The Seneca Effect Blog Returns on Substack!

 

The Seneca Effect Blog is returning! You can find it on Substack at this address:

https://senecaeffect.substack.com/

After that the original location of the blog (senecaeffect.com)  was sabotaged by the Google search engine, I thought that it was useless to fight the powers that be. So, I closed the blog. 

Yet, I found that Substack seems to be immune (for the time being) to Google's curse. And, unexpectedly, the "ghost" version of the Seneca blog stationed there continued to gain followers even though it was not updated anymore. So, I'll restart publishing Seneca-inspired posts on Substack. The new Seneca blog will be a little more philosophical and literary than the old one and it will mirror also my Chimeras blog.  More technical posts will go to www.thesunflowerparadigm.blogspot.com.

And onward we go, running with the wolves!

A Christmas Post: The Miracle of Renewables

The "Seneca Effect" has been a little gloomy, recently. So, for a change of pace, here is the translation in English of a post that I wrote for the Italian newspaper "Il Fatto Quotidiano," also reproduced in my blog "The Sunflower Society". Because it was published in a newspaper, it is simplified and short, yet it says what's needed to understand the revolution we are going through that will change the world in the coming years. If you are interested in the source of the data,  you can find them on Lazard.com. So, Merry Christmas, and never despair. Sometimes, miracles happen! 

“And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.” (Luke 2:9-10)

Miracles are not so frequent and, if one has serious health problems, it is not probable that a swim in the Lourdes pool will solve them. However, it is also true that sometimes things change quickly, opening up new possibilities. That's what's happening with renewable energy. Talking about a "miracle" is a bit much, I know, but recent technological developments have made available to us a tool that until a few years ago we didn't even dream of having. And this could solve problems that once seemed unsolvable.

For years, I've been lecturing about climate change and other looming worries, such as oil depletion. Usually, the people who came to listen to me were prepared for a message that was not exactly reassuring, but the question was what to do about it. At the end of the conference, a debate normally ensued in which the same things were said: ride a bicycle, turn down the thermostat in the house, install double glazing panes on the windows, use low energy light bulbs, things like that.

It was a little soothing ritual but, in reality, everyone knew that these weren't real solutions. Not that they're useless, but they're just a light layer of green on a system that continues to depend on fossil fuels to function. We have been talking about double glazing and bicycles for at least twenty years, but CO2 emissions continue to increase as before. Actually, faster than before. If we don't go to the heart of the problem, which is to eliminate fossil fuels, we will get nowhere. But how to do it? Until a few years ago, there seemed to be no way except to go back to tilling the fields by hand, as our ancestors did during the Middle Ages.

But today things have changed radically. You probably didn't notice it, caught up in the debate on politics. But it doesn't matter whether the right or the left wins. Change, the real one, is coming with renewable technologies. Wind and photovoltaic plants have been optimized and scaling factors have generated massive savings in production costs. Today, a kilowatt-hour produced by a photovoltaic panel costs perhaps a factor of 5-10 less than a kilowatt-hour from natural gas (and maybe a factor of 5 less than a nuclear kilowatt-hour) (source). We used to call renewables "alternative energy," but today all others are "alternative."

Furthermore, producing energy with modern renewable technologies does not pollute, does not require non-recyclable materials, does not generate greenhouse gases, does not generate local pollution, and nobody can bomb the sun to leave us without energy. Now, don't make me say that renewables have automatically solved all the problems we have. It is true that today they are cheap, but it is also true that they are not free. Then, investments are needed to adapt energy infrastructure throughout the country, to create energy storage systems, and much more. These are not things that can be done in a month, or even in a few years. There is talk of a decade, at least, to arrive at an energy system based mainly on renewables.

But it is also true that every journey begins with the first step. And now we see ahead of us a road ahead. A road that leads us to a cleaner, more prosperous, and hopefully less violent world. I haven't stopped going around giving conferences but, now, I can propose real solutions. And it's not just me who noticed the change. In the debate, today you can feel the enthusiasm of being able to do something concrete. Many people ask if they can install solar panels at home. Others say they've already done it. Some mad (and rightfully so) at the bureaucracy that prevents them from installing panels on their roof or in their garden. You also see the changing trend on social media.

There is always someone who speaks out against renewables by reasoning like the medieval flagellants who went around shouting "remember that you must die". But there are also those who respond in kind, "good riddance, and live happily together with the other cavemen." If you have a south-facing balcony (and if your municipality doesn't sabotage your idea), you can already install photovoltaic panels hanging from the railing that will help you reduce your electricity bill. No paperwork is needed! (another small miracle). One step at a time, we will succeed!

For a general assessment of the performance of renewables compared to fossil fuels, see this recent article by Murphy et al.

The Dark Side of Nuclear Fusion: A New Generation of Weapons of Mass Destruction?

In December 1938 the atomic era was born in Otto Hahns beakers at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften in Berlin, now Max Planck Institutes, where fission of uranium and thorium was discovered. In the image, the discovery as shown in Walt Disney's movie "Our Friend, the Atom" in 1956

This is a guest post by Giuseppe ("Pepi") Cima, retired nuclear researcher. It summarizes a number of facts that are known, in principle, but largely hidden from the public. Basically, research on nuclear fusion, sometimes touted as a benign technology able to produce energy "too cheap to meter," is often financed because of its military applications. The search is for an "inertial confinement device," that would detonate without the need for a trigger in the form of a conventional fission bomb. These devices could cover a range of destructive power that could go from tactical warheads to planet-bursting weapons. Fortunately, we are not there, yet, but Cima correctly notes how the current situation is similar to the way things were in the 1930s, when a group of bright scientists started working on nuclear chain reactions with the objective of unleashing the awesome power of nuclear fission. At the time, it was an enormously difficult challenge, but the task could be accomplished by means of the lavish financial support provided by the psychopathic criminals who were in power at the time, who were motivated by the perspective of developing an enormously powerful weapon. Today, we do not lack money for military research, nor do we lack criminals at the top, so we can only hope that the task of turning nuclear fusion into even more powerful weapons of mass destruction will turn out to be unfeasible. Unfortunately, we can't be sure about that and, if they are making good progress at that, surely they won't tell us. (U.B.)

By Giuseppe Cima

In February 1939, Leo Szilard, who had already thought of the chain reactions for energy in 1934, conceived the possibility of a bomb of extraordinary power. In September 1939 Szilard, with Eugene Wigner and Edward Teller, the soul of the H-bomb and the only one with a driving license, all Hungarians, went to see Albert Einstein who was on vacation on the New Jersey shore: it was already clear what to be afraid of. Szilard knew Einstein well from the Berlin years; they had jointly patented a new type of refrigerator. This time the idea was a device that could destroy an entire city in one blast. Together, they wrote a letter to President Roosevelt and almost nothing happened for about two years.

I can visualize the three Hungarians with a strong European accent, in Washington, trying to convince the Uranium Committee: a general, an admiral, and some mature scientists. "We canna make a little bomba and it will blow up a whola city." How could they believe it? But, in August 1945, six years later, nuclear power had changed the world, quickly ended world war two, and started an industry the size of the automotive one.

After a few years, Otto Hahn became a fervent opponent of the use of atomic energy for military purposes. Even before Hiroshima, Szilard, one of the most brilliant minds of the time, was ousted from anything to do with nuclear power, he devoted himself full-time to biology and in 1962 started the Council for a Livable World, an organization dedicated to the elimination of nuclear arsenals. In a 1947 issue of The Atlantic, Einstein claimed that only the United Nations should have atomic weapons at their disposal, as a deterrent to new wars. 

Why should we recall these episodes now? Because something similar is occurring today with nuclear fusion.


The essential fusion

Today, most people probably have some idea of what nuclear fusion is, even the Italian prime minister, Mr. Mario Draghi, spoke about it at a recent parliament session. Although energy can be produced by splitting uranium nuclei in two, it can also be produced by fusing light atomic nuclei. We have all been taught that this is the way the sun works and it has been repeated to boredom by people with a superficial knowledge of these processes, such as the Italian minister for the ecological transition Roberto Cingolani. But not everyone knows that if helium could be readily generated by two hydrogen atoms, our star, made of hydrogen, would have exploded billions of years ago in a giant cosmic bang. Fortunately, the fusion of hydrogen involves a "weak" reaction and is so slow and so unlikely that, even with the extraordinary conditions of the sun's core, the energy density produced by the reaction is about the same as that of a stack of decomposing manure, the kind we see smoking in the fields in winter.  To radiate the low-level energy produced in its giant core the sun, almost a million kilometers in diameter, must shine at twice the temperature of a lightbulb filament when is on.

