🚀 go-pugleaf

/ hpindda:sci.environment / jmc@SAIL.Stanford.EDU (John McCarthy) / 12:23 am  Dec 11, 1992 /
>To a technologically advanced society, not much more advanced
>technologically and not at all more advanced scientifically than our
>own, there is no such thing as permanent and continual accumulation of
>pollution.  All the transformations of matter that humanity causes
>both in manufacture and disposal conserve matter.  Except for the
>production of radioactivity, they even preserve the amounts of the
>various isotopes.  Therefore, if any substance, compound or
>elementary, rises to troublesome proportions in any environment, it
>can be transformed again to useful or at least innocuous forms, or
>moved elsewhere.

This is a protestation of faith, not the statement of a scientist. E.g. just 
how do you remove bioconcentrating fat-soluable toxic substances for which 
there are no metabolic pathways from food webs once they are introduced?
McCarthy may *believe* that for every such substance, an artificial metabolic
pathway could be genetically engineered into organisms, reworking the chemical
functioning of whole ecosystems -- but this is just a sci-fi fantasy. We
don't even know how many such substances there are nor what they are doing. 

>This is my opinion, and I think it would be the majority opinion
>of scientists and engineers if they contemplated the precise
>question.

Of scientists and engineers who are totally ignorant of biology and are
unwilling to listen to what biologists say, perhaps -- but is it a good 
idea to pay any attention to pronouncements about the living world from
such people? People would do much better to listen to biological scientists,
such as Paul Ehrlich, Edward Wilson, and Micheal Soule on such matters.

McCarthy reasons as if the biosphere and all its biological processes were
completely irrelevant to the question -- just do enough *work* (preferably
generated by nuclear power) and any Humpty-Dumpty can be put back together
again no matter how small the pieces he's been smashed into. 

We don't have anything like that much power over the world, and won't have it
anytime soon, if ever. McCarthy always assumes that the only "limits" we need
to think about are the outer limits of basic physical law, never those imposed
by the fabric of the biosphere itself. This crazy notion, if it could be 
pursued far enough, would destroy the very biosphere it deems irrelevant. But
far more likely, pursuing it would destroy *us* first. 

------------
Alan McGowen