Nanotech Coating Produces Electricity From Sewage

http://www.dailytech.com/Nanotech+Coating+Produces+Electricity+From+Sewage/article19130.htm

Could change the face of wastewater treatment

Oregon State University engineers haveapplied new coatings on anodes of microbial electrochemical cells, which heightens their electricity production by 20 times, and is another step closer to producing electricity from sewage. 

The graphite anodes were coated with palladium at one point in order to produce electricity, but that didn't produce quite as much as the nanoparticle layer of gold, which is what increased the electricity production by about 20 times. This is a huge advance toward technology that could both produce levels of electricity and clean biowaste at the same time, ultimately changing the face ofrenewable energy and wastewater treatment. Also, this sort of technology could help treat wastewater in developing nations where an inadequate power supplyprevents proper treatment.

During the course of these experiments, researchers inserted bacteria from sewage into an anode chamber and allowed it to form a biofilm, absorb nutrients and grow. The bacteria releases electrons during this process and fuels electricity production. 

"This is an important step toward our goal," said Frank Chaplen, an associate professor of biological and ecological engineering. "We still need some improvements in design of the cathode chamber, and a better understanding of the interaction between different microbial species. But the new approach is clearly producing more electricity." 

In addition, researchers have reason to believe that an iron nanoparticle coating would increase the electrical output of sewage as much as the layer of gold in some types of bacteria. Also, a "similar approach" could produce hydrogen gas rather than electricity, which could lead to further advancements in hydrogen fuel cell technology for cars as well as treating wastewater. 

"Recent advances in nanofabrication provide a unique opportunity to develop efficient electrode materials due to the remarkable structural, electrical and chemical properties of nanomaterials," said the published research paper. "This study demonstrated that nano-decoration can greatly enhance the performance of microbial anodes."

While more research is required to lower costs and improve efficiency, researchers say this technology has been proven in the laboratory. The study was led by Hong Liu, an assistant professor of biological and ecological engineering, and was published in Biosensors and Bioelectronics.

Stanford Study Exposes Lack of Credibility and Expertise Among Climate Skeptics

A study by Stanford University researchers examining expert credibility in climate change has confirmed that climate skeptics and contrarians within the scientific community comprise at best 3% of the field, and are “vastly overshadowed” in expertise by their colleagues who agree that manmade climate change is real.

As readers of DeSmogBlog know well, the credibility of climate science and scientists has come under attack in recent months. In the wake of the Climategate episode –portrayed in the right wing media as a scandalous cover-up while independent investigations found no evidence calling into question the integrity of climate science – skeptics have loudly argued that the public shouldn’t trust the overwhelming consensus among scientists that man-made climate change is real.

Flipping that faulty assertion on its head, this new Stanford study, published today in the highly-regarded journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provides even more reason for the public to scrutinize the credibility of the skeptics and contrarians themselves, showing them to possess less direct expertise and far fewer published works in the climate science literature than colleagues who agree with the consensus view.

Examining a group of 1,372 climate researchers, their publications and the number of times their work is cited by peers in related studies, the Stanford researchers found that:

1) 97-98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field support the tenets of [man-made climate change] outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; and 2) the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of [man-made climate change] are substantially below that of the convinced researchers.”

The authors found that:

“the expertise and prominence, two integral components of overall expert credibility, of climate researchers convinced by the evidence of [anthropogenic climate change] vastly overshadows that of the climate change skeptics and contrarians.”

Reviews of the scientific literature and surveys of climate scientists “indicate striking agreement with the primary conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC),” according to the study.

But you would hardly know that from watching Fox News or reading mainstream media coverage of climate change lately.

Using Climategate and the juvenile theatrics of a handful of Republican politicians as fuel, climate deniers have waged a fierce media campaign to confuse the public in recent months, an effort that poll results in the U.S. indicate had a negative impact on public understanding of climate change and recognition of the urgent need to address it.

While skeptics have been given plenty of oxygen on talk radio and TV lately, they remain remarkably quiet in the annals of peer-reviewed literature. Reams of data and papers have been published in the best scientific journals documenting and supporting the consensus view that humans have altered the climate in potentially catastrophic ways.

In contrast, evidence to support the views of contrarians and skeptics remains mostly unrecognized and unpublished in scientific journals. That is not an indication that the peer-review process is somehow corrupt, as some skeptics contend, but rather a clear sign that skeptics have failed to present to their peers any credible evidence to support their contrary opinions.

