Helping Energy Spread Out
22 views
Skip to first unread message
kirby urner
Jun 30, 2025, 7:29:45 PMJun 30
to wwwan...@googlegroups.com
Hey Terry, did we talk about this YouTube already?
It has the Carnots in their historical context and continues on through Boltzmann et al.
Thermodynamics as currently conceived.
Y'all may not be a huge fan of how it's currently conceived of course.
But even as currently conceived, there's no physics-based excuse for increasingly disorderly human affairs -- a cop out some politicians might use.
The 2nd law of thermodynamics applies to a closed system. Earth is plugged in, like a kitchen appliance to a wall socket.
Like a water wheel is inserted into a river flowing downhill.
Kirby
Keith Lofstrom
Jul 1, 2025, 4:53:38 PMJul 1
to kirby urner, wwwan...@googlegroups.com
On Mon, Jun 30, 2025 at 04:29:31PM -0700, kirby urner wrote:
> https://youtu.be/DxL2HoqLbyA
> https://grunch.net/synergetics/gst3.html
To most religious people, I say "your God is too small".
The same applies to most ideologies, imprisoned by similar
addiction to certainties painted over the tiny discrepancies
that are tunnels to vastly larger ideas and opportunities.
Our Earth is a tiny fraction of a VAST solar system, in
turn an infinitesimal fraction of an ENORMOUS (and low
entropy) space-time continuum. In a glib phrase, "you
ain't seen nothin' yet".
And given all that hasn't been seen yet, perhaps the
despairing eyes now looking at the stuff "WE" have
(shelter food transport safety etc.) and "THEY" don't
... should have better places to look. We should
dismantle the roadblocks we have put in their way.
Just as our grandparents (or great- or great-great-
grandparents) did when they escaped from European
starvation and poverty to opportunity.
My grandmother's parents left Finland during late
1800s Tsarist rule, to the relative freedom of
dangerous Wyoming coal mines. There are echos of
starvation in the calorie-thrifty (obesity)
epigenetic traits my sisters inherited.
We can focus on the past, and its echo in the present,
or we can focus on creating more opportunity. There is an
ENTIRE UNIVERSE of opportunity OUT THERE, though "we" must
THINK to access it. Those with nothing to lose (like my
immigrant ancestors) will change first.
Life is structured matter and energy - the Earth masses
VASTLY more than all of life and VASTLY VASTLY more than
all of humanity. Your body uses approximately 100 watts
and your brain can use 20 watts to power 200 trillion
synapses (not all at once!). That's more power than and
WAY MORE bit activity than the 16 trillion bit solid state
drive in this computer. Affordable computers will cross
the "brain capacity threshold" in less than two decades.
Even today, the cheapest single-chip processors (the
"yeast cells" of the automation "cake") cost less than
a penny, and are smaller than dust.
Compared to the entire solar system, the Earth is less than
a rounding error. The Earth intercepts 173,000 trillion
watts watts from the Sun (and reflects much of it); "only"
100 trillion photosynthesis watts power all of Earth life.
The Sun emits 380E24 watts, 380 TRILLION TRILLION watts,
almost all streaming to infinity, and only a tiny tiny
fraction of that power will ever touch matter again.
What a waste! What an opportunity for improvement!
How do we access and share that opportunity?
Without going into the calculus, the energy to lift mass
off the Earth and into the solar system (at 100% mechanical
efficiency) to the Earth's surface gravity (9.8 m/s²)
multiplied by Earth's surface radius (6,370,000 meters).
Escape energy is 62 million watt-seconds or 17 kilowatt
hours per kilogram of mass.
A big power customer like Intel pays about 15 cents per
kilowatt hour for green energy, so at that industrial
rate, launching a kilogram into the vast solar system
costs less than $3. If that kilogram in space is a
gossamer photovoltaic surface generating MANY kilowatts,
the potential exponential economic growth rates are
(ahem) "mind-boggling".
Those surfaces may grow into minds complementary to ours,
thinking thoughts humans are poorly adapted to thinking ...
such as preserving and enhancing life solar system life
for gigayears, rather than our current trajectory which
may sterilize our planet in less than a century.
"They" may even discover ways to convince 8 billion
angry apes to get along with each other. The resulting
collaboration could grow the entire solar system into a
"garden of wisdom", and artificially delay the "natural"
heat death by Sun expansion from 200 million years, to
more than 10 billion years. Move Earth outwards as the
Sun heats, move inwards when it cools. Humans (and our
AI collaborators) can do a lot of excellent thinking over
that vast span of time and hugely enlarged collaboration.
Who knows? We might even learn about an ACTUAL God who
lovingly spins quarks and galactic superclusters with
mind-bogglingly cosmic compassion, fostering shared
gardens of life that make imaginary the biblical Eden
seem like a hellscape by comparison.
