🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <l3aucjINNlk9@jethro.Corp.Sun.COM>, jdr@starflight.Corp.Sun.COM (Jon Roland) writes:

> In article 92Jun8211928@sgi417.msd.lmsc.lockheed.com, slagle@lmsc.lockheed.com (Mark Slagle) writes:

>>One big problem with the premise here, there may be many others,
>>is that we need to know what the important resources are in order
>>to do the calculation.  Since the article goes on to discuss
>>events on a time frame of 10000 years, it makes sense to consider
>>how well the present resource usage might predict the needs into
>>the far distant future

> The calculation is independent of the resources needed. Those
> resources may govern the time period until it is no longer possible
> to draw on external reserves, but once that point is reached, and
> it will be reached eventually, then the calculation applies.

> Since I am considering time periods as long as 5 billion years, the
> expected life of the planet, until the Sun expands to consume it,
> almost any conceivable resource on which we now or in the future
> will depend which comes from EXTERNAL reserves will eventually be
> governed by this analysis.

Your statements beg the question of the meaning of EXTERNAL.  Depending
on the scale and scope of the system, the classification of resources
can be shown to be either completely external or internal.  If the 
system in question is my home or even my neighborhood, then virtually
every resource is external.  I fail to see how that is a problem,
however.  If the system is the entire planet Earth, then none of the
resources that we utilize are external except the energy of the Sun.
Since your model of our system does not scale, it is of little or
no value in describing, much less in predicting, the various systems
with which we interact.

> One mistake we can make in trying to compare our situation with that
> of a century ago is that scientific knowledge is now systematic in
> a qualitatively different way than it has ever been before. We can
> now characterize the classes of all possible theories governing a
> particular body of phenomena. Along many lines of inquiry we can now
> see the end. Several lines have a lot of travel in them yet, but
> several key lines have largely been exhausted. Contrary to popular
> myth, scientific and technological progress doesn't go on forever.

I'm nearly dumbfounded by your hubris.  Suffice it to say that you
are not the first person to have predicted the end of science.  There
have been well educated scientists from virtually every generation of
recorded scientific history who have baldly stated that there is little
left to be learned or discovered.  Need I point out that they have all
been wrong so far?  Why are you an exception?

> In the past it has been difficult to see the limits, but they exist
> and some may now be discernable. While it may happen that future
> generations will overcome a few of those limits, we now know enough
> to require us to place our bets on them not being able to overcome
> certain fundamental contraints, and to allow that realization to
> govern the ways we make decisions so that posterity is not constrained
> in ways that are dismal.

When we begin to see limits, that is when we begin to seek alternatives.
When we begin to seek alternatives, we begin to see everything
differently.  When we see everything differently, the outlook for
posterity does not seem so dismal.

>>Now, the only thing that we can be sure that we will need on an
>>indefinite time scale is energy.  In principle, everything else
>>can be derived from an adequate supply of energy

> Interestingly enough, in the vicinity of the Earth energy is not the
> scarce resource. Between solar and geothermal we have enough to
> sustain a large population for the entire 5 billion year span. But

That is, of course, my point.  Our EXTERNAL supply of energy is
abundant and, for the purposes of this exercise, endless.  All 
other resource difficulties are transient and/or localized.

> it makes a difference how that energy is used. Market forces alone
> are not sufficient to organize the kinds of large-scale life-support
> systems that will be needed to both enable people to live in decent,
> civilized comfort, and to preserve the natural ecosystem in something
> like its original state -- the two objectives which govern my
> contributions to this discussion. It requires leadership to divert
> humanity from its familiar habits to do things like build starship-
> cities.

> The collapse of civilization and a return to the stone age, taking
> the natural ecosystem with us, is still the most likely outcome in
> the absence of such leadership.

Your pessimism is, in my opinion, unwarranted.  I hope that I am
correct.  I am, however, very wary of your "leadership".  If there
are grounds for concern, they are just that the kind of "leadership"
that you and others call for will result in political systems that
none of us can live with.  If, as you contend, market forces are
insufficient to the task of allocating the energy of the Sun, then
perhaps you are right.  Perhaps we are doomed, but not to collapse
to a stone age, but to collapse back into the totalitarian models
that have dominated a large part of the world within the past century.
I do hope you are wrong.
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Mark E. Slagle                                 PO Box 61059
slagle@lmsc.lockheed.com                       Sunnyvale, CA   94088
408-756-0895                                   USA