What would the world look like if scientists were in control

I think it would be quite a cold, rational world...much like what we have today, which is an attempt at the ultimate triumph of scientific Enlightenment rationalism run by smart people from Harvard/Yale/Princeton/MIT/Chicago...economists, political scientists, biologists, lawyers (legal scientists) behind the very banks and govt agencies you're talking about.  The political show we see on TV is just the game they play to setup the structure of the "rule by smart people."  

A more extreme example of the rule by scientists...the 3rd Reich.  Hitler was just the propagandist in front of the team of scientists in pursuit of better evolution, better allocation of resources, elimination of inefficiencies and surplus people, torturous medical research on the damned, etc.

I'd rather have Gandhi any day...or my loving grandmother for that matter...rather than yet another devotee of Enlightenment rationalism.  The key is the heart, not the mind.

We would still have to have "UnderDog  to Save the Day !"

Hear, hear!  Well said . . . Concise, and dead on. 

Oh gosh, you're so wrong!

A number of theoretical physicists (OK, only one aspect of science) believe in 'a God' because of the beauty of the natural World (to include the structure of the Universe). Chirs is a scientist but would you exclude his measured vews on the basis of his 'rationality'? NO!

Science IS. The way it is used, in the absence of a definitive, is an INTERPRETATION! The 3rd Reich was NOT a rule by scientists, it was a slanted INTERPRETATION by a ruling political elite (ring any bells?) of certain aspects of science! Phrenology was an interpretation (now discredited, but at the time an attempt to interpret known aspects on measurable head measurements). Science measures, interpretation interprets (if that's not tautological!).

If we think of the current issue of the Cap and Trade - we have the 'science', which is ALL WE KNOW GIVEN THE CURRENT AVAILABLE MEASURED OR MEASURABLE DATA, and the interpretation, which is the potential trade in the CandT Credits.

DavidC

DavidC writes:

Science IS.

I would contend that science IS NOT.  There is nothing more relative than science.  What IS, is absolute. 

I don't think the issue is Scientists themselves.  The issue is that one group of "smart people" are not better than another group of "smart people".   Any group that thinks they're better than the other to "rule" the masses is a bad idea.

This:  http://www.thevenusproject.com/

Is a society designed by scientists but there are no "rulers".  I personally think the idea is outstanding.  It's not plausible in my lifetime but I hope a generation or two down the road we'll see something like this.....cheers.

Welcome to the board T1A!

I think a look at our most recently appointed science czar is appropriate here:

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.printable&pageId=103707

Hmmm . . . . .  This is the kind of thinking that results from the intellect being untempered by heart . . .  Also, see my root essay in this thread:  http://www.peakprosperity.com/forum/affairs-heart/ .

T1A, those videos are great examples of why I would shudder at having total control in the hands of scientists, let alone anyone else.  

While very smart, I think Juan would be dangerous as a king.  He's intrigued by DNA clone technology that allows us to reboot a lifeform as a separate species...yowza.  He looks forward to the days when bionic people beat regular people at the olympics.  He looks forward to the days when bionic eyes and ears beat our natural ones...maybe we'll all line up at human factories to get our bionic implants as part of our government-controlled schools of the future?  He clearly desires species evolution controlled by and sped up by scientists so we can have better people...apparently he's not too fond of the billions he lives with today.  

His emotional affect feels disconnected to me...schizoid personality traits, which are common in the upper echelons of the scientific community...it's the disposition that allows someone to be able to enjoy sitting with thousands of pages from science journals to research a narrow topic vs. the type of person who would rather be bar hopping, or the type of person who's just not interested in going deep on a topic, or more interested in making money, or more interested in working with his hands, or more artistic. It's the disposition that makes someone enjoy taking the time to write a long post on a forum like CM.com explaining stuff in detail...yes I have some schizoid traits. :)  Schizoid personalities have intellectualization as a primary defense mechanism.  It happens to be a defense that can serve society well, but it is a defense nonetheless.  That's fine.  We all have them. But it's why no one type of people should have total power. 

We need to realize that scientific achievement is also a bubble.  It's the same exponential growth that everything else has.  Science has gotten to where it is as a result of the financial/political structure we have had.  Do we really need bionic ears that work better than the natural ear?  Do we really need to develop technology that makes the physically handicapped more capable than an olympic athlete?  Do we need to be wandering into the unknown of designing our own humans?  Do we need to be creating new energy potential in order to support the exponential growth that we know must stop eventually?  This science bubble is going to deflate along with the greater economic collapse that will put governments and academia out of business.  

And he missed the primary problem.  He said that we need to reduce our debt and change entitlements/military spending.  Yet he hasn't done the research to realize that entire structure comes from the Federal Reserve...we don't get money, exponential growth, science bubbles, etc unless the government goes heavily into debt via the warfare/welfare political machine.  The economic "scientists" working for the Fed apparently don't know it either, so I'm not picking on Juan.  I'm just saying that he still has to do more work to get to the heart of that problem, and so that's an example of how scientists don't know everything...they can still royally mess up by implementing a plan where they thought they had the answer, but they thought wrong.

If you did not put an Engineering or Scientist Solution to Problems then you would not have a Car to do go work or a computer, fax machine, cell phone, planes, trains, alarm clock, air conditioner, microwave, dish washer, fire alarms, calculator, tv, dvd, mp3, iphones, the list goes on and on.  Human Problems are basically Technical.  

