Monday, September 25, 2017

What's wrong with global warming?

What’s bad about global warming? Plants generally love the doubling of CO2, possibly offsetting the destruction of marine life. Shifting of farmlands is probably not going happen faster than we can adapt, as evidenced by Netherlands (of all places) being 2nd largest exporter (in dollars) of vegetables. I read a study that concluded it has no impact on manufacturing. It appears solar cells for fueling cars and homes (with thorium reactors for night?) could stop the CO2 increases. Worse, I do not even see global warming as relevant. We will still continue destroying species at roughly 5,000 the background rate until we are left with only the ones we find economically relevant. But it’s not exactly “us” destroying biology. The “rise of the machines” makes other species irrelevant to the point of unintentional destruction. Even human thought and labor are already so irrelevant that it’s hard to imagine of what use humanity will be to our economic machine 50 years from now other than spending basic guaranteed income. Free money destroys culture and seems to create needless violence (research on the result of the past 50 years of U.S. welfare). Even now “the machines” don’t even need capital to suddenly change everything via 1 or 2 decent programmers and/or someone making good marketing decisions. I mention capital because it has always been thought of as the tool by which the machines and a few capitalists would enslave everyone else without government intervention. The tech that makes capital irrelevant could make everyone wealthier and more independent (for example: solar cells and hydroponic gardening packages for your backyard, not to mention peer-to-peer blockchain technology replacing governments and financial industry). But I do not believe the physics that governs evolution (closed thermodynamic system receiving energy and emitting energy and entropy to the universe) that results in economizing structures of lower and lower entropy per mole is going to forever blindly find it optimal to merely fulfill human desires. Even now thinking we are somehow in control is a suspect idea. We are merely one of the many resulting enzymatic pathways physics uses to move matter via potentials. The machines are vastly better than biology at every aspect of evolution: capturing energy from the sun, moving matter with that energy, having strong structures to do it, and to model and optimize future scenarios with thinking machines. It’s taking my children 4 hours a day for 6 years and ~100 grams of grey matter to understand spoken and written Chinese as well as 1 gram of silicon on my smart phone learned in 30 seconds. It’s because the low entropy per mole of silicon allows the control of electrons instead of ions in wet brains that weigh 40,000x more. Global warming is irrelevant because biology as we know it will soon be irrelevant.