Category Archives: science

Mouravieff, me & 3 time dimensions

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“What’s happening to my life?” When people ask this, they usually wonder why they got a horrible illness or their dog died the day their girlfriend / boyfriend broke up with them, stuff like that. Not that some weird guy beloved by a UFO cult plagiarized their revelations years before they were even born. Is this the power of God or a devil?

Back to the friendly but suspicious person called Boris Mouravieff. While reading his book, I come to a point where I seriously wonder if he may have gone off the deep end, when he starts calculating the lifespans of the astral and mental bodies. And then right after that, I see this:

For the moment, it will be sufficient to say that Time possesses not one but three dimensions, and that these dimensions are strictly analogous to those of Space.

This statement may, to the casual reader, seem even crazier than the 2.4 million year lifespan of the astral body. However, what gave me the creeps was that I wrote roughly the same thing on June 6, 2010: 3 time dimensions of the mind. I went out of my way to explain that these were indeed mental rather than physical, although I seem to remember some further discussion with Llama on that topic. I don’t blame him for being skeptical. What bothers me is not that people don’t know this. What bothers me is that I do.

Mouravieff has been mentioned a few times on the One Cosmos blog, cautiously, but only a couple of his most famous statements. This is not one of them. The only online source that quotes him with any regularity, as far as I can see, is some kind of UFO cult. It is impossible that I could have come upon him long enough ago to have completely forgotten it, I think. I have a healthy respect for cryptomnesia, but in this case I vaguely remember how I made that post, and it was inspired by certain experiences (mine and others’) in meditation and such, rather than anything I had read from the outside. I probably thought in all honesty that I was the first person to come up with that particular way of expressing it.

It does not stop there. Further down the same page, Mouravieff explicitly refers to the name of the fifth dimension as “Eternity”. I know I have written a couple entries – although I am fairly sure I refrained from uploading them (this happens more often than I tell you) – entries in which I explicitly refer to the fifth dimension as “eternity” or “timelessness”. One reason not to upload it was the confusion of using these words which are saturated with a different meaning (especially the first) for common people.

You see, when we use a word like “eternity” in public (and Christianity has gone from being a mystery religion to being very public indeed), then 4-dimensional people, whose understanding of life is completely contained within the four dimensions of time and space, still think they are supposed to understand the word. Usually this happens during childhood, at which point only a very few specially chosen souls could possibly have any idea of the world beyond the fourth dimension. So they don’t think to themselves “this is a strange word and I should not have an opinion on it until I have at least some months of spiritual practice, preferably years”. They think to themselves “I know this from context”. Or, more commonly, they are children and don’t understand this from context, but instead they ask someone who is as ignorant as themselves but much older, and get told that “eternity means a time that never ends” or words to that effect.

I suppose “time that never ends” is one meaning of it, in a certain context. But it is actually more like the sky that is always above us. The four-dimensional world in which we live our mortal lives is like the horizontal world, the ground on which we travel. But at right angles to it is another dimension, and if we for the first time in our life lift our head and look upward, we see the sky. And there is something strange about the sky: It is always above us. Whether we travel to the east or the west, the sky is still there. Whether we walk across plains, climb across mountains or sail across seas, the sky is still there. It is above us the day we start our voyage, and it is still there, the same sky, when we end it, even if we are now on the opposite side of the world. Fog and clouds may obscure it, extensions of the horizontal world, but we know that the sky is still there above the clouds.

Well, that is how I see it, but who knows. What I mean is that there is something beyond time, and this eternity can touch time and infuse it so that it becomes sacred time. This is something I actually picked up from One Cosmos, which again quotes a seeming very sane Rabbi. The part about sacred time, I mean. The purpose of the Sabbath and all that. But this is not really something I should preach, I don’t keep the Sabbath. I have meditated some, though, and that is where I have what I think is direct experience of the pinhole in the roof of time, that lets us peek out in a completely new dimension in the mind.

I am not really sure I should write about such things. It bothers me to see Mouravieff write about something I thought was just my own approximation to something that cannot really be explained unless you have been there. Who am I to talk about such things? Am I immune – or at least resistant – enough to deceit, that I can talk about things that may influence people’s choices of Eternity?

When the Web was new, I wrote one of the early plain and simple introductions to meditation. And one thing I stressed toward the end was that if your meditation practice leads you to realize that you are a Very Important Person in the cosmic hierarchy, you better take a break. I fear that discovering the esoteric science of Mouravieff independently from him may be very close to such an experience. Knowledge inflates, as the Bible says, but that deserves its own entry. Which, incidentally, runs the risk of inflating me even more. As if the pasta is not giving me enough gas.

The secret of skill mastery

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In The Sims 3, you may live long enough to master numerous skills. In real life, most of us would be happy with one. But how do we do it?

