In Just 60 Years, Neoliberal Capitalism Has Nearly Broken Planet Earth

[GliderGuider]

The Second Law of Thermodynamics underwrites all our behaviour. The reason neoliberal capitalism has become the world's dominant economic system is that it is the most efficient means we have yet discovered for turning the planet into entropic waste.

Of course most people don't see it that way, preferring to blame someone. To paraphrase a famous Einstein quote, "The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who believe they are doing good."

That Was Easy: In Just 60 Years, Neoliberal Capitalism Has Nearly Broken Planet Earth

Using what it calls a "planetary dashboard," the research charts the spread and speed of human activity from the start of the industrial revolution in 1750 to 2010, and the subsequent changes in the Earth System – e.g. greenhouse gas levels, ocean acidification, deforestation and biodiversity deterioration. The analysis found that increased human activity—and "predominantly the global economic system"—has unseated all other factors as the primary driver of change in the Earth System, which the report describes as "the sum of our planet's interacting physical, chemical, biological and human processes." The most striking, i.e. "accelerated," changes to that system have occurred in the last sixty years.

"It is difficult to overestimate the scale and speed of change. In a single lifetime humanity has become a geological force at the planetary-scale," said Steffen, who also led the Acceleration study.

The conclusion that the world's dominant economic model—a globalized form of neoliberal capitalism, largely based on international trade and fueled by extracting and consuming natural resources—is the driving force behind planetary destruction will not come as a shock, but the model's detailed description of how this has worked since the middle of the 20th century makes a more substantial case than many previous attempts.

"When we first aggregated these datasets, we expected to see major changes but what surprised us was the timing. Almost all graphs show the same pattern. The most dramatic shifts have occurred since 1950. We can say that around 1950 was the start of the Great Acceleration," says Steffen. "After 1950 we can see that major Earth System changes became directly linked to changes largely related to the global economic system. This is a new phenomenon and indicates that humanity has a new responsibility at a global level for the planet."

[JFKDem62]

1. Oligarchy capitalism is killing our two most valuable resources: the planet and the people on it. nt

[GliderGuider]

4. WWII and the Cold War were fought to decide whose system would get to wreck the planet.

The test was both ingenious and insidious. Those wars demonstrated that the winning system had both the power and will to wreck the planet, and also gave it the right (might makes right) to do so. The amazing part is that nobody noticed what game was really being played underneath the facade of politics and progress.

Now it's too late: the system that's wrecking the place resists all attempts at significant reform, and there is no way to replace the system outright without wrecking the place even more.

[JFKDem62]

9. Once humans are extinct, the planet will recover. I wonder how many times humans have done this?

Damaged the planet, killed off all life. Planet recovers, human life starts again.

[Viva_La_Revolution]

16. dude, this is the first time it is the fault of humans

We've only been around for a few hundred thousand years. In that time we have only been able to decimate small areas of the earth at a time, like Easter Island or how we killed off the megafauna of Australia and North America soon after arriving there. Apparently we've had enough practice now to try for the whole planet 😞

[DhhD]

45. The biosphere is coming to an end. Earth will be out of the habitable zone in about 800 million

years. That is all the time left unless something else gets the planet first.

[tk2kewl]

2. a few incremental tweaks around the edges should do the trick

[FlatBaroque]

6. Just need to build on the ACA /

[pscot]

21. Fund Planned Parenthood

At least we'd be facing in the right direction.

[n2doc]

3. But but EEEvil Guverment Regulations are Killing Jobs! n/t

[Dragonfli]

5. I fully agree

Could you add this information as a post to an OP that concurs (although the entirety of the OP is about people awakening, before it's too late on many things)
It only partially but without reservation includes what you posted, but with far less detail.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/12511487357

[GliderGuider]

8. Done! And thanks for asking! nt

[Dragonfli]

11. Thank YOU! people need to understand we are actually facing extermination and neo-liberalism

Is a very large part of it. Have you read this yet? http://www.democraticunderground.com/10027684411
A very large solar plan scrapped due to neo-liberal corporate court lawsuits, a great example of how they are making things not just worse, but soon inevitable (if such is not already inevitable).

