[Warwick]

Brian H wrote:
Ugh. Buzz-word/code-word recommendations that we live in some kind of 18th C dreamland. With, necessarily, the same population levels (say, a billion W/W or so.)
Fuggedaboudit.

http://www.soilassociation.org/Whyorganic/Climatefriendlyfoodandfarming/Reports/tabid/387/Default.aspx

Sustainable means that – sustainable. Capable of feeding the world, on a sustainable basis. Intensive arable farming leads to soil erosion and podsolization. Intensive pastoral farming is the reason that food for humans is too expensive for the poorest.

[Warwick]

Rezwan wrote:

Except that many people would be perfectly justified, in today’s world, to correctly assume that someone else will have your job if you don’t kill yourself working. And the idea that “the hoarding survivalist generations will pass” supposes incorrectly that long work-weeks are a voluntary choice on behalf of the employed.

By “hoarding survivalist generation” – I didn’t mean it was their voluntary choice, but they have been conditioned. Of course, circumstances have to change first. We have to be in a defacto world of effectively unlimited resources, such as one with unlimited energy…

Wait. No, that’s not it. Maybe we’re all hoarders, no matter what. Human nature. I think there’s plenty to go around now if we weren’t such hoarders. But you see how shrill people get when someone tries to suggest sharing and such. So, I don’t think, given our nature, we can share. The only solution is to not have to share, to live in a world of unlimited resources. In other words, I guess I give up on people. They are at heart, little petty creatures. Who really make things unpleasant for each other. So let them drown in sugar and abundance!

Hmm. That’s depressing. I didn’t realize the implications of my thoughts. I must meditate on this. I don’t think it’s coming from a good place.

“Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed” – Gandhi

Shrillness, yeah. I can tell you must have to put up with a lot of that in the US over healthcare and such right now, reading the news. But I don’t think it’s a reflection on human nature, more like just the fact that a vocal minority can have a disproportionate slice of the airwaves. There’s good and bad in everyone. It’s true that a lot of people are easily led, or conditioned, one way or another, unfortunately. But in the long run there’s reason to hope as well. Don’t underestimate the power of ideas.

[Warwick]

Rezwan wrote:
I suspect that, as we solve the affluence problem and get rid of this sense of fear and survival and miserly possessiveness that people have which makes them see everything as property they must hoard and control – perspective on nature will shift, and become much more interesting.

Two sides to that. Surveys show that rich people are the most materialistic. Correlation or causation?
On the other hand, I used to work with someone from an oil company who would tell me about having to explain to the directors about how you just _can’t_ persuade someone at a refinery to pay any attention to environmental practices when their horizon is dominated by the immediate survival needs of their family.
Maybe like with a lot of things, if being a bully is at the top, and being a victim is at the bottom, freedom is in the middle.

Rezwan wrote:
It’s the limited resources paradigm, after all, that is behind a lot of things that are supposedly for our sake, but really are not what we want. Take those commercials where someone has a headache, and they take a pill and feel better. The person is shown at a grueling job, where they can’t miss a second, but because of the pill, they get to stay on the job. Yippee.

Obviously, evil employers are behind that ad. If your employee has splitting headaches, their body is telling them to get rest and change their lifestyle. Many employers just see the workers as tools, want them to ignore the sensible message from their bodies to get rest. So they vilify the headache, and not the insane work hours, and work to solve the symptom (headache), and not the cause of the headache (life out of balance).

I know exactly the ads you’re talking about. The thing is, 50 years ago, futurologists told us that robot slaves would have reduced the amount of work and that we would have much more leisure. So why, at least outside the home, did it not materialise? One answer is because capital has actually increased its power to take a share of income – partly as a result of monopolization in many sectors. More prosaically, the *increase* in work hours over recent decades is directly due to several factors: the demise of the power of trade unions, labour market deregulation, the rise of white-collar wage-slavery due to changes in labour supply. The changes have had the biggest impact at the bottom of the scale, with unskilled workers frequently being expected to work weekends if they are going to be the lucky one that gets the job.
Meanwhile, in France they still have the 35-hour week I think. But who would invest there when they can go somewhere the workers do 45-60 hours a week?

