I'm watching a documentary on TV about alternative energy sources. In this show, they focus on two possible sources of energy to feed our insatiable demand for ever more energy to power all of our needs and desires for pleasure and comfort. These two sources are: the oceans of the world and in particular, the Gulf Stream; and geothermal energy.
Scientists, researchers, and governments (in this instance, the USA) are actively working on these "solutions." We may be able to do it...but SHOULD we do it just because we can? In this show, I don't see them addressing the very real dangers to our world that could be the end result of their solutions.
The Gulf Stream is one of the most important entity on our planet. It plays a very major and necessary role in helping to keep our climate stable to enable us to survive liveable temperatures and to grow our foods. They discuss all of the problems of building, placing, and using giant turbines at the bottom of the ocean to use the power of the Gulf Stream to provide huge amounts of electricity for human use. They don't discuss or address the possible long-term impact this project may do to the Gulf Stream. We are already messing with the Gulf Stream's ability to be viable through our hastening of global warming.
As for geothermal energy, that would eventually provide a "renewable" clean energy source that could provide us with energy for thousands of years, they believe. However, this would involve drilling very very deep holes (in pairs: one to take water down, one to bring steam up) into the earth's crust. Maybe this may seem like just a tiny pinprick into the earth but they've already experienced the creation of small earthquakes in the proximity of these geothermal plants. One spokesman states that that's no problem. If "we created them, we can stop them." Oh, really?? We are all-powerful, are we?
Now consider this, if the few plants they build are successful, what do you suppose will happen? Eventually, there will be millions of these plants all over the world with millions and millions of holes dug deep into the Earth's crust. Do they not think or even consider what that would do to our Earth's crust? A few shouldn't hurt except maybe the people in the immediate vicinity of these plants where the earthquake events would increase and possibly over time increase in intensity as well. What would happen with multi-millions of these extremely deep holes throughout our crust? We already experience approximately half a million earthquakes a year around the world. Would we escalate that number to billions? Because, don't kid yourselves, as our population grows exponentially, so will our need for ever more energy.
Why can't our common sense and intelligence grow and keep pace with our increased use of technology? We are like the 2-year-old child who can learn to strike a match but not know of the dire consequences of starting an uncontrolled fire.
These people--scientists, researchers, inventors, governments--are focusing ONLY on finding more energy sources before the oil runs out and...it IS running out.
From my simple layman's mind, logic, and reasoning, I see only 2 viable sources of clean and renewable sources of energy that won't have a negative impact on our world. Those sources are solar and wind. Why don't these people merge all of their separate pet projects and focus on solar energy to begin with? We know it works. We can make it work better and cheaper and cleaner than anything else available to us. We don't know everything we need to know about how our climate works or about plate tectonics to mess with it without causing problems to our environment that we may not know of until it's too late (such as our use of oil and coal).
Our wanton and irresponsible and ignorant use of oil and coal in just the last 150 years have put us in this predicament of global warming. Our mentality has been: we can do it, why not do it? If it causes any problem down the road somewhere, we'll fix it then. The reality is, we created a huge problem with global warming and our efforts to date is negligible in slowing it down or getting anywhere near solving the problem. But we think we can control man-created earthquakes and possibly changing the properties and flow of the Gulf Stream?
We know global warming is causing all the ice of the world--the Antarctic, Greenland, the huge glaciers--that we depend on for our drinking water and maintaining our stable climate to melt, faster and faster EVERY YEAR! And still there is not enough interest to garner serious efforts from the governments and peoples of the world to try to solve this problem of how to slow down and/or eventually stop the melting of our ice!!! Messing with the Gulf Stream and other ocean areas and the Earth's crust worldwide will only add to the already very serious problem we have now. We are not seriously addressing that problem.
People, we are only treading water and are slowly losing ground. Maybe if we begin losing ground faster, we would take all of these problems more seriously. Will we become believers and problem-solvers only when the waters reach our chins????
Need another example of our arrogance? We know that black holes are some of the most powerful energy sources in the universe but we don't know very much else about it. So, what do our scientists want to do? They want to create their own tiny black hole believing they can control it and it won't cause any harm. Just how do they know this when they don't know much about how a black hole works? It's back to our arrogance. If we can do it, why don't we do it? Where is our common sense? Where are our priorities? What needs are we fulfilling that we would risk destroying our world? Are we so bent on satisfying our greed for energy and the goods it can provide our pleasure and luxuries that we would risk commiting genocide, not just for us but for All Life on Earth?
Why are we so arrogantly stupid and greedy to the point of self-destruction? If we're extremely lucky and if we can learn to be a responsible species, maybe, just maybe humankind can last a tiny percent of the time that dinosaurs existed. Why are we so hell-bent on shortening that time by millions of years? Why are we so damned arrogant in our belief that we can control nature? Our experience has shown that we indeed CANNOT control nature. Someone once coined the the phrase: Doing the same thing over and over again with the same (undesired or destructive) results is pure insanity. Are we then insane?
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