The End of Politics?

It wasn't so long ago that you could look at a political landscape and feel all kinds of ire at the repression of political freedom. And it is still true today that you can do that. But there are fewer kinds of ire now. In a world without borders and states, the individual will and action become more important and yet less so, since there will be fewer instruments to leverage that power.

What happens as we sink (or rise) towards greater equipotential is that each person will have more space and less effect. Suppose that information, energy, time and material resources are all distributed evenly. Then there are fewer or no gradients, and work cannot be done. This is why great works require great inequities.

But no, this is not a politically safe statement to make.

The Entropy Tango

This phrase was coined by Michael Moorcock about 30 years ago, as a title in his long-running Jerry Cornelius writings. To me, it is something stately and inexorable, the dance that must by necessity lead to the final heat death of the universe.

If everything flows and nothing remains still (as Heraclitus the Ephesian said), there is no final death. But entropy, the state of gradual loss which comes with this motion, ensures that all things come to an end.

Heraclitus was the ancient who first came up with the concept of ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω, the 'path upwards and downwards'. The phrase, read in English as hodos anö katö, or anodos/kathodos, is what electrochemists get their terms 'anode' and 'cathode' from; one is the upward path of the electrons and one is the downward path (and of course, elektrodos means 'amber path' or 'path of electrons'). But Heraclitus never factored in resistance and loss of power in his circuitous musings.

Which is what brings us back to the entropy tango. All things go round and round, up and down, but eventually, the ability to do anything productive wanes. Things equilibrate. At the end, all the lovely dancers fall down within their ring of roses.

No cell lasts for ever; no volta will bridge the dying electronic ga(s)p of the stricken system. But while the passionate embrace continues, life goes on. It is rather sobering, however, to note that the greater the energies expended, the more passionate the expression, the quicker the end. It is the choice of Achilles — to burn quickly and die a legend, or to burn slowly and die forgotten.

But either way, it is the entropy tango, danced quickly or slowly in the ballroom of time.

Humanism, Transhumanism and Posthumanism

Humanity is an organic mass mess mass of 'thinking' machines, each one different from each other one and made so by genetic reproduction and other 'genetic' algorithms. This mass appears to have thoughts about itself; it thinks that it has norms, that it has ideals, and that it can have standard types as well as ideal types. It always thinks it can improve on itself.

The problem is that it has insufficient data to actually come to conclusions about what its norms (other than statistical ones, and these too are its own inventions) ought to be; it can have no legitimate idea as to its ideals, based solely on its own perception of self; and it can have no legitimate idea as to how to improve, not having enough data as to where it can improve towards. This mass, however, has elements which will disagree with such a diagnosis, even though it is obviously true.

Once upon a time, an element of this mass said to me (another element of this mass), "Well, it has to be true that making optimal use of energy would be an improvement." I'm not so sure. What is optimal use? Every such idea, ideal, improvement, boundary, definition, norm (etc, etc) is defined by this imperfect mass. As one element named Russell said some time ago, mathematics — which a fair number of elements think is the best (query: best?) mode of thought (query: thought?) — is built on the flimsiest of foundations. So he decided to be a logician, but his project failed too.

Humanism is a work in progress, then. But progress towards what? And if it is a work in progress, what can be said about trans- and post-humanism, which some elements of the human mass also talk about? They are imaginary work in imaginary progress.

Some human elements point out that evolution occurs, and we have strong evidence for it. Of course it does, and of course we do. But there is nothing to show 'fitness' except the promise that we are putatively 'better adapted' to a changing world. In truth, we are adapted, but we do not know if it is better, or will be so, because the genetic algorithms are future-blind. We are reactive, and hence we should have no claim to trans-anything or post-anything.

In fact, the only think we can know is that we are all headed towards thermodynamic 'heat death', and hence it seems good to try to stave it off. Hence the fixation(s) on information, energy, efficiency and effectiveness. But for what? Nobody seems to know. Some, however, have odd ideas about destiny and optimisation. Those too will pass.

In the end is the singularity, as at the beginning, some others say. The point really is that the singularity is the ideal to which all information (whether it is so, or merely an aberration in the energy transactions of the universe) goes, and once it is, nobody knows.

Is it any wonder that man imagines that he imagines God? Or that man (well, some portion or other of the human mass) imagines, "What is man, that [God is] mindful of him?" In the end, faith, hope and love abide; and if not, there is nothing.

Follow the Water

My latest research sidetrack has come in the form of water analysis. Dallas Murphy's interesting account of the work of oceanography, To Follow The Water, has many interesting things to say about the movement of water. He points out that the Gulf Stream causes something like 36 Sverdrup units to go northward from the Caribbean region to the North Atlantic, keeping Europe warm and preventing an Ice Age. A Sverdrup unit is one million cubic metres of water per second. It's an awe-inspiring figure.

More to the point, while we can measure the large movements, the currents and vortices, they still remain susceptible to chaos at the local level. In late 2004, the meridional overturning circulation (in which cooling high-density salt water sinks and less-dense salt water rises in the ocean) appeared to have slowed for a while. Headlines saying that the Gulf Stream had stopped sprouted like a virulent disease. Of course, if the Gulf Stream really had stopped, we'd all be in serious trouble.

All the major oceans have these huge currents, one cycle in each hemisphere, with branches. If these currents were rivers, they'd be really huge rivers. The Gulf Stream is about 100 km wide and 1.2 km deep. It transports 1.4 petawatts of heat; that's a million billion joules per second and is about 100 times the energy consumption of the entire human race. If only we could tap it!

Ethanol

It's getting out of hand. Vast acres of land converted to corn growing for the sake of ethanol production. Here's an article about it which really would have been titled, by a less polite author, "Ethanol – the bullshit product."

The solutions are simple, but difficult to attain.

1) Use less energy. Ha. Haha. North America, China, India. Forget it.

2) Burn less petroleum. Ha. Haha. See above.

3) Use solar-derived or earth-derived sources (wind, geothermal, hydro). This will work in the very long term.

End of summary.

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More entertaining, though, is this list of the ten worst jobs in science. It must really suck to be a professional scientist (as opposed, I suppose, to an unprofessional one) these days.