[GliderGuider]

12. Yes, I know about it.

It's one of the many examples I was thinking of when I wrote above, "the system that's wrecking the place resists all attempts at significant reform."

[CrispyQ]

13. "Oh, we won't go extinct. Our big brains will save us."

At least that's what I read on DU. It amazes me that people are so sure we will never go extinct. What makes us so special? Oh yeah, our big brain. Well what got us in this mess in the first place?

[Dragonfli]

15. This world has witnessed and endured several extinction level events, planets do not care about

big brains or big bodies, it simply endures events that often radically change it's environment, each time any lifeforms that can not live in the new environment die off, there have been times when countless species have died off. We are no exception.

The planet will not even notice our passing, as I doubt it noticed the passing of other now extinct species (unless of course one believes in a Gaia consciousness in which case it may applaud our exit from the stage)

Whatever is left will have to survive a much hotter world with far fewer places where plant life exists, not to mention being capable of breathing much larger amounts of carbon gasses in the air. Big brains or not, we do not have the time to evolve our way out of this one.

The oceans are even changing for the worse, soon many species will be unable to survive there (coral is already dying off at an alarming rate for instance).

The only chance our big brains can keep our species alive is to maintain self sustained mini-biospheres perhaps in domes or some other method to avoid the actual new environment, such will also need replenish able water and space to grow food in, and elaborate filtration systems to obtain breathable air,

I doubt we have the time to produce many such enclosed environs, and even if we do, our numbers will be quite few and isolated from the rest of the world.

This scenario is based solely on my laymen's knowledge on the subject, but I doubt I am far off from the reality.

I also doubt such environs will be built at all, and if the are, they will be very few and we will be an endangered species according to accepted numbers.

[GliderGuider]

17. Based on our experiences with Biosphere I and II

We don't know nearly enough about complex systems or ecology to keep a closed environment going long enough to matter. Hell, we had a whole planet to play with, that isn't even a totally closed system, and look what we did. Can we manage a closed environment with much tighter constraints? Not on your life.

This is why I've spent the last decade coming to terms with the realization that we're fucked.

[Dragonfli]

18. Thanks for the input, I instinctively doubted we could accomplish it successfully, but with what you

Just disclosed to me, I am even more certain. I knew about how screwed Biosphere I was, but did not know the second project failed as well as I didn't keep up on it other than vaguely remembering they were going to attempt it.

[GliderGuider]

19. I knew a woman who crewed the second Biosphere II mission

Her name was (is) Pascale Maslin, and she said the first crew almost died in there because the project leader didn't know enough about soil biology and gas exchange. Those two missions were textbook examples of how we can't manage closed systems, from either the scientific or psychological points of view.

[hatrack]

22. Wasn't one of the main problems the concrete taking up oxygen from the atmosphere?

Not sure if I'm remembering precisely, but they definitely missed more than a few calculations . . .

[GliderGuider]

27. Close. Here's a description of the problems they had

What Went Wrong?

As an attempt to create a balanced and self-sustaining replica of Earth’s ecosystems, Biosphere II was a miserable (and expensive) failure. Numerous problems plagued the crew almost from the very beginning. Of these, a mysterious loss of oxygen and widespread extinction were the most notable.

Catching Their Breath

Starting when the crew members were first sealed in, Biosphere II experienced a constant and puzzling decline in the percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere. It was initially hoped that the system was merely stabilizing itself, but as time passed it became increasingly clear the something was amiss. Not quite 18 months into the experiment, when oxygen levels dropped to the point where the crew could barely function, the outside managers decided to pump oxygen into the system so they could complete the full two years as planned.

Obviously, Biosphere II was not self-sustaining if outside oxygen had to be added in order for the crew to survive. The reasons behind this flaw in the project were not fully understood until some time later. As it turned out, the problem had more to do with carbon dioxide than with oxygen. Biosphere II’s soil, especially in the rain forest and savanna areas, is unusually rich in organic material. Microbes were metabolizing this material at an abnormally high rate, in the process of which they used up a lot of oxygen and produced a lot of carbon dioxide. The plants in Biosphere II should have been able to use this excess carbon dioxide to replace the oxygen through photosynthesis, except that another chemical reaction was also taking place.

