Maybe we could download ourselves off the planet
This from today’s The Press:
Is humanity striding towards glory, or are we so busy reaching for the stars that we’re about to sail off the edge of a cliff?
Good question. The article goes on to the arguments of Ray Kurzweil:
…the vast changes of the 20th century amount to only about 20 years of research at the 2000 rate. Because the pace is forever quickening, he predicts that this century will see the equivalent of 20,000 years of change at the 2000 rate.
and
Carefully tailored drugs and genetic engineering will beat back disease and extend the human lifespan. In about 15 years, when biological manipulation reaches its limits, nanotechnology will take over.
Microscopic robots will not only repair and improve our bodies from the inside, but allow manipulation of the world around us at the molecular level.
Kurzweil imagines the human body transformed, our organs superseded by an army of nanobots, our brains merged seamlessly with technology. Once computers surpass the complexity of the human brain, around 2020, human and machine intelligence will gradually merge.
The inferior human brain will become obsolete and, by the middle of the century, humanity will have left its biological heritage entirely behind.
Jared Diamond then provides the ‘walking off the cliff’ view:
because the deforestation took centuries, the long-term trend went unnoticed from generation to generation. Those who chopped down the last tree were already used to a mostly denuded island.
Similar human frailties were behind other collapses, frailties which still permeate society.
There are clear parallels with our current situation. Will our descendants one day wonder what we were thinking as we pulled the last fish from the sea?
Or wonder what we were thinking as we pumped the last drops of oil out of the ground?
But an even more striking budget base-jumping analysis is in London’s The Independent yesterday (their time), which reports:
The world has already passed the point of no return for climate change, and civilisation as we know it is now unlikely to survive, according to James Lovelock, the scientist and green guru who conceived the idea of Gaia - the Earth which keeps itself fit for life.
In a profoundly pessimistic new assessment, published in today’s Independent, Professor Lovelock suggests that efforts to counter global warming cannot succeed, and that, in effect, it is already too late.
The world and human society face disaster to a worse extent, and on a faster timescale, than almost anybody realises, he believes. He writes: ” Before this century is over, billions of us will die, and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.”
In Lovelock’s actual article in the same issue, there is a curious echo of Kurzweil:
We have to keep in mind the awesome pace of change and realise how little time is left to act; and then each community and nation must find the best use of the resources they have to sustain civilisation for as long as they can. Civilisation is energy-intensive and we cannot turn it off without crashing, so we need the security of a powered descent.
I’ll let you read these articles above to fill in the details, but in short, Lovelock’s earlier view that nuclear power was the only way of heading off climate change while keeping the lights on (for everywhere except New Zealand and Iceland) seems to have been replaced with a simple ‘nothing can stop it, we’re doomed’.
To bring it all back home to New Zealand’s Parliament, here’s someone who insists on being optimistic. Rodney Hide, went to the Hydrological Conference “to explain gently that the Greens are hard-core socialists peddling propaganda dressed up as science”.
In the speech itself:
Drilling for oil in 400 feet of rough water demonstrated to me how resources aren’t defined physically but by science and technology combined with our ability to organise and to make use of them.
That’s why the human race continues to flourish and prosper 30 years after the environmental doomsday books so terrifyingly predicted our imminent demise.
We didn’t run out of resources for a very simple reason: we can expand our knowledge and thereby expand our resource base. We now have more resources than ever before. We will have even more tomorrow.
I did travel to countries that had run out of everything. These were the eastern bloc countries. Their problem wasn’t the physical limits of their resource base but their failed economic system.
That’s the other problem with the doomsday books.
They said a lot about ecology, systems and feedback loops, but ignored, first, the economic system within which natural resources are defined and used and, second, the feedback loop that prices provide. The failure was fatal to the models’ predictive power. If something gets scarce, its price goes up, spurring conservation, the search for more supplies and discovery of alternatives. The doomsday models failed because they were too narrow.
Yep, someone predicted we were doomed 30 years ago and we’re still here, so I guess we can ignore somone saying we’ll be gone in a 100 years. After all, the market is really good at “powered descents” and wherever there’s “breeding pairs”, someone will be generating a price signal. 
January 17th, 2006 at 5:31 pm
Well if Lovelock is right, we’re all fucked and there is nothing we can do about it.
So the solution surely isn’t to conserve energy, but to have a huge 100 year long party and go out enjoying ourselves with a bang!!
January 17th, 2006 at 5:39 pm
Complex little creatures aren’t we?
Emotionally we CAN’T relate to each other much beyond the small hunter/gatherer sized groups we evolved in.
We CAN’T share our resources with others who have less than subsistence level resources, and no means of birth control. Thus we let them die, often without a second thought. (We CAN however use disproportionate amounts on finding more and more efficient ways of killing off those communities which don’t fit into our group!)
Now, having disregarded the lives of others humans (and without any consideration at all for the other species who share this planet), it seems that we (as individuals) now want to live forever!
Homo sapiens indeed!
(I watch this space with intererest.)
eredwen
January 17th, 2006 at 8:25 pm
Technology is NOT the answer, it’s mis-use is part of the problem.
Only by getting back in tune with nature can we realize the wisdom that goes beyond greed, as our ancestors did. mother nature is a benevalent provider when her immutable rules are obey, ignore them………and spend your weekends parked up on pharmeutical drugs and food cheering on corporate sports teams and spending the rest of yur week trying to ignore the hypocrasy and emptiness of your life in a dsyfunctional society…. and remember……be HAPPY!
