Be very careful (Fermi Paradox edition)

Enrico Fermi, considering the billions of stars out there in the galaxy, noted to a number of physicists back in 1950 that the real mystery is why we haven’t seen any aliens yet. Even given a very low percentage of planets that have intelligent life which produces technology, the colonizing wavefront of at least one of these civilizations should have reached planet Earth. The Fermi paradox could thus be succinctly stated “Where is everybody?”

There are several postulates as to why they haven’t made it here yet, and it helps to review the Drake equation, from wikipedia:

The Drake equation states that:

where:

N is the number of civilizations in our galaxy with which we might hope to be able to communicate;

and

R^* is the average rate of star formation in our galaxy

f_p is the fraction of those stars that have planets

n_e is the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets

f_ℓ is the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop life at some point

f_i is the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop intelligent life

f_c is the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space

L is the length of time such civilizations release detectable signals into space.

For most of the numbers we have started to get a better and better guesstimate.  As we move from right to left, starting from the equal sign, our certainty about each variable decreases, until we get to “L”

We know almost nothing about L, except what we have observed from our planet. Some despair that L may be very low, because civilizations tend to self extinguish. Or it may be the case that even if they develop the technology, they might be uninterested in using that technology to communicate with us.  Imagine, for example that the Earth had cloud cover that never allowed inhabitants to see the night sky. Civilizations that arise on such a planet might be very inward looking, and never even consider what’s beyond. But it seems most likely that that would be rare.

As we find more and more suns that have planets, and some with ones that appear to be earth-like in some ways, the probability is that civilizations tend to self-extinguish once they develop technology cannot be ignored.

Why might that be? Why would L be very small, nearly uniformly?

Systemic Risk (executive privilege v scientists edition)

The White House is an amazing source of scientific thought; not only can the president and his cronies interfere with the science about Global Warming, but the process that the EPA uses to determine whether or not a chemical is toxic or poses a risk of causing cancer is also part of the White House’s purview.

It’s an amazing case of regulatory capture, hopefully temporary:

White House Undermines EPA on Cancer Risks, GAO Says

By H. Josef Hebert

The Associated Press

Monday 28 April 2008

Washington - The Bush administration is undermining the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to determine health dangers of toxic chemicals by letting nonscientists have a bigger - often secret - role, congressional investigators say in a report obtained by The Associated Press.

The Self-Regulating Market requires state intervention

Tim Lee makes a couple of points about what he sees as the puzzling connections between free trade and protectionism, and he stumbles across the point I’d made earlier to one of Jerry Brito’s comments, (yes, the comment that Jerry can’t respond to, and therefore must censor) It’s a simple point the Karl Polanyi made in his excellent book The Great Transformation: that the self-regulating market requires state intervention, both for it’s creation and for its maintenance . So the creation of a self regulating market in copyrighted goods requires state intervention to create and maintain that market. But Tim, being a libertarian, can’t read or understand Polanyi, so he’s confused about why those who support free trade also support certain market interventions:

<i>This is a fascinating question. One of the things I find really interesting about the 19th century political debate is that the opposing political coalitions were more sensibly aligned, perhaps because people had a slightly clearer sense of what was at stake. My impression (which may be wrong in its details) is that the free traders tended to be liberals and economic populists. They clearly understood that protectionism brought about a transfer of wealth from relatively poor consumers to relatively wealthy business interests. In the opposing coalition were a coalition of business interests and xenophobes making fundamentally mercantilist arguments about economic nationalism.</i>

Karl Polanyi covers this period in his book The Great Transformation. His perspective is a little different.

First, Polanyi notes that those opposing the liberal agenda there were the defenders of the old order, ultimately derived from the feudal social structure, as well the working urban proletariat. Their interests never coincided and their visions of an alternative to the dominant liberal creed were so very different, it is not surprising that they never formed a united opposition. It is true that once the middle class realized that free trade meant cheaper food they were temporarily won over to its cause. But there were a few others who realized how disastrous free trade would be in the long run.

Second, Tim Lee, as all libertarians do, makes a whole series of informational exclusions about what comes along with liberalism. For example, it cannot be an accident that Great Britain, during the time of the ascendancy of liberal ideals, also maintained a very large colonial empire. Ultimately, adherence to the dogma of the self-regulating market requires state intervention to ensure that the prices of labor, land, and money are all controlled only by economic factors internal to that self-regulating market. When social, environmental, religious or national policies interfere with the operating of that self regulating market, state intervention is required. Case in point: US invasion of Iraq. When political ideals interfere with the functioning of the self-regulating market, state intervention is also called for by supporters of the market. Case in point: the DMCA. From this view, the fact that those who support the self-regulating market also support strong imposed patent, copyright and trademark laws is entirely consistent and unsurprising.

The bottom line is: you cannot separate the economic functioning of society from its broader social, political, environmental, national and social contexts, as liberals are wont to do. Human society just cannot be distilled into neatly separate fungible categories. They are all connected. Failure to come to grips with this reality is why libertarianism can only be maintained by making excluding whole categories of information.

Thus the following confusion on Tim’s part:

<i>Today’s free trade debate is much weirder, because there are enough businesses who want to export things that significant parts of the business community are for freer trade. On the other hand, the liberals who fancy themselves defenders of relatively poor consumers find themselves in bed with predatory industries like sugar and stell that have been using trade barriers to gouge consumers. And the “trade” debate has increasingly come to be focused on issues that don’t actually have much to do with trade, whether it’s labor and environmental “standards,” copyright and patent requirements, working retraining programs, cross-border subsidies, etc.</i>

Drawing Boundaries Around Democracy (Tax Free Internet Edition)

Corporations have a long history of drawing lines around democracy, so they can escape the effects of the popular mandate. One of the most egregious examples of this was the creation of a town near East Saint Louis [present day Sauget] which was created by just one vote (the night watchman of the factory) in order to prevent the town of East Saint Louis from annexing and then taxing that same factory. The factory was thus enclosed by a boundary around democracy. That particular example is behind us, and I rather doubt that would happen today. It just wouldn’t fly.

