Michael Tobis wrote:
> 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.
Darned! I missed Rifkin's work. However, I did read Georgescu-Roegen
30 years ago and think that the later works of Herman Daley and Howard
Odum are important.
"Steady-State Economics", Herman Daley, 1991. Island Press
"The Energy Basis of Man and Nature", Howard T. Odum, 1981
"Environment, Power, and Society", Howard T. Odum, 1971
I suppose I will need to read Sayre's book too.
> 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.
Mankind's impacts on the Earth aren't in any way likely to cause
another Snowball Earth or Earth-to-Venus transition, near as I can
tell. We are caught in the middle of a massive entropy increasing
process as the high energy from the Sun flows thru the atmosphere and
back out again. We are probably going to remain bit players in the
overall scheme of things. This result is even more likely as it looks
as though the peak of world oil production is upon us.
> 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.
As an engineer with science leanings, I too am a techno-optimist. I
know how to "make" energy (in the common sense meaning) and how to use
it efficiently. But, I am incapable of relaying that to the outside
world with anything like enough speed to make a difference. I think
Malthus
was correct, if one allows for scientific advances. Sooner or later
(maybe sooner), population growth will exhaust the available
resources, including ecological resources, and then there will be a
die back. It happens all the time in local ecosystems and I see no
reason to think we are not part of the global ecosystem which provides
those life support functions most of us take for granted. We have the
technology to limit population growth and even shift into reverse with
minimal real pain, but we don't have the necessary political will to
do that, thus I think we are going to see more of the business-as-
usual in population, i.e., the 4 horseman will come to a town near
you.
> 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.
"Progress" as it was defined in the past is actually the problem in
that the Earth will not sustain those sorts of activities in future.
However you want to put it, science will be proven correct. The laws
of physics are not subject to negotiation or a democratic vote. The
laws of physics are not
going to change for whatever supernatural world view may be dominate
in a nation or culture. It's easy to forget that we in the U.S. are
presently in a conflict with a world view that doesn't give a damn
about the western scientific point of view. The Islamist view is
focused on the ultimate trip
to Heaven and this life to them is just a stop over between planes.
That's the main reason they are willing to die in a drive by bombing.
If we run out of the will to kill before they run out of bombs, then
all those great words in the pile known as Western Philosophy may
simply vanish.
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