Very cool link! Thanks.
I wonder how much more “efficient” cars have gotten. They
have certainly gotten lighter over the years. But are they really getting that much
more energy from gasoline?
“I wonder why we, the
apologists and denialists for anthropogenic crises are so quick to take credit
for man's great abilities to fill every corner of the world, to dominate every
climate, every landscape, yet insist that we could *never* be the cause of
major systems imbalances in the world”
I suppose the same is true in reverse. There are those that apologize for
our greatness and deny that we’ve done wonders yet insist that we could
never be the cause of our own destiny. It’s all a matter of perspective.
Sometimes I wonder, if a conservative is someone that resists change,
then are those that “save the whales” and fret about “global
warming” or “global cooling” also conservative? Did those
mammoths died because they didn’t change; that they were too “conservative”
of a species and didn’t adapt and evolve? Did they really die or did
their genes live on in other species? If we hunted them to death and that’s
bad, is it also bad that they supplanted other species during their rise and
caused them to go extinct?
“I think I'll choose to live
in a region of the multiverse where humans *do* recognize their
self-destructive habits”
I don’t think you have a choice. If in this universe we destroy
ourselves, our conscious continuity will only live on in those other universe
where we don’t destroy ourselves.
Imagine all those other universes where a killer asteroid hit the
Earth, or nuclear war, or plague killed everyone. We’ll, here we are and
there we’re not!
Rob
From:
[hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Sunday, April 19, 2009 6:16
PM
To:
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] How many
years left
Robert Howard wrote:
http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/our-economic-past-the-great-horse-manure-crisis-of-1894/
I'll say it so Doug doesn't have to (get to?):
That sounds like a lot of Horse Shit to me!
Seriously (hah!)
I had the great pleasure of attending one of Geoff West's lectures on Scaling Laws in
Biology. It was a good reminder of the main point of the above
article: Things don't go on as they did before. Clearly, by
the time Chicken-Little is running about squawking that "the sky is
falling!", others with more careful powers of observation and cooler heads
have been hard at work finding a "solution" to the
problem.
Sigmoidal growth curves start out slow, ramp up as compound growth happens,
things begin to saturate and growth becomes more "linear" and then
ultimately they "supersaturate" and growth goes flat. In
"innovative" systems like mutation-selection and human-technological,
as one system starts to saturate, another system starts to compete, to fill the
same ecological/economic/sociological/technological niche. What we end up
with is something like a series of piecewise linear growth systems appearing to
be a single one with super-linear, accelerating growth.
I'm not convinced that the introduction of Internal Combustion Engines and
automobiles to displace the c19 Manure-machines in use for transportation was
anything but a deferral and aggravation of the problem. I believe
that we exchanged a relatively obvious, localized, and
quickly-recovered-from problem (horse-shit-in-streets) for a much less obvious,
less localized, and longer-to-recover-from problem (urban and regional
smog). During the 1970's oil crisis, we doubled the fuel efficiency
of the average automobile from 10-20 to 20-40, but by then we were already
wallowing in our own smog, so we backed off on the ultra-efficient leaned-out
engines that were spewing Nitrous Oxides (but few particulates or unburned
hydrocarbons) and lived with automobiles getting 15-30 for the next 30 years.
In the 1960's 10,000 miles a year was a lot of miles for the single family
automobile. By today, every member of the family of driving age (in the
I wonder why we, the apologists and denialists for anthropogenic crises are so
quick to take credit for man's great abilities to fill every corner of the
world, to dominate every climate, every landscape, yet insist that we could
*never* be the cause of major systems imbalances in the world? In my
humble moments, I would like to believe that we have no such ability, but then
I look around and realize that maybe we *are* a force to be reckoned with...and
I wonder if we will rise to the occasion of our own reckoning?
I don't know if running out of available flint was part of what kicked us from
paleolithic stone to neolithic stone, or from neolithic stone to bronze tools,
but there is a lot of evidence that *we* *did* knock down the bulk of the
megafauna that thrived during the pliestocene and that neolithic (highly
improved from paleolithic) tools might have had a lot to do with
it. So even before what we call "early civilization", our
cleverness may have had continental, if not global impacts on the
biosphere. Losing a few woolly mammoths and rhinoceri, giant
sloths, cave bears, sabertoothed cats, and dire wolves might not really matter
in any large sense... but it does seem worth noting that even with the barest
of technology, our ancestors might have had such widespread effects.
Humans seem to have a "manifest destiny" that involves the
ever-increasing of the stakes. Those of us who grew up on
space-traveling science-fiction might believe that we are somehow going to
escape the planet/solar system as it collapses under our weight behind
us. Many of us are descendants of those who fled other continents as
*they* seemed to be collapsing under *their* own (sociopolitical?)
weight.
Of course, Europe and
Perhaps the Singularians are correct. Perhaps we can just keep pushing
things off into the future faster and faster and faster until the future is an
eternal accellerated-pace NOW!
Fortunately I have multiverse theories to escape laterally into/across... I
think I'll choose to live in a region of the multiverse where humans *do*
recognize their self-destructive habits and develop new systems of awareness
that are just this side of catastrophically self-destructive, rather than just
"the other side". What good are "basins of
attraction" if we can't choose which ones to slide gently
into?
- Steve
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