We are wasting our time with Budgets, interest rates, stocks, bonds, anything financial.  Our old way of solving solutions will fail and we will awaken to a new higher level of thinking, because the current path we are on is leading us to a Collapse.  After the Collapse of our current system, Survival is the main concern, not this Greed and Selfishness that we have today.  

The Resource Based Economy Must emerge in order to have a REAL civilization.  The real question is NOT do we have the Money to do something?  The REAL question is Do we have the Resources?  

If an Asteroid is going to Hit the earth, do you really think The leaders of the World would be sitting there Scratching their heads asking "Do we have enough money to blow up the Asteroid?"  

Hi JK21,

Well, as there was plenty of evidence that a finanical asteroid was on its way (I've got books written in the early 2000s that we were heading for problems, I can remember seeing a TV programme about 3-4 years ago on self-declaration mortgages) and a large number of prominent politicinas have said' nobody saw it coming' (oh yes we did), it would not surprise me in the least if the leaders of the World sat there scratching their heads (or other parts of their anatomies) and said 'Asteroid? What asteroid?'

Incidentally, I've just seen Meredith Whitney's video where she 'caused' the big rise in the markets the other day. Joe Saluzzi, of Themis, was on Bloomberg last night (he's brilliant) and said that Whitney was actually very bearish and the markets had latched on to the one  thing it wanted to, ignoring the rest of her talk. He's right.

dailybail.com/home/meredith-whitney-says-unemployment-will-reach-13-cnbc-clip.html

DavidC

Peak population has been hit, in the 70's if you eliminate the additional energy that is being spent on agricultural production (in the developed world that is selling subsidized food to the third world) which is why peak oil is so important and we're around about the peak of oil production now maybe a little over peak maybe a little after peak, James Kunstler in "The Long Emergency" for instance wrote

Peak resources we're near. Copper for instance is a good example, that peaked some time ago too, now we're recycling it, but there was a lot of waste up until about 10 or so years ago. I could see us mining trash dumps for resources within the next 10-20 years.

Unfortunately the time for some of the idea's your positing is well past; time to market for most "inventions'" is 10-15 years of initial invention, research, development and then production, and is hugely resource intensive to get that first unit rolling off a production line. In 10-15 years if we're at Oil peak, which I think that most of us think that we are, and we continue oils use in the same way, the African famines of the 80's and 90's will look like minor hunger problems.

For instance Mexico currently supplies the US with 1/3 of it's oil, in the next ten years the expectation is that that surplus will be consumed by Mexico's internal market, so no oil will be available for the US, so where will we get it from? The Middle East, nope they're running at mostly max production now and world oil consumption is climbing, Russia, nope they have declining reserves and growing markets. Now how will the US produce grain for developing countries with 1/3 of it's oil gone, simply put it can't or if it does then the huge subsidies it currently gives will cease, since many of the developing world countries have a largely stunted agricultural industry (due to cheap imports of US raised corn and wheat) they're to put it quite bluntly screwed.

The reasoning as to why is irrelevant to the problem.

The fact that it's happened (or is happening) at a time where we do not have room for maneuver to try to resolve the situation is.

If only 100 years ago we thought about having too much dependence on oil would turn into a crisis later we wouldn't be in this situation now either. You're seem to be in the denial phase of thinking, which isn't an insult, but we do not have the time to try to fix the system from within the system. Yes if vehicles could go 100 miles on a tank of gas that would be awesome and give us some time to try to resolve the situation, as long as ERoEI is at parity with current vehicles, but we really needed those vehicles 10-15 years ago, ideally in even earlier in 1980.

Who is fabricating peak oil? Either the 3 E's and the crisis surrounding them as Chris discusses them are really happening is actual or not, Chris didn't "invent" the peak oil theory 1956 was the first discussion about peak oil (Hubbert), and accurately predicted US oil peak production and decline between 1965 and 1970. We also know that peak discovery happens prior to peak oil extraction, and peak discovery happened in 1965, finding about 55 billion barrels that year, it's declined ever since, Oil reserves peaked in 1980 when production overtook discovery. Indeed if you look at oil production graphs over the past 50 years we're already on a downward slope with increasing consumption. Current reserves also have huge doubts surrounding them, unless they're proven (as 90-95% accurate) then the probability of the resource can vary anywhere from 50% (probable) to 5% (possible) accuracy, for example 20% of Shells reserves evaporated in 2004 when it was discovered that there was either no oil, or that it could not be extracted.  World Oil production has been flat since 2005, not a good sign considering the price of crude oil at that time, if more could have been pumped then you betcha they would have. Saudi'sGhawar field production (the largest in the world) is falling at 8% per year, Kuwait's Burgan field production entered decline in 2005, of the 811 largest oil fields the net decline is 4.5% per year (according to Cambridge Energy Research Associates).

If you do some digging on Oil production, reserves and so on you'll see that the current situation is looking grim, oil consumption is still increasing, oil production is level or gradually falling. Overall I'd say that there's a lot of hard evidence to prove that we're around peak right now.

Now the Hirsch report from 2005 stated that mitigation efforts needed would be either

• 20 years is required to transition without substantial impacts
• A 10 year rush transition with moderate impacts is possible with extraordinary efforts from governments, industry, and consumers
• Late initiation of mitigation may result in severe consequences.

Unfortunately peak oil is easy to see in retrospect, like peak oil discovery. Currently the US has no mitigation strategy for falling global oil production.