January 17th, 2006 at 8:55 pm
PS: We’d be uploading ourselves off the planet
January 17th, 2006 at 8:55 pm
I consider myself a futurist and have to throw in this correction -
Don’t hold out for artificial intelligence any time in the next hundred years - we have barely made a single step towards it ever. There’s nothing to suggest that something becomes aware and intelligent at some point of mathematical power. Computers will not “surpass” the “obslete” human brain unless there is an UNPRECEDENTED breakthrough. There have been very few unprecedented breakthroughs, ever.
Unfortunately the most convincing argument here is the one that says we’re buggered and we may as well surrender.
Mr. Hide’s argument may well be quite true for the rest of his life. But beyond? The market only protects resources for as long as the interested money is around to get richer. At what expense? The market will ultimately fail.
I buy that it’s too late to save everything, but not too late to save *something*.
January 17th, 2006 at 10:17 pm
“There are clear parallels with our current situation. Will our descendants one day wonder what we were thinking as we pulled the last fish from the sea?
Or wonder what we were thinking as we pumped the last drops of oil out of the ground?”
If technology is going to advance 1000 times more this century as last, how are we going to run out of resources? Do you know how much more efficient technology was in 2000 vs. 1900? Besides, I thought the greens were all for more energy efficient technology.
January 17th, 2006 at 10:22 pm
Sorry, sorry for the hold-up on several posts tonight, I’ve just unblocked something in the plumbing…
January 17th, 2006 at 11:19 pm
“mother nature is a benevalent provider”
that’s why thousands of years ago everyone died in the mid 30s, you had children from your early teens, people lived in their own community, with little means to travel far, to communicate with others far, and if you were different and had new ideas to do anything.
People with a golden age view of primitivism ought to try it out and see what it is like to lose your teeth by the time you’re 20, and spend your entire waking existence hunting, gathering and defending yourself against others.
There is LESS war today than ever before, and far more opportunities for people to leave the country, city and job they are in than ever before.
I take the article as being one of the innumerable calls of armageddon that get a certain sector of the population excited, in contrast to the evidence of ever increasing lifespans, leisure time, social and personal mobility and exposure to more and more variety of people, culture and experiences than ever before. The end of the world was long predicted by doomsayers based on religious faith - then it was nuclear war - now it is environmental degradation, yet major cities have cleaner air and water than ever before and the proportion of the global population living under state slavery and poverty is ever decreasing.
life is good.
January 18th, 2006 at 1:14 am
With respect to New Zealand, Lovelock is too pessimistic. With respect to nanotech, Kurzweil too optimistic. With respect to AI… the argument wasn’t really made… Kurzeweil is talking about nanotech supports and cyber augmentation, not a pure AI.
As for whether we’ll see real AI in my lifetime… I’d bet, reluctantly, yes because I know how to build one myself, but don’t have the money or time to devote to it and the people who do have the time and money follow Even and Eredwen’s worst predictions of misusing bleeding edge tech.
But tech isn’t evil. It is a partial answer and has the ability to keep us from regressing completely to the stone age or extinction. It doesn’t however address the problems that Eredwen points out, and every engineer knows the frustration that comes of fixing stuff only to have some busy idiot come along and break it because there’s a short term profit in selling copper for scrap. This has parallels at many levels, some of them global.
Since most of us would (I hope) regard Lovelock as being extreme with respect to NZ civilization, we must reject DPF’s answer as being prematurely wasteful… indeed, it is the antithesis of our duty as members of our species…. which is to try to survive, thrive and evolve into something even better adapted to survival in the future. That isn’t an optional “wouldn’t it be nice” effort, it is incumbent on us to make our BEST effort…
We may be doomed but fatalism is always premature.
respectfully
BJ
January 18th, 2006 at 1:26 am
IMHO, the Lovelock story was the real news of the day, the Press story was just a space-filling review of two books.
the depressing Lovelock story was also on page B3 of the Herald and promoted above the masthead with “Global Warming - Past the point of no return”
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/category/story.cfm?c_id=26&ObjectID=10363983
the Herald also have a follow up story
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/story.cfm?c_id=5&ObjectID=10364105
with an excellent round up of quotes from environmental leaders responding to Lovelock.
Sounds like our only hope is terraforming biotechnology/nanotechnology.
January 18th, 2006 at 1:34 am
Liberty, I must take issue with your comment that “There is LESS war today than ever before”,
bollocks, wars have been a constant ever since 1945.
But I must agree with two other things you said:
“and far more opportunities for people to leave the country, city and job they are in than ever before” and “thousands of years ago everyone died in the mid 30s”
yes, this is because we are currently at a peak. We are currently consuming at peak levels. Peak oil. Peak energy. Peak society. It’s downhill from now on…
January 18th, 2006 at 8:05 am
Stuey
There is only one technology out there that will “save” us from our excesses and the excess of us. We have to achieve Cheap Access To Space.
Without it we are doomed to decline because the diminishing resources of the planet we’re consuming will not suffice no matter how efficiently we consume them.
The other things we COULD do aren’t tech. They are societal. All an engineer can do or hope for, is to stave off the inevitable reckoning when people starve to death because the systems supporting our numbers finally collapse under the weight of those numbers.
With it, we gain access to the wealth of the Solar System and the ability to become independent of the fate of any single planet. We gain access to nearly unlimited amounts of power and mineral wealth. We gain elbow room.
That’s a form of success for a species. It is rather non-green in the sense that it does not “preserve” or “constrain growth” but it has green effects despite its tech nature.
respectfully
BJ
January 18th, 2006 at 8:37 am
Unless carbon dating is a crock, humans have been around for a good while - enough to live through quite a few cycles of warming and cooling, evolution and catastrophe, and generally anything that comes their way as part of this great experiment called Earth.
Bottom line: we’re still here.