I mentioned a while ago that you can become a grandmaster of chess – or the equivalent in any other venue – by dedicating approximately 10 000 hours to pushing yourself. (More when you are older, probably, but somewhere around this.) This may be all you need to know, but the actual working of the mind in these cases is also known. I have written about it some years ago, but let me write it again in new words, without looking back. If you are like me, it should interest you.

Usually when we do mental work, we use a combination of short term and long term memory. Short term memory is very limited, but essential in all works of the mind. How limited? Most humans can only remember 7 things at a time. 7 random digits, random letters, random words or random icons. Note that the information content is not an issue. The number of elements remains the same. But if the element itself is complex and unfamiliar, so you must remember it as a sequence of parts, these parts will go from the quota of 7.

You can exceed the limit for a very short time, usually enough to dial a phone number, but even this has its limit, and not much higher. By brain training games you can over time raise your limit to 8, and some people have a slightly higher limit naturally. It does not sound like much, but it is actually a pretty dramatic benefit. Even when operating automatically, the mind depends on short term memory to connect and compare different elements.

But this is not how mastery works. Masters do not need to have a 8 or 9 element short term memory, although it obviously would not hurt. But they use a completely different approach: In the words of Scientific American, the masters seem to use long term memory like short term memory. How do they do that?

Let me take an example: the numbers 3 2 7 1 2 1 9 5 8 2 6. Millions of people would not be able to recall this even when they had finished reading it. Of those who could, most would have forgotten it before they had finished singing one verse of their national anthem (which I assume is nearly automatic in most people). I, on the other hand, remember this easily after 7 hours of various reading, writing, playing and exercising. And rightly so: For I am born on the 27th of December (month 12) 1958. This leaves me with a whopping 3 elements to remember: The number 3, and my birth date, and the number 26. (Yes, I think of numbers in this range as a unit, rather than as two digits. After all, I’ve been 26 once!)

Now you may say this is cheating, and you are absolutely right. But the thing is, a grandmaster of chess knows every realistic combinations of pieces on a chess board like his birth date, more or less. That is where those 10 000 hours went, after all. They did not disappear in the fog. He has memories of them, conscious or otherwise. That particular pattern of pieces on the board gave him a victory once, a loss another time. They are all familiar to him, real and obvious. So for him, a particular combination of pieces on the board – or even a sequence of these – is remembered as one unit. Thus, his long term memory seems to be projected into the short term memory, because he can hold several extremely complex data structures in his mind at the same time, which is just plain impossible to you or me.

This seems a bit similar to how we automate “muscle memory” to perform body skills without needing to think about the details, like biking or driving a car. Generally, humans are really good at automating. This is not necessarily a good thing: Once we are past our youth, we tend to automate so much of our life that the days just pass in a blur, without us needing to be actually present in them. But what the skillful masters do is automate steadily more of the lower-order functions of the mind, whereas they continue to expand their skill at a higher level. If you reach a stage where you have automated everything you do, and you don’t push forward, your progress stops.

So, pretty obvious once you see it, I guess. But doing it is another matter. Even if we know how, few of us are going to master even a single skill in our lifetime, much less surpass numerous destinies while we are alive.

The day everyone walks

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Yes, we love this country! Or at least some of us really like the countryside. ^_^

May 17 is Norway’s national day – unlike most nations, it celebrates our constitution rather than our independence. Arguably, our independence comes from this celebration of the constitution. It was a highly politically charged tradition during our union with Sweden, up until 1905 when the union was dissolved. By then, the tradition of celebrating May 17 was established as a joyous occasion for the whole family, although the original reason for having the May 17 marches headed by singing children was probably to discourage loyalist police from shooting at the marchers, as happened occasionally during the early years.

Be that as it may, Norway and Sweden are now best friends, but the celebration continues, headed by singing children waving small flag joyously. It is the one day of the year when nearly all Norwegians actually walk, an activity that we should do a lot more in order to keep our health care expenses (and bodies) from ballooning. (Children holding balloons have become a part of the May 17 tradition, but ideally the children should not look too much like the balloons!)

In the mid to late 1800s, Norwegians stood together in the face of a challenge to their cultural identity. As a result, we not only got this particular tradition: We got a national cultural renaissance of epic proportions for such a small nations. Writers (including Ibsen), composers (including Grieg), artists (including Munch) and even some capable politicians. Those were the days. Today, we are a success story of a nation, widely recognized as the world’s best country to live in. And we are not only unremarkable: We cannot even be bothered to walk half an hour a day to save our own lives, much less to save billions on health expenses. Even a quarter of an hour would be a great help, say scientists. But we can’t be bothered to do even that for the country we love – or for our friends and family, or even for ourselves.

