36 Comments

1. Leo Linbeck III:

It’s really quite simple: environmental quality follows wealth creation. If you have money, you can afford to buy clean air, water, etc.

This graph, copied from Bjorn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist says it all:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/53982000@N00/3238408708/

L3

Jan 29, 2009 - 9:57 pm 2. elby:

What the leftists don’t understand is that they need wealth to pursue the things they hold dear. Whether it is a clean environment or scientific research, a secure and wealthy society is necessary. The left is about to kill the goose that laid the golden egg. Once that is done, they can kiss all their leftists fantasies goodbye.

Jan 29, 2009 - 10:20 pm 3. Bob:

No, no, and no.

It always happens this way. Once a civilization of beings reaches a certain point, and we’re at it, curiosity gets the cat. The inventive monkey developes a machine like that starting up in Europe, swirling atoms and parts of atoms about, creates a black hole, and zingo, that’s it. And that is the reason why SETI never comes up with any contact. All the others have gone zingo before us. We live in interesting, and unique times, with only months to go.

I recommend surfing, or fly fishing, with the little time that remains.

Cheers.

Jan 29, 2009 - 11:03 pm 4. twobyfour:

@ 3. Bob

There are two problems with your zingo scenario.

1. Black holes are a mathematical construct and it is likely they do not exist. There are other explanations for the menagerie of phenomena like Darkwing Duck… err, Dark Matter, Black Hole, Reg Giant, White Dwarf. The names allude to fairy tales and I suggest that may be exactly the case. The CERN cyclotron can’t create a black hole even it it was an existing phenomenon, there is simply not enough gravity to fetch for a black hole to form. The magnetic trap that particles are accelerated through is a virtual vacuum.

2. The critters from other places (or non-places–frequency shifts) may have been already here. Even may be roaming today. We just would not know, or if we would, we would think it is something else. We may have been wired that way and the dudes from the First Time hanged up a big sign somewhere: “You can look, but do not touch, much, or we kick yer butt!
Elohim”

SETI presumption that anyone would use plain radio signals for interstellar comm is naive. After a few parsecs the signals that we generate are almost indistinguishable from the background radio noise. Too much interference by natural radio signals. Second, it is a slooow method of communication. Third, you don’t advertise, you don’t know who may listen, unless there is somewhere around hanging a big sign: “You can look, but do not touch, much, or we kick yer butt!
Elohim”

Jan 29, 2009 - 11:53 pm 5. Lifeofthemind:

All problems to these people are semantic. They want a environmentally friendly and secure society with a declining consumption level by the masses. The easiest way is to redefine society as meeting the needs of the enlightened minority in (to use the term from 1984) the Inner Party while reducing the numbers and the footprint of what Lenin called the “useless eaters.”

Jan 30, 2009 - 12:11 am 6. twobyfour:

@ 5. Lifeofthemind:

“…while reducing the numbers and the footprint of what Lenin called the “useless eaters.”

As long as they are instrumental in voting in the power structure, they are useful tool, and the excess eating is considered a give-take necessity.

But once the power structure is firmly in place, they would become useless eaters and squashed like insects. The “right to work” would become essentially an euphemism for work duty–servitude, and by no means it would be the worker’s decision what type of work he/she would contribute.

The young lefties simply have no idea. They are lucky that the above is not likely to happen, in that scope, but if there was a way to create some isolated environ for them where they can experience the “paradise”, I would contribute as much as I could to pay their relocation expenses and give them the opportunity. There is no better cure like the real thing.

Jan 30, 2009 - 12:42 am 7. Fletcher Christian:

In deep time, perhaps another intelligent life form would evolve; and then, they will have no chance to form a technological civilisation, because we have already used up all the resources necessary for such that are easy to get at.

True, over even deeper time new ore deposits and oil and coal beds might form; but by the time they are ready, Earth will be uninhabitable by multicellular life, having got hotter as the Sun evolves.

We are it, people. We need to get off this mudball NOW, and then maybe sapient life will be secure in the cosmos. We can’t console ourselves with the idea that somewhere, in another galaxy, there are people who occasionally look up at the stars and wonder what they are. Why not? Because there might not be any. The Fermi Paradox casts a long shadow.

Jan 30, 2009 - 1:12 am 8. wildernesscalling:

LotM and 2X4, this last election does demonstrates elitist use of power to put forth the puppet of their choice to dance to the grinder for the “Useless eaters” to marvel at, the next of couple (2010, 2012 and possible 2014) will determine if even the monkey will be needed any more.

