Another day, another depressing UN climate meeting. I find myself becoming increasingly incensed by the constant destruction of our world by people who are only interested in personal power and financial gain. If you are an idiot you can argue against climate change, but you can't dispute the rampant pollution, deforestation, over-fishing and unprecedented pace of the destruction of nature that our species is now capable of - and yet, somehow, our elected politicians manage all that and more.
In the linked article about the climate meeting, someone from Greenpeace says "It's absurd to watch governments sit and point fingers and fight like little kids while the scientists explain about the terrifying impacts of climate change". It is absurd, but the thing that most people must surely have noticed by now is that most governments simply don't care about the long-term repercussions of inaction, because politicians are too preoccupied with polls, re-election and/or self-gain.
It's time for us to give up on politicians and solve the problem ourselves.
First we need to come up with a better way of generating power. I must admit, I didn't pay enough attention during physics to achieve this on my own, but someone out there must have a smart idea. Fusion reactors, a gigantic array of solar panels in orbit around the sun beaming the power to ground stations, or one of those perpetual motion machines powered by magnets which always seem to show so much promise in YouTube videos. We need to get together and come up with some good ideas for creating limitless clean power.
Next we need to implement the ideas. We'll need to get our hands on a decent budget to achieve our goals. Sponsorship, bake sales, fun-runs, armed insurrection - however we get funded, we'll then split up into teams and implement the ideas so that we can generate unlimited power.
Then we give the power away to anyone who wants it, for free. Apart from politicians, who have shown they don't deserve power in any form.
With unlimited power, all sorts of things will be possible. As everyone knows, E=MC2, so once we have enough E, we can start making some M. It's a pretty simple equation, so I'm guessing it should be pretty simple to put into practice. We'll build a machine (I call it a "replicator") which generates matter from energy. We just have to build one, then we can use that to build more replicators and give them away to everyone who wants one.
An unlimited flow of free goods will destroy the economies of the world, but that's ok, because who needs money when you have free stuff. We can now all dedicate our lives to the arts, to recreation, and to figuring out how to build massive space ships with warp drives so we can live in space while wearing uncomfortably tight one-piece spandex jumpsuits.
Yesterday I watched SpaceX's Dragon capsule dock with the ISS for the first time, and was struck by just how significant that achievement was for our species. No matter how you feel about the commercialisation of space, our civilisation has reached the point where one man can decide he wants to put something into space and achieve it. Not only that, but we can make it dance around and hook up to something else we put up there, with incredible precision. That is the sort of thing we are capable of. We have figured out how to walk on the moon; how to build tiny boxes that fit in the palm of our hand and contain the sum of all human knowledge; how to pull apart and manipulate the very building blocks of life.
With all we know and have accomplished, I refuse to believe that we are incapable of finding a solution to our apparent incompatibility with nature. My plan may be absurd, but until smarter and more powerful people than me decide they want to fix the problems we have created, it'll have to do.
So. Anyone have any magnets?