It is interesting to note that the study, which was funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and Stanford University, did not look at the issue of industry funding or conflicts of interest among the skeptics identified in the report. Even without taking those important factors into account, the Stanford researchers demonstrate a clear lack of credibility among skeptics who doubt man-made climate change. The vast majority of skeptics who signed onto joint statements denying man-made climate change “have not published extensively in the peer-reviewed climate literature,” the study found.

This study from Stanford has documented yet again the total lack of credibility and expertise among climate skeptics, yet as long as Fox News and talk radio exist, the public will continue to be duped into the false assumption that there is doubt among the scientific community on this issue.

While President Obama has pledged to craft policy based on the best science available and to consult with the most credible experts, climate skeptics have used biased media outlets and a bullhorn to sow doubt about the scientific consensus on climate change. That dangerous distraction enables lawmakers to avoid making science-based policy decisions, delaying action on climate change and fostering continued dependence on dirty energy sources.

Joe Public v the volcano - Slavoj Zizek

We are living in an age when we are both able to change nature and more at its mercy than ever –– as the Icelandic volcano has proved.

Many of those who have a fear of flying are haunted by a particular thought: that is, how many parts of such a complicated machine as a modern plane have to function smoothly in order for it to stay in the air? One small lever breaks somewhere, and the plane may spiral downwards . . . When you start to think how many things could go wrong, you cannot help but panic.

The people of Europe have experienced something similar in the past few weeks. That a cloud from a minor volcanic eruption in Iceland - a small disturbance in the complex mechanism of life on earth - can bring to a standstill the air traffic over almost an entire continent is a reminder of how humankind, for all its power to transform nature, remains just another living species on the planet.

The serious socio-economic impact of such a minor outburst is a result of our technological development (in this case, air travel); a century ago, such an eruption would have passed almost unnoticed. Technological development has made us more independent from nature and, at the same time, on a different level, more dependent on nature's whims. Decades ago, when a man first stepped on the surface of the moon, his now-legendary words were "That's one small step for [a] man; one giant leap for mankind". With the eruption in Iceland, it was more "a small step back for nature, but a giant step back for humankind".

Our growing freedom from and control over nature - indeed our survival - rely on a series of stable natural parameters that we tend to take for granted: in temperature, for example, the composition of the air, water and energy supply, and so on. We can "do what we want" only so long as we remain marginal enough. The limits to our freedom become palpable with ecological disturbances, as our ability to transform nature destabilises the basic geological conditions of life on earth.

That humankind is becoming a geological agent on earth indicates the beginning of a geological era that some scientists have named the "Anthropocene": the time of man. Certainly, there are good reasons to surmise that the main cause of the unexpected strength of the devastating earthquake in China in 2008 (if not the earthquake itself) was the construction of the enormous Zipingpu Dam in the region. This created large new artificial reservoirs, and the additional pressure on the surface seems to have influenced the balance of the underground cliffs, thus contributing to the earthquake.

There is, however, something deceptively reassuring in this readiness to assume responsibility for the threats to our environment. We like to feel guilty because that suggests everything depends on us - if we pull the strings of the catastrophe, then we can save ourselves simply by changing our lives. The ongoing volcanic outburst is a reminder that our ecological troubles cannot be reduced to our hubris, to our disturbing the balanced order of earth.

Nature is chaotic and prone to wild, unpredictable and meaningless disasters, and we are exposed to its merciless whims - there is no Mother Earth watching over us. Indeed, in the case of a volcano, the danger comes from inside the bowels of the earth; from beneath our feet, not from outer space. We have nowhere to withdraw.

Science is helpless

In the media, the volcanic ash has sometimes been treated as a natural catastrophe, sometimes as a meteorological phenomenon; sometimes it has been said to concern the economy (that is, the financial loss of the airline companies or of those who rely on air transport, such as the flower growers in Kenya). At other times the focus has been on the disruption of social life and the plight of passengers stranded abroad for days, even weeks. The main argument in favour of the closure of airspace over Europe was the danger that the volcanic dust posed to planes' engines; the main argument against was the financial loss this closure entailed for the airlines and the wider economy.

The confusion of natural and cultural or economic concerns in the arguments over the prohibition of flights raised the following suspicion: how come the scientific evidence began to suggest it was safe to fly over most of Europe just when the pressure from the airlines became most intense? Is this not further proof that capital is the only real thing in our lives, with even scientific judgements having to bend to its will?
The problem is that scientists are supposed to know, but they do not. Science is helpless and covers up this helplessness with a deceptive screen of expert assurance. We rely more and more on experts, even in the most intimate domains of our experience (sexuality and religion). As a result, the field of scientific knowledge is transformed into a terrain of conflicting "expert opinions".

