h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

No I can't in just a few paragraphs, Alji. Could you?

When you look at the development of human technology, some things standout.

First, there's been increased energy throughput, with the attendent increase in entropy. That's why the world is more polluted now than before.

Second, expense. Regions in the Third World that were previously self-sufficient in food production are now experiencing famine. Part of that has to do with the farming methods. When advanced methods are introduced to these regions, only a few of the people can pay the expense of the energy infrastructure and what they do implement puts subsistance farmers out of business. Consequently, you can see tractors rusting in the fields and agricultural commodities being produced for export exclusively on very large landholdings, on the average 3000 acres or more.

The average person in a developed nation requires the equivalent of 20 acres to support her/himself. The average person in a developing nation then has to get by with five acres.

The effects of technology has been to concentrate wealth, not increase the output for everybody, because there's no free lunch. If it isn't here, you can't use it.

The oil, gas and coal resources are essentially non-renewable. What took millions of years to cycle by natural processes is being consumed at a rate that will probably terminate the supply in another 50 to 100 years. Some suggest 300 years, but that's pretty optimistic.

Of course, people are always talking about the reserves that aren't economically recoverable right now but would be later when prices are higher. But then that puts further barriers in front of the developing nations who can't afford the resources now. How will they afford them later?

In short, technology doesn't create anything. It allows us to utilize things that are already here and once we utilize them, they become unavailable or scrap. We can recycle the scrap sometimes but not nearly as effectively as the natural cycles that already exist. But often we don't have the time to wait.

Clean water resources are in extreme jeopardy right now. Yes, people are producing food at incredible rates from the Great Plains for example but they're using up water from 100,000 years ago to do it. We can't recharge those aquifers fast enough.

If we capture the water to irrigate then we deny it to the people downstream who end up living in a salt marsh where there was once a river delta. Any arable land brought into production by irrigation then is balanced by land lost to the sea.

The problem with technological solutions is that they don't anticipate the consequences of the technology very well and that's what's naive about it. They also fail to account for the costs, which are related to increase pollution and expense. In order for a lightbulb to work as intended, you need a generator and everything required to make it and make work.

For every new technology developed, there's probably been another, older, less energy and resource intensive technology that's been lost.

In less than a century, nuclear energy has created hot waste that nobody knows what to do with. Nuclear energy was supposed to fuel the grand successor to the industrial revolution but guess what? There's a slight problem. If we fuel things as planned, the earth might not be inhabitable in a very short time. It doesn't take a lot of nuclear waste to cause problems, not nearly as much as coal waste or oil waste, and we really don't know what to do with those either, except stop using the fuels.

Now we're told that fusion power will ultimately secure all our energy requirements for eons to come. I wonder. You know, we already have a perfectly good fusion reactor in service conveniently located 93 million miles away, which is a relatively safe distance for such things. If we can't figure out how to utilize it, how do you suppose we'll figure out how to utilize smaller ones electrical utilities can control and market?

Burning hydrogen? Yes, it's byproducts are heat and water, but where do you get the hydrogen? Do you mine Jupiter? Or get it from the water you already have? Will you discover that the process is not quite balanced, that some of the resource becomes unavailable with each cycle? Yes, that's exactly what happens, which is why there isn't more hydrogen on earth already. There's not gravity to keep it here.

What's funny is that everything needed for human survival is already here and always has been. But if humans don't learn to conserve, they'll use up things faster than can be replaced in a human lifetime. Then all that technological sophistication will have been for nothing. You can never produce enough for people who think enough is never enough.

I'll have to come back to you on this one but one point before I go - Hydrogen is not a problem, you start with water then you use the enrgy of the Sun to split it into oxygen and hydrogen. Burning the hydrogen recombines the oxygen and hydrogen and there's no polution.
It's time(16 October 2002 01:12:43 AM) for some shut-eye, Nos da.

Alji ,{Guru},(Join The Guild of Wizards @ U197895)

You're correct, however, then it becomes a water cycle issue, doesn't it? Also, a silicon crystal growing issue and copper or aluminium issue if you're planning on splitting the molecule by hydrolysis. Nano technology is already posing issues about the technological equivalent of microrobial infection. So we're back to Square One, as usual. I told you it wouldn't be easy to explain. Now, do you see why?

