PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

7. COMPETITION IS THE CREATOR AND THE REGULATOR
approach the straight line proposed by the model. One may ask what
was the prime mover here—the environmental concerns that succeeded
in slowing the rate of growth or the nuclear energy craze that forced environmentalists
to react?
The coming to life of such a craze is understandable. Nuclear energy
made a world-shaking appearance in the closing act of World War II by
demonstrating the human ability to access superhuman powers. I use the
word superhuman because the bases of nuclear reactions are the mechanisms
through which stars generate their energy. Humans for the first
time possessed the sources of power that feed our sun, which was often
considered as a god in the past. At the same time mankind acquired independence;
nuclear is the only energy source that would remain
indefinitely at our disposal if the sun went out.
Figure 7.6 suggests that nuclear energy has a long future. Its share
should grow at a slower rate, with a trajectory parallel to those of oil,
coal, and natural gas. But there is no alternative in sight. The next primary
energy source—fusion and/or solar and/or other—is projected to
enter the picture by supplying 1 percent of the world’s needs in the
2020s. This projection is reasonable because such a technology, once
shown to be feasible, would require about a generation to be mastered
industrially, as was the case with nuclear energy.
Let us try to be optimistic and suppose that progress gallops and a
new clean energy source (possibly involving several technologies) enters
the world market during the first decade of the twenty-first century.
It will have to grow at the normal rate, the rate at which other types of
energy have entered and exited in the past. Therefore, it will have an
impact on nuclear energy similar to the way gas had an impact on oil.
That is, nuclear energy, and to a lesser extent gas, will saturate at lower
levels while the new energy will reach relatively higher shares. Still, nuclear
energy will have played a role at least as important as oil did in its
time.
But another reason I believe this optimistic scenario is unrealistic,
apart from matters of technology is that such a scenario would make the
gas and nuclear peaks come earlier and consequently fall out of step
with the fifty-six year cycle that seems to dominate such cosmic matters.
We will be looking at this cosmic cycle closely in the next chapter,
and in particular in Figure 8.3.
166