John McCarthy, inventor (discoverer?) of LISP, has a set of pages purporting to provide evidence in support of technological optimism.
I presume that technological optimism is the same thing as that which its detractors call "the technological imperative".
Fascinating looking stuff, which I haven't the time to read now. The front page includes the statement
With the development of nuclear energy, it became possible to show that there are no apparent obstacles even to billion year sustainability.(1) A billion years is unimaginably far in the future.
(1) Solar energy would also work. The technological possibility of transmitting solar energy over long distances can be developed and would also guarantee the continuation of human progress. It is likely to be several times as expensive as present energy, but we can afford it if necessary.
There's something truly bizarre about a definition of sustainability which can accept both
- the consumption of a raw material which has built up over geological time, and
- the creation of waste which we don't know what to do with.
Seems to me that technological optimism is per definition faith: nuclear power is sustainable, because we can use it for long enough that we or someone else will be able to solve the considerable problems which exist with it now.
As to transmitting solar energy, I'm not sure what that's about and without links it's hard to say. If it involves converting solar to e.g. electrical energy, then you aren't transmitting solar energy, you're transmitting electricity.
I have huge respect for McCarthy's work in computing. I have long wondered whether he believed in the viability of the Artificial Intelligence project, a project which, if it hadn't generated such an enormous range of hugely useful results for computing in general could be characterised as a horrific waste of resources. It has, so it doesn't need to be, but I do wish people would just stop using a term which was always and is still both absurd and misleading. In any case if he did (or worse, does) believe in that project, then I must qualify my respect. And I suspect that further reading of these pages on "sustainability" would qualify it more heavily still. We'll see.
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