Wind & energy topic
(it was supposed to be posted as a comment to Krzysztof Rybinski’s blog article, but it seems that his comments mechanism is in even worse shape than my gallery script:), so I just put it here)
The energy topic is fun to follow, but contains two branches that I find of equal interest, not just the one related to energy sources:
1. SUPPLY
..and most importantly human ability to innovate will soon (I define soon as < 20 years) eliminate our dependence on oil.
This is something I would expect as well, so the rest is a matter of details, i.e. whether wind, solar, bio-fuel, fusion, etc. Makes one reconsider engineering career, but it?s all too late:)
2. DEMAND
What?s interesting in demand is increasing amount of energy that we consume in order to fulfill our informational needs.
The energy requirements of the huge infrastructure that Google is building (and others following) are already quite publicized.
Looking a bit more into the future, there is Second Life and other virtual realities. Nick Carr suggested in an article (Avatars consume as much electricity as Brazilians) that virtual ids consume roughly comparable amount of energy as the real ones.
The sophistication of VR will only increase. The dependence on it may increase likewise. After all, since a significant (major?) share of value of the products we consume is already informational (design, software etc), their consumption can be successfully migrated to VR. Producers are already announcing that they will release new products first in Second Life.
If having second life becomes popular, the energy consumption will likely boom.
