Nut Nut's Attempt At A Book About Politics & Society
Dear Forum Members,
Over in the poker threads, they have members who blog about their poker experience. I've been wanting to write a book but haven't been able to get over the hump just writing in private. I need the feedback and interaction so I'm inviting you to read and interact.
I'm personally quite fond of the TV series Game of Thrones, so I would like to occasionally throw out a few quotes from the series which provide some mindset grounding.
The first quote is from the character Theon Greyjoy in season one. After Ned Stark is taken prisoner and Robb Stark declares war .... Theon asks Robb if he is afraid. When Robb Stark replies that he is indeed afraid, Theon replies "good, it means that you're not stupid".
So I acknowledge that I am afraid.
The second quote is from Cersei Lannister in season one. In it she tells Ned Stark "when you play the Game of Thrones, you win or you die, there is no middle ground". So, I understand that I'm offering to run the world in a different fashion that the current lords of the realm and they aren't going to take kindly to me if I develop any traction.
The final quote (for now) is from the character Tormund Giantsbane when the wildings were contemplating joining Jon Snow in the Battle of the Bastards. Tormund speaks of the bravery Jon Snow showed in saving the wildings at Hardhome and how he died for them. He tells the gathered. "He died for us and if we're not willing to do the same for him, we're cowards. And if that's what we are, then we deserve to be the last of the free folk".
This last quote speaks to my self image .... that if I don't have the courage to attempt to participate in an effort to preserve human life on this delicate version of a planet that we all inhabit, then I am a coward.
So ... thank you all in advance for supporting me in my effort to not be a coward.
About God, The Universe & Science
There is nothing in the world which gives rise to more tribal division than differing interpretations of God.
The scientific method to which I adhere informs me that there are some things I will never know. I am content with a certain amount of mystery and the limits of human sensory apparatus.
I do however, have an intuitive self and a logical self which lead me to certain baseline assumptions.
I don't believe in a deceptive God which is tricking us humans with physical evidence. I grasp with a sense of humility that I don't have the means to rule out that possibility, but I'm rolling with a non-deceptive God.
This version of God which I believe in is revealed through scientific investigation and a scientific method which works like this.
1) Observation - what we can measure
2) Hypothesis - what we suggest might be a possible explanation for what we measure
3) Experiment - a test designed for the purpose of testing a hypothesis
4) Results - the data yielded from the experiment
5) Theory - the best possible explanation for the experimental results. Note .... this is not the same thing as a conclusion. In science, there is always room for doubt and re-examination. Scientists never reach a point of absolute certainty.
The scientific method reveals a universe which is about 13.8 billion years old and has been expanding since its inception.
My intuitive self imagines this as God exhaling. When God exhales, the universe expands and when God inhales, the universe contracts into that infinitely dense phenomena which gave rise to the Big Bang. So .... in my view, we are living in a repetitive cycle of God's inhalations and exhalations. This would not be our first rodeo in such a setting.
The Story of How We Arrived Where We Are Today - Part 1, the Origin of Life
For the first 2/3 of the history of the universe, there was no Earth or related solar system. And since a year describes aspect of the Earth's orbital relationship with our Sun, there was no such thing as a year during that initial 2/3.
The Earth was formed and due to its chemical composition and distance from the sun, our planet had the potential for biological life which emerged relatively soon after its formation.
Biological Life Vs Chemical Life
It's important to be clear about how we define the term "life".
The universe was created as a dynamic entity which was responsive to various environmental forces of nature. So, from a chemical and physical standpoint, the universe has always been alive. The biological definition of life involves a cellular component and the capacity for replication which involves DNA.
DNA
The Earth was born chemically alive and those chemical reactions gave rise to compounds called nucleotides which ultimately became the letters of the language of biological life or DNA.
It's a simple language. It has only 4 letters. All of the words are 3 letters long. so it has only 64 possible words. The variety comes in the infinite number of ways that the words are put together.
