An article by Sha'Tara...

Stalking the Intractable Future – The Law of Diminishing Returns
                                
[thoughts of a burning woman]

I’ve been working on an interesting problem: the ratio of awareness of the future to ‘remembrance’ of the past.  That is, how much past do I need to remember in order to ‘travel’ a certain amount of ‘time’ into the future.  There has to be a universal formula that applies here but advanced math was never my strong point.  Perhaps those theoretical physicists involved in categorizing chaos are already working on this.  Perhaps, if not, they should be looking into it.

It is by and large believed that the future is intractable; that it cannot be known; that it falls in a similar category as long-term weather predicting.  Some would probably say it remains the exclusive domain of the gods who, we are told, are omniscient.  But this much I know now.  The farther back into the past I delve, the farther into the future I can see.  It’s not only history repeating itself, though there is some of that.  You develop an extra ‘sense’ as to what the future holds based on the past you can remember.  And why not?  It’s pretty simple.  You place yourself at some point in your past and you look into the future from that point.  That particular ‘future’ of course is still in your past.  You can see it.  Now you train your past self to accept what it sees as its future as a real time, with real events. 

Using that method, I have been able to project myself into an Earthian future that makes complete sense, from where I stand here.  And here’s what I find interesting: the “ratio” of past remembering to future awareness is huge.  If I credit my ‘remembrances’ of being a living ‘mermaid’ on the planet Tiamat as real, then I have gone back some 5 billion years.  That amount of past has allowed me to travel past this point into a future 1000 years hence.  I don’t even know how to divide 5 billion by 1000 to state the actual ratio of whatever to one – if anyone here knows how to do that math, please post it back to me!  All I know is, it takes a lot of ‘past’ to be able to travel any ‘distance’ into the future!  And, one must remember that all this work only produces one possible future. 

That’s all very interesting but not very helpful is it?  What we should be looking at is a much shorter range ratio of past to future.  For practical purposes we don’t need to know the future a thousand years hence.  We probably only need to know it ten years hence, enough lead-time to make appropriate changes to our current ways, and to guide our children to be wiser than us if they wish to survive the coming crunch.  How far back do we  need to ‘remember’ to correctly judge this ten-year future?  How about ten thousand years?  That should be fairly easy to do for anyone with limited ‘astral travel’ expertise.

We of earth have accepted the trade-offs offered by our ‘leaders’ that [for example] having a gas-guzzling SUV in the driveway today offsets the disastrous potential of war, famine and homelessness ten to twenty years from now.  We have settled for the Biblical “mess of potage” against our earth heritage; gambling with the law of diminishing returns also called ‘entropy’ or state of disorder. 

The more demand we place on any of earth’s finite resources; the faster we use it up; the sooner we reach the point where it is no longer practical (economical) to draw useful energy from that resource.   We do not need to reach a point of complete entropy to experience the collapse of our technology-based lifestyle.  All we need is to reach the point where one dollar’s worth of input to create a useful item from any resource only yields 99 cents at the point of consumption.  I am not talking about money here, but about total useful energy available from all sources to supply all needs.  That’s the problem of inhabiting a closed system while living as if it was open-ended.  In terms of useful energy – converting heat to work – we live under the rules of finite conditions.

The mega corporations have been facing this problem for quite some time already.  By playing the numbers (remember Enron?) they have been able to hide the truth not only from their investors, employees and Joe consumer, but from themselves at the board-room level.  The first time I heard of corporate cut-backs I knew it was only a matter of time.  Study the history of war and you can ‘see’ long before the end at what point one side is going to lose, even while it is still winning significant battles on many fronts and seems unbeatable.  Napoleon and Hitler make great study subjects. 

For hundreds of years business has fought an undeclared war against the earth environment.  In the last fifty years and less that war was no longer secret: it was openly declared.  Now anyone with an iota of common sense can ‘see’ the inevitable results of that war.  Earth could be depleted of surface resources but it could never lose!  So, guess who must.

I’ve heard the fairy tales.  I know about free energy and secret alien technology.  I know about cars that convert hydrogen from water and run on bottled water that you buy at your convenience store.  I also know about the space ship in my latest science-fiction novel that uses a matter converter to create fuel for itself.  I even know about ‘breatharianism’ (living a perfectly normal physical life without ingesting food or drinking water.)  And I know about the genie and his three wishes.

At the moment and for the foreseeable future there is at least one problem with all that.