Future thrills

We know that the sun, the winds, the waves, running water is energetic and can be harnessed for human purposes. Much has been done, and more will come. These energies have a high level of sustainability.

But there is more. The geothermal heat can also be used, and this is already done in many areas, especially where there is volcanic activity near the surface of the earth. Examples are the US, New Zealand, Philipines,  Iceland and others where part of the energy is taken from these sources. This energy is quite close to the surface which makes it easy to utilize, although there are risks as well.

But we know that by going deeper – in non volcanic areas – heat can be found down there in the stone masses.

An example is found in the city of Oslo, Norway where a project will collect energy about 5 km underground. This energy will be green, sustainable and available for a long time. A certain cooling seems to be expected, maybe in 100 – 200 years. Here geological subterranean surveys have been undertaken, and good areas have been found. Down here there is a degradation of radioactive substances like uranium, thorium, kalium resulting in the creation of heat. No CO2!

The oil industry knows how to drill, and a number of wells will now be drilled, connected into a system, filled with water and pumped to the surface. The temperature down there is about 120 degrees C, and the temperature of the water coming up will be about 95 degrees C. The heated water will be distributed in the near area for private housing purposes, and the heat from one such well will be enough for about 2500 habitats.

So possibilities are opening up: you can drill more holes, much deeper, you can use the hot water for electricity generation, you can drill still deeper and have increasing temperatures – about 20-30 degrees C. per km down.

So now interest is increasing: several projects in Norway, many in Germany, and so on. And experience will tell – we will learn and grow this area. And it is much simpler and less risky than wind, waves – so here we will see substantial growth. And the economics? We will se as we learn. Maybe new risks will emerge?

Good work! Put it into your green energy plan.

The end of oil is near – they say. This will be true some time, but we will have oil and gas exploration, pumping and use for a long time to come. Shall we say at least a hundred years? Or 200 years?

Now a Norwegian company has established a global oil and gas database in connection with their energy consulting services . This will be kept continously updated based on facts, reviews, findings from researchers, info from companies and governments all over (most of) the world. They can now make a production profile for most oil and gas fields in the world.

The database can be used by companies for business, governments for policymaking, students for learning, journalists for… and so on.

The company says:

“UCUBE – a revolution within the E&P business intelligence!

UCube is a complete information database for strategy and business development work for the global upstream oil & gas industry. UCube provides field by field bottom-up reserves, production forecast, financial figures and a range of additional decision parameters worldwide with a time span of 200 years. UCube includes more than 70,000 oil & gas fields and licenses, and more than 3,000 companies. Download a brochure describing UCube here.

UCube provides all data available at your fingertips in one, integrated application. UCube comes with an easy to use graphical user interface enabling fast filtering, extraction and display of data. All data is simultaneously updated in graphs, tables and map view.

UCube is run online via a Cube Browser downloaded to your local PC, and can be accessed from anywhere with internet connection. Data is continuously scouted and updated and users can have new versions available over night. How to download and install UCube is described here.

Rystad Energy has developed a number of additional databases, or Cubes, to support quantitative analyses in our consulting projects. Further details of the other Cubes can be found here.”

The link to the company: Rystad Energy

So now we will know – just check the database! And remember that in the course of a very long time oil will be phased out – several hundred years. What is to be found in the unexplored parts of the world: South China sea, the Pacific, the Arctic areas? And what more is to be found where we already are pumping – e.g. under the basalt layers?

So keep exploring, drilling and pumping, lads – there is much more down there.

And another angle to this story is: why don’t we get such databases for everything we have on Earth: iron ore, bauxite, cobalt, uranium, rare earths, gold……. The development, the use, the distribution, the introduction of sustainability principles could all be facilitated – a genuine global improvement that would be. Surely we need that?

If we wanted to have wise men/women in the world: What shall be the basis of knowledge for wise people – what is their knowledge and what do they teach? How will they be trained? Can we find common ground?

Many old cultures have their own ways, their own aims and intentions. The new wise men should provide a neutral way forward, help people find their own I or personality. This can obviously be many things – it is for the person herself to decide.