A vast majority of Biosphere II was built out of concrete, which contains calcium hydroxide. Instead of being consumed by the plants to produce more oxygen, the excess carbon dioxide was reacting with calcium hydroxide in the concrete walls to form calcium carbonate and water.

This hypothesis was confirmed when scientists tested the walls and found that they contained about ten times the amount of calcium carbonate on the inner surfaces as they did on the outer surfaces. All of the walls in Biosphere II are now coated with a protective layer, but oxygen levels continue to be somewhat problematic.

Walking a Tightrope

The designers of Biosphere II included a carefully chosen variety of plant, animal, and insect species. They anticipated that some species would not survive, but the eventual extinction rate was much higher than expected. Of the 25 small vertebrates with which the project began, only 6 did not die out by the mission's end. Almost all of the insect species went extinct, including those which had been included for the purpose of pollinating plants. This caused its own problems, since the plants could no longer propagate themselves.

At the same time, some species absolutely thrived in this man-made environment. Crazy ants, cockroaches, and katydids ran rampant, while certain vines (like morning glories) threatened to choke out every other kind of plant. The crew members were forced to put vast amounts of energy into simply maintaining their food crops. Biosphere II could not sustain a balanced ecosystem, and therefore failed to fulfill its goals.

Other Problems

Biosphere II's water systems became polluted with too many nutrients. The crew had to clean their water by running it over mats of algae, which they later dried and stored.

Also, as a symptom of further atmospheric imbalances, the level of dinitrogen oxide became dangerously high. At these levels, there was a risk of brain damage due to a reduction in the synthesis of vitamin B12.

And of course, there were inevitable disputes among the crew, as well as among those running the project from the outside.

[Ghost Dog]

30. Apples and Oranges.

The forthcoming controlled luxury environments for those who consider themselves 'elites' will not need to be completely isolated from the surrounding environment.

[GliderGuider]

33. I was commenting on Dragonfli's reference to closed environments.

Obviously environments that are not as tightly closed don't present the same difficulties over short time frames. However, humanity has a very poor track record of managing complex systems - we had a whole planet to play with, and look what's happened.

I don't give a shit if a few rich people cloister themselves in sanctuaries. They are irrelevant.

[Ghost Dog]

38. Yes, I understand, Paul.

As you know, I am interested in predicting and observing the ongoing and developing social and socio-psychological processes concomitant with environmental change.

I predict efforts will be made to set up such 'Arks', and that, without deep political change, efforts will be made by those with the power to cull a very large proportion of our population.

[GliderGuider]

39. Yes, I think you're probably right about that.

Humans will try everything they can think of (and a lot of things that are unthinkable) to survive. It might even work, for a few people, for a while.

[Ghost Dog]

31. Yes, I think the new feudal overlords will attempt this:

maintain self sustained mini-biospheres perhaps in domes or some other method to avoid the actual new environment...

Just an extension of current 'gated community' practise. For security as well as ecological reasons human populations superfluous and/or threatening these self-declared 'elites' and their servants will be recipients of RCT (Robotic Culling Techniques).

All this in the context of a vast and also human life- (and potential-) destroying global class war.

[StandingInLeftField]

7. The Human infestation will be short-lived

The planet will carry on without us (thankfully.)

[GliderGuider]

10. That's what it looks like. nt

[SusanCalvin]

14. This gets me in the gut.

I don't go around thinking about it every minute, or I'd go crazy, but I really do believe I'll probably live to see the ship sink.

[Ghost Dog]

32. Me too, and I'm 61 years old.

[SusanCalvin]

35. 63, almost 64 here.

It just seems, in the time I've been hearing about it, that every new estimate shows it drastically worse than previous estimates. And I've been hearing about it for a lot of years.

[GliderGuider]

36. I've been trying to digest this information for 12 years now

I did almost go crazy from it for the first four or five years. Just when I think I've come to terms with it, it jumps to a whole new level. It still shocks me to see how fast and deep the river of change is flowing.

[MisterP]

20. I'd also add that much of this was done in the name of anticapitalism

once the people (i.e. the demagogues) seized the country's resources and once the Third World doubled its population, nobody would push it around no more! what unites this to capitalism of all stripes is developmentalism

[NNadir]

23. You lost me when you attached the second law of thermodynamics to, um...

..."neoliberal capitalism," whatever "neoliberal capitalism" is supposed to be. (Don't tell me, I really don't want to know.)

