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Have you ever thought of our planet as a spaceship? Probably not, but it is one and to the highest degree. It is the 'ultimate' space ship that Nature provided for us.
Imagine an artificial spherical space ship, a technological product, that is a scaled-down version of Earth, with the main difference that everything is placed inside its spherical hull, instead of on its surface. It's a very large space ship, a space colony, hundreds of kilometers in diameter and divided in various sections, all being independent nations, just as is on Earth. Imagine further that everything that the inhabitants of this space ship do is largely the same as what we do on Earth. We don't have to go further into structural details of this spaceship, as it is just a lead to the line of thinking.
One of the first observations we can make is that whatever the inhabitants of this spaceship do, whatever technology they use, if the number of people there exceeds a critical value, the life support systems of this spaceship must collapse sooner or later. This critical value is reached long before all people there would stand shoulder-to-shoulder, because the life support systems have a finite capacity for a certain number of people per habitual volume. The limit is not set by availability of energy, which we can set to be sufficient for any number of people, but by the limited life support resources that the spaceship contains.
If these resources were all renewable in a closed cycle of repeatable processes, which we can call the ecological system, if there were no industrial activities, but renewable production of food and recirculation of purified water only, while the drive energy for it comes from a nuclear reactor that does not pollute the system in any way (as does not our Sun), life in this space ship could be sustained for indefinite time, as long as the number of people (and animals) does not exceed the critical value. This was the situation on Earth, until the first human discovered the use of fire.
The use of fire allowed people to convert natural resources into products that were not renewable, thus decaying to garbage and causing wastes - pollution. Let's assume that say 20 thousand years ago there were not more than between 50 and 100 million people on Earth. If these people would have used our today's modern technology, using fossil fuels and causing pollution the same way we do, it's obvious that the small scale of it would not have had any impact on the Earth's ecological systems. If however today's around 7 billion people would live under stone-age conditions, burning a few kilos of wood per day and person (which btw equals present global energy use), it's just as obvious that they would burn the last tree on Earth within a few decades! From this we can conclude that if the number of people exceeds a critical value, the Earth's ecological systems will inevitably collapse, regardless whatever.
We do not need to make advanced scientific analyses to understand that Spaceship Earth is going to its end, regardless what technologies, however 'green', we would use. Technology only determines the time scale towards final collapse, but cannot prevent it from happening. Nonetheless, such an analysis was made by MIT on the initiative of "the Club of Rome" and published 1972:
The Limits To Growth
A Report for the Club of Rome Project on The Predicament of Mankind.
Published by: Universe Books, New York © 1972 by Dennis L. Meadows
http://www.dieoff.org/page25.htm
At the time it got great attention in the news media, but today it is totally forgotten by all. It came to a conclusion of a possible stable world model, as to:
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to be stabilized by around the year 2000 and remain stable from then on. However, only the first four curves were stable, while the curve for natural resources was not and declined to become zero at some undefined future (see fig. 46 in the report). It also said that the adviced measures to be taken must be initialized within the next 25 years, otherwise it would be too late to avoid the final collapse of the Earth's ecological systems (due to the inertia in them).
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We are now almost 40 years later and nothing much has been done yet. Moreover, in view of the declining natural resources, we can understand that industrial production cannot remain stable in the longer run, because 100% recirculation cannot be achieved (second law of thermo - entropy). Economy sets the limits, long before technology would.
Today, with the effects of global warming, the melting North Pole, global climate change, ozone depletion and other disaster indicators, we can fear that MIT was right at large and so we have no other option than to 'abandon ship', while we still can. Can we?
Time is running out because what we need is immediate technological development to expand in space, while we instead waste the necessary funds on warfare and destruction. Indeed, if the world's war industry would be redirected to space technology, we could have factories on the Moon within 20 years from now. We have the technology to start with it, only the funds are missing, but do we have enough time left?
Green technology won't save us, but it can buy us time to postpone the final collapse of Space Ship Earth, so that we can 'escape' in time. If not, we are in the same deadly trap that presumably most, if not all technological civilizations in the Universe before us have perished by (we may very well be the only one right now - we are separated in time, rather than in distance).
To save our planet, or at least Mankind itself, we need a global organization that will have authority over all nations in the world on some crucial issues. We need a kind of 'World Constitution' that all countries must submit to, on penalty of being boycotted by the rest of the world, by a World Community that overrules all ideological and religious differences and redirects the world's resources towards the preservation of Mankind.
Its name: the Global Resource Authority (GRA)
