Looking to the future: the value of helium

This is exactly the kind of article I like to see. Thinking critically about the future, people's needs, and flows of materials. Makes me want to buy a lot of helium and wait for 50 years. Not sure iif the time horizon is right. Could be 15 to 150 years or more I guess.
http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/going_going_gone/

environmental idea

find a way to quantify the benefits of all things green, organic etc. i know i do not shop at the health food store/food co-op because stuff is too expensive and even a bit snooty. if there were a way to see that the total cost of ownership of this food were cheaper for me (for medical reasons etc.) or cheaper in general (because the real cost of environmental impact is priced into the non-organic stuff) then i would probably buy it, and so would a lot of people. fact of the matter is though that organic food may not be healthier and in many cases it may not be less of an environmental impact either. without this real quantification, its difficult to tell.

energy idea

make smart grid control devices. try to make something that people will like to standardize on since this will be crucial for a smart power grid to work.

question about our global future

ok so no proposed answer to this one, its a question that boggles my mind: how can the world's population be controlled without being inhuman, immoral, inequal, restrictive, or otherwise not nice?

i am reading a book by Thomas Friedman Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution--and How It Can Renew America At times he's saying that we need to control the population on the earth' especially as people begin to consume at american levels, but at other times he is calling for an end to energy poverty, to increase the standard of living worldwide.

if we need to fight population growth
to preserve the environment, why would we fight poverty at all? this is the old malthusian dilemma - except that Malthus was a cold unfeeling dude who didn't care about human suffering. the answer is obvious, we fight poverty to fight human suffering. also its important to note that developed countries have lower birth rates, so that could help with overpopulation, but so far they still consume more!

now again though, how do we keep our world livable for ourselves and the other species without doing something like this though, or enforcing a strict one child policy like they do in china? technology is certainly one idea. actively reducing the standard of living of people across the globe (retrogression) is also one idea, and if you look around it has a surprising number of proponents already. still this goes against all human history so far.

I think part of our species essence is to grow change and catalyse things. this philosophy of constant growth and improvement has been with us for a long time and doesn't seem to be going anywhere. this view however means that we must be willing to kill off our species and many others in the process at some point. is this creative destruction or calamity? from one perspective we are accomplishing in thousands of years something that has taken nature millions of years before. as humans we have a tremendous fear of death and change. We also must not forget that we are natural too, and thus our actions are as well.

i hope you realize i am just being provocative to get us thinking about this tremendously difficult issue so that we can hopefully solve it in a way we can all agree on. we are intelligent and concious of these issues so we should be able to do better and realize we don't need to kill things off and cause pain. nonetheless a solution is needed to humanely limit the human impact on the earth. the hope is that we can do this without abandoning our growth.

I think the premise of Friedman's book is that we can do this. I'm not sure I agree though. how can we both continue to increase people's standard of living, not limit population and not impact the environment? we may need to give up our love of growth at some point to keep ourselves alive. I love creativity and new things, so I hope not though. My view, which I share with scientist Steven Hawking, is that we need to prepare now to colonize other planets. That may be one of the only hopes we have to continue humanity's grand dream of universal knowledge.

art idea

oh man this one is so bad but kind of funny in a stupid sort of way. would be kind of nice to see mixed in with a set of stuffy type art. i think that would be the real art in this idea. ok so here it is... you have a little booth sort of like a voting booth for just your head and upper body. the piece is called 'album' - outside it has the title written small but conspicuously. the whole thing looks serious and beautiful. Inside the private curtained area is a book that has a picture of a plumber type dude on the cover. His name is Al. inside the book you have pictures of his bum. al bum. album. like i said, stupid, but the placement, the setup and the experience would make it not bad art. people like to get tricked a little bit and in my opinion its good to suprise people, make them laugh, and question where they are and what they're doing. album. hehehe.

pseudo-energy idea

give carbon offest credits(is this the right term?) for planting trees and other vegetation. when plants are cut down carbon credit must be purchased. possible exemptions for food and other crops.