Dave Lysak mentioned humans “jostling” in the furtherment of their goals a few comments back in the last post, a nervous agitation of human souls and cells seeking fulfillment of their energy requirements. I found this video clip of jostling ruthenium atoms in carbon nanotubes and thought it thermodynamically similar, at a smaller scale, of what humans are up to.
Rhenium atoms in carbon nanotubes.
You can see that the atoms are unsettled, releasing and accepting photons from each other and from what must be an environment turbulent with electromagnetic wave energy. They jostle and jostle, each in competition with the others to reach that position and bonding configuration closest to absolute zero, which might not be very close zero at all, but closer. Waves are incoming from the environment and outgoing and being passed from electron to electron. If they were chilled sufficiently perhaps the Brownian motion would slow and finally stop. No doubt the mechanism that provides the visuals adds heat to the subject and ambient temperature of earth’s biosphere is not free of turbulence thanks to the sun.
But what does this have to do with humans jostling or any organism for that matter? It may seem counterintuitive, but humans are also trying to achieve the lowest energy state. They bounce around the environment motivated by greed and dopamine trying to find a configuration of atoms and molecules to help settle into a lower energy state, to help them reach their most stable configuration where significant amounts of energy has been depleted from their bonded structures and exhausted as heat wave energy. But humans avoid their own equilibrium state, lowest energy level, by helping others achieve theirs, by eating and essentially burning them. In the process they build-up their own complexity and avoid low-energy equilibrium with the environment. Like recharging a battery before it goes dead. In accordance with the Second Law of Thermodynamics the total energy in bonds that has moved farther away from equilibrium, become more complex, in building the human dissipative structure, is less than the amount of food/bond energy or complexity that was consumed. Some of the food energy lost from the food bonds is exhausted into the local environment and then into space. There can never be one-hundred percent efficiency or conversion of food to dissipative structure. But the entire ecosystem cannot run down to equilibrium as the sun creates electromagnetic turbulence every day to stir the matter, including and especially chlorophyll, which again captures some of the ample energy in bonds, likely later to be released by some other dissipative structure like a caterpillar.
The struggle for existence is the struggle to release energy from other matter that still has the potential to reach a lower energy state. Don’t mind eating the pig, according to the universe it’s not in a optimal state of being. If you eat it, much of the embedded energy will be released and your own structure will be bolstered while a certain proportion finds its way into space. But equally, the human is not in an optimal state either. Nothing that lions and tiger and bears and other humans can’t take care of. The whole biosphere would likely approach its lowest energy state if it weren’t for the sun blasting us daily with wave energy that blows the atoms from their comfortable low-energy states. The complex behaviors of humans and other dissipative structures are no different in essence from atoms jostling to reach the lowest energy state. Humans and other organisms do it at a large scale by eating big chunks of energy rich matter and burning it. The universe thanks you for releasing the heat from the pig, even though you’ve bolstered your own out-of-equilibrium structure.
Squeezing the energy out of fossil fuels is the human’s special project for the universe which has the beneficial side effect of allowing humans to eat much more organic life than would have been possible with the energy derived from their tissues. We can actually eat food that would have traditionally had a negative Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI) throughout all of natural history. Fossil fuels have been a nice subsidy while they lasted but have created lots of damage to the coevolved ecosystem. Humans in their rRNA tool-building capacity are desperately trying to come-up with something additional to eat as fossil fuels begin to wane. Even the organic matrix and been stripped bare and has been depleted of nutrients so that even if fossil fuels lasted, the matrix of industrial growth for human food likely would not and fake laboratory meat and meal worms will not make-up for capacities being lost from the natural environment.
Idaho potato farmer.
A farmer (technological RNA) working a field in Idaho that will likely grow taters. The plants will capture the energy from the sun with chlorophyll and produce some starchy sugars to store in the taters. Humans, knowing that there’s a lower energy state potential for the taters, will dig them up and eat them, maybe at McDonald’s, and release their bond energy back to space while bolstering their own structures. It is often said that there are ten calories of fossil fuel energy spent on every calorie of food produced and eaten. Judging by the diesel eating tractor and the irrigation system along with pesticides, processing and distribution, that might be pretty close. It seems like an impressive economies-of-scale operation though, much more efficient than a backyard gardening effort. If humans were to try to accomplish the same feat, planting by hand, harvesting by hand, picking bugs off the plants and carrying water from the nearest river, I’m sure that in the end they would use more energy than they got from the potatoes. Negative EROEI equals starvation. But at least it would be totally organic.
This is an example of high EROEI living:
Cheek storage of excess energy, similar to that found in some rodents.
And this is an example from Madras, India during the famine of 1877 of negative EROEI living:
This is what happens when we suddenly stop using fossil fuels. People on the verge of bankruptcy, also known as death by starvation in the natural world.
