Curious that your focus on the future (special issue, Jan. 28) was based on the same premise as any Buck Rogers dreamscape of the 1930s: Technology will grow ever more clever and continue to amaze us all! Things will be like today, only multiplied exponentially. Progress will continue upward and onward forever.

Sadly, every civilization has had to conform to the second law of thermodynamics, meaning that the energy source of the civilization has determined the limits of its social, economic, and political life. Our civilization has grown from the Middle Ages to the present on the basis of fossil fuels, first coal and then oil. The oil resources in the earth’s crust, however, are now reaching a point of diminishing prospects, and coal is poisoning our atmosphere at a dangerous rate. The development of new ways to extract the plentiful energy present in the universe will require decades, and bringing breakthroughs into daily use will require decades beyond that. We face a potentially disruptive century or more of learning to live on less energy.

Author Joel Achenbach ’82 has ignored those limits of energy. Instead he describes the brightest kid on the block, Nathan Myhrvold *83, amassing his inventions while assuming that tomorrow our energy supply is going to look like today, only more so. Wrong.

So calling this collection of articles “Looking Ahead” is, to my mind, misleading. It’s half the picture. The other half is not so sanguine, and I would like to see an issue of PAW with as much emphasis on Princeton efforts on this darker side, energy descent, featuring professor emeritus Ken Deffeyes, for example, and Michael Oppenheimer and other IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] members on the faculty. If oil is peaking, the trip down the other side will be the exciting part — if we can invent that.

Jim Newcomer ’57