Today’s new post is from @RickLindroth. He breaks down the science for us behind the damage being done to our Earth’s ecosystems.
READ: Our Climate Crisis: 2 Degrees, 11 Years, 17 Words - Article - BioLogos
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Richard Lindroth’s science article exemplifies to some extent what scientists do: Discover what is.
But his lack of imagination keeps him from predicting the future accurately.
Thus far, only three types of human predictions have been accurate for more than 50 years out:
- Celestial Mechanics
- Demographics
- Wright’s Law of Technological Progress (an older, and more accurate version of Moore’s Law).
The first set of predictions is why NASA can hit a bulls-eye a billion miles away.
The second set of predictions is why Americans are still arguing about the Scopes Trial (i.e. atheists have significantly fewer children than devout Evangelicals; Think of it as evolution in action. Yes, very ironic.)
The third set of predictions is why Trump has not been able to bring back coal; the price of renewable energy keeps dropping. It is why Ray Kurzweil was able to predict the drop in price (and exponential rise) in worldwide use of solar power. It is also why global warming is the least of our problems. At the current rate of Wright’s Law, by 2060, not only global warming, but weather control will likely be a high school science fair project. Advanced nanomanufacturing will make it easy to transform the mass of a 100 miles of freeway into a Hall Weather Machine - a system consisting of many small (1 cm) transparent balloons with a controllable mirror, and full of hydrogen (or helium), hovering at 50,000 ft. (or higher) that can either reflect light back into space, or redirect it as desired. It doesn’t take much imagination to understand that such a system can not only make any concerns about global warming or cooling irrelevant, it should make you start worrying about a “baby” system being used as a weapon of mass inconvenience. A mature system will be able to deliver the energy of a nuclear bomb per second - continuously, at any target. Nanomanufacturing systems will also make respirocytes possible; very simple artificial red blood cells that will enable you to hold your breath for four hours, and survive heart attacks, strokes, and major bleeding injuries. I will leave the downside as an exercise for the reader, as long as you stick to reasonable energy/mass estimates. Advanced nanotechnology is not magic, and it will be able to do great and wonderful things (e.g. move the Earth to 150 million miles out when our Sun goes into it’s red phase), but as with the discovery of fire, there is a price to be paid.