Matter is always being moved about on the surface of the earth by energy passing through or staying for a short while before it continues its entropic journey back into space. The incoherent movements like methane seeping from deep sea deposits, tornadoes randomly smashing communities to smithereens and warming oceans killing defenseless coral reefs are a few examples, but it’s not until we consider the coherent flows of energy that we can be both horrified and somewhat entertained by the wicked potential of mother nature.
The incoherent flow of energy pretty much moves through matter randomly, jostling air and water molecules and stirring a bit of surface matter and eventually ending-up as infrared radiation traveling through the medium of space. It has little coherency beyond a variety of common intermolecular interactions. On the other hand, the coherent flows of energy are not allowed to flow willy-nilly as they make their way to “the cool” to borrow from Eric D. Schneider and Dorion Sagan’s book “Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics and Life”. The coherent flows of energy, the ones that define life, are those that are made to flow in a certain direction, non-randomly, usually through a chain of biochemical reactions in a watery medium. It just so happens that the coherency is defined by information or DNA at the cellular level which happens to code for the biomolecules which spend their days passing the energy baton in furtherance of the survival of the system which they comprise. Never a completely efficient operation, the various non-random, biomolecular jostlings stir the watery medium in which they occur and send waves of thermal waste rippling towards the epidermal shore. The result is that structure is built, nervous systems are defined and the coherent flow of energy results in non-random, energy seeking systems or cellular aggregates on a gradient seeking mission. If you have noticed or participated in the human preoccupation with food and investments you might understand to where the coherent flow of energy leads, to an obsessive effort to acquire yet more energy.
In the case of humans the energy flow is said to be equivalent to a 100-watt light bulb. The mission for all of that biomolecular coherency defined over billions of years of evolution is to keep the light bulb lit. This is why humans are constantly competing and killing for energy. It’s not like it’s a matter of free will, there are billions of years of evolving DNA and resulting coherent mixtures and movements of biomolecules to make sure the energy is somehow loaded into the maw, distributed and turned into ATP. This is why humans are so preoccupied with accumulating wealth, worrying daily about their crypto, gold, silver, fiat, real estate and homes, each is trying to assure themselves of a continuous flow of energy into the future. Strangely few have concern for ecosystem, the greatest generator of wealth, without which all human light bulbs go out. Most people seem to think that the health of the technological system or economy in which they function as rRNA is of most importance and can guarantee their own organic cellular well-being. The coherent energy flow, defined by DNA has made sure they pay particular attention to things like the next meal, appearance and copulating to fruition like fruit flies, although human ingenuity has created ways to get the opioids without the progeny, after all, raising progeny RNA, even if handed-off to various schools and institutions, can interfere with the competitive tendencies to advance ones career in the technological system. A new energy flow from fossil fuels has advanced human’s new role as rRNA but the feeding frenzy has temporarily blinded humans to the exceptional importance of maintaining a healthy ecosystem. The new technological tools have enabled a cancerous pillaging of the natural world. It remains to be seen, by someone or something in the future, if the technological system can replace humans with robots that are not dependent on the ecosystems continuance.
One-hundred watts. Your brain has evolved to make sure you spend time finding and eating the fuel necessary to keep the lights on.
One of my grandfathers was primarily old school ecological, didn’t make much money in the technological system, but had eleven children which all survived to become upstanding energy degraders. My other grandfather was more successful in the technological realm, applying tools to the ecosystem to deliver an abundance of energy. He owned warehouses and farm supply business. His three children and farms, stores, warehouses were also all superb energy degraders. From copulator to business operator, the transition from ecosystem entrepreneur defined by coherent energy flow from the ecosystem to technological entrepreneur defined by coherent energy flow from the pool of fossil fuels, has been underway in earnest for at least a couple of centuries.
Eventually it became apparent that the better life could be had by owning and operating within technological cells whose magnificent new tools could make mince meat of the ecosystem and various energy and resource gradients rather than having many technologically unequipped children that would accept meager returns throughout their lives. Today many will decide not have any children at all, an affront to their DNA, but certainly enabling more time to garner rewards for their own dead-end bodies from the technological, cancerous consumption of everything.
And the technology will continue evolving and consuming until it reaches limits. What better way to throw back the limits than by applying technology to eliminate a whole population of inferior, half-baked rRNA whose tendencies lead them to a slower, less technologically adept existence. I suppose you could call them useless eaters, useless to the technological cancer. Little did the technological humans realize that the robotic RNA would soon eliminate them just as their ancestors cancelled the less technological Neanderthals. I found the perfect video clip to describe the current state of mRNA technological evolution (see below).
