Re: Maximum age.

Catja Pafort <green_knight@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Zeborah wrote:

However. "clean water" etc isn't just "stuff", it's "stuff" plus
"quality". The stuff itself isn't being seriously depleted (we
presumably lose some water, air, and possibly even soil to the vacuum of
space, but the amount is presumably insignificant), it's the "quality"
of the stuff that is being compromised.

Correct, of course.

Which means that if we can develop ways to clean dirty water,

Very difficult. We have ways of not-polluting water; but they tend to be
expensive, whereas dirtying it and letting someone else pay for it
appears to be short-term cheaper.

There are plenty of ways to clean water, too. A couple of them I can do
myself in my kitchen. More of them are taught in introduction to
engineering classes. More are being developed for cheap filtration
units for developing countries on an individual scale; even more on the
industrial scale.

Dirtying it and letting someone else pay for it is not always cheaper;
it may only seem that way because we don't yet know more efficient ways
of producing things. And this efficiency is something chemical
engineers work at on a regular basis: how to get more product and less
waste (whether energy waste, water waste, or whatever else) from a given
input.

One of the postgrad students I've been working with is trying to develop
a testing method that will regulate production more efficiently and thus
save a particular industry energy: they pay less for electricity, less
electricity is used, he gets to put more letters after his name,
everybody wins.

<snip>
and fertilise infertile soil, then we solve the problems.

Now soil is different in that soil doesn't just get depleted in quality,
soil gets eroded and washed away and dumped in rivers, lakes and oceans,
and you can't get it back; you need to create new soil, which is a
lengthy process.

Raise more mountains, make more compost. Mother Nature can do the
former; we're developing and perfecting ways to speed up the latter.

(And sometimes create other problems; but those can be solved too. See:
chemical engineering; nanotechnology; natural resources engineering;
forestry; oh, etc.) And the people who can solve these problems are the
people who have access to education, secondary education, higher
education, and expensive research labs.

The problem with engineering solutions is that engineers are imperfect:
we've got a long history of engineers trying to solve flooding, for
instance, which works up to a point - at which the problem then gets
shoved around a lot, inconveniencing someone else.

Of course engineers are imperfect. Fortunately humans aren't perfect at
anything, not even at messing up our world. The imperfections, in the
long run, cancel out (or perhaps better). --At least, this is what I
presume, as an article of faith. If I presumed otherwise - that even
properly educated humans are better at messing things up than at fixing
things - then I'd have to believe that the whole lot of us should
immediately commit suicide; none of this messing around with reducing
reproduction only in certain economic areas. If 6 billion humans are
destroying the planet then 5 billion humans will still destroy it,
they'll just take longer and not write as many cool books in the
meantime.

Zeborah
--
Gravity is no joke.
http://www.geocities.com/zeborahnz/
rasfc FAQ: http://www.lshelby.com/rasfcFAQ.html
.

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