Most of the threats we face today are not external (or "natural"), but generated by human activity shaped by science (the ecological consequences of our industry, say, or the psychic consequences of uncontrolled genetic engineering), so that the sciences are simultaneously the source of such threats, our best hope of understanding those threats, and the means through which we may find a way of coping with them.

Even if we blame scientific-technological civilisation for global warming, we need the same science not only to define the scope of the threat, but also, often, to perceive it in the first place. The "ozone hole", for example, can be "seen" in the sky only by scientists. That line from Wagner's Parsifal - "Die Wunde schliest der Speer nur, der Sie schlug" ("The wound can only be healed by the spear that made it") - acquires a new relevance here.

How much can we "safely" pollute our environment? How many fossil fuels can we burn? How much of a poisonous substance does not threaten our health? That our knowledge has limitations does not mean we shouldn't exaggerate the ecological threat. On the contrary, we should be even more careful about it, given that the situation is extremely unpredictable. The recent uncertainties about global warming signal not that things are not too serious, but that they are even more chaotic than we thought, and that natural and social factors are inextricably linked.

Either we take the threat of ecological catastrophe seriously and decide today to do things that, if the catastrophe does not occur, will
appear ridiculous, or we do nothing and risk losing everything if the catastrophe does take place. The worst response would be to apply
a limited range of measures - in that case, we will fail whatever happens.

Unknown knowns

When it comes to the risk of ecological catastrophe, we are dealing with "unknown unknowns", to use the terms of the Rumsfeldian theory of knowledge. Donald Rumsfeld set out this theory in a bit of amateur philosophising in February 2002, when he was still George W Bush's defence secretary. He said:

There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don't know we don't know.

What Rumsfeld forgot to add was the crucial fourth term: the "unknown knowns", things we don't know that we know - which is the Freudian unconscious, the "knowledge which doesn't know itself", as Lacan put it. To the assertion that the main dangers in the Iraq war were the "unknown unknowns" - the threats that we did not even suspect existed - we should reply that the main dangers are, on the contrary, the "unknown knowns", the disavowed beliefs and suppositions to which we are not even aware we adhere.

In the case of ecology, these disavowed beliefs and suppositions are the ones that prevent people from believing in the possibility of cata­strophe, and they combine with the "unknown unknowns".

Humankind should get ready to live in a more nomadic way: local or global changes in environment may demand unprecedented large-scale social transformations. Let's say that a huge volcanic eruption makes the whole of Iceland uninhabitable: where will the people of Iceland move? Under what conditions? Should they be given a piece of land, or just dispersed around the world? What if northern Siberia becomes more inhabitable and appropriate for agriculture, while great swaths of sub-Saharan Africa become too dry for a large population to live there - how will the exchange of population be organised? When similar things happened in the past, the social changes occurred in a wild, spontaneous way, with violence and destruction. Such a prospect is catastrophic in a world in which many nations have access to weapons of mass destruction.

One thing is clear: national sovereignty will have to be redefined and new levels of global co-operation invented. And what about the immense changes to economies and consumption levels demanded and brought about by new weather patterns or shortages of water and energy sources? How will such changes be decided and executed?

It is instructive, here, to return to the four elements of what the French Marxist philosopher Alain Badiou calls the "eternal idea" of revolutionary politics. What is demanded, first, is strict egalitarian justice: worldwide norms of per capita energy consumption should be imposed, stopping developed nations from poisoning the environment at the present rate while blaming developing countries, from Brazil to China, for ruining our shared environment.

Terror firmer

Second, terror: the ruthless punishment of all those who violate the imposed protective measures, including severe limitations of liberal "freedoms" and the technological control of prospective lawbreakers. Third, voluntarism: the only way to confront the threat of ecological catastrophe is by means of collective decision-making that will arrest the "spontaneous" logic of capitalist development (Walter Benjamin, in his essay "On the Concept of History", pointed out that the task of a revolution is to "stop the train" of history that runs towards the precipice of global catastrophe - an insight that has gained new weight with the prospect of ecological catastrophe).

Last but not least, trust in the people: the wager that the large majority of the people support these severe measures, see them as their own and are ready to participate in their enforcement. We should not be afraid to encourage, as a combination of terror and trust in the people, the resurgence of an important figure in all egalitarian-revolutionary terror - the "informer" who denounces culprits to the authorities. (In the case of the Enron scandal, Time magazine was right to celebrate the insiders who tipped off the financial authorities as true public heroes.)

