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

Exponential Climate Change

Finished the book. His focus is on painting the picture of what the future will be like, in various ranges of "worseness" and how we might respond to it, and how civilization will likely get greatly reconfigured. I don't really think the guy is being overly alarmist or hyperbolic. Stuff is real. 

A main takeaway is that the model of progress we've had since perhaps the Enlightenment (post Dark Ages) needs to likely change. The upward exponential modulated by sine waves of various crests and troughs may well be permanently modulated down to sea level (literally and figuratively) by a negative exponential driven by climate. Progress will likely level or decline until we adapt to the radically different conditions,and it could take millennia, since we'd pretty much have to re-do everything we did over the last 12,000 years in a much more sustainable light. The technology might be there, but the geopolitical upheavals may take centuries to quell. 

Of course the degree of this can be mitigated by acting as early as possible to completely decarbonize in an orderly way, but the will just doesn't seem to be there. Too much inertia. And, no, onesy-twosy neoliberals driving EV's won't cut it. It's dramatic change needed across civilization.  Hopefully 2020 will be the turning point, and the youth marching in the streets will gain momentum toward action, lest their children live amongst the ruins of a once relatively prosperous civilization in a new, much extended, Dark Age, dwarfing any that hit humanity before...

My next book is The Growth Delusion...after a detour to a big history one called Origin Story, which, in the early reading, posits the idea of the universal law of an entropy tax on creating order, which climate change is precisely that!

-Greg

Thoughts on Entropy and Evolution

Physical laws (thermodynamics) assert that entropy increases -- we go from neatness to messiness over time. However, that is contradicted when it comes to life forms and the things they create. It's kind of my operational definition of a life form -- any phenomenon in the universe that self-induces movement against entropy. The only stuff like that which we know of so far is here on Earth. Ok, where am I going with this? Well, the idea is kind of recursive when it comes to humans (and perhaps any other intelligent life forms). Intelligence evolved to in fact do this better and at scale. Now, there are unintended consequences to this, where someone's decrease in entropy is an increase for someone else -- e.g. externalizing pollution, anthropogenic climate change, etc. What we might need to do is to figure out how to optimize this at all levels of human groupings. All we've managed to do heretofore is settle it by conflict, rather than thoughtful optimization. Maybe the objective functions suggested above can be derived from that kind of thinking, fueled by detailed, even quantitative, analyses based on all the science we know. [Aside: kind of has a religious tint to it as well since religions, at least in their origins, have been attempts to do this, but then hijacked, co-opted, instead by concentrations of power over others.] The tools, technology, institutions, etc., that humanity creates should be consistent with what makes the best sense in that kind of framework.

-Greg

Initial Musings about Entropy, Life, and Civilization

A fundamental law of the universe is that things tend toward a maximum state of disorder - entropy. An operational definition of any life form is some phenomenon that "momentarily" counteracts that through self-directed action.

Now, one life form's self-directed action can accelerate another's level of entropy (e.g. lion eats gazelle, invasive plants taking over environments, etc.). Humans have found ways to do this in very magnified ways both within and outside their species - to such an extent, it'll be carved into the geologic record as the anthropocene. Key to enduring survival of the human species is how to optimally manage the externalities, unintended consequences, and the like of how entropy is redistributed in the name of human self interest. Optimistic view is that current levels of knowledge and technology can be appropriately applied at a meta level to solve it. Willingness and cooperation are all that's needed.

Why do the greatest civilizational influencers in the history of the world eventually arrive at a point with idiots running them? Pax Romana, Pax Britannica, and Pax Americana all seem to have degenerated after upgrading the world. Is it a natural human pattern?

-Greg