Jan 30, 2009 - 1:42 am 9. twobyfour:

@ 7. Fletcher Christian

because we have already used up all the resources

Sigh. So we manufacture tools and then they go poof? One man’s garbage is another man’s treasure. Anyway, we haven’t even scratched the surface. Oil seems to be a renewable resource. The well emptied mere 50 years ago are filling up. The rust in our garbage dumps may become the ore of future generations. There are other methods how to extract energy, and some may have been used in the past and may be used in the future. Coal, oil and heavy metal isotopes aren’t the only energy sources.

but by the time they are ready, Earth will be uninhabitable by multicellular life, having got hotter as the Sun evolves.

Sun evolves into what? Did you know that the temperature on the surface of the sun is some 5000k, while the temp of the photosphere is 1200000k? Don’t you think that’s odd? And does not that indicate that our current model is wrong? And BTW, speaking of multicellular life, what do you think we are?

We are it, people. We need to get off this mudball NOW, and then maybe sapient life will be secure in the cosmos. We can’t console ourselves with the idea that somewhere, in another galaxy, there are people who occasionally look up at the stars and wonder what they are. Why not? Because there might not be any.

Actually, we may be a result of colonization efforts a long long time ago. In our galaxy, we are on a periferry, a backwater. I would bet that there are visitors (that somewhat look like us that you’d not notice them in a crowd) that pay big (whatever it is they have) to see us, primitives, or rather not as much primitive as odd because we can barely communicate and yet the diversity that it endows is amazing… Universe is teeming with life and some of it is very old.

Jan 30, 2009 - 2:06 am 10. twobyfour:

@ 8. wildernesscalling

So you think the monkey has a definite expiry date? Sure, even a complex tool is a tool and they wear out and need to be replaced.

Jan 30, 2009 - 2:13 am 11. RWE:

I think it was in 1992 that someone suggested an answer to Fermi’s Paradox relative to SETI (i.e., Where Are They?).

Maybe they really Are Out There but they never invented Capitalism and are just a bunch of poor ‘effing communists with not enough Design Margin to scrape together a radio transmitter,

Maybe the model for intelligent life in the universe is not Darth Vader’s Galactic Empire but Mugabe’s Africa.

Which brings us back to Wretchard’s point.

Jan 30, 2009 - 7:13 am 12. Pseudo-Polymath » Blog Archive » Friday Highlights:

[...] and economic expansion … not what you’d expect. Also examine this goofy statement by a Berkeley commission … are they [...]

Jan 30, 2009 - 7:41 am 13. Stones Cry Out - If they keep silent… » Things Heard: e52v5:

[...] and economic expansion … not what you’d expect. Also examine this goofy statement by a Berkeley commission … are they [...]

Jan 30, 2009 - 7:42 am 14. Mongoose:

elby: Oh they understand that they need wealth — your wealth. They know how to get it too.

Jan 30, 2009 - 8:18 am 15. Mongoose:

RWE: Maybe they are out there, have been watching us and have figured out the Democrats. Maybe they just keep mum to keep what they have. This would seem to be a sign of super human intelligence, at least these days. Sounds like an advanced civilization.

Jan 30, 2009 - 8:22 am 16. Captain Ramen:

The simplest explanation is usually the correct one. The reason we haven’t detected any complex life anywhere else in the universe is because we got here first. If there is other intelligent life out there, why isn’t it obvious? Where are their Von Neumann Probes?

Jan 30, 2009 - 9:30 am 17. LarryD:

Maybe life is a Von Neumann probe?

Jan 30, 2009 - 10:55 am 18. Tom A:

Look back at old photgraphs of the Civil War. In almost every pulled back shot there are wide swaths of land that have been cleared of trees and growth for farming. In fact, when reading contemporary 19th century accounts it becomes readily evident that the Eastern seaboard was denuded of old growth forests to provide farmland for farmers. In any side by side comparisons of Matthew Brady photographs and their modern equivalent taken from the same perspective, it’s amazing how much of the forest and undergroth has returned in a century and a half. A good example would be the William Frasinitto photograph comparisons of 19th century locations with the same location in the mid to late 1970’s. So, Wretchards point is well taken and I would suggest proofed.

