From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Alberto G. Corona
Sent: Wednesday, December 10, 2014 9:41 AM
To: everything-list
Subject: Re: real A.I.
There are not so many people. with the density of New York, all of them could
live a small state of USA. more or less
There are vast wastelands and deserts. There are plenty of energy in the
universe waiting to be used. And the space is infinite, by the way.
The malthusian obsession for space and resources is more ancient than malthus.
It is as old as human exist. scarcity and the impression that resources will
finish exist fo as long as humans can plan the future. The first humans moved
because the game and the vegetables got exhausted .
So the worries for space and resources are at the same time rational and
irrational. Are rational considered locally. Are irrational when they are
expanded in time and space to the humanity and history as a whole.
Space is infinite and mostly empty. And to get to it you first have to rocket
out from the Earth’s gravity well. A one liter bottle of water costs around
$10,000 to get to low earth orbit, $20,000 to get to geosynchronous orbit and
$50,000 to land on the moon. That is the cost for a single bottle of water.
Barring some incredible future technology – say a space elevator -- the costs
of getting off the earth and in to orbit and beyond will remain astronomically
high.
The universe may be infinite, but our place in it is very finite. We must live
within our planets limits, not the universes ultimate limits, because we have
no practical way of reaching those resources.
-Chris
2014-12-10 18:17 GMT+01:00 John Clark <[email protected]>:
On Tue, Dec 9, 2014 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List
<[email protected]> wrote:
> You seem to accept both that the earth is warming at a geologically (and on
> ecological time scales as well) extremely rapid rate
Rapid, but not unprecedentedly rapid.
> if AGW
Don't forget IHA.
> contributes just a small fraction of global warming then what other climate
> drivers do you propose as providing the rest of the driving force for climate
> change?
I don't know, whatever super complex factors that have caused the temperature
of the Earth to go up and down so radically over the billions of years that
existed before humans ever evolved I guess.
> As for your sanguine attitude that global warming (along with the inevitable
> attendant sea rise and flooding of the most densely populated and
> agriculturally productive regions of the planet) is not so bad…
The Earth has been at a vast number of temperatures in the last billion, or
even in the last million years, do you have any reason to think that the
temperature it was in 100 years ago was the exact temperature that would
maximize human happiness and productivity?
> you are entitled to your opinions
Thank you. And you are entitled to my opinions too.
> we should be very, very careful before experimenting with the basic
> equilibrium states of our planetary biosphere.
Forget it, we gave up that option long before the pyramids were built. It was
not a coincidence that the megafauna of North America and South America and
Australia that had existed for many millions of years disappeared almost
immediately after humans visited those continents for the first time. And
today there are over 7 billion people on the Earth, never before have there
been that many large animals of the same large species, nothing ever even came
close. To keep that many animals alive radical things are going to be needed to
be done, to also keep them happy even more radical things are going to be
needed, like directly or indirectly diverting nearly 40% of the planet's
photosynthetic output to human use. It would be astonishing if that sort of
intervention did not cause global changes of some sort to the climate, but
short of asking 5 or 6 billion people to kill themselves there is simply no
alternative.
And don't talk to me about windmills, if this is a serious problem it needs a
serious solution, you need more than moonbeams and lollipops to keep 7 billion
people alive.
John K Clark
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Alberto.
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