As a person for whom a good part of my life involved the second law of thermodynamics - as amusing as the the continuous attempts to legislate it away have been - I have to say that it's a law of physics, not a law of so called "political science." It's a beautiful and elegant law, but it's purely mathematical physics, and nothing else.

To paraphrase Feynman, "'social sciences" do not make laws," In my view of history, any attempt to attach the laws of physical science to "social concepts" has been, and is, at best specious, at worst, dangerous. Only the attempt to attach biological laws to social science has been worse, at least where the laws of natural selection are concerned.

Have a nice day tomorrow.

[GliderGuider]

24. We have different worldviews? I'm stunned.

Well, not so much stunned as amused that it seems to surprise you.

I attach a much higher value to personal meaning than to others' definitions of truth.

Despite that, the idea that civilization as a collective human behavior can be usefully analogized as a heat engine is not original to me. A lot of actual scientists share the view.

My condolences on your shriveled imagination.

[NNadir]

25. Well shriveled is a hard word.

Irrespective of scientists not cited who imagine the world as a heat engine, it may be imaginative, but in my experience, many things are imaginative but nonetheless less than useful.

We each have different world views to be sure. I may certainly have a different view of what is science and what is imagination.

Science without imagination is not very good, but such imagination must address things in a way that is consistent with measurable phenomenon or at least arise as an implication of theory.

Sorry, but seeing the world as a heat engine doesn't strike me as a useful concept.

[GliderGuider]

26. It has been an enormously useful concept for me.

Ideas like the Maximum Power Principle, the Maximum Entropy Production Principle and the idea that the Second Law underpins the operation of life itself as proposed by Schrodinger, have helped me untangle a lot of previously opaque and apparently irrational aspects of human behaviour. That sort of untangling is part of my creation of personal meaning. Different strokes for different folks.

Sorry about the hard language - it was very early in the morning, and I have to admit that you trigger me at the best of times.

[NNadir]

37. No offense taken.

I generally have a strong reaction to implications that a particular socio-economic system is responsible for environmental degradation.

I made fun of that concept - that solutions to problems are only viable to the extent that they are absorbed or possible in only some (usually idealized) economic system - some years ago, in a poll I attached to a post on another website, where, interestingly, I was banned for telling the truth:

Smashing the Corporate Robber Baron Centralized Power System with Individual Power Systems.

I have always wanted to be a "socialist-libertarian advocate of liberationist hemp farming in the Cuban people's state," but never had the guts to do it.

(The banning was delicious, and well worth it; particularly as I find rote anti-nukes to be an ethically questionable, indeed, dangerous lot.)

It was not so much the "second law" part that got me, it was the "neo-liberal capitalist" part that set me off. I don't attribute the degradation of the environment to be a function of a particular political ideology or system. I attribute it to generalized ignorance and myopia. The best system in the world will fail if the participants are fools, as we are currently seeing in the American elections.

I am aware of Schroedinger's book on life, but never actually read it, although the origins of life has long been an interest of mine, chiefly because of what may pass for a "spiritual" need to believe that life on this planet is not as unique as I often think it is. I've flirted with a lot of crazy ideas in my already too long life, among them, the Anthropic Cosmological Principle about which Frank Tipler's always prattling. It seems to me that if some of his rhetoric were true, then the fact that unintelligent life is replacing intelligent life in this planet, and that the unintelligent life is engaged in biological event in which it destroys its own carrying capacity, well then the whole universe is in a world of hurt.

Still, I'm an optimist, in the sense that if this planet dies, another will be born, and the nice thing about dying is to make room for that which will be born, in my less than humble opinion anyway.

To show we're still friends, in spite of our coarse words in this exchange from the series of desultory lectures they give at the Princeton Plasma Physics lab - the lectures making the lab more useful than generating electricity from fusion power has proved to be - let me suggest a video lecture on the origins of life that I watched with my son the aspiring artist, rather than my son the aspiring materials scientist:

COLLOQUIUM: Chance, Necessity, and the Origins of Life It's not too heavy, and it's kind of fun, and since you mention the Maximum Entropy Production Principle, it has a nice statistical concept that I attempted to explain - a lot less elegantly - to my father, a creationist, when I was a kid. It's given as a "back of the envelope" calculation. Try it, you may like it.