There may be a need to institutionalize this – connect it to an organisation or movement.

People are initially connected to a local community, with local values, local customs, a sense of belonging. This does not mean you can not move to wherever you want, but you must have a basis that is safe, well known, and shared. Developments may take you many places, and hopefully the knowledge you base your existence on is adaptable and broad enough to accommodate you wherever you are.

The knowledge might be structured something like this:

• Deep ecology of the Earth
• Understanding and knowing yourself, life choices, life possibilities, learning to stretch the mind, find out about the forces of the mind,  consciousness, life itself
• Relating to others
• World history
• Human societies, ways to live
• The wisdom of change, the inevitability of change
• World tour to develop thinking, observe, participate, learn
• Initiation rite, ceremony

Individuals must have the will to take part in such schemes. There is also the question of do we need this? The simple intention is to establish working on your own inner world, and hopefully that many would like to participate. Harmonious people – harmonious world – a world of consideration, helpfulness, thoughtfulness.

There is room for everybody here if we make it so.

There clearly are a lot of things we do not understand, and we should not call them mysteries, spiritism and “outlaw” them, but try to find out more so we can have a better civilization.

The Silk Road was the transport system going from the East – Mongolia, China, other old states that once were – to the West – Middle East, Persia, India, even Europe. It appears the Greeks had exchanges of ideas with eastern emissaries.

The Silk Road seems to have originated in Xian in China, ending in the Middle East and going into the Roman sphere.

There are many parallel roads and side roads in the Silk Road system, and silk from China was once an important part of the trade. The trade went on for thousands of years, rudiments are still there.

The Silk Road is now a mythical concept that once was, it was about trade and culture, Marco Polo made it known, meeting Mongol and Chinese rulers, traders of many kinds have used it for centuries as a transport system for goods and ideas, exchanging these between East and West.

We knew little then, it was hard to travel, but many important technical products were exchanged and ideas flowed both ways.  Trade, pilgrims, soldiers, nomads, emissaries went from East to West and back – cultures were exchanged, giving impulses for development in both places.

So trade of goods and ideas on the Silk Road was significant in the development of our civilization, it contributed to the development of the modern world.

We should consider reopening the Silk Road in order to facilitate the exchange of culture, build understanding of roles in the new world that is emerging. The emerging power of the East – India, China, the rest of Asia – makes it important that we know each other’s thinking, develop personal relationships so that focus can be on peaceful activity to benefit all. The main focus should be on the human and spiritual side of being – to find a new area of focus outside the business/military complex.

China and India have made agreements to start a process developing links between the two countries, and we should all join in. This time the Silk Road should also include the US and all of western Europe, even the South Americas and Africa.

Maybe a naive idea, but the world needs a new focus to avoid building new blocks and power groups and help giving us a more balanced world.

Let the flow of ideas be the most important for the new Silk Road, the old regime of Western/US domination based on business/militarism alone needs replacement with a better system – to make a better world. The cultural side should be strong, so we can expand the human side of being.

India and China have started the work – other should join. It is not too late.

It is interesting to follow the development of modern art forms, and performance art seems to be on the rise. It can not easily be put into nice and predictable category-boxes, it is a challenge for all of us: to take part, be surprised, to understand, to think afterwards.

This weekend the city of Bergen, Norway had an arrangement called Never or Now, also presenting a seminar to discuss, explain and contextualize the art.

Performance art shows the active body in space interacting with others, pictures, things and artefacts, videos in real time. The possibilities for variation are immense – for suprises also.

The aim is to be quiet, dramatic, tense, funny, shocking, abnormal – it is all up to the artist who is a free spirit. The artist wants to make you part of his world, to make you better understand your own.

So the members of the audience can expect anything, unpredictability is part of performance art, real life comes up. Performance art is also a one-off, so you have to be there.

The Never or Now festival in Bergen takes place in the former Bergen Kjøtt (meatproduction facility), an old 4-storey, 2000m2 building which has been converted into studios for artists of all kinds, and that can take about 1000 spectators.

