So when do you plan to discard your computer, internet connection, etc? No time like the present, eh?

We’ll miss you.

PS. I like your new house. I hear Al Gore lives in one just like it.

However, this is not a winning strategy. There is a great deal more potential in clean alternative energy and local transmission than industry and their fellow travelers would have you believe. Expanding extreme fuel which is by definition difficult to extract – resource intensive of precious things like clean water and the local environment – and transporting it thousands of miles – even if the “protections” guaranteed were honest, which they demonstrably are not (viz. the smaller Keystone pipeline which has a poor safety record and in our current climate is likely to become poorer) – is a fool’s choice.

We all need to wake up and notice what is all around us, discard our expensive toys and work for and with each other instead of demanding ever more poisonous fuel for those toys.

This is not an intellectually useful answer. One might as well say that it’s okay to fritter away your life savings because there’s no way to know when you’ll come up with the ingenious idea that makes you a trillionaire.

The economic K-T event through which we are currently descending has a fair amount to tell about our future tech options, if only people would listen. Grand dreams of socially engineered technocratic perfection aside, you cannot change human nature and you cannot decouple our potential for achievement from the relative ease of discovering and exploiting the energy sources required for it. We don’t even fix our bridges anymore.

Future technology cannot be predicted. If it could, we’d already be doing it. I don’t say that we will, and frankly I doubt that we’d bother, it’s just that there’s no fundamental physics saying we couldn’t.

It’s like someone in a horse-powered civilisation demanding to know where you’re going to get all the extra horses from – by recruiting donkeys? It’s not a question that can be answered from the perspective of a worldview stuck in the past.

“To say that the carrying capacity is vastly underestimated is to claim that all resources and waste sinks are orders magnitudes larger than what we think they are.”

Larger than what the Mathusian Greens estimate them to be, yes.

“Which is nonsense that one must have completely lost his mind to seriously claim.”

What, anyone who doesn’t agree with you must be mad?!! Heh.

“There are no substitutes for food, energy and environment suitable for human habitation at the very least.”

Each sort of food substitutes for all the others, each source of energy substitutes for all the others, and we’re nowhere near running out of space, which we can make habitable, as we’ve made the spaces we already live in habitable.

“Given that we are past Peak Oil, and are wrecking the climate and the ecosystems of the planet, how exactly are we way below the carrying capacity of the planet?”

Whether we’re past peak oil or not is unknown, and pretty irrelevant anyway. It’s like saying we’re past “peak horse”, because the amount of horse power we use is declining.

And we’re not wrecking the climate or ecosystems. You know my views on climate. The ecosystems are adaptable and ever-changing, anyway, and we’re now prosperous enough to devote some time cleaning things up. We never got near the limits, and things are getting better.

“At the very least, the carrying capacity of the planet is limited by photosynthesis efficiency.”

No it’s not. It’s limited by photosynthetic efficiency times our energy supply. It takes a square of land less than six metres on a side to grow enough food for a person, and with artificial light you can stack them on top of one another. Modern methods have far less impact on the planet.

And engineering more efficient photosynthesis would be a great help to the ecosystems of the planet, increasing diversity, and the density of life that a given area can support.

“I talked enough about entropy above, why the hell are you saying this then????”

Yes, I know you talked a lot about entropy. It wasn’t anything I didn’t already know – just a more complicated way of saying we need energy to make stuff. We don’t go around telling everybody we’ve “run out of aluminium” just because the natural supplies are all locked up in ores that require energy to separate. We don’t say we’re “running out” of new TVs or mobile phones because the raw materials require effort and negative entropy to put together. They’re manufactured. How much of them we have depends on how much we manufacture, and if we want more we just need to make more.

Negative entropy – or energy as we more commonly describe it – is not in short supply. We already use it for manufacturing things, so to say we don’t have enough to do so is contradicted by simple observation. Saying the same thing in more technical terms doesn’t change that.

It takes $95-worth of negative entropy per year, per person. We’ve got plenty.

Remove the friction and air resistance, and you can go as far as you want on arbitrarily little energy input.

So how exactly are you proposing to eliminate air resistance if it is not a secret? Move us to the Moon?

We’re currently running at only a tiny fraction of our carrying capacity – which the greens grossly underestimate.

Carrying capacity is determined by the resource or waste sink that is in shortest supply. To say that the carrying capacity is vastly underestimated is to claim that all resources and waste sinks are orders magnitudes larger than what we think they are. Which is nonsense that one must have completely lost his mind to seriously claim. There are no substitutes for food, energy and environment suitable for human habitation at the very least. I posted a very useful article above, here it is again:

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/

Given that we are past Peak Oil, and are wrecking the climate and the ecosystems of the planet, how exactly are we way below the carrying capacity of the planet? At the very least, the carrying capacity of the planet is limited by photosynthesis efficiency. And before you start with the nonsense about how we should convert the whole planet into a giant human feeding lot, how we can engineer better photosynthesis, and the rest, let me cut you off on time and point out that this is precisely the thing we should not be doing because this will completely destroy the ecosystems of the planet which are absolutely necessary for our survival.

We don’t say we’re short of metals because they only exist as ores which have to be processed to get pure metal – water is the same.

I talked enough about entropy above, why the hell are you saying this then????

That’s not the reason.

“Why the hell are you asking me about the energy that it takes the Earth to orbit the Sun when you know perfectly well what I mean.”

