Re: [FRIAM] How many years left

[Steve Smith]

Robert Howard wrote: It reminds me of the Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894. http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/our-economic-past-the-great-horse-manure-crisis-of-1894/ I'll say it so Doug doesn't have to (get to?):         That sounds like a lot of Horse Shit to me! Seriously (hah!) I had the great pleasure of attending one of Geoff West's lectures on Scaling Laws in Biology.  It was a good reminder of the main point of the above article:  Things don't go on as they did before.   Clearly, by the time Chicken-Little is running about squawking that "the sky is falling!", others with more careful powers of observation and cooler heads have been hard at work finding a "solution" to the problem.   Sigmoidal growth curves start out slow, ramp up as compound growth happens, things begin to saturate and growth becomes more "linear" and then ultimately they "supersaturate" and growth goes flat.   In "innovative" systems like mutation-selection and human-technological, as one system starts to saturate, another system starts to compete, to fill the same ecological/economic/sociological/technological niche.  What we end up with is something like a series of piecewise linear growth systems appearing to be a single one with super-linear, accelerating growth. I'm not convinced that the introduction of Internal Combustion Engines and automobiles to displace the c19 Manure-machines in use for transportation was anything but a deferral and aggravation of the problem.   I believe that we exchanged a relatively obvious, localized,  and quickly-recovered-from problem (horse-shit-in-streets) for a much less obvious, less localized, and longer-to-recover-from problem (urban and regional smog).   During the 1970's oil crisis, we doubled the fuel efficiency of the average automobile from 10-20 to 20-40, but by then we were already wallowing in our own smog, so we backed off on the ultra-efficient leaned-out engines that were spewing Nitrous Oxides (but few particulates or unburned hydrocarbons) and lived with automobiles getting 15-30 for the next 30 years. In the 1960's 10,000 miles a year was a lot of miles for the single family automobile.  By today, every member of the family of driving age (in the US) has a vehicle that drives at least that much (well, maybe only in the suburban and rural parts of the country). Little did we know (yet we did, but somehow we didn't pay attention), but even the near-perfect system for converting hydrocarbons to useful work, a little waste heat, some C02 and some H20 would be a major part of our global climate crisis!   So the solutions to our regional smog problems (improved combustion) contributed to our *global* climate crisis by enabling us to burn yet-more fossil fuels with (apparent) immunity! I wonder why we, the apologists and denialists for anthropogenic crises are so quick to take credit for man's great abilities to fill every corner of the world, to dominate every climate, every landscape, yet insist that we could *never* be the cause of major systems imbalances in the world?   In my humble moments, I would like to believe that we have no such ability, but then I look around and realize that maybe we *are* a force to be reckoned with...and I wonder if we will rise to the occasion of our own reckoning? I don't know if running out of available flint was part of what kicked us from paleolithic stone to neolithic stone, or from neolithic stone to bronze tools, but there is a lot of evidence that *we* *did* knock down the bulk of the megafauna that thrived during the pliestocene and that neolithic (highly improved from paleolithic) tools might have had a lot to do with it.   So even before what we call "early civilization", our cleverness may have had continental, if not global impacts on the biosphere.   Losing a few woolly mammoths and rhinoceri, giant sloths, cave bears, sabertoothed cats, and dire wolves might not really matter in any large sense... but it does seem worth noting that even with the barest of technology, our ancestors might have had such widespread effects. Humans seem to have a "manifest destiny" that involves the ever-increasing of the stakes.   Those of us who grew up on space-traveling science-fiction might believe that we are somehow going to escape the planet/solar system as it collapses under our weight behind us.  Many of us are descendants of those who fled other continents as *they* seemed to be collapsing under *their* own (sociopolitical?) weight.   Of course, Europe and Asia did not collapse and *we* (humans at a global scale) will not collapse either, but rather we will come up with "yet another" clever way to push the consequences of our desire to have more/faster/cheaper off into the future. Entire species, even ecosystems and possibly human subcultures may have to cease to exist to allow for that.  Perhaps the Singularians are correct.  Perhaps we can just keep pushing things off into the future faster and faster and faster until the future is an eternal accellerated-pace NOW!  Fortunately I have multiverse theories to escape laterally into/across... I think I'll choose to live in a region of the multiverse where humans *do* recognize their self-destructive habits and develop new systems of awareness that are just this side of catastrophically self-destructive, rather than just "the other side".  What good are "basins of attraction" if we can't choose which ones to slide gently into?   - Steve

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