The Monster Footprint of Digital Technology

The power consumption of our high-tech machines and devices is hugely underestimated.

When we talk about energy consumption, all attention goes to the electricity use of a device or a machine while in operation. A 30 watt laptop is considered more energy efficient than a 300 watt refrigerator. This may sound logical, but this kind of comparisons does not make much sense if you don’t also consider the energy that was required to manufacture the devices you compare. This is especially true for high-tech products, which are produced by means of extremely material- and energy-intensive manufacturing processes. How much energy do our high-tech gadgets really consume?

http://www.energybulletin.net/node/49730

“Consciousness and Complexity”

In the case of humans, we are above the threshold at which great organized social complexity emerges. Yet, we may be as cognitively limited as our ape cousins. Consider that we know scientifically, that our actions are destroying the planetary ecosystem, altering the weather, and that this global civilization is based upon ever-increasing use of ever-diminishing hydrocarbon energy resources. Our rational response to this would be to immediately take drastic actions to remedy these behavioral errors.

Yet, our material wealth, the position and power of societal elites, the very way that we have been indoctrinated to understand and interact with reality itself, is based upon preservation of the existing patterns of social order. So we as a global society, effectively do nothing. At least we do not take effective actions in a timely manner.

…Like the great apes we are able to comprehend reality abstractly through mathematics, and for humans, science, but at a concrete, tangible level, we are unable, as a species, to translate abstraction into changed action. Humans fail the test, though at a higher level of social complexity than great apes. This conclusion strongly suggests that a creature that was cognitively to humans as we are to great apes would NOT fail this test. Therefore it is possible to not fail. The question before us is: is it possible for humans to not fail it?

http://www.opednews.com/articles/1/Consciousness-and-Complexi-by-Dr-Michael-P-Byro-090715-151.html

“Is Obama Gorbachev?”

Tom Wolfe wrote a fabulous op-ed in the Sunday New York Times commemorating the Apollo 11 moon landing of 1969.  In it, he speculated that the achievment itself spelled the end of the NASA program because it lacked a philosopher corps that might have furnished it with more meaning beyond its element of “single combat” between the US and the Soviets in the “space race.”   This meaning, he said, might have been supplied by someone like NASA’s chief engineer Wernher Von Braun, who once stated (in effect) before a congressional committee that  “…we must build a bridge to the stars, because as far as we know, we are the only sentient creatures in the entire universe. When do we start building that bridge to the stars? We begin as soon as we are able, and this is that time. We must not fail in this obligation we have to keep alive the only meaningful life we know of…. Unfortunately, NASA couldn’t present as its spokesman and great philosopher a former high-ranking member of the Nazi Wehrmacht with a heavy German accent.”
The further trouble, of course, is now that we sentient creatures seem to be in the process of destroying our home planet, how might we justify our spread to other worlds? We’ve fallen short both in resources and philosophy.  In our current state of evolution we seem unlikely to ever again go further afield than the moon and not exactly worthy of making trips elsewhere anyway.  Stay tuned a few hundred thousand years….

http://kunstler.com/blog/2009/07/is-obama-gorbachev.html

“World at Gunpoint Or, what’s wrong with the simplicity movement by Derrick Jensen”

So, part of the problem is that “looking down the barrel of environmental catastrophe” makes it seem as though environmental catastrophe is the problem. But it’s not. It’s a symptom—an effect, not a cause. Think about global warming and attempts to “solve” or “stop” or “mitigate” it. Global warming (or global climate catastrophe, as some rightly call it), as terrifying as it is, isn’t first and foremost a threat. It’s a consequence. I’m not saying pikas aren’t going extinct, or the ice caps aren’t melting, or weather patterns aren’t changing, but to blame global warming for those disasters is like blaming the lead projectile for the death of someone who got shot. I’m also not saying we shouldn’t work to solve, stop, or mitigate global climate catastrophe; I’m merely saying we’ll have a better chance of succeeding if we recognize it as a predictable (at this point) result of burning oil and gas, of deforestation, of dam construction, of industrial agriculture, and so on. The real threat is all of these.

http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/4697/