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Kurt Cobb: Limitless imagination and physical limits

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https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Science_and_Invention_Feb_1922_pg905_-_Cities_of_the_Future.jpg

“The city of the future, 10,000 years hence, will not be located on the surface of the Earth. It will be floating up miles high, and such things as snow, rain, and storms will be unknown to the city dwellers of the future.” (Hugo Gernsback, 1922)

 

Humans can imagine lots of things. They can imagine angels and demons. They can imagine whole worlds unlike ours with beings unlike us. They can convey these products of imagination in art, in literature and in film.

They can imagine flying machines, armored cars, diving suits, machine guns and human-like robots. Leonardo da Vinci imagined all of them hundreds of years before they became everyday reality. Hero of Alexandria, a Roman citizen and engineer, described a steam engine 1700 years before Thomas Savery obtained the first patent for one.

It didn’t occur to the ancient Romans to refine the idea of the steam engine for transport or industrial work. They lacked the imagination for such a move and perhaps the necessity. After all, they had built a thriving empire without the steam engine, and the Mediterranean already offered quick, wind-powered transport to practically any part of the empire.

How do we distinguish those ideas that are forever going to remain in the realm of fiction and those that can become concrete reality? Of those that are possible how do we determine which won’t destroy us? Both questions are very difficult ones indeed.

We are “moderns”. We believe we have thrown off the burden of superstition and can now see in the clear light of day all the rational possibilities in the world that were previously hidden from our understanding. In this era of enlightenment the rush of invention and the power it has given us have resulted in the conceit that there is no limit to the power we can ultimately have.

That has given rise to an entire genre of fiction we call science fiction. Much of it concerns itself with space travel, particularly encounters with faraway alien civilizations. And, there is some reason to believe, just based on the immense size of the universe, that such civilizations exist even though we have never heard from them.

The science fiction genre and the enormous technological flowering of our age has encouraged the notion that anything we can imagine, we can achieve or invent. With regard to invention, the trouble with imagination as prediction is that if our imagination were vivid enough to detail the workings of a futuristic invention, those details would be tantamount to having created the invention itself.

All too often, we have objects with mere capabilities, but with no specifications. We have energy-matter transporters, but no specifications and no reason to believe based on the laws of physics that there could be any. We have ships that travel faster than the speed of light. There are theories about how to achieve such speeds. But, the amount of energy required is so enormous–by one calculation the energy contained in all the matter of the planet Jupiter to propel a 1,000 cubic meter ship–that it is hard to imagine how such an energy burst, if achieved, would not destroy the object it was trying to propel.

And, here we get to the crux of the matter. The above illustration is probably the most extreme one we could conjure of what actually constitutes technical prowess. Technology requires energy to run. What we’ve essentially been doing so far is substituting fossil fuel energy for human labor to run the technology that makes us feel so powerful. This has allowed productivity per person to skyrocket in the industrial age, but at a cost. That cost is the rapid depletion of fossil fuels and the climate effects of burning them.

Technology has given us the illusion of increasing “efficiency” in labor, when, in fact, this “efficiency” has been achieved through the wildly inefficient use of energy from the burning of fossil fuels. That inefficiency is the reason we are burning through so much fossil fuel so fast and creating climate change and depletion problems. (I am indebted to Nate Hagens for this insight.)

So, here I would like to propose a check on every “miracle” technology we are expecting in the future to do everything from making work optional (robots) to solving the climate problem (scrubbing the air of carbon dioxide). If the proponent of any yet-to-be-invented or yet-to-be-widely-deployed technology cannot explain where he or she will get all the energy needed to run it at scale in ways that 1) won’t destroy the climate and 2) are in accordance with the known laws of physics, you should be very skeptical that it will ever be widely used.

A society that is ruined by climate change will cease to be technologically adept. So far, the best information we have about how to avoid a climate catastrophe is summed up in two principles: 1) Stop emitting greenhouse gases and 2) stop destroying things such as forests which absorb them.

Many of the technofixes which I’ve seen such as scrubbing the atmosphere of excess carbon involve enormous energy use. I know that the fantasists will protest that we will do all the things we want to do with “clean” energy. They must believe we have a lot longer for such an energy transition than we actually do. And, they likely don’t understand the vast differences in energy density between fossil fuels and renewable energy. So far, “clean” renewable energy is only adding to our capacity rather than replacing our existing fossil fuel infrastructure.

The human imagination is an amazing thing. Its expression in literature, music and art can delight us and also be a mirror for our deepest selves. But it can lead us as well to mistake all our internal yearnings–for love, power and excitement–for external possibilities that have technological solutions which may not be possible or which may have serious downsides.

I am not trying to stop innovation. I am only trying to distinguish helpful innovation that betters our chances of survival and increases our overall quality of life from that which only sends us further down the road of climate instability and resource depletion and thus puts our very survival as a species at stake.