Besides, adversity is character-forming, innit?
January 18th, 2006 at 10:07 am
heh.
I was in Hofstadter’s AI class when Kurzweil’s book came out 6 years ago. We had a lovely time ripping his arguments to shreds.
Kurzweil’s arguments are actually not technology based. He uses lots of technobabble about nanotech and the like, but it’s almost all a smokescreen: irrelevant to his real argument. His real argument is based on just what Hide’s arguments are based on. Kurzweil think’s it obvious that Moores Law (which predicts that the number of transistors in a square centimeter will increase exponentially) will run forever. That there are technological barriers are unimportant: limits of physics are unimportant. Because the market will demand it and so it will happen.
Likewise his other stuff: Kurzweil is sure science and technology will improve “exponentially” because he thinks it does so now. Which is odd: my grandmother’s kitchen saw vast changes as she went from boiling hot water on a coal stove to 1970s electric appliances, my kitchen technology is pretty much exactly the same now as it was in 1974 (when mum first got a microwave). Moving from horses to cars was a much bigger move than any change in transport in the last 40 years. Technology hits physical limits, and the effects technological change slows down.
Which also appears to be Hide’s view. That science predicts problems is utterly irrelevant: as long as you are Economically Pure Of Heart (or of Market) then everything will be okay. It’s a staggering arrogant view, based on the views of Hide (an economist) that economics is the One Science To Rule Them All - get your economics right, and everything well be golden.
[Kurzweil’s views are also very odd in other ways: he confuses raw computing power with the ability to solve problems, so he thinks bigger faster computers will just obviously be AI. For an example of how that’s wrong note that machine translation can now mistranslate a page a millisecond and could only mistranslating a page an hour 25 years ago, but that’s not a solution to the problem of machine translation.]
January 18th, 2006 at 10:42 am
People - such as Rodney - seem to recently have started refferring to the ’substitution principle’, as in his oil rigs example - the idea that, as one resource becomes uneconomic to exploit (for example by running out), the market will find something to replace it.
For one thing, this assumes that the market knows the full value - to us - of whatever it’s destroying before it’s destroyed.
And while it might work okay for widget sales, I don’t think it applies to potable water, breathable air, living waterways and fish in the ocean.
And of course it gives the impression of assuming that the total useful resources are infite or at least won’t run out before the heat death of the universe.
Actually, it’s just an extension of the assertion that a free market will always allocate resources in the most useful manner. Which I think has some practical and theoretical problems.
Oh, and, libertyscott, much as I appreciate life today - and I really do - it should be noted that rural medieval people’s teeth were quite good. No lollies. And they got worn flat so food didn’t get caught in them.
January 18th, 2006 at 10:58 am
Mother Nature is a benevalent provider Liberty.
If i had the chance i would go with live with a primitive society, not corrupted by industrialisation and their environment destroyed by privatisation, at the drop of a hat, and the quality of life would be 100 times better on all levels-noble ideals would not be talked/written about, they simply were lived.
It’s the height of ignorance to think that technology can be the ground of our being, but i have to give credit to the effectiveness of modern indoctrination/psychosis.
January 18th, 2006 at 11:19 am
Here’s a great article that basically says that per capita technogical innovation peaked in the 1920’s and has been on the way down ever since.
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/opinion/dn7616
It’s always interesting to note that the techno-optimists are usually economists by training and the techno-pessimists are scientists and engineers. They are aware of the fact that physical laws will always trump economic laws.
BJ, like your way of thinking re: cheap access to space, when you say “we will gain elbow room”, what do you mean by “we”?? I imagine that the first thing an extra-planetary self-sufficient society will do is secede.
January 18th, 2006 at 11:36 am
…and I wonder if Rodney has considered the energy input/energy output relationship when drilling for oil in 400m of rough water (as opposed to poking a hole in the ground in Texas and watching the oil come out). Hey Rodney.. there will always be oil in the ground, but when you need the energy equivalent of 2 barrels of oil to extract 1 barrel of oil, that’s when economic theory hits the brick wall of physical reality. All the easy to get at oil has been got. The rest will be harder (therefore more expensive) to get at. Technology will help, but technology development costs money and energy.
January 18th, 2006 at 12:33 pm
Superdan - I am not sure of your point. I wasn’t talking about “colonizing” space as in forcing the people out there to support the people in here, I was talking about colonizing space as in moving out of the gravity well. Who cares if some group secedes… there’s a lot of room out there, and it isn’t as if we’d be greatly troubled by the loud parties next door. You’re saying that the folks who go out first will slam the door shut on the rest of us? Not likely. The ones who go out first will get the choice real-estate? They usually do… but there’s a LOT of real-estate out there to be had. Particularly if you don’t like being trapped in a gravity well. The O’Neill colonies come to mind.
A vast amount of human evolution was in small isolated tribal environments… it is what we understand at the brain-stem-instinct level. It is the level at which our social conditioning works best. When we have a relatively hostile environment, lots of free energy and sparse population we’re a lot happier with neighbours of any colour or religious persuasion.
Rodney has rocks in his head.
respectfully
BJ
January 18th, 2006 at 1:30 pm
As for whether we’ll see real AI in my lifetime… I’d bet, reluctantly, yes because I know how to build one myself, but don’t have the money or time to devote to it….
ROTFL
January 18th, 2006 at 1:58 pm
A response to Waymad’s comment above:
“Unless carbon dating is a crock, humans have been around for a good while - enough to live through quite a few cycles of warming and cooling, evolution and catastrophe, and generally anything that comes their way as part of this great experiment called Earth.
“Bottom line: we’re still here.”
