It annoyed me rather than giving me enjoyment. But leaving aside their silly metaphor of a ladder, the main point is perfectly true and very important = we have built a fantastically complex 7 billion person economic and technological realm that is actually magical even to people who have great understanding of how things work and I include myself in those few people who pretty much understand how things work.
I write "magical" because we have soared far beyond the chimpoid realm of hunter gathering and genocidal tribal alpha male territorial dominance hierarchies. We're now dabbling not just in quantum theory, photons, electrons, quantum computing, solid state physics but have departed the space-time framework of physics of good old Albert Einstein, Bohr, Schroedinger and all those blokes up to our more recently departed Lucasian mathematics man Stephen Hawking. Roger Penrose, Brian Green were more recent battlers in the realm. My wife bought me The Elegant Universe 22 years ago as the 21st century began and Dr Irwin Jacobs and team had laid the foundations of mobile Cyberspace and extra-somatic intelligence which is now well underway. That space-time realm is now increasingly defunct apparently. I'm nearly obsolete. Like an Egyptian mummy. My knowlege of 1950s carburetors is definitely past its use-by date. So is a lot more of what I know.
The hunt is now on for consciousness which we're all familiar with but it's actually magical. Out of the four forces of the apocalypse [strong, weak, gravity and electromagnetic] and the four components of DNA, we get all we know and experience. It's all held together by and made out of some smart alecky wave functions that don't seem to exist but actually do, or at least they do when something or other is around to make them turn into something or other aka reality.
What exists? Rewinding the cosmos as cosmologists think we can, we get to a Big Bang. Nowadays, we have lots of condensed wave functions into what we think of as objects with mass such as dirt, rocks, potatoes, cars, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, the sun, all the other stars, black holes and interstellar gas and whatnot. But the cosmologists say there is as much again of "dark matter" = a puzzle. And more puzzling, the cosmos is expanding and accelerating in antigravity magic.
Regarding dark matter, E = mc2, that is, Energy = mass x speed of light x speed of light. That makes sense because energy in garden variety Newtonian physics of ordinary objects = 1/2 mass x velocity x velocity. Turning mass into energy we get the wave functions heading in opposite directions at the speed of light [the fastest there is], so the total energy is not half the mass x velocity x velocity but the whole mass x the speed of light x speed of light = mc2.
The dark matter mass equivalent = E/c2 Since we [the cosmologists] know more or less how much mass is "dark", then the amount of wave function energy tootling around the cosmos at the speed of light in high mobility wave function photonic form and maybe graviton form = dark matter x c2.
So we're way past the top of the metaphorical ladder with methane at the top. Dark matter is maybe the top of the ladder.
Having been an oil bloke, dabbling in all of it from methane down to coal and tars, the ladder metaphor is silly. And also plain wrong in that oil isn't more "oxidized" than methane.
Oil, gas, tars, coal, peat and wood are just carbon forms with more or less hydrogen attached. They are pretty much fungible depending on economics, supply and demand, at the time. We don't actually need any of them, other than that they are the cheapest way of doing things we want to do depending on the situation at the time and place.
Here's another way to do things = build fusion or fission reactors, or photovoltaic panels, then use that energy to get carbon out of limestone [there's a LOT of that stuff around], then turn that carbon and hydrogen from water into anything we like that normally is made from the ladder your bloke described, such as ethylene.
35 years ago I was part of BP Oil International R&D teams and we were funding fusion reactor research, BP Solar was our photovoltaic maker. I was a paid up methanol fan club member [until oil got too cheap again] and was very keen on a single step zeolite process from methane to gasoline [that would have been so good to turn low value and even negative value methane into car fuel].
Meanwhile, the chimpoids are rampaging and might ruin it all. They are armed with nuclear weapons. Affirmative action and transgender wokies have their fingers on the triggers with DementiaJoe10% as commander in chief and Hunter Biden clipping the ticket and hiring the prostitutes, buying the cocaine and booze. That's going to end badly. Not a good VVV scene.