A Norwegian proverb says: “It takes a strong back to bear good days.” I suspect this applies to everyone, but it certainly does here.

Pulse while jogging

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No. A high pulse while jogging is not a good thing.

After reading the transcript from my cardiologist, I pondered how to make my potential “superpower” of super-low resting pulse into something useful. When walking fast, my pulse is typically around 110-120 depending on the day. But jogging even a short distance brings my pulse up in the 140es, at which point I slow down to a walk again. No point in taunting the asthma to attack.

And then I used Google to learn more about normal pulse while jogging, and found numerous young people asking “Is it normal to have a pulse of [180 / 190 / 200] while jogging?” The answers varied in quality, but generally the answer is NO WAY! Most humans have a maximum pulse below 200 even when young. A pulse of above 180 should be reserved for when you try to outrun a tsunami, or during the spurt phase of a championship. Or in other words, don’t voluntarily bring on a pulse like that unless there is a cardiologist and a heart starter nearby, or unless your life is forfeit anyway.

(The exception to this is high-intensity interval training, where you exert your muscles and heart very hard for a brief interval. This is used by athletes who want to improve their maximum performance. As long as you know your limits and do it right, it is surprisingly harmless. But if you are not already an athlete, don’t do interval training without the OK from a competent physician. Get to know your max pulse and that you don’t have any illnesses that may interfere.)

Back to the joggers. It is likely (and sometimes they actually say it) that these people are in a similar situation as I, only younger. They have not actually been jogging before, but they have seen others do it. So they set off, but it is harder than it looks. Why is this? It is usually because the body is not adapted to this particular use.

Even if you are in good shape, when you switch from one type of exercise to another which you are unfamiliar with, the pulse will go way up for some weeks. In part the body simply does not know how to do this exercise efficiently. In part the muscles for that task are not developed. Two things happen to muscles when you start using them in a new way: 1) They add muscle fiber, if you are straining them harder than before, and 2) they add small blood vessels, if you are using them longer than before.

If your body tries to bring sugar and oxygen to the muscles but the blood vessels are too small and too few, the heart needs to work that much harder, and your pulse will go way up, even if you don’t have an illness. What you need to do then is to give your muscle time to adapt. This means weeks where you exercise in the new way but not too hard.

For instance, after I have warmed up by walking, if my pulse is below 120, I start jogging until the pulse passes 140 on its way up. Then I slip back into walking, which I am quite experienced at. When the pulse fall below 120 again, I can jog for another stretch. If you are young and don’t have asthma, you can go quite a bit higher than that, but the point is that you should not stress test your heart when your muscles can’t benefit from it anyway. They still need to grow to their optimal size, and interval jogging three times a week will be enough to make them do that. But you have to keep at it. There is no magic wand. You have to put time and miles into walking if you haven’t even done that, and later you do the same for jogging, and eventually running. It may look easy on TV, but you have to put your own miles into it.

When you’ve got your jogging right, you should be able to keep a simple conversation while jogging, without having to slow down to get your breath back. If you jog alone, you should be able to recite a poem, or a familiar prayer. If your pulse is anywhere near 180, I’d go for the prayer.

10,000 hours

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A rule of thumb says that a grandmaster of chess – or the equivalent in any other venue – has put in at least ten thousand hours of practice.
And by “practice” we mean “relentless pounding on the invisible wall of your comfort zone.”

Psychologist Anders Ericsson did the research that gave us the 10000 hours rule, although others have popularized it in books. Much of the “evidence” is anecdotal, admittedly. But you know why? Because most people don’t put 10,000 hours into anything except their work, if that, and in that case rarely with enthusiasm and relentless dedication. Most jobs probably don’t even allow you to challenge yourself that way for 40 hours a week, five years, as it would take at that speed. And even if they did, most workers would rather quit, if they could get away with it, than exert themselves like that for a company they didn’t own.

At my own workplace, we get reorganized more often than every 5 years, although there is some continuity, so that is not my excuse. I just suck at organizing my own research when it comes to something as unpredictable as humans and the way they use hardware and software. The hardware and software is the easy part, of course. “Everything in the world fits together, except humans.”

One of the more famous examples was the guy who decided to put his three daughters through this level of relentless chess training while they grew up, to see whether they really would become expert chess players. All of them did. In all fairness, so was their father. But there is not a 100% chance of the next generation inheriting the chess mastery, or even a 33% chance. And whatever chance there is, usually only applies to the sons. Chess is still a male-dominated mind sport, and certainly was when the girls were small. Of course, if they had had no talent whatsoever, they might have run away from home or worse. I am not sure how ethical it is to be the destiny of your children in such a way, I find it creepy. That said, girls could do worse than play chess.

Not limited to chess and playing instruments (the most common examples), the 10,000 hour rule also applies to sports. Although in this case the life phase probably matters a lot, regardless of whether talent does. Skill sports you can get started on early, but strength and endurance sports are not for small kids, so your window of opportunity is narrower. Old age is not a great time to take up sports either, although it actually seems OK for running. There are several examples of men taking up running at the age of gray hairs and doing pretty well, running marathon long after retirement even if not winning.

Whatever thoughts I had about doing this, it definitely won’t happen today. Today my health is well below average (whining in my personal journal) and even my appetite is shot. But I have other interests as well. After all, one of my slogans is “surpassing numerous destinies while one is alive”. My higher aspiration may be to become a grandmaster of esoteric wisdom. But a more cynical observer may think I am closer to becoming a master of playing The Sims 3. ^_^

What if … instancing?

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Today is fluffy entry! We all know that parallel worlds only exist in science fiction and such. (Of course, so did communications satellites and flat-screen TVs…)

Not only are online roleplaying games becoming more and more lifelike: The real world is also becoming more like one of those games. (Or rather, our image of the real world is changing to that. It seems reasonable to assume that reality itself does not change.) Recently, science seems to verify that there is a lower limit to size. Particles cannot be divided into smaller particles forever: The so-called Planck size puts an absolute limit on how small things can physically be, kind of like the pixels on a screen limit the graphics of video games. Some scientists also claim there is a Planck Time, a smallest possible unit of time, playing a similar role in reality as the clock frequency of a computer.

Real life seems to have gotten the occasional upgrade as well: When I was a kid, it was doubtful whether Earth could actually feed 5 billion humans. Now we are 7 billion and produce enough food for 10 billion, although much of the food is wasted, some is used for “biofuel” and some is lost in transport. The laws of nature are supposedly the same, but the software – the human mind – has been upgraded. This is superficially similar to how a multiplayer online game is upgraded to handle more simultaneous players as it becomes more popular. And human life has certainly become popular lately.

So far, though, we have not seen instancing in real life. In MMORPGs, instancing was spearheaded by City of Heroes 8 years ago these days, and has later been adopted by other games both older and newer. In CoH, most missions were “door mission” which you entered through the front door of a more or less random office, warehouse or cave opening. But even if two teams went through the same door, they came into different – sometimes strikingly different – locations, each of them unique to the team.

In addition, CoH had zone instancing. A particular part of the city, such as the newbie area Atlas Park, might get so full of heroes that there would not be enough villainy for them all to stop, not to mention that the abundance of special effects and unpredictable movements might slow down the computers. So past a certain number of heroes, the next arrivals would go into a new instance called Atlas Park 2, and after that Atlas Park 3 etc.

It seems unlikely that we will have instancing in real life! But if we did, what form would it take? I have of course given this much thought. (As Scripture says: “The eyes of the fool is at the ends of the world.”) The result is a fictional “n-space”, based on an utterly imaginary second time dimension. Modern cosmology assumes that there may be an infinite number of alternate universes, that the possible universe branches continually every time two different outcomes are possible. One where Schroedinger’s cat is alive, one where it is dead, and so on. If it were possible to travel sideways through these universes (which would require a second time dimension, as far as I can see), we could get to worlds where humankind failed to arise or survive, and claim them for ourselves. (Of course, the victorious Nazi empire might already have done that – but probably not, since most major scientific breakthroughs seem to involve Jews at some stage or another…)

Right now the whole concept is as fictional as can be. I may, in fact, use it in some of my fiction; I have several half-baked ideas to that effect. One important factor is the cost and convenience of traveling between timelines. It would probably require some kind of base station, although it would be interesting if one could have personal worn shifting devices or at least car devices allowing one to shift the car to another timeline. This would probably not be safe enough to be widespread, even if it were technically possible. (Besides, the more impossible the technology, the more impressive it should look, right?). A more reasonable approach is building a large gateway through – a portal to the parallel world. If the cost of sending things to a nearby world was similar to a trip to the moon, it would probably mainly be used for science and to bring back exterminated species, stuff like that.

If it was feasible to keep a permanent “gate” to an empty instance of Earth, where you could drive through for a modest fee, we could start building a new city in the same place as an old, dig a new mine in the same place as one we had emptied etc. I really doubt anything like that will ever happen in real life. Then again, now that the idea is out there, who knows. There is a saying in Genesis that when humans all have one language, nothing will be impossible for them. Perhaps it is safer for all if the Chinese stick to Mandarin for a while yet…

Fallback strategy: Simplicity

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Screenshot Sims 3

Many of my sims enjoy painting and decorating their homes with their own paintings. Me, I enjoy playing The Sims and decorating my journal with my screenshots. ^_^

I am not really a pessimist on behalf of civilization. I think it is entirely possible that by 2050, there will be 9 billion humans who are richer than I am today, eating whatever they want, traveling wherever they want, having more entertainment than we can even imagine today. Why not? The arrow is certainly pointing in that direction, and has done so for generations, and change is happening faster and faster.

But there is also the possibility that some critical resource will run out and there won’t be any obvious replacements. Actually, we know that many of our resources will run down over the next generation: Oil, gas, probably coal, and some metals. Freshwater in some areas, various types of terrain probably. As of today, alternatives are more expensive or less effective, which is why they haven’t already replaced the original. This may continue, and we would then end up with a world which is simply more expensive to run, so to speak.

Unless there is some kind of breakthrough (or breakdown),  this is where we are headed, a world where most of the world’s population competes on roughly the same playing field as we for resources that are limited either in quantity or quality. This is not a disaster exactly, but it means there is a good chance we will have to scale back our expectations of becoming richer and richer year by year. Is that really such a horror? Until a few generations ago, the whole world was what we now call “third world”. Your ancestors and mine included. Even if we never get to take a trip to the moon, as my 10 year old self expected to do, we have much to be grateful for.

The value of material peak experiences is highly overrated.

People look forward for years to retirement, when they will do everything they did not have time for while working. A few months after they retire, most have scaled down their ambitions, and quite a few wish they were still at work. (And their family members wish it even more!)

People save up for years to go on a particularly rare vacation, and look forward to it with ever mounting expectation. The actual experience is usually pretty good, but nothing like the excitement in advance. It is like that with pretty much anything. A new car, a new house, marriage, divorce – while you usually don’t quite regret them, the awesomeness you waited for is nowhere to be found. Wherever you go, you still bring yourself with you, and this is the main part of every experience. Your self colors all you experience. It is the most important part of your life, so be sure to make it the best self you can.

Once you see through the fallacy of the wonderful peak experience, and are willing to settle for 95% happiness every day instead of 100% happiness “someday”, a lot of options open up. Everyday things can get you that far: A hobby that allows self-expression, spending time with friends, perhaps pets, or books. These need not cost a fortune, and you need not travel far for them.

Do you really think you should be number one? In the prehistoric time of scarcity, it may have been important. If you were not at the top, there might not be enough food for you, or you might not get to choose a suitable mate. Today? There is already more food in the world than needed for the world’s population; if you read this on the Internet, your problem is more likely to be too much food than too little. As for mating … I hope that depends on other things than being number one, now.

Once you let go of the need to be number one, life becomes so much easier. We don’t need the newest and best, we can enjoy whatever works, and can find happiness in simple things that don’t impress anyone but are enjoyable to ourselves.

Free yourself from the need to impress others, and you have a lot more time to do the things you really want to do. Which are those? They are the ones you wish you had chosen when you reach the end of your life. That is when you no longer feel the need to impress anyone, no longer wear a mask, when you are finally yourself. Why not start earlier?

We don’t need to be rich or famous to be ourselves. We just have to be honest. It is not easy, but it is affordable. Less pursuit and more happiness.

Using all that CO2

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You may try this in your own garden, but be careful if you make your own charcoal, the process can create carbon monoxide while it lasts. There is also the obvious fire hazards.

Yesterday I wrote at length about the futility of carbon taxes: Almost all the fossil fuel will be in the atmosphere within the lifetime of most of my readers anyway. Today I will tell you how we remove some of this carbon dioxide at a moderate cost, and in the process feed multitudes for thousands of years. It is really quite simple. Even if our high-tech civilization should fall apart, this particular thing is still easily within our reach. After all, I am talking about something that has been tried successfully before, ranging from about 450 BC to around 950 AD.

During this period, the Amazonian rain forest was populated by a native people which we suspect was the ancestors of some of the nomadic people living there after the European invasion. The soil in this rainy area is of poor quality, as the rain washes nutrients out of the ground and the rapidly growing plant life mops up what is left. Yet many patches deep in what is now forest have a strikingly fertile, deep black soil that is ideal for farming: The so-called Terra Preta, the black soil of Amazon forest.

When clearing forest, these people may have used smoldering instead of wildfires, covering burning trees and bushes to reduce them to charcoal. Charcoal can also be made to more exact qualities and quantities by recent but still fairly simple methods. The charcoal was mixed with manure, compost and  the occasional pottery shard and buried in the resource-poor soil, creating a new type of dark soil with amazing properties. It yields triple the harvest without any extra fertilizer, binds nitrogen and even regenerates itself for more than 2000 years – presumably until it is removed by force.

The charcoal, of course, consists largely of carbon, which is not released to the atmosphere as it would have been through burning. Once out of the air, it stays in the ground for the aforementioned thousands of years. This has historically not been a great idea, as the climate has become slowly colder for about 10 000 years, until quite recently. Today we have a new chance: There hasn’t been this much carbon in the air since the age of dinosaurs. If there ever was a time to mass produce terra preta, now would be that time.

In addition to the old-fashioned kilns for making charcoal, modern technology opens for a process of pyrolysis, where leftover biomass (like straw from corn etc) in addition to wood can be broken down to “biochar”, releasing flammable gases in the process that can not only supply continuing energy to the process but also produce energy. This may still be out of reach for parts of the third world, but while you were not looking, most of the tropical nations stopped hunting with spears and started getting mobile phones. Whether this in reality turns out to be part of the solution or part of the problem, I cannot say for sure.

***

 OK, we have a way of extracting carbon permanently (or very nearly so) from the atmosphere, in the process greatly increasing crop yields without artificial fertilizer. It is possible even with simple technology, and can use either wood or worthless byproducts from agriculture. The new fertile soil regenerates itself beyond the foreseeable future. Should our civilization one day collapse, having transformed the soil of the tropics this way would vastly improve the chance of any survivors to bounce back quickly.

Why aren’t we already doing this? What could possibly stop us from cheaply, harmlessly providing food for our descendants for thousands and tens of thousands of years into the future?

Well, there is the small detail that you can get more crops THIS year with less work and less expense, by using artificial fertilizer.  Since the overwhelming majority of people are like your neighbors, not like you, this is reason enough. The second reason is of course that they have never heard about it. Now you have. For more information, just search the Internet for “terra preta” and “biochar”, while we still have an Internet.

 

Carbon taxes

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We may think we live in the post-industrial era, but we have actually just moved the smokestacks out of sight.

This entry is inspired by the book The World in 2050, published by The Economist, a magazine I have spoken well of over the years. In its chapter on global warming, the book takes the position that it is already too late to avoid the climate change in 2050, but it is still not too late to avoid multiplying this for the centuries after this. Of course, most people who read this book are probably grownups at the very least, so it may not interest them much how the world will look in 2070.

Climate change literally happens at a glacial pace. And I mean literally literally, not the way people these days have taken to using the world “literally” as an amplifier. The world is dotted with glaciers, and these grow and shrink very slowly, thus the “glacial” speed. The melting of these is a major part of the climate change. As long as there is plenty of ice to melt, the temperature will not increase rapidly, since the process of melting (technically called a “phase transition”) requires a much larger amount of heat than simply warming the same amount of water by one degree.

We have been able to pour large amounts of carbon dioxide (and some methane) into the atmosphere and the temperature has only increased a little. We have literally (literally) “seen nothing yet”, in the sense that all that has happened at any one place on Earth lies within the natural band of fluctuation. Whenever a particular place is extremely warm or cold or humid or dry, someone will usually be able to dig out that it was even more so in 1937 or 1899 or some other time in the past, and conclude that It Doesn’t Really Matter, the more things change the more they remain the same.

Some of my friends, God-fearing men and women, are absolutely convinced that man-made global warming is just a socialist hoax. This is a reasonable thought: When socialists agree on something, it is probably something nefarious. In this case, however, the greenhouse effect has been known since well before the first internal combustion engine. We just never thought it would be a problem. It will be a problem, but as usual not one socialism can solve. It will also be an opportunity, something socialism is spectacularly bad at.

The amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are in fact quite small even now, by interplanetary standards. Venus has an atmosphere of mostly CO2, while here on Tellus it is less than one tenth of a percent! It is natural to think that this cannot possibly have any noticeable effect. Therefore, the whole climate hysteria is simply a way for the left to introduce even more taxes, now called “green taxes” or more correctly “carbon tax”.

***

In so far as carbon taxes come in addition to other taxes, I am as wary of them as any conservative. Since the panic is still entirely theoretical, if we increase taxes now it is a safe bet that the government will use the money to play Santa Claus and barrel pork to important voters so as to remain in power and live it up. The idea that the green taxes will be used to combat or adapt to climate change is unlikely to actually be practiced until some visible horror arrives, such as water lapping into the streets of London and New York. This is still some years off, thank the Light. Thus, we are not going to do anything, except fly around in jet planes and hold conferences about how to reduce the use of jet planes, stuff like that.

Meanwhile, we continue to pump up oil and gas and dig up coal and tar sand, and burn it off as fuel mostly. Just how much we drill depends in principle on the expected demand, but there is also a time delay because you can’t just sail out in the Arctic Ocean one day and come home with a ship full of oil. It takes several years to make all the installations ready. But in principle, it is the demand that determines the drilling. And it does so by influencing price. The higher the demand, the more people are willing to pay for fossil fuels, and the more money there is to earn from drilling, and the more places people will drill.

