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Posted by D. Sherman on Thursday, May 15, 2008 at 00:22:01 :
In Reply to: 300 years of coal posted by 48PW on Wednesday, May 14, 2008 at 22:17:49 :
Yes, we have loads of coal. But if we go for the CO2 reduction plan (Kyoto or whatever) that the rest of the world and probably most Americans want, we won't be able to use that coal unless we burn a whole lot more of it to sequester the CO2.
As for humans being unlike any animal that has come before, you could say that about a lot of temporarily-successful species -- blue-green algae, trilobites, pterodactyls, passenger pigeons, smallpox viruses, buffaloes... In every case they were very successful for a while but succumbed to natural forces or aggressive predators. In economics, there's a saying that the four most dangerous words are "it's different this time."
If there's a radical expansion of intelligence underway, I don't see it. I see a radical expansion of technology, particularly communication and transportation, and that gives a lot of people more time to think about interesting things rather than just try to scrounge enough food to life another day and avoid being killed by anyone or anything.
As for the "singularity", that's just the modern new age version of the old "age of aquarius", which isn't really all that different from the second coming of Christ. There are lots of different ways to imagine that all of a sudden, humanity will cross some metaphysical threshold and everything will suddenly become wonderful. Since we're in a technological age, it's easy to assume that "consciousness shift" will be due to technology. In olden times people thought it would be due to divine intervention or some other magical occurrence. You could certainly be right. I certainly can't formulate any sort of proof that something that's never happened before absolutely won't happen in the future. I'm not banking on it, though.
The problem with putting lots of faith in technology to solve all our problems is that not all problems have technological solutions. It's easy to look back at all the great inventions of the past 200 years and expect science to just keep coming up with more breakthroughs. The trouble is that problems that look almost equally difficult before you start working on them turn out to extraordinarily different in their actual difficulty once you get into it. Pick two similarly-looking hard problems, and odds are one will turn out to be an "easy hard problem" and the other a "hard hard problem". In every case, once the solution to the easy hard problem was found, the public generally expected the hard hard problem to be solved shortly thereafter. Here are some prime examples from the 20th century:
Killing germs: Anti-bacterials were easy. Anti-virals are hard.
Nuclear energy: Fusion reactors are easy. Fission reactors are hard.
Speedy travel: Faster than sound is easy. Faster than light is hard.
Cancer: Curing a few specific kinds is easy. Curing most of them is hard.
It's easy to look at all the wonders science has wrought over the past century and expect it to provide more wonders as needed, but there's no logic behind that. The longer people work unsuccessfully on a given problem, the less likely it is to every be solved. Batteries are a good example. We desperately need a battery breakthrough. However, the basic chemistry of batteries has been well-known for 150 years and lots of smart people have been trying to make better ones ever since. They've made gradual improvements, but nothing near a "breakthrough". Likewise with engines -- materials have improved slightly, and control systems have improved quite a bit, but an engine today (piston or turbine, internal or external combustion) works just like they did 100 years ago and is only a little bit more efficient. Genetic engineering is really the only field of science I see today as being new enough that real breakthroughs are possible. There's a good chance somebody will happen to hit on some breakthrough in some other area as well, but for the most part, what we're getting now is gradual technological improvement, not new scientific discoveries.
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