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“What does it mean to 'Bring Life' to each of us, to all of us, and to the entire galaxy?”
- Theme question for SolSeed's first organized event
“Rational hyper-intelligent critters would realize that even hyper-intelligent critters can make mistakes and having backups is a good idea. In this case having a terrestrial planet people can live on [without high technology] in the event of a really massive systems crash is a good idea ...”
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bdunbar , in a comment thread here
“Taking and not giving back, demanding that 'productivity' and 'earnings' keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity--most of the World, animal, vegetable and mineral, is laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it's only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which sooner or later must crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life.”
- Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, pp. 480-481
Many sources agree that more solar energy falls on Earth's surface in an hour than humanity currently uses in a year. But according to Nikolai Kardashev, eventually we could reach a point where we use it all, along with every erg of available nuclear, chemical, and geothermal energy this planet can produce.
Okay, in actual fact you can be a so-called Kardashev Type I civilization just by using a total of around two hundred quadrillion watts, however obtained. But let's take it literally for a moment. ( It's a pretty insane idea, really... )
As if Type I weren't crazy enough, Kardashev Types II and III involve harnessing all the energy of a star and a galaxy, respectively. The premise I don't buy here is that increasingly advanced civilizations must always use ever-growing amounts of energy. It's infantile, really--why assume that there is no such thing as “enough?”
Now, I'm all for getting out there and building some colonies and big solar arrays in space, on Mars, and on extrasolar planets. Even a Ringworld or a Dyson sphere could be pretty cool if we figured out how to do it right. But I think that in all these adventures, we're really going to want to take samples of our biosphere along for the ride. It's what created us, after all--and for the time being, we really can't live without it.
- Theme question for SolSeed's first organized event
“Rational hyper-intelligent critters would realize that even hyper-intelligent critters can make mistakes and having backups is a good idea. In this case having a terrestrial planet people can live on [without high technology] in the event of a really massive systems crash is a good idea ...”
-
bdunbar , in a comment thread here“Taking and not giving back, demanding that 'productivity' and 'earnings' keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity--most of the World, animal, vegetable and mineral, is laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it's only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which sooner or later must crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life.”
- Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, pp. 480-481
Many sources agree that more solar energy falls on Earth's surface in an hour than humanity currently uses in a year. But according to Nikolai Kardashev, eventually we could reach a point where we use it all, along with every erg of available nuclear, chemical, and geothermal energy this planet can produce.
Okay, in actual fact you can be a so-called Kardashev Type I civilization just by using a total of around two hundred quadrillion watts, however obtained. But let's take it literally for a moment. ( It's a pretty insane idea, really... )
As if Type I weren't crazy enough, Kardashev Types II and III involve harnessing all the energy of a star and a galaxy, respectively. The premise I don't buy here is that increasingly advanced civilizations must always use ever-growing amounts of energy. It's infantile, really--why assume that there is no such thing as “enough?”
Now, I'm all for getting out there and building some colonies and big solar arrays in space, on Mars, and on extrasolar planets. Even a Ringworld or a Dyson sphere could be pretty cool if we figured out how to do it right. But I think that in all these adventures, we're really going to want to take samples of our biosphere along for the ride. It's what created us, after all--and for the time being, we really can't live without it.
