort, and will require a substantial amount of time – and energy.  If we wait too long, there won’t be enough time left to build a replacement energy source.

Fossil fuels – oil, coal, gas – have stored the Sun’s energy that fell on the Earth in the past.  Over the course of the last one hundred fifty years we have burned through a large portion of the stored solar energy from millions of years gone by.

The only feasible energy source that can serve as a replacement for oil is direct collection of solar power.  Trying to collect solar power at the Earth’s surface to run all of our modern civilization, however, is not practical:  The Sun is overhead only part of a day, and may be obscured by clouds in the air or snow on the ground.  Solar collectors take up a lot of space, and the power consumed by a city far exceeds the amount of solar power falling directly on it.

Because of the problems with trying to collect it on the ground, solar power is generally ruled out as a viable replacement for oil power.  It is those very problems that make it imperative for us to build a network of solar power satellites in orbit, where the Sun is always shining, and beam the power to the ground.  Only then can we hope to have enough area in the collectors to be able to gather all of the energy needed to support a power-hungry civilization and make it cheaply available.

Building a constellation of solar power satellites is going to require a tremendous investment, and it’s not going to happen overnight.  We must get started NOW, however, or the end of civilization predicted above will befall us.

I’ve started Space Power Now! as a vehicle for raising public awareness of the critical nature of the energy crisis looming in the near future, and how solar power delivered from satellites in Earth orbit is the only reasonable long-term solution.  Please, visit the site, participate, and let’s make it happen! The future of humanity depends on it!

          

The universe is infinite and an open topology.  This means you could start out anywhere in space and go forever without being any closer to “the edge of space” than you were when you started.

One of the objections posed against this concept is that if the universe were truly infinite, then there would be a light source in every direction you looked.  As a result, the sky would have to be white because there would be a light source somewhere in every direction.  The dark night sky is therefore taken as refuting the idea that the universe is infinite.

Well, the sky is white – if you’re looking in the microwave portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Does that count?  Well, yes it does:  The more energetic photons that started out as visible light some nearly infinite distance away have passed through an unfriendly universe on their way to us:  Collisions and near misses with other photons, space warped by gravity wells, other hazards we haven’t even discovered yet – these all suck energy out of passing light.  When electromagnetic energy is lost, the photons fall down the spectrum:  Extremely energetic photons of hard X-rays become soft ones, ultraviolet becomes violet, green shifts to yellow, red to infrared, infrared to microwave.  Given enough distance, a photon will eventually run out of energy, having dissipated everything it started with into the intervening void.  We’ve been taught that a photon starts out with a certain amount of energy and always has that same amount, but it doesn’t really work that way when you look on a large enough scale.

This doesn’t bode well for the evidence assumed to be supporting the Big Bang theory – red-shift:  Instead of being a result of accelerating expansion at larger distances, red shift is caused by a much more mundane effect – light running out of energy – its energy being dissipated into the void by the nature of the universe.

There are several other problems with the Big Bang:  If the universe is expanding, what is it expanding into?  Isn’t the universe (by definition) everything that exists?  The red shift is assumed to be a measure of the rate of the universe’s expansion:  Things that are farther away are all older and red shifted more because they have been accelerating longer.  Well, no:  It has taken the light from distant objects longer to get to us than from closer ones and the photons have just had more time and distance to lose energy.  Does it really make sense that there would only be extremely old objects in the great distances and none nearby?

Gravity isn’t the result of the surface of the Earth accelerating away from the center of the core at 9.8 meters per second per second.  A much more likely explanation is that the mass of the Earth is shielding us from the skyful of photons that would bombarding us from the other side, so those from the sky above us pins us down just as if there were a mysterious vacuum pump sucking us toward the center of the Earth.

I’m working on developing TheSkyIsWhite.org to discuss and disseminate information about the physics and philosophy behind, about and derived from the concept of an open infinite universe.  Feel free to check it out.