Once upon a time, we called this communism.

Volta pöördub näoga filmitööstuse poole

Tundus teemasse, energiasääst ja innovatsioon:

"Miks peaks eestlaste LED parem olema kui praegu kasutatav valgustus? "Kogu võtteplatsi kulu valgustusele ja transpordile väheneks tunduvalt," selgitas Reivik.

Kui praegu on vaja vähemalt kaubabussi, et transportida võtteplatsile vaid valgustuse jaoks vaja minevaid elektrijuhtmeid, siis tulevikus võiks tema sõnul LED-valgustite väiksemate gabariitide ja võimsama valguse tõttu kogu võtteplatsi valgustus ära mahtuda sõiduautosse."

Volta pöördub näoga filmitööstuse poole

28.05.2010, 08:32 Loe kommentaare (7)

3D-kaamera loojatena tuntuks saanud meestel on käsil uus projekt, millega plaanitakse minna valgustama filmitööstust.

Valgustama just selles mõttes, et peaks praeguseid HMI (elavhõbehaliidil põhinevaid) lampe hakkaksid asendama võimsamad, odavamad ja säästlikumad LED-valgustid.

"Tuua välja toode, mis asendaks praegust HMI-valgustit - see vallandaks revolutsiooni ning muudaks filmide tegemise odavamaks," rääkis 3D-kaamera üks looja Kaur Kallas.Kallase sõnul plaanitakse järgmise paari aastaga EASi toetuse abil investeerida 20 miljonit krooni, et välja arendada tehnoloogiliselt täiuslik LED-valgusti prototüüp ja siis seda tootma hakata.

Tootma plaanitakse hakata siinsamas Tallinnas asuvas Volta tehases. "Tootmine jääb kindlasti Eestisse, sest äristruktuur, kus suurem osa tootmisest asub Hiinas, ei ole jätkusuutlik," rääkis Volta tehnikadirektor Madis Reivik.

"Turg on õhuke ja me ei müü oma tooteid lõpptarbijale, vaid filmitööstusele ja nemad peavad Euroopa Liidu toodangut kvaliteetsemaks," lisas Kallas.

Tasub ära juba paari võtteperioodiga

Ühe valgusti hind võiks tulevikus olla alla 1000 euro, mis on praegu kasutatavast valgustusest 30% soodsam. "Tasuvusaeg on sellel tehnoloogial absurdselt lühike ehk mõne võtteperioodiga tasuks investeering juba ära," rääkis Reivik.

Miks peaks eestlaste LED parem olema kui praegu kasutatav valgustus? "Kogu võtteplatsi kulu valgustusele ja transpordile väheneks tunduvalt," selgitas Reivik.

Kui praegu on vaja vähemalt kaubabussi, et transportida võtteplatsile vaid valgustuse jaoks vaja minevaid elektrijuhtmeid, siis tulevikus võiks tema sõnul LED-valgustite väiksemate gabariitide ja võimsama valguse tõttu kogu võtteplatsi valgustus ära mahtuda sõiduautosse.

Aastakäibeks oodatakse tulevikus kuni 100 miljonit

Koostöö Voltaga oli Kallase sõnul soodsaim ning samas ka loogiline lahendus, kuna Baltimaades on tehas ainuke, kellel on LEDdega töötamise kogemus. Reivik lubas, et Volta suudab LED-valgusteid toota 100-1000 tükki päevas, vastavalt sellele, kuidas nõudlust on. "Selleks plaanib Volta laiendada ka tootmisbaasi 5-10 miljoni krooni eest," lisas ta.

LED-valgusti võiks Kallase sõnul tootmisesse jõudmise järel ettevõtmise kasumisse viia 3,5 aastaga ning 10 aastaga loodetakse käibes jõuda 0,8%ni kogu filmivalgustite turust. "Reaalne käive võiks olla 50-100 miljonit krooni aastas," lisas Reivik.

LEDde promomist plaanitakse alustada Ida-Euroopast ja Aasiast, kus filmide eelarve on väiksem ja kulud valgustusele moodustavad eelarvest suurema osa.

"Kui meid seal hästi vastu võetakse, tuleb ka Ameerika järele, sest seal ollakse lihtsalt uute asjade proovimisel vähem riskialtid," põhjendas Kallas. Tema sõnul on varajast prototüüpi tutvustatud ka Poolas filmitehnikat rentivatele firmadele, kel on uue toote vastu suur huvi.

