The New Horizons probe, on gravity assist to Pluto, recently skirted past Jupiter's vast domain of moons, faint planetary rings and intense radiation belts. Beautiful images of a giant world draped in streaming cloud bands and swirling storms broader than the Earth were returned as the tiny probe hurtled through Jovian space. The robotic interplanetary explorer is traveling between worlds at a speed faster than any other space mission to date. With a 4 kilometer-per-second (km/s) boost from Jupiter's gravity well, the vehicle accelerated to 21 km/s relative to the gas giant and 23 km/s relative to the sun.
Even at a velocity that would take New Horizons from Los Angeles to New York in about three minutes, the probe would not reach distant Pluto until 2015. Eight years traveling through the cold, dark emptiness of the outer Solar System.
All the while, a growing energy crisis will continue to unfold back on the spacecraft's homeworld, the Earth. For industrial civilization, the energy shortfall marks a critical inflection point, like New Horizon's gravity assist via Jupiter, one triggered by the relentless decline in oil production world-wide, the so-called Hubbert's Peak in oil production. Oil, the lifeblood of industrial civilization. Oil is the "master domino" according to Dr. A. M. Samsam Bakhtiari, an Iranian energy expert. When the oil production domino is healthy, all the other dominos of civilization--important structures such as food production, health care, education and economies--thrive. When oil falls, the rest follow. Likely, space programs, with their delicate budgets, would crumble early. Save maybe for those programs that had military application.
Would anyone listen to New Horizons' signals in 2015?
What might happen to civilization world-wide over the course of the next eight years? By the middle of the next decade, world oil production will likely be dropping quickly. By 2020, it could be back to 1970-levels, with a resource-consuming human population well over twice what it was when people visited the Moon. And this projection assumes that above-ground factors such as war won't accelerate the process of oil production decline.
Oil wars began in the 20th century. The Iraq invasion of 2003 appears to be one of several, and this one appears to have been among the first that is a direct response to Hubbert's peak. How many more conflicts will unfold over the next eight years? How many lives will be lost to the body-rending violence of supersonic bullets and crushing bomb blasts? With the rapid ticking-away of kilometers as New Horizons travels between Jupiter and Pluto, people will fall. Little dominoes that helped prop up the vast business of civilization.
Potential nuclear conflict loomed. Such an eventuality could take away many humans, and much of the infrastructure of industrial civilization. The facilities to support space missions, such as NASA-Ames, the Kennedy Space Center and the Jet Propulsion Laboratories, might be a shattered ruin. There, indeed, may be no electronic ears waiting to receive New Horizons' distant signals from Pluto.
No more space discovery. The collection of Mars rovers would sit silent and collect a coat of ruddy dust over the decades and centuries, never to be visited by future human explorers on a grand mission to colonize space--a mission that seemed so inevitable during the heyday of Apollo. The artificial satellites that surrounded the Earth would die, become increasingly pockmarked with micrometeoroid impacts and eventually plunge back to Earth as their orbits decayed. The Hubble telescope would heat to plasma temperatures as it scraped the atmosphere on its way down, a brilliant flare that would just as quickly fade, like the very era of discovery that helped put the sensitive eye into orbit. No more extrasolar planet detection. No more soul-stirring images of stellar explosions, nebulae and the process of star-formation.
The age of peering deep into the past, of uncovering the processes that led to the creation of the Earth, life, and human beings, would be over. It seemed possible that, as future centuries unfolded, much of the information gleaned by science could become lost. Forgotten during an age of conflict. A vast edifice of knowledge, crumbling away like the World Trade Center in 2001.
What did that say of humanity? In the 20th century, our species appeared to have a purpose. People were supposedly the eyes of the Universe, probing everywhere, learning how everything functioned. Like a child peering closely at her hand, humanity, an integral part of the Universe, was in the process of learning about itself every time it explored the huge, intricate and ancient environment from which the tool-using ape emerged. With technological progress exploding exponentially during the Age of Oil, humanity's eventual expansion into space seemed like destiny. Earth's precious, beautiful and amazing life would make that next leap—occupying other worlds, reaching for the stars.
Due to an almost magical nature, oil provided the fuel for god-like thinking even despite the obviously wobbly and uncertain foundation that should be expected from a structure made out of a liquid. An oil crutch. A slick and easily-obtained support that temporarily masked many of the challenges of living.
Now, as the Earth's store of oil became increasingly depleted, godhood seemed like a false promise. A dream. The energy crunch seemed to force humanity back to reality. Homo sapiens' self-proclaimed greatness appeared to be nothing more than a group hallucination brought about by an overwhelming addiction to a special, black hydrocarbon that formed over geologic timescales.
With oil depletion, it appeared increasingly obvious that human beings were just a mere animal. Of course, deep down, most people knew this. The power of oil addiction simply kept many people from considering the reality very deeply. Humans were prone to the same strengths and failings as other species. Humans are instinctual creatures, and carry within their brains a powerful program to exploit a given bounty with as much efficiency as can be mustered. This trait is critical for survival in the energy-limited environment provided by Earthly ecosystems. Generally hidden deep underground, oil's vast bounty of energy didn't play much of a role in surface-based evolutionary processes. Now, humans have stumbled across an amazing treasure. Like ants swarming a pile of sugar, people exploited this vast and accessible energy resource--oil--and used it up as quickly as possible lest someone else take the good stuff away. And, as the oil ran out, humanity now faced the challenging prospect of continuing without such a powerful form of energy to prop-up the species.
Without the support, space colonization seemed a distant dream. A fantasy. Like the fantasy of utopia offered by the creation of suburbia. It seemed people were so strongly attached to the planet that gave birth to them that they would not be leaving anytime soon, if ever.
Humanity's purpose, it seems, is something other than space colonies, or the discovery of all the secrets of the Universe. The purpose of H. sap, if there is one, is probably much more humble than such grandiose notions. Indeed, Hubbert's peak appears to be screaming to humanity that there is no purpose at all, save perhaps one: That age-old task of living in the harsh and challenging realm that envelops the Earth. Nothing more. Nothing less.
In 2015, as Pluto is scanned by distant New Horizons, symbol of an animal that has a wonderful but nevertheless bounded technological ingenuity, and follows its program to send signals back to Earth, the new information may go undetected. At that time, human minds may be focused on the much more immediate task of staying alive in an environment thrown into chaos by an oil-starved industrial revolution. The probe will sail away into the vast depths of space, soon to be forgotten. And human beings will continue the struggle of survival among the complex depths offered by Earth's living shell.
The Age of Oil closes. Reality returns.
No comments:
Post a Comment