To do something useful on Earth by means of nuclear fusion, one can't use hydrogen but needs two of its rare isotopes, deuterium and tritium, not by chance the ingredients of H bombs. The promoters of fusion for pacific purposes don't mention bombs, but this is precisely what I want to talk about, the analogies between fusion now and what happened in the 1930s and 1940s.


Peaceful use?

Reading what was written by the scientists who worked in nuclear fusion in the early years of the "atomic age" shows that the development of an energy source for peaceful use, energy "too cheap to meter", is what motivated them more than anything else. The same arguments were brought forward by Claudio Descalzi, CEO of ENI, a major investor in fusion, addressing the Italian Parliamentary Committee for the Security of the Republic (COPASIR) in a hearing of December 9th 2021: fusion will offer humanity large quantities of energy of a safe, clean and virtually inexhaustible kind.

Wishful thinking: with regard to "inexhaustible," we cannot do anything in fusion without tritium (an isotope of hydrogen) which is nonexistent on this planet and most of the theoretical predictions, no experiments to date, say that magnetic confinement, the main hope of fusion, will not self-fertilize. Speaking of "clean" energy, Paola Batistoni, head of ENEA's Fusion Energy Development Division, at reactor shutdown envisages the production of hundreds of thousands of tons of materials unapproachable by humans for hundreds of years.

However, the problem I am worried about here is a military problem, mostly ignored, even by COPASIR, the Parliamentary Committee for the Security of the Republic. There are many reasons to worry about nuclear fusion: the huge amount of magnetic energy in the reactor can cause explosions equivalent to hundreds of kilograms of TNT, resulting in the release of tritium, a very radioactive and difficult to contain gas. On top of it, with the neutrons of nuclear fusion, it is possible to breed fissile materials. But the risks that seem to me most worrisome in the long run will come from new weapons, never seen before.


New Weapons

To better understand this issue, let's review how classical thermonuclear weapons work, the 70-year-old ones. Their exact characteristics are not in the public domain but Wikipedia describes them in sufficient detail. For a more complete introduction, I recommend the highly readable books by Richard Rhodes. There exist today "simple" fission bombs, which use only fissile reactions to generate energy, and "thermonuclear" bombs, which use both fission and fusion for that purpose. Thermonuclear bombs are an example of inertial confinement fusion (ICF), where everything happens so quickly that all the energy is released before the reacting matter has the time to disperse.

The New York Times recently announced advances in the field of inertial fusion at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab in California with an article reporting important findings from NIF, the National Ignition Facility. What really happened was that the 192 most powerful lasers in the world, simultaneously shining the inner walls of a gold capsule of a few centimeters, vaporize it to millions of degrees. The X-rays emitted by this gold plasma in turn heat the surface of a 3 mm fusion fuel sphere which, imploding, reaches ignition. Ignition means that the fusion reactions are self-sustaining until the fuel is used up. As described in the article, without an atom bomb trigger, a few kilograms worth of TNT thermonuclear explosion occurs as in the conceptually analogous, but vastly more powerful, H-bomb of Teller and Ulam from the fifties. 

Fig. 1 Diagram of the Teller-Ulam thermonuclear device. The explosion is contained within a cavity, technically a "hohlraum", in analogy to the gold capsule of the NIF experiment but hundreds of times bigger.

We don't have to worry about these recent results too much, for now, NIF still needs three football fields of equipment to work, nothing which one could place at the tip of a rocket or drop from the belly of an airplane, but its miniaturization is the next step.

In fusion, military and civilian, particles must collide with an energy of the order of 10 keV, ten thousand electron-volts, the 100 million degrees mentioned everywhere speaking of fusion. Regarding the necessary fuel ingredients, deuterium is abundant, stable, and easily available. Tritium on the other hand, with an average life of 10 years, can't be found in nature and only a few fission reactors can produce it in small quantities. The world reserves are around 50 kg, barely enough for scientific experiments, and it's thousands of times more expensive than gold. The fusion bombs solved the tritium procurement issue by transmuting lithium 6, the fusion fuel of Fig. 1, instantaneously, by means of fission neutrons. In civilian fusion, instead, the possibility of extracting enough tritium from lithium is far from obvious. It is one of the important issues expected to be demonstrated by ITER, a gigantic TOKAMAK, the most promising incarnation of magnetic fusion, under construction in the south of France with money from all over the world but mainly from the European community. The Russians, who invented it, and the Americans, the ones with most of the experience in the field, are skeptical partners contributing less money than Italy. The NIF inertial fusion experiment, instead, is financed by the Pentagon with billions of dollars, the most expensive fusion investment to reach ignition. 

Along the lines of NIF, there is also a French program, another country armed with nuclear weapopns. CEA, the Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique, Direction des Application Militaires, finances near Bordeaux the Laser Méga-Joule (LMJ), three billion euros and operational since October 2014. Investments like these show the level of military interest in fission-free fusion and so far they are the only ones who have achieved self-sustaining reactions.


Private enterprises

In the private field, First Light Fusion, a British company, has already invested tens of millions to carry out inertial fusion by striking a solid fuel target with a tennis ball size bullet. The experimental results consist, for now, of just a handful of neutrons. The amount of heat generated is, so far, undetectable, but the energy of the neutrons, 2.45 MeV, corresponds to the fusion of deuterium, the material of the target. I cited First Light Fusion to indicate that there is interest in inertial fusion even in private companies outside nuclear weapons national laboratories. Marvel Fusion, based in Bavaria, is another private enterprise claiming a new way to inertial confinement ignition.

For those wondering if the 12 orders of magnitude of difference for the density of the fuel needed in comparison to that of solid matter, and that of TOKAMAK, the one of a good lab vacuum, hide alternative methods to carry out nuclear fusion for peaceful and military purposes, the answer is certainly positive. Until now, in academia, before the advent of entrepreneurs' fusion, no proposal seemed attractive enough to be seriously pursued experimentally. The panorama could change in years to come, the proposal of General Fusion, Jeff Bezos's company to be clear, is of this type: short pulses at intermediate density. One wonders if the CEO of Amazon is aware of sponsoring research with possible military applications.


Experiments

The idea of ​​triggering fusion in a deuterium-tritium target by concentrating laser radiation, or conventional explosives, has long fascinated those who see it as a potentially unlimited source of energy and also those who consider it an effective and devastating weapon. At the Frascati laboratories of CNEN, the Comitato Nazionale per l'Energia Nucleare, now ENEA, Energia Nucleare e Energie Alternative, we find examples of experimentation of both methods in the 70s, see "50 years of research on fusion in Italy" by Paola Batistoni.

According to some sources, the idea of ​​triggering fusion with conventional explosives, as in the Frascati MAFIN and MIRAPI experiments of the mentioned CNEN review report, was seriously considered by Russian weapon scientists in the early 1950s and vigorously pursued at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory during the 1958-61, the years of a moratorium on nuclear testing, as part of a program ironically titled "DOVE".

According to Sam Cohen, who worked at the Manhattan Project, DOVE failed in its goal of developing a neutron bomb "for technical reasons, which I am not free to discuss." But Ray Kidder, formerly at Lawrence Livermore, says the US lost interest in the DOVE program when testing resumed because "the fission trigger was a lot easier". It didn't all end there though, it is instructive to read now an article that appeared in the NYT in 1988, which describes a nuclear experiment carried out in order to verify the feasibility of an inertial fusion explosion not triggered by fission, such as Livermore's NIF. In addition to showing the unequivocal military interest in these initiatives, the article gives an idea of ​​the complexity, and slow pace, of their development. Nevertheless, the initiatives of the 80s seem to be bearing fruit now.

Modern nuclear devices are "boosted", they use fusion to enhance their yield and reduce their cost but the bulk of the explosive power still originates from the surrounding fissile material, not from fusion. However, there are devices where energy originates almost exclusively from fusion reactions such as the mother of all bombs, the Russian Tzar Bomb. With its 50 megatons, a multi-stage H, the addition of a tamper of fissile material would have greatly enhanced its yield but it was preferred to keep it “clean”.

