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WinnersBeyond Peak Scenario Contest |
The Golden Age After Peak.
by Domenic Schmelzer
It is more than a generation away and will not be experienced by the baby boomers. The rest of us will have already given up hope and will be holding on to the memories of the 1990s and 2000s. Nevertheless, a new reality will be breaking through the clouds of a desperate and assumed-to-be dying world. It will be comparable to the rebuilding years after WWII and the Great Depression.
The first element will be one of Dualism. Most of us will be very poor, trying to make ends meet - growing vegetables on rooftops and balconies in the cities, while the suburbs are abandon to those willing to make them produce agriculturally. This subsistent way of life will be both imported from Cuba, which will be integrated into the world community a decade or so after Peak, and taken over from the Pennsylvania Dutch (Amish, Menonite, Hutterite) methods.
On the other side of the equation will be the government agencies and a mofia-style oligarchy. They will have continued to consolidate power and run/controll a number of companies who continued to think and plan in an unorthodox manner. The owners, directors and technichians will be organized on the post Soviet Russian oligarchical model.
Three areas of consolidation and innovation will begin to stand out.
1) Bio-Engineering
Since the abundance of the 20th century has disappeared, researchers and farmers look for and develop plants which grow on saltwater and in otherwise hostile environments. Here is to be noted the work and projects of Prof. Carl Hodges in Eritrea, Arizona and Baja California as a forerunner.
2) Transportation
Whereas the coal-powered and polluting rail and shipping systems experience a fuminous return - rail being driven by electricity produced primarily from coal - air flight experiences a renaissance. Military needs and research begins building an infrastructure for floating transport. For the much-hailed hydrogen economy materializes in a completely unexpected sector: Flight. Solar-cell and wind parks installed above twelve thousand meters transform collected water vapor into hydrogen and oxygen, which are then used as fuel, driving airships which never land. For the hydrogen is not only used to drive the ships, it is also used to make them float. Nanotechnology helps produce light materials which minimize the weight of the floating structures. The hydrogen produced above the clouds is stored in enormous balloon-like structures, filling the ships passing by. The jumbo-jets of the past cease to exist and are replaced by much more slowly-moving dirigible devices. Trans-Atlantic flight, for instance, which had taken six hours now takes 18 hours. For the longer lasting flights, floating hubs are errected, complete with skyports and floating hotels (skytels).
Military flight, which is much more speed-oriented, depends on ethanol, bio-diesel and synthetic fuels. On the ground, private personal transport has nearly disappeared, also bieng driven by bio and synthetics for the few who can and will afford it. Mass transportation and cargo transport is taken care of by rail and highway trains, as semis are used to pull up to ten trailers from one city to another - also at pre-industrial speeds. Four-lane highways have a right lane with average speeds of around 20mph.
3) Energy Production
The mish-mash of energy production used at the beginning of the 21st century, as it became evident that fossil-fuel use would be restricted, continues into mid-century: Wave generators, wind mils, hydro-plants, solar parks, coal power plants, nuclear, etc... are all used, to the extent that they can be kept running. Black-outs continue to be the norm. On the one side, however, small solutions will dot the map as individuals attempt to produce and even sell energy from cheap, individual wind and solar units. Energy farmers / scavangers will look under every rock to find small ways to make energy.
On the other hand, vertical energy production will be introduced for the few large scale producers. Since present examples do not exist for this, I will need to describe it in greater detail. The closest model at present is that of the Solar Tower, to be resurrected in Australia (experimental in Spain until 1987). A kilometer-high tower is to use a chimney effect to direct heated air through turbines and up a chimney, which will create the suction necessary to keep the system working. Heat sources will vary from glassed-in solar collection areas in the high-sun regions to geothermal heat to waste heat from other (such as factory) processes. Geothermal heat production in Germany, for instance, is tapped into at 4000 meters below the surface. It is used to drive turbines and then heat vertically-built dwellings on its way up. Also surface housing is heated and cooled this way. The remaining heat rises through a chimney, creating a suction which drives more turbines. The chimney is not a solid structure, but is made of flexible elements filled with heated bouyant gases like hydrogen and helium. The chimneys will reach many kilometers into the sky, making the chimney effect greater.
One of the innovations created by the vertical environment is that of the thermal elevator. Rising heat propells people and light goods thousands of meters into the atmosphere. At a height of 10,000meters, the tower becomes a floating sky port, making long-distant travel possible without having to "take off", as we know it, or land. The sky ports are the beginnings of floating cities which will begin domination the world's architecture in the 22nd century. In 2050, the vertical constructions primarily serve the world's energy and transportation superstructures.
At different levels along the way up the floating towers are various devices for collecting energy. Floating wind mill farms installed between 4,000 and 10,000 meters are able to take advantage of continuously strong winds of the jet stream. Off-hour electricity is used for hydrolysis, hydrogen being used to keep the mostly weightless tower elevated and as a fuel for transportation as presented above. A good bit of the wind energy in the higher regions and stronger winds will be used to drive gyroscopes, which hold the towers at any wind speed in place.
Between 15,000 and 20,000 meters, the tower changes in nature. Here it is used as a connecting link to minutely thin solar fields or rather wings, also held up by helium and hydrogen. Although solar collectors here are not essentially more efficient, they are out of the way of other constructions and human activities, not stealing surface space for other activities such as agriculture while dispersing their shade over a very large surface area. They are also not as subject to high wind velocities. Electricity is guided through wires leading through the tower, which resembles more and more an umbilical coard reaching up to the heavens. Year for year, the tower takes on new funcitons and an increasing role in human affairs.
Space travel will have been to the most part abandon. Far from having reached Mars, the US had returned to the moon for a short while - China having likewise made a couple of moon landings before its programs were also abandon. Existing satellite systems were kept up on a national basis while planned new systems usually fell apart in the making for a lack of funding. At the same time, inflatable space-station elements and solar-sail technologies begin maturing by the mid-21st century, making the habitiation of the upper atmosphere finally possible. Solar sails are attached to satellites orbitting at 120,000 to 180,000 meters in order to counteract atmospheric drag. As the century continues, the world's space agencies begin building a ring around the equator at 140,000 meters. This serves as a near-earth base for assembling and launching spacecraft working in a near-weightless environment, accellerating launch objects and collecting resources from outer space. And year for year, the gap between 20,000 meters and 140,000 gradually closes.
Finally, as a result of a) new saltwater-resistent plants and agricultural methods , b) the need to find new sources of energy and c) well-educated but hightly underemployed populations, the earth's deserts become the goal of colonization. North Africa is once again managed by the Europeans, becoming its bread basket, as sand dunes are turned productive. Solar collectors in various altitudes increase shade, helping moderate surface temperatures. Collecting water from the atmosphere becomes one of the larger activities of agriculture. The central North Sahara becomes productive for the first time in almost 2000 years while the US/Mexican-border area becomes home to a new economically progressive cultural center.
Would you like to help build the future?
Please Email: dominic@schmelzer.com