There is simply never going to be a day in which you'll get more out of things than you put in, one way or another. It's not going to happen. You can play games with money or people's heads but the laws of the universe aren't optional. Technology then becomes something like sleight of hand, a magic trick, and no more significant than that although its capable of doing a good deal more damage.

If technologists were compelled to observe the Hippocratic Oath like doctors, things would be going a great deal less rapidly and more deliberately. Yet even the doctors now are ignoring the prohibition against doing harm in order to make a fast buck.

I recently learned that David Livingstone gave up medical practice because the Africans rejected his overtures to heal them claiming his methods were just as coincidental in their results as their methods for making rain. Whether saving souls was any less coincidental in its results is debatable, but it probably did less harm and he did manage in a small way to disrupt the slave trade.

That's something to ponder when you're tempted to conclude that there are no limits to human ingenuity. The limits are there but people don't want to recognize them. It's a little like having to grow up.

agcBen said
>In principle, there is no reason why at some point well into the future we shouldn't all have as much as we want of whatever we want, for free.
She was being very optomistic and to me it sounds like a nightmare world. Does 'as much as we need of whatever we need' sound any better?

Have a look at this site - http://www.john-daly.com/


Alji ,{Guru},(Join The Guild of Wizards @ U197895)

Mr. Daly appears to have his own personal agenda, doesn't he? He apparently started his crusade in response to the fluorocarbon destruction of the ozone layer theory first propounded in the 1970s I believe.

I don't doubt that destruction is taking place. The fact that it or the accumulation of methane may be leveling out merely confirms that efforts at controlling these emissions have had some positive effects, no thanks to Mr. Daly of course.

While there may be a good deal of environmental "junk science", that is hardly different from the junk science prevailing in the medical research community. Statistical studies are susceptable to many interpretations as well as sampling biases.

For these reasons, I prefer to study the rocks that represent a larger sampling than can be obtained in the contemporary world.

The economic models that have heretofore been employed to justify the patterns of resource utilization or extraction do not address the entropy/waste issue at all. That's why they are fundamentally flawed. They do not account for the cost of accumulating junk.

For example, if you were to place Mr. Daly in a chamber full of carbon dioxide, he would expire within a few minutes. A variation of this experiment was once conducted on some birds by Lavoisier to prove that animals require oxygen to survive.

The salient issue is that life cannot survive in even modest concentrations of its own waste products. This is why wine has sediment. The sediment is the dead yeast killed by the alcohol, a waste product of the fermentation process.

Dispersion of waste products is absolutely essential for survival, however, that can't be accomplished if the products are accumulating faster than they can be dispersed. Moreover, it is quite possible for the process to exhibit a positive feedback component that will cause the accumulations to actually accelerate at some point. When that point is reached, remediation is problematic at best. You get a finished bottle of wine or a dead world depending on the scale of the process.

Typically global climatic changes have occurred at rather slow rates resulting from geologic processes associated with the movement of crustal plates. Accumulations of carbon dioxide such as we observe now were also apparently present during the Cretaceous when Pangea was breaking up.

The difference is that such concentrations during the Cretaceous took millions years to appear. Now they take only a few hundred years. Clearly humans are having an effect that may be balanced in the near future in a fashion similar to what happens in a fermentation vat. This is the simple process that people like Daly fail to appreciate when they apparently assume as a matter of faith that someone will miraculously deliver them from their own manure pile and do it for free.

Diatoms might be of some assistance in remediation if they weren't being threatened by oceanic pollution. Likewise, rainforests also remediate CO2 concentrations but they are also being threatened. What does Daly presume will substitute?

The problem here is that one way of life, promoted by the Europeans primarily, has impacted the environment on a scale unprecedented in human or earth history. The promoters of this way of life simply can't accept that it might be dangerous to pursue it in the long term, which is evidently starting to become the short term.

This is a classic case of putting on blinders. It is not a wise perspective to adopt and its pursuit may very well terminate the Cenozoic or at least the Holocene.

