This is in serious need of a critical update. The Chinese government since 2014 has known about the discovery that the dust from the Taklamakhan is a critical component to western USA rainfall events.
The continuation of desert reclamation in this area by China is a threat to the national security of the USA in terms of sustainability of human settlements hydropower, irrigation and biodiversity..It further is in general violation of a number of the Stockholm Declaration Principles.
The Tarim Basin wherein lies the Taklamakhan Desert has to my knowledge a shallow acquifer allowing for this project to be done without huge energy lines installations but if we imagine it going around the State of New Mexico as it is of comparable size, that's still one heck of a major transmission grid..even done with solar electricity.
It has to be one big expenditure too of resources.
One could of course also discuss "governance" with this perspective. We humans are obsessed with the idea of governance and politics, built on the notion that we can control processes and events. But life does all this without any governance. Is the price too high for us to do the same? I mean, it is probably our ability to partly "control" life processes that has made humans such a force on Earth - for the better and the worse - and that our numbers have exploded. Meanwhile our control is partly an illusion and meanwhile we are not able to govern life as a whole, and we should be happy for that, because we would turn it into something dead.
Thinking loudly a bit more: the idea of an "invisible hand" is a leading feature of the market ideology. Certainly, markets are often "better" at processing information than top-down systems, such as Soviet planned economy. One problem is that markets also have in-built tendencies for accumulation of capital that will try to control the process and work in favour of the interests of the captial holders, capitalists, Another problem is that while "markets" may sometimes work fairly well for the human societies they certainly don't work well for other species. In a similar way as captitalism pervert the human markets, humans pervert natures market (resource flows). I wrote something about the market being THE superalgorithm a while ago, https://gardenearth.substack.com/p/the-singularity-is-already-here-it-is
There is much to say on the analogy between the biosphere and the free market. One thing is that a true free market is unstable with respect to monopolization, i.e. concentration of resources. In the biosphere monopolization is physically prohibited by the fact that the energy basis of life is solar energy which cannot be stored and hence concentrated.
In the context of free market and capitalism, the fact that solar energy cannot be concentrated means that one tree cannot deprive all others of it. Trees do not move and only get energy where they are. This is because solar photons are massless particles that, unlike money, cannot be stored.
That is why the biosphere as a whole, where plants are the primary producers, cannot become a centralized system.
Of course, solar energy can be converted to plant biomass (and then concentrated). But that is another story.
Yes greed and ignorance unfortunately disrupts the balance and in some cases nature is often prepared to wipe the sIate clean once again and start over with few or non of us
This is an important topic. Not everything that exists in Nature is part of the regulation system. Indeed, every algorithm is prone to errors during copying. As long as the number of errors does not exceed a certain limit, the algorithm remains functionable. So the question is, are we part of the algorithm or are we one of its (fatal?) errors?
It might be said that Nature thinks and decides and operates on a simple principle of meeting the physical needs of all living beings, including human beings.
Good work!. You're spot on. Nature internally and externally is programmed to continue its own existence. Unfortunately Also are the greedy humans that keep reappearing throughout the eons of time and try as they,we may to coopt and disrupt the natural processing.
Destruction of forest balance by over logging, destruction of the vital coronary arteries(Rivers of our planet) by damming the major river waterways going into our oceans, thus starving all,all marine life of vital nutrients and robbing the foundation to all life, silica. Hydrodamtruth.org
A super computer is only as good as its memory so a study of the genetic code stored in the DNA of every organism vs the memory of a super computer could offer interesting insight as to the actual usefulness of computational power. I agree right now we are putting in peril the stored memory of millions of years of life in the DNA of every organism and would guess the memory of experience is of equal scale to the computational scale.
According to our estimates (see Fig. 2 in https://bioticregulation.ru/ab.php?id=info02 ), the store of genetic information of the biosphere and the store of information in our present civilization are comparable, at around 10^16 bit.
The rate of technological progress, 10^7 bit/sec, outpaces the rate of evolutionary change, 1 bit/sec, by a wide margin.
The rate of information processing by the biosphere is, on the contrary, significantly larger than that of the civilization, 10^35 versus 10^16 bit/sec, as I discussed in my post.
So the main thing is not the amount of information stored, nor how rapidly it changes, but WHAT is this information. Is it about how to deplete the resources most rapidly, as our civilization does, or is it about how to persist over time, as Life does.
This second algorithm of persistence is much more complex as it includes information about the environment that we humans don't know. Running this (unknown to us) algorithm apparently requires huge information processing power (that we don't have). That is why our only solution is to let Life work for us. This means that we must leave a significant area of the planet untouched.
Evolutionary change time scale? when a million or a billion steps are needed to work toward a change, you say this obeys the second law of thermal dynamics but are we not gaining knowledge with each step? are we measuring the progress or the work that goes into it? and what is order in a natural system but the ability to increase ways in which to interact. In relation to the genome of species 99.9% is the same and 0.1% is different between humans which equates to 3 million variants per individual . if this is roughly equal between all living organisms the amount of possibilities ie the store of knowledge I would say would be vastly greater than the store of human knowledge. I totally agree that we should be doing our best to decrease our impact on our natural systems. Many thanks
"0.1% is different between humans which equates to 3 million variants per individual" -- but this is not our useful information. Rather, these are mutational substitutions representing the erosion of information in the course of its copying. All that is good and meaningful is our common. Like health is uniform, but diseases are all different. So when we calculate the amount of meaningful DNA information in the biosphere, we should not take the intraspecific genetic polymorphism into account.
