This last week seems to have dominated by Egyptian themes and it’s got me looking back to the last 2020 (BC) as opposed to looking forward to the next 2020.

My youngest daughter’s all time favourite programme ‘Primeval’ returned to our screens on Saturday night. The new episode was set in the Egyptian wing of the British Museum and it reminded me of being in awe of the Egyptian artefacts when I first saw them on a trip to the museum when I was at primary school. On a more recent trip a few years ago I remember that, aside from the architectural marvel of the Museum’s glass roof, the Egyptian wing was the undoubted highlight – as indeed have been similar exhibits in the New York Met and the Louvre.

Earlier in the week I watched a documentary which was about the theories of a French Architect who has devoted 7 years of his life since the turn of this century, using 3D software to painstakingly model how the great pyramids could have been built .

Firstly I found it staggering that the ingenuity of humans 4000 years ago, when the population of the world was equal to half the population of the UK today (around 35 million), was such that we are still trying to figure out how they did these amazing things.

Besides this architect’s ‘internal ramp’ theory (which density scans conducted in previous investigations show could well be the most feasible explanation for how massive blocks were carried to the top of the structures) the explanation for how even more massive single blocks of granite were manoeuvred into place above the main burial chambers using a complex counter weight system was even more inspiring.

Then, a couple of days ago, I settled down to open the latest National Geographic magazine and its lead article is about Hatshepsut – a woman in the Egyptian royal bloodline who decided to rule as a King rather than as a Queen.
Aside from this quirk that has fascinated archaeologists for years and led to a ‘Indiana Jones’ type quest to locate her Mummy (which was finally discovered a couple of years ago and confirmed her gender) Hatshepsut was responsible for many architectural wonders including his/her temple at Deir el-Bahri. This location has become notorious for the terrorist attack on tourists in 1997 when 62 people were massacred but aside from this bloody recent history, the architectural beauty of the structure would not look out of place in the modern world 4000 years on.

They say that there are events that happen during your lifetime so momentous that you never forget where you were when you heard about them. For me, the attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001 is undoubtedly the biggest one. Having visited Manhattan a number of times and those iconic buildings too, it was a staggering event to witness and made all the more poignant because I was working for Lucent at the time – a US organisation that had much of its heritage in New Jersey and many employees in New York state and the surrounding region.

When the news came through, I was with some colleagues at a coffee bar in the Lucent UK HQ getting an early afternoon drink. I remember us rushing back to our desks to access the online news sites which were struggling under the weight of demand but already showing early images of the first plane strike. As the events unfolded it became clear that friends and relatives of the company’s employees were caught up in it directly and that brought the impact and suffering closer to home.

I was reminded of the aftermath of that tragic day when visiting the Bell Labs website today looking for the background on the stories its parent organisation Alcatel-Lucent is making at the GSMA World Congress.

Bell Labs has a section on its site headed ‘Government Research’ which makes specific reference to military communications, homeland security and the intelligence agencies. Although I was only ever on the periphery of this research operation and its developments related to 3G, I have always followed its developments with interests as it has had a profound effect on our world historically (the transistor, lasers, solar cells, DSL, Comms Satellites, cellular networks) and will no doubt do so again.

In the weeks and months following 9/11 it emerged that Lucent engineers had been instrumental in supporting and rebuilding communications networks and rescue efforts around ground zero during and after the events and I was also aware of US Government contracts being awarded to the company for homeland security efforts. I left the company just before the 2nd Gulf War broke out in 2003 and it’s clear that Bell Labs research and development activities have been targeted towards military needs over the last 6 years as the US has waged unconventional wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that have relied increasingly on advanced technology to confront a persistent and determined enemy.

While my general belief is that the Iraq war, in particular, was ill-judged and generally badly executed there seemed little doubt that we would have to confront the Islamic fundamentalists somewhere, somehow as history shows the danger to society as a whole of ignoring such twisted beliefs. Besides the horrific consequences of war on many levels, a subsequent benefit is the advancement of technology and the positive impact that can have elsewhere in society.

One can only guess at the purpose of the long range, high resolution laser based radar research that it openly publicises on its website that continues a tradition of Bell Labs radar innovations used in warfare as far back as the World War 2. But the fact that the US has been battling an enemy adept at hiding in difficult terrain and disguising itself amongst civilians and has seemingly been increasingly successful at picking out individuals using unmanned drones, possibly illustrates how some of this development is being used.

In a subsequent interview with James Lovelock I have read recently, he describes himself as an ‘Optimistic Pessimist’ – this is based largely on his observations on how the human population react in times of crisis and his belief that we can actually be happier than when dealing with long periods of peace and prosperity.

I am also reminded of my socio/economic history studies and the predictions of Thomas Malthus about population growth out-stripping food supply, which did not come to fruition in the timescales he was proposing.

World population has soared to numbers Malthus probably could not have conceived of thanks to modern agriculture, with its complex machinery, immense transport infrastructure and fertilizers.

But wait…machinery, transport, fertilizers on the scale we use them today would not be possible without an abundant supply of cheap fossil fuels. And it was this, more than any other factor, that Malthus could not predict in his observations.

So are we heading for a double whammy here? Global temperature rises of at least 2oC during this century that render massive areas of land uninhabitable, combined with an increasing decline in fossil fuel availability that makes modern agriculture too expensive to sustain at its current levels?

Optimistic forecasts on that ‘peak oil’ date (the point at which reserves decline) put it at 2020. This is followed by charts that indicate oil availability falling back within 90 years to levels seen at the beginning of the last century – when cars had barely been invented.