It is important to underline that the H component of a thermonuclear device, unlike fissile explosives, contributes little to long-term environmental radioactivity. Uncovering the secrets of the ICF could indicate how to annihilate the enemy while limiting permanent environmental damage. It is the same reason why civilian fusion is claimed to be more attractive than fission: the final products, mostly helium, are much less radioactive than the heavy elements characteristic of fission ashes. As mentioned earlier, radioactivity nonetheless jeopardizes the usefulness of civilian fusion in other ways: a heavy neutron flux reduces the already precarious reliability of the reactor, and radioactivity protection greatly increases its cost.

Despite the rhetoric of some press advertising, the relevance of ICF for energy production is minimal for many reasons: first of all, as in the case of NIF, the primary energy, the supply power of all devices involved, is hundreds of times higher than the thermal energy produced by the reactions, the quasi-breakeven reported refers to the energy of the laser light alone. Even more importantly the micro-explosion repetition rate and the reliability necessary in a power plant constitute insurmountable obstacles.


Where do we stand?

Back to ICF, the Lawrence Livermore National Lab's NIF experiment is funded by the Department Of Defense aiming at new weapons while complying with yield limits imposed by the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT). The Question of Pure Fusion Explosions Under the CTBT, Science & Global Security, 1998, Volume 7. pp.129-150 explains why we should be concerned about pure fusion weapons presently under investigation.

With nuclear fusion, we are witnessing a situation similar to what appeared clear to many of the scientists who participated in the development of weapons at the time of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: nuclear energy is frighteningly dangerous while potentially useful for producing energy and as a war deterrent.

With fusion, the balance between weapons and peaceful uses seems to be even more questionable, making further developments harder to justify. Fusion weapons, which will arrive earlier than reactors, are potentially more devastating than fission with a wider range to both higher and lower yields. Low-power devices, while remaining very destructive, would not carry a strong deterrent power, and the super high-power ones, hundreds and thousands of megatons, would have catastrophic consequences on a planetary level. On the other hand, electricity production by fusion seems now less and less likely to work out, economically less attractive than the already uninviting fission.

The wind and photovoltaic revolution, rendering the already proven nuclear fission obsolete despite the urgency of decarbonization, are making fusion unappealing even before it's proven to work. At the same time, possible military applications should discourage even the investigation of fusion tritium technologies. At the very least, new research regulations are needed.


It's a collective choice

Is "science" unstoppable in this instance?

First of all, I would characterize these developments as a purely technological development than a scientific one. We are talking of applications without general interest, not a frontier of science. Fusion is a "nuclear chemistry" with potentially aberrant applications, in analogy to other fields which are investigated in strict isolation. Fortunately, fusion is an economically very demanding technology, impossible to develop in a home garage. Working on fusion can be, at least for now, only a collective choice that reminds the story of the atomic bomb at the end of the 30s, but at a more advanced stage of development than when Szilard involved Einstein to reach Roosevelt. Is the genius is about to come out of the lamp?

Author's CV - I researched nuclear fusion in labs and universities in Europe and the US, publishing around 100 peer-reviewed papers in this field. After losing faith that a deconstructionist approach to fusion could yield better reactor performances than already indicated by present day experiments I started an industrial automation company in Texas. I have now retired in Venezia, Italy, where I pursue my lifetime interests: environmental protection, energy conservation, teaching technology and science, and, more recently, mechanical watches. Giuseppe Cima

Previously published in Italian on Scenari per il Domani, sep 14 2022

Italy: Giorgia Meloni as a Scapegoat for the Incoming Disaster

 

My blog titled "Chimeras" explores mainly mythological and literary themes, but the world we call "real" is often intertwined and affected by the world of our ancestral beliefs and fantasies. So, I published this week an interpretation of Giorgia Meloni's success in the recent Italian election in terms of ancient human sacrifices that all human societies practice when under heavy stress. Ms. Meloni is facing an enormously difficult task and she risks to be playing the role of the victim in a new sacrificial rite. Hopefully, it will be just a virtual sacrifice, but we can't exclude a real one. Below, I reproduce the text from the "Chimeras" blog. I recognize that it is a bit esoteric, but do not forget that it comes from a blog that deals extensively with human sacrifices.

 Reproduced from "Chimeras" 

The victory of Giorgia Meloni's party in the recent Italian election has generated a wave of hate on social media, with many people showing on their social accounts pictures of the dead body of Benito Mussolini hanged upside-down in a square. A clear message to Ms. Meloni, and a reminder for all of us of how nasty people can be. It is a characteristic of all human societies that, in periods of heavy stress, the removal of a high-rank leader may take the shape of a human sacrifice. The most common victims are men, but in the direst situations, women may take the role of sacrificial victims. Ms. Meloni is at risk of becoming a sacrificial victim, the scapegoat that Italians will search for when, this winter, they'll find themselves freezing in the dark.

In the Iliad, we read about the sacrifice of Iphigenia, the daughter of King Agamemnon, performed to propitiate the travel of the Achaean fleet toward Troy. After having destroyed Troy, the Achaeans repeated the ritual, this time with a Trojan girl, Polixena, daughter of King Priam. Both were high-rank women for whom we could use the term "princesses."

In "The Golden Bough," (1890), James Frazer noted how a high-rank victim makes the sacrifice more valuable and more effective to appease the dark deities to which it is dedicated. So, the victim may be raised to the role of "king" just before being killed: groomed, exalted, showered with gifts, and made to access the best goods available. The typical victims are men, probably because young males can be considered expendable, whereas the reproductive value of a young woman cannot be replaced. When things are truly dire, though, "queens" may be sacrificed, too, as especially valuable victims. 

Human sacrifices are often not explicitly recognized as such by those who perform them. For instance, the ancient Romans strongly condemned human sacrifices but they performed them abundantly in the form of bloody and cruel executions. Think of the killing of the Jewish leader named Yeshua bin Yusuf by the Roman government in Palestine, ca. 30 AD. On the cross on which he was nailed, there were the words in Latin "Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum." It was supposed to be a mockery, but it is also true that Yeshua was of a noble Jewish family, so he was a king or, at least, a prince. 

Moving to our times, we, like the Romans, strongly condemn human sacrifices. But, like the Romans, we may indulge in bloody sacrifices much more often than we are willing to admit. The Christian roots of our view of the world originate from the slaughter of the Christian martyrs, starting from the 1st century AD. In more modern times, we can see World War One as a ritual slaughter of millions of young men, sacrificed to obscure and malevolent deities called "states." The most difficult moments of WWI also implied the sacrifice of Queens. One of them was Mata Hari, a famous actress and dancer, ritually sacrificed in 1917 in France. The same destiny befell the wife and the daughters of the Czar of Russia in 1918. 

World War Two had similar threads of ritual killing. The Japanese "kamikaze" fighters are a good example of how a society under heavy stress may punish its young men in a ritual of death. On the other side of Eurasia, the German government embarked on an elaborate mass murder program that involved the elimination of people considered inferior ("Untermenschen"), Jews, Gypsies, and even German citizens. Not for nothing, the term "holocaust" is used for these mass exterminations. 

Another ritual killing of WWII was that of the Italian leader Benito Mussolini, in 1945, together with his lover, Claretta Petacci (in the image). Their bodies were hung upside down in a public square after a cruel ritual of beating and mangling them. They were the sacrificial victims designated to atone for the defeat that had nearly destroyed Italy and killed hundreds of thousands of Italians. Claretta Petacci was not responsible for the disaster, but she was killed, too. As it often happens in history, a young woman may be the ideal victim for the atonement that the sacrifice is about. 

And now, let's take a look at our times. If there ever was a society under stress, it is ours. We passed all the limits of survival: destroyed the old-growth forests, killed off large numbers of species, poisoned the atmosphere, depleted our mineral resources, eroded the fertile soil, polluted water and the atmosphere, set the planet on a path to irreversible warming, and a few more little things, including having deployed a sufficient number of nuclear warheads to wreck the ecosystem and, most likely, kill everybody. And we haven't renounced our beloved habit of making war against each other. 

