John Hopkins on Tue, 18 Oct 2011 18:14:58 +0200 (CEST) |
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Re: <nettime> Franco Berardi & Geert Lovink: A call to the Army of Love and t... |
Hi Mark!
Order and energy availability go hand-in-hand. Even the persistence of information/knowledge into the future is directly dependent on energy (re)sources to maintain it.Indeed, thermodynamics is an important "theory" but, as many have noticed, life-in-general seems to defeat the "2nd Law" everyday.
I dunno, maybe we are moving towards the proposition of some friendly wagers! ;-)
HUMANS, who are clearly different from other living things, further
That clarity is not universally accepted nor supported by, say, theories of evolution, genome mapping, biochemistry, appearances, and indeed, overall behavior.
confound thermodynamics -- which means that however "stupid" we might be, we are still the only beings "smart" enough to come up with something as useful as the 2nd Law.
Yes, for example, in "Into The Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life" (Schneider, Eric D. and Dorion Sagan), there is a deep exploration into the puzzle of why it is that life (Life!) initiates self-organization which itself appears to be in contravention to thermodynamic laws. However, this does not preclude the situation that Life as it proceeds is still subject to thermodynamic laws. If you stop the inflow of energy into a living system that system will eventually die (move to disorder). Humans-as-living-organism are no exception to this application of thermo. So, yes, why there exists self-organization of a full scalar range of systems (accretionary processes which create galaxies and stars which create planets which create conditions for life and where life erupts) is a bit of a puzzle. But as things proceed, life, planets, stars and galaxies, all the observable cosmos, fall under thermodynamic processes. Yes, we are smart enough to observe consistencies in the universe we inhabit, that is a necessity for any Life-form to continue itself. But knowledge and information need an abundance of energy to project themselves into the future, and it is very likely that, as energy sources tighten up, knowledge will be the first loss.
Danny Hillis, co-founder of both, is responsible for PREDICTION #605
-- personally I'd rather explore the I-Ching than follow the promotional lead of a 'perpetual motion machine' enthusiast ... ;-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_of_the_Long_Now (needs winding!)
"By December 31, 2020, synthetic solar energy (fusion) will have been shown to be a technically feasible, by an experiment demonstrating a controlled fusion reaction producing more harnessable energy than was used to ignite it."
My brother-in-law is the lead physicist for NIF (National Ignition Facility https://lasers.llnl.gov/) which is the project ('experiment') you speak of at Lawrence Livermore Lab near San Francisco. They had their first successful test of the system a couple years ago (not a test of the fusion reaction at all, just a test of the laser arrays). The ultimate success of this project doesn't mean that there will be ample energy for all suddenly in 2020. This is an extreme naive view as projected by techno-utopians. Participating in the construction of the laser array at NIF has taken my b-in-law's entire career from when he started as a post-doc under Edward Teller. The complexity and manufactured precision of the array system is several orders of magnitude greater than what is neccessary to run, say, a nuclear power plant. And, yes, all these human-constructed systems are completely subject to thermo -- the greater the complexity, the greater the instability and the greater the energy consumption of the globe-spanning infrastructure needed to keep such a system 'alive.' It has taken more than 25 years (and is, as of 2009, 600% over budget - now around 5 billion) and 8 years late) to get to the point of this small experimental apparatus functioning (not yet a demonstration of 'free energy for all' by any stretch of the imagination). There is a sizable chunk of the nuclear science community who believe it is/will be a failure. Not to mention the primary purpose of the project is for testing the efficacy of nuclear weapons. It is merely sold to the public who underwrite the multi-billion dollar project under the 'free energy for all' rubric. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility -- under "Criticisms"). No fusion reaction has yet been initiated. And if it does, it is at a scale of nanometers: nothing approaching what would be necessary for 'commercial' production. Huge problems with things like neutrino release (basically impossible to shield from), would dog any deployment for decades if not longer. And this is under the assumption that the US nuclear weapons behemoth techno-social system will still be lumbering along in 20-30-40-50 years from now. It also falls under the weight of thermodynamics, needing huge influxes of (hydrocarbon) energy, but is losing the fight on the streets to humans who strangely enough would rather have health care than have a nice nuclear umbrella with which they can kill everyone on the planet. cheers, jh ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ John Hopkins Watching the Tao rather than watching the Dow! http://neoscenes.net/ http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org