Horse manure will bury London 9 feet deep by 1950

Posted in: Comment, Talks and Presentations

This was an 1894 headline in The Times, warning of the doom to come.  It features in a YouTube video by the authors of Resource Revolution: How to capture the biggest business opportunity in a century.

The horse problem is now hard to conceive.  Here's a comment from nofrackingconcensus:

Horses are lovely animals, but when crowded into cities they cause a variety of problems.  The 15 to 30 pounds of manure produced daily by each beast multiplied by the 150,000+ horses in New York city resulted in more than three million pounds of horse manure per day that somehow needed to be disposed of.  That’s not to mention the daily 40,000 gallons of horse urine.

Here's what the authors of Resource Revolution write:

The chance to meet soaring demand for oil, gas, steel, land, food, water, cement, clean air, and other commodities in a sustainable way by transforming how companies and societies prosper represents nothing less than the biggest business opportunity of the century.  A combination of information technology, nanoscale materials, and biotech with traditional industrial technology can unleash a step-change in resource productivity and generate enormous new profit pools.  However, capturing these business opportunities – and avoiding the disruption they bring – will require an entirely new approach to management.

Don't panic, seems to be the message as it's a bet against human ingenuity.  I decided not to do that a while back.

Posted in: Comment, Talks and Presentations

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