Would you be surprised if we were to indulge in large-scale human sacrifices? We are not yet there, but the path seems to be traced. Have you noted how popular are "Zombie" movies? Take a look at them in light of what I have been saying here: don't you see them as a blueprint for the mass extermination of suburbanites? Truly, the fascination with this idea casts much light on what our society has in mind for the near future. We are not yet to the point of seeing the elites booking zombie-killing safaris in the suburbs of our cities. But other possible large-scale sacrifices are possible. I already mentioned how, during WWII, the German government hired the country's doctors to cull the undesirables. They complied, happily. That could be easily done in our times, too.

Human sacrifices, though, are not so much about numbers, but about the visible high status of the victim. Now, after the electoral victory of Giorgia Meloni in Italy, many people commented by publishing on their social accounts the images of Mussolini's dead body and of his lover Claretta Petacci. A clear message to Ms. Meloni.  For sure, Italy is going toward a difficult period. With the supplies of natural gas cut, this winter Italians are going to find themselves freezing in the dark, and without a job. Whoever will be leading the country at that moment, risks being deemed responsible for the disaster. And it is also true that people can be extremely nasty when they are in a dire situation. 

Look at this image with Giorgia Meloni's face upside down. It is reported to have been taken in Torino during the electoral campaign of 2022 in Italy. "Fasci Appesi" means "hang the fascists." Giorgia Meloni seriously risks becoming a new sacrificial victim, perhaps not just a virtual one,  to appease the dark Gods that humans have themselves created. I mentioned how the victims were exalted and turned into kings before killing them and we might even imagine that Meloni was chosen as "queen" for exactly this purpose by the subconscious societal mindsphere. 

Several commentators, in Italy, have expressed the same idea, although not in terms of human sacrifices, but simply in terms of political expedience. In this interpretation, the hastily organized election of September had exactly the purpose of placing at the top a figure that will act as a target for the ire of the population, when Italians will actually realize what it means to be without electric power. The term "scapegoat" has been correctly used. It doesn't mean that Ms. Meloni will be shot and hanged by the feet. Simply, that her rapid demise as a leader will lead the way to an authoritarian government that will impose draconian (a word charged with meanings) measures on the Italian population. On the other hand, Meloni may also do better than expected and succeed in spite of everything. Who knows? Good luck, Giorgia, because you'll need a lot of it.  

____________________________________________________

From the blog of Alfio Krancic: il Governo Meloni, an interpretation similar to mine. The author does not say what will be the destiny of Giorgia Meloni, accused of genocide, but we may imagine it

Early November 2022, the Meloni government takes office

New government oath in the hands of President Mattarella;

5 November: 1st Council of Ministers;

November 7; Spread at 275 points;

November 10: Increase in food prices by 30%;

November 12: 100% gas price increase; 90% gasoline and diesel;

November 16: A wave of frost hits Italy;

November 18: The government decides that indoor temperatures must not exceed 17 °C;

November 19: First demonstrations with clashes in the squares. Interior Minister Salvini accuses social centers of stirring up the mob;

November 20: Clashes with victims in Rome. Barricades and urban warfare. Salvini accuses the black bloc;

November 21: The government allocates 10 billion euros to Ukraine;

November 24: Demonstrations against living costs end with clashes in the streets, with several victims. Brawl in Parliament when Salvini takes the floor;

November 25: The headquarters of the right-wing parties, Fratelli d'Italia (FdI), Forza Italia (FI) and Lega are stormed by angry crowds;

November 26: Stern warning from President Mattarella to the Government;

November 27 Spread at 380 points;

November 29: Food prices increase even more;

November 30: 3 million people protesting in the streets. Violent clashes in many cities;

December 2: The grip of frost does not leave Italy and Europe;

December 5: Gas emergency: reserves can't last more than 2 weeks;

December 6: Salvini criticizes the Meloni government in a speech at the Papeete beach. Meanwhile, the polls give FdI at 6%, FI at 5% and the League at 4%.

December 7: The Italian Institute of Statistics (Istat) claims that since the birth of the center-right government, 100,000 people, mostly elderly, have died of hunger and cold in 6 weeks. The news provokes violent demonstrations with deaths, injuries, and looting.

December 8: President Mattarella sends an ultimatum to the government.

December 9: To mitigate the lack of food, the government markets insect meal and dried grasshoppers.

December 10: Spread at 590 points. There is talk of bankruptcy of the Italian state. First demonstrations of the left in favor of a return of Draghi.

December 12: Salvini and Berlusconi withdraw from the government. 

December 13: Prime Minister Meloni resigns. Demonstrations of jubilation throughout the country.

December 15: Defections in FdI, FI and Lega. Half of the deputies form a group in favor of Draghi's return. Mattarella appoints Draghi as Prime Minister. He immediately forms a new government.

Warranties sent to Meloni, Berlusconi and Salvini for genocide, treason, and more.

December 18: The Covid 22 epidemic breaks out. Tens of thousands of infected. The new Minister of Health Roberto Speranza recommends a very tight lockdown. The government approves. Curfew from 4 pm to 12 am the next morning. The army appears in the streets with tanks and armored vehicles. Draghi in a dramatic appeal to unified networks says that the measures have been taken for the good of the Italian people because of the disasters of the "fascist" CDX government and because of the new pandemic. People stop taking to the streets and hide in houses. On the balconies and windows appear sheets with rainbows and slogans: "Everything will be fine!", "We'll do it!" The ventennio of Draghistan begins.

(h/t Miguel Martinez)

The Age of Exterminations VIII -- How to Destroy Western Europe

US Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau Jr., (1891-1967). He was the proposer of the "Morgenthau Plan" that would have turned post-war Germany into a purely agricultural region, exterminating tens of millions of Germans in the process. It was approved by President Roosevelt but, fortunately, it was never put into practice. 

In the book titled "The Death and Life of Germany" (1959), Eugene Davidson tells us how, after that WW2 was over, the US military authorities explicitly ordered the American servicemen in Germany, and their wives, to destroy the leftovers of their meals. They wanted to be sure no food would be left for their German maids and their starving children. It was not an isolated story. After that Germany surrendered, in 1945, the general attitude of the Allies was that the Germans had to be punished. For this purpose, they deliberately limited the supply of food to Germany. 

This attitude of the Allies predated the German defeat. In 1944, Henry Morgenthau Jr., Secretary of the Treasury of the United States, had proposed the plan that would take his name, the "Morgenthau Plan." It called for the transformation of Germany into a purely agricultural society at a medieval technology level. That would have been obtained by the complete destruction of Germany’s industrial infrastructure. A consequence of the plan would have been the death of tens of millions of Germans: a primitive agricultural economy would not have been able to sustain the German population. 

The Morgenthau Plan was initially approved by President Roosevelt, and it was even publicly diffused in the press. It was later abandoned by President Truman, but it remained a practical set of guidelines for the allied policies in Germany until 1948 and an untold number of Germans starved to death. Some people speak of at least one million victims of the famine (or even several million) during the period from 1945 to 1948. Others propose smaller numbers, but we'll never know for sure. 

As we all know, the Germans were far from being innocent in the global extermination game. In addition to the Shoah, the German government engaged in the extermination of other ethnic groups, including German citizens judged to be a burden for society. In 1942, they developed the “Generalplan Ost” (General Plan for the East) that foresaw the extermination of tens of millions of Slavs in Eastern Europe. The survivors would be used as servants and laborers for the German "master race" (Herrenvolk) who would colonize the former Slavic lands.

It is impressive for us to remember how, less than a century ago, there were Western governments happily engaged in planning exterminations involving tens of millions of Europeans. Could these dark times return? It is said that society is just three hot meals away from barbarism. We could rephrase this old saying as, "society is just one defeat away from extermination." 

Indeed, the events of the past few months saw Western Europe inflicting a terminal defeat on itself by abandoning its main source of energy: Russian oil and gas. For the time being, Russian gas keeps flowing into Europe and the lights are still on, although it cannot be said for how long. 

Yet, Europe continues planning for its own defeat, as we can read in the recently published "REpowerEU" plan. The plan is mostly greenwashing, recommending such things as hydrogen and other useless technologies. But the substance of the plan is in its calling for huge investments in new regasification facilities that will allow importing large amounts of liquefied gas from the US. The EU plans to switch to sources that will be much more expensive (and also more polluting) than Russian gas. 