Ironically, the development of science, possibly the greatest legacy the Europeans have ever bequeathed to the world, shows the hazards posed by the culture that devised it. No one needs to rely on alternative cultural interpretations of what is a good way to live to see that there is something flawed in the dominant culture's way by its own reasoning. To selectively ignore this knowledge then probably evidences some sort of insanity, which neither science nor alternative cultures can comprehend.

I was ambling around hootoo, checking out the <./>info</.> page as is my wont when things are quiet, and found this thread with Alji's name in it. Since he is an interesting chap, I came over to see what he had been saying, and found y'all had mentioned me.

The entry you were discussing, 'Money and the power of belief', was originally an entry about just that, and did not mention technology at all. I am not particularly interested in technology (pace, Rita) but I am very interested in how belief functions in the human psyche. Hence the entry saying, in effect, the emperor has no clothes.

Hoovooloo gave me the quote from Iain Banks' Culture books, and the paragraph about technology. (He is an engineer). I put it in almost verbatim, and co-credited him on the entry, because it put context around the concept 'money is a sign of poverty'.

There is no real reason to say any of this, but it is wierd (but not unpleasant) to drop into a conversation at random, and find yourself discussed!

All the best to all

Ben

Sorry if I misinterpreted the source. I presumed by quoting you were endorsing, Ben. People usually don't quote things in support of their assertions unless they agree with the quote.

Interestingly, I think that the belief in technology coming to the aid of remediating scarcity is quite as arbitrary as the notion that money represents wealth, although money has no inherent value. Do you suppose that has any relevance for your interest in how beliefs function in the human psyche? Do you suppose people are inclined to confuse tokens with what the tokens are supposed to represent and, therefore, come to rather unreasonable conclusions about the way things are or ought to be?

One of the problems with the way in which guide entries are co-credited is that it is impossible to see who wrote what. It isn't a problem, and I do endorse what Hoovooloo was saying in so far as I find it a plausible speculation about a possible way forward. I don't view it as a prediction, and technology is not an area I am competent to hold strong opinions in anyway. The reason for the entry was to challenge people's view of their relationship with money, and Hoovooloo's speculations helped me do that.

>Interestingly, I think that the belief in technology coming to the aid
>of remediating scarcity is quite as arbitrary as the notion that money
>represents wealth, although money has no inherent value.

You are right, that is interesting. I have thought much more about money, wealth and value than technology. It seems to me that scarcity will go when money is irrelevant. I guess that could be achieved by universal spiritual growth, but I look around me and don't see much of that. Technology is another possiblility. At the moment I cannot think of any others.

I am wary of the sort of technological advances HVL outlines, because there will be an immense vested interest in preventing them, viz the music industry's response to Napster. Now that was just fluff, and irrelevent to society as a whole. But the oil companys won't want free power, now, will they? (Which is one of the reasons they are investing in green energy, before anyone else does). If technology really begins to undermine scarcity, and therefore wealth, then the powers opposing it will be great.

>Do you suppose that has any relevance for your interest in how beliefs
>function in the human psyche? Do you suppose people are inclined to
>confuse tokens with what the tokens are supposed to represent

Only all the time!

>and, therefore, come to rather unreasonable conclusions about the way
>things are or ought to be?

Well, they certainly come to unreasonable conclusions about the way things are or ought to be. Do they do that *because* they confuse the tokens with what they are supposed to represent? I am not sure. Yes, very probably. There is a tendency to concretise the abstract, and then ascribe voliton to that concrete 'concept'. For example I was having a discussion recently in which the other person was saying 'society does this' and 'society does that'. Well society can't turn the gas down under the milk to stop it boiling over. I fail to see how society can pressurize people into conforming to a certain standard of behaviour, for example. Society can have no agenda. But he was talking and thinking about society as if it was a thing, not a concept. So yes - he had come to unreasonable conclusions about the way things are or ought to be, if not by confusing the tokens with the things they represent, then by confusing the concrete with the abstract.

Actually DNA said that perfectly in the quote about 'small bits of green paper' at the beginning of that entry.

All the best

Ben

Do you suppose there are words in English that have unclear meanings so as to facilitate the discussion of unclear things?

