ON TECHNOLOGICAL STAGNATION

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.

WHY STAY ON OIL?

INTRO

Let's imagine a world in which there is no more oil for internal combustion engines, but a cheap recyclable fuel that only needs a first load and lasts until the engine ends its life cycle. ¿Is it possible? I found the hypothetical answer some twenty years ago and I am a lawyer, not an engineer nor a scientist. I cannot test it because financially I live just at minimal human acceptable condition. But I am sure the core idea is running everywhere and already has been tried by powerful corporations and maybe it is under patent protection so noboby can use it. In my simplistic view, it can be adapted to current engines with a few tweaks, except for jet engines that would require an important new approach. But maybe jet fuel could be based on alcohol with new environmentally improving technologies.

WHY REMAIN ON PETROLEUM?

• Oil is still abundant and more profitable as it becomes harder to extract
• It makes a few Middle East countries powerful and rich
• There are many oil byproducts that are still useful and fortune making, such as plastics, lubricant oils and other which are environmentally poisonous too but very profitable
• The most important reason for oil to stay as the blood of current civilization: The United States is the main oil-technologician and keeps its own in-ground reserve well protected. This guarantees their true world power in case of crisis or planetary war. US reserves are estimated so huge that could keep the world running on gasoline for centuries.

OUTCOMES
One result from this is that the world will keep emitting carbon to the atmosphere and changing our environment into something less oxygenated and more vegetation-oriented by favoring photosynthesis, yet the true effect on plants is uncertain. Will humans easily adapt to a less oxygenated air? Another outcome is that oil derivatives are going to remain expensive so the world will keep growing slowly. Is this good or bad? If the whole planet's economic growth raises a lot, there will be more consumption and waste, but at the same time, better developed countries become more environmentally efficient. So the net outcome of a slowly growing world could be renewable resources exhaustion, at least in poor countries, while non-renewables might expand their availability.

CORE REASONS

I made the assumption that high oil price is leading the world economics to a slowdown. But the true cause for this might be more difficult to attain. Perhaps oil price is part of the answer but automation and robotics, big corporations' over-accumulation of wealth, rich countries too focused on making cars while the market could have reached its limits or people just shifted desire from cars to other things (maybe because of gas prices) or even rich countries might have peaked their enthusiasm for growth and are just bored and not wanting to keep on leading the world. Scarcity of commodities (renewable or not) other than oil could be part of the problem. The economy of information and fun seems not to be creating as many jobs as needed to boost a depressed planetary economy.

More links:
CO2 on plants

http://www.science20.com/chatter_box/why_plants_cant_sequester_excess_co2

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2002/december11/jasperplots-124.html
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Increasing-Carbon-Dioxide-is-not-good-for-plants.html

Oxygen decrease

http://survivalacres.com/blog/oxygen-levels-are-dropping/

http://e360.yale.edu/feature/a_looming_oxygen_crisis_and_its_impact_on_worlds_oceans/2301/

http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/09/30/carbon-emissions-threaten-the-fishing-industry-by-shrinking-fish-sizes/

On oil
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_product

http://www.forbes.com/sites/lorenthompson/2012/12/03/what-happens-when-america-no-longer-needs-middle-east-oil/

http://www.fossil.energy.gov/programs/reserves/index.html 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_refinery

Aviation fuel

http://www.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123308337

On economic growth
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-01-23/business/36496291_1_olivier-blanchard-euro-zone-imf-chief-economist

THE FIFTY YEARS TO COME

I remember an article from the 1970's on the negative impact of automation in economics. No solution was found and things were left as they came. Now most developed countries are hitting the ground and becoming economically slow. More and more people are jobless. My guess is that not only automation is involved in the current economy's downfall. It seems World War II years were the last important techno-scientific revolution span. That happened long ago. On current time humankind is drowning in cars. To me, this is half the problem. Car factories cannot grow anymore or even survive. Building cars and parts appear to be an important segment of global economy. Some kind of tech-revolution should burst from somewhere. If not, a worldwide war might force the change with the risk of returning to past centuries after destroying the current civilization.

Automation and an economy focused on cars are the combination that leads to a failing economy from my viewpoint.

What to do with automation? There are four choices:

• Letting things flow on their own
• Stopping the automation progress (not likely as I see it)
• Developing some kind of welfare-economy led by corporations
• An unexpected correction devised by governments, companies or both

If nothing is done, the world's economy is going to deteriorate every day. A global war might arise or some kind of civilizations-collision could happen. My bet is that a sort of free income will be given to jobless people only by big corporations in the beginning. Then it should  spread to almost every company either big or small. It does not seem a good solution since nobody wants to give money away. So this free emolument should be very short if determined exclusively by the private sector. Therefore it would not boost any economical growth.

Perhaps the impulse to a change is coming from developing countries which are more free to experiment. So this means a different world with the power moving from Europe and The United States to China, India, Brazil and some other. It is already in course...

Forgive some misspelling. English is second language to me. By the way, this is not a translation from Spanish. There is no Spanish document similar to this.