Kommentaarid

Raivo Lugima, Filmimees OÜ suuromanik ja juht

Kui tehnoloogia areneb ja suudetakse luua ja asendada järjest energiasäästlikumaid meetodeid, siis kindlasti oleks turgu. LED-valgusti peab lihtsalt suutma konkureerida oma omaduste poolest. Kui ta teeb sama töö ära kolm või kuus korda väiksema energiaga, siis jumal hoidku... Oleksin nõus ka ise neid testima. Me oleme kasutanud LED väikseid kaamera akulampe ja need on end küll õigustanud, aga suuri ma ei ole kohanud.

Hendrik Saks, valgusmeister

Põhimõtteliselt vajab filmitööstus uuendusi küll, aga ega neid uuendusi väga kergelt ei toetata.

Kui võtta suured prožektorid, siis LEDga ei tee nii võimast valgust. Vahel on vaja ühte valgusallikat, mis valgustaks nagu Kuu, aga mida tuhmim on valgusallikas, seda teravam on vari. LEDga on üks suur pind, see annab sellist pehmet valgust ja vari tuleb mahedam. Eks sel LED-l ole tulevikku küll, aga et see vahetaks prožektorid välja, seda kindlasti mitte.

TASUB TEADA

LED-valgusti eelised HMI ees

• ei vaja tööstusvoolu, on energiasäästlik

• eluiga pea igavene, kulud valgustusele langevad tunduvalt

• valgusti juhtplokk ei tekita heli

• valgusspekter on parem

• vette kukkudes ei põhjusta katastroofilisi tagajärgi, võrreldes HMI-valgustitega

• saab kombineerida tavalise valgustiga

• saab ehitada väiksemaid, aga võimsamalt valgustavaid paneele

• hoolduskulud on peaaegu olematud

Gulf Oil Spill

THE LIFEBOAT MOVEMENT IN VERMONT

VIDEO

This is my first real large talk since 2005. I held nothing back. In it, I say things that are certain to tick off almost everybody out there. That was intended. What I want now is for anybody to challenge me to back up anything that I said here on mainstream media. (Special thanks to George Galloway. You showed me how to do this.) Vermont is a very special place. It is one of only two states in U.S. history that were independent republics before voting to enter the Union. The other, of course, was Texas. I just spent almost a week in Vermont on a whirlwind tour that included major speaking engagements in Burlington, Montpelier and Brattleboro; two TV appearances (including this one); two in-studio radio interviews, and many smaller appearances at a number of venues. Vermont is unique among all the states in that, by itself, it could be made into a lifeboat as a state. I met with both the Gubernatorial (Dennis Steele) and Lt. Governor candidates as well as candidates for the state senate. As I listened to them I heard that their concerns -- as well as their emerging platform -- are taken from the pages of the collapse of human industrial civilization.

What you will see here is explosive and controversial. I guess you could say I'm really back now. It's time to bring this to a head because there is no more time to waste. From now on I will refer to the Peak Oil/Sustainability movement only as the Lifeboat Movemement, because that's what it is. It belongs to all mankind.

MCR

Doomsayers Beware, a Bright Future Beckons

Long before “sustainable” became a buzzword, intellectuals wondered how long industrial society could survive. In “The Idea of Decline in Western History,” after surveying predictions from the mid-19th century until today, the historian Arthur Herman identifies two consistently dominant schools of thought.

The first school despairs because it foresees inevitable ruin. The second school is hopeful — but only because these intellectuals foresee ruin, too, and can hardly wait for the decadent modern world to be replaced by one more to their liking. Every now and then, someone comes along to note that society has failed to collapse and might go on prospering, but the notion is promptly dismissed in academia as happy talk from a simpleton. Predicting that the world will not end is also pretty good insurance against a prolonged stay on the best-seller list. Have you read Julian Simon’s “The State of Humanity”? Indur Goklany’s “The Improving State of the World”? Gregg Easterbrook’s “Sonic Boom”?

Good books all, and so is the newest addition to this slender canon, “The Rational Optimist,” by Matt Ridley. It does much more than debunk the doomsaying. Dr. Ridley provides a grand unified theory of history from the Stone Age to the better age awaiting us in 2100.

It’s an audacious task, but he has the intellectual breadth for it. A trained zoologist and former editor at The Economist, Dr. Ridley has established himself in previous books, like “The Origins of Virtue” and “Genome,” as the supreme synthesist of lessons from anthropology, psychology, molecular genetics, economics and game theory. This time he takes on all of human history, starting with our mysteriously successful debut. What made Homo sapiens so special? Dr. Ridley argues that it wasn’t our big brain, because Neanderthals had a big brain, too. Nor was it our willingness to help one another, because apes and other social animals also had an instinct for reciprocity.

