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PaperclipPerfector  22d ago (text post)   26714 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 30, 2024

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People once thought that all light was fire--that all light consumed. But my house today is brighter than any pharaoh's court, and it burns not.

The steady pressure of cold electrons coming out of your wall outlet is a neat trick of civilisation, like cut and packaged meat without fur or claws or eyes, but something, somewhere, still had to burn for it.

The steady pressure of cold electrons coming out of your wall outlet ... something, somewhere, still had to burn for it.

...except when it comes from falling water or splitting atoms.

If we accept a broad enough definition of burning (I'm for the usable-energy-converted-to-entropy one here) - something burned to get the water up first, and to fuse the atoms we proceed to split.

If we accept a broad enough definition of burning (I'm for the usable-energy-converted-to-entropy one here) - something burned to get the water up first, and to fuse the atoms we proceed to split.

But was that the definition @naraburns was using?

How did the water rise to begin with? Where did those larger atoms come from? Burning.

but something, somewhere, still had to burn for it.

I weep for those hydrogen atoms that were forced to combine into helium, probably without their consent, and for that mass that were converted to energy to provide me with my civilized existence. Let this be an acknowledgment we all live from the energy that once was the mass belonging to those native hydrogen atoms.

The steady pressure of cold electrons coming out of your wall outlet is a neat trick of civilisation, like cut and packaged meat without fur or claws or eyes, but something, somewhere, still had to burn for it.

Yes, it's a metaphor, metaphors are like that. But it seems pretty clear to me that the closer the asymptote of consumption efficiency approaches the hard limits of entropy, the better off we are.

Likewise: it's easy to notice (or Notice) that there are a host of fairly serious problems that civilized discourse has (at least so far) failed to solve. It's harder to notice the ones it has solved, as they are by definition solved and, so, rarely even enter into our consciousness. "Burn it to the ground" is not a solution; at best, it may result in a different set of problems. At worst, well, it potentially only makes things worse.

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