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The great 'power-down' never did happen. Yes, there were short-term supply crises with oil and gas, and increasingly dogged protests as each new coal project was pursued. But the hydrocarbons kept flowing, and stacking up, at least for the first few decades of the twenty-first century, as we found ever more inventive ways of squeezing and milling it out of ancient geological traps.

But set against this dismal' progress' was an emerging realization of the astounding potential of nuclear fission. When finally done right, it proved to be cheap, safe, massively scalable and inexhaustible. By the 2060s, we had an abundance of zero-carbon power, Which was just as well, because planetary rehabilitation was an energy-hungry task.

We geo-engineered, we intensified agricultural production, we built upwards, and virtually. Space-'cyber' and 'outer'-were the vast vistas of the next economy. And it was the visionary entrepreneurs that ended up taking us to space-permanently-opening up a virtually unlimited supply of raw materials and living space for the future of humanity. On Earth, our footprint shrank, as we pulled back from our encroachment of wildlife and habitats and let nature gradually reclaim large swathes of the planet. We simply didn't need it anymore, and it was time to give back.

Item Type:	Other Book Chapter
Keywords:	future, society, climate change
Research Division:	Environmental Sciences
Research Group:	Ecological Applications
Research Field:	Ecological Impacts of Climate Change
Objective Division:	Environment
Objective Group:	Climate and Climate Change
Objective Field:	Ecosystem Adaptation to Climate Change
Author:	Brook, BW (Professor Barry Brook)
ID Code:	107150
Year Published:	2015
Deposited By:	Plant Science
Deposited On:	2016-03-07
Last Modified:	2016-03-09
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