Potential futures without KESTS to GEO are almost certain to happen, sad to say, based on the responses I've found happening while I have been presenting to the public the best designs I can create for KESTS to GEO over the past 16 years spanning since 1988. If we had begun KESTS to GEO when I first proposed the concept in 1988, there would surely be some built by now, at least prototype ones, already providing some economical electrical access to GEO, yet the reality test is that people did not do it!

There are gloomy websites devoted to futures, all apparently unaware of existence of KESTS to GEO's potentials to rescue our futures. They focus on the sudden collapse of industrial civilization when oil peaks production and begins a rapid decline; CO2 accumulation Greenhouse Effect causing massive climate change and flooding of coastal cities; starvation and pestilence going rampant again; the Implosion of Civilization.

Not being quite that pessimistic, the factors most influential are:

1) public's blaise belief everything is fine, no big problem lurks;

2) relatively inexpensive abundant energy from fossil petrochemicals used for fuels increasingly are used for industrialization of the countries upon which the oil reserves exist, less to be sold to other countries, and increasingly speed the depletion of economically recoverable oil reserves, while also increasing the CO2 load on the environment so the the greenhouse effects increase;

3) continued accumulation of industrial civilization's toxic waste materials which nature can't recycle, increasingly poison the world's ecosystem including nutritional sources and drinking water;

4) focus blame on "overpopulation" institutes forcible reproduction control, as always likely to benefit the few; does nothing for the toxic materials problem of modern man's civilization; a reduced population would likely still drive their gargantuan tough SUV's to work and use unrecyclable computers and TV's, for example.

5) sudden collapse of any of these systems could cause cascade failures of the other systems already weakened, causing massive "die-off" of living systems including human. Whether some pockets of agrarian people survive depends largely on how sick we have made the ecosystem through all that.

Copyright © 2004 James E. D. Cline