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