Do you know how fast the world is changing?

by Mindchild 20 Replies latest jw friends

• 

  JanH

  Skipper,

  Stephanus, you must be talking about the book, The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World.

  Sounds interesting, especially since I have read a lot of material skeptical towards environmentalist doomsaying. I don't doubt you are familiar with the late Julian Simon. His essay collection The State of Humanity is well worth exploring. The articles are varying in quality, but his own articles are particularly well documented.

  Perhaps "scientific" doomsaying is just another aspect of the fascination humans seem to have with doom & gloom (or perhaps it is just because we in the west have been exposed to Christian apocalypticism for a millennia or two?) ? I do remember when I was a kid, and some scientists asserted that supersonic planes would lead to global cooling, giving us a new ice age. If I am not much mistaken, global warming was first advocated by some of the same people.

  - Jan
  --
  "Doctor how can you diagnose someone with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and then act like I had some choice about barging in here right now?" -- As Good As It Gets
• 

  Mindchild

  Jan,

  Actually no, I can't remember reading any of Simon's books recently but I may have back in college. Thanks for the tip.

  I wonder why we (collectively as a society) enjoy apocalypticism but maybe that is perhaps a bit of warning for us not to go too far over the edge. I know that sometimes I get in some dark moods and can easily scare the shit not only of myself but everyone around me by thinking about some horrific things that are perfectly capable of happening. Something about bad news feeding on itself and making you even more sensitive to it is what it feels like, like a feedback cycle to get you really down. Typically though, I try to take a balanced look and look at various views and then recognize it is all a matter of various potentials mixed with complexity and emergence.

  Skipper

  "The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. The religion which based on experience, which refuses dogmatic. If there's any religion that would cope the scientific needs it will be Buddhism...." Albert Einstein
• 

  Seeker4

  Jan and Mindchild,

  Just spent a weekend on the University of Vermont campus with a group of futurists, and last week met and heard Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute speak. Lovins is pretty amazing - doing a lot of things that other folks are only talking about. For instance he just completed the design on a 5-passenger SUV that gets nearly 100 mpg - and can be returned to the factory and recycled every few years (I understand this is becoming much more common in Europe). Lovins also grows bananas in his headquarters office building - which is located high in the Rocky Mountains.

  I too am struggling with the dire warnings of deep ecologists and then those like Julian Simon who question whether we're facing as severe an ecological crisis as some are saying. There do seem to be some things to be seriously concerned about though, and among them are the fact that we are for the first time experiencing mass extinctions of plant and animal species (about 27,000 species per year) as a result of one species overusing the planet's resources.

  And there can be little doubt that we are using up oil and gas resources at an incredible rate with often bad consequences to the water and air that we all need to survive. And no matter how much oil and gas there is, they will eventually run out. What this will result in is hard to say - but my feeling is that it is better to err on the side of assuming serious problems and responding so those don't happen rather than assuming minor glitches only to find that we've woefully underestimated matters.

  Writers like Paul Hawken in "The Ecology of Commerce," present what seems to be a balanced view that sees the solution in an integrated effort involving science, environmentalists and business. His view of businesses actually IMPROVING the environment year by year and ADDING to the supply of energy available instead of decimating energy sources at the SAME TIME that they make profits and improve the overall quality of life and living is an idea that is gaining momentum. Lovins idea is to make things 4x as energy efficient, which is not that difficult to do, and then get 4x the use out of it through reuse and recycling instead of throwing things away.

  The synergistic reduction in energy use of such an approach is amazing. As Lovins and Vermont Congressman Bernie Sanders noted when Lovins spoke, we now have all the technology and know how to do these very things. What is lacking is the political will. But perhaps we'll see the scientists and the business people just go ahead and do this all on their own.

  I recently started writing for a socially responsible investing website and the number of people involved in this sort of thinking is growing at a tremendous rate. I've been thinking that the events of Sept. 11 are indeed a powerful reminder that no longer can some of the world's population (a small percentage) demand and use the vast majority of the world's resources to maintain an oppulent lifestyle while billions live in squalor, violence and poverty. And despite the JW teaching of how wicked humans are, my feeling is that most people would like to see an end to human misery for as many people as possible.

  And for futurists there is a wonderful website you can find by simply typing "thinkers and visionaries" in a search engine. TONS of links to interesting people with lots of good ideas. Lovins and Hawkens are also well represented on the web.

  Nice discussion, and thanks for the new thinkers you've brought to my attention.
  S4
• 

  Seeker4

  Oh, one other thing. Mindchild - your Einstein quote seems, uh, ungrammatical or poorly translated, or both. I think I understand what it's trying to say - but it might be a bit more powerful if it made sense.

  S4
• 

  bboyneko

  Hey speaking of new technologies, those of you familair with quantum mechanics, 'spooky action at a distance' will be happy to note that scientists have already teleported matter and will teleport larger things soon.

  Speed, and more speed

  Peter Shor at AT&T Laboratories in Florham Park, N.J., showed that a quantum computer could solve several types of problems much faster than they could be solved on a conventional computer.

