Re: What would you do to save the environment?


James Nicoll wrote:

In article <1191091649.655115.33680@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Damien Valentine <valends3@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I'm afraid I don't understand what you're suggesting here.
As far as I know, we use "amazingly inefficient ways" of
sun-to-biomass conversion because we're biological beings;
there's no getting around the 90%-loss-law for each step up
in the food chain, unless you're going to discard biology
altogether and create some kind of machine intelligence
ecosystem.

We're constrained by our nature to consume chemicals
of a particular sort to fuel ourselves but there's nothing
except the fact that we don't know how to do it economically
yet that says that we need to use conventional biology to
produce those chemicals.

Will this new technology actually be more efficient? I have
to wonder.

One huge advantage of conventional biology is that we humans don't
have to keep replacing these producers of chemicals ourselves
-- beyond relatively simple tasks such as encouraging them
to reproduce themselves (even a caveman could do it).

Maybe technology someday will advances to the point of being
based on von-Neumann nano-replicators. That would take care
of my main objection. But that whole scheme looks like an
imitation of conventional biology. If we ever get a
"nano-replicator ecology" up and running, I think it's at
least a reasonable possibility that it will have to carry
analogues to the kind of overhead that conventional biology
has to carry: reproductive systems, immune systems, parasites,
predators. Could it be that we can't do a whole lot better
than the naturally evolved systems we see around us?

This isn't relevant, except as an analogy, but consider the
history of Artificial Intelligence research. We have found that
some the tasks that seemed hard to us were relatively easy to
program, but some tasks that seem easy to us humans can be very
difficult to do with computers -- because (I believe) we have
evolved to be very, very good at those tasks. It seems to me
that turning resources into more of one's species is the sort
of task that conventional biology would be very, very good at,
because of its importance to survival, just as learning to speak
and recognize faces is important to our specifically human
way of surviving.

This is not to say I think it's /impossible/ to design a biome
that is significantly more efficient than our natural one, just
as I don't think it's /impossible/ to build a brain significantly
smarter than the natural human variety. I just think that it may
well be a very difficult job, in super-efficent biome-design as
in super-human artificial intelligence.

I guess we'll see.

Jim Burns
.

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