Deborah Harrell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote
> I really do try to think about what I'm doing WRT
> energy consumption; I'll bet that if everyone did the
> same or more (and there are those who make me look
> like a glutton!), it *would* make a significant
> impact.
On the one hand, if everyone did, the world would be a better place.
Kant was right! Always act as if everyone were doing the same.
But the solution does not scale. Even if four out of five people did
the right thing, we would still have problems. That one-out-of-five
person would use too many resources.
On the other hand, Kant was wrong! We do not want everyone to do the
same thing.
Think of hot air balloons. (A cheerful example.) It is fun to see a
few occasionally. It is even fun to see a whole bunch once in a
while. But I don't think anybody wants everyone in them. They make
too much noise when their burners operate; and if everyone flew, the
sky would be too cluttered.
The same principle applies to actions that have a bad impact on the
planet, so long as the impact is not too large. We and the planet can
afford a few deleterious impacts. The ecology just absorbs them.
Smoke vanishes into the air; it does not become pollution.
Governance fails on a planetary scale. It works in countries with
functioning legal systems, or it could work if the governments thought
rightly. London does not have `pea soup fogs' any more; pea soup fog
was a smog caused by the burning of soft coal. It took more than a
century, but the government finally came to think right.
Big and legal organizations are vulnerable. Rich countries can hurt
them. But most of the world is poor and extralegal. While big
organizations do big actions, many impacts are small. It is not that
each impact is big; small ones add up.
The problem is that laws do not matter. In most of the world, it is
easy to bribe the enforcers.
One solution is to motivate everyone in a non-legal manner: greed,
selfishness, and short term thinking. Corruption is irrelevant.
That is why I think von Neumann machines, rapid replicators, are
important. They will not get rid of people's desire for attention,
status, or dignity, but they will get rid of material wants or make
them cheap. That is a step.
Rather poor, primitive von Neumann machines have been built. In 2001,
Greg Chirikjian of John Hopkins University showed a Lego robot capable
of driving around a track and assembling four modules into a robot
identical to the original. Also, as of May 2005, Hod Lipson and his
colleagues at Cornell had built a device that assembled large,
identical components or `modules' into duplicates of itself. However,
the parts themselves had to be manufactured in some other way.
Highly useful replicators do not have to do everything. (When a
replicator requires some external inputs the jargon term is that it
lacks `closure'. Such a replicator cannot mutate; each duplicate
costs.) Useful replicators do not have to work with atoms, either.
But they do have to be fast. Slow replicators cost a fortune.
Currently it takes 7 years or so to double the material side of an
economy -- roughly speaking, that is what the Chinese economy is
doing.
(Every modern economy experienced a generation or so when it doubled
every 7 - 10 years, except the first. Great Britain grew at more or
less the same slow speed, less than 2% per year for two hundred years
(measured from decade to decade, not year to year), except for the
decade or two at and after the First World War, when it did not grow
at all. Its growth was very fast in the latter 18th and early 19th
centuries. It is considered slow, now. The US went through its fast
growth period in the mid-19th century.)
(My sense is that an inorganic replicator should double every 7 months
or every 7 weeks.)
--
Robert J. Chassell GnuPG Key ID: 004B4AC8
[EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.rattlesnake.com http://www.teak.cc
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