> On 28 Dec 2014, at 11:40 am, John Clark <[email protected]> wrote: > >> On Sat, Dec 27, 2014 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List >> <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> > we burned our planetary surplus up in a fantastically expensive cold war. >> > What did that get us? > > We got nuclear weapons which prevented the cold war from turning into a hot > war and cause the second half of the 20th century to be much less violent > than the first half, in fact per capita the least violent time in human > history. If you told me on August 10 1945, the day after the nuclear bomb > went off in Nagasaki, that as of December 27 2014 no other nuclear bomb would > be set off in anger I would have said you were crazy. Shown what I know. > > John K Clark >
That's the main part - shown what we know. Trouble is, we can never know the full story so humanity always flies by the seat of its pants in terms of its decision-making. Heads we drop the bomb - tails we don't drop the bomb. Sounds to me like you want to drop the bomb. But History would have you believe that it got down to just this ridiculously narrow range of options constraining action at the time. There are always other options to choose from. Think MWI. The trick is to be aware of the options from which you can choose and even to be in a position to generate options. It is surely desirable to have the broadest range available. That's what I call freedom. Freedom means "free to choose within a limited range of options". Options always exist but are limited and finite in any situation so that's why effort in the direction of perception pays off; to try to see the full range - you may be able to get pretty close to it with practice. You cannot choose from what you cannot see. Are you really, fully free when you choose beer simply because you aren't aware of the existence of other beverages? Most peoples' definition of freedom simply means "Nobody tells me what to do." "Nobody coerced me into it." As in all the current news footage of North American heads going into cinemas clutching their ticket and saying "I'm an American. No one tells me what to do." Free to be blind or myopic to alternative options for action is indeed a form of freedom. Had we not dropped the bomb on Japan we would certainly be in a different universe now. Probably one in which I as a citizen of an extended Japanese empire in the Pacific would enjoy bullet train (shinkansen) style air-conditioned serene comfort on my daily commute over the vast distances people routinely travel here, just to get to and from work. Instead we enjoy some of the lousiest public transport on the planet as we struggle to knit our major urban centres together even now in the 21st century. Had Japan conquered Australia we would be at the hub by now of a vast technology-empire and instead of our rising obesity crisis, we might have adopted a more healthy Japanese-style diet. Yeah - I would chow-down on a whale burger. Don't like the greasy taste of kangaroo... Kim > >> >> >> >> >> From: [email protected] >> [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of John Clark >> Sent: Saturday, December 27, 2014 10:46 AM >> To: [email protected] >> Subject: Re: William Stanley Jevons >> >> >> >> On Fri, Dec 26, 2014 at 10:29 PM, Kim Jones <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> >> >> > Tee hee. So you are saying - are you not - that it never makes sense to >> > worry in any naked sense about our tendency to gobble everything up like >> > bacteria in a petri dish >> >> >> >> The bacteria shouldn't worry if the edge of the petri dish hasn't come into >> view even in the largest telescopes the bacteria can build. >> >> But we live on a biosphere on the watery and rocky floor of the ocean of air >> enveloping our planets gravity well. Our planet has 510 million square >> kilometers of surface (more than 70% of which is covered by ocean, leaving >> under 150 million square kilometers of land surface area). >> >> By far most of our planet is inaccessible to us, locked up in the mantle and >> the core. Our entire recoverable planetary resource base is contained within >> the very thin skin of the atmosphere, land surface; the upper crust we can >> mine or drill down to and the oceans (to the extent we can). Our whole >> resource base is this thin shell at the planetary surface. >> >> This is not an inexhaustible resource base and to use the petri dish analogy >> it most definitely is not beyond the view of our most powerful telescopes. >> >> Off planet the universe is infinite; it is just that getting there to this >> infinite resources out there is also infinitely hard. I am sure Alpha >> Centauri systems have plenty of resources, but they do not count as part of >> us earthlings reserves until such time as we can actually go there to >> recover them. >> >> I personally wish that over the last five decades the super powers had spent >> more effort in getting off planet than they did in struggling with each >> other down here in the trenches on earth. I believe we would have been in a >> very different situation if we had already established other resource bases >> on the (small gravity wells of) the moon and near earth asteroids. >> >> But instead we burned our planetary surplus up in a fantastically expensive >> cold war. What did that get us? We are here where we now are, because of >> past stupid (perhaps inevitable) decisions and a global misdirection of >> effort into – non-producing military expenditures as opposed to building up >> an orbital infrastructure built using significant inputs from off world >> resource bases (such as the moon). >> >> But we did not do that and by now I doubt if we can; we have become too >> impoverished by now and locked into a planetary resource struggle end game. >> >> -Chris >> >> John K Clark >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> -- >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups >> "Everything List" group. >> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an >> email to [email protected]. >> To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. >> Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. >> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. >> >> -- >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups >> "Everything List" group. >> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an >> email to [email protected]. >> To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. >> Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. >> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. 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