What will Humanity Become - pt 3
October 26th 2007 05:36
:
what goes here?
Ok, the last post I did for this didn't post properly and then it was lost, and I couldn't be bothered writing it again, so the series died. Now it's back.
3. The Industrialisation of Nature
Through bio engineering and the creation of synthetic organisms we will radically change our relationship with nature and the way we produce things. For example we could make colonies of bacteria to perform specific tasks like extracting heavy metal pollutants from soil and stuff like that. Essentially we will be putting nature to work for us, rather than concieve of our production as against nature. Currently our production model is a straight line something is extracted from nature, some kind of work is done on it, it gets used, it gets disposed of. Some things are used and disposed of in extremely quick time scales, while others have longer life spans. But make no mistake, everything is on this linear progression. Even things which claim to be recycled are on this same progression, nothing is recycled back into what it originally was, it is recycled into a lower grade product, then that might be recycled again into something lower again, but eventually it ends up as rubbish, it just takes a bit longer. A five year old could tell you that you cannot continue doing this forever. So how has life existed for 4 billion years on this planet? By using the free energy of the sun and by keeping chemicals in closed loops, not straight lines.
Looks like we had to learn this the hard way. This new shift to conceive of our production as part of natural cycles, rather than outside of and in opposition to it could be either really good or really bad, depending on whether we have learnt any lessons from the first two industrial revolutions.
People are scared that we might create a super-bacteria which spreads out into the world and mutates and has some unforseen adverse outcome on an epic scale.
The thing we have to learn is diversity. The more diverse we make this world, the harder it is for one thing to sweep through everything. The agricultural industry still hasn't gotten this through it's thick skull, but many people are awake to this obvious fact. Forget your pesticides and anti-biotics and shit, that's only making things worse when the problem is of our own creation and the solution is a simple re-introduction of diversity.
If we don't do it this way, if we create one organism for a variety of jobs and spread it in ridiculously huge numbers all over the globe, we will start something which we simply will never be able to control. If we haven't already ended the whole game with our destruction of various ecosystems (especially the overfishing of the oceans and the destruction of the amazon) it will definitely be game over if we screw this one up.
But there's just a slim chance that someone with a brain in their head will be somewhere in a position to influence how this all goes down and humanity will be shown the light. Here's how I see the best possible outcome: We realise that our production need not be against nature but with nature. For example, when we want to grow food, you don't clear a huge area of all it's plant and animal life and fill the place with one crop, removing nature to place in something human. What we should do is go into that area and work with the existing ecosystem, work out how we can improve the flow of energy in that system, fix any problems or blockages and increase the amount of edible food growing in the area. We can be a help to every single living organism in the areas that we live, but instead we have chosen to be destroyers, but we are only destroying ourselves. We should view ourselves as nature's care takers, constantly improving the system. Put everything that we use into closed cycles, so that we don't take anything out without assuring there will be more for us to take in the future. We get constant free energy from the sun, it has powered everything for 4 billion years. It powered the plants and algae millions of years ago which died and eventually became oil, why are we going such a round about way of getting our energy from the sun?
Everybody is faced with a choice as to how they are going to live in their home. Does the cupbaord have an infinite supply of plates, or should we wash them and put them back when we are done, so there will be plates in the future? Are we going to slowly but surely make our home a worse and worse place, let rubbish piles grow while natural resources decline? Or are we going to make our home better and better? I think we should continually make it better, seems kinda obvious...
3. The Industrialisation of Nature
Through bio engineering and the creation of synthetic organisms we will radically change our relationship with nature and the way we produce things. For example we could make colonies of bacteria to perform specific tasks like extracting heavy metal pollutants from soil and stuff like that. Essentially we will be putting nature to work for us, rather than concieve of our production as against nature. Currently our production model is a straight line something is extracted from nature, some kind of work is done on it, it gets used, it gets disposed of. Some things are used and disposed of in extremely quick time scales, while others have longer life spans. But make no mistake, everything is on this linear progression. Even things which claim to be recycled are on this same progression, nothing is recycled back into what it originally was, it is recycled into a lower grade product, then that might be recycled again into something lower again, but eventually it ends up as rubbish, it just takes a bit longer. A five year old could tell you that you cannot continue doing this forever. So how has life existed for 4 billion years on this planet? By using the free energy of the sun and by keeping chemicals in closed loops, not straight lines.
Looks like we had to learn this the hard way. This new shift to conceive of our production as part of natural cycles, rather than outside of and in opposition to it could be either really good or really bad, depending on whether we have learnt any lessons from the first two industrial revolutions.
The thing we have to learn is diversity. The more diverse we make this world, the harder it is for one thing to sweep through everything. The agricultural industry still hasn't gotten this through it's thick skull, but many people are awake to this obvious fact. Forget your pesticides and anti-biotics and shit, that's only making things worse when the problem is of our own creation and the solution is a simple re-introduction of diversity.
If we don't do it this way, if we create one organism for a variety of jobs and spread it in ridiculously huge numbers all over the globe, we will start something which we simply will never be able to control. If we haven't already ended the whole game with our destruction of various ecosystems (especially the overfishing of the oceans and the destruction of the amazon) it will definitely be game over if we screw this one up.
But there's just a slim chance that someone with a brain in their head will be somewhere in a position to influence how this all goes down and humanity will be shown the light. Here's how I see the best possible outcome: We realise that our production need not be against nature but with nature. For example, when we want to grow food, you don't clear a huge area of all it's plant and animal life and fill the place with one crop, removing nature to place in something human. What we should do is go into that area and work with the existing ecosystem, work out how we can improve the flow of energy in that system, fix any problems or blockages and increase the amount of edible food growing in the area. We can be a help to every single living organism in the areas that we live, but instead we have chosen to be destroyers, but we are only destroying ourselves. We should view ourselves as nature's care takers, constantly improving the system. Put everything that we use into closed cycles, so that we don't take anything out without assuring there will be more for us to take in the future. We get constant free energy from the sun, it has powered everything for 4 billion years. It powered the plants and algae millions of years ago which died and eventually became oil, why are we going such a round about way of getting our energy from the sun?
Everybody is faced with a choice as to how they are going to live in their home. Does the cupbaord have an infinite supply of plates, or should we wash them and put them back when we are done, so there will be plates in the future? Are we going to slowly but surely make our home a worse and worse place, let rubbish piles grow while natural resources decline? Or are we going to make our home better and better? I think we should continually make it better, seems kinda obvious...
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