In the spirit of avoiding deadlines by reading things I don't have time
for and writing things I probably should delete before sending, or
better yet, not bother to write:
I have a love/hate relationship with Freeman Dyson and his work and
legacy.
I have a love/hate relationship (quite parallel actually) with Global
Climate Change.
I'm a human-chauvanist (in the sense of Robert Heinlein) and I loathe
myself for it.
I'm a bleeding heart liberal humanist (in the sense of many of us on
this list) and I loathe myself for it.
Yes Nick, it is time for another huge helping of starchy, fatty, Ennui,
liberally drizzled with rich, spicy Angst:
I think it is horribly/wonderfully arrogant of us to think we can do
anything of consequence to this planet. But then "what means
consequence"? After all, even our most devastating nuclear holocaust
would look like a drop in the bucket compared to one good impactor from
space (or any other historical Extinction Event). And at the same
time, there is some evidence that humans, at the end of the last ice
age managed to wipe out most of the megafauna (where did those
mastadons, giant tree sloths, dire wolves and sabertooth cats go
anyway?) on the planet, sparing only those in Africa who (apparently?)
adapted to our enhanced predatory (neolithic?) capabilities as fast as
we developed new ones?
Mother Nature is not really that nice to her children (and I think of
us as some of her most precocious brats to date), starting as early as
the Siderian period, the rise (and cum-uppance) of the Oxygen
Extinction. Stupid Photosynthesizers... didn't they know when to
quit? And look what they ushered in, Oxygen Metabolizers that could
run circles around them, gobble them up like so much fodder and shit
them out. The over-zealousness of the photosynthesizers lead to the
creation of their own new masters, the oxygen-eating herbivores who in
turn provided a substrate for the carnivores, which collectively
provide a great playground for Homo Sapiens Exploitatus (read Genesis
and talk to some fundamentalist Christians if you don't think this
planet was designed to be our playground).
Like members of the pantheon of Greek (and Roman and Norse) Gods, Ma
Nature gives us the rope to hang ourselves, lets us stew in our own
juices, offers us the best of all parental benefits: "benign
neglect". Those cigarette burns on our cheeks? That just comes from
not being careful enough around adults smoking cigarettes at a cocktail
party (gesticulating wildly in their drunken exuberence). Only the
slow and dull-witted let that happen more than once. Thanks Ma, you
are right... I'll be more careful next time... and thanks again for the
chemistry set you gave me for Xmas and the big box of matches! Have a
nice party.
Whether Al Gore (and the many very serious scientists he quotes, or the
many Chicken Littles who flock to him) are correct or not, I am not
sure. My human-centric arrogance loves the idea that in 100+ years of
industrial activity we have been able to kick the planet's ecological
and climatological balance so far out of whack that we might not
recover. My (somewhat more humble) humanist side abhors that we can so
blithely set the planet on fire (metaphorically) with little thought to
the consequence to all the cute little baby seals and our cute little
grandchildren and their even cuter grandchildren (if we, the species
last that long).
Dyson is not only a deep thinker, but also a grand thinker. What
could something as mundane as "Global Climate Change" mean to someone
who has proposed collecting up all of the planetary and asteroidal
material in the solar system to create a perfect shell at the optimal
distance from the sun to create a perfect "inside out" planet,
intercepting every bit of radiation energy leaving the sun. If it
were set at 1 AU, to simulate the solar flux of earth (how
terra-centric can we get?) we get a surface something like 55 million
(~2^16 ) times that of earth. The total energy output of the sun is
about 2^43 times our current use. All the engineering problems aside
(hah!) we have a theoretical maximum in this solar system (unless we
decided we needed to boost the rate of fusion in the sun, if we could)
of at least 55 million times as many people consuming trillions as many
times as much energy per capita (put your money back in GM/Hummer
stock)! Given that we would be living on a shell whose "other side"
(a few meters or kilometers away?) we might even be able to make much
more efficient use of the solar flux than we do now, restricted by
having to create/find gradients in our closed little atmospheric and
oceanic shell. Imagine the entire surface of the sphere a huge set of
valved heat-pipes just waiting to provide thermal gradients for optimal
energy utilization to do useful work! Imagine all that "useful work"!
Oh the things we could do!
Of course Dyson scoffs at our fears of global warming, and suggests we
bio-engineer forests to sequester carbon. He might even be right
(that we have the wherewithal to do such). And if we start doubling
our population every 30 years right away, we can have the population
necessary to maximally use the Dyson Sphere in a mere 11 generations
(330 years!) (check my math guys). We'd better quit worrying about
minor problems like rising sea levels and desertification of the
interior of north America and get cracking on the really hard problems
like how to gather up and reshape all the non-solar matter in the solar
system. Better kick a few Obama Bucks into Space Technology, hell
kick them all in!
