Steve S.,
Now I KNOW you should write an op=ed for the Times. Or better still, the NEW
YORKER.
The Liberal's Contract with the world: "You let me do to you whatever I want,
and in return I give you my guilt."
Another Liberal fallacy: "As long as I have contempt for myself, I get to have
contempt for you"
These are habits of mind I both deplore and indulge in myself in the same
sentences. In fact, in those very sentences.
But when I am trying to be serious, I return to the existentialism that I was
braised in as a kid.: Choosing is what humans do; we have to take our best
shot! And if our best science tells us (1) that global warming may be a
terrible problem and (2) that we wont know if it is a terrible problem until
after it is too late to do something, then we ==>must<== take a crack at
solving the problem.
Note the use of modal language! ("==>must<==") Anytime somebody uses modal
language, they have entered into the world of values ... have, in fact, taken
leave of their sense, gone mad!. I cannot argue for "taking our best shot". I
just believe that as humans we "should" do it, and hope that you will join me
in this belief, because I would rather be mad together than mad alone. This is
the best rationale I can muster for supporting Anti-global warming measures.
To be serious, we have to escape irony; to escape irony, we have to go mad.
The solution is that easy.
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([email protected])
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
----- Original Message -----
From: Steve Smith
To: The Monday Morning MisApplied Complexity Coffee Group Grope
Sent: 3/30/2009 12:41:38 PM
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Freeman Dyson and Homo Sapiens Exploitatus
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
<[email protected]> 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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