If such possibilities are options on the cosmic menu,
I'll gladly skip the "war d'oeuvres" and help the Cosmic
Chef de Cuisine prepare a banquet for all Life and Mind
... forever.
Keith L.
--
Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com
> https://youtu.be/DxL2HoqLbyA
> https://grunch.net/synergetics/gst3.html
To most religious people, I say "your God is too small".
The same applies to most ideologies, imprisoned by similar
addiction to certainties painted over the tiny discrepancies
that are tunnels to vastly larger ideas and opportunities.
Our Earth is a tiny fraction of a VAST solar system, in
turn an infinitesimal fraction of an ENORMOUS (and low
entropy) space-time continuum. In a glib phrase, "you
ain't seen nothin' yet".
And given all that hasn't been seen yet, perhaps the
despairing eyes now looking at the stuff "WE" have
(shelter food transport safety etc.) and "THEY" don't
... should have better places to look. We should
dismantle the roadblocks we have put in their way.
Just as our grandparents (or great- or great-great-
grandparents) did when they escaped from European
starvation and poverty to opportunity.
My grandmother's parents left Finland during late
1800s Tsarist rule, to the relative freedom of
dangerous Wyoming coal mines. There are echos of
starvation in the calorie-thrifty (obesity)
epigenetic traits my sisters inherited.
We can focus on the past, and its echo in the present,
or we can focus on creating more opportunity. There is an
ENTIRE UNIVERSE of opportunity OUT THERE, though "we" must
THINK to access it. Those with nothing to lose (like my
immigrant ancestors) will change first.
Life is structured matter and energy - the Earth masses
VASTLY more than all of life and VASTLY VASTLY more than
all of humanity. Your body uses approximately 100 watts
and your brain can use 20 watts to power 200 trillion
synapses (not all at once!). That's more power than and
WAY MORE bit activity than the 16 trillion bit solid state
drive in this computer. Affordable computers will cross
the "brain capacity threshold" in less than two decades.
Even today, the cheapest single-chip processors (the
"yeast cells" of the automation "cake") cost less than
a penny, and are smaller than dust.
Compared to the entire solar system, the Earth is less than
a rounding error. The Earth intercepts 173,000 trillion
watts watts from the Sun (and reflects much of it); "only"
100 trillion photosynthesis watts power all of Earth life.
The Sun emits 380E24 watts, 380 TRILLION TRILLION watts,
almost all streaming to infinity, and only a tiny tiny
fraction of that power will ever touch matter again.
What a waste! What an opportunity for improvement!
How do we access and share that opportunity?
Without going into the calculus, the energy to lift mass
off the Earth and into the solar system (at 100% mechanical
efficiency) to the Earth's surface gravity (9.8 m/s²)
multiplied by Earth's surface radius (6,370,000 meters).
Escape energy is 62 million watt-seconds or 17 kilowatt
hours per kilogram of mass.
A big power customer like Intel pays about 15 cents per
kilowatt hour for green energy, so at that industrial
rate, launching a kilogram into the vast solar system
costs less than $3. If that kilogram in space is a
gossamer photovoltaic surface generating MANY kilowatts,
the potential exponential economic growth rates are
(ahem) "mind-boggling".
Those surfaces may grow into minds complementary to ours,
thinking thoughts humans are poorly adapted to thinking ...
such as preserving and enhancing life solar system life
for gigayears, rather than our current trajectory which
may sterilize our planet in less than a century.
"They" may even discover ways to convince 8 billion
angry apes to get along with each other. The resulting
collaboration could grow the entire solar system into a
"garden of wisdom", and artificially delay the "natural"
heat death by Sun expansion from 200 million years, to
more than 10 billion years. Move Earth outwards as the
Sun heats, move inwards when it cools. Humans (and our
AI collaborators) can do a lot of excellent thinking over
that vast span of time and hugely enlarged collaboration.
Who knows? We might even learn about an ACTUAL God who
lovingly spins quarks and galactic superclusters with
mind-bogglingly cosmic compassion, fostering shared
gardens of life that make imaginary the biblical Eden
seem like a hellscape by comparison.
If such possibilities are options on the cosmic menu,
I'll gladly skip the "war d'oeuvres" and help the Cosmic
Chef de Cuisine prepare a banquet for all Life and Mind
... forever.
Keith L.
--
Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com
kirby urner
Jul 1, 2025, 5:30:11 PMJul 1
to Keith Lofstrom, wwwan...@googlegroups.com
Methinks a still popular ideology today is "because we always lose energy to chaos when we do stuff, life on earth must become more and more chaotic over time, which explains a lot." Of course it explains nothing because Earth is a locally syntropic enterprise.
The textbooks usually focus on photosynthesis: the plants and plankton are syntropic. But then when it comes to the animals, they just eat. No attention to city-building or cultivating.