So, is anthropogenic global climate change real? I fear it is. I hope
it isn't. What I'm equally disturbed about is that *we can't tell!*.
I don't mean that the climate change scientists don't have really good
data and even good models (ice cores from antartica, greenland, etc.).
What I mean is that as a species, as a culture, we are so tangled up in
our value system that something vaguely like half of us (well, half of
those living in the US, or half of those in the 1st World) insist that
*they know for a fact* that the *other half* are totally insane and
being disagreeable for entirely specious and political reasons. Half
of us think the other half are trying to destroy the biosphere while
the other half think that the *other* other half are trying to destroy
the economy.
Either way, everyone thinks everyone else is trying to destroy humanity
(and life, the universe, and everything)! If the stakes are this
high, why are we screaming and running in every direction at once?
Wait... isn't that what we humans (primates, mammals, vertebrates)
do? What possible survival value is there in that? The canoe is
rocking and tipping madly and we are all rushing to see how far out the
side we can hang our bodies to try to balance the "idiots" hanging out
the other side. Anyone who's fallen out of a canoe knows that a good
strategy when things get tippy is to move to the center and drop down
low, not shriek loudly as we manically try to obtain a dynamic balance
with the other shrieking occupants.
When the wildfire roars through the forest or prarie, the animals,
great and small run blindly in all directions. Those that run away
from the fire, flush more, and give them a direction to run in. The
only thing a smoke-blinded panicked creature needs to know in a
wildfire is to run like hell in the same direction everyone else around
you is running (even if they are running in circles). By the time the
fire is about to consume you, this is a good strategy. Back when it
was just starting and you were (un)lucky enough to be near the front,
this is as likely to get you killed immediately as it is to help you
run in a direction where you get to have a chance of being killed
slowly or maybe, just maybe, not at all. We are the ones who started
the fire (if there is one), isn't it amazing that some of us are eager
to run right back into it and toss some more accellerant on it? Maybe
it is just an illusion, a collective hallucination, and isn't it brave
of those who run directly into it spraying volatile combustibles around
like holy water?
In the spirit of hunkering down in the center of the canoe... I think I
should dig out those 5 year old vegetable seeds and start patiently
doing germination tests. Then I should start preparing an area inside
my south facing windows to sprout some starts. In about a week, the
soil will be ready for some light tilling and I could plant those peas
and an early crop of greens outside and start getting ready to put in
the starts mid-May. Nah... I think I'll go to the Hummer store and
see if the prices are finally down enough that I can finally trade my
30 yr old 40MPG Civic in on... I deserve to ride in style. I am,
after all, one of Mother Nature's most special children! Gas is
hovering at $2... no big deal. And the produce section is *full* of
great green goodness shipped halfway across the planet, all shiny and
wrapped up in cellophane, much prettier than anything I could grow
myself. What was I thinking? Articles on big thinkers like Dyson get
me all nostalgic sometimes.
Besides, I need to work on the mathematics to see if my version of the
Dyson Sphere will remain solar-stationary based on the "solar wind"
alone, and what angular velocity I need to provide 1G, and whether the
resulting coriolis forces will mess with my head. I guess I should go
back and read Niven's RingWorld again for some pointers. What are we
going to use to replace the magnetic field to deflect the "bad rays"
and where will they go? Oh shit! I think we just created a giant
Cavitron! No wonder there are so many pulsars in the known universe...
they are just all of the civilizations who survived their own nonsense
long enough to turn their solar system into a giant Cavitron spewing
beams of intense energy around the Universe as cautionary beacons for
the rest of us.
Ahhhhhhhhyeeeeeeee!
- Steven Angsty Smith
Homo Sapiens Exploitatus ExtraOrdinaire
That's a funny coincidence ... I am reading it just now.
I'm always glad to come across another skeptic on anthropogenic
global warming, particularly from someone with such strong credentials.
The sustained level of pervasive hand-wrangling on this issue is quite
worrisome. The actions that some are proposing to curb carbon
emissions is far out of line relative to the level of uncertainty that
still exists, and I think it likely that a stiff carbon tax of some
sort will do much more harm than good.
And I do get tired of the badly written articles one finds on
this subject in the press. The level of blind acceptance among the
press corp is rather reminiscent of those covering the Bush white house.
Anyway, that's just my opinion. I have seen a slight uptick in
skeptical writings over the last year or so on AGW, so maybe we have
started to turn the corner on this issue. One can hope.
Cheers,
Ted
*I didn't just drop a bomb, did I?
On Sun, Mar 29, 2009 at 10:47 PM, Nicholas
Thompson
<[hidden email]>
wrote:
While we are at it, did anybody read about Freeman Dyson in
the Times Mag today? What did you think?
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