In his Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) lecture, Rob Hopkins reminds us the oil is limited and that we must transition to a world without it so we can wean ourselves off oil now. During the lecture, there was a graph that stunned me...
This is a graph of time verses energy availability.
While the audience too all of this in, Rob said, while holding a jar full of oil…
“This bottle of oil, distilled over a hundred million years of geological time, ancient sunlight, contains the energy equivalent of about five weeks hard human manual labor -- equivalent to about 35 strong people coming round and working for you. We can turn it into a dazzling array of materials, medicine, modern clothing, laptops, a whole range of different things. It gives us an energy return that's unimaginable, historically. We've based the design of our settlements, our business models, our transport plans, even the idea of economic growth, some would argue, on the assumption that we will have this in perpetuity.
Yet, when we take a step back, and look over the span of history, at what we might call the petroleum interval, it's a short period in history where we've discovered this extraordinary material, and then based a whole way of life around it. But as we straddle the top of this energy mountain, at this stage, we move from a time where our economic success, our sense of individual prowess and well-being is directly linked to how much [oil] we consume, to a time when actually our degree of oil dependency is our degree of vulnerability.”
In order to be safe, we must assume this energy model is right and we must seek out a equally powerful source of energy. This source of energy can be found in space. Solar power is more efficient in space and He-3 is available in space. However, this promised land of energy requires energy to reach.
This is why the petroleum interval must be the time where humanity executes space habituation. We must use are abundance of energy now to secure energy for the future. The shuttle uses over 20 terajoules of energy in its launch. That is 4.78011472 × 10^9 Kilocalories. That’s the energy stored in 153847 gallons of gasoline (1). Plus, you have to combine the energy to move the shuttle to the launch pad, the energy required to push all the data NASA generates during every launch, the energy NASA workers use in commenting, the energy costs to create the special fuel for the shuttle, and so on and so on. This is multiplied when we increase the number of rockets launched when space habitation occurs. These are mind boggling amounts of energy that are trivial this age of abundant energy, near infinite energy. In other words, NASA does not have to worry about the energy it needs to launch rockets not being available.
However, once we leave this planet’s gravity well, we once again have access to near an abundant source of energy. Thus, we must inhabit space now.
Source:
1: “Page Untitled.” Syracuse University. Web. Accessed on 27 December 2009. <http://physics.syr.edu/courses/modules/ENERGY/ENERGY_POLICY/tables.html>
Hopkins, Rob. "Rob Hopkins: Transition to a world without oil" Nov. 2009. Online video clip. TED. Accessed on 27 December 2009. <http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/rob_hopkins_transition_to_a_world_without_oil.html>
