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openspace4life“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. I can only see two ways to harness all the solar energy available on Earth: we either pave over the wilderness with solar arrays (talk about too much of a good thing!) and replace the lost photosynthesis capacity with giant oxygen-making machines of some kind, or we claim all the world's plants as “our oxygen generators” and just eradicate all those irritating critters who are always nibbling on them.
If you enjoy hiking in the woods, watching birds, etc. then this future is horrifying enough as is. But what these and similar scenarios entail is actually far worse, because it's not just the carbon-oxygen cycle we'll have to manage if we take over management of this planet. There's the global climate, of course, and that's not just a carbon-dioxide-management issue; water vapor is a far more important greenhouse gas overall, and wiping out vast tracts of rainforest has a real impact on how water vapor moves through our atmosphere. Then there's the large-scale water filtration that goes on deep underground, the acidity and salinity of the oceans (where half the world's photosynthesis happens), nitrogen fixation and all the other magic that makes healthy soil for us to grow crops in--and I'm sure the list goes on.
So what, you ask? With all that energy, we can just build climate-controlled domes over our cities and manufacture all our food from basic chemicals. But the problem is that, being fallible and having only a few centuries of experience with global-scale technologies (compared with the eons Gaia has spent on R&D working out how to keep a planet habitable), we might one day run into some big problems that wouldn't be problems if we only still had a biosphere to help us out.
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. I can only see two ways to harness all the solar energy available on Earth: we either pave over the wilderness with solar arrays (talk about too much of a good thing!) and replace the lost photosynthesis capacity with giant oxygen-making machines of some kind, or we claim all the world's plants as “our oxygen generators” and just eradicate all those irritating critters who are always nibbling on them.
If you enjoy hiking in the woods, watching birds, etc. then this future is horrifying enough as is. But what these and similar scenarios entail is actually far worse, because it's not just the carbon-oxygen cycle we'll have to manage if we take over management of this planet. There's the global climate, of course, and that's not just a carbon-dioxide-management issue; water vapor is a far more important greenhouse gas overall, and wiping out vast tracts of rainforest has a real impact on how water vapor moves through our atmosphere. Then there's the large-scale water filtration that goes on deep underground, the acidity and salinity of the oceans (where half the world's photosynthesis happens), nitrogen fixation and all the other magic that makes healthy soil for us to grow crops in--and I'm sure the list goes on.
So what, you ask? With all that energy, we can just build climate-controlled domes over our cities and manufacture all our food from basic chemicals. But the problem is that, being fallible and having only a few centuries of experience with global-scale technologies (compared with the eons Gaia has spent on R&D working out how to keep a planet habitable), we might one day run into some big problems that wouldn't be problems if we only still had a biosphere to help us out.
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.
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no subject
Date: 2008-12-16 11:03 pm (UTC)Whatever.
It's infantile, really--why assume that there is no such thing as “enough?”
We use more energy than our ancestors - but we get a great deal of return on it. Modern medicine, electric blankets, microwave ovens. Television! Electricity itself.
The _knowledge_ we've gained could only be gotten by a civilization that has so much damned energy we can afford to let individual members study Amazon pygmy newts for twenty years, and not have to spend twenty hours (or more) a week chopping wood just so they don't _die_ in the winter.
Okay, we could call 'enough' right now - but if we'd done _that_ fifty years ago my wife would be dead (heart disease) and we'd be stuck with huge mainframe computers and no internet. I prefer the future, thanks!
Hmmmm ... there are civilizations that call 'enough'. They're stagnant and heirarchical and no fun to live in: see Egypt before the Greeks conquered 'em and China after 1400.
I think I'm rambling ...
no subject
Date: 2008-12-17 05:52 am (UTC)