From fire to respiration for human civilization

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-Greg

Extruding social governance from fundamental laws of the universe

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-Greg

Work Energy Flows

I've read three interesting books lately that relate here and relate to each other in a meta way: The Uninhabitable Earth, The Growth Delusion, and Origin Story. Key meta-takeaway is that in the long run, we humans need to figure out a way to optimally manage the flow of work energy (thermodynamic "free" energy) to best serve our purposes, with broad allocation across species (ours and others), and with minimal, ideally zero, unintended consequences -- minimum impactful entropy costs. Could also be lots of opportunity moving the world into that frame of mind as well.

-Greg

Hari Seldon

Back on the entropy thing, I think ultimately, the Hari Seldon equations and derivative laws we ultimately develop, if we last long enough to reach that stage of enlightenment, will incorporate the management of entropy and the distribution of its burden across civilization, along with similar distribution considerations of free energy that counteracts it. If you stop to think about it, fundamentally, it's what we fight about. The big issues of today and over time -- health care, climate change, food production, fresh water production, labor availability, etc. -- can all be viewed through an entropy/free energy lens. What remains then is the management of the other tendencies of human behavior like one-upsmanship, power grabbing, appetite for various stimuli or excitement, etc. -- which, when you consider the origin story writ large, it's also about disturbances or excitement that spontaneously arose in an otherwise boring soup...life, evolution, and human behavior have inherited that and it's what stimulates progress.

-Greg