I actually thought about Rifkin's view of entropy and information
theory for a while before I concluded that the second law of
thermodynamics gets applied where it doesn't apply.
My first glance at Sayre's book didn't make it obvious to me whether
or not he was falling into the exact same intellectual trap, but it
seemed to me that something equally silly was going on, as if
unconstrained anthropogenic cooling would somehow be life enhancing as
opposed to high-entropy warming.
On Don's other point, I count myself a techno-optimist but a
socio-pessimist. I think solutions to our problems are technically
feasible but socially infeasible.
Progress-enhancing methods of the past will not scale to the present
circumstance, because our problems arise directly from our past
successes and our attachments to its methods. I don't think dressing
sociology or ethics up as physics helps though. This is cargo-cult
philosophy, I'm afraid.
mt
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