3 ms·

I likewise find the "harmony with nature" idea to be laughable, but for a very different reason. If "nature" has any meaning at all, then we are part of it. O

I likewise find the "harmony with nature" idea to be laughable, but for a very different reason. If "nature" has any meaning at all, then we are part of it. Other animals are perfectly happy to change their situation to their benefit. Beavers, for example, can create lakes by choking off rivers. Are they living "in harmony" with nature? That feels like a strange question to me, and so I wonder why it shouldn't feel like a strange question when the beavers are replaced by humans.

lutorm 12y ago
Beavers, in some sense, must, because their impacts have had plenty of time to get back at the beavers if it was going to. That doesn't mean they didn't ruin it for some other species. It's kind of the idea that the most successful parasites can't kill their hosts too efficiently or quickly, because then they run out of places to live. If you screw up your environment like that, it'll come back to haunt you.
deciplex 12y ago
Animals without a natural check on their population and resource consumption can also experience a population boom followed by a sharp decline and even collapse, possibly extinction.
- lutusp 12y ago
  Yes, very true. I've recently been working on a mathematical extension of the Logistic function that models this process that's often seen in nature: http://arachnoid.com/peak_people http://arachnoid.com/peak_people
  - nitrogen 12y ago
    I wonder, could you create a closed form of the final solution by allowing only a portion of the nonrenewable resources to be consumed? At least, this should remove the sudden discontinuity in the slope of the nonrenewable resources function.
    - lutusp 12y ago
      > I wonder, could you create a closed form of the final solution by allowing only a portion of the nonrenewable resources to be consumed? You may not be surprised to hear that that was my original, much desired goal, but after much thought and experiment I realized that the abrupt discontinuity caused by the exhaustion of the nonrenewables is real, for the reason that, in practice, the rate of nonrenewable use increase as their exhaustion approaches, creating an abrupt knee that resists conversion to a closed form. > At least, this should remove the sudden discontinuity in the slope of the nonrenewable resources function. But that abrupt end to nonrenewables is real -- it reflects the fact that the growing colony becomes increasingly reliant on them as their exhaustion approaches. So the knee can't be removed without changing the meaning of the equation. Oh, well -- as it turns out, there are many very common differential equations that resist conversion to closed form. Orbital systems with more than two bodies are a classic example. Another one is the integral to the common exponential function that gives us the normal distribution -- very commonly used in statistics and elsewhere, but no closed form. All applications of the normal distribution use a numerical algorithm called the "error function" to produce results -- all of them approximate, and having the drawback that they cannot be symbolically differentiated or integrated. Maybe a much more skilled mathematician that I am could find a way around this obstacle, but I doubt it.

lutorm 12y ago

Beavers, in some sense, must, because their impacts have had plenty of time to get back at the beavers if it was going to. That doesn't mean they didn't ruin it for some other species. It's kind of the idea that the most successful parasites can't kill their hosts too efficiently or quickly, because then they run out of places to live. If you screw up your environment like that, it'll come back to haunt you.

deciplex 12y ago

Animals without a natural check on their population and resource consumption can also experience a population boom followed by a sharp decline and even collapse, possibly extinction.

lutusp 12y ago
Yes, very true. I've recently been working on a mathematical extension of the Logistic function that models this process that's often seen in nature: http://arachnoid.com/peak_people http://arachnoid.com/peak_people
- nitrogen 12y ago
  I wonder, could you create a closed form of the final solution by allowing only a portion of the nonrenewable resources to be consumed? At least, this should remove the sudden discontinuity in the slope of the nonrenewable resources function.
  - lutusp 12y ago
    > I wonder, could you create a closed form of the final solution by allowing only a portion of the nonrenewable resources to be consumed? You may not be surprised to hear that that was my original, much desired goal, but after much thought and experiment I realized that the abrupt discontinuity caused by the exhaustion of the nonrenewables is real, for the reason that, in practice, the rate of nonrenewable use increase as their exhaustion approaches, creating an abrupt knee that resists conversion to a closed form. > At least, this should remove the sudden discontinuity in the slope of the nonrenewable resources function. But that abrupt end to nonrenewables is real -- it reflects the fact that the growing colony becomes increasingly reliant on them as their exhaustion approaches. So the knee can't be removed without changing the meaning of the equation. Oh, well -- as it turns out, there are many very common differential equations that resist conversion to closed form. Orbital systems with more than two bodies are a classic example. Another one is the integral to the common exponential function that gives us the normal distribution -- very commonly used in statistics and elsewhere, but no closed form. All applications of the normal distribution use a numerical algorithm called the "error function" to produce results -- all of them approximate, and having the drawback that they cannot be symbolically differentiated or integrated. Maybe a much more skilled mathematician that I am could find a way around this obstacle, but I doubt it.