ships, more ships, and new kinds of ships.
I think, sooner or later, we are going to have to face the fact that we are using too many of this worlds resources and putting out way too much waste product.
The implications of this are grim, but, with careful managment, I believe, liveable.
There will be many casualties in this era of great change.
I think of my grandfather and the world he grew up in. If he had told his parents in 1911 (when he was about 6) that someday, well within his life time, just about every American adult would own a motor car, people would be flying coast to coast in flying machines at the rate of about eight miles a minute, and that he, his children, and his grandchildren would be watching people walk on the moon, his parents would think he was crazy.
Now I can imagine my Godson, now 4 years old, someday telling me that, well within his life time, only about one in five American adults will own a car, that all stored energy usage will be formally rationed, and that ecologist will replace economist as the primary arbiters of what goes on and does not go on in our society.
If he does, I will be dismayed but not shocked.
The transportation of goods, that can easily be made locally, over long distances in a timely fashon is, I believe, going to be an early casualty to tomorrows grimmer realities.
Much of todays global corporatism, often refered to as 'globalism', is based on 20th, not 21st century assumptions. And these assumtions are:
1.) That energy is always going to be cheap and plentiful,
2.) That the accumulation of waste product, anything from toxic trash to greenhouse gasses, can be safely ignored, and
3.) that there will always be a '3rd world' of poorer countries in which the richer countries can both extract the resources they have exhausted on their home turf and deposit the waste product they want to get rid of.
21st century realities, I believe, are going to be somewhat different.
The order of easy and reliable shipping is going to corrode much the way it did during the implosion of the Western Roman Empire. Nobody will be able to afford a navy to protect them. (the appearance of modern day pirates may be a symptom of this process already starting)
Future motor ships will be powered much as they are today by diesel and/or its bio counterpart, but will have much smaller engines (less than 1 hp/ton) and, correspondingly, much greater armenment. These ships will carry huge bulk cargoes. Smaller ships, which may become quite numerous, will be either sail assisted or sail powered entirely. STORED energy use, such as hydro electric, biomass, fissionables, and fossil fuel, will be the energy use taxed and rationed. DIRECT energy use, such as wind and solar, will not be (but not for the lack of trying).
In the words of a character in the novella I recently finished: "We need ships, more ships, and new kinds of ships."
Just one wipe of my crystal ball.
Bob
), I promise to post in this thread what said there.