There are many simultaneous performances, most specially made for the site – and beware also of the off-site performances. Artists have been given carte blanche – boundaries are loose.

Is this kind of art bringing us closer to what life is all really all about? There is resistance, some surprises surpass what we like, the thinking is often so-called bizarre – but maturity must never come or the performance art loses itself.

Se link Never or Now Performance Art Festival

May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser, professors of neurosciences at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway, have found that the brain makes its own maps. They have been awarded the 2011 Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine for this and similar work.

The brain of the rat – and probably human brains too – has a kind of “biological GPS” which provides individuals with a sense of spatial orientation.

Individuals have the ability to find their way when they need to go from one point to another, and they can memorize spatial environments. The neurons that contribute to this are situated in the hippocampus and the entorhinal cortex.

The entorhinal cortex is where information is processed prior to being sent to the hippocampus, and this is where the professors discovered the existence of special neurons which they called “grid cells”.

These cells fire selectively when the individual passes different locations in the environment. (What impulse or signal fires the cells – what are signals and where do they come from? Visual through the eyes?) The firing locations of each cell define a periodic triangular array that tiles the entire space visited by the subject, much like the cross points of graphics paper, but with an equilateral triangle as the unit of the grid.

The brain thus makes its own maps.

So the the entorhinal cortex turns out to be a crossroads in the network of neurons, and it allows us to find our way.

The Mosers also identified other types of neurons which play a part in navigation. They found cells in the brain system that respond selectively depending on the direction taken by the animal, and cells that tell the animal when it is approaching the physical limits of its environment. The signals emanating from these different cells are used by spatial memory circuits in the hippocampus.

Edvard and May-Britt Moser’s discoveries are quite remarkable. They have shown how the brain calculates the position of the organism in its spatial environment, completely overturning prior conventional thinking in the field.

You already have a GPS and you didn’t know? That is because it has been on “automatic” all the time.

When shall we se the end of conventional thinking?

See link: NTNU News

The re-thinking of the US role in the world ought to be on many people’s agenda. Strain is visible, and there are now obvious grave budgetary difficulties, and something has got to give – or happen.

It all has to do with military spending: the military part of the budget has passed 50 %, there is a non-solved economic crisis going on touching upon all ordinary Americans lives. The US military spending is about half the military spending of the whole world – with 5% of the world population. Nobody seems to be willing to challenge this activity, to end wars, to turn all this productive capacity into bettering the lot of the ordinary Americans instead.

The US defence activity is not a project to protect own shores and land, it is about being active all over the world, about policing the world, and building and wielding economic power for a select few. It has been said that American forces can be present anywhere in the world in the course of two hours. It is a great machine.

A new arms race seems to have been set in motion related to China. Other conflicts are boiling in many places, there is heavy arming in the Middle East – the US military industry is producing like never before, weapons are also bought in many countries. The people of the US benefit only slightly from this, but the owners of the military industry benefits wildly. In the process the US has made the world into a playground for itself: pushing security thinking forward, backing it up with military equipment and running a global economic wonder-machine for the select few.

The result of using such massive resources for war purposes is a slow process of suffocation for US society and the US role in the world. This clearly can not go on. The USSR is already a goner – will the US be the next one? Or will there be a war soon – to prop up the economy? A disgraceful thought of course.

The US never disarmed after world war one – it appeared there was lots of money to be made keeping military activity on a high level. It also never disarmed after World War II – there was just too much money to be made. And it will just keep going so long as the taxpayers can pay.

It has all been called the military-industrial complex MIC, war has become part of the economic policy, it stimulates the economy, war is good for the economy. Similar thinking has earlier been seen in Britain, Germany, France in colonial days. But now US taxpayers are seeing the picture: The US economy can no longer carry this burden – the end is near. People are not getting what they should have for their tax money: a good life. The politicians see this well, but appear lame.

Also the fearmongering – we had the cold war, now is terror – what will be the next – glorifying war – we don’t need enemies to have a society.

Is this all we can say – is there a systemic force at work that we can not control? Is this the fruit of centuries of civilisation, of idealistic nation-building? Think what is possible instead – what it could be.