We don't like to credit the Sun for our negentropic city building. We're just the chlorophylls vis-a-vis these relatively gargantuan organisms.
You'll hear a lot of ignorami saying "the economy is zero sum" as if my gain is your loss, by some law of physics, forgetting computers, like Motherboard Earth, are plugged in, and a capacitor over here is not necessarily "stealing energy" that rightfully belongs to a transistor over there.
A long time ago I wrote something I called a manifesto, because I knew manifestos are something one usually writes in one's idealistic youth, so I wanted to get mine out of the way:
Kirby
kirby urner
Jul 7, 2025, 1:13:50 PMJul 7
to WWWanderers
Just threading the needle a bit more, weaving in an apropos blog post from the other day:
Thank you Keith, for sharing your excellent meditations on this topic.
The Earth Energy Budget has long been of interest and is a classic doorway into Markov Chains for many an ecologist.
From Markov Chains we get to Markov Blankets, a term coined by the Active Inference community, into which I have pretty firmly integrated at this point.
Kirby
Keith Lofstrom
Jul 8, 2025, 3:09:42 PMJul 8
to kirby urner, wwwan...@googlegroups.com
I will (reluctantly) top post like the rest. Barbaric behavior,
but then, so is feeding a dog while humans starve.
----
Entropy is in the eye of the beholder. Are sophisticated lies
counter-entropic?
I just finished reading Patrick Moore's 2010 book "Confessions
of a Greenpeace Dropout", which has many good points, and also
some AWFUL misinformation regards the science of "global warming".
Worth reading, with the proviso that Moore is a renowned PhD
biologist and environmentalist ... who seemingly knows nothing
about physical CONSERVATION OF ENERGY. Ecology measures with
20% uncertainty ... physics measures with parts per million
uncertainty. LIGO measures with 1e-21 uncertainty, impressive
to a measurement geek like myself.
One measure for Earth warming is "inbound watts" minus "outbound
watts". Circa 2020, the inbound watts exceed outbound watts by
around 1 watt per square meter of surface. That's 510 trillion
watts for the entire surface area of the Earth, 4.2 quadrillion
kilowatt-hours of radiative global heating per year.
Note that coal, oil, and gas combustion add 18.2 quadrillion
kilowatt-hours of heat per year immediately. Very little of
that heat is "instantiated" in steel and concrete and other
energy-laden semi-permanent materials. That complicates
calculations of the accumulating heating budget - which allows
ideological opportunists to "cook the energy accounting books"
when they estimate future heating and future radiation of heat
to space (cooling).
You won't see that heating directly in atmospheric climate
records, because most of the heat (and most of the increased
CO₂) ends up in the world's oceans ... for now. Hotter water
expands, CO₂ makes carbonic acid, lowering pH. Not being
ocean dwellers, this HUGE effect is easy to ignore - for now.
Eventually, ocean life fails. We don't know what the threshold
for that is; it never happened before, or we would not be here.
Perhaps the threshold is far beyond what we've done so far,
perhaps we are already halfway there. But if or when it does,
fragile humans and most macro-life won't survive the outcome.
Bad planning.
Even without our current "nudging towards the edge", our Sun is
heating; our Earth will heat also. In the natural course of
things, the Earth become uninhabitable by large animal life about
200 million years from now. Not a huge fraction of the universe's
13800 million year age or the Earth's 4500 million year age, but
commensurate with the 200 million year existence of land mammals.
That said, making the Earth uninhabitable for mammals in 20 or
100 or 1000 years from now is obscenely evil, a smaller survival
time fraction than megamurders in Hitler's concentration camps.
Both atrocities can be rationalized by powerful minds with
warped morality. Or merely cherry-picking the "facts" as part
of "motivated reasoning".
I confess that I did that myself for decades, before a whisper
of intellectual integrity made motivated reasoning about climate
intolerable. You might compare my "environmental salvation"
to Christians leaving a revival meeting pledging to never sin
again, then breaking that pledge at the soonest opportunity.
"Lord, protect me from sin, but please not yet."
Given human nature, the only realistic solution is to search
extra-diligently for unlikely-but-MAYBE-possible techno-fixes
that un-cook our goose for a few more decades. I've been
told that I personally needed to do this by supposed adults
since I was a ten-year-old protogeek.
"Energy spreading out" in tandem with intelligence spreading
into the solar system probably won't save life on Earth from
idiots on Earth, but it might regenerate new life after the
idiots exterminate themselves.
"Evolution in Action", a phrase that "frenemy" Jerry Pournelle
attributed to his writing collaborator Larry Niven. Evolution
requires a solar system with life; let's keep it alive.
Keith L.
