Uncharted Territories

2 months ago | unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com | Tomas Pueyo

I don’t usually do guest posts, but today is an exception. Maxwell Tabarrok is an economics researcher at Dartmouth College and author of the substack Maximum Progress. He proposed this article about the end of Japan’s stagnation, and I found it super interesting, especially as I am just studying Japan and the economic miracles of this country, Taiwan, South Korea, and China. Japan’s economy is also important to understand, as it’s the canary in the coal mine of low fertility rates.

Dec 11, 2024 | unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com | Tomas Pueyo

In the previous article, we saw how many powers are involved in Syria, and how there are winners and losers. Today, we’re going to explore exactly what’s happening on each side: Israel, Russia, Turkey, Europe, Iran, Kurds, and Fundamentalist Sunni Islam. Syria has been a threat to Israel for decades. Now, Israel is taking advantage of the chaos in Syria to eliminate that threat in the short term and weaken it in the long term. How?

Nov 19, 2024 | unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com | Tomas Pueyo

I don't know Anders Sandberg did his but I was trying to come up with a estimate of how much energy we can use. Today we use ~20TW and the Earth energy imbalance (ie global warming) is 460TW (source: )So ~20x more energy use we will reach the level of current global warming(*). So yes, reaching 120x is possible by pumping greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere and injecting sulfur in the stratosphere. I would like to point out that a huge chunk of future energy use will be compute power.

Nov 19, 2024 | unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com | Tomas Pueyo

Some people fear there are too many humans on Earth. They’re wrong. We could 12x our population, from 8B today to 100B if we wanted to, while maintaining quality of life on Earth. Where would we all fit? Could we feed everybody? Wouldn’t pollution explode and ecosystems collapse? This is what we’ll answer today.

Nov 12, 2024 | unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com | Tomas Pueyo

Thomas, Thanks for explaining about desalination. I've been thinking we'll need more desalination plants because of the increasing demand for water for data centers. However, your idea that "the prices of both solar photovoltaics and batteries have been dropping at about 12% per year for decades! That’s why solar plus batteries can now cost $0.12 per kWh,⁸ and that number will keep falling at ~12%/year.