Flame — HabitableZone

Flame » in reply to re: Don't you know that you can count me in.

below with the black gang
ER — (archived)

True, I'm no human-hater, but if I had to live in the Trantorian planetary paradise you proposed, even if you did so only only in jest, I might just become one. Humans are apes, not social insects. But I guess termites make more docile and dedicated workers.

Your infatuation with technology is puerile, technology allows us to live in hostile environments but only at the cost of importing everything we need, and with the consumption of vast amounts of energy to force it into useful forms. And energy, although never created or destoyed, is degraded irretrievably when employed to do work. It's basic thermodynamics: when concentrated, non-entropic energy sources are used to do something, the waste heat generated may be the same, but it is too dispersed to be useful. It accumulates along with the rest of our garbage and we have to spend even more energy to get rid of it. Waste heat cannot be recycled, it can only be radiated into the void.

The purpose of environmentalism is not to convert the planet into a park so we can spend our days frolicking in fields of wildflowers. It is to exploit the natural energy management and resource generating properties of the ecosystem so we can employ as little technology as possible to maintain our comfort, security, health and happiness. And by "less technology" I don't mean simpler or more primitive systems, but more efficient and less intrusive ones.

The world you describe will be kept afloat by the black gang in the engine room, desperately shoveling the ever-diminishing coal into the boilers and furiously maintaining the machinery that will still break down faster than it can be repaired. I suspect you fantasize yourself on a spotless gleaming bridge high above the water, in your starched whites, creases as sharp as a knife, watching a perfect sunrise across a sea of molten amber.

Log in or register to post.

The whole thread (51 posts)