7 October 1999

Tomorrow I leave for Johannesburg. I'll be flying to Paris tomorrow evening, a Friday, spending 24 hours in a hotel near the Charles deGaulle airport, and then on to South Africa. I'll arrive around 11pm J'burg time. That should be Sunday night. I think I speak on Wednesday, so I'll have a full two days to recover from the flights. I think there's a dinner I'm scheduled to attend Monday night. I'm looking forward to the trip, the audiences and the comraderie.

In just a few days, give or take a few days, our planet with be home to 6 billionth human being. Happy birthday to the baby as well as the happy parents! Welcom aboard! Have a cigar! There's plenty of room, don't you know. Lots of free air and water, a landscape brimming with opportunity, plenty of sunshine and need for good hard working human beings.
Yes, we do have some serious issues to grapple with in the coming years. Very serious issues. Severe ecological distress, warming oceans, harsh climate changes; this in the midst of swelling human populations, pressed to the edge of an exhausted frontier. There is no room for growth when exploitation of natural resources is fundamental to the business model employed. In other words, there's no more free lunch.
But wait! There is free software! With well paid programmers writing it, competitive growing companies exploiting it and returning value to increasingly wealthy stock holders, the ensuing growth in that ecological niche has no apparent adverse environmental impact. The more that software takes the place of matter, the more efficiently we become at utilizing the effectively limited materials we do enjoy. Hence, we are optimizing. Hence, I am optimistic. :)

I'm looking forward to this trip. It's been two months since I addressed an audience, and I miss it.