Jethro Tull Dances on Thomas Malthus' Grave, Unleashes a Wicked 18 Minute Jazz Flute Solo

The title for this post is the title of one of the chapters in the book I'm writing, The Church on the Edge of the World and Other Walks Through History (hopefully out by next Summer). I wasn't going to use it here on the blog, but I saw something in the news yesterday that was such a good example of the idea that I couldn't resist giving a taste of it here.

First of all, I'm going to be curious to see how many of you even get the joke in the title. Maybe one of you will explain it to the rest in the comments below.

Anyway, here's the idea...

Thomas Malthus (1766 - 1834) was a British economist and college professor in Hertfordshire, outside London. His big idea was that population grows at a geometric rate while food production grows at an arithmetic rate. So population will exceed resources, leading to the collapse of society, mass starvation, etc. Sound familiar? Liberals positively love Malthus: they've predicted one Malthusian Doomsday Scenario after another for the last 300 years. Mankind is going to use up all the food, the farmland, the oil, the fish in the sea. We'll be frozen by ice ages or roasted by global warming or overrun by crowded cities or have no forests or animals or clean water. Soylent Green is People!

Except... Malthus' predictions never happened.

You see, about 100 years before and about 50 miles away there was this guy named Jethro Tull (1674-1741) in the village of Crowmarsh Gifford. Tull was an agricultural inventor. He tinkered with and made practical the seed drill, which increased crop yields per unit of seed. He advocated the use of horses for plowing instead of oxen because horses were faster and thus allowed farmers to be more efficient with their time. He improved the design of the plow and fertilization methods. It took a couple of generations for Tull's mechanized farming techniques to catch on, but as they did farming became more efficient. In fact, as Malthus was predicting the end of the world he was unaware that a quiet agricultural revolution was going on. The amount of food produced per farmer and per acre went through the roof.

So, what did I see in the news this week that prompted this post? How about this as a Jethro Tull-like leap frog over all the Malthusian Doom and Gloom about running out of energy and carbon pollution:

Nuclear power plants smaller than a garden shed and able to power 20,000 homes will be on sale within five years, say scientists at Los Alamos, the US government laboratory which developed the first atomic bomb.

The miniature reactors will be factory-sealed, contain no weapons-grade material, have no moving parts and will be nearly impossible to steal because they will be encased in concrete and buried underground.

The US government has licensed the technology to Hyperion, a New Mexico-based company which said last week that it has taken its first firm orders and plans to start mass production within five years. 'Our goal is to generate electricity for 10 cents a watt anywhere in the world,' said John Deal, chief executive of Hyperion. 'They will cost approximately $25m [£13m] each. For a community with 10,000 households, that is a very affordable $250 per home.'

Deal claims to have more than 100 firm orders, largely from the oil and electricity industries, but says the company is also targeting developing countries and isolated communities. 'It's leapfrog technology,' he said.

The company plans to set up three factories to produce 4,000 plants between 2013 and 2023. 'We already have a pipeline for 100 reactors, and we are taking our time to tool up to mass-produce this reactor.'

And this:

Other companies are known to be designing micro-reactors. Toshiba has been testing 200KW reactors measuring roughly six metres by two metres. Designed to fuel smaller numbers of homes for longer, they could power a single building for up to 40 years.

You know what sucks, though? The US government will probably never allow them here. We'll invent them but Europe, Latin America, Asia will get them. This is becoming a seriously idiotic country.

Last Friday I posted about how we can't imagine the events of the next 100 years but that in 2108 I imagine that people will still eat their lunch by the lions in Trafalgar Square or in the Sheep Meadow in Central Park. Maybe the buildings around them will be powered by clean, automobile-sized mini-reactors in the basements. Cool.

Michael Crighton died this week of cancer. He famously gave a speech in 2003 about global warming in which he said:

Let's think back to people in 1900 in, say, New York. If they worried about people in 2000, what would they worry about? Probably: Where would people get enough horses? And what would they do about all the horseshit? Horse pollution was bad in 1900, think how much worse it would be a century later, with so many more people riding horses?

But of course, within a few years, nobody rode horses except for sport. And in 2000, France was getting 80% its power from an energy source that was unknown in 1900. Germany, Switzerland, Belgium and Japan were getting more than 30% from this source, unknown in 1900. Remember, people in 1900 didn't know what an atom was. They didn't know its structure. They also didn't know what a radio was, or an airport, or a movie, or a television, or a computer, or a cell phone, or a jet, an antibiotic, a rocket, a satellite, an MRI, ICU, IUD, IBM, IRA, ERA, EEG, EPA, IRS, DOD, PCP, HTML, internet. interferon, instant replay, remote sensing, remote control, speed dialing, gene therapy, gene splicing, genes, spot welding, heat-seeking, bipolar, prozac, leotards, lap dancing, email, tape recorder, CDs, airbags, plastic explosive, plastic, robots, cars, liposuction, transduction, superconduction, dish antennas, step aerobics, smoothies, twelve-step, ultrasound, nylon, rayon, teflon, fiber optics, carpal tunnel, laser surgery, laparoscopy, corneal transplant, kidney transplant, AIDS… None of this would have meant anything to a person in the year 1900. They wouldn't know what you are talking about.

Now. You tell me you can predict the world of 2100. Tell me it's even worth thinking about. Our models just carry the present into the future. They're bound to be wrong. Everybody who gives a moment's thought knows it.

Take that Thomas Malthus! Eat this, Mr. Gloom and Doom: