From: Damien Sullivan (phoenix@ugcs.caltech.edu)
Date: Wed Apr 09 2003 - 11:06:14 MDT
On Tue, Apr 08, 2003 at 11:16:07AM -0700, Hal Finney wrote:
> Don't we, as Extropians, expect that mankind will have much greater power
> to influence the climate in the next several decades than he does today?
> Won't we be able to adjust atmospheric levels of greenhouse gasses to
> the point necessary to achieve our goals? In fact won't we likely be
Adjust those levels on what time scale? And what about the prediction
problem? Being able to influence the climate doesn't mean we'll know how to
influence it to get what we want. Wolfram suggests that if you want to really
predict the weather you'd need a computer comparable in mass to what's
involved in the weather -- irreducible computation.
> these modifications. The technical ability seems nearly certain.
Doesn't seem certain to me. Why should it seem certain? The computational
problem may be huge and we don't know how far computing progress will really
go. Drexlertech is unproven. The masses and energies involved in the climate
are huge.
This seems like TechnoRapture thinking to me. "We don't need to worry about
that problem because we'll have it solved soon. Somehow."
-xx- Damien X-)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Apr 09 2003 - 11:15:12 MDT