Rezwan wrote:
All of that is possible, is reinforced, under a survivalist mentality, where you’re worried someone else will take your job if you don’t kill yourself working, or the Chinese will control market share, or whatever. Zero sum self and nature exploitation. Very boring. And I don’t think it reflects reality. But people do get shrill about it.

This is often couched in terms of “efficiency”.

The temptation of efficiency is strong, and certainly, efficiency has its place. But I think a big part of human essence is inefficiency, gratuitous exploration, play. Hopefully, this will assert itself more as years go by. The grumpy hoarding survivalist generations will pass, and the emerging generations will be a lot more groovy about it all. More integrated with natural patterns, setting their clocks by wildebeest migrations, very happy to have excuses to not go to work for 3 weeks at a time while roads are closed.

Except that many people would be perfectly justified, in today’s world, to correctly assume that someone else will have your job if you don’t kill yourself working. And the idea that “the hoarding survivalist generations will pass” supposes incorrectly that long work-weeks are a voluntary choice on behalf of the employed.

Obviously I’m writing this as I wait for my Professor to reply to me so I can carry on editing, it’s only 8.38 pm. 🙂

[Warwick]

Brian H wrote: As for farming, there are many ways to skin that carrot; check out urban hi-rise farms, e.g. And FF power makes all sorts of other models viable.

I looked into it. Hydroponics, interesting as it is as a curiosity, has some significant issues as a replacement for soil-based farming. You may be supposing that the nutrient chemicals will be recycled indefinitely but in my experience of growing plants in water, that’s definitely not what happens. Algal growth is inevitable and you periodically have to refresh the water. Plants that grow without access to minerals, do not represent a source of those minerals for humans. What about bees? Are they going to have everything they need to survive on in the building? Do we even know what that is, they’re monstrously fiddly creatures to manage (as certain countries are finding out, thanks to Roundup Ready). It could be an idea with a future, but it’s never going to replace what we basically need – soil-grown crops, grown organically and sustainably.

[Warwick]

Brian H wrote: Ah, overpopulation. The trump card.

If all the world was organized into 4-person families, living in 2 story houses on 4600 sq.’ lots — they’d all fit inside Texas. And then you could have all the rest for yourself!

Well that’s very kind of you. Actually the distribution of land ownership is pretty much like that in many countries (but it’s not me that happens to own it).

When we all live in Texas (most of us in the middle of a desert then), where are we getting water, food, wood? At the moment we like to get water and wood by depleting natural sources so that ecosystems die off or are gradually attrited. We like to get more food by progressive deforestation / desertification, and intensification. The pollution created by agrochemicals now befouls rivers across most of the Western world, and there are plenty of ecosystems that have been wiped out completely.

And yes if we all live in Texas there will be no lack of room for wildlife, but since that hasn’t happened yet, we’re kind of spread out and like to build lots of roads and cars. Rezwan’s flying cars will be here one day maybe, then we can just kill birds, but I think that for the average subsistence farmer in the majority world, that day is a long way off. It’s been shown many times that the effect of dividing up wildwood with roads is that the ecosystem fails – all the larger species need to cross the roads and if they can’t they’re screwed. We could imagine a different world where is some weird and wonderful rural public transport, but let’s not bet on it.

It’s not easy to persuade someone affluent to do something such that they’d barely notice the difference, like driving a 1 litre car instead of a 3 litre car, so is it realistic that we are going to see a big change in human behaviour away from things like poaching endangered species (which makes a huge difference to someone poor)? The Chinese demand them for medicine, African herders see them as a threat to livestock, and so on.

In the US, populations have about depleted the Great Plains aquifer that is the water source for quite a large patch of states. Never mind what’s happening to the good ol everglades. California too will be running out of water within 30 years.

Many of us also use things like varnish, paint, plastic, jewellery, birth control pills, and so on and so on, which release environmentally hazardous chemicals (hazardous to humans too if they stick around long enough) in their manufacture and/or use. With few enough people doing it, things will come back to a balance; we passed that point long ago.