I am not familiar with the principle of maximum entropy, but a quick look through Google scholar and that all wonderful Wikipedia suggests to me what it is, an effort to apply the mathematics of Boltzman and others to information theory. (I have seen this point about information theory raised in connection with Maxwell's Demon somewhere, the Demon being, like Schroedinger's cat, a useful analogy to visualize concepts in physics.) My cursory glance suggests that this theory applies to the interpretation of data sets, but that which it predicts must be testable.

I don't think that the proposition that "Neo-liberal capitalism" either by its presence or absence has lead to the demise of the planetary ecosystem is in fact, a testable hypothesis. If what you call "Neoliberal capitalism" refers to imperfect but worthy efforts to reach "World Development Goals" as articulated by the UN, and sometimes, for better or worse, funded by the (gasp) World Bank, I disagree with this. The Millenium World Development Goals is one of those rare international efforts that has succeeded to an appreciable degree: The proportion of people living on less than $1.25/day has dropped below one billion for the first time in many decades.

I note that rich countries often have birth rates well below replacement value; this would be true of the United States were it not for immigration, but lest anyone question it, I believe the United States is enriched, and has been enriched, but its immigrants, and the beautiful things their cultures bring to us.

To return to the second law of thermodynamics, we can say that on a planetary scale, the entropy of one critical element has in fact increased radically. That element is carbon. Stuart Kauffmann interestingly described life - which is carbon based - as an "eddy in thermodynamics." I once had the great privilege, with my sons, to sit for about two hours sitting and talking with Freeman Dyson in his office, during which that phrase came up, "an eddy in Thermodynamics" and he said that it was an elegant statement, and then went on to do a riff on Stuart Kauffman, and their acquaintance. Carbon of course, is the main carrier of that eddy, the matrix in which it occurs if you will. That, I think, is where the second law is most relevant to the environment.

Don't worry though, be happy: We'll soon have solar roadways in France.

Have a nice day tomorrow. No offense intended, none taken.

[GliderGuider]

40. Neoliberal Capitalism and the Second Law

I can't tell you how much I appreciate such a civil reply. It's enough to make me sell my trust fund!

In return, here's a bit of my own perspective and how I arrived at it.

Unfortunately the title and text of the OP article was about "neoliberal capitalism", because the author is fixated on it as being the destructive mechanism. He re-interpreted the Stockholm Resilience Center's findings through the lens of his own prejudice. That's understandable since we all do it, but like virtually all other commentators he studiously ignored the question of root cause. After all, neoliberal capitalism didn't just spring into the world full-grown and fully armed, like Athena from the forehead of Zeus. As an economic exploitation system it was an evolutionary development with a lineage that can be traced back through industrial capitalism, state capitalism, mercantilism, feudalism, monarchies and empires galore.

Environmental damage is detectable under all of those previous systems, and increased rapidly with the size of the economic units and their level of sophistication in organization, technology and energy deployment. Neoliberal capitalism just happens to be the most effective such exploitation mechanism yet devised on the planet, and for the moment has vanquished, neutralized or absorbed all significant competitors. Its effectiveness is patently obvious from the damage chronicled in Steffen's "Great Acceleration" graphs.

The failings of our current quasi-global system are not what fascinate me however, because they are trivially obvious. The question that has held my attention for the last decade is "When we can see such damage being done, why are we not acting to reduce it?" Why are we failing to act rationally in the face of such catastrophic existential risk?

I have looked for the answer through a process of root cause analysis, using the basic technique called "Five Whys":

The 5 Whys is a technique used in the Analyze phase of the Six Sigma DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control) methodology. By repeatedly asking the question “Why” (five is a good rule of thumb), you can peel away the layers of symptoms which can lead to the root cause of a problem. Very often the ostensible reason for a problem will lead you to another question. Although this technique is called “5 Whys,” you may find that you will need to ask the question fewer or more times than five before you find the issue related to a problem.

