Guessing the roots of economic
crisis
In 2013 the world is crossing through lots of
uncertainty, economic difficulties and fear of environmental
collapse. In a previous document I had suggested a few reasons to
this state of things: oil price, disappearance of some industries,
automation, shift of popular interest in cars and some other. But
maybe there are other problems like the worldwide conflict between
keeping contaminating technologies such as oil fuels and the need of
more environmentally friendly ones. Another cause for economic
downgrade might be that the private sector just reduced personnel to
an optimum. I mean, maybe there was some sort of employment boom,
in which there were many job positions not being really necessary.
Perhaps outsourcing to less developed countries killed many work
positions in the developed world. This should have led to better
living standards in poor countries where the outsourcing economy
created jobs. But it seems it did not happen. I guess one essential
cause for economic difficulties is technological stagnation, I mean
not searching for revolutionary options but only improving what
already exists.
Cutting edge tech
Up until now technology and perhaps science, have been
only refining what had been under development from the beginnings of
twentieth century: airplanes, engines, computers, rockets, etc.
Reaching the sky is a very expensive endeavor that prevents humanity
from conquering new worlds or make use of minerals in the moon or
somewhere else. Oil price rises every passing day, which reduces the
chances to transportation, commerce and recreational travel. But
reducing its cost would lead to higher atmospheric contamination. Renewable
resources are reaching exhaustion limits which is a threat to human
success on earth. Mineral reserves are decreasing. All of these issues require a true revolution in
technology and science in order to guarantee humanity's
sustainability and our expansion to new worlds.
What does it take
So far the only motor to technological revolutions has
been worldwide war. The US financial crash of early twentieth century
was resolved by entering World War II. Atomic technology came out of
the war with a great financial cost. After the war all those German engineers
and scientists were recruited by the USA and Soviet Union. As a
result from this, rockets took people to the moon, airplanes evolved
from wooden bodied ones to metallic jets capable of beating the sound
barrier. But now planetary war does not seem likely due to nuclear
weaponry and its devastating menace. There is a theoretical vision
developed by The Club of Rome, which states that human race will collapse by 2040. Now we are experiencing depletion of sea-fishing
resources, air pollution, metals shortage and climate change that
seem to be confirmations of that doomsday scenario. A nuclear
worldwide war is possible when economic crisis deepens to
unmanageable. Maybe the world will not end, but atomic weapons
apparently model a war to last just days or weeks, until parties at
conflict negotiate a truce or someone just loses the fight. This
would not allow time enough for a revolution in science and
technology. So maybe the engine to this foundational shift will come
after reaching the doomsday scenario suggested by the Club of Rome.
A final clarification
I decided to write this document without
any Internet research. This is because I think when being too
methodical, one misses creativity and our own biases are usually
corrected without trace. So maybe I will develop a second document
with data gathered from the web so I can check how close to reality
I was.
