Today's giant global supply chains are getting more and more fragile, especially with current trends to more extreme just-in-time manufacturing and delivery. Long term economic malaise can deter companies from investing and even maintaining existing equipment. By the time they do, who's to say that the companies producing that equipment are even going to be around in the long run? Or their suppliers, and so on until the level of raw materials. Are we going to even see before unrepairable damage has occurred in our ever more specialized supply?
Monetary factors like currency fluctuations or unavailability of capital can also stress, weaken and even break global supply chains.
Currently there are large efforts underway to effectively create more money through mechanisms such as massive debt. The methods to do so may be very indirect, but all it will do is to change the multiplier of money units to buy certain physical resource at the end of any value chain. People easily forget we're still physical people living in a physical world and that nature's realities are non-negotiable.
It's important to realize the root of our economic problems aren't about politics, bankers or what or who ever people like to blame. Instead it's about all of us. World's expanding population hitting their collective heads to resource production rate glass ceiling. Important, because we need to act _yesterday_ to fight what's coming at us in the future. And for that to happen, people who have the intelligence, knowledge and skills - and who manage and employ those people - must be aware of it.
Yes, for example subprime crisis was human created (banker, who we love to hate), but expensive resources - in other words high living costs - is what made individuals' inability to service the loans cross a critical point and create a full-blown crisis.
Another important reason to understand where we stand is prevention of general unrest and political instability when the decline will be deeper and felt harder. Otherwise people who mean good by revolting will accelerate the decline and greatly increase human misery. If the blame for the situation is misdirected, this will be a true danger in the future.
Oil is the king of the resources. Transportable liquid fuel is the bottleneck of modern economy. Today there's nothing that can replace it within an order of magnitude of scale. It is very worrisome oil is the key behind production of most of those other resources.
We need something that is robust against such threat. One obvious way is to make production progressively more local.
3D-printers might be the first baby steps on this path. Small baby steps, but you have to start from somewhere.
But what we need is not just small plastic things, just for electronic devices we'd need integrated circuits, capacitors with different characteristics, conductors, batteries, displays, motors and so on. Maybe there are ways to create those components with nanotechnology, biotechnology or perhaps something else; regardless, it should be possible to replicate it with in the proverbial garage in such a way, that does not require large amounts of energy or complicated industrial inputs.
Technology that worked more like a growing tree would enable us to keep some part of the things we are used to, even in a future declining world. So far we've enjoyed economic and industrial growth for several centuries, but there's got to be a point when first stagnates and then starts to decline. The scary part is we're most likely already in the decline phase.
Given that type of technology that requires just a source of energy and certain common raw materials from the immediate environment, moon and asteroids would become an interesting opportunity. We could send the initial seed factories there, and let them process locally available resources, build supporting equipment in situ and eventually even build bigger factories. Then abundant solar energy could be turned into products and electricity that could be beamed back to earth. Should nuclear He3-fusion ever become a viable energy source, that very same moon automated self-sustained industrial base could process and collect Helium-3 to ship it back to earth.
That's my dream and hope for salvation anyways. I hope it can be reality one day. I hope those people who matter wake up and start to work on this today. Today.