I started from my question above and just kept asking "Why?" at each level until I could go no further. Roughly speaking, the levels involved:

• The history of social organization, including politics and economics;
  
• The forces that shape social structure and culture;
  
• Group and group membership psychology;
  
• Individual psychology regarding leadership and followership;
  
• The origins of short-term thinking and denialism;
  
• The history of technological development;
  
• The preference for physical comfort and future security;
  
• How human psychology has evolved;
  
• "Society as ecosystem" / "Society as organism";
  
• How natural selection applies to social organisms;
  
• What physical forces operate in natural selection and competition generally (e.g. the Maximum Power Principle);
  
• How living organisms obtain and use energy, and dispose of waste;
  
• The analogy between societies and organisms in their energy use and waste disposal;
  
• The fundamental role of energy in organisms and societies;
  
• How they extract usable low-entropy energy (exergy) from energy gradients and fuel sources;
  
• How they use the exergy for maintenance and growth;
  
• How they discard the higher-entropy waste in a way that doesn't harm the organism/society; and finally,
  
• How entropy production facilitates the general growth of system complexity.

This is not an exhaustive list by any means, but it will serve as a thumbnail sketch of the territory I explored.

Once I had asked "Why?" about five thousand times, I found I had arrived at an irreducible question - a "Why" for which there was no known answer. The question was, "Why is the Second Law the energetic foundation of all change?" I am totally satisfied that it is. After performing my herculean feat of reductionism, I found that every thread of inquiry led straight back to the Second Law. Threads as different as why cells are structured as they are, why societies seem to have have growth imperatives, or why I will not usually turn down a raise, for example. Through a tangled chain of connections worthy of James Burke himself, they can all be traced back to the inexorable increase in entropy within whatever environment we are interested in.

There is one problem. The purpose of doing root cause analysis is to find the one thing you need to change to correct or prevent the problem. But if the root cause is thermodynamic to some degree in every case, and entropy cannot be prevented, what is to be changed? We can (with great effort) change the embroidery on the tapestry of life, but the warp and weft of its thermodynamic fabric is apparently unalterable.

Faced with that realization, I've largely stopped talking about it except in offhand comments. What can be gained from such a perspective? From the human point of view, absolutely nothing. It's a fundamentally nihilist perspective. The best I can do with it is to accept it and just move on with my life, to find happiness in the moment, as it pleases me. It has sure stopped me from worrying about how to prevent the looming collapse. This understanding is what has prompted me to walk away from activism and advocacy.

So when it comes to the nuclear/renewable/fossil energy turf war, perhaps it's clearer why I now call down a pox on all your houses.

My web site has a reading list of some of the papers that helped shape my inquiry:
http://paulchefurka.ca/Thermodynamics%20Reading%20List.html

It was nice chatting with you...

[NNadir]

41. I'm not generally reported as being "civil." That's a new one, but thanks...

Nonetheless I think you're taking the concept of "heat death," a little too far.

(That said, Boltzmann did commit suicide, but I don't think his discoveries of the statistical mechanical basis of the second law had much to do with it. I also don't think he was making a statement about population growth. It is said that he had classical clinical depression, a tragedy, for sure, for science as well as for his family.)

To state that the difference between nuclear energy and so called "renewable energy" is merely a "turf war" strikes me a vast over simplification of clearly different approaches that are distinctly relevant to the future of the human race. Now it may prove true that the human race is psychologically incapable of making good choices at the right time, but such an outcome is clearly not deterministic.

The extent to which we are experiencing heat death is a choice, not a technological, or for that matter, a physical imperative.

If one is speaking of entropy, energy density is an important concept. I have calculated that a human being living at an average continuous power consumption of 5000 watts - about twice average per capita global power consumption right now - would need to fission, in his or her lifetime, about 100 grams of plutonium. Given that more than 50% of the world population now lives under appalling conditions, this is an excellent moral argument for increasing, as opposed to decreasing, average power consumption. The hundred grams of plutonium is very different than the amount of dangerous natural gas, dangerous coal, or dangerous petroleum one must consume for the same result, or for that matter, the amount of steel one must refine to build wind turbines. Given that the uranium supply of the planet is essentially unlimited because of the macroscopic geochemical cycle, I'm not going to sit up at night worrying about the second law, so much as I'm going to worry about stupidity.