Those nucleotides bound together in long strings and provides the instructions for the synthesis of amino acids which are the building blocks of proteins.
Eventually, millions of these nucleotides came together with the cumulative instructions necessary to build a cell wall and enable a cell to copy itself in a process called mitosis. Life on Earth was on !!!
God provided a dynamic means by which the letters of DNA could be changed and therefore alter the protein synthesis of the cell. Scientists call this mutation.
Scientists have a name for the organism which represents our most recent common ancestor. It's call LUCA or Last Universal Common Ancestor. LUCA came into existence about 4 billion years ago.
The Story of How We Arrived Here Today - Part 2, Earth During Pre-Human History
The Earth has been quite dynamic during its 4.5 billion year history. The land mass has been moving all around the planet since inception the way a restless sleeper moves around a bed in their sleep.
When we think of the Earth, it's important to separate it into its three forms.
Solid (core, mantle and crust),
Liquid (water)
Gas (primarily atmosphere)
The early Earth, like its neighbors Mars and Venus, had an atmosphere which was primarily CO2 and no oxygen. So we humans couldn't have survived in the version of Earth that God created.
The Earth was oxygenated by an organism called cyanobacteria whose metabolism was based upon oxygenic photosynthesis.
This metabolism was basically CO2 + H20 + sunlight ==> glucose (C6H12O6) + O2. Not only did this metabolism create oxygen, it also created glucose which is the building block of plant life and an essential ingredient of animal metabolism or cellular respiration.
Life on Earth and the physical planet changed dynamically.
At some point, cellular life become more complex with the introduction of the mitochondria (a cell within the cell) and eukaryotic life began. Eventually, multicellular life came into being and than sexual reproduction or meiosis was introduced as a means to add more dynamism to the process of rearranging the letters of DNA and a boom in the diversity of the animal kingdom.
Life has ebbed and flowed. Species have died out and been replaced by new ones which are better suited to the ever changing condition.
Dramatic changes in the environment have resulted in events called mass extinctions, of which 5 have been documented in the last 450 million years. Emptying out the playing field has the consequence of creating a new playing field for successors which are best suited to the new conditions.
Mammals
Our mammalian ancestors came into being several hundred million years ago. If you want to understand more about mammals, then read the following.
Most recent mass extinction
The most recent mass extinction occurred about 65M years ago when a large celestial object crashed into what is now known as the Yucatan near Mexico. The dinosaurs and almost all megafuana (animals larger than 50 kg) were wiped out in the process. The large animals that did survive such as alligators and sea turtles were able to do so based upon their ability to live below the protective surface of the water.
The mammals that survived the last extinction had weights that measured just ounces.
When the dust settled from the last mass extinction. The playing field was emptied out for our ancestors to grow and thrive. Successful mutations led the way for primates and gave way to monkeys and apes.
Part 2- Continued
Planetary Configuration
As stated previously, the land mass of the planet has been moving all around like a restless sleeper.
About 2.6 million years ago, the land mass arrived in its current configuration when the Panama Isthmus slide into place and closed off the opening between N America and S America through which the Atlantic & Pacific Oceans formerly flowed freely.
This began the geologic period known as the Pleistocene.
Milankovitch Cycles
Since the Earth entered the Pleistocene, the planet's climate has been dominated by Milankovitch Cycle's which describe the Earth's cyclical orbital relationship with our Sun. Each cycle lasts about 100,000 years.
The Milankovitch Cycles are basically like a seesaw and feedback loop.
As the planet orbits in a manner which it receives more sunlight it works like this .....
More sunlight ==> more warmth ==> more release of greenhouse gases from earth and ocean reservoirs ==> more heat ==> interglacial periods
This continues until the planetary orbit leads to less sunlight and then the process moves in reverse leading to glacial maxima where places like NYC and Boston are under ice.
For the 2.6M years prior to the year 1900, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere a oscillated between 160 and 280 ppm (parts per million) and the average temperature on Earth oscillated by ~ +/- 5C.
