outside in space

where is my cyberpunk future I was promised 🇦🇺

repost ≠ endorsement

[HealthRanger @HealthRanger]

I have to apologize in advance, because I think I’ve failed to explain this with sufficient clarity on my part, and it’s important to get this right. Our current global population of 8+ billion people is only alive because of a supply chain infrastructure built up over the last 60 years or so which saw dramatic scaling of natural gas extraction infrastructure (largely in Qatar and North America), dramatic improvements in oil extraction from existing Persian Gulf wells, and a tremendous amount of downstream chemistry that processes raw gas and oil to produce critical substances for our world such as helium (He), sulfuric acid, phosphate fertilizers, nitrogenous fertilizers, polyethylene, naphtha, aluminum smelting and so on.

The sulfuric acid that extracts phosphate (for fertilizer) from phosphate rock ores, for example, comes from pulling excess sulfur out of “sour” crude oil. (The core chemical reaction converts tricalcium phosphate into phosphoric acid and gypsum, with very high efficiency.) The “sour” refers to sulfur content. Without high-volume oil extraction, you don’t get the sulfur needed to produce this key type of fertilizer. And without the low-cost energy from the gas extracted from gas fields like Las Raffan, you don’t get the Haber-Bosch process that pulls N2 Nitrogen out of the atmosphere and breaks it to form ammonia (NH3) which becomes the feedstock material for nitrogenous fertilizer. (I’m simplifying the steps, but you get the idea.)

If these raw materials that normally pass through the Strait of Hormuz don’t get restored in short order, we aren’t merely facing annoying economic effects like higher food prices, higher diesel prices, fuel rationing, supply chain disruptions, loss of food packaging plastics and so on…
...we’re facing a loss of the infrastructure that keeps 8+ billion people alive on this planet.

If you lose 25% of the global supply of these critical substances, you will sooner or later lose 25% of the global population: 2 billion people. The Persian Gulf, by the way, supplies roughly about one-third of the world’s fertilizer that traded in the global marketplace. Do the math.

Right now, literally 50% of the global population is kept alive from food that’s fertilized using nitrogenous fertilizers derived from natural gas. A significant portion of that gas normally comes out of the Persian Gulf. But no longer. Not since Trump bombed Iran and started this war, resulting in Iran closing off the Strait of Hormuz.

QatarEnergy, which suffered extensive damage to two of its LNG processing trains and suffered a catastrophic explosion when trying to restart one of its processing trains a few weeks ago, has already declared force majeure and publicly announced a 3-5 year repair time for its damaged gas trains. So if we’re lucky, then QatarEnergy’s gas will be fully back online possibly around 2030. That’s if the war stops tomorrow and the repairs can get under way.

But if Iran chooses to strike additional gas trains – a feat that is easily achieved by Iran, possibly in retaliation for Trump’s latest threats to target and destroy Iranian civilian infrastructure – the repair time grows to ONE DECADE. And that assumed Qatar could even get the financing to fund such an effort, which itself seems doubtful.

Should that scenario unfold, the entire planet will be lacking critical energy, helium, nitrogenous fertilizers and their parent molecules (ammonia, urea, etc.), affordable aluminum smelting and other outputs that are downstream from Qatar’s gas production. This shortage will last ten years in a best-case scenario. During that decade, it is impossible that all 8 billion people will have enough to eat. It is also impossible that all the world’s current industrial manufacturing operations will economically survive, which means widespread global job losses.

The lack of fertilizer means a mass die-off on planet Earth is unavoidable if the infrastructure destruction in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, etc., escalates to the point of all-out war. Iran has so far decided to refrain from achieving the near-total destruction of critical infrastructure across the region, but that restraint may end quickly if Trump escalates the U.S. bombing campaign to target Iranian power plants, bridges, water treatment facilities and other key civilian infrastructure.

Stated differently, the fate of some significant portion of the world’s 8 billion people now rests in the hands of an orange mad man who demonstrates zero understanding of the ramifications of his escalation actions. And if he proceed to make good on his threats, he will unleash a series of events that will make the continued survival of the full 8 billion people on planet Earth quite literally impossible, likely for a decade or longer.

This would plunge Earth into a 10+ year “dark ages” and likely see the loss of billions of lives, the fall of numerous governments around the world, and economic destruction on a scale no living person has ever witnessed. Nor has history ever witnessed that we know of. Add in a dose of civil unrest, large-scale uprisings and regional warfare, and you have a recipe for global instability and systemic collapse that no one in a position of power has seriously pondered. The impacts of this would be, arguably, similar to planet Earth being struck by a high-velocity (and large) asteroid, unleashing mass kinetic destruction and a dimming of the sun, causing photosynthesis collapse on a global scale, lasting several years while food crops fail, famines take hold and nations tear themselves apart from the inside. And I haven’t even covered the climatic changes that would end civilizations around the world.

It almost seems like a cliché to state we are facing, “the end of the world as we know it,” but hell, we are literally facing the end of the world as we know it. And Trump, infused with all the madness and arrogance of a rogue emperor who has lost the plot, is pushing us all right to the edge of the abyss.