And sure, world food shortages (as opposed to famines caused by a shortage of funds, a la Amartya Sen) would not be happening without factory-farming. If we devoted arable land mostly to feeding humans, food would be relatively plentiful.

But without civilisation we will one day converge to a Malthusian equilibrium where we are running out of something, or everything, or overtaken by a massive disease – it’s in our nature. We’re rabbits, not foxes.

[Warwick]

Oh, I guess that since I have an economics degree from a top uni, I’m a bit of an economist. I’ll see sometime what I can muster regarding that part of your essay. Really like the positive tone of it.

[Warwick]

Rezwan wrote:

But it’s true that the 1st industrial revolution mostly turned into creating new ways to conquer and enslave, and at the height of it the average lifespan for an urban worker was less than 20. The paradigm then was very much one of unenlightened self-interest; there’s no need for history to repeat itself.

What was its “height”? And I don’t know about history repeating itself, but the average worker now lives a much longer time. Perhaps you could say at the inception, conditions for workers were terrible, lifespan short, but as the affluence spread, workers stopped putting up with that. This would imply there is a progression inherent in the thing. Jeffrey Sachs puts a different spin on the industrial revolution and poverty, which I quoted a lot in this post on poverty.

I more or less like your piece of writing about poverty. If you want to see Bjorn Lomborg get taken apart at the seams for the dizzy fantasist that he is, read Monbiot’s website (or regular column in the Guardian).

You may remember from school learning about the reformer Edwin Chadwick. In his ‘Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Britain’ in 1842, he wrote that the average life expectancy in Rutland (agricultural, not changed much) was 52 years for a gent and 38 for a working man. In Leeds it was 44 years for a gent and 19 for a working man. (Naturally this was probably before they separated out infant mortality, but that’s beside the point.) I’ve got out my old school textbook, P. Sauvain (1987) to tell you that!

Broadly speaking, the quality of life for the working classes was far worse in the 1840s than 100 years earlier as it turns out (just as someone forced at gunpoint into a Chinese factory to breathe plastic fumes is worse off than when they were a rural peasant; just as someone that is displaced from a rainforest to live in Sao Paulo’s shanty town amid the filth and crime is worse off). After the Public Health Act of 1848, conditions improved and thereafter gradually carried on improving, because of more social reforms in the late Victorian era (the main reason for the low life expectancy was disease, which was reduced by public investments in clean water and sanitation). If you ask when life became ‘better’ than before the industrial revolution, for someone at the bottom, well maybe not until late 1800s at the very least I’d guess. Basically, people in an ultra-capitalist society view each other as commodities and people are a commodity that can get very cheap. It took a long while for people to grab part of the fruits of technology, rather than just being exploited alongside it, which is what happened at first.

[Warwick]

Aeronaut wrote: So, how do you propose to change human nature so that all this power is used for the good of all? After all, we’re just the third Industrial Revolution, following steam and steam–>electric.
Btw, you may want to google “third industrial revolution”. A group of higher profile advanced thinkers think they can pull it off using fossil fuels…

I don’t think it calls for a change in human nature. Human nature was no different, for example, when the post-war societies of Western Europe were striving (and mostly succeeding) in creating property-owning democracies, with public ownership of public goods and the development of the welfare state. Huge advances were made. Human nature is an obstacle to utopia, not always an obstacle to progress.

But the question of how to do the most good with an invention (which in effect it is) like focus fusion, is a deep and complicated one. Not one that I can answer immediately even superficially, but here goes.

It’s unlikely you’re going to be able to twist anyone’s arm even if you tried. It’s not so obvious how you can help someone in a country that’s basically in the grip of a corrupt military regime that swallows everything, of which there are plenty.

BUT, there are a lot of poorer countries that have quite a reasonable government. So for a start, maybe you could give preferential terms to people depending on what they can afford – price discrimination, as with airlines. It’s fortunate that in many poorer countries, there are universities with a DPF programme. That means there must be people there that could be developed as Focus manufacturers, developers, maintainence engineers. (In fact, selling cheap to the poor is a very aggressive sales tactic – stacking high is imperative if you want to be sure of out-competing the less clean alternatives.)