Personally, I don't think the scientific explanation of atmospheric concentration in ppm is easily understandable for laypersons.I think it's easier to understand that in the coldest part of a glacial maximum, the weight of CO2 in the atmosphere is equivalent to te weight of 7 Mt Everest's and during an interglacial it's about 12 Mt Everests.
So, humans evolved and built civilization on a version of Earth with 7-12 Mt Everests of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Modern Humans
Modern humans arrived on the scene about 300,000 years ago. Meaning we have lived through 3 Milankovitch Cycles and the oscillations between glacial maxima and inter-glacials such as the one we are presently occupying.
Holocene
The Holocene period succeeded the Pleistocene ~ 11,700 years ago. In the larger scheme of things, this is just the most recent interglacial. The big difference is that human capability with tool building had evolved to a point where agricultural civilization became possible.
A bit about humans .....
Most people differentiate humans from other animals based upon our brains ..... which is certainly fair.
But one aspect about our physical dominance over other land animals is our endurance. No land animal can cover more ground in a 24 hour period than a human can and that physical endurance was a major factor in our ability to hunt game during our history as hunter gatherers.
Check out the results in distance racing events like the 10k or marathon and you will see that the results are dominated by people from Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda which is from the region where the human population originated. Those people have not evolved away our ancestry and therefore lost that aspect of physical dominance in favor of newer survival traits.
Check out the results in distance racing events like the 10k or marathon and you will see that the results are dominated by people from Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda which is from the region where the human population originated. Those people have not evolved away our ancestry and therefore lost that aspect of physical dominance in favor of newer survival traits.
This seems pretty spurious. Distance runners have a higher percentage of slow twitch muscle fibers compared to sprinters who have more fast-twitch muscle fibers, but there is no reason to think that slow-twitch fibers should be the default or that evolution/natural selection worked in the direction of slow --> fast.
How We Got Here - Part Three, The Holocene Until The Industrial Revolution
The Agricultural Revolution changed human societies in a profound manner. Instead of tribal competition for hunting grounds, we were competing for agricultural territory. The survival advantage came to the largest and best equipped cohesive tribes.
The competition was brutal and 95% of male DNA lineage was wiped out across the during the Y-chromosome bottleneck of the Neolithic Revolution.
The reasoning for this was pretty straightforward. All groups require a decision making apparatus for competitive advantage so power was concentrated among very few males who were given breeding priority. Conquered males were either killed or enslaved. Conquered females were kept alive as they were necessary to grow the population for competitive advantage.
It's important to note that these changes were organically rooted in our biology as they were taking place simultaneously across parts of the world which had no communication with each other.
Domestication
People took wild dogs and animals and bred them to serve human purposes ..... creating cattle for example.
But people were also domesticated and nature rewarded a system in which the majority of its members were obedient while maintaining a small population of people who would compete for the throne. In the words of the comedian George Carlin .... all the people in power want from us is "obedient workers".
Religion
The need for larger population as a survival advantage created an evolutionary question. How do we create a cohesive group when the numbers of the population grow large ?
The answer was fear. Both in the physical consequences that the powerful rulers could deliver and the potential for a horrific eternity which could come from crossing a judging God.
So ... the myth of a judging God was invented as a survival necessity. It turns out that religion and evolution are not mutually exclusive concepts .... religion is a product of evolution as is everything else.
The ruling elites provided a combination of dominating the outlook of an afterlife and the physical force necessary to punish those who broke the rules necessary to maintain tribal order. They successfully brainwashed the citizens to believe that the rules necessary to maintain order came from a divine and absolute source of what is right and wrong. They claimed to be God's spokespersons and the best of them were successful at doing so.
Technology & The Rise & Fall of Empires
Just like the dynamic rise and fall of species who flourished and then became extinct ..... human civilization has seen a continuing rise and fall of powerful leaders and societies.
Most often, it was technological innovation with things like the printing press, guns and ships which paved the way for new emerging powers. Nuclear weapons are a modern example of dominant technology. Environmental destruction and overshoot was often the cause of societal decay as in the case of the Mayans.