Lovelock’s point is that there’s now more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than ever before in human history (most of the increase above average levels having been created since 1800) and it may already be too late to prevent levels rising to the point at which human life is threatened. The change in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide has been identified as the major trigger (acting with other gases) causing that climate change. It takes ages to get rid of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Unfortunately, while the rate of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is currently increasing (from among other things the burning of fossil fuels), the rate at which carbon can be absorbed by the sea, land and plants/forests is falling. We can expect to see a continued rise in CO2 levels for a long while yet, whatever we do in the next few years.
You may relish the idea of gifting our descendants the stimulating challenge of surviving on an ice planet, but I certainly don’t.
This argument is picked up and explained in a user-friendly way by Tim Flannery in a recent book called, The Weather Makers. .
January 18th, 2006 at 2:26 pm
Worik - Always pleased to entertain someone. Don’t laugh too hard though… the last project I worked on was the Mars Exploration Rover. respectfully BJ
January 18th, 2006 at 2:36 pm
BJchip… don’t get me wrong, I am a big fan of space exploration/colonisation. Sign me up. Overall it would be excellent for the human race to put some eggs in different baskets. I just don’t see how it would help the planet (ie most of the human race). It might even be a bit dangerous, given that anyone in space with a spare asteroid, a rocket, an understanding of orbital mechanics and a grudge could conceivably drop said asteroid on New York.
January 18th, 2006 at 2:40 pm
With respect to the doomer predictions of the last 30 years.
The boy may have cried wolf too many times, but in the end, the wolf DID come!
In the case of oil, technology HAS helped to increase production, but this has been at the expense of the post-peak decline. UK North Sea Oil is a classic example. Water-injection, horizontal drilling, etc. gave high levels of production in the 80s and 90s, but their decline rate (since their 1999 peak) is very steep (currently about 15% per year and accelerating). Similar technologies have been used in most of the handful of super-giant oil fields that supply almost a quarter of the world oil thirst. That includes the biggest oil field on the planet, Ghawar in Saudi Arabia.
Also, technological advances (in all areas) have been helped by a century of very cheap energy. Without the cheap energy, will we still enjoy the same rate of technological advancement?
January 18th, 2006 at 4:01 pm
Superdan - I’m from New York, and I want to be as far from it as possible
respectfully BJ
January 18th, 2006 at 5:15 pm
“that’s why thousands of years ago everyone died in the mid 30s,..”
No, that is not correct. The AVERAGE life expectancy may have been mid 30s, this does not mean everyone died in their mid 30s. The distribution would be bery skewed. Lots of children dying in infancy, young men dying in war, young women dying in childbirth. But if you survived to middle age, your life expectancy would not be that much less than that of a middle aged man or woman now.
And it is debatable whether high infant mortality was caused by nature or culture. Cities such as London were open sewers and cholera was rampant, not because of nature but because of overcrowding and extreme disparities between the rich and the poor. Infant mortality improved not because of high technology, but because of basic hygeine, boring things like drainage and more importantly more equitable distribution of wealth.
January 18th, 2006 at 5:50 pm
Ho hum, time to go build a Battlestar Galactica in the back yard and send the grandkids off in search of a Borg cube to raid for nano-probe technology.
January 18th, 2006 at 6:54 pm
The more unequal the distribution of wealth, the more corruption you have. That’s what the advantage of privatisation is…
January 18th, 2006 at 9:05 pm
Pigovian taxes and/or enhanced property rights. All this “let’s stop economic growth” rhetoric goes unnecessarily far. As long as you can ensure actions with negative externalities are properly regulated to prevent Prisoner’s Dilemma issues, you can otherwise go on how you like.
Inevitably, we’re going to be hurt by oil prices going up. That’s what you call a correction of short-term behavior, it occurs in many countries with abundant natural resources when they get too accustomed for it. The market failing? Hardly, it’s a pretty fair punishment
If we had a magical food producer that only worked for 100 years, you’d find less development than would be otherwise. It’s a classic resource curse, or an “affluence curse” in some respects too. This doesn’t mean we need to subdize alternative energies - unless people are just too stupid for their own good. In that case… education?
January 18th, 2006 at 10:30 pm
Yes many geologists are saying that Peak Oil is arriving before 2010.. we wont know it until we’ve passed it. See http://www.fromthewilderness.com… Were living at the end of the Age of Cheap Oil. Technology has increased our ability to suck oil out of the ground faster - hence it is going to go into decline at a steeper rate. None of the alternatives have the energy density of oil except perhaps uranium, but then there would not be enough of that anyway, not that I want to go that way!
The great Human project is about to face its most challenging problems. Even if we did get the technology to move into space, where the heck are we going to colonise given the cost?? I recall reading that the Moon missions cost about US$3 trillion??
Countries cant even seriously act to cutback carbon emissions let alone start funding a planetary colonisation project or dare I mention getting the figures correct for budget estimates for funding a war for oil in Iraq.
We’ve got more than enough problems on this planet to try and resolve before we go galavanting of to another one (Mars?)
Im seriously wondering how a colonising base on another planet is sustainable in all aspects of its needs without massive technology inputs from a home planet esp long term genetic diversity of food plants etc etc
Saudi Aramco who manage the Ghawar field pump 7 million barrels of seawater into the field to get 5 million barrels of crude out… not sustainable. A month ago the Kuwait state Oil company announced that the Burgen Field (2nd largest oil field in the world, has now gone into decline after 60 years of production).
