A · world · without · ...

OK, Now I'm really mad! I woke up this morning to find that someone had broken into my garage last night and taken my bike! The car was still there, complete with a new scratch all the way across the driver's side door!

I called the local police but after hanging on the phone for 20 minutes I gave up. Instead I walked down into town to see if I could report the theft in person. Apparently, due to the current situation all minor crimes are no longer being recorded. I was told I could complete an incident form if I wished but that I shouldn't expect to see my bike again. There was even a poster up advising people to keep there bikes inside their main property; a lot of use that is to me now.

When I got home I called around all the local bike shops but they are ALL out of stock, completely! As a final thought I turned to ebay but it looks like the market in second hand bikes in going through the roof.
 


 

So it looks like I'll be acting like Homo erectus for the foreseeable future.

This is a beautiful sight but just how much is it costing to light thousands upon thousands of office building around the globe every night?

It's time to stop thinking locally and start working nationally and internationally to find serious ways of reducing the number of lights we leave burning away when no one is there!

Perhaps we should start lobbying our politicians to make motion sensors, linked into the lighting circuit, mandatory in all new office buildings and set a 10 year timeline to have them retro-fitted to existing buildings over a certain size. If nothing has moved in a room for 15 minutes why does a light need to be on?

Is oil shale America’s answer to peak-oil challenge? (pdf)
As this crisis deepens one thing that is becoming clearer to me is that it’s not that we are running out of oil; it’s just that we are running out of easily accessible oil. With the advent of ‘peak oil’ it now makes more economic sense to start developing the alternative oil resources such as oil shale. The United States Energy Information Administration estimates the world supply of oil shale at 2.6 trillion barrels of recoverable oil, 1.0-1.2 trillion barrels of which are in the United States. OK so oil extraction from oil shale isn’t easy but it’s not impossible and perhaps it’s time to ‘think outside the box’

How big is your box?
So where else might we look for hydrocarbons? Well how about in space! C-type asteroids or carbonaceous asteroids are the most common variety forming around 75% of known asteroids. The largest known C-type asteroid is 10 Hygiea measuring in with diameters of 350–500 km and a mass estimated to be 3% of the total mass of the asteroid belt.

If such an object could be manoeuvred into a near-earth orbit, using perhaps a surface mass ejection system, it would provide a massive source of carbon rich material that could be mined. In principal such an object could be used as a counterweight to a light, yet strong, space elevator pylon that would be used to transfer the material from the asteroid back down to the planet. Other possibilities include mining the moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos, both of which have a carbonaceous make-up.

Science fiction?
Such ideas are not necessarily the stuff of science fiction. If mankind is to have any type of long term future then space colonisation will have to happen. Only this week scientists have discovered the first rocky planet with a verifiable high water content only 20.8 light years away, orbiting the faint star Gliese 581, in the constellation Libra. This planet is obviously unreachable at present, but someday, if we are to survive, we will have to colonise somewhere like this .