Take "society" of example. While it might not do something like remove the milk from the fire before it boils, it might represent a group of people who consider milk food and furthermore consider that it ought to be cooked, but not too much. However, this would be unclear, would it not, in the context of the discussion of what society may or may not do to enforce conformity?

Such concepts still have value as variables in determining how things interact. The concept of society has a role to play in discussions of how large groups of strangers interact, internally and externally.

The fact that you don't understand how society can pressure people into conforming does not in any fashion discredit the notion that the conformity exists and is indeed one way in which the society is defined. You would then need to determine what did cause the conformity, if it wasn't some sort of "pressure", which I'm taking to mean some form of coercion or intimidation. If the pressure is admitted to exist, then the source of the pressure needs to be identified. That source is assigned the term, society, in the absence of something more specific such as the ruling class or the law or the police or whatever.

Perhaps this would help in understanding how people use terminology, tokens then.

I should mention that the Lakota language has words for which there aren't any clear meanings. These words are used to describe unclear things such as that which animates the world at large, often called "wakan tanka" or "ska taku ska ska", and often erroneously translated as God or Great Spirit. One can't translate a meaningless term very well, but some still try.

We definitely need words to describe unclear things. And words with unclear meanings are the only linguistic tool we have. Nuance steps in escorting association and emotional response with it. Without these words we would have no poetry.

Where the problem comes is when people forget that words like 'society' are not concrete, and that sentances like 'society imposes conformity' are in fact metaphors. They take the metaphors literaly, and end up either confused or dangerous or both.

Much of what society 'does' to the individual, is in fact what the individual does to themselves in response to what they see society 'doing' to them.

Peer pressure is an interesting one. It implies a bunch of people saying 'go on, do it, do it, or we will all hate you'. While a lot of peer pressure does work like that, much of what is called peer pressure is actually peer permission. For example if a friend drops out of college and his world does not come to an end, then I will tend to think 'well, maybe I can do that too'. If you add expectation and a need for acceptance into the mix, then the forces that are acting are internal responses to external events, not the external events themselves.

I think it is acceptable to say 'the government puts pressure on smokers by raising taxes' because a government is a legal entity with a structure, and agenda, and accountablility. There is a tent there, that people are on the inside of, or the outside of. But I am more wary of saying 'society puts pressure on smokers by ostracising them socially', because there is no entity there. Smokers may feel pressurised by social ostracism, but that is another matter.

To misquote the song by the Who: "Who are they?"

We definitely need unclear words, because words are the main tool that we have for sharing and communicating our understanding of the world, and the world is full of unclear things. There are also mathematical tools, and things like musical notation. But they are as limited in their scope as words are. The limit is just more obvious, because most of us have at least one language, and don't speak mathematics or notation.

But using words in the context of spiritual subjects, and in the context of the function of the mind, and very probably in other contexts, is like going into a dark room with a torch, and shining it around the place looking for darkness. The act of using the torch makes the darkness vanish. That is NOT how you find darkness.

Enough. It is one am here, and I need to find some darkness and sleep.

Interesting about the Lakota language.

B

We'd need 4 more planet Earths for everyone to live like an American. So even if population growth stopped today, Americans could still consume excessively, and billions would live in poverty.
See http://www.newdream.org/justice/index.html

By making carbon di-oxide the bad guy, the experts in the UK say the only way we can get down to the Kyoto level is to use Nuclear Power.

Alji

Number of people that the planet could support living as the Europeans do, with modest but comfortable homes, refrigeration for food, and ready access to public transit, augmented by limited auto use: everyone.
[Alan Durning, "Asking How Much Is Enough," State of the World 1991, p. 157.]

http://www.cn.org/zpg/3a.htm

Alji

I'm sorry, Ben. I still don't grasp your distinction between concrete entities and abstractions. In what fashion is government any less abstract than the society it claims to represent? Or any more concrete for that matter?

Well a government is a legal entity for a start. It has defined roles and responsibilities, it is answerable for its actions, it can be overthrown or re-elected. It comprises a clearly defined and named group of individuals with clearly defined roles and responsibilities of their own. And governments have stated agendas (called election manifestos).

