It is tautologically uncontroversial that closed systems have limits. It is also relatively well understood that from a practical perspective the biosphere is and will be for the foreseeable future, a closed system.
Self awareness is the phenomenon which has punctured the limits of this closed system - and is now disrupting the system itself with the side effects of non-biological chemical synthesis and energetics.
At the same time the primary agents of that change - humans - remain firmly a part of their greater biological context. They proceed with the same motivation and desire for resources and procreation that is manifested by the less conscious elements of the bioshpere.
In short, they love their children.
How to solve the problem that lies therein? By successfully subverting the biosphere to our own advantages we have willed into being many billions of us - the vast majority of whom wish to will into being their own children to love. But the closed system has limits and those limits are finite.
We are now at the critical point where our own self-awareness tells us that to create children is to not love them. However our biological impulses are incapable of accepting this anti-biological reality, and instinct holds the trump card.
Bearing these 2 points in mind I have a modest proposal;- understanding that humanity is more numerous than is feasible, and understanding that humans will continue to desire to procreate, is not the logical solution to reduce the size of those offspring?
Island or Insular dwarfism is a somewhat uncontroversial theory which explains evolutionary reduction in body size of species in constrained ecological environments.
With our unprecedented capabilities of biological manipulation, and our urgent ecological issues, I believe it is now the time to investigate making humans smaller.
There will be many many issues associated with this proposal - technological, social, ethical, political, and biological (parents want their kids to grow up big and strong after all).
But from a philosophical perspective I can see nothing wrong with the idea. Can you?
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
The mechanics of a metal ecosystem
We are living through the next great evolution of ecosystem complexity and it is the era in which metallic and mineral materials become incorporated as structural and electrical components of biological systems.
Until very recently carbon compounds (keratin, chitin, cellulose) have been the main structural substrates in known biological systems. With the rise of humans and human technology (the anthropocene period) has come increasing utilization of metals for structural purposes, and as time progresses the incorporation of metals into biological systems will become more and more intrinsic.
Of course the anthropocene period has also seen the rapid decline in viability for a large number of living species constituted from traditional materials. However even with catastrophic collapse of the global biome we can anticipate that the majority of information accumulated in the planetary genome will survive - the level of redundancy of information retained in DNA will ensure this, and the tiny but rapidly growing amount of this data encoded into artificial computer systems will play its part also.
As the trend continues we will see deeper application of biological concepts to information processing and robotics systems, and increasing amounts of incorporation of metal technology into biological systems.
At some point the the two trends will converge, and metals fabrication and manipulation will become encoded and embedded into the biological system or new proto-biological systems.
Use of metal in structural contexts delivers extreme advantages - this is the reason we name the some of the ages of human civilization after metals.
But metal purification requires high energy processes (heat or chemical) and reductive environments - both of which are currently inimical to most life and to computing (biological or otherwise).
The critical step as the ecosystem transforms into a metal utilizing one will be the development of powerful computation systems which can operate at very high temperatures and in hostile chemical environments.
If this sounds unlikely (yet familiar)it might be because it is analogous to an earlier transition; the one which occurred when life moved from the sea to the land.
Until very recently carbon compounds (keratin, chitin, cellulose) have been the main structural substrates in known biological systems. With the rise of humans and human technology (the anthropocene period) has come increasing utilization of metals for structural purposes, and as time progresses the incorporation of metals into biological systems will become more and more intrinsic.
Of course the anthropocene period has also seen the rapid decline in viability for a large number of living species constituted from traditional materials. However even with catastrophic collapse of the global biome we can anticipate that the majority of information accumulated in the planetary genome will survive - the level of redundancy of information retained in DNA will ensure this, and the tiny but rapidly growing amount of this data encoded into artificial computer systems will play its part also.
As the trend continues we will see deeper application of biological concepts to information processing and robotics systems, and increasing amounts of incorporation of metal technology into biological systems.
At some point the the two trends will converge, and metals fabrication and manipulation will become encoded and embedded into the biological system or new proto-biological systems.
Use of metal in structural contexts delivers extreme advantages - this is the reason we name the some of the ages of human civilization after metals.
But metal purification requires high energy processes (heat or chemical) and reductive environments - both of which are currently inimical to most life and to computing (biological or otherwise).
The critical step as the ecosystem transforms into a metal utilizing one will be the development of powerful computation systems which can operate at very high temperatures and in hostile chemical environments.
If this sounds unlikely (yet familiar)it might be because it is analogous to an earlier transition; the one which occurred when life moved from the sea to the land.
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