Reddit reviews Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto

I agree, and think it could happen.

I recently read a book by Stewart Brand, and one thing he talked about was urbanization. It's a huge worldwide trend, and in most societies urban populations have birth rates lower than replacement. World population is likely to head sharply downward starting around 2050.

Meanwhile we're getting better at making denser cities, with self-driving cars and personal rapid transit grids. And in China, they're starting to build huge skyscrapers that are practically cities in themselves.

Another factor is energy. We could coat vast areas with solar panels and windmills, but that's not exactly the vision you're seeing. But we could also go with more compact sources. There are advanced nuclear power designs that are a hundred times more fuel-efficient, produce a hundred times less nuclear waste for the same power, and are a lot safer than conventional designs. Nuclear fusion is surprisingly close to fruition, too. (That's five links not three, each a different approach.)

But the big land-eater is farming. People talk about farming in skyscrapers, but I ran some numbers on that...converting everything to indoor farming would take 125 terawatts and a million square indoor kilometers. Current world energy production is 17 terawatts.

However, if you can synthesize food calories directly with say, 25% efficiency, instead of growing plants, you can get by with 3 terawatts. A guy who presented at Google's Solve for X is working on that, and says he can make cheap, super-healthy food that tastes like it's as sugary and fatty as you want, and he can feed the world with an area the size of Rhode Island. It'd at least work for packaged and fast food, and the indoor farms are perfect for the organic produce market...no pesticides, no need for tasteless tomatoes that can survive long transport.

And of course, with cheap fusion or fission we won't need biofuels anymore. There are a lot of people working on making liquid hydrocarbons from CO2 in the air, assuming we haven't converted to electric. The energy cost of getting carbon from the air is only about tenth the energy content of the fuel. (See the "fuel from air" section here, and the references here.)

Another Solve for X presentation was about a cheap new way to desalinate. We could reforest the Sahara.

If we can avoid wrecking the biosphere too badly before all this happens, we could end up with a really nice planet.

Some nice tidbits about hormesis in the talk. Also, his book's companion site is a treasure trove for anyone interested in thinking about the future of this planet :)

There's a great book I was reading recently called Whole Earth Discipline. It has some great points on Climate Engineering, especially the positive aspects of it.

I'm pretty sure that R.A.W. and Robert Shea took so much acid that they flashed forward and saw what was coming. I'm giving Illuminatus! a second read through now (somewhat interrupted by Stewart Brand's Latest), and it's spooky how spot on it is.