Future Development

I decided to start a new thread about this because I see a lot of people on this forum write about the prospects for the future regarding resources, food and water. A lot of you seem convinced that we are more or less heading down a dead end street while using up oil and basically everything we need to live.
So I just wanted to give the discussion a few new aspects that might make you feel a bit more easy about it.

First of all some of you might have heard that in Germany the Fukushima incident has lead to a new heated discussion about the use of nuclear powerplants. Now there are official estimates that it might be possible to get entirely indepedent of nuclear energy by 2020.
The same discussion affected the industry working on renewable energy devices, for which suddenly a great demand has emerged. For these technologies estimates were made that they may enable Germany to get independent of coal-fueled energy plants by 2050.

Looking at the importance of oil there is a lot of progress in the development of electric cars as well, with some prototypes already being in use in Norway. Over the last years more efficient designs for energy storages for them have been found, and just a few weeks ago a group of researchers managed to create a way to load them in just a few seconds as opposed to the time consuming loading times for usual batteries for example, which was a great hinderance for loading an entire cars energy. This way they can be loaded just like you would tank up gas at the gas station.


And finally theres a video regarding the problems of overpopulation. It might be quite optimistic and I suspect the actual transition into the last phase might actually get a bit more rough, but when I first saw it I felt that I had entirely missed the fact, so I think it is worth sharing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTznEIZRkLg

Originally posted by Athena This sounds like good news, but I can not view the video.  Some of our troubles might decrease, if we all became vegetarians.  It is said that raising beef consumes a lot of land for growing corn which is fed to cows, and a lot of water.  Plus the oil base fertilizer for growing the corn, and the transportation of fertilizer, corn, beef.

Edited by Arab - 07-Apr-2011 at 11:44