Book Teaser

The following is a teaser, the first few pages of a book I am working on called "Through the Eyes of God: How Humanity Can Save Itself."

Enjoy.

Humanity is at a fork in the road. It is a very significant fork, because the choices we make over the next 50 years will determine the future of our race for the next several million years, and once we choose our path we are stuck with it.

You may be familiar with the Kardashev scale. It is a measure of the technological advancement of a race based on the amount of energy it can generate and consume. Type one societies are able to produce and consume the energy equivalent of all of the solar energy available to their planet, type two can produce and consume the energy equivalent generated by their star, and the level definitions go on increasing in energy requirement. Currently, humanity is just over Type .7, which is a pretty respectable level of development if you ask me.

It hasn’t been an easy road to this point, though. Many wars have been waged, many good men have devoted their lives to the study of science, and many governments have invested considerable wealth into energy research. The most significant leap forward in energy technology came with the discovery of fossil fuels. They are so plentiful, so easy to harvest, and so dense in energy that they have enabled humanity to experience a dramatic and sudden leap forward in technological advancement. Everything from the invention of computers, to the advent of the internal combustion engine, to the discovery of plastic, we owe to fossil fuels. They have truly taken society to a place it never could’ve reached otherwise.

There is a problem though: Fossil fuels are a finite resource. In a short span of only about 200 years, our species has consumed almost all of the fossil fuel reserves on the planet Earth, reserves which were created over the course of billions of years. When the fossil fuels run out, what comes next? There are only two choices. We can either use the gift of fossil fuel as an essential stepping stone to an even more advanced level of society and energy generation, or we can take several steps back and become a pre-industrial society again, with limited access to energy or advanced manufacturing materials.

Choosing not to choose is choosing to go back. A type 1 civilization is advanced enough to persist, a type 0 civilization is small enough to persist, but our current level of energy generation and consumption is unsustainable. In order to move forward, we must intelligently leverage our remaining reserves of fossil fuels to enable a new type of human civilization. If we fail, our descendents may have another chance in a few million years, when the reserves have been replenished by the decaying bodies of trillions of carbon based life forms. There is no shortcut however. Fossil fuels are a gift, a necessary step from primitive to advanced civilization.

This book is the story of choosing to move forward. It is the future that man can deliver upon himself should he choose to recognize the precarious nature of his own existence, embrace his own strength, and create something better with the rare opportunity before him.