3 ms·

This is really insightful. A lot of human “progress” and activity includes us exporting growing amounts of high entropy waste, for a mostly unaccounted for, def

This is really insightful. A lot of human “progress” and activity includes us exporting growing amounts of high entropy waste, for a mostly unaccounted for, deferred cost. In most natural systems there is no waste - everything gets recycled. We create a mess digging for elements around the planet, consuming the “value” of the things we make from those elements (and large amounts of energy) in a way which lasts a very short time, and disposing of the waste which then mostly get spread around the planet in even greater mess. I find it difficult to see how automation will easily solve our waste problem - it seems many orders of magnitude easier to try to solve it before human waste gets to a giant garbled heap or gets spread around the atmosphere/oceans/groundwater/(soon low earth orbit) where it’s difficult to retrieve, and seems to cause huge problems to the natural world (and ultimately is) by being in places it shouldn’t be. Why are humans so good/bad at creating a mess? Are we equipped with skills/incentives to solve this conundrum, or will we continue to drown in our mess?

kragen 7y ago
The Earth doesn't recycle solar energy; it wastes ≈100% of it by radiating it away into space. Over 99% of it never even gets photosynthesized, just being absorbed as heat and then reradiated as infrared. Far less than 1% was ever accumulated in fossil fuels, and of course accumulating it as heat at the surface would be fatal. Nor does it recycle, for example, crustal iron; once the iron finds its way into a subduction zone and melts into the mantle, it gradually finds its way to the core, never to return. Even the fast CO₂ cycle is noticeably leaky, as a substantial amount of CO₂ is taken up by marine organisms that sink to the bottom and stay there, eventually being compacted into limestone and remaining limestone for hundreds of millions of years (the slow CO₂ cycle), until probably being liberated again by volcanism. So, I think that for most definitions of "waste", it is false that in most natural systems there is no waste. It's true that recovering materials from the atmosphere and oceans is more difficult than mining them. But most of the materials we're discussing don't end up in the atmosphere and oceans; they end up in landfills. And recovering them from landfills is, generally, much easier than mining them from natural deposits. Landfills are much more concentrated and heterogeneous deposits of "valuable" elements than the ores from which they are mined; for example, a single accidentally discarded catalytic converter may contain 5 grams of platinum-group metals, which are reduced and relatively easy to recover; commonly mined natural ores of platinum-group metals (the Merensky, chromitite, and contact types of deposits) typically contain 5 grams per tonne of ore, mostly oxidized and thus requiring not only froth flotation but also smelting. And catalytic converter platinum-group elements are far from the only "valuable" elements in landfills. The trouble is that when the humans go digging around in landfills with their bare hands, it reduces their life expectancy a lot, because of poisons, injuries, and poor safety practices around refining. This is not a new problem for mining — the Spanish silver mines were a death sentence for the enslaved indigenous Americans sentenced to work in them — but the particular measures needed to solve the problem are different for landfills than for other mining. Automation will largely solve them. I suspect that the same ritual-pollution taboos that cause the humans to deprecate garbage collectors, cannibals, and undertakers are a major factor in the slow development of landfill mining. A Kessler syndrome in LEO will be only a short-term problem, as the lifetime of objects there is limited to decades, not even a single million years!, by atmospheric drag, and the quantity of mass there is limited by launch "costs". MEO Kessler syndrome would be a more serious problem. Doing things creates messes. Lowering entropy locally — one definition of life — raises entropy globally. Doing more things will create more messes. Doing things intelligently can create safely contained messes.

kragen 7y ago

The Earth doesn't recycle solar energy; it wastes ≈100% of it by radiating it away into space. Over 99% of it never even gets photosynthesized, just being absorbed as heat and then reradiated as infrared. Far less than 1% was ever accumulated in fossil fuels, and of course accumulating it as heat at the surface would be fatal. Nor does it recycle, for example, crustal iron; once the iron finds its way into a subduction zone and melts into the mantle, it gradually finds its way to the core, never to return. Even the fast CO₂ cycle is noticeably leaky, as a substantial amount of CO₂ is taken up by marine organisms that sink to the bottom and stay there, eventually being compacted into limestone and remaining limestone for hundreds of millions of years (the slow CO₂ cycle), until probably being liberated again by volcanism. So, I think that for most definitions of "waste", it is false that in most natural systems there is no waste. It's true that recovering materials from the atmosphere and oceans is more difficult than mining them. But most of the materials we're discussing don't end up in the atmosphere and oceans; they end up in landfills. And recovering them from landfills is, generally, much easier than mining them from natural deposits. Landfills are much more concentrated and heterogeneous deposits of "valuable" elements than the ores from which they are mined; for example, a single accidentally discarded catalytic converter may contain 5 grams of platinum-group metals, which are reduced and relatively easy to recover; commonly mined natural ores of platinum-group metals (the Merensky, chromitite, and contact types of deposits) typically contain 5 grams per tonne of ore, mostly oxidized and thus requiring not only froth flotation but also smelting. And catalytic converter platinum-group elements are far from the only "valuable" elements in landfills. The trouble is that when the humans go digging around in landfills with their bare hands, it reduces their life expectancy a lot, because of poisons, injuries, and poor safety practices around refining. This is not a new problem for mining — the Spanish silver mines were a death sentence for the enslaved indigenous Americans sentenced to work in them — but the particular measures needed to solve the problem are different for landfills than for other mining. Automation will largely solve them. I suspect that the same ritual-pollution taboos that cause the humans to deprecate garbage collectors, cannibals, and undertakers are a major factor in the slow development of landfill mining. A Kessler syndrome in LEO will be only a short-term problem, as the lifetime of objects there is limited to decades, not even a single million years!, by atmospheric drag, and the quantity of mass there is limited by launch "costs". MEO Kessler syndrome would be a more serious problem. Doing things creates messes. Lowering entropy locally — one definition of life — raises entropy globally. Doing more things will create more messes. Doing things intelligently can create safely contained messes.