The Second Agricultural Revolution
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Ag...
In the 17th-18th centuries, agriculture underwent a major increase in productivity which paved the way for more labor to available for a future Industrial Revolution.
Industrial Revolution
The Industrial Revolution was enabled via harnessing the energy from long deceased fossil deposits.
Before going into detail about that .... let's take a step back and review the metabolic balance between plants and animals.
Animals use oxygen as an input and create CO2 as a waste output in a process called cellular respiration.
Plants do the opposite .... they use our waste product CO2 as an input and create oxygen as a waste output in a process called photosynthesis.
Prior to the Industrial Revolution, there were ~ 800M humans who each exhaled ~ 800 lbs (0.4 tons) of CO2 per year. The cumulative amount of CO2 we exhaled in 1750 was 0.32 gigatons.
The Industrial Revolution created machines which emulate animals in their creation of CO2 as a waste product. As a result of both increase in population and these machines, the cumulative CO2 footprint of humans is now 40 gigatons per year.
We have increased our carbon footprint by 130x in the last 300 years !!!!
And there is no corresponding increase on the other side of the equation .... photosynthesis has remained the same.
We need to ask ourselves what happens to a formerly balanced system when we increase one side of it by 130x ???
That is what I endeavor to explain to people along with a recipe for making the most out of a collapsing system.
Creating Competent & Literate Citizens With Science Fundamentals
Nearly every citizen in the United States gets a driver's license. They are motivated to do so because driving in the US provides a huge survival advantage.
The complexity of a drivers license exam is covered in a 30 or 40 page guide which a student needs to memorize and be tested upon.
The science background which is necessary to understand the predicament of human civilization isn't any more complicated than a drivers license exam ..... but people don't know it because they don't believe they have a personal incentive to do so. They're wrong.
I'm going to lay out the basic science which I would pay American citizens to learn in order for them to become more competent citizens and voters.
If you’re looking for literary criticism I would recommend finding peer-reviewed sources and using wiki more as a starting point
Science Lesson # 1 - What is Energy ?
Another term for energy is radiation or EMR (Electro Magnetic Radiation )
Energy comes in a variety / spectrum of frequency and wavelengths which are inversely proportional to each other. Something that Einstein demonstrated.
A radio wave is a low frequency form of energy with a long wavelength while a gamma ray is on the other end of the spectrum with a high frequency and short wavelength. Other types of energy fall somewhere in between.
The science associated with determination of frequency is spectroscopy.
A single wave / unit of energy is called a photon.
For the purposes of understanding climate change we need to understand that the energy which is coming from the sun toward the Earth is largely in the visible portion of the spectrum and the energy being emitted from the earth is infrared radiation or heat. We need to understand that heat is not some amorphous thing that we feel. It is a physical thing.
The reason that the energy being emitted from the Earth is not the same as the energy emitted from the Sun is the temperature of the object they are being emitted from. A physicist named Planck helped demonstrate the relationship between temperature and energy frequency.
Science Lesson # 2- What is Matter ?
One of the thing we need to understand about matter is that like the universe itself, it is dynamic and subject to change.
A student in a high school chemistry class will be introduced to the Periodic Table of Elements.
A single unit of an element is called an atom.
Each atom contains a nucleus and is surrounded by an energetic field with particles called electrons.
Science Lesson # 2- What is Matter ?
One of the thing we need to understand about matter is that like the universe itself, it is dynamic and subject to change.
A student in a high school chemistry class will be introduced to the Periodic Table of Elements.
A single unit of an element is called an atom.
Each atom contains a nucleus and is surrounded by an energetic field with particles called electrons. Inside the nucleus are both protons and neutrons.
The name and number of an element is determined by the number of protons in its nucleus. For example, Carbon is atomic #6 on the periodic table because a carbon atom always has 6 protons in its nucleus.