The universe is very far from the predicted "heat death," as one can see from both the local and universal distribution of the elements and the binding energy curve of nucleons. At least on a cosmic scale, the universe is still essentially pure hydrogen, with the rest of the periodic table being essentially a set of minor impurities.

If I see a young person who has figured entropy out, and is losing sleep over it, I advise them not to worry. Life is not so long that it will matter, or better put, need matter.

It is physically possible to reverse entropy if one has access to energy, so long as one has a heat sink. This is the basic principle behind every common industrial metal refined from an ore, or for that matter, an old fashioned ice tray in an electric freezer. The planet has been a stable radiating heat sink for billions of years, mostly, with some fluctuations, including some involved with explosively growing species, the "disaster" of oxygen releasing photosynthetic organisms being one such case. The current problem before humanity - and my cynicism aside I'm rather fond of humanity overall - is that it has disrupted the heat exchange properties of the planet, and this is entirely a function of not substituting nuclear energy for all other forms of energy, a task that is clearly feasible in the golden age of chemistry, if not simple and easy. (My opinion is that most things worth doing are not simple and easy.)

With all due respect, I still think you're attaching too much metaphysics to a physical concept.

Have a great weekend!

[GliderGuider]

42. Fortunately the world has room enough for both scientists and philosophers.

The ongoing polarization of Western culture towards the endpoints of science and religion has largely depopulated the middle ground where I am most comfortable. My position has a lot in common with those in the 19th century who were called "natural philosophers".

Mortimer Adler describes natural philosophy this way:

"Major branches of natural philosophy include astronomy and cosmology, the study of nature on the grand scale; etiology, the study of (intrinsic and sometimes extrinsic) causes; the study of chance, probability and randomness; the study of elements; the study of the infinite and the unlimited (virtual or actual); the study of matter; mechanics, the study of translation of motion and change; the study of nature or the various sources of actions; the study of natural qualities; the study of physical quantities; the study of relations between physical entities; and the philosophy of space and time."

That is a succinct description of the "scientific" subset of my range of interests, to which I have added the human-centered soft sciences of psychology, sociology and anthropology, as well as an interest in the nature of consciousness and the non-dualism of Zen and Advaita.

Because of this breadth, enabled by the fact that I'm not concerned with success or status, I have lived my life as an enthusiastic dilettante. When it comes to knowledge, breadth is far more important to me than mastery. I'm a huge proponent of consilience.

I'm not attached to science or any other field of human exploration as a primary source of meaning. I was actually relieved when my root cause analysis of the human condition ended in a position of total nihilism, where the concept of intrinsic meaning was swept away.

Hinduism has given us the archetype of Shiva: a god who is simultaneously the destroyer and creator. My conclusion that the Second Law was in a sense the First Cause (of the material universe and all its manifestations) became the Destroyer aspect of Shiva. That conclusion destroyed for me all possibility of finding intrinsic, external meanings "out there" somewhere. At the same time, however, it also displayed Shiva's Creator aspect. By destroying all possibility of external meaning it opened the space for me to create my own meaning.

What that word salad means is that most people who have been successfully programmed by their nature and culture to derive meaning from a single area like science or religion may find my views mushy, shallow, unfocused and ill-conceived. What to them is a sign of my failure I take as a sign of success in my endeavor to live life on my own terms.

To your statement, "The extent to which we are experiencing heat death is a choice, not a technological, or for that matter, a physical imperative" I would respond that this reflects your personal perception of human choice and the role of physical imperatives in the operation of the universe. Your use of the categorical "is" arrogates a certainty about these matters that IMO is epistemologically dubious. However, I'm quite happy that you have found this position meaningful. If you are making a mistake, it's perhaps similar to one I've made many times in my own explorations: projecting a personal view as a universal truth.

I may be attaching too much meta to my physics for your taste, but it's a dish that suits me to a T. The wonderful part of life is that there is room for us all, at least for a little while longer.

Have a great weekend yourself.

[NNadir]

43. Well then, given the clearer perspective on our "philosophical" differences, may I suggest...

...a possibly "bridging" book, to which I referred earlier in this exchange, Frank Tipler's and John Barrow's The Cosmological Anthropic Principle." Like your arguments, it has too much "meta" in the physics for my taste, but both authors are, in fact, physicists nonetheless. If I recall correctly - I read it many years ago, and for a brief while took it quite seriously - there is a long riff on causality and "first causes."