If applied, the REpowerEU plan could lead Western Europe to a situation similar to what the Morgenthau Plan foresaw for Germany in 1945: deindustrialization. For this to happen, it is not necessary for Europe to go dark. It is sufficient to increase the cost of energy to such a level that European industrial products would cease to be competitive in the world market. That would generate a spiral of decline that would strangle to death the European economy. Eventually, Europe would become unable to import a sufficient amount of food for its population. Famines would necessarily follow. A new Morgenthau plan, this time Europe-wide. 

Is that possible? As usual, history does not really repeat, but it rhymes. The events of World War II are not so remote from us that we can exclude that they would be repeated in some forms -- including widespread famines and exterminations in Europe. Below, you can find an interpretation of the current situation by Michael McGarrity -- who comments on the Facebook group "The Seneca Effect." This text is reproduced with his kind permission. 

Medieval EU: Plant Oats, Raise Goats.

By Michael McGarrity 23 May 2022

How many years will it take for Russia to adapt and stabilize to a new level of sanctions? Probably not long but, in the meantime, I believe that Europe will deindustrialize as plentiful, reasonably priced, Russian energy and food now sanctioned must be substituted by some yet to be identified source. Today, the German Prime Minister was "hopeful" that in 2023 Energy Production in Senegal may be ramped up to provide additional energy for Germany. This is highly irrational. Siemens, a great German technology company that requires large quantities of energy to produce its products, is now scrambling to find new sources. 

It is likely that many countries will be buying Russian energy through third-party countries such as India. Germany may now buy Russian energy from India at greatly increased prices, it will be rebranded as Indian, not Russian energy while companies such as Siemens lose competitive advantage in the world markets due to greatly increased energy production costs. Over the long term, a general reduction in global energy supplies will harm those who have to pay the highest prices. By this winter, the EU faces significant risks of energy and food shortages. The domino effect on energy will have lag times in the EU. They are not yet evident, but they are already operating.

As European energy and food stores deplete, likely by this winter, the EU economy will become medieval. Russia is self-sufficient in terms of energy and food, but there is not a sufficient supply of energy and food in the world to replace the sanctioned Russian sources in the coming years. The die is cast. The EU is due for a minimum of two years of deindustrialization. Russian Arctic natural gas facilities can't be switched on and off like a light switch. Grain that is not planted can't be harvested. Fertilizer that doesn't exist can't fertilize crops. Some yet to be implemented substitute energy sources such as Senegal will take years to be realized. China, India, and Mexico will quickly take over markets held by great German companies like Siemens. The cake is baked for the EU in terms of rapid deindustrialization, which may be permanent.

All this is part of the delusional thinking underlying the sanctions on Russia, yet to be realized in terms of impact. The reality is that 440 Million EU Citizens are on a fast track to a dystopian Medieval life and there is no turning back due to the scale of the problem, which is related to physical, not ideological constraints. The Russian economy might be destroyed by the sanctions, but no Russian will go hungry or cold. Russia may evolve a self-sufficient standard of living similar to that of the mid-1990s, while Europe goes back to the 1400s: goat carts and bearskin clothes.

I'm no expert in Geopolitics or Finance. I'm an expert in large-scale disaster recovery testing. Nothing theoretical, all practical exercises timed to the minute of what it takes to restore systems, supply chains and such. Politicians such as the German Prime Minister, touting notions of instant natural gas production in Senegal are delusional. It's time for EU citizens to start planting oats and raising goats.

Stereocene: The Future of Earth's Ecosytsem

Here is a post that appeared four years ago on "Cassandra's Legacy" and that I think is worth republishing here, on "The Seneca Effect," after some minor revisions. It is part of a series of rather speculative posts on the future of humankind and of the universe. Here are the links to the series

The Next Ten Billion Years

Star Parasites

The Long-Term Perspectives of Nuclear Energy

The Great Turning Point For Humankind: What if Nuclear Energy had not been Abandoned? 

 

______________________________________________________________________________

Stereocene: The Future of  Earth's Ecosystem

 During the "golden age" of science fiction, a popular theme was that of silicon-based life. Above, you can see a depiction of a silicon creature described by Stanley Weinbaum in his "A Martian Odyssey" of 1934. The creature was endowed with a metabolism that would make it "breathe" metallic silicon, oxidizing it to silicon dioxide, hence it would excrete silica bricks: truly a solid-state creature. It is hard to think of an environment where such a creature could evolve, surely not on Mars as we know it today. But, here, on Earth, some kind of silicon-based metabolism seems to have evolved during the past decades. We call it "photovoltaics." Some reflections of mine on how this metabolism could evolve in the future are reported below, where I argue that this new metabolic system could usher a new geological era which we might call "Stereocene", the era of solid-state devices.

 

What Future for the Anthropocene? A Biophysical Interpretation 

An abridged version of a paper published in 2016 in 
"Biophysical Economics and Resource Quality"

Ugo Bardi
Dipartimento di Chimica - Università di Firenze

The history of the earth system is normally described in terms of a series of time subdivisions defined by discrete (or “punctuated”) stratigraphic changes in the geological record, mainly in terms of biotic composition (Aunger 2007a, b). The most recent of these subdivisions is the proposed “Anthropocene,” a term related to the strong perturbation of the ecosystem created by human activity. The starting date of the Anthropocene is not yet officially established, but it is normally identified with the start of the large-scale combustion of fossil carbon compounds stored in the earth’s crust (“fossil fuels”) on the part of the human industrial system. In this case, it could be located at some moment during the eighteenth century CE (Crutzen 2002; Lewis and Maslin 2015). So, we may ask the question of what the evolution of the Anthropocene could be as a function of the decreasing availability of fossil carbon compounds. Will the Anthropocene decline and the earth system return to conditions similar to the previous geologic subdivision, the Holocene?

The Earth system is a nonequilibrium system whose behavior is determined by the flows of energy it receives. This kind of systems tend to act as energy transducers and to dissipate the available energy potentials at the fastest possible rate (Sharma and Annila 2007). Nonequilibrium systems tend to attain the property called “homeostasis” if the potentials they dissipate remain approximately constant (Kleidon 2004). In the case of the Earth system, by far, the largest flow of energy comes from the sun. It is approximately constant (Iqbal 1983), except for very long timescales, since it gradually increases by a factor of about 10 % per billion years (Schroeder and Connon Smith 2008). Therefore, the earth’s ecosystem would be expected to reach and maintain homeostatic conditions over timescales of the order of hundreds of millions of years. However, this does not happen because of geological perturbations that generate the punctuated transitions observed in the stratigraphic record.

The transition that generated the Anthropocene is related to a discontinuity in the energy dissipation rate of the ecosystem. This discontinuity appeared when the ecosystem (more exactly, the “homo sapiens” species) learned how to dissipate the energy potential of the carbon compounds stored in the earth’s crust, mainly in the form of crude oil, natural gas, and coal). These compounds had slowly accumulated as the result of the sedimentation of organic matter mainly over the Phanerozoic era over a timescale of the order of hundreds of millions of years (Raupach and Canadell 2010). The rate of energy dissipation of this fossil potential, at present, can be estimated in terms of the “primary energy” use per unit time at the input of the human economic system. In 2013, this amount corresponded to ca. 18 TW (IEA 2015). Of this power, about 86 % (or ca. 15 TW) were generated by the combustion of fossil carbon compounds.

The thermal energy directly produced by combustion is just a trigger for other, more important effects that have created the Anthropocene. Among these, we may list as the dispersion of large amounts of heavy metals and radioactive isotopes in the ecosphere, the extended paving of large surface areas by inorganic compounds (Schneider et al. 2009), the destruction of a large fraction of the continental shelf surface by the practice known as “bottom trawling” (Zalasiewicz et al. 2011), and more. The most important indirect effect on the ecosystem of the combustion of fossil carbon is the emission of greenhouse gases as combustion products, mainly carbon dioxide, CO2, (Stocker et al. 2013). The thermal forcing generated by CO2 alone can be calculated as approximately 900 TW or about 1 % of the solar radiative effect (Zhang and Caldeira 2015), hence a nonnegligible effect that generates an already detectable greenhouse warming of the atmosphere. This warming, together with other effects such as oceanic acidification, has the potential of deeply changing the ecosystem in the same way as, in ancient times, LIPs have generated mass extinctions (Wignall 2005; Bond and Wignall 2014).