What about the nature of ownership? Is there something to be said for that ancient idea, the democratic cooperative? – either for producers or operators, depending on how you envisage production?

What about harnessing the abilities of international voluntary organisations, or starting one, to make the most of an energy supply in regions where capital development is not at a point where it could otherwise make the most difference? Another thought – there are a lot of industrial places in the world that are hurting badly right now and for the foreseeable, which fortunately means there is a potential untapped resource of engineers and technologists. It’s just a question of what leverage will see them gainfully employed in places that need it.

Don’t be afraid to be bold.

I looked up the 3rd industrial revolution and got Jeremy Rifkin… not sure where you’re going with that. But it’s true that the 1st industrial revolution mostly turned into creating new ways to conquer and enslave, and at the height of it the average lifespan for an urban worker was less than 20. The paradigm then was very much one of unenlightened self-interest; there’s no need for history to repeat itself.

I’ll write more if I think of something else.

[Warwick]

Rezwan wrote:

CO2 is the tip of the iceberg as regards environmental destruction going on right now … For instance the oceans are rapidly becoming full of tiny bits of plastic, dumped from Chinese factories, which are probably going to destroy marine ecosystems worldwide once they have been whittled small enough.

I don’t understand that. Why would small bits of plastic be a problem? They seem pretty benign. Do they react with anything? Isn’t there a lot of debris in nature? If an animal swallows a bit of plastic, wouldn’t they just poop it out?

I think plastic debris is more of an aesthetic annoyance – people see it, and it reminds them of other people – which we all tend to dislike a bit.

Check out “Life after people“. If people disappear – like the rapture comes or a unique to humans virus – and there’s no one around to maintain things, all our artifacts and impacts will just get swallowed back by nature. Most of this happens in 500 years, and, except for deserts where things don’t rot, by a few thousand years (which is NOTHING in geological time, or even natural history time) there won’t be a trace of us.

And then the sun will rise, and set, over and over, on the natural world, all those critters leading their short, intense, violent lives, escaping predators, competing for resources, eating and being eaten. Until asteroids hit or the sun blows up or whatever.

As chance would have it, the place where I read about the plastic particles was a book called “The World Without Us” !
http://www.worldwithoutus.com/about_book.html
I totally recommend this – it doesn’t say anything hectoring about how to save the environment, but it is terrifically interesting.
Sounds like the History Channel take on things was a lot more optimistic — maybe they sussed some of the things they didn’t mention but didn’t want to go through all the morbid stuff for an American audience?
The first thing he points out if the national grids all switched off, every fission plant would explode.
So yeah, the plastic particles thing: go here

http://www.worldwithoutus.com/excerpt.html

Not as benign as all that …

Thompson’s team realized that slow mechanical action—waves and tides that grind against shorelines, turning rocks into beaches—were now doing the same to plastics. The largest, most conspicuous items bobbing in the surf were slowly getting smaller. At the same time, there was no sign that any of the plastic was biodegrading, even when reduced to tiny fragments.

“We imagined it was being ground down smaller and smaller, into a kind of powder. And we realized that smaller and smaller could lead to bigger and bigger problems.”

He knew the terrible tales of sea otters choking on polyethylene rings from beer six-packs; of swans and gulls strangled by nylon nets and fishing lines; of a green sea turtle in Hawaii dead with a pocket comb, a foot of nylon rope, and a toy truck wheel lodged in its gut. His personal worst was a study on fulmar carcasses washed ashore on North Sea coastlines. Ninety-five percent had plastic in their stomachs—an average of 44 pieces per bird. A proportional amount in a human being would weigh nearly five pounds.

There was no way of knowing if the plastic had killed them, although it was a safe bet that, in many, chunks of indigestible plastic had blocked their intestines. Thompson reasoned that if larger plastic pieces were breaking down into smaller particles, smaller organisms would likely be consuming them. He devised an aquarium experiment, using bottom-feeding lugworms that live on organic sediments, barnacles that filter organic matter suspended in water, and sand fleas that eat beach detritus. In the experiment, plastic particles and fibers were provided in proportionately bite-size quantities. Each creature promptly ingested them.

