IGUS = Information Gathering and Utilizing System.
The future course of humanity is probably guided by maximum entropy
principle. This is that systems will proceed to maximum entropy in minimal
time. This is not that controversial for closed systems. Open systems tend
to avoid this by being open to energy sources and by having a reservoir to
dump waste heat or entropy. Life is of this nature, where every species
exists in a network with other species that provide negative feed backs
which prevent them from consuming everything, taking all possible energy
and resource stocks and eventually leaving a wreck behind. However, we
humans have large brains that permit us to eliminate negative feed backs
and to increase positive feedbacks. This probably started with Homo erectus
that learned to use fire and to chip stones into tools. They took
themselves off the menu and put more living things on their menu. In doing
this we are consuming the biological energy and biomass stocks at a faster
rate than they can be replenished. The system is starting to approximate a
closed thermodynamics system.
With regards to the environment it is most likely the case we will not stop
what we are doing. We will most likely try to control and engineer our way
out of these troubles while continuing to play the same game. We are on a
maximum entropy trajectory. This most likely means that within a
comparatively short time we will consume everything and convert it all into
trash or should we say entropy. This is in effect what is reflected in our
economy. The rate that we double the rate of deforestation is about 75
years. It is also estimated that there are 3 trillion trees, but that
before humans there were 6 trillion. It is not hard to see that at this
rate we will trash out all forests by the end of this century. I would
image at and beyond this time the planet will be completely trashed; as the
Grateful Dead put it, "We will leave this place an empty stone." We will
try to engineer our way through things until we reach some fundamental
limits on the level of complexity we can manage. Once we reach our failure
point there is a heart warming movie *Soylent Green* that outlines a
possible scenario. We might also throw thousands of nuclear bombs into the
picture as well.
I have great suspicions about these futurist ideas about colonizing space
or that we will become conscious entities in computers and so forth. I
think it is possible that cyber-brain interlinks will become common, but I
frankly see this as more of what advanced technology is doing now; these
are methods of escaping problems and reality than they are about solving
things. The idea of matryoshka machines as planet sized or Dyson sphere
powered hypercomputers and other things I tend to regard as pure science
fiction. The same holds for Kardashev ideas about extremely advanced IGUS
or civilizations. I would also say that a part of this suspicion is that
through my lifetime there have been these problems mounting in the world,
and from my estimation we really have not solved a damned thing. From the
problems of environment to drug addiction the most we do is to mitigate
things, but in general these problems persist. In addition as time goes on
additional big problems emerge that again we will at best ameliorate and
manage, but not really solve. Global warming is probably just the beginning
of a host of more global environmental problems that face us with the
prospect of rendering this planet incapable of supporting us 7.5 billion
ground apes rampaging out of control.
Complexity is related to entropy. Kolmogoroff entropy is the summation S =
-sum p_i log(p_i) and this complexity. A simple example is N states with
p_i = 1/N. It is not hard to calculate that the entropy is S = log(N). The
Earth is 6x10^{24}kg and the sun 2x10^{30}kg. So by certain measure the sun
is actually more complex. How one partitions things into macrostates is
actually a rather subjective choice of ordering.
LC
On Wednesday, February 7, 2018 at 10:13:42 AM UTC-6, John Clark wrote:
>
> On Tue, Feb 6, 2018 at 4:04 PM, Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com
> <javascript:>> wrote:
>
>
>> *> *
>> *He [Freeman Dyson] did brilliant work on QED and other physics. The
>> Dyson sphere is not one of his brilliant ideas. He has also been on the
>> climate denial side, and continues to be as far as I know.*
>>
>
>
> Dyson doesn't say the climate is not changing nor does he say humans have
> nothing to do with it, and he doesn't even deny that change could be
> a
> bad thing, what he does say is that on a list of important world problems
> climate change is nowhere near the top. And I think he's right about that.
> After all its not as if this is anything new,
>
> the climate has
>
> always
>
> been changing. Other than a few very brief ice ages during the last few
> million years the temperature has always been warmer than now and
> occasionally
>
> much
>
> warmer; at least that's the way things have been during the last 600
> million years. And by the way, right now the sea is rising at the rate of
> about one inch every 10 years, that would make for a rather dull Hollywood
> style disaster movie
> .
>
>
> > **
>> *Any IGUS that might engage in this sort of thing would be doing it for
>> the long haul, as in millions of years. Such a giant project would be meant
>> to be around for a long time.*
>>
>
> I don't know what IGUS means.
>
>
>
>> >
>> *If so the decoupling of the sphere from the star is problematic, for
>> even small gravitational perturbations from other stars will cause the star
>> to deviate from the center.*
>>
>
> Then slightly perturb the sphere in the opposite direction to get it back
> to the proper position.
>
>
> *> This would be a large management problem.*
>>
>
> A trivial problem for a Jupiter Brain.
>
>
>
>> >
>> *Any hyper-advanced IGUS will most likely not generate energy this way,*
>>
>
> From the context I assume IGUS means ET, if so then I don't see why ET
> wouldn't make a Dyson sphere if he wanted to have a huge source of power
> that would last for billions of years.