------------
> --
> "Science would be ruined if it were to withdraw entirely into narrowly defined specialties. The rare scholars who are wanderers-by-choice are essential to the intellectual welfare of the settled disciplines." Benoit Mandelbrot
> ---
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "WWWanderers" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to wwwanderers...@googlegroups.com.
> To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/wwwanderers/CAPJgG3Q%3DVAoEO_UJL5MfihMUPdAZfC0ZTU7TGM%3DDLZRKV%2BHAQA%40mail.gmail.com.
--
Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com
but then, so is feeding a dog while humans starve.
----
Entropy is in the eye of the beholder. Are sophisticated lies
counter-entropic?
I just finished reading Patrick Moore's 2010 book "Confessions
of a Greenpeace Dropout", which has many good points, and also
some AWFUL misinformation regards the science of "global warming".
Worth reading, with the proviso that Moore is a renowned PhD
biologist and environmentalist ... who seemingly knows nothing
about physical CONSERVATION OF ENERGY. Ecology measures with
20% uncertainty ... physics measures with parts per million
uncertainty. LIGO measures with 1e-21 uncertainty, impressive
to a measurement geek like myself.
One measure for Earth warming is "inbound watts" minus "outbound
watts". Circa 2020, the inbound watts exceed outbound watts by
around 1 watt per square meter of surface. That's 510 trillion
watts for the entire surface area of the Earth, 4.2 quadrillion
kilowatt-hours of radiative global heating per year.
Note that coal, oil, and gas combustion add 18.2 quadrillion
kilowatt-hours of heat per year immediately. Very little of
that heat is "instantiated" in steel and concrete and other
energy-laden semi-permanent materials. That complicates
calculations of the accumulating heating budget - which allows
ideological opportunists to "cook the energy accounting books"
when they estimate future heating and future radiation of heat
to space (cooling).
You won't see that heating directly in atmospheric climate
records, because most of the heat (and most of the increased
CO₂) ends up in the world's oceans ... for now. Hotter water
expands, CO₂ makes carbonic acid, lowering pH. Not being
ocean dwellers, this HUGE effect is easy to ignore - for now.
Eventually, ocean life fails. We don't know what the threshold
for that is; it never happened before, or we would not be here.
Perhaps the threshold is far beyond what we've done so far,
perhaps we are already halfway there. But if or when it does,
fragile humans and most macro-life won't survive the outcome.
Bad planning.
Even without our current "nudging towards the edge", our Sun is
heating; our Earth will heat also. In the natural course of
things, the Earth become uninhabitable by large animal life about
200 million years from now. Not a huge fraction of the universe's
13800 million year age or the Earth's 4500 million year age, but
commensurate with the 200 million year existence of land mammals.
That said, making the Earth uninhabitable for mammals in 20 or
100 or 1000 years from now is obscenely evil, a smaller survival
time fraction than megamurders in Hitler's concentration camps.
Both atrocities can be rationalized by powerful minds with
warped morality. Or merely cherry-picking the "facts" as part
of "motivated reasoning".
I confess that I did that myself for decades, before a whisper
of intellectual integrity made motivated reasoning about climate
intolerable. You might compare my "environmental salvation"
to Christians leaving a revival meeting pledging to never sin
again, then breaking that pledge at the soonest opportunity.
"Lord, protect me from sin, but please not yet."
Given human nature, the only realistic solution is to search
extra-diligently for unlikely-but-MAYBE-possible techno-fixes
that un-cook our goose for a few more decades. I've been
told that I personally needed to do this by supposed adults
since I was a ten-year-old protogeek.
"Energy spreading out" in tandem with intelligence spreading
into the solar system probably won't save life on Earth from
idiots on Earth, but it might regenerate new life after the
idiots exterminate themselves.
"Evolution in Action", a phrase that "frenemy" Jerry Pournelle
attributed to his writing collaborator Larry Niven. Evolution
requires a solar system with life; let's keep it alive.
Keith L.
------------
> "Science would be ruined if it were to withdraw entirely into narrowly defined specialties. The rare scholars who are wanderers-by-choice are essential to the intellectual welfare of the settled disciplines." Benoit Mandelbrot
> ---
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "WWWanderers" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to wwwanderers...@googlegroups.com.
> To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/wwwanderers/CAPJgG3Q%3DVAoEO_UJL5MfihMUPdAZfC0ZTU7TGM%3DDLZRKV%2BHAQA%40mail.gmail.com.
--
Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com
kirby urner
Jul 21, 2025, 12:47:30 PMJul 21
to WWWanderers
Hey guys --
More food for thought in the form of a video I just made this morning. Fresh from the oven!
I mention the discussion we've been having here on the Wwwanderers list (i.e. this very thread), albeit briefly.
You might wanna audit and send me comments? Discuss here?
Quaker Economics (GST) from School of Tomorrow, Cascadia (17 mins 35 secs)
Kirby
Reply all
Reply to author
Forward
0 new messages