THE THERMODYNAMIC CRISIS

Globalization has catalyzed the decline of the nation-state and spawned decentralized violence/opposition (which is increasingly effective due to innovations in theory and DIY technology). The result has been an ongoing crisis in the global control system we use to mitigate the impact of emerging challenges -- our responses/efforts are therefore slower, less effective, and more divisive. Much of this has been documented in this blog and the book, Brave New War.

The Other Crisis
This "Control System Crisis" is particularly unfortunate since globalization has also created a "Thermodynamic Crisis" characterized by increasingly expensive energy (demand growth that far exceeds supply growth as well as expensive/inefficient substitution for declining sources) and ecosystem overload (global warming, pandemics, water/soil depletion, etc.).* The reason for this is that our global scale civilization has exceeded:

• The production capacity of stored solar (oil, natural gas, etc.) energy resources. As demand (driven by 2 billion more people, a 3x gain, becoming middle class consumers) continues to outstrip supply, we will see energy inputs become increasingly expensive.
  
• The carrying capacity and natural defenses of our ecosystem. More specifically, our civilization's entropy production has exceeded the baseline negative entropy of our environmental systems.
  
• Our global system's capacity for evolutionary change. Incremental changes to the global system through technological innovation, economic restructuring, and social reengineering can't produce the results needed to reverse or slow this crisis.

The Impact
Worse, there are signs that these crises are coupling into a global scale positive feedback loop that threatens increasingly frequent disasters (of a wide variety of types).

*I'll provide a MUCH more detailed examination of this in my new book, "The Resilient Community."

Comments

[Duncan Kinder]

Translation: in the future, the noise to signal ratio will tend to increase whereas in the modern era, the reverse has been the case.

The overall thrust of the modern era had been to transmit ever clearer, stronger signals.

The overall thrust of our future efforts, instead, should be to detect ever weaker and fuzzier signals.

[NietzschesGhost]

I was wondering when someone would start talking about thermodynamics. Bravo. It's about time someone with a voice started considering that angle.

Completely off-topic: I'm looking forward to your commentary on the recent events in Lebanon.

[namhenderson]

Interesting point about the signal to noise ratios...

It is true that it seems as if we have reached a point where our "control" of complexity is not as effective as it once was/appeared.

[enigma_foundry]

One of the under-rated texts of the previous century had to be C.P. Snow's The Two Cultures. He talks about problems that develop when his society divided it's knowledge into compartments, or cultures.

One example he gave was the fact that many of those educated in Liberal Arts could not recall or explain the Second Law of Thermo-dynamics.

Prescient, or what?

The only way to break these positive feedback loops is through the construction of alternate economic and social structures, and there is ever indications that those structures are in their incipient stages.

Getting there is not going to be pretty, unless the present incumbants can see this is their interest, too. It's a crises of education, fundamentally.

[julianj]

This is getting really interesting. I look forward to your analyses.

@namhenderson Joseph Tainter wrote a significant book called The Collapse of Complex Societies in which he postulated that they reached a complexity where they were getting diminishing returns on investment in more complexity and so devolved into simpler societies. He tries not to be "negative" about this devolution process, but I am fairly certain that the people involved didn't enjoy it very much, even if they survived it.

[g48]

I've been thinking down the same trail for a while now too. And it looks as if a lot of other folks here have been also.

Looks like convergence, and a new paradigm emerging.

This is going to be *very* interesting.

[M. Simon]

Total crap.

The control of the means of production by the individual makes systems more resilient. It does make government more brittle due to its inability to act, and when it acts to do the right thing. Good. People will still trade with each other for what they want. You know, that capitalism thingy.

We are no where near running out of stored energy and new sources of diffuse energy (solar, wind) are coming on line with increasing frequency as costs come down.

And then there are things like this which are not 50 years away but 5.

Easy Low Cost No Radiation Fusion
http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/2006/11/easy-low-cost-no-radiation-fusion.html

Experiments are underway:

WB-7 First Plasma
http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/2008/01/wb-7-first-plasma.html

Here is what you can do to speed things up:

Starting A Fusion Program In Your Home Town
http://iecfusiontech.blogspot.com/2008/05/starting-fusion-program-in-your-home.html

And speaking of the second law of thermodynamics - may I suggest you get an education. It only applies to closed systems in equilibrium. It also ignores the fact that you can trade energy for information. In fact entropy and information are duals. Exactly. As long as a system can receive energy flows from outside the system information (the opposite of entropy) can continue to increase. We live in such a system. Our anti-entropic engine is the sun. When you consider solar inputs, all the burning of fuels that man does for energy represents 1/10,000th of solar input. And that is not even a small fraction of off planet resources. Or the possibility of designing organisms to harvest energy or materials (like organisms that concentrate gold for instance - already in existence).

We are entering an age of unparalleled abundance and you want to spend you time kvetching. If it makes you happy.

[Duncan Kinder]

"In fact entropy and information are duals. Exactly. As long as a system can receive energy flows from outside the system information (the opposite of entropy) can continue to increase. We live in such a system. Our anti-entropic engine is the sun."

This is what I was referring to in my posts about signal / noise ratios. The higher the signal / noise ratio the more information and the less energy.

I merely am suggesting that we be better attuned to receiving the ample signals we are getting from the sun and less concerned with our pumping out signals through fossil fuel concentrations.

Whether, in practice, that may mean the technologies you suggest is an open question.

[Duncan Kinder]

In my prior post, i meant "less entropy" not "less energy."