[ExI] Silence in the sky-but why?

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Fri, Oct 11, 2013 at 5:27 AM, Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:

> Thermodynamics trumps economics.

### Nah, it's the other way round. Not in the sense that money could
buy the perpetuum mobile but in the sense that our primary limitations
are not absolute, low level physical limits (e.g. total radiative
capacity of Earth at 500C surface temperature) but rather high-level
cognitive and social issues (stupidity, dominance, parasitism) that
keep us now at a level many orders of magnitude away from the physical
limits.

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 I tend to focus on thermodynamics
> vs. ecology because it's both a short-term large-scale problem
> and also a benchmark. It's useless trying to explain
> generic overshoot if you can't explain the one facet of it:
> the energy limitations. It's simple problem, we have lots of
> empirical data, yet that benchmark already indicates a failure.

### The inability to finish Yucca Mountain has nothing to do with
thermodynamics. Societal failure is like rotting fish - it starts at
the head.

Rafal