Burning fossil fuels generate the exergy needed to create industrial structures which, in turn, are used to extract more fossil fuels and burn them. In this sense, the human industrial system can be seen as a metabolic system akin to biological ones (Malhi 2014). The structures of this nonbiological metabolic system can be examined in light of concepts such as “net energy” (Odum 1973) defined as the exergy generated by the transduction of an energy stock into another form of energy stock. A similar concept is the “energy return for energy invested” (EROI or EROEI), first defined in 1986 (Hall et al. 1986) [see also (Hall et al. 2014)]. EROEI is defined as the ratio of the exergy obtained by means of a certain dissipation structure to the amount of exergy necessary to create and maintain the structure. If the EROEI associated with a dissipation process is larger than one, the excess can be used to replicate the process in new structures. On a large scale, this process can create the complex system that we call the “industrial society.” The growth of the human civilization as we know it today, and the whole Anthropocene can be seen as the effect of the relatively large EROEI, of the order of 20–30 and perhaps more, associated with the combustion of fossil carbon compounds (Lambert et al. 2014).

A peculiarity of the dissipation of potentials associated with fossil hydrocarbons is that the system cannot attain homeostasis. The progressive depletion of the high-EROEI fossil resources leads to the progressive decline of the EROEI associated with fossil potentials. For instance, Hall et al. (2014) show that the EROEI of oil extraction in the USA peaked at around 30 in the 1960s, to decline to values lower than 20 at present. A further factor to be taken into account is called “pollution,” which accelerates the degradation of the accumulated capital stock and hence reduces the EROEI of the system as it requires more exergy for its maintenance (Meadows et al. 1972).

Only a small fraction of the crustal fossil carbon compounds can provide an EROEI >  1, the consequence is that the active phase of the Anthropocene is destined to last only a relatively short time for a geological time subdivision, a few centuries and no more. Assuming that humans will still exist during the post-Anthropocene tail, they would not have access to fossil fuels. As a consequence, their impact on the ecosystem would be mainly related to agricultural activities and, therefore, small in comparison with the present one, although likely not negligible, as it has been in the past (Ruddiman 2013; Mysak 2008).

However, we should also take into account that fossil carbon is not the only energy potential available to the human industrial system. Fissile and fissionable nuclei (such as uranium and thorium) can also generate potentials that can be dissipated. However, this potential is limited in extent and cannot be reformed by Earth-based processes. Barring radical new developments, depletion of mineral uranium and thorium is expected to prevent this process from playing an important role in the future (Zittel et al. 2013). Nuclear fusion of light nuclei may also be considered but, so far, there is no evidence that the potential associated with the fusion of deuterium nuclei can generate an EROEI sufficient to maintain an industrial civilization, or even to maintain itself. Other potentials exist at the earth’s surface in the form of geothermal energy (Davies and Davies 2010) and tidal energy (Munk and Wunsch 1998); both are, however, limited in extent and unlikely to be able to provide the same flow of exergy generated today by fossil carbon compounds.

There remains the possibility of processing the flow of solar energy at the earth surface that, as mentioned earlier on, is large [89,000 TW (Tsao et al. 2006) or 87,000 TW (Szargut 2003)]. Note also that the atmospheric circulation generated by the sun’s irradiation produces some 1000 TW of kinetic energy (Tsao et al. 2006). These flows are orders of magnitude larger than the flow of primary energy associated with the Anthropocene (ca. 17 TW). Of course, as discussed earlier, the capability of a transduction system to create complex structures depends on the EROEI of the process. This EROEI is difficult to evaluate with certainty, because of the continuous evolution of the technologies. We can say that all the recent studies on photovoltaic systems report EROEIs larger than one for the production of electric power by means of photovoltaic devices (Rydh and Sandén 2005; Richards and Watt 2007; Weißbach et al. 2013; Bekkelund 2013; Carbajales-Dale et al. 2015; Bhandari et al. 2015) even though some studies report smaller values than the average reported ones (Prieto and Hall 2011). In most cases, the EROEI of PV systems seems to be smaller than that of fossil burning systems, but, in some cases, it is reported to be larger (Raugei et al. 2012), with even larger values being reported for CSP (Montgomery 2009; Chu 2011). Overall, values of the EROEI of the order of 5–10 for direct transduction of solar energy can be considered as reasonable estimates (Green and Emery 2010). Even larger values of the EROEI are reported for wind energy plants (Kubiszewski et al. 2010). These values may increase as the result of technological developments but also decline because of the progressive occupation of the best sites for the plants and the increasing energy costs related to the depletion of the minerals needed to build the plants.

The current photovoltaic technology may use, but do not necessarily need, rare elements that could face near-term exhaustion problems (García-Olivares et al. 2012). Photovoltaic cells are manufactured using mainly silicon and aluminum, both common elements in the earth’s crust. So there do not appear to exist fundamental barriers to “close the cycle” and to use the exergy generated by human-made solar-powered devices (in particular PV systems) to recycle the systems for a very long time.

Various estimates exist on the ultimate limits of energy generation from photovoltaic systems. The “technical potential” in terms of solar energy production in the USA alone is estimated at more than 150 TW (Lopez et al. 2012). According to the data reported in (Liu et al. 2009), about 1/5 of the area of the Sahara desert (2 million square km) could generate around 50 TW at an overall PV panel area conversion efficiency of 10 %. Summing up similar fractions of the areas of major deserts, PV plants (or CSP ones) could generate around 500–1000 TW, possibly more than that, without significantly impacting on agricultural land. The contribution of wind energy has been estimated to be no more than 1 TW (de Castro et al. 2011) in some assumptions that have been criticized in (Garcia-Olivares 2016) Other calculations indicate that wind could generate as much as about 80 TW, (Jacobson and Archer 2012), or somewhat smaller values (Miller et al. 2011). Overall, these values are much larger than those associated with the combustion of fossil fuels, with the added advantage that renewables such as PV and wind produce higher quality energy in the form of electric power.

From these data, we can conclude that the transduction of the solar energy flow by means of inorganic devices could represent a future new metabolic “revolution” of the kind described by (Szathmáry and Smith 1995). (Lenton and Watson 2011) that could bootstrap the ecosphere to a new and higher level of transduction. It is too early to say if such a transition is possible, but, if it were to take place at its maximum potential, its effects could lead to transformations larger than those associated with the Anthropocene as it is currently understood. These effects are hard to predict at present, but they may involve changes in the planetary albedo, in the weather patterns, and in the general management of the land surface. Overall, the effect might be considered as a new geological transition.

As these effects would be mainly associated with solid-state devices (PV cells), perhaps we need a different term than “Anthropocene” to describe this new phase of the earth’s history. The term “Stereocene” (the age of solid-state devices) could be suitable to describe a new stage of the earth system in which humans could have access to truly gigantic amounts of useful energy, without necessarily perturbing the ecosystem in the highly destructive ways that have been the consequence of the use of fossil fuels during the past few centuries.

References (see original article)

 

The Next Ten Billion Years

 

This is a post that I published on "Cassandra's Legacy" in 2012. It was one of the most successful posts ever published on that blog, it was reposted, discussed, and criticized in several places, including a long rebuttal by John Michael Greer, "The ArchDruid." I commented on Greer's comments here. I think it is appropriate to repropose this rather ambitious description of the history of the universe on my new blog, "The Seneca Effect," after I explored some similar arguments in recent posts (The Great Turning Point of Humankind, Long term Perspectives of Nuclear Energy, and "Star Parasites").

So, here it is, just slightly revised and updated with respect to the initial version.

The next ten billion years

Posted by Ugo Bardi  

It is not surprising that we found the future fascinating; after all, we are all going there. But the future is never what it used to be and it is said that predictions are always difficult, especially those dealing with the future. Nevertheless, it is possible to study the future, which is something different from predicting it. It is an exercise called "scenario building". Here, let me try a telescopic sweep of scenario building that starts from the remote past and takes us to the remote future over a total range of 20 billion years. While the past is what it was, our future bifurcates into two scenarios; one "good" and the other "bad", all depending on what we'll be doing in the coming years.

The past 10 billion years

- 10 billion years ago. The universe is young, it has existed for less than four billion years. But it already looks the way it will be for many billion years in the future: galaxies, stars, planets, black holes and much more.