Society on the other hand has none of the above, and no equivalents to any of the above.

Governments are not concrete, but there is more to grab hold of there than there is with 'society'.

B

The ratio is illustrated in the amount of land required to sustain the developed nation citizen compared to the underdeveloped one. It's approximately four to one, as you implied, Alji. The ratio probably varies when such things as mineral extraction are considered. We see an overall increase in mineral utilization proportionate with colonization.

It is often argued that the people in who's territory the minerals lie cannot use the minerals because their level of development is not sufficiently advanced. Therefore, the developed people have every right to extract those minerals in their not so balanced view.

The question then is why must the minerals be utilized at all? What is so compelling about the developed lifestyle that we must all accept the notion that people who adhere to it deserve four times the resources allocated to everyone else?

The current warmongering in America can be best attributed to a awkward, veiled attempt to secure those resources by coercion or intimidation if necessary. That is what Bush really means by "civilization". Colonization is the tool that civilization uses to provision itself. So, again why should we acquiesce to the rather arbitrary and capricious dictates of civilization as Bush et al defines it?

With all due respect to the adherents of civilization, I don't think the Vatican, Westminster Abby, Chartres, the Parthenon, or the Sears Tower deserves yielding up one acre of land, one drop of water, or one human life. I rejoice not in the monuments of men but in the natural world that nurtures all of us.

For some enough is never going to be enough. For them, this world wasn't made well enough and their awkward attempts to improve it invariably make things worse for the many to advantage the few. It is that imbalance that has kept the human community in turmoil for centuries. It has never worked and never will. When will some people get that through their thick skulls?

So does the government exist in a vacuum? Does it govern no concrete entities, Ben?

No.

They govern people. And groups of people. They run schools, and hospitals, and transport services, and armies, and tax departments. What they do affects companies, and charities, and students, and pensioners, and trades unions, and employees.

So you have a legal entity with clearly defined roles acting on other legal entities with clearly defined roles.

B

And what is this aggregate of legal entities called? A nation perhaps? And what constitutes that nation outside of the rigorously legal, nation state components? A society perhaps? What else could we call it? It's not a tribe certainly.

Suppose we consider for a moment that none of this is concrete. Suppose it exists because people say it exists and will enforce their dictates if there is any dispute. Was there a time when the nation state didn't exist? I think there was, during the late medieval period because we can see the transition in the historical records.

Did the formerly abstract suddenly become concrete? Or is it still an abstraction supported by the concrete threat of violence?

I don't think it helps that we tend to polarise. Governments are not concrete the way that concrete is concrete. But they have more reality than 'society'. They can pass laws that affect peoples lives for a start. That does not make them real. (Hell, you are talking to a woman who does not believe that money is real). But if we polarise into concrete and abstract, or talk about black and white, we exclude the sound of birdsong.

In 1995 I realised that commonality was shifting. I now work on international IT projects with other IT professionals. I have more in common with them than I do with the people who are of the same nationality and race who live in the same apartment block as I do. So my commonaltiy has shifted horizontally to join with people outside my nationality, whereas before it was closely allied to geography. I think this is happening at all levels and in myriad ways, and is one of the sublty subersive things about the internet. It is also one of the reasons I am on this site.

What do we call the aggregate of legal entities governed by a government?

I dunno. I don't get particularly hung up on the difference between nation, state, and country, so I have not made any conclusions about the differences.

B

Well, I do get hung up because prior to the 16th century the notion of a nation state was completely foreign to my people. And because the abstract institutions of that entity were forced on us, we've had a considerable amount of adaption to pursue for the convenience of the conquerors.

For you this may merely be a curiosity. For us, it has been a matter of survival, more than a slight inconvenience. That is why I found your assertions of the concrete nature of government somewhat selfserving and parochial. I apologize that it has come to this, but there's no point in tiptoeing around the topic any longer, is there?

The internet IT associations you cite are very much like the communities of interest or convenience that probably first caused to humans to gather in groups larger than extended families. They are relatively benign in their impacts on individuals and families, unlike the coercive governments that replaced them.

It's perhaps ironic that as governments attempt to gain control of the internet, the whole sorry scenario will probably be played out once again.