January 18th, 2006 at 10:30 pm
even said..”..If i had the chance i would go with live with a primitive society..”
have you thought about moving to gore..?
phil(whoar.co.nz)
January 18th, 2006 at 10:36 pm
bj..i am impressed by the glimpse at your cv….over at whoar we are space nuts..and run space news/stories whenever they arise..
would you consider doing a memoir for us on your experiences/work/thoughts on the rover…?
i would place it in the guest columnist section of whoar….it can be whatever length you see fit…
cheers..phil(whoar.co.nz)
January 18th, 2006 at 11:16 pm
It’s true that life expectancy of 30 just means high infant to young-adult mortality, but that doesn’t make it any more of a pleasant prospect to go back to! Mother nature is a benevolent provider, but she provides best for viruses, bacteria and parasites, and unfortunately we are the provisions. Personally I’ve no desire to enjoy that kind of lifestyle at all.
When it comes down to whether you’d trust Lovelock or Hyde to be right about the future, what loony would put their money on Hyde? Humans could outsurvive the cockroach though, so I’m not worried about the prospect of us dying out. The prospect of the esteem future generations are going to hold us in for bringing them to that doesn’t appeal much though…
January 18th, 2006 at 11:58 pm
oil went up 2 dollars today, now at 66 dollars again…
http://tinyurl.com/8c9ab
January 19th, 2006 at 12:07 am
“Heinberg compared this to the growth of yeast in a sugar solution. At first the yeast feast on the sugar and proliferate abundantly, but when the sugar runs out, the yeast get poisoned by their own waste products and die off. This process is reliably used in the manufacturing of alcohol.
“So this raises an important question,� Heinberg said, switching to an overhead that read, “Are people smarter than yeast?�
http://www.energybulletin.net/
January 19th, 2006 at 9:15 am
BJ - “With it, we gain access to the wealth of the Solar System and the ability to become independent of the fate of any single planet. We gain access to nearly unlimited amounts of power and mineral wealth. We gain elbow room. ”
I’m unconvinced of your argument. So we’d gain access to vast mineral resources, at cost of immense expenditure of energy. There’s nowhere habitable to go (short of irradiating earth completely, earth is always going to be vastly more habitable than any solar alternative).
The root cause of our current dilemma is not that earthly resources fail to meet human needs, but that human *populations* exceed the ability of earth to provide. The solution is to limit population, not continue with current growth (or even existing poluation levels). IMHO, one of the finest of the Gaian-type observations is that the only thing in nature that continues with unchecked growth is a cancer. Human can grow in many dimensions - intellectual, emotional, spiritual that cuase little problem.. it’s unchecked physical growth that is the cause of many of our problems.
January 19th, 2006 at 10:39 am
“Mother nature is a benevolent provider, but she provides best for viruses, bacteria and parasites, and unfortunately we are the provisions”……….wrong.
Actually bacteria is an ally in protection against viruses and parasites. But the intuition that guided us in our evolution has been turned into destruction, lost to competition against everything(including nature). But life forms are not fixed in nature, they are polymorphic, so perhaps we can find our way back.
January 19th, 2006 at 12:18 pm
Huskynut - You aren’t counting the advantage of getting out of the gravity well in the first place, nor the principle requirement I put on the project. Cheap Access To Space.
Once you are there a bit of tube and aluminium foil will gather you all the raw energy your heart desires. There is no “immense expenditure of energy” required. Nor is there inherently an immense expenditure of energy required to reach space… it isn’t as hard as Lockheed and Boeing have made it , they make their money on expendable boosters and have repeatedly white-anted the development of real reusables and cheap launch systems.
Earth is the most habitable PLANET, but an O’Neill colony can be quite equally habitable. It does not require a planetary mass to provide “gravity” and allows relatively free access to the whole Solar System, because it ISN’T at the bottom of a gravity well. So cost of transporting asteroids and other resources to the colony and dealing with waste is minimal.
The only obstacles to our doing it right now are the cost of getting into space and our lack of experience living and working there… and the latter is dependent on the former. Both are surmountable at less cost and effort than the Fusion power projects of various nations.
The root cause of our difficulties has to do with the nature of life itself. We have no ability/instinct to curb our growth, live together efficiently and peacefully, share fairly or any of a myriad of traits needed to keep this planet in balance. As an engineer I can’t address those except to observe that they need to be dealt with and trying as an individual to lead people to deal with them. I observe however, that such a solution is ultimately only a longer form of suicide than the current form… (a race to consume the planet as fast as possible).
Leaving the planet behind is the ONLY option that provides for long term survival of the species. It would be nice to be able to preserve it in its natural state , I LIKE this planet. I don’t know any other home… but I’d be one of the first to leave. I want my children to have the best chance to grow and survive that I can offer them.
This planet won’t support any more “growth” … something has to give. It is a closed system and unless we get out of the dish or find a way to clean it ourselves we ARE no smarter than yeast. I’ve made Heinberg’s argument for 45 years , and nobody has answered it yet.
respectfully
BJ
January 19th, 2006 at 12:55 pm
The solution for getting off the planet cheaply is, of course, a space elevator.
The Spaceward Foundation is on the job, check out http://www.elevator2010.org/site/index.html, http://www.spaceward.org/ and http://www.spaceelevator.com/
The Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson, worth reading by greenies for a number of reason, has some great space elevator action in it, tho’ he theorises that the maximum number of elevators on Earth is ten, each carrying a million people a day off the planet. The problem being that by the time that’s possible in the 22nd century, that’s less than birth replacement rate.
January 19th, 2006 at 1:12 pm
i think what really needs to happen is for mankind to learn to use the 90% of the brain we currently DONT use. Maybe then we will see some progress made.
January 19th, 2006 at 4:07 pm
I’ve seen several reasons for getting off the planet, and one or two against.
It might be good for the human psyche as a whole to have some sort of frontier.