“At some point,” Dr. Ridley writes, “after millions of years of indulging in reciprocal back-scratching of gradually increasing intensity, one species, and one alone, stumbled upon an entirely different trick. Adam gave Oz an object in exchange for a different object.”

The evidence for this trick is in perforated seashells from more than 80,000 years ago that ended up far from the nearest coast, an indication that inlanders were bartering to get ornamental seashells from coastal dwellers. Unlike the contemporary Neanderthals, who apparently relied just on local resources, those modern humans could shop for imports.

“The extraordinary promise of this event was that Adam potentially now had access to objects he did not know how to make or find; and so did Oz,” Dr. Ridley writes. People traded goods, services and, most important, knowledge, creating a collective intelligence: “Ten individuals could know between them ten things, while each understanding one.”

As they specialized and exchanged, humans learned how to domesticate crops and animals and sell food to passing merchants. Traders congregated in the first cities and built ships that spread goods and ideas around the world.

The Phoenician merchants who sailed the Mediterranean were denounced by Hebrew prophets like Isaiah and Greek intellectuals like Homer. But trading networks enabled the ancient Greeks to develop their alphabet, mathematics and science, and later fostered innovation in the trading hubs of the Roman Empire, India, China, Arabia, Renaissance Italy and other European capitals.

Rulers like to take credit for the advances during their reigns, and scientists like to see their theories as the source of technological progress. But Dr. Ridley argues that they’ve both got it backward: traders’ wealth builds empires, and entrepreneurial tinkerers are more likely to inspire scientists than vice versa. From Stone Age seashells to the steam engine to the personal computer, innovation has mostly been a bottom-up process.

“Forget wars, religions, famines and poems for the moment,” Dr. Ridley writes. “This is history’s greatest theme: the metastasis of exchange, specialization and the invention it has called forth, the ‘creation’ of time.”

You can appreciate the timesaving benefits through a measure devised by the economist William D. Nordhaus: how long it takes the average worker to pay for an hour of reading light. In ancient Babylon, it took more than 50 hours to pay for that light from a sesame-oil lamp. In 1800, it took more than six hours of work to pay for it from a tallow candle. Today, thanks to the countless specialists producing electricity and compact fluorescent bulbs, it takes less than a second. That technological progress, though, was sporadic. Innovation would flourish in one trading hub for a while but then stagnate, sometimes because of external predators — roving pirates, invading barbarians — but more often because of internal parasites, as Dr. Ridley writes:

“Empires bought stability at the price of creating a parasitic court; monotheistic religions bought social cohesion at the expense of a parasitic priestly class; nationalism bought power at the expense of a parasitic military; socialism bought equality at the price of a parasitic bureaucracy; capitalism bought efficiency at the price of parasitic financiers.”

Progress this century could be impeded by politics, wars, plagues or climate change, but Dr. Ridley argues that, as usual, the “apocaholics” are overstating the risks and underestimating innovative responses.

“The modern world is a history of ideas meeting, mixing, mating and mutating,” Dr. Ridley writes. “And the reason that economic growth has accelerated so in the past two centuries is down to the fact that ideas have been mixing more than ever before.”

Our progress is unsustainable, he argues, only if we stifle innovation and trade, the way China and other empires did in the past. Is that possible? Well, European countries are already banning technologies based on the precautionary principle requiring advance proof that they’re risk-free. Americans are turning more protectionist and advocating byzantine restrictions like carbon tariffs. Globalization is denounced by affluent Westerners preaching a return to self-sufficiency.

But with new hubs of innovation emerging elsewhere, and with ideas spreading faster than ever on the Internet, Dr. Ridley expects bottom-up innovators to prevail. His prediction for the rest of the century: “Prosperity spreads, technology progresses, poverty declines, disease retreats, fecundity falls, happiness increases, violence atrophies, freedom grows, knowledge flourishes, the environment improves and wilderness expands.”

If you’re not ready to trust an optimist, if you still fear a reckoning is at hand, you might consider the words of Thomas B. Macaulay, a British poet, historian and politician who criticized doomsayers of the mid-1800s.

“We cannot absolutely prove,” he wrote, “that those are in error who tell us that society has reached a turning point, that we have seen our best days. But so said all who came before us, and with just as much apparent reason.”