Energy and human resource development in developing countries: towards effective localization.

Abstract

When one considers a picture of planet Earth taken 1 billion miles away from a NASA probe orbiting Saturn, it appears as a very tiny blue dot amid an oceanic abyss of blackness. That is it. That is the earth, where we all live. Nothing more, nothing less, pondering a tiny blue speck where humanity has lived, died, and aspired for the last 15,000 some odd years of its existence. It is finite, it is limited, it appears very much alone. When standing in the Australian Outback, hiking the high desert of southern Arizona, adrift in the straits of Cuba, or flying over the vast expanses of eastern Siberia, it would seem the boundaries of earth are unlimited, uninhabited, and with far more land or sea than anyone could possibly imagine. Wide-open terrain that needs to be filled with something, anything, yet very empty, very quiet, also very alone. One can fly the entire distance from New York to Los Angeles in less than five hours on a nonstop flight, a distance of well over 5000 kilometers, conversely, living in Sri Lanka, a small island nation the size of the US State of Vermont, a journey from the capital city of Colombo to the east coast via its narrow, winding, congested roads can take a full day, a straight-line distance of less than 100 miles. Energy, fossil fuels in particular, has given mankind the ability to travel long distances unencumbered, but the fact remains humanity is still very fragile, very alone, and highly dependent on each other to thrive, live, and succeed. Proximity and nearness, size and magnitude, are all relative. Two opposite truisms thus emerge: The world is a very big place, difficult to transverse, yet at the same time, it is also a very tiny planet, where getting from point to point can be reached quickly with the energy we have on hand and the right logistical framework.