It would be useful (as pointed out before) not to have all our eggs in one basket if things turn to custard here, not that it would be much consolation to those of us left on Earth (and I know I’m not going anywhere).
There’s a lot of scientific discovery to be done in space (if you happen to think that’s a good thing, and admittedly some of that can be done by unmanned probes).
There are vast resources in space (once we get there).
One argument that I’ve sometimes made that I’ve not seen anywhere else is that if we are to have self-sustaining colonies in space, we will have to learn to set up some sort of ecosystem from scratch. I think that will be found to be _really_difficult_ and the knowledge gained might be of some use in understanding our ecosystem here, or at least better appreciating how carefully we need to look after it.
The main arguments against space are of course that it is currently a very messy costly business to escape the gravity well, and uses up resources that could be better used looking after this place. My counter-arguement to that is that the resources used getting into space are an investment the species - abeit a very long term one (if it pays off at all), and it is something we will get better at.
January 19th, 2006 at 4:23 pm
So you remember the Biosphere experiments Roy?
respectfully
BJ
January 19th, 2006 at 4:25 pm
Marsboy
The problem is that we do use all that dark grey matter, and we don’t know how.
respectfully
BJ
January 19th, 2006 at 5:14 pm
BJ wrote:
> So you remember the Biosphere experiments Roy?
Yes, I do - that’s why I know it’s a hard problem. However, if we ever want to have people survive independently of earth, it would be someting we’d have to put a lot more effort into learning how to do.
If it turns out not to be possible, I guess we are stuck here.
January 19th, 2006 at 5:24 pm
I can’t believe anyone is seriously suggesting off-planet-emigration as a solution to climate change. That is so selfish. Hasn’t anyone read Stark by Ben Elton?
January 19th, 2006 at 5:36 pm
Hasn’t anyone read Stark by Ben Elton?
No
I wasn’t suggesting it as a solution to climate change. It provides solutions inaccessible to us from the planet’s surface, but simple enough once we are spaceborn…. but I was concerning myself with survival of the human species and any other animal or plant we take with us.
How is that selfish? You’ll have to explain it so my selfish genes will understand it.
respectfully
BJ
January 19th, 2006 at 5:43 pm
Roy
If the earth can manage an ecosystem, then we can manage to duplicate the effort… the fact that the planetary system balances tells us that we can build one that balances… but it isn’t as easy as planting a few bushes and seeding the place with whatever we please…. it needs a lot more effort than has been made to date. Thing is, it IS easy compared with some other problems we have to solve.
We’re running out of Copper. We’re running out of oil. We’re going into the Uranium mining business in a big big way. China is talking about hundreds of reactors. Hell the waste heat alone will turn into a forcing factor.
respectfully
BJ
January 19th, 2006 at 5:48 pm
Stuey,
I don’t think anyone really sees it as a solution (and yes, I have read Stark).
What it might to is keep some of the human race alive if we really do screw things up on climate change (or get hit by plague, or the 50km diameter asteroid that we don’t see coming, or find some ingenious way of killing ourselves). We might also gain some helpful knowledge and resources, but that is a bit of a long shot, particularly with the rate climate change is happening at.
I think we should push into space, but also do whatever we can to look after the only habitat we currently have. The two goals are not incompatible.
While we are comparing what we’ve read, have you read the short story “If I Forget Thee, O Earth . . .” by Arthur C. Clarke?
January 20th, 2006 at 12:52 am
to Mr. Hyde:
it’s funny how the mythical “free market” goes completely out the window as soon as actual physical shortages occur.
the allocation of truly scarce resources is never left up to the market/price mechanism alone.
“free market systems by definition strongly discount the future”–comment by someone on peakoil.com
January 20th, 2006 at 10:07 am
bj - fascinating stuff. but just to be contrary (’cause it makes for a more interesting discussion ;-):
- the argument for a contingency plan in case the planet gets smacked by an asteroid or plague or other global disaster is valid risk management, but if humankind can’t manage the self-restraint to avoid screwing it’s own planet then surely we’re an evolutionary experiment that is best flushed straight down the loo, rather than exported to the nether reaches of the solar system?
- on your desire for a place toward the head of the queue for the big emigration.. isn’t there a little of the escapist fantasy in the idea that things would be socially any different off-planet than on earth? if the technology were created, the costs would ensure it’d be a self-select group of wealthy individuals that went.. it’d be very interesting to see whether such a narrow group were capable of maintaining a functional society, but quite frankly, I think the odds are better within the biosphere..
January 20th, 2006 at 11:02 am
Huskynut: Very well said!
January 20th, 2006 at 11:33 am
Huskynut: “isn’t there a little of the escapist fantasy in the idea that things would be socially any different off-planet than on earth?”
Which is where the Association of Autonomous Astronauts (AAA) come in, the community-based space program aiming at building new social realities in space rather than repeating the mistakes seen here on Earth.
Raido AAA said back in its heyday in the late 90s (see http://www.uncarved.org/AAA/sint.html)
“What makes us different to other space programmes is that we’re far more interested in what’s going to happen when we actually get out there. We’re not just interested in technology itself, we’re interested in how the technology is used. We’re interested in the new possibilities that are going to open up when we begin to form autonomous communities in space. We’re interested in the kind of lives that we’re going to be able to construct for ourselves when we get into zero gravity.”
See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Autonomous_Astronauts
http://www.uncarved.org/aaa.html
January 20th, 2006 at 4:22 pm
Huskynut - If the human species is a mistake of evolution then it is, but I have an obligation is to make sure it isn’t proven to be such. Fatalism is well… fatal and invariably prematurely adopted.
Even if some nonexistent supreme entity flushes I will keep trying to swim upstream. It’s a responsibility.