Those magnificent men with their CRISPR machines. Current state of mRNA technology. Go ahead and get on-board, they’ll work-out the kinks eventually.
The primary goal of coherent energy flow is to intercept energy or market share and grow. The clueless human RNA, freshly minted from the local school system with specialized information and tool using abilities, finds a cell to perform their daily repetitive functions to get their energy and rewards. The owners of the cell will give them a regular energy stipend for performing their tasks. Most haven’t a clue as to what’s going on and spend their lives on the hamster wheel of little success until their worn-out bodies finally succumb to the ravages of time and the eventual realization that things won’t be getting any better. Those that own capital, the cells and machinery of technological production, gladly use the lives of other humans in the productive process and greedily siphon their productivity, but cannot be wholly condemned as they’re guided by a naturally acquired greed.
In the video clip below a line worker just can’t figure out his own dissatisfaction with life, a human RNA doing repetitive motion like their organic, cellular counterpart slapping amino acids together. The stakeholders as Klaus Schwab calls them, appreciate the effort as they congratulate themselves on effective stewardship of the technological enterprise and reward themselves with billions earned by the sweat of forlorn human RNA. For thirty years of this torture you may be granted ownership of a tech cell, if you’re lucky. However, the self-organizing winds are shifting and the fifteen years of “retirement” has been deemed too expensive. The ecological human kept grandma and grandpa around, even though their productivity waned and may even have become negative. It was a sort of “thank you” for all those years of hard work. But the new technological human will see grandma and grandpa become a thing of the past as they are put down lest they deprive the technological system of some fraction of energy flow needed for its continued growth and evolution. Thank you grandma and grandpa, job well done, now die. I’ll be sailing the seas on my 500 million dollar yacht while you molder in the grave. There are different rules for stakeholders and when resource scarcity means the wealth pump that served them well during growth will soon go into reverse, they are eager to make genocidal changes to maintain their disproportionate share of wealth.
A typical human RNA working in a technological cell building transport vesicles to be used to distribute human RNA and goods within the technological system.
Perhaps the most wicked trick of mother nature is to create us to feel for an unfeeling colony of cells. The primitive eyespot of the protist has given way to two ocular organs and brain that serve the needs of the entire system of trillions of cells. The inputs from these “eyespots” and other sense organs pass into a mass of neural tissue sculpted by evolution to achieve competition, cooperation and greed to assure the unfeeling cells accomplish their goals .Whipped by pain and enticed by pleasure, the brain plays us like a puppet. Our main tasks of which we are constantly reminded are to eat, compete, eliminate waste and reproduce. With any spare time we can use curiosity to develop the analog mind which has paid energy dividends in conjunction with other evolutionary adaptations including a hand which can readily bond and fabricate tools, vocal chords which can represent aspects of reality with sound waves and many other changes in the brain related to making sense of and sometimes distorting the many aspects of reality. The concept of death can hardly be avoided by even the dullest mind although we try our hardest, sometimes practicing religious rituals and holding beliefs that banish the prospect. The illusion of self which operates in the analog mind and plans our next move in conjunction with the motor cortex and is given the responsibility of keeping the cellular system safe is panicked by the inescapable prospect of death. Our entire existence is dedicated to the cellular colony and promoting its success and reproduction. For many millions of years we could not see death, the analog mind was not well-developed. But our evolution into technological function with a more elaborate analog mind has outweighed the negatives associated with death salience and the brain has even evolved to cover-up death while still gaining the benefits of technology. The “self” of humans, more developed than in any other organism, operates and plans in an analog mind and fears its own passing as its cellular system eventually and inevitably fails. There is no place for the “self” to be when the analog mind goes poof and the body dissolves back into the environment. It’s somewhat of a dirty trick for evolution to create us to be useful to a collection of unfeeling cells only to abandon and throw us away in the end – job done. That’s what the technological cells intend to do with us too after our usefulness is exhausted. It seems we’re trapped between two sets of cells, organic and technological at quite different scales. The organic cells are telling us to do one thing and the technological cells are trying to control us in other ways. Dealing with the demands of ones own microscopic cells is enough but many have taken to a job identity and seem to thrive in that environment with short breaks for feeding and eliminating wastes.
I’ll end here with the motor homunculus which displays relative motor innervation or motor cortex dedicated to specific body areas. The hands or bonding organs and mouth for conveying information are overwhelmingly represented as they have become most important in our new role as technological RNA. But our organic evolution is not fast enough, genetic manipulation and technological amendments await us so we can be improved dissipative structures and eliminate gradients (whatever remains of them) faster and more efficiently.
By the way, my old website died an untimely death as I didn’t pay the bill within forty-five days. I have copies of past posts, but the associated comments have likely dissolved back into the environment forever. Isn’t that the way things go.
MEGACANCER 