When the particles lodged in their intestines, the resulting constipation was terminal. If they were small enough, they passed through the invertebrates’ digestive tracts and emerged, seemingly harmlessly, out the other end. Did that mean that plastics were so stable that they weren’t toxic? At what point would they start to naturally break down—and when they did, would they release some fearful chemicals that would endanger organisms sometime far in the future?

Richard Thompson didn’t know. Nobody did, because plastics haven’t been around long enough for us to know how long they’ll last or what happens to them. His team had identified nine different kinds in the sea so far, varieties of acrylic, nylon, polyester, polyethylene, polypropylene, and polyvinyl chloride. All he knew was that soon everything alive would be eating them.

“When they get as small as powder, even zooplankton will swallow them.”

[Warwick]

Rezwan wrote:

Concern: X is the biggest issue I worry about today. (or, most important task for science)
Commitment: Personally making a significant effort to help out with X.
Optimism: Belief that X will be achieved.
Confidence: Those who should be doing something about X are doing so.

I like this angle for fusion. Perhaps some of you can develop a questionnaire to begin measuring this… Of course, an actual measure would have to use random polling or whatever – proper methodology. In any case, just putting things in these terms is a helpful tool to get people to think about the importance of the issue and where they stand on it. And it can be a part one and part 2 thing – fusion in general, vs. aneutronic fusion…

I’d like to brainstorm on this a bit. That means – – – this needs its own topic thread.

I guess I’m at Concern. As a statistics/simulation person I’m not sure what work is needed in the fusion arena. (I once applied to work at IST Lisbon, the place that does the research for HIPER, but they said they wanted someone with a more plasma background.)
I imagine the same applies to a lot of people – other than telling their mates about it, what commitment can they make?

Optimism – I’d say fairly. Confidence? Well, I believe some people are doing something… and that a lot of other people really really like treading in others’ footprints and building tokamaks.

[Warwick]

Rematog:

Yes, methane is a more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2. CO2 is the tip of the iceberg as regards environmental destruction going on right now … For instance the oceans are rapidly becoming full of tiny bits of plastic, dumped from Chinese factories, which are probably going to destroy marine ecosystems worldwide once they have been whittled small enough. In a more affluent, energy-rich society, that is the kind of thing we need to address. Habitat destruction in order to create plantations of cash crops is decimating biodiversity. I’m not sure why you would be OK with that.

Overpopulation is a massive problem – energy is not the only resource – and the only way populations stop expanding is when it pays more to have fewer kids, because they all require significant investment and do not represent an economic gain. That can only happen when i) you don’t need family to go to work for you if you get sick or unemployed; ii) you don’t need kids to work for you to provide for you when you’re old; iii) your kids have genuine prospects if you invest everything you have (including time) in bringing up just a few. These factors are what avoided the predicted Malthusian equilibrium for the “developed” world in the 20th century. Our best choice right now, never mind if we become more energy-rich, is to try to bring about progress towards that same thing for everyone presently living in a shanty town with no state pension and no decent prospects. I think it’s fair to call that civilisation – and at present we in the developed world are the ones that are being uncivilised, by letting the World Bank and their neoliberal fellow-travellers work against it.

Btw, I’ve been to Ohio and didn’t see anywhere that would have lost anything by being reverted to nature. What was it they said in “The Faculty”? Anyway, you should come to the UK and see what it’s like when all of the housing estates start to coalesce into each other.

[Warwick]

WMM sucks. You should get something like Sony Vegas Studio (for simple things like this works a treat). Professional-oriented software is expensive but consumer-level packages like this do not cost a huge amt. I’ve personally tried using both WMM and SVS and it’s worth getting the latter.

[Warwick]

Hi all

I don’t know if you are familiar with the work of Mendel Sachs

http://www.compukol.com/mendel/publications/publications.html

I read through this old one

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/9027722471/qid=926450603/sr=1-3/002-5908934-8425436

(from the library, not by paying $269 lol) and I have to say it is all theorems – totally sound stuff.

As a Bayesian, this makes me happy, because he completely explains away any apparent ontological randomness. In quantum gravity, randomness is epistemic.

Warwick

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