Yes, I know what you mean. I know why it is wrong, too. It was more or less the same misunderstanding Aristotle had (so you are in illustrious company) when he said that being at rest was the natural state of things, and that it took a continual supply of force to keep things moving. But that idea went out of fashion with Galileo.

“The kind of things that people need moved from one place to another have to do so against significant forces in the opposite direction. Cars wouldn’t need fuel if this wasn’t the case.”

There is no fundamental physical reason why they have to, it’s just the inefficiencies of current technology. They are limits that future technology would potentially be able to bypass. They’re not set by thermodynamics, they’re not hard, there’s no reason they should limit our future capabilities. Which is what you were saying.

“Why would you ever bring this up for any other purpose than to troll???”

I’m bringing it up as the blindingly obvious example showing why you’re talking nonsense. You’re taking practical limitations of current technology, and declaring them (with no justification) to be absolute limits of fundamental physics – thermodynamics specifically. Cars use fuel to overcome friction and air resistance. Remove the friction and air resistance, and you can go as far as you want on arbitrarily little energy input. And there is no fundamental lower limit to friction.
(It might take something like room-temperature superconductor maglev in vacuum tubes to do it, but it’s not against the laws of physics.)

It’s the same with a lot of your stuff – you declare things to be fundamentally impossible that we’re already doing, or that there’s no fundamental reason we can’t do. There’s plenty of it that we can’t currently afford to do, but there’s no telling what direction future technology will go. It’s like looking at a horse-powered civilisation and declaring nothing greater than what can be done with horses is possible.

Take this fresh water thing. You could have said all that more simply by saying that desalination costs energy, which costs money. In fact, it costs around $0.50/m^3, and an average person in a developed country uses roughly 500 litres per day, or 190 m^3 per year, costing $95 (with current technology). It’s actually considerably cheaper, because huge amounts are desalinated naturally – a lot more than we use – so $95/yr is as expensive as it can get. The main problem being that the distribution of fresh water doesn’t match the distribution of population, so we would have to pump it around from place to place, which we haven’t done yet. Again, it’s a practical limitation of current technology and economics, not a fundamental problem in the physics, and there’s no reason whatsoever we could not solve it in the medium-term future. We don’t say we’re short of metals because they only exist as ores which have to be processed to get pure metal – water is the same.

We’re currently running at only a tiny fraction of our carrying capacity – which the greens grossly underestimate. Yes, there are limits, but it’s not currently relevant because we’re nowhere near them, and very unlikely to ever get to them, either. I would say it’s not a problem at all – and certainly it’s a lot less of a problem than plenty of more immediate problems we face.

We have a long way to go, yet, but there’s no fundamental physical reason we can’t get there.

55. Nullius in Verba Says:
September 1st, 2011 at 1:52 pm

The above is precisely the reason I said that I expect you to say next that the Second law of Thermodynamics disproves evolution

Because the misunderstanding there is treating the Earth as closed system when it isn’t and we have something quite similar here

Why the hell are you asking me about the energy that it takes the Earth to orbit the Sun when you know perfectly well what I mean. It is completely different situation on Earth. The kind of things that people need moved from one place to another have to do so against significant forces in the opposite direction. Cars wouldn’t need fuel if this wasn’t the case. Why would you ever bring this up for any other purpose than to troll???

Perhaps for your next trick, you could have a go at explaining how we can possibly run out of water on a planet that is 2/3rds covered in it.

Very simple, but it is more helpful to think about things in terms of entropy and negentropy (which is what we are really talking about but I avoid using the term because when people don’t understand energy you can’t expect them to understand the concept of negative entropy).

It matters very little that there are huge quantities of water on the surface of the planet, what we need is relatively pure water while the majority of it is impure salt water. The former is in a state of low entropy, the latter in state of higher entropy. You need quite a lot of negative entropy to make the impure water pure. So if you transfer too much of the pure water into the big pools of salt water or you contaminate it directly with various impurities that make it unusable, you shift it to a state of high entropy that you again need a lot of negative entropy to return it back to pure form from

Since negative entropy is scarce, it is not at all hard to run out of usable water. Which is what we are doing – aquifers are being pumped at rates much larger then their recharge rate all over the world, rivers don’t even reach the sea because all the water is used for human purposes, countless lakes and rivers are so contaminated that the water is unusable for humans.

The idea that the second law disproves evolution is based on most people having only a vague idea of what the second law says, and figuring that if you keep on making vague claims that things are forbidden by the second law and citing “hard thermodynamic limits” without ever explaining what you mean, that people who are scientifically illiterate might give you a pass.

Unfortunately for you, I do know what the second law says, so it’s not working.

You said that it takes a certain minimum amount of energy to move objects from one place to another and you can not do the work for less than that. So what is the minimum amount of energy needed to move the entire Earth half a solar orbit? In Joules, please.

Is it not obvious to anyone who has passed second grade that the Earth requires no energy source to keep moving, that this principle applies in general, and in fact there is in general no minimum energy required to move things from one place to another? Moving from the bottom of the hill to the top does require an input of energy, but moving in the reverse direction is able to give back that same energy – and hence has a negative ‘requirement’.

It’s much the same with the rest of it. You boldly assert, and cite misunderstood bits of physics you’ve picked up, and try to bluster your way past any awkward questions or counter-examples anyone offers. It’s very entertaining.

Do please keep it up. Perhaps for your next trick, you could have a go at explaining how we can possibly run out of water on a planet that is 2/3rds covered in it.