I would normally say, at this point, “I hope you have a year’s supply of food” to make it through what’s coming, but honestly that won’t be enough if Trump pushes us into an all-out infrastructure destruction war. The loss of the 60+ years of human infrastructure that has allowed the population to double from 4 billion to 8 billion over just a few decades will be REVERSED, and the population will shrink from 8 billion to 4 billion or possibly even less, depending on wars and economic strife.

Trump isn’t merely at war with Iran, in other words. He’s waging war on the entire human race. He is assaulting the very civilizational infrastructure that made our modern population possible to sustain. That infrastructure can be destroyed in an instant, with a rebuilding time of a decade or longer. And once it’s gone, there’s no going back to the way things were in 2025.

And during the new dark age, what will billions of human eat if there’s no fertilizer available for agriculture?
The honest answer is that they’ll sooner or later start eating each other.

Prepare accordingly. And demand an end to this senseless war before we all find ourselves in the cross hairs of global destruction and the death of billions of human beings.

[Samyaza Speaks @SamyazaSpeaks]

The Biblical Experience

Music: Holy Place by BENNETT

[Jason Reza Jorjani @Jason_Jorjani]

This is the last summer of relative peace and stability. Enjoy it. A storm is coming that will ravage and devastate this world for decades into the future. What comes out the other end of the whirlwind will be another world. “A new world, if you can TAKE it.”

[PJ Ace @PJaccetturo]

Everything they taught you about July 4th, 1776 is a lie.

The Redcoats weren't soldiers. They were something else.

We recovered the real footage using Utopai 🧵👇

[Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland]

Atlas Shrugged made simple:

1. Society runs on a small number of highly capable producers – industrialists, inventors, engineers – whose work everyone depends on but takes for granted.

2. The system starts rewarding need over achievement: the more capable you are, the more you’re expected to sacrifice for those who aren’t.

3. Success gets treated like a debt – taxed, regulated, resented – until the most capable start asking why they bother trying at all.

4. One by one, led by a man named John Galt, they simply withdraw – walking away rather than keep propping up a system that punishes them for producing.

5. Without them, the whole structure collapses, revealing that the “automatic” prosperity everyone assumed was actually being generated by specific, irreplaceable people.

6. Atlas is the Titan from Greek myth, condemned to carry the sky on his shoulders forever – Rand’s stand-in for the producer class, holding up civilization while getting blamed for it.

7. “Shrugged” is the whole argument in one word: Atlas doesn’t fight, doesn’t protest – he just quietly sets the weight down. Nobody realized the sky was being held up by anyone in particular, until the day it isn’t.
You don’t want us? We just go…🤷🏻‍♂️

[outside in space @CezInSpace]

@Rainmaker1973 Sensational plane, more than 60 years ago and still the XB-70 is awe-inspiring

[David Murrin @GlobalForecastr]

What if Taiwan isn’t the destination but just the first step

[Aviation Archive - Tim Farmer @aviationarchive]

The Tupolev Tu-114 was the Soviet giant based on the Tu-95 Bear. First flown in 1957, it entered service in 1961 with four Kuznetsov turboprops. It cruised at 480mph, over 5,500mi range and seated up to 220. It was the fastest prop airliner ever and largest at the time.👀

[Heavy Pulp @heavypulp]

Fall Seven Times and Stand Up Eight!

[HashingZap ✝️ @HashZappa]

https://t.co/eBRMGn3yLT

[Aviation Archive - Tim Farmer @aviationarchive]

Some of the best B-36 footage seen here in this clip of "Strategic Air Command". I did not know that In 1959, as an active pilot in the USAF, Jimmy Stewart was promoted to Brigadier General and he even flew one combat mission over Vietnam aboard a B-52.🫡

[Heavy Pulp @heavypulp]

Everything is Computer, but Computer isn't Everything!

[outside in space @CezInSpace]

@icantevenfilms this is absolutely brilliant

[Rothmus 🏴 @Rothmus]

Uncertainty is what’s fueling the blackpill.

The future will turn out far brighter than most people can even fathom right now.

[outside in space @CezInSpace]

@richimedhurst The US may be perceived as very messy in their day to day approach, but I do think you may have a very good grasp of a bigger Grand Strategy being played here.
Your documentary strikes me as spot on

[outside in space @CezInSpace]

@TheDefiantGhost Not sure when this interview will be available, but this one line has me hooked with anticipation - "interdimensional demonic intelligence"

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Actually, AI/Robotics will mean everyone can have a penthouse if they want. The output of goods & services will be several orders of magnitude higher than today’s economy.

Read the Iain Banks Culture books for the best imagining of how it will be.

That said, what is the future you want? Amazing abundance seems the best to me.

[Truthful🛰️ @Truthful_ast]

Comparison of External Tankage vs Internal Tankage Space Shuttle capable of orbital missions to the Moon.

[Casey Handmer @CJHandmer]

It's not optional. We must do this.

[outside in space @CezInSpace]

I don't think we'll ever see a president again with such meme vibes quite like Trump...
Binary Heroes - "Caesar's Got Jokes"
https://t.co/rt99piAp47