  Such problems range from factoring large prime numbers, the key to breaking data-encryption codes, to the "traveling salesman" problem, which tries to find the most efficient path for people to take if they need to visit several customers in a given amount of time.

  Quantum computers, Wootters notes, require large assemblages of entangled particles to achieve the data-crunching power required to solve these problems. Entanglement also holds the key to quantum communication and quantum teleportation - ways of transferring quantum information within and among quantum computers.

  The possibility of quantum teleportation was first posited in 1993 by IBM researcher Charles Bennett and colleagues.

  "Teleportation is a really unfortunate term," says University of Michigan physicist Christopher Monroe. "It implies moving people from point A to point B," when in fact it refers to "creating a quantum state in one place that used to exist somewhere else" with no intervening connection.

  In order to instantly teleport those states, he continues, the sender and receiver must share entangled resources, such as Polzik's atomic clouds.

  In what Dr. Monroe calls the most notable teleportation experiment yet, three years ago a team of researchers at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena used quantum teleportation to transfer photons over a three-foot distance.

  Unlike other experiments that destroyed the transported photons as part of the process that confirmed their arrival, the Cal Tech group devised a system to verify the photons' arrival without destroying them.

  The next step, Monroe continues, will be to teleport states of atoms or other particles of matter - a feat he estimates is still 20 years away.

  .. http://www.csmonitor.com/2001/1004/p15s1-stss.html
• 

  Mindchild

  Hi Seeker,

  Wow, it sounds like you got exposed to a lot of interesting ideas. I like going to conferences like that myself but have been too busy lately to pull it off. I've been personally involved with a group of techies and engineers that are trying to encourage radical new innovations that are earth-friendly. You may have heard of this group as it started out being called the First Millennial Foundation that later changed names to the Living Universe Foundation. Lots of great people and ideas but there are real problems in getting out of the talk and armchair hero stage and actually doing things.

  Unfortuantely, for the time being in this world, economics rule. There will be more exploitation of the enviornment as long as it is profitable and there are consumers who want the goods. If it were not for checks and balances and some outside resistance, the earth would be turned into one giant parking lot. Yes, there are many people who do have a conscience and want to do their part and these individuals have made some difference but compared to the forces of globalization and the urgent desire of billions to have the lifestyle that Americans take for granted, well...let's just say you haven't seen anything yet when it comes to taking advantage of the global commons.

  There are indeed some things we can do to moderate this downward slide to prevent it being an immediate nightmare but the complexity of the issues involved may be beyond human intelligence to adequately manage and then our best chance of survival is with A.I. that is more intelligent than man, and are supposed to be here in as little as 10 years by some sources.

  Time will tell.

  Oh, thanks for your input about Einstein's quote. It was the actual wording but I found something else I liked better:-)

  Skipper

  It may be that your whole purpose in life is simply to serve as a warning to others.
• 

  Seeker4

  Like the new quote, though I must say that at times I feel more like an example of what is possible as opposed to a warning.

  Will check out this group.
  Thanks,
  S4
• 

  Stephanus

  Unfortuantely, for the time being in this world, economics rule.

  Hey, what's wrong with that, Skipper? It's the rich countries which are currently reversing the environmental damage of earlier, less enlightened and more impoverished times (and they have the surplus resources {wealth} to achieve that goal).

  You want environmental degradation, visit any really impoverished country on the planet. Visit a rich country and you'll see large scale sustainable forestry and reforestation, and rehabilitation of land degradation and the cleaning up of water ways.

  As for Lomborg, his book is the result of a project he started where he set out to disprove Julian Simon's assertions that things are getting better for humanity at large and resources are increasing, not diminishing as the Malthusian imperative would seem to demand. To Lomborg's surprise, he found that Simon was for the most part right; hence his whole change in outlook and his book.

  "Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others." - Groucho Marx
• 

  Stephanus

  I should add that like Lomborg, I come from a very environmentalistically oriented background. Here's a link to a site about my father, if you don't believe me!:
  http://www.uow.edu.au/science/env/prize.html

  "Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others." - Groucho Marx
• 

  Mindchild

  Stephanus,

  Economics is a two edged sword. It can and has been used to do exactly what you mentioned in terms of cleaning up the enviornment. However, when you look at the reasons why third world countries are often so horrific with their enviornment, it is that they don't have enough money for people to have a first world lifestyle and be enviornmentally responsible at the same time. Yes, there are varying degrees of exceptions but for the most part, there is an enormous gap between the rich and poor in the world, with the wealth being concentrated by a very small fraction of mankind.

  What I suggest and challenge the world to do is design a new game to play. The economic game today benefits the people with the knowledge of how to play the games and who have the connections. The average person living in Bangledesh doesn't have a chance of playing fair. I'm not saying that we should rob the rich and feed the poor, that hasn't worked in the past. I'm saying screw the current economic gamesmanship which is so unfair and make everyone in the world millionaires. This might happen when nanotechnology arrives and makes wealth meaningless as then you can have anything you want for free. The question is...will we make it until then?

  Skipper

  It may be that your whole purpose in life is simply to serve as a warning to others.