Energy Issues

Like so many movies, Cloud Atlas is about TEOTWAWKI, except that unlike Soylent Green etc it is not set in a specific time but spans some 6 centuries [another "eternal recurrence" of SIX].

It is unclear if the last scene on Mars is the end of humans but it IS clear [as in Avatar] that Earth has been abused to the extent it is uninhabitable [ie for humans, as we know it].  Also as for such movies the REASON for the end is a "contest" between running OUT of energy and pollution caused by that using up process.

It all starts [energy wise] in 1970s when we had the TWO "Oil Crises" ie 1973 [Israeli Issue] and 1979 [Iran Issue], both of which had America experience petrol rationing and realizing that the days were well and truly gone since America was self-sufficient in oil.

Cloud Atlas is very clever in juxtapositioning the two crises by doing a re-run of the 1979 events of the psy-op movie The China Syndrome which prophesiesed the 3 Mile Island Nuclear near disaster, but making the date as 1973.  Luisa Rey is the facsimile of the Jane Fonda character, right down to the VW, and Isaac Sachs is Jack Lemmon character.

Our hero Luisa foils the Swanekke psy-op just as Jane did for the 3 Mile Island look alike, and it looks like the outside scene of Luisa and Isaac was filmed at Unit 2 of 3 Mile Island, which was never re-commissioned.

So once again Cloud Atlas brings actual history [rather than fiction], and other movies, into the story.  But let's dig deeper.

Big clues are fusion engines and "rad levels being high"

Nuclear Fusion has been seen as the Holy Grail since 1950s but today the experts agree that IF it is ever to be a reality, that it is still 50 to 100 years away.

In 1973 Swanekke [ie same as 3 Mile Island etc] is able to effectively generate power via Nuclear Fission, but there are two downsides to fission, ie the 3 Mile Island issue [which came to be with Chernobyl] of disaster radiation as well as the radiation of the waste products of the fission process.  And while oil reserves are well less than 50 years, uranium also has a use-by-date at about 200 years.

So what that all suggests is that the oil did run out, fission "took over" [where it could] and by the time it too ran out at The Fall [exactly 200 years away] it seems that the Prescients had developed fusion, BUT the damage had been done by the long term use of fission.

So the end message is that although fusion technology overcame the need to dig another oilwell or uranium mine, the waste products of those hundreds of years of use/abuse had produced the "On the Beach" scenario [except OTB was about radiation from a nuclear WAR rather than long term fission caused radiation].

The words said to Meronym, "every minute you are out there..." seem to suggest that these Prescients were the privileged few [Illuminati? - whatever] who lived in a type of cocoon with radiation control whereas the other 99.9% simply dies as in OTB.  Similarly it seems Hawaii is the Australia of OTB where the radiation has a time delay in reaching that far [from America] but there is no doubt that survival there has a use-by-date [but local would not know that].

In between we saw Sachs was doing business in Korea and in Korea section we see a vehicle is powered by Swanekke Power Corp. What that means is anyone's guess but it looks like it is fusion.