Jan 30, 2009 - 12:08 pm 19. Raoul Ortega:

I know it’s obvious, but someone has to do it…

…

Speak glowingly of those greater than yourself,
And heed well their advice, even though they be turkeys.
Know what to kiss, and when.
Consider that two wrongs never make a right, but that three do.
Wherever possible, put people on hold.
Be comforted that in the face of all aridity and disillusionment,
and despite the changing fortunes of time,
There is always a big future in computer maintenance.

You are a fluke of the universe.
You have no right to be here.
And whether you can hear it or not,
The universe is laughing behind your back.

– Deteriorata

Jan 30, 2009 - 12:11 pm 20. Roderick Reilly:

“”"”"”"The young lefties simply have no idea. They are lucky that the above is not likely to happen, in that scope, but if there was a way to create some isolated environ for them where they can experience the “paradise”, I would contribute as much as I could to pay their relocation expenses and give them the opportunity. There is no better cure like the real thing.”"”"”"”"

Superb idea for a reality show.

Jan 30, 2009 - 12:30 pm 21. Bob:

To constitute an effective Great Filter, we hypothesize a terminal global cataclysm: an existential catastrophe. An existential risk is one where an adverse outcome would annihilate Earth‐originating intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential for future development. We can identify a number of potential existential risks: nuclear war fought with stockpiles much greater than those that exist today (maybe resulting from future arms races); a genetically engineered superbug; environmental disaster; asteroid impact; wars or terrorists act committed with powerful future weapons, perhaps based on advanced forms of nanotechnology; superintelligent general artificial intelligence with destructive goals; high‐energy physics experiments; a permanent global Brave‐New‐World‐like totalitarian regime protected from revolution by new surveillance and mind control technologies. These are just some of the existential risks that have been discussed in the literature, and considering that many of these have been conceptualized only in recent decades, it is plausible to assume that there are further existential risks that we have not yet thought of.

The Great Filter

Well, I gotta go to the Mall. Later.

Jan 30, 2009 - 12:37 pm 22. Fletcher Christian:

twobyfour – Perhaps the word “evolves” was incorrect usage. However, models (well-tested models) indicate that in about 400-500 million years, comparable to the regeneration time of mineral deposits, the sun will be about 10% hotter. This leads, because the dependence of Earth’s temperature on solar luminosity is not linear, to an average surface temperature of about 60 deg C – at which point the weather will get very violent indeed, for one thing.

My numbers may be a bit off – but that’s the gist. Earth only has one shot, and we are it.

Jan 30, 2009 - 4:18 pm 23. elby:

elby: Oh they understand that they need wealth — your wealth. They know how to get it too.

Well, they ain’t gettin’ much if they come after my wealth! Cause there ain’t much there to get!

But if they go after them rich people, they still got problems. After they loot their wealth, and give the rich no further incentive to make more wealth, then its over. Kind of like the heiress blowing the whole inheritence on expensive wine and caviar.

Jan 30, 2009 - 5:25 pm 24. RWE:

Tom A: Go take a look at Oklahoma. Because of the Buffalo herds and range fires there were almost no trees when the White man got there. Now it has lots of trees, still many areas of open land, but lots of trees nonetheless.

At Cape Canaveral in Florida if you need to build something there you have to take environmental remedial action, which consists of – get this – knocking down twice as many trees as you would require otherwise. Since we put out the lightning-caused forest fires, there are too many trees now and to get the place back to its natural state you have to knock some down.

South of Santa Barbara, in an area along the coast called Summerland, there is a restaurant I used to stop at. It has a photo on the wall of the area circa 1910. There were oil derricks along the shore then, cheek by jowl, a solid row.

Also in Santa Barbara, the anti-offshore oil drilling crowd was no doubt disturbed when a study by UCSB showed that the offshore drilling has improved the air and water quality. By sucking up the oil and natural gas that would have escaped into the air and the ocean the environment actually was bettered. Of course, the Santa Barbara air quality people found the Pacific Ocean to be noncompliant for particulate matter released into the air and I guess they are still trying to figure out who to fine over that violation.

Jan 30, 2009 - 5:38 pm 25. Eggplant:

Captain Ramen said:

“The simplest explanation is usually the correct one. The reason we haven’t detected any complex life anywhere else in the universe is because we got here first. If there is other intelligent life out there, why isn’t it obvious? Where are their Von Neumann Probes?”