Enter the carbon tax. Europe has had such taxes for so long now, it is taken as granted. Here in Norway, gas now costs $2.68 per liter, which is about a quarter of a gallon. So around $10 a gallon, most of it tax. Scientists are still uncertain whether this has had any effect on driving distance at all, but it is thought that people may have switched to modern, fuel-efficient cars slightly earlier than they otherwise might. It is hard to quantify, though, since we don’t have a parallel Norway in which the taxes remained low.

But what if we dared raise taxes to a point where it actually would curb demand? Wouldn’t we save the world through taxation, for the first time? After all, with higher prices, demand would go down; but the higher prices would not transfer to the oil companies as higher profit, so drilling would not increase. Win! Or…?

Well, yeah, to some extent this would work – if the whole world did it. That would require a massive alien invasion, and I think that would be more of a problem than the greenhouse effect. So what happens in the real world when Europe increases its “green taxes”?

The demand for oil goes down just a little. This causes the price to go down just a little too – perhaps a dollar or two, although that may be exaggerating. What happens next? The slightly cheaper oil means the remaining 6.6 billion earthlings can afford to use MORE oil than they otherwise would, and they will do so until a new equilibrium appears, close to the previous.

***

I don’t  think people really have realized that we already may have passed “peak oil” in its original sense, not in the sense of the scare stories where suddenly cars become useless because one day there is no gas. It does not work that way. What happened was that one day we extracted the most oil we had ever done, and the next day we didn’t, because it was so hard to get to. The IEA, which is the closest there is to an official authority on energy, claim that this happened in 2006 with crude oil. However, thanks to technologies for converting oil from tar etc, actual peak oil may have happened in 2011 or even be in the near future. In any case, what really happens is that demand is increasing at a whole other scale, as emerging markets keep growing toward western levels of energy use, while production of fossil fuels (including gas and coal) is rising more slowly and will eventually fall.

Because energy demand is rising steadily among most of the world’s population, fossil fuels are already becoming more expensive year by year. If we suppress the demand in one corner of the world, this is a godsend for the rest of the planet, since demand there is limited by the high cost. The production remains the same – the prices are already so high that it is the technical challenges that delays production, not waiting for a better price. Even if Europe and the USA both completely stopped using fossil fuels, which would definitely send the prices down, all fossil fuel will still be gone over the course of a generation or so. What remains will be what is ridiculously hard to get to, so that you would need a price of $1000 a barrel or more to make it worth it. Actually, I confidently predict that crude oil WILL reach $1000 a barrel unless something miraculous happens, although at the time it will be used as a raw material in chemistry rather than for fuel.

The upper limit of the fuel price is going to be decided by something entirely different: Alternative energies. When sun power, wind power, wave power etc gradually come online in large enough quantities, the demand for oil will begin to fade. But as I said, it will still be valuable for chemistry. And alternative energy is still dependent on government subsidies even though crude oil now costs over $100 a barrel on a regular basis. There are only a few limited, local uses where renewable energy is profitable today. This will change, but it will take time (and an even higher oil price).

The short of it is, aggressive taxation in the rich nations may delay the End of Oil – the point where almost all of it is in the atmosphere – by somewhere from weeks to a couple years, depending on how extreme the taxes are.  The effect is utterly dwarfed by the ever growing demand and the growth of alternative energies, which will decide the cut-off point of the fossil fuel price and thus the speed of emptying the known reserves. The taxes are almost but not quite irrelevant.

Let us be excessively optimistic, unrealistically so, and grant the remote possibility that Draconian carbon taxes may delay by as much as five years the day when all fossil fuel is converted to CO2. But climate change is a process that continues at a slow, steady pace for several centuries. A handful of years delay (during which we will still have extracted and burned ALMOST all the oil, gas and coal, just not absolutely all) will not be visible in the climate statistics – it will drown in the random noise, the wobbling of the planet, changes in the solar wind and natural fluctuations in the cloud cover, the occasional volcano eruption, stuff like that. We won’t ever notice.

 ***

 So is there any reason at all to have carbon taxes? Oh yes, but on one condition: That they replace other taxes. It is better to tax something that is less useful, such as oil, over something that is more useful, such as work. If we can make people drive a little less, it won’t do much good but it won’t do much harm either. If we make people work less, everyone will suffer.

So moving taxes from production to consumption is generally a great way to make the world a better place without actually cutting the taxes. I guess doing that is too much to hope for. But if we move taxes to fossil fuel use, this will cut itself gradually over time. When the fuels are gone, they are gone. And it will likely happen over the span of a generation or so. At that point, the more of the taxes that are on fossil fuels, the better, since no one will be paying them. Go go green taxes!  ^_^

Two confidences

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“Just how perfect can I be?” There are two very different ways one can arrive at this feeling. One of them is very much more likely when you are young.

