[ExI] How to make progress (was Re: Why do political and economic leaders deny Peak Oil and Climate Change?)

[Alfio Puglisi]

On Mon, Sep 9, 2013 at 5:23 PM, John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Sep 9, 2013 Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:
>
>
>>
> > Why, why has exi-chat regressed into a slimy pool, full of reactionary
>> trolls?
>>
>
> When did you turn into somebody who refuses to let facts change their
> belief about what is true?
>
> > I think another hiatus from ExI is in order
>>
>
> COWARD!
>

I do wonder too whether the benefits of lurking around here to read the
occasional interesting post outweight the tiredness of having to sift
through all the BS. In not even 24 hours we have 1) someone barely
containing his excitement suggesting prison terms because the Arctic is not
melting as fast as he was daydreaming, but only faster than any model has
predicted 2) someone else giggling on how Europe's biggest economy will
soon have to scramble for food, apparently because of a couple of solar
panels he doesn't like and 3) various people going "la la la can't hear
you" whenever the words "expensive" and "oil" are uttered at less than
three paragraph's worth of distance.

That's depressing. Worse, it's boring. That must be as close as a capital
sin you can get around here.

I can't get how any car-loving techie shouldn't be just drooling thinking
of a Tesla Model S. I can't get how anyone with a sense for order of
magnitudes is not awed at the thought of a cubic km of ice undergoing a
phase transition and slowly liquefying with fractal features probably going
below optical microscope resolutions, and then thinking that hundreds of
billion of tonnes of the stuff (already out of my paltry imagination
faculties) are undergoing the process and still are but a microscopic
fraction of the total - while sipping a drink full of ice cubes. I can't
get how anyone who has seen a coal plant can't scream "civilization!" in
front of a magical piece of silicon which produces electricity with no
moving parts just holding it high up. I can't get how having more energy
sources available than one can count, all technologically ready and within
a few cents in cost from each other, can't awe anyone who has tried to
pedal on a bicycle with a generator bulb. LEDs can shine red and white
without heating up - cold light, get that! SpaceX goes to the space station
and wants to build a horizontal flavour of the experience in California. We
can describe biological nanomachines like the influenza virus atom-by-atom
and be overwhelmed a second later by the realization that we are still
clueless on how a couple dozens of aminoacids fold together without even
thinking.

Instead, one gets a lot of posts "the government this" and "the
environmentalists that". Cheer up, people! We should just spend our whole
day with our mouth wide open, struck with Stendhal's syndrome upon seeing a
cat, a machine honed by millions of years of evolution to be a perfect
hunter of no less sophisticated small creatures. Maybe we are getting old.

Alfio
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