From: Christophe Mckeon Date: 2009-04-17T04:07:42+09:00 Subject: Re: Goodbye Ruby - Hello Earth hello again, ok, this is the last peep out of me on this quite OT thread. i will gladly carry on the conversation privately with anybody who is interested in doing so. after a few days reflection, i can see how my original post was as emotionally motivated as it was intellectually motivated, and so a few things were not particularly well thought out. what can i say, my entire worldview shifted drastically in a fairly short amount of time, i was emotional, sorry. something which some of you have pointed out is that i can probably put my IT skills to good use in working towards a solution. this is probably a very good idea which i may consider along with my permaculture studies. some people seem to have concluded that i intended to save the world single-handedly by giving up computers, that is clearly nonsensical and is not what i meant to convey. i do think a culture moving away from unnecessary and unsustainable technologies is a must however. some of you mentioned the idea that going backwards or regressing is what i was advocating. someone even mentioned isolation in a commune behind a plow. that is not what i am advocating, quite the opposite. current agricultural practices are incredibly primitive. the so called 'green revolution in agriculture' in the mid 20th century essentially just took an incredibly naive system (ecologically speaking) and poured gallons and gallons of petroleum on top of it. something akin to trying to improve on the recursive factorial algorithm by running it on faster and faster machines. the principle problem with these practices is precisely the plow and the notion that mono-cultural agriculture can be sustainable. *many* civilizations have fallen due to this most basic of naive assumptions. ours is up next in line. i can recommend an excellent book on the history of these issues called "dirt, the erosion of civilizations" by David Montgomery, a professor of earth & space sciences at the univerity of washington. you may also be interested in a BBC documentary that explores the food crisis which petrocolapse is threatening great britain (and everybody else) with. it goes into permaculture in the last 1/3 of the film. http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=farm+for+the+future&emb=0&aq=f# some people mentioned the dubious notion of 'the singularity'. at this point in time, in contrast to for example, the dire warnings of the worlds climatologists which are science fact, the highly speculative notion of 'the singularity' is science fiction verging on religion. i think that that is something to keep squarely in mind. but even if it were not fanciful wishful thinking, the energy required for that kind of phase transition simply will not be available. just about everything including growth economies are about to start shrinking. finally, the question of whether it is even desirable needs to be asked, when we already have 3.9 billion (see below) year old 'technologies' which quite readily sustain life when not abused. here is a video by somebody i believe has a firm grasp on the relationship between populations, economies, technological progress, etc. and their underlying reliance on energy and resources. he touches on theories like "the singularity" at one point. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFjFG24BeX8 the biggest problem with the techno-fixer mentality that i have however is that i do not believe our technologies to be all that fantastic. can you get the brightest minds in engineering today and have them build a system which can be sent to say, mars, and which can reproduce while diversifying, and last billions of years while morphing to survive various cataclysmic planetary wide shifts in climate, and impacts from space etc.. we can hardly keep the wheels on our bloody mars rovers from falling off, and you want me to believe that there is a technological singularity looming? the technological singularity happened several times over the past 3.9 billion or so years, with the emergence of autocatalytic networks, going into early bacteria, and then eukaryotes, etc. we have all around us 3.9 billion year old technology honed by massively parallel incremental design (evolution). it is many many orders of magnitude more complex and resilient than our tinker toys, it is our life support system, and we are destroying it's capacity to support human life. it will outlive us. there were some comments which along the lines of, just let 'evolution' happen, don't get in the way. it is difficult to argue with such a position. when somebody says we must all die, while bowing down to the alter of this so called 'evolution' which is essentially just a culture of plunder gone rampant, and an incredible hubris vis a vis our rudimentary technologies. i just consider that one of the many sociopathologies of civilization, or perhaps a coping strategy of particular individuals who are educated enough to understand the data science is feeding us, but not knowing which way to turn for solutions, intellectualize and abstract away the very real dread which most sane human beings feel when felt with the prospect of annihilation. human beings lived for hundreds of thousands of years before the culture of plunder took over and now threatens all of our lives. here is the video which affected me most, just because it shows just how easy it can be working with nature using intelligent ecological design to get what we want, e.g. health, a clean green biodiverse environment, good fresh food, etc. instead of working against her as we have been for about 10,000 years now: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7404455615181917912&ei=wnDnSZfSCaryqAOwg9HvBg&q=permaculture so there it is, i'll now shut up and let you get back to rubying. _c -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.