A simpler explanation is their von Neumann Probes detected our world 231,868,456 years ago and determined that we were uninteresting. Somewhere in the galaxy there is a star catalog with over a thousand volumes. In Vol. 932, on pg. 4567 there is a three line entry that describes our entire solar system including the Earth. There’s a three digit code indicating that our atmosphere is a nitrogen/oxygen/argon mix and our world is inhabited with DNA based nucleated cellular life forms. This same catalog indicates that there are 132,234,983 worlds almost identical to ours so we don’t merit the expense of another von Neumann Probe.

Also the ultimate question: What is 6 * 7 ?

Jan 30, 2009 - 6:39 pm 26. someone:

“Over the longer haul, in deep time, nature will evolve intelligent and technological life again, until it eventually succeeds in spawning a culture which is humble enough to understand that it is part of a plan and has enough faith and wonder to see what lies over the next hill.”

Maybe the successful civilization will be the one who finds the dead alien civilizations of their planet’s past. Maybe that will be our contribution. Yay!

Jan 30, 2009 - 6:55 pm 27. Utopia Parkway:

Over the longer haul, in deep time, nature will evolve intelligent and technological life again, until it eventually succeeds in spawning a culture which is humble enough to understand that it is part of a plan and has enough faith and wonder to see what lies over the next hill.

I don’t think we’ll care too much about that if it’s not our descendants who are part of that “intelligent and technological life.”

In some sense I agree with you, or not. It doesn’t really matter. Yes, if humans degrade the environment to the point that we go extinct, it’s possible that the descendants of lizards or gobys will evolve intelligence and technology in 100 million years or so. I suppose the percent of my DNA in those intelli-lizards and intelli-gobys will be pretty much the same as the percent of my DNA in the Human descendants that might otherwise exist in 100 million years, but it doesn’t feel quite the same.

In the end I’d rather that we left the primeval forests and rain forests to our descendants, rather than the faux jungles that you seem to thing are just as good.

Jan 30, 2009 - 10:18 pm 28. lfmayor:

#26… spot on! Maybe we’ll be the tech boost that will propel them up and out, a la the “museums” in The Mote in God’s Eye.

Jan 30, 2009 - 11:08 pm 29. outa my league:

My initial impulse is to post the Art em-Bell-ished Face on Mars figure.

But alas, you guys are taking yourselves awfully seriously, and evidently are in a highly suggestive state.

It would be a pity for the Face on Mars to become overly commerialized, like too much Mayo on a Hoagy.

Jan 30, 2009 - 11:54 pm 30. Fletcher Christian:

utopia – I remember reading somewhere a speculation that the most likely start for the next intelligent race is raccoons. Apparently they are highly adaptable, omnivorous and rather intelligent; the only problem is the lack of an opposable thumb – which no doubt could change. They are also highly social.

Maybe we should all leave, and we’ll find out who will take over.

Jan 31, 2009 - 1:15 am 31. A Conservative Teacher:

If you want to see something really cool about how fragile human civilization is and how quickily the jungle can reclaim cities, check out this website:

http://www.forgottendetroit.com

The city of Detroit is being reclaimed by the wild in a demonstration how liberal policies destroy the civilization of man.

Jan 31, 2009 - 6:51 am 32. Mad Fiddler:

(This is my conjecture based on what I know of physics as a layman, not based on specific training. I invite criticism and correction from learned physicists. And Anybody Else, too.)

Despite the romanticized view of certain delusional types, farming methods in elder days were breathtakingly wasteful and inefficient compared to those of current days. This is NOT simply that we soak the plants and the soil with evil chemicals to force plant growth, but that we employ a far more penetrant awareness of ecologic relations among plant, soil, atmosphere, hybridization and cultivational schema. Yes, ancient farmers had a more intimate knowledge of *their* world, but that intimacy comprised the inefficiencies and compromises which they had arrived at empirically. In other words, they were intimately familiar with methods that worked for them, in their time, with the tools they had.

“Slash and burn” is a perfectly reasonable system for a wilderness in which humans are a minor component of the ecology. The forest can recover from having a patch reduced to ash, sustaining the agricultural plantings for a village of a few families for a couple of decades, then grow back in a couple of generations. Those families would meanwhile have been gathering foods from the surrounding jungle and presumably dropping their wastes in the immediate area of the land they’d cleared, providing nutrition for eventual forest regrowth. They were part of the ecosystem, right? When they moved on, the forest would grow again, and the system remained in equilibrium.

