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Digital travel and the price of oil

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rusty old oil barrelsIt may be mercifully low again at the moment, but it’s safe to assume that once the global economy adjusts to recent events, the price of oil will obey its historical trend and start climbing once again.

Over at The Guardian, Charles Arthur suggests one of the major outcomes of increasing oil prices will be that travel – be it for work or pleasure – will become much less of a reflex action, at least for those of us who aren’t ridiculously wealthy:

If you need a shorthand for thinking about the future, then, it’s this: analogue will be increasingly expensive; digital will be increasingly cheap. Getting in a car or on a train or a plane? Analogue. Expensive. Non-renewable. By contrast, downloading an album, watching a webcast concert, watching TV: digital. Endlessly replicable, virtually instantly transmitted, cheap.

What, in turn, does that mean for our society? Apart from fewer cars on the roads (though possibly with more people sharing rides in them), it means more time working at or near to home, if your work involves things that can be done digitally. For all those jobs that need to be near to physical things – that is, where you make things like cars or food or whatever – you’ll have to be based nearer the place you work.

I hasten to point out that this is not exactly a new suggestion, but what would have been delivered as a slightly comedic tongue-in-cheek piece of journalism ten years ago (doubtless complete with a reference to “sci-fi futures of virtual travel”) seems much less ludicrous in the light of our new-found interest in frugal living. [image by Atli Harðarson]

I seem to remember one of Stephen Baxter’s Destiny’s Children books featuring a very-near-future Earth where travel is achieved by a kind of mash-up of telepresence and VR technologies. Can anyone think of any other sf stories or books with a similar theme?

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Daewoo in Madagascar – the new corporate colonialism?

farm land in MadagascarWith the headlines all taken up by news of crises closer to home, you might not have heard about the civil unrest and political turmoil currently underway in Madagascar.

Even if you have, you might not be aware of what is emerging as one of the trigger factors: Korean company Daewoo inking a deal with the Malagasy government to buy 1.3 million hectares of land, approximately half of the country’s arable real estate.

The company said it had leased 1.3m hectares of farmland – about half the size of Belgium – from Madagascar’s government for 99 years. It plans to ship the maize and palm oil harvests back to South Korea. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The pursuit of foreign farm investments is a clear sign of how countries are seeking food security following this year’s crisis – which saw record prices for commodities such as wheat and rice and food riots in countries from Egypt to Haiti.

It’s not news that food shortages are affecting many countries at the moment, but this move has a distinct whiff of colonialism, no matter how Daewoo’s project manager paints it as a unique expression of Korean psychology. Possibly more worrying still is the fact that few Korean companies seem willing to invest in the project, while a number of foreign interests apparently are. And then there’s this gorgeous slice of doublethink from a Korean journalist covering the story:

I feel more convinced than before that Korea needs Daewoo’s success in Madagascar, not only to prove that its model is different from the models of Britain, the United States, the Netherlands, France, Germany and Japan during their colonial pasts, but also that it is setting a new precedent for both African states and outside investors to benefit from.

Because, y’know, the best way to prove you’re totally different from the old colonial empire-builders is to pretty much replicate their tactics under cover of supposedly legitimate and benevolent business.AMIIRITE?

As the effects of climate change increase the pressure on global agriculture, we’re going to see a whole lot more of this sort of thing; as the nation-state concept loses strength, it’s the weaker nations that will suffer first as their bigger rivals seek to consolidate their remaining power and resources. Borders are just lines on a map to hungry people… and hungry corporations.

All the links above (and a number of others to help you get up to speed on this story) can be found on MetaFilter. [image by World Resources Institute]

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Genesis2.0

The goal of engineered-from-scratch custom life-forms is still a long way over the event horizon, but bioengineering research is moving slowly and steadily in the right direction:

Many of the components of this minimal cell already work well together. Biotechnology companies routinely sell commercial kits to synthesise DNA, RNA or proteins to order in a test tube. But these kits only work for a few hours or days before the components are used up and the reaction grinds to a halt. To create a system that runs indefinitely, Forster and Church will also need to add a DNA molecule that encodes all 151 components, so that the system can make new ones as needed. Once they have combined this DNA with a starting set of components, they should in theory end up with a replicating, evolving – in short, living – system.

Good stuff, myriad potential medical uses, yaddah yaddah yaddah. But surely some long-run risks similar to those associated with self-replicating nanotech must be considered – green goo instead of grey, perhaps?

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‘The media’s deliberate stupidity’

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beePresident Obama’s budget includes a mere $1.7 million, or 0.00041 percent of spending, for honeybee research. Jamison Foser notes that some politicians find that outrageous or hilarious, but that the debate — if you can call it that — over budget earmarks misses an an important point as far as bees are concerned:

Honeybees are pretty important. See, humans need food. Without it, we die. And bees not only produce honey, they pollinate all kinds of crops — onions, cashews, celery, strawberries, beets, broccoli, cabbage, cucumbers, apples … you get the picture. Honeybees play an important role in our food supply, and our economy. And honeybees have been disappearing at an alarming rate in recent years, for reasons that are not fully known.

It might be useful to know why. And, while admitting that earmarks might not be the best way to fund research, it might also be useful if politicians would stop criticizing things they don’t understand just because they sound funny. Volcano monitoring, planetarium projectors, fruit-fly research, and studies of the DNA of  threatened species called grizzly bears all come to mind.

But if polticians can’t be bothered to understand, and behave like short-sighted anti-space senators in early Arthur C. Clarke, is it too much to ask that our media could be bothered to investigate claims and counterclaims, instead of chortling like Beavis and Butthead?

[Bee picture by Robert Seber]

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