However, a carbon atom doesn't always have the same number of neutrons in its nucleus. Sometimes it has 6 neutrons, other times it has 7 or 8. These different versions of the same element are called isotopes.
In nature, atoms often join together to form molecules in which the respective atoms share their electrons.
The energetic bonds which hold atoms together also have a characteristic frequency just like EMR and these can be measured via spectrometry. So matter is really a combination of particles and energy.
The phenomena by which the contents of a nucleus can change and matter can be changed from one element to another is called radioactive decay. It's not terrible important to understand this in detail, but it's a super important tool for scientists to understand the geologic past and how the universe has aged and changed over time. A scientist named Rutherford demonstrated radioactive decay in lab setting.
Science Lesson # 3 - What's in The Air ?
The Earth's atmosphere is densest near the surface and it thins at higher altitude. That's why climber need supplemental oxygen to survive for any length of time at the peak of Mt. Everest which is less than 6 miles above sea level.
While we can't see it, the air is full of gas molecules which we can't see with basic human vision.
There are two categories of gases.
1) Well mixed gases whose concentrations are roughly the same all around the planet's surface.
2) Local gases such as water vapor which are more abundant in humid environments.
The distribution of well mixed gases in the atmosphere at the Earth's surface is rough as follows. As the altitude increases, the concentration decreases.
Nitrogen (N2) ~ 78%
Oxygen (O2) ~ 21%
Argon ~ 0.9%
Carbon Dioxide (CO2) ~ 0.043%
Other (~0.07%)
What is a greenhouse gas ?
A greenhouse gas is a molecule whose energetic bonds fall into the frequency range that is compatible with absorption of infrared radiation which is the physical entity we call heat energy.
The most important GHG gas molecules are CO2, Methane (CH4) and water vapor (H20). There are others, but that would be a more advanced lesson.
The way that greenhouse gases warm the Earth is by absorbing outgoing heat radiation from the Earth and keeping it in the Earth's atmosphere. In the absence of any GHG's in the atmosphere, the Earth would be 30C colder. The oceans would be frozen and there would be no human life present. So ... a moderate amount of GHG's is a good thing for those who want a habitable planet.
The heat absorption capability of these GHG's molecules was demonstrated in a lab by a UK scientist named John Tyndall way back in 1859.
The thing which is important to understand is how delicate the Earth systems we depend upon for survival actually are and how much we have changed things.
[QUOTE=Luckbox Inc;59067750]This seems pretty spurious. Distance runners have a higher percentage of slow twitch muscle fibers compared to sprinters who have more fast-twitch muscle fibers, but there is no reason to think that slow-twitch fibers should be the default or that evolution/natural selection worked in the direction of slow --> fast.[/QUOTE
It's pretty obvious that the people who have migrated out of Africa no longer have the need to track down antelope over tens of miles.
Nature has a very efficient way of eliminating resource allocation to unnecessary traits.
In the case of Africans who were enslaved, it's quite clear that those doing the enslaving put a premium on the strength and power which is embodied in the dominance of sprinting dominance of black athletes from places like the US and Jamaica.
The traits and their geographic concentration are the results of genetic domestication and regional environmental differences.
This guy ran 180 miles in one day. A sled dog can't do that.
Anyway .... back to the topic at hand..... for those who would seek to cloud the issue about the Earth warming as a result of "natural variability" and not due to human climate emissions.
A good question to ask them .... what besides greenhouse gases keeps heat in the Earth's atmosphere and prevents it from radiating out to outer space ?
The scientific answer is nothing. GHG's are the only known phenomena which keeps heat in the Earth's atmosphere.
This version of God which I believe in is revealed through scientific investigation and a scientific method which works like this.
You don’t understand value and its relationship to God. Anything truly valuable is not easily obtainable. God is the highest value.
God is hidden from scientific investigation because the actual God won’t be cheapened in that way.
Science Lesson # 4 - Feedback Loops, Chain Reactions & Tipping Points
This section is best introduced with an analogy.