The escapism? Mea Culpa… except I don’t expect things would get “better” in terms of human societies and human-human relations. That will take several million more years of evolution. Cheap access however, makes the self-selecting wealth less of a factor.
Odds are the same in either place IMHO. Odds of survival of at least one society however are increased by there being more than one society making the attempt.
This is not a worry for NZ though. We’re firmly rooted on shaky ground
respectfully
BJ
January 21st, 2006 at 11:50 am
Bjchip said “except I don’t expect things would get “betterâ€? in terms of human societies and human-human relations. That will take several million more years of evolution…”
Things were better in our evolution but we have lost touch with nature, we are now in a state of devolution, not evoluton. What had survived to remind us of our true lost potential got conquered by our “superior” civilisations as they were unable to match our techonological “advancement” in weapons for killing people basically. We use to simply live with nature and were one with it, gave thanks to it, life was deemed succesful if we had given back to the society. There was no need for a constant race in arms, repression technologies or any of the like.
So Green values are here for a reason, they are recollections of a life properly lived and in accordance with nature’s laws. Any right wingers who say that it is kill each other or be killed are degenerates.
January 21st, 2006 at 2:06 pm
> they are recollections of a life properly lived and in accordance with nature’s laws.
Where and when was this, even?
If we go back to pre-agriculture, the best description I’ve heard to describe life then is ‘nasty, butal and short’ (average life expectancy of 18 or thereabouts). Then we go thorugh lots of history, full of things like warfare and slavery (and near slavery such as Feudalism), then up to the industrial revoultion onwards where we gain the ability to do more things but it comes with the ability to really screw up the planet and ourselves. I’ve heard it suggested that even agriculture is destructive in the long term (places like Iraq used to be very fertile).
We may have done some things better in the past than we do now, but it is counterproductive to romanticize it.
Our challenge now is to find a balance where we use our resources and technology appropriately in an environmentally sustainable wayto improve society. We can’t wait millions of years - we have to work towards it now. Or we could try to get back to some sort of nonexistent golden age.
January 21st, 2006 at 3:37 pm
Even
I can’t identify any period or culture that matches the idyllic state of harmony you describe. Farms and farmers crowd out hunter-gatherers and provide better support for leisure and for learning. You worship what you will, but observe the real the lives of people in your ideal more closely and you will see things that would be unimaginable today. Which may be the problem. Were some things better? Sure… there were fewer of us and we were further apart.
Arrayed with that advantage are ignorance, superstition, early death. Tribal rather than global war… but the ugliness in the human soul is visible then as well as it is now.
We still think socially with our monkey brains. We don’tunderstand our jealousies, we have scant control of our instincts for violence. Those controls have to evolve to greater levels for us to handle the greater crowding that our tech. success has made possible.
respectfully
BJ
January 23rd, 2006 at 6:28 pm
Bj chip said:”I can’t identify any period or culture that matches the idyllic state of harmony you describe”……
..These words of a mining propector, spoken after twenty years among the native people of Ugnada, echo the sentiments of many people who have observed native cultures before the foods of modern commerce arrived: “The heaven of my choice in which to spend all eternity would be to live in Ugnada as the natives of Uganda lived before the coming of modern civilization”………
…..”The people of Hunza have lived in relative isolation high in Himalaya mountains for over 200 years, following a way of eating and thinking that has lenghtened their lives and reduced their susceptibility to the diseases of civilized man. In this tiny country many Hunzas live to be over 100 years of age, physically healthy and mentally alert. Men in their 90’s play polo and volleyball and father children. These sturdy people often walk over a hundred miles a day, go barefoot in the snow or swim in icy water. The secret of their healthy life is found in their simply and natural diet, vigorous outdoor life and freedom from mental worry. The mountain dwellers eat little meat but large amounts of WHOLE goat milk products..”
And another “uncivilised tribe of savages”…….The sturdiness of the child life permits children to play and frolic barefooted even in water running down from the glacier in the late evening’s chilly breezes, in weather that made us wear our overcoats and gloves and button our collars…”
….” The WISDOM of these people regarding Nature’s laws and their skill in the art of living comfortably with rugged Nature has been approached by few other tribes in the world. The sense of HONOUR among these tribes is so strong that practically all cabins, temporarily unoccupied due to the absence of the Indians on their hunting trip, were entirely unprotected by locks, and the valuables belonging to the indians were left in plain sight….”
…”Spiritual values dominate life. Part of the national holiday celebration each August was a song expressing the feeling of “one for all and all for one”. Price wrote: “One wonders if there is not something in the life-giving vitamins and minerals of the food that builds not only great physical structures within which their souls reside, but builds minds and hearts capable of a HIGHER type of manhood in which the MATERIAL values of life are made SECONDARY to individual CHARACTER” There was evidence of this throughout the WORLD…”
…….About this subject, Dr F.M. Ashley-Montagu, a world reowned anthropollgist and author of various popular and scholarly books, wrote in his article in the June 1940 issue of “Scientific Monthly”: The SocioBiology of Man: ‘In spite of our advances, we spiritually and as human beings are not the equal of the average Aboriginal or Eskimo-we are very definitly their inferiors. We lisp noble ideals and noble sentiments-the Australians and the Eskimos practice them-they neither write books nor lecture about them”…
January 23rd, 2006 at 6:42 pm
“However, the spirit expressly says that in latter times some will turn away from the faith, addicting themselves to seducing spirits, and to teachings of DEMONS; teaching lies in HYPOCRISY; burning up their own conscience; hindering marriage; abstaining from foods which God created to be consumed with THANKFULLNESS by the faithful, and recognizers of truth” Tim 4:1-3.
