Old Blue
I submit that the center of gravity is neither Iraq nor Afghanistan, but the people of the Islamic countries of the Middle East and Central Asia.
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I saw this line and somehow flased on Hemmingway’s Old Man and the Sea.
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When you look at sedimentary rock or the ground under any city — you can see one age laying right on top of the next. That sediment and rubble falls from above.
Some of the change that’s coming to the middle east in the next 10-30 years will reflect the immense innovative technological power drive that’s ongoing in the west and east. The cost of Solar power for example is now falling faster than computing power. Nanosolar’s factory last september introduced a solar cell that produces electricity for $1@watt. Installation might cost another $1@watt. To understand those numbers its helpful to consider that the cheapest means of producing electricity currently is Coal which costs 2.10@ watt. Solar power costs are expected to fall further faster in the next couple years. In ten years the cost of solar power will be a fraction of the cost of today’s coal power electricity.

That means that desert regions will become giant power units.

The cost of desalination is currently falling much more slowly than photovoltaics. Both Singapore and Australia have undertaken research programs to cut the cost of desalination in half in +-7years.

That’s not very ambitious imho.

The goal of desalination work should be to cut the cost of desalination to 1/10 current prices and create cheap easy to maintain pipelines that push water uphill for a thousand miles inland for little or no cost in terms of energy.

What happens to deserts when you deliver cheap power and cheap water to them?

Think this is a pipe dream?

The serious dreamers showed everyone a picture of water ice on Mars.

The stuff I’m talking about is starts to scale in only +-a decade.