Imagine you have two identical pots that you place on a stove on identicalyl high heat settings. One pot has 1/2 gallon of water and the other has 5 gallons of water. Which pot comes to a boil first ?
The answer is that while both pots are destined to come to a boil, the pot with less water will come to a boil first.
Why is this ..... because there are fewer molecules in the 1/2 gallon pot and it requires less energy to effect the transition from liquid to gas. The larger pot has a longer delay.
Why is this important to understand ? Because the Earth surface is effectively a giant pot of water and over 90% of the heat energy on the Earth's surface is stored in the ocean. The increase in GHG levels is the equivalent of the temperature setting on the stove in the example above. But what we see today is not the fully realized version of the current temperature setting.
What is a Chain Reaction ?
A good example of a chain reaction is a bunch of dominoes lined up in a room. Push the first domino and all of the lined up dominoes are destined to fall.
What is a Feedback Loop ?
A positive feedback loop is slightly different from a chain reaction. It's when factors reinforce and amplify each other.
A negative feedback loop is when factors dampen each other.
What Is A Tipping Point ?
A tipping point is the moment at which future consequences become inevitable.
An example of this might be pushing a heavy boulder up to the crest of a hill and the tipping point would be the moment its center of gravity passes the peak of the hill. At that point, the boulder's destiny is determined .... it is going to go down the other side and come to rest in the valley below.
Science Lesson # 5, Paleoclimatology The Answer To Mystery of What Lies Ahead Is Based Upon The Past
The field of paleoclimate science involves humans applying their considerable intelligence to reconstruct the historical climate on Earth.
How do they do it ?
They study fossil records, both animal evidence and non-animal evidence. They extracts ice cores which provide an uninterrupted 800,000 year record of Earth's atmospheric history. To go further back, they rely on isotope ratios. They look at sediment layers. They date the phenomena they observe with what they understand about radioactive decay.
They calibrate the greenhouse effect on Earth with the temperature data from other planets to validate their calculations.
No one has ever seen a world in which Antarctica has been free of ice because much of it has been there for over 30 million years. But we can look beneath the scene at a topography which has been gouged out by the ebb and flow of ice sheets over time and know that it happened. We can see alligator fossils in the Arctic.
The paleoclimate data tells a story of an Earth which has ranged in temperature by ~ 5C as CO2 levels have repeatedly doubled and halved over the last few million years.
Something Genuinely Scary - How Much Have Humans Have Changed The Earth
Earlier, I mentioned that during the 2.6M years which preceded the Industrial Revolution, the weight of CO2 in the atmosphere had oscillated between 7x ands 12x the weight of Mt. Everest.
If you want to check the math ..... each ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere weighs 7.82 billion tons. Mt. Everest weighs an estimated 175 billion tons.
So at the low end of 160 ppm * 7.82 / 175 = 7.15, At the high end 280 ppm * 7.82 /175 = 12.5
Today, CO2 values are in the neighborhood of 430 ppm, so based upon CO2 alone, the new Mt Everest equivalent would be 19.2
But as mentioned earlier, CO2 is not the only important greenhouse gas. The next important GHG is methane .... which although much lower in atmospheric concentration and having a shorter atmospheric life is also much stronger than CO2 on a molecule by molecule basis.
The concentration of methane has risen from 0.7 to 1.9 ppm in the last century. But each methane molecule is 120x more powerful in the short run than a single CO2 molecule. So a 1.2 ppm per million increase in methane is similar to a 240 ppm increase in CO2.
240 ppm * 7.82 / 175 = an additional 10.7 Mt Everest equivalents from the increase in methane.
19.2 + 10.7 means that we are now at close to 30 Mt Everest equivalents of GHG's in the atmosphere.
If 7 Mt Everest equivalents represents an ice age and 12 represents the interglacial normal we grew up in, what does 30 Mt Everest equivalents get us ??
Most of what you are posting here are reposts of you it seems.
No idea where you're going with all of this, the science lesson is weird.
