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Entropy production delusion

It is common in knowledgeable circles to talk about the development of civilization in terms of entropy discussion. The term 'entropy...

Tuesday, September 6, 2016

fuzzy perspective

We often use numbers to convey information or to carry out specific operations. In many cases numbers are explicit statements, not open to misinterpretation. Your phone number is in that category, so long as someone else is not using it for some nefarious purpose without your knowledge! Your age is also deterministic, even if you give someone the wrong number to mislead them.

But numbers often are only rough indications of a quantity. If you tell someone your weight, the number could well be an approximation of what you saw when you last stood on some scales. The media provides numbers on the rate of economic growth or unemployment that you take with a grain (or more) of salt because you are aware of  how governments often provide misleading figures to suggest their policies are working.

Often numbers cause problems because they misrepresent the situation, as already noted. This can also occur in the operation of machinery. The Japanese devised a means of handling this problem by developing measures to process what they called 'fuzzy' data.

When you think about it, we have to try and make something out of a lot of fuzzy information. We know that often the meaning of information is biased by selective arguments or numbers. Smart people know that economic growth is illusionary because the ecological cost is not included. Goverments pursue economic growth because it tends to improve the materal standard of living as well as giving people employment. most people are taken in by this fuzzy views.

There are campaigns encouraging people to quit smoking because it can harm their health but there are no campaigns to encourge peolp to give up driving even though their cars are using up irreplaceable natural material wealth and doing irrevocable harm to the environment.this is but one example of the fuzzy perspective that people have.

But the most insidious fuzzy perspective is that money controls what happens in the operation of industrialized civilization.Money flow just governs the decisions (mainly fuzzy) but does little to grow understanding of the unsustainablity of industrialized civilization or of the damge being irreovcably done to flora and fauna as well as the environment.

Tityas's health

Tityas, the vast organism that industrialized civilization has built largely in recent time using up limited natural crustal resources, is a complex mix of cities, roads, ports, airports, bridges, tunnels, houses, factories, skyscrapers, machinery, cars, ships, aircraft, electronics, TVs and numerous other items that provide goods and services people have become dependent on.

Tityas is totally dependent on obtaining material resources from Gaia, the natural system that has evolved here on Earth over eons and will continue to evolve long after the inevitable demise of Tityas ends the Anthropocene era.

The human survivors of this collapse of Tityas will be those who have adopted measures to cope with the inevitable powering down as Tityas enters its senescence. They will be those who have gained understanding of the unsustainability of operations of Tityas

Monday, September 5, 2016

Entropy production delusion

It is common in knowledgeable circles to talk about the development of civilization in terms of entropy discussion. The term 'entropy' was introduced to describe the natural law always governing the flow of energy from source to sink. Sunshine is radiant energy from our prime source, the Sun. We can regard it as income because we can rely on it to supply the energy to power some of our technological systems as well as all the natural systems. However, most of the concentrated energy that powers technological systems comes out of the fossil fuels and uranium in crustal store. So it is energy capital that is being irrelaceably dissipated as it does work in industrialized infrastructure for us. Replacing some of that use of energy capital by using energy income in solar and wind systems to intermittedly supply some electricity will only slightly ease the inevitable powering down.
Moreover, useful energy is always a property of materials.In many cases, these irreplaceable materials are transformed into waste by the action of friction with such unintended deleterious consequences as land, sea and air pollution, climate disruption and ocean acidification and warming. So society will have to adapt to an industrialised civilization running down.