As that article says, the normal person has no idea how everything has come to be, what it takes to keep it going, no idea how it works, nor how fragile it is. A bit of covid disruption was enough to seriously mess things up, and a negligible conflict over Crimea and a little bit of eastern Europe has made people lose their minds [not that they had much to lose but the effect of that loss is showing up in the pump price for petrol].
A third of century ago, I took my dearly loved now deceased niece Trudy [about age 17 at the time] around the industrial area of Antwerp at night. That to me is tourism!! It was fascinating = nuclear reactor fed steel mill fed robots in car factories with chemical factories, tyre makers etc etc all working away, with the output of thousands of cars roaring through the night on mile long trains at 70 mph heading to the hinterlands of Eurostan. Each factory needed only a few people [like Homer Simpson] to keep an eye on the dials and maybe do a bit of tweaking.
Since then, things have accelerated. We now have A380s flying 10 km high at 1000 km per hour for 10,000 miles with up to 1000 people on board, in luxury. Autonomous cars and trucks are nearly reality. Mobile Cyberspace is taken for granted. Google delivers infinite knowledge from anywhere to anywhere, soon to be in such high resolution low latency with sterephonic sound that reality itself will be able to be delivered from anywhere to anywhere at nearly zero cost.
Autonomous drones can make deliveries in 3D around cities rapid and cheap.
Elon Musk is doing what I wanted Globalstar to do 23 years ago [but Globalstar people were too dopey to figure it out, even when told] delivering mobile Cyberspace to anywhere from low earth orbit [I guess he won't do it right but maybe near enough = his subscription service is stupid].
An example of fragility was Elon Musk describing when their production line of Teslas was stymied for lack of a big of ethernet cable. They went shopping around LA buying retail what they could find. A billion dollar factory stuck for a few cents worth of plastic and copper wire.
Currently there are supply chain disruptions around the world. That'll go exponentially parabolic to asymptotically hyberbolic hyperbole if China shuts off rare earth exports or Russia turns off the gas completely to discipline the chimpoids in Washington and Liz Truss and Herr Gruppenfuhrer Stoltenberg and Barbarossa Scholz. Even without neutron bomb fusion reactons in the sky, things could get bad in a big way.
A few decades ago, I noticed that natural forces have similar patterns, which is not surprising given that there are only 4 forces and some DNA chemistry with 4 components acting in conjunction with [I'm making this bit up right now] 4 components of consciousness.
For example, in fluid mechanics there's a thing called Reynold's number which Google can tell you about in vast and intricate detail, which gives the point at which fluid flowing in a pipe goes from laminar to suddenly turbulent. The speed and pressure can be increased until suddenly, depending on viscosity and whatnot, the nice smooth fast lines of travel by fluid particles flips to turbulent and the flow goes bung. I theorize that a similar process applies to people. More and more, faster and faster, nice and smooth, all going hunky dory. Then suddenly, for no apparent reason, it goes turbulent and all hell breaks loose.
A similar thing happens on motorways as the number of vehicles increases. Flow is laminar. More and more vehicles flowing smoothly, then it flips, maybe for no reason at all, or just that somebody slows for a minute to look at somebody walking over a bridge. Flow goes slow, like turbulent flow in fluids in pipes. It can take hours for such a motorway flip to slow flow to clear if the traffic congestion remains. A "ghost" of some long gone event remains, maybe for hours in the right conditions.
A similar idea to the complexity of interdependent international systems is "How to make a pencil". Nobody knows how to make a pencil. It seems simple. But a modern pencil requires an infinite array of human activity because the wood can't be cut without a chain saw and processing factory, which requires everything to make the equipment that makes that factory and chainsaw. The paint requires the vast petrochemicals industry to get the feedstocks to make pigments, solvents and whatnot. The "lead" isn't lead of course, but graphite compounds which don't just magically make themselves.
Mqurice |
