Objectives of the ELAM (Earth’s Lodgers’ Activity Management) movement. by Denis Arthur Frith

Hi Denis,

You raise a number of great points. There are certainly things that a FM could not feasibly provide viewer foreknowledge about. I think that if they are invented, they will have their place alongside the techniques we have been using all along. They will also open up new applications that prediction alone could not manage. Thank you for what you have added. Your article is now on my spreadsheet to read. Have a great weekend.

Aaron

Dear Denis,

Extremely deep analytical essays in the spirit of Cartesian doubt, optimism and deep knowledge of the problems of modern Humanity. You have a concrete Program of action and it is important that you engineer. We must find the will for the Future of our children and grandchildren. We must remember that "Freedom is the recognition of necessity" (Hegel). Scientific picture of the world should be the same rich sense of the "LifeWorld" (Husserl), as the picture of the world of lyricists . We must every hour, every minute, every second to hear the Voice of the Earth. Call for earthlings: "We start the path ," Hope - our compass earth

I invite you to my forum and my essay FQXi Essay 2012-2013.

I wish you good luck!

All the Best,

Vladimir

Dear Denis,

Thank you very much for your answer! You are doing very important, noble work for the benefit of future generations of spacecraft called "Earth." I wish success to ELAM and success to you in the contest and in research.

Best regards,

Vladimir

Hello Denis ~

In my own essay - "How Should Humanity Steer the Future ?" by Margriet Anne O'Regan - I recommend 're-centralizing' women as the foundation on which to build our 'redemption'.

This recommendation lends itself to this end, i believe & hope to show, due to the fact that 'the agendas' of men not only differ markedly from that of (un-spoiled) women but that 'quantity' rather than 'quality' is an integral & highly destructive component of the male agenda. This grab for 'quantity' is the impetus behind this lethal notion that continued growth is 'the way to go'.

I say 'un-spoiled' women because the agenda of women un-spoiled by patriarchy always veers towards 'quality' rather than vast numbers of anything.

I hope you read, like & rate my essay !!

Thank you

Margriet.

Denis,

I'm glad the delay let me get to your essay before scoring closed. I agree entirely with your analysis and you described the argument well. What I've been thinking deeply about in recent years is implementation. Do you think that just; "A Cultural Revolution fostered by the ELAM movement" will happen, or counter the economic forces that drive our actions? And even if we do, what do we actually 'switch' to?

I champion renewable energy resources and was recently Architect for the larges UK wind farm (Thames estuary) but in terms of environmental 'costs in use' even that is small meat. It takes massive energy to construct, more to maintain, lifetime is limited, and it takes more energy to remove. Photovoltaic science is improving but only gradually.

I determined we need a quantum leap in understanding nature. We can then bring in technology that doesn't ravish the planet. I suggest that's treating the fundamental cause rather than the symptoms. Don't you get the feeling that many essays here consider peripherals, symptoms or semantics. Almost none get at the nub, which is about fundamental physics', which is 'nature'.

Of course the problem is poor vision. My own essay may hit the very crux of our confusion about nature, allowing unification, which will lead to far better use of solar and other renewables. But Scientists are so embedded with old thinking the can't even SEE it! (non scientist's of curse don't see it either. So I'm now a little distraught. Even with good answers available our short sightedness abides.

Sorry to rant a bit but I think you'll understand my frustration. You epitomize it in part with;"people are misusing their free will because of lack of understanding of the long term consequences" Admittedly a few others also have seen the value, but not enough to count. Your essay paints the picture well. Full marks for that, and I hope you keep up the good work. Mine is allegorical, showing how better thinking finds a real and comprehendable solution to the wierd nonsense of the last 100 years (see the short analysis in my last few blog posts).

Best of luck getting in the final group

Peter

Hi Denis,

Your essay made a very important point. "The accent to date has been on the benefits of technological innovations without taking into account the irrevocable ecological costs."

Without taking away from that true conclusion there are hints of change in technologies like Wikipedia.

"Improved understanding will encourage altruism and pride in contributing to a society making best possible use of the remaining natural resources." That is your sentence and I like it.

Don Limuti

Hello Denis

Life is an existence proof. If life can do something, we can hope that technology can do it too. Life has existed on Earth for a long time. Your ideas are one way that technological civilization might do so also. However, there are other possibilities that score better on a utilitarian scale.

For example, Lewis [1] estimates that there is enough material in the asteroid belt to build habitats for 10,000,000,000,000,000 people. (10,000 x 1 trillion) - - probably an overestimate. If we assume that every human life has its share of good, that is a lot of utility. Meltzer et al [2] shows a possible method for construction of these habitats. Armstrong and Sandberg [3] show a possible method for settling, not only the asteroid belt or even the galaxy, but thousands of galaxies. Anderberg's essay in this contest [4] suggests a method that might result in even higher utility.

These all are forms of singularity and require exponential growth. Exponential growth sometimes hits limits. Nevertheless, even if we assign these a fairly low probability, they still have a humongous expected value (probability times value). That suggests that they are worth at least some attempt to make them happen. I suggest that even a future requiring drastic cutbacks should have some hope and some R&D to support that hope.

[1] John Lewis, Mining the Sky: Untold Riches from the Asteroids, Comets, and Planets, Perseus Publishing, 1997, pg. 194.

[2] Philip Metzer et al, "Affordable, Rapid Bootstrapping of Space Industry and Solar System Civilization," Journal of Aerospace Engineering, April 2012.

[3] Stuart Armstrong & Anders Sandberg, "Eternity in six hours: Intergalactic spreading of intelligent life and sharpening the Fermi paradox," Acta Astronautica, Aug-Sept 2013.

[4] Tommy Anderberg, A Future Brighter than 100 Trillion Suns, FQXi essay contest.

Science fiction sometimes works.

Consider portfolio strategy. If you have good reason to think the market is going down, you could make money by shorting stocks. However, if your portfolio has nothing but shorts, scheduled to mature at the same time, you are putting all your eggs in one basket and are quite likely to be wiped out. You are right about resource limitations. However, it seems wise not to sell technology totally short. Sometimes it comes up with ways to conserve resources, or to make resources out of things that were not resources before.

Hello Denis

Life consists of lots of molecular machines inside of a cell. There are machines that generate energy, machines that pump things through cell walls, and so forth. If we had designed it, we would call it nanotech. Indeed one of the paths to nanotech is to use the machinery of DNA and RNA to make our own versions. We can already manufacture DNA to order.

You say "Technology always irreversibly uses natural resources." It that true of the "technology" inside of a cell?

I quote from Lance McGill's paper in this contest: "... one issue I have dealt with over the course of many articles has been the concept of "using up resources." While on the surface, this seems to be a logical train of thought, it lies very firmly in the assumption that any given resource once used can never be reused. While there are many examples of such one-way transformations of resources in our current reality, it seems unlikely that once we have acquired the ability to manipulate matter at the atomic level at will that any given resource will remain 'scarce'. In truth, the overwhelming majority of our 'used resources' lying dormant in garbage dumps will most likely become the source of vast amounts of recycled resources. "

I am not claiming that this will absolutely become true, but can you be sure that it absolutely will not? Life is an existence proof that total recycling is possible.