LifeItself

Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and others have been touting the multitudinous advantages of colonizing the Moon and Mars. The scientific idiocies of these proclamations are so outlandish that I will not bother commenting on them. But, at the same time, Stephen Hawking's name has come up in the context of Mars colonization. Dr. Nate Hagens uses Hawking's ideas about Mars colonization in his Reality 101 course at the University of Minnesota to illustrate the point that human society is composed of tiny islands of high competence floating in a vast sea of narratives. Let me start from quoting a recent email by JDW on the subject of human escape to outer space: "Without a synthesis which shows how different narratives relate to one another, people are free to use “verbal logic” to create properly-constructed sentences which don’t correspond to possible realities. “Verbal logic” is nearly an oxymoron, because there’s not much in the way of error-correction built into it. Anyth...

If you are like me, you may read, watch and listen to what is happening around you with disbelief. But should we be incredulous? Perhaps not... By chance, I looked at " What on earth are we doing ?," a sad commentary on human condition I wrote 6 years ago, and this passage caught my attention: Our Society “In order for us to maintain our way of living, we must, in a broad sense, tell lies to each other, and especially to ourselves. It is not necessary that the lies be particularly believable. The lies act as barriers to truth. These barriers to truth are necessary because without them many deplorable acts would become impossibilities. Truth must be at all costs avoided. When we do allow self-evident truths to percolate past our defenses and into our consciousness, they are treated like so many hand grenades rolling across the dance floor of an improbably macabre dance party. We try to stay out of harm's way, afraid that they will go off, shatter our delusions, and l...

Tonight, I switched from al Jazeera International to BBC World Service.  It took about twenty minutes before I quit with disgust and switched back. Here's what I saw.  Somewhere at the World Economic Forum in Davos, there was a stage lined with eight armchairs ready for a live BBC program.  Seated on the stage were Christine Lagarde, the current IMF director, a pretty African woman, likely representing the developing world, and several very important looking white men. I started watching the BBC Davos report when Ms. Lagarde made her points:  IMF is now anything but business as usual.  Three IMF economists did a lot of analytic work and arrived at the following conclusions: (1) Extreme income inequality is bad for economic growth , (2) income redistribution is good for growth , and (3) jobs for the masses keep people engaged and are good for sustainable growth . She told us that these points were met with great disbelief and scorn by her IMF colleagues, ...

The proper mass balance of carbon fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems, described in Appendix B of my OECD paper (2007), confirms the compelling thermodynamic argument that sustainability of any ecosystem requires all mass to be conserved on the average. The larger the spatial scale of an ecosystem and the longer the time-averaging scale are, the stricter adherence to this rule must be. Such are the laws of nature. Physics, chemistry and biology say clearly that there can be no sustained net mass removal from any large ecosystem for more than a few decades. A young forest in a temperate climate, shown in the previous blog , grows fast in a clear-cut area and transfers nutrients from soil to the young trees. The young trees grow very fast (there is a positive net primary productivity or NPP ), but the amount of mass accumulated in the forest is small. When a tree burns or dies some or most of its nutrients go back to the soil. When this tree is logged and hauled away, almost no nutr...