- 1 billion years ago. From the debris of ancient supernovas, the solar system has formed around a second-generation star, the Sun, about 4.5 billion years ago. The planets that form the system are not very different from those we see today. The Earth has blue oceans, white clouds, and dark brown continents. But there are no plants or animals on the continents, nor fish in the water. Life is all unicellular in the oceans, but its activity has already changed a lot of things: the presence of oxygen in the atmosphere is a result of the ongoing photosynthesis activity.

- 100 million years ago. Plenty of things have been happening on planet Earth. Starting about 550 million years ago, perhaps as a result of the ice age known as "snowball Earth," multicellular life forms have appeared. First, only in the oceans; then, about 400 million years ago, life has colonized the surfaces of the continents creating lush forests and large animals that have populated the Earth for hundreds of millions of years. That wasn't uneventful, though. Life nearly went extinct when, 245 million years ago, a giant volcanic eruption in the region we call Siberia today generated the largest known extinction of Earth's history. But the biosphere managed to survive and regrow into the cretaceous period, the age of Dinosaurs.

- 10 million years ago. The age of dinosaurs is over. They have been wiped out by a new mass extinction that took place 65 million years ago, caused perhaps by a giant asteroid hitting the Earth or, more likely, by a giant volcanic eruption in the region that, million years later, will be called "India." Again, the biosphere has survived and now it prospers again, populated with mammals and birds; including primates. We are in the Miocene period and the Earth has been cooling down over a period of several million years, possibly as the result of the Indian subcontinent having hit Asia and created the Himalayas. That has favored CO2 removal from the atmosphere by weathering. Icecaps have formed both at the North and the South poles for the first time in several hundred million years.

- 1 million years ago. The Earth has considerably cooled down during the period that we call "Pleistocene" and is now undergoing a series of ice ages and interglacials. Ice ages last for tens of thousands of years, whereas the interglacials are relatively short hot spells, a few thousands of years long. These climatic oscillations are perhaps the element that stimulated the evolution of some primate species which have developed bipedal locomotion. One million years ago, homo Erectus and homo Abilis can use fire and make simple stone tools.

- 100.000 years ago. The glacial/interglacial cycles continue. The hot spell called the "Eemian" period, about 114,000 years ago, has been short-lived and has given way to one of the harshest known glaciations of the recent Earth's history. But humans survive. In Europe, the Neanderthals rule, while the species that we call "homo sapiens" already exists in Africa.

- 10.000 years ago. The ice age ends abruptly to give rise to a new interglacial; the period that we call "Holocene." The Neanderthals have disappeared, pushed over the edge of survival by their "Sapiens" competitors. Climate stabilizes enough for humans to start to practice agriculture in the fertile valleys along the tropical region of Africa and Eurasia, from Egypt to China.

- 1000 years ago. The agricultural age has given rise to the age of empires, fighting for domination of large geographical areas. The human population has been rapidly growing, with the start of a series of cycles of growth and collapse that derive from the overexploitation of the fertile soil. 1000 years ago, the Western World is coming back from one of these periodic collapses and is expanding again during the period we call "Middle Ages".

- 100 years ago. The age of coal has started and has been ongoing for at least two centuries. With it, the industrial revolution has come. Coal and crude oil are the fuels that create a tremendous expansion of humankind in numbers and power. 100 years ago, there are already more than a billion humans on the planet and the population is rapidly heading for the two billion marks. Pollution is still a minor problem that goes largely unrecognized. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been increasing to near 300 ppm over the 270 ppm which has been the level of the pre-industrial age. This fact is noted by some human scientists who predicted that it would cause a warming of the planet, but the long term consequences are not understood.

- 10 years ago. The fossil fuels that created the industrial age are starting to show signs of depletion and the same is true also for most mineral commodities. The attempt to replace fossil fuels with uranium has not been successful because of the difficulties involved in controlling the technology. Energy production is still increasing, but it shows signs of slowing down. The human population has reached 7 billion and keeps growing, but at reduced rates of growth. The Earth's agricultural system is in full overshoot and the population can only be fed by means of an agricultural industrial complex based on fossil fuels. The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has been growing fast and is now about 370 ppm. Global temperatures have been rising, too. The problem of global warming has been recognized and some efforts are being made to reduce the emissions of CO2 and of other greenhouse gases, but their concentration keeps increasing.  

Today. The world's industrial system seems to be close to stopping its growth and the financial system has been going through a series of brutal collapses. The production of crude oil has been stable during the past few years, but the overall energy production is still increasing because of the decision to extract expensive and polluting fuels out of "shales." The extraction of such fuels has been claimed to be a great success, but it seems that it has already reached its peak. The political situation is chaotic, with continuously erupting minor wars. The human population is now getting close to eight billion. The climate system seems to be on the verge of collapse, with deforestation, global warming, increased atmospheric humidity, decline of the ice caps and more. The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is now over 400 ppm and it keeps increasing.

The future in two scenarios

1.The "bad" scenario.

10 years from now. In 2030, the production of "conventional" crude oil has been in decline for about two decades. The enormous effort made to replace it by liquids produced using non-conventional sources, tar sands, shale oil, and other "heavy" oil sources, as well as biofuels, has been a failure. Uranium, too, has become scarce and several countries which don't have national resources have been forced to close down some of their nuclear plants. These trends are partially compensated by the still increasing production of coal; which is also used to produce liquid fuels and other chemicals that once were obtained from oil. The growth of renewable energy has stalled: there are no more resources to invest in research and development in new technologies and new plants, while a propaganda campaign financed by the oil industry has convinced the public that renewable sources produce no useful energy and are even harmful to the environment. Another propaganda campaign financed by the same lobbies has stopped all attempts of reducing the emissions of greenhouse gases. As a result, agriculture has been devastated by climate change and by the high costs of fertilizers and mechanization. The human population starts an epochal reversal of its growing trend, decimated also in reason of the increasing fraction of fertile land which is dedicated to biofuels.

100 years from now. In 2100, the human economic system has collapsed and the size of the economy is now a small fraction of what it had been at the beginning of the 21st century.  Resource depletion has destroyed most of the industrial system, while climate change and the associated desertification - coupled with the destruction of the fertile soil - have reduced agriculture to a pale shadow of the industrial enterprise it had become. The collapse of agriculture has caused a corresponding population collapse; now around two billion people. Most tropical areas have been abandoned because global warming has made them too hot to be habitable by human beings. The rise in sea level caused by global warming has forced the abandonment of a large number of coastal cities, with incalculable economic damage. The economy of the planet has been further weakened by giant storms and climate disasters hitting about every inhabited place. Crude oil is not extracted anymore in significant amounts and where there still exist gas resources, it is impossible to transport them at long distances because of the decay of the pipeline network and of the flooding of the ports. Only coal is still being extracted and coal-fired plants maintain electric power for reduced industrial activity in several regions of the North of the planet. Labrador, Alaska, Scandinavia, and Northern Siberia still host remnants of the old industrial society. Using coal liquefaction, it is still possible to obtain liquid fuels, mostly used for military purposes. The Earth still sees tanks and planes that exchange gunfire against each other.

1000 years from now. The industrial society is a thing of the past. Human-caused global warming has  generated the release of methane hydrates which have created even more warming. The stopping of the Oceanic thermohaline currents has transformed most of the planet into a hot desert. Almost all large mammals are extinct. Humans survive only in the extreme fringes of land in the North of the planet and in the South, mainly in Patagonia. For the first time in history, small tribes of humans live on the rapidly de-frosting fringes of the Antarctic continent, living mainly on fishing. In some areas, it is still possible to extract coal and use it for simple metallurgy that uses the remains of the metals that the 20th century civilization has left. Human beings are reduced to a few hundred million people who keep battling each other using old muskets and occasional cannons.

10.000 years from now. Human beings are extinct, together with most vertebrates and trees. Planet Earth is still reeling from the wave of global warming that had started thousands of years before. The atmosphere still contains large amounts of greenhouse gases generated by human activity and by the release of methane hydrates. The continents are mostly deserts, and the same is true for oceans, reduced to marine deserts by the lack of oxygenating currents. Greenland is nearly ice-free and that's true also for Antarctica, which has lost most of its ice. Only bushes and small size land vertebrates survive in the remote northern and southern fringes of continents.

