Nuclear Families

This past week, courtesy of my friend Jason, I came across an interesting talk by a demographer and economist named Peter Zeihan. Mr. Zeihan uses the economics of transportation and energy, combined with demographics, to make some predictions about the future of our planet. It's about an hour long, but he's an entertaining speaker and anyone interested in these topics should have a good time.



Now despite the fact that I find this analysis really sharp, it isn't likely that Mr. Zeihan's predictions are going to be 100% accurate. The world is simply too complicated. In particular, I think we're going to see a very different energy future thanks to technologies discussed by Kirk Sorensen in his TEDx Talk.

This one is a wicked-cool 10 minutes, so everyone should enjoy it:


Multiple nations and commercial groups are seriously looking at Thorium power. Then there's technologies like the Integral Breeder Reactor or Bill Gates' still-experimental Travelling Wave technology. But sooner or later, cheap, clean, safe nuclear will become a reality, at which point even shale will look expensive and toxic.

If you're interested, there's a documentary called Pandora's Promise on Netflix, and Kirk Sorensen has a longer, more detailed video as well.