It’s not insane to be concerned about new technologies. such as the particle colliders. Arthur Holly Compton, one of the scientists supervising the Manhattan Project, alluded to the concern that the ignition of a fission bomb might initiate a chain-reaction in the atoms of the atmospheric gasses that would propagate and spread around the world. Edward Teller had made the original speculation, but after Hans Bethe did the maths, those scientists who had a solid working knowledge of radiation at that time realized that the energies released by a fission bomb would not be sufficient to affect the stability of atomic nuclei of the surrounding atmospheric gasses, because *that* is after all the critical issue. If the nuclei of atmospheric gasses were that fragile, we would be living in a very different sort of universe.

By the same token, if we are in danger from the effects of sub-microscopic black holes that might be formed by the collision of subatomic particles in the latest supercollider, that danger has existed since the advent of the earliest experiments directing opposing streams of subatomic particles on collision paths, or for that matter, since the beginning of the present universe. After all, we exist in a constant flux of high-energy cosmic rays, which are the highly-accelerated particles hurtling through space after being ejected from stellar cataclysms. Those particles exhibit energies higher than anything human science has been able to conjure, and over the four billion year lifetime of this planet, there is at least the possibility that some of those have collided to form microscopic black holes near enough to be captured by Earth’s gravitational field.

In ANY case, gravitational attraction is at any scale inversely proportional to the square of distance from the CENTER of an object’s mass. Compressing two subatomic particles into a single particle – “black hole” or NOT – does not somehow magically increase the gravitational force the combined masses are able to exert!

Consider that (a) the mass of a black hole – and thus its gravitational attraction to other masses – cannot be greater than the sum of the original particles; (b) gravitational attraction varies at all scales inversely as the square of the distance between the centers of the masses; (c) at the scale of subatomic particles, electrostatic forces and the strong and weak nuclear attractive forces vastly overwhelm gravity as determinants of particle interactions.

Any newly created subatomic-sized black hole is only going to be able to accumulate mass from neighboring particles when it comes within a spectacularly small distance from any matter it approaches. Sub-atomic particles are calculated to take up a miniscule fraction of a percent of the volume of an atom. That means that relative to their sizes, subatomic particles exist in an environment in which they are separated from each other by relatively enormous distances. So
the probabilities of an infinitesimal black hole approaching other particles closely enough to engulf additional mass is astronomically small.

Besides all that, Cosmologist Stephen Hawking indicates that subatomic black holes are most likely to “evaporate” relatively quickly, as they lose energy and mass by sucking in occasional halves of matter-antimatter pairs that are thought to seethe in and out of existence at the smallest scale of the present reality. The un-captured particle essentially carries away mass and energy from the tiny black hole, which shrinks both in radius and mass until it finally dwindles to nothing. (Black holes above a certain mass would not suffer this fate because their gravitational field would capture both members of the matter-antimatter pair!)

So, We’re SAFE, guys!

Jan 31, 2009 - 11:56 am 33. Michael B:

The faith of the en-viros is vested, fully, in themselves.

They will claim it’s invested in science, but – and admittedly in summarized fashion only – fact is it’s invested in their own tendentious/ideological use and abuse of truer forms of science, and it’s invested in their own attempts to traduce those who oppose them on better scientific grounds. So, ultimately, their faith is vested fully in themselves; in critical areas they studiously eschew self-criticisms and self-reflection at points where doing so would begin to jeopardize their heavily ideological/scientistic view of the world, their weltanschauung or however it might be better characterized.

Jan 31, 2009 - 2:24 pm 34. 3Case:

To add to RWE’s exposition: Do not forget all the quaint stone walls running through the woods here in New England.

Feb 1, 2009 - 7:21 am 35. JFSanders:

I tripped over one of them “quaint” stone walls on a hike one time. If it wasn’t for a good friend who had decided to carry the extra load of med supplies I most likely would have lost my lower leg. Although they will make good shooting positions when we have to educate the lefties.

I tend to believe that the LHC will provide us with the technology to leap into interstellar space. At least it will enable us to have unlimited bandwidth for aggravating each other on the intertoobs…

Jim

Feb 1, 2009 - 10:35 am 36. Economic Growth in Latin America Leads to Rain Forest Regrowth | The Blog of Record:

[...] “The forests are coming back. Why? Jobs.” [...]

Feb 2, 2009 - 9:35 pm

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