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to come next. This way we increase our chances. If not, what's going to happen?
We have to go back to where the steam engine found us. That means going back to
the “wooden age”. But how do we get back to that? That's the problem I'm talking
of. Because you have to share your food with the animals. And there are already
too many of us. If we just stopped now there would be some kind of catastrophe,
with people who have nothing invading other places and so on. So, in order to
slide down slowly from the energy of the steam engine to the energy of wood and
perhaps the energy of the winds and the tides and running water which are also
solar, though they are called indirect. In order to slide back to the time of Plato,
of Charlemagne, of Galileo, we need a slow change that will avoid the catastrophic
shake-up of humanity. And this is my reason for conservation. I'm not saying, oh,
conservation, conservation, which people think means going without for a few days,
not eating everything today. It's not that. Because that would be stupid. One of
my colleagues asked me a stupid question - he said “Oh yes, conservation, conserva-
tion, but how can you be sure that humanity will even continue to exist in the next
thousand years?”. Do you know Eskilos, in Antigone? When the messenger comes
to tell him that Antigone has buried her brother, that's bad news, so he came and
said “I don't want to bring bad news. Nobody likes to be the bringer of bad news”.
And another thing. There are economists who don't like my theory and they say
“What sort of time scale are you thinking in? 500 years? 1000 years? 2000? 3000?”
They want to fit me into a time scale, to be more precise than anyone possibly
can be. I said “I'm talking about the flowing future, the future that is subject to
change”. Change that I am not able to predict. I can't say it will happen next year
or the year after. I only know that things will go in one direction or the other and
I'm simply saying here that we're at this crossroads, and that at this crossroads our
best option is conservation. Nor is it as simple as I say in my papers. The question
isn't to start saying “Oh, Georgescu's going to start conserving”. Conservation is
to be applied for just the reason I've come to work with it. I could give you a list
of articles on conservation written by engineers. But there is another way to talk
about conservation and this is conservation from the point of view of entropy. You
can say “Well, there are certain mechanisms, boilers, for example, which exist in
order for things to be the way they are, and with a few small modifications we can
make them more useful, improve their e
ciency”. Most of New York, for example,
is heated by steam that comes from plants. That's an example of how you can do it.
You make the system more e
cient because everything remains the way it is. But
this is technological conservation. And I'm talking about entropic conservation, in
which the conservation of materials is implicit. I formulated the fourth law which
has not been accepted. Why not? I don't know. No one has attacked it. No one has
said it's OK. Some Italians have written to me and I haven't had time to answer
them. One paper has accused me of trying to present my Law, the Fourth Law,
as something new when actually it is a known fact. That was Mr A, and then Mr
B comes along and says “No, in fact it's wrong”. So someone says it's true but it's
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