I regard the book as a kind of useful mythology, in the sense that all myths have some utility, either for good or for bad. It's an argument that the purpose of the universe is to be seen, as opposed to the alternate argument that the universe has no purpose whatsoever, but merely is. In the latter case, it's not clear that causality can even be discussed, but that's another matter.

I feel, in a small way, I have seen. Now, feeling my mortality, I realize what a blessing that has been.

As my life draws towards its inevitable close, I remark that I have struggled my whole life with a sense of spirituality. I was raised in a family of devout Christians - positive Christianity I might add - and went on from there, with all kinds of visions of what the "ultimate" might be.

I suppose that it the end, I only have to remark that seeing the world in a way that proceeds almost exclusively through my scientific knowledge, I can only remark that it has been a remarkable privilege to have lived at all, to be something which is, a being who sees. I don't know about first causes, and I am quite uninterested in the broadest sense in epistemology for and of itself, but I will say this: Unlike many less fortunate people, it was my phenomenal luck, if not my noumenal luck, finally, after much struggle, to understand that life is insanely beautiful.

My interest in nuclear energy, my forceful advocacy for it, is very much involved with my desire that other human beings, some human beings, as many as is possible in our too often tragic world, will have the pleasure of seeing the world, to stare into it and be struck with ineffable wonder. This may be more prosaic than a full scale philosophical adventure into first causes and the like, but it's the best I do for spirituality.

I have much enjoyed disagreeing with you. Thanx.

[GliderGuider]

44. Well said. I think I know what you mean about seeing.

It's interesting to note that our scientific/spiritual trajectories must have crossed each other at some point. I was brought up in a hard-science, hard-atheism family, where there was no space for spirit of any sort, religious or otherwise. That was my position as well for the first 55 years of my life. And now here I am a decade on, with a strong interest in the noumenal and a worldview that allocates only part of its space to science. It seems from what you say that your journey has proceeded largely in the opposite direction. Some part of me finds that ironically amusing.

When you repeated his name, I recalled that I had investigated Frank Tipler's views early on in my adventure, and rapidly discarded him as being too woolly-minded for my palate. I've looked into final causes a bit, especially Teilhard de Chardin's "Omega Point" concept, but in the end decided that whether or not the universe itself has a purpose was immaterial to me.

My thermodynamic philosophy can easily turn into teleology, but that is just a choice of the investigator. It's not one I choose any more. There is enough "ineffable wonder" as you put it, in the simple fact that we are here and aware, right now. For me at least, any further sense of universal purpose is unnecessary. Life is to be lived, in connection with others doing the same.

This exchange has been a great pleasure for me as well. Cheers.

[Bigmack]

28. So my husband emails me a link to this, says

it's by "my buddy, Glider Guider," knowing that that attribution will cause me to open the post....which I do...to discover this. Alas, NO surprises...we've both been saying, arguing, this for years, but it's real nice to have good data to bolster our arguments. WHY is it SO hard for most people to grasp the notion that INFINITE GROWTH IN A FINITE SYSTEM IS A LOGICAL IMPOSSIBILITY????? Thanks for you post, Molly

[GliderGuider]

29. Humans just don't do limits.

Of course neither does any other animal. Too bad we're so busy looking in the mirror we don't even notice them, let alone draw the appropriate analogies.

[The2ndWheel]

34. Because we use our minds

The human imagination is basically limitless. That's how we think. It's not just the bad stuff, like capitalism, or greed, or population, or whatever. It's all the stuff you like too. Medical science, human rights, pick whatever you want. We don't want limits on these things. We don't want them being finite. There should be no limit to human progress.

That's all part of the infinite growth in a finite system. Human progress either has no limit, or it does. Both aren't going to be true. If human progress has no limit, then infinite growth seems like it could be a thing. If human progress does have a limit, who gets to tell who what they can or cannot do?

Because we can't figure out the answer to that 2nd question, we just go with everyone can have everything. Which will always clash with the physical limits of the planet, in one way or another, but we can't answer that 2nd question, so we do everything in our power to get around those limits.