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10 Comments on "Kurt Cobb: Limitless imagination and physical limits"

  1. onlooker on Mon, 22nd Aug 2016 9:57 am 

    Good article. In turn these ideas relate to what do we want technology for. Our employment of technology reflects on us, on our self control, prudence, foresight and priorities as a species. Now our main source of energy is running out even as we have such a huge, all with needs and wants. And a climate becoming increasingly unstable. It seems we must acknowledge we have employed technology unwisely. All discussions are irrelevant now as we will be forced to confront the consequences of our mistakes

  2. onlooker on Mon, 22nd Aug 2016 9:59 am 

    huge population

  3. Davy on Mon, 22nd Aug 2016 10:06 am 

    “I am not trying to stop innovation.” I am going to propose we do just that in the physical and begin our innovation in the spiritual. We must leave technology and energy intensity and its bastard child complexity. We need to do this with innovative narratives and “isms” not yet devised or followed. We need to do this quickly and it needs to be realized once we go there, there is no turning back. Our answers are paradoxical and they revolve around right is wrong and wrong is right. This will not be done at the top of our civilization but it can begin to take root at the grass roots level. We can reject modernism. We can reject it but for the right reasons. We can reject it because it is clearly failing us. We can acknowledge it is poison and the more poison we produce will not make less poison. We can reject those who want to end the status quo only to populate it with another. These are the people arguing politics today or the greenies claiming a shiny new world of alternative energy. Most of all we need to embrace humility of our mortality and prepare for death and destructive change that will leave no one untouched. We can do this and we will do this because nature has mandated it as so. Fight nature and you will be destroyed. It does not matter who you are or even if you command a nuclear arsenal. We are clearly no longer in charge. We never really were in charge but there was 100 years we thought we were. Now reality is back where it should be and we are SOL facing tough decisions for indulging in fantastical hubris.

  4. Cloggie on Mon, 22nd Aug 2016 10:15 am 

    “In 1000 years time we are going to have Colosseums, 10 times as big as the one we have now”

    Anonymous Roman, 90 A.D.

    In 1906 in a Berlin bar, a man was overheard saying to a friend that later in the 20th century people would watch theater plays on a screen in their living rooms. And that Germany would conquor entire Europe, including much of European Russia and that Berlin would be divided and occupied by Russians (“Soviets”) and Americans. That governments would be able to blow up entire cities with a single bomb and that these bombs could be delivered to the other side of the worlds using so-called missiles. The an also claimed that men would land on the moon. Later in the century, everybody would own a car, would have visited other parts of the world in a machine called airplane and that the entire world would be interconnected, enabling them to exchang pictures, static or moving, and that they could see each other.

    The police was warned as it was obvious that this man was a lunatic who was a danger for society and needed to be locked away.

  5. dohboi on Mon, 22nd Aug 2016 10:37 am 

    Our main work is (or should have been before we totally screwed the pooch) to re-imagine ourselves back into the limited world that we actually inhabit. Instead we continued to go with the unreal, imagined world of limitless resources and of limitless ecological sinks (to the extent that we even thought about the latter).

  6. Anonymous on Mon, 22nd Aug 2016 10:45 am 

    Cloggie, where did you get the 1906 story from? Did you make it up? or is it someone else’s? Either way, I fail to see why anyone would ‘warn the police’ about someone like that, since bars are full of you know…drunken bullshitters that make outlandish claims as a matter of course. Ive heard plenty of BS in bars over the years and never once did it occur to me I should involve the police. Why would I or anyone, in 1906, or 2016 think to call the pigs because someone thought airplanes would become widespread someday, or someone says practical matter-teleportation is doable?

    If there was a some kind of point you were trying to make with that story of yours, it fell flat on its face since really doesnt make any sense and its hard to understand what point you are trying to make.

  7. PracticalMaina on Mon, 22nd Aug 2016 10:54 am 

    Since the guy was in Europe he had some type of clairvoyance, which according to Cloggie is the norm because of their superior inbreeding.

  8. Sissyfuss on Mon, 22nd Aug 2016 11:21 am 

    Clogged drain pipe is always stuck in the past. Humor him and he might go away.

  9. penury on Mon, 22nd Aug 2016 12:01 pm 

    I also used to read science fiction and one on my favorite t.v. programs was always “Dr.Who” hyowever I never really thought that this was fact. Apparently I was in the minority.

  10. theedrich on Thu, 25th Aug 2016 12:39 am 

    ØBillary: toolset of DeepState head Sörös.  From all of the polls, it looks like the masses prefer a criminal as president.  This is not particularly new, since we have seen smaller versions of it before (Kwame Kilpatrick in Detroit, Marion Berry in DC, etc.), but today the number of degenerates and imported maggots has become so large that it simply overwhelms any chance of halting the collapse.  In addition to various “entitlements” such as Social Security, the “third rail” of politics, the reptile who owns the MSM, the Demonic Party and many RINOs has a firm grip on the national steering wheel.  Long ago this master of hedge funds and Wall Street corruption learned that the mother’s milk of politics is money, and how to use bribery to destroy nations — the U.S. above all.  His philosophical mentor was Karl Popper, like him an atheistic Jew whose only claim to fame was the partially valid statement that a scientific hypothesis was helpful only if there were tests which could prove it wrong.  The “Popperazzi” have made much of that proposal, which works some of the time, but not if techniques or technology are not yet sophisticated enough to devise such tests.  It does not invalidate hypotheses which may advance science even though they may have to wait for “negative” tests to be devised.

    At any rate, it is not Popper’s dabbling in science which is of concern, but his anti-evolutionary political propaganda about “open societies,” which Sörös has adopted as his North Star.  As a typical European (Austrian) Ashkenazi, Popper hated the society which had made his existence possible, and transferred that hatred to Sörös.  Now is the golden opportunity that the latter has been waiting for:  a corrupt female bribee and presidential candidate who will do his bidding.  As every advertizing executive and every politician knows, the masses are moved by primitive feelings, not by logic.  And with absolute control of the international media in his hands, all foreigners in Canada, Latinoland and Europe are easily persuaded by the unopposed palaver of Sörös and his elite pals.  As Popper was (or affected to be) ignorant of evolutionary genetics and the differences between Afroids, Proto-Mongoloids and other races, so Sörös implements that ignorance in spades.  So we can now expect the final act of America:  its self-immolation for the sake of “humanity” and the aggrandizement of the elites.

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