100.000 years from now. The planet is showing signs of recovery. Temperatures have stabilized and silicate erosion removed a large fraction of the carbon dioxide accumulated in the atmosphere. Land animals and trees are growing again.

1 million years from now. The planet has partly recovered. The planetary tectonic cycles have re-absorbed most of the CO2 which had created the great burst of warming of long before. Temperature has gone down rapidly and polar ice caps have returned. The return of ice has restarted the thermohaline currents: oceanic waters are oxygenated again. Life - those species that had survived the warming disaster - are thriving again and re-colonizing the tropical deserts - which are fast disappearing.

10 million years from now. Earth is again the lush blue-green planet it used to be, full of life, animals, and forests. From the survivors of the great warming, a new explosion of life has been generated. There are again large herbivores and carnivores, as well as large trees, even though none of them looks like the creatures which had populated the Earth before the catastrophe. In Africa, some creatures start using chipped stones for hunting. In time, they develop the ability to create fire and of building stone structures. They develop agriculture, sea-going ships and ways of recording their thoughts using symbols. But they never develop an industrial civilization for lack of fossil fuels, all burned by humans millions of years before them.

100 million years from now. Planet Earth is again under stress. The gradual increase in solar irradiation is pushing the climate towards a new hot era. The same effect is generated by the gradual formation of a new supercontinent generated by continental drift. Most of the land becomes a desert - all intelligent creatures disappear. There starts a general decline of vertebrates, unable to survive on a progressively hotter planet.

1 billion years from now. The Earth has been sterilized by the increasing solar heat. Only traces of single-celled life still survive underground.

10 billion years from now. The sun has expanded and it has become so large that it has absorbed and destroyed the Earth. Then, it has collapsed in a white dwarf. The galaxy and the whole universe move slowly toward extinction with the running down of the energy generated by the primeval big bang.

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2.The "good" scenario

Ten years from now. In 2030, fossil fuel depletion has generated a global decline in production. That, in turn, has led to international treaties directed to ease the replacement of fossil fuels with renewable energy. Treaties are also enacted with the purpose of minimizing the use of coal. The production and the use of biofuels for industrial machinery has been forbidden everywhere and treaties force producers to direct all the agricultural production towards food for humans. The existing nuclear plants make full use of the uranium in the warheads that had been accumulated during the cold war. Research on nuclear fusion continues, with the hope that it will provide useful energy in 50 years. Even with these actions, global warming continues and agriculture is badly damaged by droughts and erosion. Population growth stops and widespread famines occur. Governments enact fertility reduction measures in order to contain the population. The economy thrives, stimulated by the demand for renewable plants.

A hundred years from now. The measures taken at the beginning of the 21st century have borne fruit. Now, almost 1% of the surface of the planet is covered by solar panels of the latest generations which produce energy with an efficiency of the order of 50%. In the north, wind energy is used, as well as energy from ocean currents, tides, and waves. The production of renewable electrical energy keeps growing and it has surpassed anything that was done in the past using primitive technologies based on fossil fuels. No such fuels are extracted any longer and doing so is considered a crime punishable with re-education. The industrial economy is undergoing rapid changes, moving to abandon the exploitation of dwindling resources of rare metals, using the energy available to exploit the abundant elements of the Earth's crust. The human society is now completely based on electric energy, also for transportation. Electric vehicles move along roads and rails, electric ships move across the oceans and electric airships navigate the air. The last nuclear fission plants have been closed for lack of uranium fuel around 2050, they were not needed anymore. Research on nuclear fusion continues with the hope that it will provide usable energy in 50 years. Despite the good performance of the economy, the ecosystem is still under heavy stress because of the large amounts of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere during the past centuries. Agriculture is still reeling from the damage done by erosion and climate change. The human population is in rapid, but controlled, decline under the demographic measures enacted by governments. It is now less than 4 billion humans and famines are a thing of the past.  With the returning prosperity, humans are restarting the exploration of space that they were forced to abandon at the start of the 21st century.

1000 years from now. In the year 3000 A.D. the ecosystems of the planet have completely recovered from the damage done by human activities during the second millennium. A sophisticated planetary control system manages solar irradiation by means of space mirrors and the concentration of greenhouse gases by means of CO2 absorbing/desorbing plants. The planet is managed as a giant garden, optimizing its biological productivity. The Sahara desert is now a forest and the thermohaline currents pump oxygen to the northern regions, full of life of all kinds. The solar and wind plants used during the previous millennium have been mostly dismantled, although some are still kept as a memory of the old times. Most of the energy used by humankind is now generated by space stations which capture solar energy and beam it to the ground in forms easily usable by humans. Research in controlled fusion energy continues in the hope that it will produce usable energy in 50 years. Humans are now less than one billion, they have optimized both their numbers and their energy use and they need enormously less than they had needed in the more turbulent ages of one thousand years before. The development of artificial intelligence is in full swing and practically all tasks that once had been in the hands of humans are now in the "hands" of sophisticated robotic systems. These robots have colonized the solar system and humans now live in underground cities on the Moon. The new planetary intelligence starts considering the idea of terraforming Mars and Venus. The first antimatter powered interstellar spaceships have started their travel to faraway stars.

10.000 years from now. There are now less than a billion human beings on Earth who live in splendid cities immersed in the lush forest that the planet has become. Some of them work as a hobby on controlled nuclear fusion which they hope will produce usable energy in about 50 years. The New Intelligence has now started terraforming Mars. It involves similar methods as those used for controlling the Earth's climate: giant mirrors and CO2 producing plants that control the Martian atmosphere, increasing its pressure and temperature. The terraforming of Venus has also started with similar methods: giant screens that lower the planetary temperatures and flying plants that transform CO2 into oxygen and solid carbon. That will take a lot of time, but the New Intelligence is patient. It is also creating new races of solid-state beings living on the asteroids and orbiting around the Sun. The exploration of the galaxy is in progress, with spaceships from the solar system now reaching a "sphere" of about a thousand light-years from the sun.

100.000 years from now. About 500 million humans live on Earth - mostly engaged in art, contemplation, and living fully human lives. Some of them still engage in experiments that are supposed to produce controlled nuclear fusion after 50 years or so. Mars is now colonized by Earth's plants, which are helping to create an atmosphere suitable for life; it is now a green planet, covered with oceans and lush forests. Several million human beings live there, protected from cosmic radiation by the planetary magnetic field artificially generated by giant magnetic coils at the planet's poles. The temperature of Venus has been considerably lowered, although still not enough for life to take hold of its surface. The exploration of the galaxy is in full swing. Other galactic intelligences are encountered and contacted.

A million years from now. Venus, Earth and Mars are now lush and green; all three full of life. Mercury has been dismantled to provide material for transforming the solar system into a single intelligence system that links a series of creatures. There are statites orbiting around the sun, solid-state lifeforms living on asteroids and remote moons, ultra-resistant creatures engineered to live in the thick atmosphere of Jupiter and of the other giant planets. Humans, living on the green planets, have become part of this giant solar network. The other extreme of the Galaxy has been now reached by probes coming from the solar system.

10 million years from now. The New Intelligence is expanding over the Galaxy. The Green planets are now the place of evolution tests and the re-created Neanderthals now live on Mars, whereas dinosaurs have been recreated on a Venus where the planetary control system has recreated conditions similar to those of the Jurassic on Earth.

In 100 million years from now. Controlling temperatures over the three green planets of the Solar System has become a complex task because of the increasing solar radiation. Mirrors are not enough anymore and it has been necessary to move the planets farther away from the sun. The statites that form the main part of the solar intelligence now surround the sun almost completely in a series of concentric spheres.

In a billion years from now. The solar radiation has increased so much that it has been necessary to move the green planets very far away. One year lasts now as 50 of the "natural" Earth years as they were long before. But these are no problems for the Solar Intelligence, now just part of the Galactic intelligence. The three green planets. Venus, Earth, and Mars are three jewels of the Solar System.

In ten billion years from now. The sun has collapsed in a weak white dwarf and all the planets that orbit around it are frozen solid. The Galaxy has lost most of its suns and the universe is entering its last stage of expansion which will lead it to become a frozen darkness. The Galactic Intelligence looks at a galaxy that is by now a pale shade of its old glory. The Intelligence says, "Let there be light" And there is light.




(this text was inspired by Isaac Asimov's story "The Last Question")