I am disturbed by the larger philosophy it represents; that things will be much, much better if we can just stop all of the destructive forces of nature from occurring. If we can prevent tropical cyclones, tornadoes, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and the like, then everything will be ok.
What such a philosophy fails to take into account is that these forces aren't just destructive. They represent a system that has a certain equilibrium which is maintained by periodically removing excess energy that has been introduced. Sometimes this surplus of energy is quite considerable, and so the transfer of that energy results in damage to things along the path.
It is possible that going the other direction might work for some things; force the energy transfer to occur more often but less severely. However, even this might have unintended consequences. Less powerful tropical cyclones may not survive to areas as far inland that may depend on their seasonal arrival for necessary rainfall.
I think the best thing we could do is educate people that certain things are not and will never be in our control, and that our reaction should not be panic and sensationalism but cautious respect and preparation.
But modern life can't tolerate such deep and profound respect for the planet that cyclone-acceptance requires.
People forget that Manhattan island was once under a glacier, a couple thousand years ago. When people talk about "preventing and reversing climate change", they're not talking about putting Manhattan back under a glacier.
This analogy is a bit off. Manhattan is no longer under a glacier for the same reasons cyclones form. Climate change has been a part of this planet's behavior for the whole time it has been inhabited by any forms of life. To complete the analogy, I wouldn't will us to put the heat energy from the cyclone back into the tropical ocean that fueled it.
For that matter, modern life already tolerates deep, profound respect for processes on this planet. Research being done right now into the formation of tornadoes in the plains every spring is being done with the goal of greater detection. Tornado prevention is not something I hear a whole lot about; the goal is to get people out of the way while something of immense energy plows through a region.
Building tornado shelters, much like building stilted houses along the coast, or buildings ables to withstand repeated ground waves along the West coast, are a result of people coming to understand these forces and how they behave. This to me rings of a pretty deep and profound respect; a recognition of something to be studied and understood, not just prevented, and maybe not even to be prevented once we understand the implications.
Maybe I am discounting too much the power of our ingenuity; maybe I am calling for too much humility. Perhaps, in time, we will discover a way to do what tropical cyclones do without unwanted side-effects. Depending, I might even want to help work on it. But I am not optimistic that we will.
To be honest, I am disturbed by the philosophy in your post. That stopping a natural cataclysm has side-effects isn't really something to be surprised of. If you don't take it into consideration then you just made a mistake (and a stupid one at that).
But to turn that into a system of thought and to consider non-intervention to be the default - I don't see the logic in that.
> I think the best thing we could do is educate people that certain things are not and will never be in our control
Excuse me for wanting a cure for cancer. Yes, using a nuclear weapon is not the brightest idea in the book, but this doesn't mean the problem is unapproachable. A couple of directions that might be usable in the medium future:
- lowering the content of water in atmosphere in an area is something we can already do. Microparticles that facilitate rain are a pretty scalable method. This could be used to steer proto-hurricanes away from shore.
- large amounts of high-entropy energy are freely available in space.
But what I want to know is what good do you thing would do to "educate people that certain things are not and will never be in our control"?
But to turn that into a system of thought and to consider non-intervention to be the default - I don't see the logic in that.
Wrong interpretation. I am not saying we not intervene at all. I am saying that we understand our cure may, in some cases, be worse than the disease. And not out of respect for the planet, but out of a desire for our own continued survival. Curing cancer is one of those cases where I think the cure is better than the disease; there are issues of increasing population from people dying, but we've shown ingenuity there in the past (thanks, Normal Borlaug). Preventing tropical cyclones is one of those cases where I worry the cure is not better than the disease, at least until we find a cure for all the other implications of doing so.
It's a question of the best default. I think it's ok for people to try to change things, and let the checks and balances stop them when they go overboard.
From what I gather you try to stop people from even thinking about possible solutions, on the grounds that solutions may be worse then the disease. In some (most?) cases that's true, of course, but I still think it's better to have many ideas to chose from, even if most of them are useless and some are dangerous.
In the end I think it goes to how scientifically literate are the politicians. If they're smart enough not to implement stupid ideas then we're safe. If they're not... I think the problem is with the politicians, not with the ideas themselves.
Well, you could have tried. I don't see how one could express disagreement regarding the education of people, such that they realize we are not all-powerful being destined to control every aspect of the Universe.
"Education" implies that the people who oppose you are merely ignorant, rather than wrong. It's profoundly disrespectful -- a debating tactic to avoid confronting the opinions of those with whom you disagree, or listening to their arguments.
I can understand how someone could reasonably believe that there are things that we intelligent beings could never control (the spinning of a galaxy or something), but it seems really odd on a tech-oriented site to find those who not only don't agree that we could control natural phenomena on this one little rock, but who don't believe that any argument worth listening to could exist, such that they're calling for the education of those who disagree, rather than the convincing of those people.
You read my call for education as a call for indoctrination. That's not what it is; it is a call for realizing the implications of our actions go deeper than just the immediate consequence, and that if we try to gain control over a system at a natural equilibrium, and attempt to pin it to a new equilibrium that is more convenient for us, we may disturb other equilibria as well. The consequences could be far worse than just leaving the system alone, and building our society to withstand it rather than control it. This is why many houses along the Gulf Coast are built on stilts.
At least in the case of tropical cyclones, I am having a really hard time believing that we will be able to prevent their formation, and still be able to emulate accurately all of the various effects they have on the planet. We'd have to build systems to advect heat from the ocean to the mid-atmosphere and mid-latitudes, rain to places where the storms no longer go. We'd have to find a way to prune all the weak trees these storms naturally prune. The same argument is made for the infrequent windstorms Seattle experiences; it keeps the forests healthy by knocking down the weak and sick trees. We've have to do this identification and pruning by hand, not just in the tree farms, but in whole forests.
This is the kind of education I'm hoping for. Not telling people we can't control nature and that is the end of that, but explaining, with as much depth as they would like into the theory, that attempting to define a new equilibrium for a particular system on this planet runs the risk of other equilibria being redefined as well, and also needing to be controlled; these in turn may redefine even more equilibria, ad infinitum. Maybe "can't" is the wrong word here, maybe what I mean to say is "you don't want to".
Don't worry too much. The belief that nuclear energy will turn us into masters of the universe is an index fossil of the 1950s. This FAQ won't outlive the baby boomers who came up with it, all of whom were presumably raised on too many My Friend the Atom filmstrips and not enough Mad magazines.
When I was a kid I had a sort of Popular Science-y book from the early sixties that talked excitedly about the plans to dig the second Panama Canal by using underground nuclear blasts. Even as an eight-year-old I knew that this was a hilarious anachronism.
It's representative of the average person's inability to judge scale at the extremes. As a random person on the street which is bigger and by how much: an atom or a transistor in their iPod? It's the same with the very large/powerful. The average person thinks, "A nuclear bomb is big and a hurricane is big, ipso facto." It's hard to comprehend just how much more powerful a hurricane is than a nuke!
Wait, I can understand if people don't get it right even to within a few orders of magnitude -- I know I couldn't -- but don't people know that an atom is a gatrillion times smaller than anything visible with the naked eye? High school science can't be THAT bad.
The transistors in your iPod are also a gatrillion times smaller than anything visible with the naked eye. If one of them is 100 nanometers square (assuming a 30nm process — anybody know if 3λ is about right for a transistor?), that's 4× less than a wavelength of light. Your visual resolution might go down to 10 000 nanometers or so, which means that in the space of the smallest dot you can see, you can fit on the order of ten thousand transistors. (More than you'll find in an 8080 or 6502.)