>
>
> >
>> *It would be far smaller and compact to generate energy by converting
>> matter directly to energy via quantum gravitation or black hole
>> physics.Such being could use their stellar system material to convert
>> around a million tons per second into energy to generate as much energy as
>> a star like the sun. So large Dyson sphere needed.*
>>
>
> Maybe, but that would require new physics and I was being conservative. A
> Dyson Sphere requires no new science it just needs better engineering. And
> even if what you suggest is possible and ET prefers to generate energy in
> some very exotic way we don't now understand we should still be able to
> detect the waste heat in the form of infrared or microwaves because even a
> Jupiter Brain can't get around the second law of thermodynamics. But we see
> no sign of such waste heat, and so I conclude that there is no ET, or at
> least there is no ET that isn't as dull as dishwater.
>
>
>
>> > **
>> *there is no real implication or possible role we have in the universe, *
>>
>
> Assuming we are the first and something isn't about to destroy us then
> you've got
>
> that backwards. The universe won't be assigning us a role we'll be
> assigning a role to the universe. A cloud of hydrogen gas a billion light
> years away can't give meaning to you but you can give meaning to it. You
> are in the meaning conferring business not hydrogen gas.
>
> >
>> *with global warming I suspect that rather than actually doing something
>> to adjust ourselves we will instead engage in planetary climate/weather
>> control.*
>>
>
> I certainly hope we start talking about
>
> planetary climate/weather control
>
> because the the cures environmentalists propose are far worse than the
> disease, they forget that
>
> humans are large
>
> mammals
>
> and
>
> 7.5 billion
>
> of them
>
> need to be fed,
>
> and you can't do that on moonbeams and wishful thinking. Nathan Myhrvold,
> the former chief technical officer at Microsoft
> ,
> has an idea
>
> that
>
> might
>
> actually work
>
> he wants to build an artificial volcano.
>
> Mt. Pinatubo in 1991 became the best studied large volcanic eruption in
> history, it put more sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere than any volcano
> since Krakatoa in 1883. There is no longer any dispute that stratospheric
> sulfur dioxide leads to more diffuse sunlight, a decrease in the ozone
> layer, and a general cooling of the planet. What was astonishing was how
> little stratospheric sulfur dioxide was needed. If you injected it in the
> arctic where it would be about 4 times more effective, about 100,000 tons a
> year would reverse global warming in the northern hemisphere. That works
> out to 34 gallons per minute, a bit more than what a standard garden hose
> could deliver but much less than a fire hose. We already spew out over
> 200,000,000 tons of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere each year, but all
> of that is in the lower troposphere where it has little or no cooling
> effect, the additional 100,000 tons is a drop in the bucket if you're
> looking at the tonnage, but it's in the stratosphere where its vastly more
> effective.
>
> Myhrvold wasn't suggesting anything as ambitious as a space elevator,
> just a light hose about 2 inches in diameter going up about 18 miles. In
> one design he burns sulfur to make sulfur dioxide, he then liquefies it and
> injects it into the stratosphere with a hose supported every 500 to 1000
> feet with helium balloons. Myhrvold thinks this design would cost about
> 150 million dollars to build and about 100 million a year to operate. In
> another design that would probably be even cheaper he just slips a sleeve
> over the smokestack of any existing small to midsize coal power plant in
> the higher latitudes and uses the hot exhaust to fill hot air balloons to
> support the hose.
>
> If Myhrvold's cost estimate is correct (and I admit most cost estimates
> are not) that means it would take 50 million dollars less to cure global
> warming
>
> than
> what
> Al Gore
> used
> just
> to
> advertise the evils of climate change. But even if Myhrvold's estimate is
> ten times or a hundred times or a thousand times too low it hardly matters,
> it's still chump change. In a report to the British government economist
> Nicholas Stern said that to reduce carbon emissions enough to stabilize
> global warming by the end of this century we would need to spend 1.5% of
> global GDP each year, that works out to 1.2
> Trillion
> (
> that's
> trillion with a
> T
> ) dollars *EACH YEAR*!
>
> One great thing about Myhrvold's idea is that you're not doing anything
> irreparable, if for whatever reason you want to stop you just turn a valve
> on a hose and in about a year all the sulfur dioxide you injected will
> settle out of the atmosphere. And Myhrvold
>
> isn't the only fan of this idea, Paul Crutzen won a Nobel prize for his
> work on ozone depletion, in 2006 he said efforts to solve the problem by
> reducing greenhouse gases were doomed to be “grossly unsuccessful” and that
> an injection of sulfur in the stratosphere “is the only option available to
> rapidly reduce temperature rises and counteract other climatic effects”.
> Crutzen acknowledged that it would reduce the ozone layer but the change
> would be small and the benefit would be much greater than the harm.
>
> >* *
>> *The complexities of this, both technical and political, are formidable.
>> Never mind the many orders of magnitude greater complexity in managing
>> something like a Dyson sphere.*
>>
>
> Big is not the same as complex, the Earth is far more complex than the
> sun and the
> gravitational
>
> dynamics of a Dyson sphere would be far simpler than the weather.
>
> John K Clark
>
>
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