apocalyptica and the astrophysicist
sastyk | March 20, 2012Richard Heinberg has a nice piece about drawing conclusions from present trends. Among his observations:
If current economic trends continue . . .
China's economy will be 8 times as big as it is today by 2040.
China's economy will surpass the size of the present global economy before 2050.
The US federal debt will double--from $14 trillion to $28 trillion--by 2022.
In 2072, the federal debt will amount to $896 trillion, or $1,629,091 for each American (assuming a US population then of 550 million).
By the end of the century, each American will "owe" over a billion dollars.
Thanks to the…
sastyk | January 5, 2012
If you have followed energy issues from anywhere other than a cave on a mountain peak, you've probably heard technoutopians utter some variation on the following sentence two or three hundred times "We walked on the moon - of course we can do whatever it takes to shift from fossil fuels to some other source of energy." The moon shot is perceived as the ultimate example of "put in a quarter and get out the technological outcome you want" in our history. If we could set out to put a man on the moon and do it in less than decade, can't we do anything we want to, with just enough ingenuity?…
sastyk | August 9, 2010I was planning to whine a little. You see I got back from Maryland and I was really, really tired. Got up at 4am after a late night to get to the train the first night. Four hours sleep the second night, because I was (you pity me, right?) drinking wine with Dmitry Orlov, Megan Bachman, John Michael Greer and other cool people until the wee hours. Then my train pulled into NYC close to midnight and I didn't get to bed at the Hotel In-Law until the wee hours again. Up at dawn to catch the next leg of the train up to home, with guests coming a couple hours later. So I was most definitely…
sastyk | August 3, 2010Now it is no secret that I think that we are facing a major shift in our society, and one that will not be entirely fun, to put it mildly. It should also be no secret that while I love to write jokingly about when zombies come, I don't actually believe we're facing an apocalypse of any kind. Indeed, as I've written many times, part of the problem with addressing our situation is that we flit wildly between assumptions of techno-utopianism and absolute apocalypticism. I think what we are facing is serious enough without turning it into a cartoon, unless, of course, there are actual zombies…
sastyk | June 17, 2010My husband turns 40 this weekend, and we are celebrating. When asked what he wanted to do for his birthday, he said he wanted a party, just like the ones we have for the kids on their birthdays - lots of food, lots of friends, very casual. We've managed to collect 40-50 friends and family together, and are going to eat a lot of lasagna and strawberry shortcake, watch the kids play with the animals and in the creek, drink beer and maybe make some music.
Despite our intention (and we still intend) to do more work together on this blog, Eric still mostly exists for the purposes of this…
sastyk | April 9, 2010I know, I know, I promised you that Eric and I would start doing joint posts months ago, and we haven't done a single one. Sorry folks. Besides the fact that it has been a crazy-busy period in our lives, there's another reason. We didn't fully grasp the reality of this blogging together project. You see, it hadn't fully registered on us that in order to do it, we would have to find time when both of us were a. wholly free of all children b. awake and c. not doing something else.
These circumstances aren't really all that common in our lives, I fear. The way we manage on comparatively…
sastyk | December 18, 2009When I decided to switch over to science blogs, I told Eric that he had to go with me. We've talked for years about doing a project together, but have always worried that a book or something would kill our extremely happy marriage, that we'd end up fighting over grammar (he's much more of a stickler on this than I am, which is sort of strange given our respective backgrounds). But blog posts, well, we could presumably do this together with minimal risk of homicide. So next week (this week is grading hell week for the honey) we'll start our "Apocalyptica and the Astrophysicst" series with…