Pew Research, who (fittingly for their name) found out that American Christians knew less about religion than anyone else in America, have also found out that Democrats also know less about politics. The parallel is striking, if you ask me. The less you know, the more you are into it… or?

It is a bit more complex than that, in both cases. See, the study shows that the Democratic party has two very different groups of voters. The one that gives them the bad score is the barely literate working class workers who are connected to the party through their union and don’t need no facts to disturb them. The other part of the party, much smaller but quite important, is the academic elite. They tend to do the thinking for the party, and are pretty well informed. They also tend to be a bit remote from the mainstream, to put it that way. (Luckily for the Democrats, the elite of the Republican party is not exactly the man in the street either.)

The Democratic party, like all leftist parties (of which it is quite possibly the least leftist in the world, but by American standards it is leftist) has these bold plans to reform society. There may be two very different points of view that lead to this aspiration, and I will show how these fit the two main voter blocks mentioned above.

The Dunning-Kruger effect is the overconfidence of the ignorant. Because they know so little, they think there is very little to know, and so they overestimate themselves. Looking at others, they have no clue how to estimate them either, so will randomly put them down or up depending on unrelated factors.

Once you learn a bit – not a lot, but enough to get an overview of that particular field – you realize that you have been an idiot, and your confidence plummets to record lows. It stays low for quite a while as you continue to study, but gradually climbs as you amass a wide and deep knowledge base. In the end, it is clear to you and your fellows in this particular field that you are a leading expert. You start getting used to the fact that others just don’t know what they’re talking about, and gradually you stop listening to them. In this way you enter the second and last overconfidence, the overconfidence of the elite.

You may wonder why I call it overconfidence when they actually are the best, head and shoulders and chest above the rest. The answer is: Because they are still not God, they are not omniscient, not by a long shot.

The exception to this rule is Ryuho Okawa … according to Ryuho Okawa. I have mentioned before that I can totally understand why he thought he was a god. When you read (and write!) more books in a year than most successful people do in a lifetime, it is hard to find your place in the rank and file of what normally pass for humanity on this planet. Not that I am like that or anything, I am just an ordinary superhuman. ^_^

Now the tenured elite in America have not actually come out and called themselves God and Savior, but they clearly do believe there is no other being in the universe that is above them, and they have bold plans to make life better for the lesser humans, this time through social engineering.  Wanting to reshape the very soul of a nation according to their untested ideas (or, in some cases, tested and failed) is almost certainly reaching too far.

Luckily democracies are really good at oscillating, so that after a few years of Democrats there will be a spell of Republicans and so back and forth. Religion does not have this natural oscillation. This is why I would rather have democracy than theocracy, no matter how well-meaning the theocrats are. In fact, the more well-meaning, the more likely to go completely overboard. The more certain you are of your own righteousness, the more clearly evil are those who oppose you, and unfortunately they just have to be removed with extreme prejudice.

Socialism, as I have said before, is essentially a political religion. It is no coincidence that communist regimes, the extreme of socialism, murdered millions and millions and millions of people over the past century, not just in one country but several. For the betterment of mankind, of course. (Social democracy, on the other hand, is still subject to oscillations. To refer to a country like my native Norway as “socialist” is pretty ignorant. Rather, any democracy will eventually move in the direction of the majority voting for money to themselves, from the savings of the past generations first and then by borrowing from the future, until the creditors shut the door. As we say about Greece: When your socialism fails, blame capitalism!)

But enough about the sad political religion of the left.  Let us see whether true religion also has two prongs, like politics have. The large mass of staunchly religious would be those who don’t know enough about religion to even doubt it. Then there would be a large number of doubters in the middle. And finally at the other end there would be those who have studied religion in great detail, both in theoria and praxis, and have confidence because they truly know in what they believe.

And unlike socialism, which wants to change the world from the outside, changing circumstances, true religion seeks to change the individual from inside. Therefore change always begins with ourselves. As the Christian Bible says: “It is now the time when the judgment begins with God’s house.”  Such a confidence can be tested quickly and effectively through the experiences of daily life. In fact, it cannot avoid being tested. Then our divine nature (or lack thereof) will definitely show itself.

But once you have studied religion enough to realize your ignorance, there is no going back (unless you stop really early, I guess). Madness is not the only danger in books: There is also the danger that something may be understood that can never be forgotten. You have to keep learning, working your way up from the lowlands of doubt until you reach the city on the hill. And our understanding, or lack thereof, will be tested in our own lives sooner or later. A saint or sage can say: “Come follow me!”. Listen for this from your pastor or rabbi, and the same from your congressman, and it will serve you and your country well.