Provocation # 148. Radical numbers.

The following is sketchy.

I like Musk’s use of numbers.

 

https://youtu.be/OIgzzAMgnSU

“Two  billion wall batteries  would be needed  to meet all the world’s energy needs.  Difficult? Most people think impossible. We have 2 billion cars, replaced every twenty years. We can do this. “

If we took the social side in the same straight-forward way, what draconian but adequate measures would be necessary. A few off the top ideas floating around:

 

•Stop all air transportation  October 31. Use internet

•Cut population radically

•War can do it.

•One child families gets each child 4 parents.

•Food. Seed production increased and distributed. Everyone plants.

•Freeze on mortgage payments, cut rent. (Down come the banks).

•Unemployment is first step toward redeployment,

You get the idea. Necessary but impossible? But something will happen.

 

Two major narratives to start:

◦Collapse; climate,  food, grid, finance

◦Cohere, struggle but widespread survival with dignity..

Smart money right now seems to be  on cohere (though private conversations suggest widespread skepticism), because if you win, great, and if you lose no worse than if you had bet on collapse. But since this takes many smart people who, in choosing the likelihood of society cohering,  out of the effort to work on draconian measures, which consequently hurries us toward failure.

 

What to do?