That past event sheds light on a pattern of behavior, and it’s important to reverse that trend, to prevent future enclosures that steal from the larger society, without giving back. Today, there are plenty of ways that corporations use the internet to enclose their company, and seal it off from democratic institutions which might tax them. Of course, the anti-democratic reality of this enclosure is obscured by the language of freedom that is used to make the case for a “tax free” internet.

But there is one simple question that we can ask the libertarians that exposes the bankruptcy and anti-freedom agenda of the tax free world that they are trying to create. It is a question that libertarians cannot acknowledge, let alone answer.

Peter Raven lecture

Heard Peter Raven lecture just last Friday, and it was excellent. Can’t find too much of his stuff online though, but here’s one link.

He was asked about ethanol by e_f to which he simply said “It is a terrible idea.” Finally, someone in Saint Louis, heart of the corn belt, saying the truth about ethanol.

But I was able to get the question in, and he answered at some length, referring to the food riots that are presently occurring all over the world.

Why don’t we have people like Peter Raven in positions where they can influence public policy more? It might have something to do with: the deliberately confused picture painted by the media, don’tcha think? A prime example can be found right over at Reason magazine’s website.

I find it interesting that ethanol was pushed like crazy by a few big corporations, but now that it is clear that ethanol is really, really bad for the environment there is a lot of revisionism going on. And that’s what the piece from Reason magazine “The Biofuel Brew ha-ha: How the greens are making it more expensive to get blotto” is: revisionism.

Apparently, now that ethanol has been outed and found to be just a little greener than open pit coal mining, the libertarian party line is: Let’s blame the greens!

Einstein Quote of the Day:

The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our very existence depend on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life.

Can you find the bulldozer in this picture?

One of the panaceas that you typically hear about Peak Oil, is that we can just start converting coal to fuel.  While it is true that that is technically possible, that is a very energy intensive process itself.  Also, those who say this usually don’t have a clear picture of how damaging coal mining is to the environment.

Well, as found over at Peak Energy, here’s something that should give a very clear picture of how devastating open pit mining is:

What you are seeing is a very small part of the machine used for open pit mining swallowing a bulldozer. (The bulldover is the little yellow thing near the top of the wheel.)  Take a look at more pictures, which show that the wheel is just a small piece of the entire machine here.

Systemic Risk (Food Crisis Edition)**Updated**

The food crises is getting worse, and it could even happen that Amartya Sen’s observation that there has never been a famine in a country that had both a free press and a functioning multi-party democracy will appear to break down.

This is because the world economy exists in many places outside of either a multi-party democracy or a functioning free press, and those islands of functioning democracies with a free press may be cast about by forces that are outside of their control. These food riots have, for example, received very little press coverage in the USA. So perhaps Sen’s observation is still correct, it’s just that due to globalization it operates at a different scale. The world needs a functioning free press.

**Well, the press does seem to be taking note of the deepening crises, and I’ve added link to a CNN article that is typical of the coverage. The points are being made that this is a world wide phenomena, and that ethanol production, if not a culprit in the present round of food riots, will make the future food outlook even more grim. It should be obvious that ethanol production, to the extent it raises prices for food is deeply immoral. Furthermore, it is extremely stupid, as it gives those who are suffering, seeing their children dieing each day for want of food, a focal point for their hatred of the first world. **

Two things to be done by those who care:

1. Derail ethanol production, which has unnecessarily linked the food economy to the oil economy; and
2. Eat much less meat, which requires massive amounts of grain to produce equivalent amount of food protein. Beef is by far the worst offender, requiring much more grain to produce a pound of beef than a pound of chicken.

These are so extremely easy to do, but with the press shirking its basic responsibility to inform the public, can they alone be blamed for the moral failure of the West to address this crises? The press is clearly not doing its job here.

Here are the gory details:

Jerry Brito, censoring e_f comments

Well, at least I know I hit a raw nerve over at TLF, since Jerry Brito has been deleting my comments which are responding to his post. My post gets through initially, but then gets deleted a little while later, which would, I believe, mean that it’s not something innocuous like a spam filter.

Here are my comments. What do you suppose he disagrees with so much that he finds it necessary to delete my comment? Does TLF have a policy about deleting comments they disagree with?

A cool device from H-P

Another device that’s similar to the ASUS eeepc: It’s small, light weight and is available with Linux pre-installed:

HP releases its first Linux-powered laptop
Apr. 09, 2008

At the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit at the University of Texas Supercomputing Center April 8, Hewlett-Packard announced the release of its first Linux-powered computer to be sold in the United States, the HP 2133 Mini-Note PC running Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 Service Pack 1.

HP was expected to offer a Linux desktop, and now it has finally done so. It’s not, however, the Linux desktop that many users expected. Instead of being a general-purpose consumer system or business PC, the Mini-Note is meant for the education market.

Chris Sieger, director of IT Services for Alexandria City Public Schools in Virginia, said in a statement, “HP listened to our needs and now is delivering a product designed by education for education.”

So now Dell and Lenovo are probably the two largest hold-outs from the UMPC market. But, the Dell machine has been leaked, and I doubt Lenovo will hold out for long. Why would they?

And, in a related development, a report that talks about why light devices optimized for Web 2.0 run Linux, not Vista. It seems Microsoft did not anticipate Web 2.0 when they designed Vista: