Microelectronics, fiber optics, earth-orbiting satellites, and free enterprise are allowing a collection of the best engineering and business minds on our planet to build technology that will be able to instantly interconnect - by text, audio, and visual images - all currently living human minds with one another and with all recorded human knowledge from the present and from the past.

We are all familiar with ways in which this technology has already touched our lives. These have been just a beginning. The advances of the coming decade will astonish even the technologists.

Our libraries will disappear, as virtually all recorded knowledge becomes available at every human location by means of electronic networks and, where preferred, on low-cost plastic disks. Transmission of audio, visual, and textual information will become essentially instantaneous as the bandwidth of this electronic miracle increases far beyond our individual abilities to utilize it.

With the collapse of their monopolies on knowledge stored in libraries and information delivery, educational institutions - from elementary school through college - will be transformed. Most will die. The remainder will be engaged primarily in testing and accreditation.

As far as information and communications are concerned, all human minds are going to be electronically connectable and effectively relocatable to a single point in time and space. Even those minds that are no longer living will be able to occupy this point to the extent that their knowledge has been recorded and retained.

While these changes will transform most aspects of our lives, they will not substitute for all of our activities. A popular myth is spreading that we are moving into the "information age'' and a "post-industrial'' society. It is claimed that, in this mythical new age, even pseudoenvironmentalist energy rationing will be harmless because information technology requires very little energy. This is nonsense.

The maintenance and enrichment of human lives still require steel, concrete, fuel, and all of the other commodities and manufactured goods upon which we depend. We must have food, shelter, clothing, transportation, medicine, and other necessities to survive; and we must have literature, art, music, and the tools to explore new frontiers in the microscopic worlds and in outer space in order to fulfill higher human objectives and needs. Better information can make us more effective in these works, but it cannot substitute for the works.

There is no such thing as a world "post-industrial society.'' Post industrialism can be tried on a local or national level, but the risks are great. The United States is, for example, the current world leader in information technology, but it is rapidly losing its leadership in most other technologies - especially heavy industry. Confiscatory taxation and out-of-control regulation and litigation are driving productive industry out of America and into more favorable environments. It is astonishing that Communist China, while still under the control of a terrible tyranny, is rapidly overtaking American industry because China has lower taxes and less regulation and litigation.

Also, advances in information technology do not stand alone as unalterable advantages because not all information is true - and -even true information is not useful unless it is intelligently utilized.

If a child asks his parents several times for the same dispensation -but each time gives a different reason for the request - they may justifiably conclude that it is the dispensation that the child desires. Obviously, the reasons are merely means to an end. So it is also with adults.

With regard to killing as one purpose of energy rationing, we have used the word "genocide.'' "Murder by the State'' by Gerald W. Scully, NCPA Policy Report No. 211, September 1997, available from the National Center for Policy Analysis, 12655 N. Central Expwy., Suite 720, Dallas, TX 75243, distinguishes "genocide,'' the murder of minorities, from "democide,'' the murder of the general population by their own government. Those on the bottom of the economic ladder, the first to be killed by energy rationing, might be considered a minority and, in any case, are often constituted more of recognized minorities, but the difference is merely semantic.

Scully documents the fact that 7.3% of the world's people have been murdered by their own governments during the 20th century - vs. 8.9%, 4.7%, and 3.7% for the 13th, 17th, and 19th centuries respectively. These numbers do not include deaths by war or by abortion.

Nor have these murders been carried out by only a few evil governments with which we are all familiar. He lists 74 countries that have conducted democides during the 20th century, including 19 communist countries and - among noncommunist countries - 19 in Africa, 15 in Latin America, 13 in Asia and the Middle East, and 8 in Europe.

Scully thinks that democide will diminish as governments realize people are more valuable alive than dead. He supports this hypothesis with graphs of democide vs. productivity. Worldwide, however, the century by century decline in democide has been sharply reversed during the 20th century - a century of rising per capita productivity.

The lesson is that governments do not hesitate to kill their own people when those in control decide that this is in their personal interests. We like to believe that the United States is different (except for occasional small incidents - which have been rising in frequency recently), but world energy rationing is a planet-wide program. We cannot expect its morals and objectives to be any better than the the lowest common denominator of the many governments involved - most of which have engaged in democide during the 20th century.

Scully concludes that democide is associated with about a 20% loss of national wealth and is the result of dominant group and authoritarian rule. A 20% loss - not personally affecting the rulers - is a small price to pay for power. Moreover, world energy rationing is obviously a program associated with authoritarian rule - on an international scale.

As always, our technology coexists with the character of man - and has no meaning separate from its effects upon mankind. We build for fun and for usually noble reasons, but we must never forget to "watch our backs.'' The ignoble characteristics of man are always there.

It is wrong to knowingly kill a child every 12 seconds from malaria by banning the use of DDT as we are doing now. It is even worse to increase this killing by orders of magnitude through energy rationing.

British ships of the line had enormous fire power but they were very slow - approximately 5 knots. They needed to be short and massive in order to hold the weight of large numbers of very heavy guns. Longer and lighter ships were more maneuverable, but lacked cannons and strength that could compete with the heavier ships.

Fear is the stock in trade of the antitechnologists, and lack of knowledge exacerbates fear. The myth that there is an epidemic of cancer caused by industrially produced chemicals has proven, therefore, to be a gold mine for pseudoenvironmentalist propagandists. If you are in their business, however, one Bruce Ames can spoil your whole year. Ames and his colleagues and coworkers just keep churning out research data that discredits this myth - the principal myth that keeps the Environmental Protection Agency in business.

2. "Environmental synthetic chemicals are an important cause of human cancer.'' The percentage of cancers induced by such chemicals is so low that it cannot be measured reliably enough to verify, while the cancer-causing effects of banning chemicals, such as diminished consumption of fruits and vegetables, are high and easily measurable.

7. "The toxicology of synthetic chemicals is different from that of natural chemicals.'' This myth - not scientific evidence showing environmental harm or health dangers, since none exists - is at the heart of enviropropaganda for the ban of DDT. Ames and Gold quote the 1970 National Academy of Sciences report which concluded that "In little more than two decades DDT has prevented 500 million deaths due to malaria, that would otherwise have been inevitable.'' (Ames and Gold give this reference as National Academy of Sciences, U.S.A., The Life Sciences: Recent Progress and Application to Human Affairs, the World of Biological Research, Requirement for the Future, 1970, Committee on Research in the Life Sciences, Washington, DC, p 526.)

Today (see Access to Energy 24, No. 12, p 4 for references), hundreds of millions of people suffer unnecessarily from malaria and one person (usually a child) dies every 12 seconds from this disease. Most of these deaths are the direct result of the baseless rationing of chemical technology by the United States government - the ban of DDT. The children we are killing, however, do not vote in our elections.

The featured automobile is stripped to just enough frame and tires to hold one human, the motor, and the "fuel.'' This car can travel 15 miles at 20 miles per hour on 48 gallons of liquid nitrogen. At current prices in Southern Oregon, this is $125 worth of liquid nitrogen.

Reducing this price by half to allow for economies of scale, I calculate four dollars per mile or approximately 80 times the fuel cost for my 1983 GMC diesel Suburban. Compared to a current model automobile of weight comparable to the test car, the fuel cost is about 150-fold higher (300-fold at current prices).

Even if they give the fuel away, however, there is another small problem. In order to drive the same distance (1,000 miles) that my Suburban travels on 40 gallons of fuel, the test car will require 11 tons of liquid nitrogen. Eleven tons of fuel (on a very large trailer) will drop my fuel efficiency to at least a factor of four below the test car, so now I need 40 tons of fuel. This is approximately the capacity of the tractor-trailer trucks that are used to distribute fuel to service stations. These trucks require even more fuel. Let us assume a factor of two.

So, we estimate that this new technology will give us a range of about 500 miles if we all travel in tractor-trailer fuel trucks and pay about 1000-fold more for our fuel. Not to worry - they are tinkering with ways to make it better - probably by means of lubrication with a fat tax-financed research grant. As to the ancillary advantage of cleaning the atmosphere of carbon dioxide, it will be necessary to liquefy about 50% of the atmosphere of the entire Earth to reduce carbon dioxide levels to those of the 1940s. The energy for this liquification and for storage of the resulting carbon will need to be produced without the use of hydrocarbon fuels.

The only advantage of this method of propulsion is that its development will not lead to peudoenvironmentalist demonization of nitrogen. The only technologies selected for demonization are those that do cost-effective and practical work. This one does not.

On March 1, 1954 a thermonuclear bomb test named Bravo Shot -Operation Castle in the Marshall Islands accidentally exposed about 300 Marshall Island residents and U. S. military personnel to dangerously high levels of radioactive fallout. Unprotected by potassium iodide supplements (now available to French citizens, but not to most Americans) many of the exposed individuals, especially the children, developed thyroid tumors and other thyroid abnormalities.