The scale of human exploits has long surpassed our ability to comprehend. We are creatures that can barely keep track of 200 individual people in our heads, and yet we are constructing building with capacities of 100,000. Our vision has extended from the narrow cone projecting from our eyes to cover the dark side of the moon, clouds on distant worlds and events so small and so short that their very existence can be validly called into question. And yet we continue forward, the only thing that can possibly limit us is our own ignorance and fear.

I feel we are on a knifes edge between a future best described as mad max with cell phones and the techno-utopias of star trek and the like. What is fascinating is that the gravest threat to human survival is something imaginary: the belief in and wasteful dispensation of money. While the world hangs it self in a noose made of oil pipe, so devoted to a hydrocarbon based source of energy that ripping mountains off the land to extract tarsands, other energy options languish. Yes, hyrdocarbons are they “easiest” fuel. Plentiful, inexpensive (even still), and endlessly applicable. Anywhere you need to create pressure and heat, you can use hydrocarbons. But obviously, the twilight of oil is upon us, with no potential new megawells to be discovered and no hope that the supply will ever meet demand again.

How we meet this challenge as a race, as a species, will determine if we ever have a chance in the greater universe. This peak could be the end of us as a space faring race. As the developed economies start to collapse under the weight of their own debt (another imaginary construct), wars will erupt around the glob, distracting people further from the idea that Man is a species alone on earth, that we must align with one another to bring forth a new age of hope and prosperity. If we extend out into our solar system, we could harness the vast energies of our sun or of the deep resources of fusion fuel on the moon. Such developments could bring forth a time when energy itself is as free and plentiful as the very air.

With such vast supplies of energy, in the form of electricity, it would be reasonable to power every vehicle with a fuel cell or direct hydrogen-oxygen combustion. Such reactions produce nothing but water vapor, and their fuel is water separated into it’s component parts. We cannot do this today because the energy to separate the water molecules is greater than the reaction produces, so the Energy Return over Energy Invested is below one. But with an infinite source of power, say a massive fusion complex powered by lunar helium 3 or a desert turned into a petawatt class solar farm, much of the scarcity inherit in the world disappears.

And that is the choice we have as a race. Shall we continue down the path of scarcity, of hoarding. Or shall we attempt to move beyond our psychology and create a reality where life is free, in the truest of senses. Where the land is not polluted by “cheap” yet truly expensive forms of energy generation. A place that has moved beyond money and ownership as each person would be equal, the riches of the solar system tapped to the benefit of all.