Cold Fusion (aka Low Energy Nuclear Reactions or LENR) is on the precipice of altering the landscape of energy-production, and along with it, the cultural landscape as well. Four separate companies: Industrial Heat LLC, Brillouin Energy Corporation, Defkalion Green Technologies, and Blacklight Power all appear to be on the threshold of breaking into the marketplace with cheap, environmentally safe, and virtually limitless energy technologies. Beyond energy, LENR-based processes hold promise for both the desalination of drinking water and the remediation of nuclear waste. My presentation will focus not only on the technical applications of the CF-LENR phenomenon, but also the sociological and historical implications as well.
Lord Martin Rees, Fellow of Trinity College and Emeritus Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge, is interviewed about catastrophic risks.
You recently set up the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, along with philosopher Huw Price and Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn. What do you hope to achieve? We believe governments and corporations are in denial about new risks that have only a small likelihood of occurring, but which would be truly catastrophic if they did occur. We’d like people to spend more time and energy thinking about these risks, rather than focusing mainly on risks that are more familiar but relatively limited, like train crashes.
The crisis we face is not environmental, it’s civilizational.
There are far too many people consuming far too many resources for the planet to bear. As the climate changes, how do we undertake the hard transition from an industrial-technological civilization to an ecological-technological civilization? However we do it, it’s a slog.
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We may be on the cusp of a new geological age. The Holocene has hosted all human civilizations to date. Its salient mark has been a relatively stable climate. Now the Holocene is exiting, and ahead lies the “Anthropocene,” an age of human-induced change in core planetary processes, climate volatility, and uncertainty. The changes reach from the polar ice caps to the ocean depths, touching every ocean, landmass, and layer of the atmosphere. Human civilization is due for a rude awakening to the reality that the basic unit of human survival is not human society—it is the entire planet. We may soon be forced as a species to accept a truth that cosmologist Thomas Berry asserted: because “planetary health is primary” and “human well-being is derivative,” the first law of economics is the preservation of nature’s economy.
The impending ecological catastrophe is perhaps the greatest challenge humans have ever faced. Where are the leaders and where is the renewable moral-spiritual energy for tasks that will span generations? Might religious environmentalism contribute something essential?