“While many of the primitive races studied have continued to thrive on the same soil through thousands of years, our American stock has declinded rapidly within a few centuries and in some localitites within a few decades. In the regions in which degeneration has taken place the animal stock has also declined…….No era in the long journey of mankind reveals in the skeletal remains such a terribly degeneration of teeth and bones as this brief modern period records. Must NATURE reject our vaunted culture and call back the more obdient primitives? The alternative seems to be a COMPLETE readjustment in accordance with the controlling forces of Nature.”…
…”Of course, using food as medicine is ancient. The pharmacopeia of ancient Egypt, Babylonia, Greece and CHina as well as those of the Middle Ages was based on food. Only in this century has society become almost exclusively dependent on manufactured pills to cure our misery…”
January 23rd, 2006 at 6:48 pm
…”We can now visualise our universe, it’s light, gravity and heat, its season, tides and harvest, which prepare a habitation for the universe of vital forms, microscopic and majestic, which fill the oceans and the forests. We have a common denominator for our universes within and around each other, our world, our food and our life have POTENTIALS so VAST that we can only observe DIRECTIONS, not goals. We sense human achievements or ignominious race SELF-DESTRUCTION. Every creed today vaguely seeks a utopia; all have visualized a common controlling force or deity as the most potent force in all human affairs. Yes, man’s place is most exalted when he obeys HIS MOTHER NATURE’S LAWS..
January 24th, 2006 at 8:10 am
Even
Your religion is what it is. The reality I am trying to point out to YOU is that if we all adopt it roughly 5 Billion of the 6 Billion people on the planet will die… quickly.
Facing that reality I find religious anti-technology attitudes rather less than useful. The supernatural benefits are clearly (to me) the result of being raised in a tribal society and letting the weak die. Small, isolated and tightly bound as a result, and closely related to the bands of apes to whom we owe so much of our evolution.
Using food as medicine is accepted and acceptable… we pay the big pharma companies way to much to patch things up after the fact, but medicines have their use. Shall we deny antibiotics to a child and so condemn that child to death? Shall we accept far higher mortality, so that the survivors are the strongest?
What happened to the value of being smart along that hallowed road you follow? If we are able to save ourselves by using our big brains instead of our hardened muscles… is that not also a natural result? My understanding of Thermodynamics, Physics and Computers isn’t unnatural… it is a result of our society’s using and recording the results of our god given intelligence. If I were not to use it I would not be fulfilling my potential.
If you are saying there are too many of us? I agree. If you are simply railing against technology I can’t. Are a lot of people going to die as a result of the past century’s excesses? I don’t doubt it. I will however, fight to the death to prevent my civilization’s reverting to “primitive”.
It is a sin to eat from the tree of knowledge in some basic religions. Not mine. I want to know what the priests are really up to, and why the virgins had to be sacrificed.
respectfully
BJ
February 1st, 2006 at 1:40 am
“Space elevator”?
How high does the world’s highest elevator go?
And why would that be?
February 1st, 2006 at 8:06 am
Space Elevators are as a concept, as old as I am. If you think about Gravity and Orbital Dynamics and the strength of materials with an open mind they are an obvious solution to the problem of the immense energies and accelerations required to reach orbit.
The strengh of materials is almost there (carbon nanotubes). The understanding of power accumulations in the cables is not yet complete. Protecting the cable from orbital debris is a problem not yet addressed.
Actual cost for the electricity to lift something to orbit is measured in pennies (well probably dimes now, as we’re inflating every fiat currency like mad these days).
We are talking about 35000 Km of cable. It’s a long ride on the elevator, pack a lunch.
respectfully
BJ
February 1st, 2006 at 1:42 pm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator
a wikipedia featured article
February 6th, 2006 at 10:31 am
o.k. so if we have these magical materials able to withstand terrible stresses, again i ask, how high does the world’s highest elevator currently go, and why do you suppose that is?
these materials would not only have to cope with vertical stress as with a tall building, but immense lateral stress too.
even if we had such a material, the whole idea doesn’t hold water. since objects closer to the earth have to travel faster to stay in orbit, the “counterweight” or furthest end of the elevator would actually be getting dragged around by the closer-in parts and would at the same time be dragged in towards the earth.
as for the saving of energy, it is true that an elevator arrangement would eliminate the need for the vessel to contain enough fuel to thrust not only the vessel but that same fuel off the surface of the earth. in the elevator concept, the thrusting capacity for the initial stage would remain on earth, so the vessel could be lighter. it will of course, still cost as much energy to launch a kilogram of matter into space as it would via rocket, only less kilograms would have to be launched.
February 7th, 2006 at 4:09 am
Andrew
First look up the word geosynchronous. This planet ALSO spins.
There’s also a set of problems with the rate of work being done and with aerodynamic drag effects… if you have the materials to do it, there’s nothing more efficient.
With respect to weather, did you consider that it needn’t actually even touch the ground to work? It COULD simply hang above the worst of the weather, accessible to any decent airplane. Most of the modeling shows that it isn’t affected enough by terrestrial winds to matter, but I am not as certain that the conditions on this planet will remain so benign.
The most worrying aspect of the design is the orbital debris problem. We’ve left a lot of garbage in orbit. See, there IS a green aspect to this !
As for power, there’s heaps of that available out there. Much more than here. Much cheaper. Out there it is MASS that is costly and power that is cheap.
The real sticking point is getting the construction crews up there and getting the initial work done, and persuading someone to pay for the project.
respectfully
BJ
February 7th, 2006 at 2:13 pm
Andrew - I forgot to mention. Orbital VELOCITY is the same at 3 meters as it is at 36000 KM - respectfully BJ