Vincent, as with intelligence, consciousness is a loaded term primarily related to humans. From my perspective, Nature is so much more complex that assigning consciousness to it may not do a proper credit to that complexity.
Thank you Anastassia, any term yes will be framed and in this way will limit what we are discussing. Definitely in spending time with Indigenous Peoples in the rainforest,the consciousness I experienced was very different of which human consciousness, as Indigenous Peoples are well aware, is a small subset.
One might characterize the information-processing capabilities you describe as a form of intelligence hard-wired into the biosphere as a whole through billions of years of evolution. Sustainability might turn out to be an extremely simple information-based process for scaling back the human-created things-we-extract flows & pollution flows that are disturbing natural ecosystems beyond their self-repair point, and allowing the biotic regulation of the environment to stabilize the ecological crises (including the climate crisis) as a whole.
Good summary! "Sustainability might turn out to be an extremely simple information-based process for scaling back the human-created things-we-extract flows & pollution flows that are disturbing natural ecosystems beyond their self-repair point, and allowing the biotic regulation of the environment to stabilize the ecological crises (including the climate crisis) as a whole"
I agree that in a way that is very simple. What we still need to realize that this is our only way to sustainability. We cannot reach sustainability in any other way except relying on healthy natural ecosystems. In a way, we are still trying to create perpetuum mobiles (circular economy and the like). At a certain point we will see that they just don't work.
Intelligence is a loaded and somewhat ambiguous term, so I am trying not to use it when talking about biotic regulation.
Fascinating perspective. In the end, everything life-based is the result of processing of information, whether done by a human made computer or through biological processes. I wonder if it could apply to inorganic processes.
This notion of the universality of computing has been formalized in the paradigm of physical reservoir computing, where "computation" comprises the extraction of a useful pattern from the reverberation of an input through a nonlinear "reservoir". The properties of an ideal reservoir are recognized to be exactly the properties of living organisms and meta-organisms. The crux of the issue is that the modality of computing - the questions asked and the answers bought- is fundamentally different than in digital computing, and requires a different state of consciousness.
Are you familiar with the association induction hypothesis of the cell by the late and great Gilbert Ling? He too brings a brilliant reorientation to the energetics of life
Wow! This is very humbling. Thank you so much.
A Canadian Grandma
Comment feedback SAV
New World Encyclopedia
On Taklamakhan 12/12/2024
This is in serious need of a critical update. The Chinese government since 2014 has known about the discovery that the dust from the Taklamakhan is a critical component to western USA rainfall events.
The continuation of desert reclamation in this area by China is a threat to the national security of the USA in terms of sustainability of human settlements hydropower, irrigation and biodiversity..It further is in general violation of a number of the Stockholm Declaration Principles.
https://www.hcn.org/issues/46-22/the-dust-detectives/
Very interesting work! Thanks for sharing Stephen
The Tarim Basin wherein lies the Taklamakhan Desert has to my knowledge a shallow acquifer allowing for this project to be done without huge energy lines installations but if we imagine it going around the State of New Mexico as it is of comparable size, that's still one heck of a major transmission grid..even done with solar electricity.
It has to be one big expenditure too of resources.
I would say so!
I replied in another thread, see https://bioticregulation.substack.com/p/how-much-wild-nature-do-we-need
Interesting perspective, thanks.
One could of course also discuss "governance" with this perspective. We humans are obsessed with the idea of governance and politics, built on the notion that we can control processes and events. But life does all this without any governance. Is the price too high for us to do the same? I mean, it is probably our ability to partly "control" life processes that has made humans such a force on Earth - for the better and the worse - and that our numbers have exploded. Meanwhile our control is partly an illusion and meanwhile we are not able to govern life as a whole, and we should be happy for that, because we would turn it into something dead.
Thinking loudly a bit more: the idea of an "invisible hand" is a leading feature of the market ideology. Certainly, markets are often "better" at processing information than top-down systems, such as Soviet planned economy. One problem is that markets also have in-built tendencies for accumulation of capital that will try to control the process and work in favour of the interests of the captial holders, capitalists, Another problem is that while "markets" may sometimes work fairly well for the human societies they certainly don't work well for other species. In a similar way as captitalism pervert the human markets, humans pervert natures market (resource flows). I wrote something about the market being THE superalgorithm a while ago, https://gardenearth.substack.com/p/the-singularity-is-already-here-it-is
There is much to say on the analogy between the biosphere and the free market. One thing is that a true free market is unstable with respect to monopolization, i.e. concentration of resources. In the biosphere monopolization is physically prohibited by the fact that the energy basis of life is solar energy which cannot be stored and hence concentrated.
Fossil fuels are concentrated solar energy. It is possible to concentrate solar energy but only over geological time scales.
In the context of free market and capitalism, the fact that solar energy cannot be concentrated means that one tree cannot deprive all others of it. Trees do not move and only get energy where they are. This is because solar photons are massless particles that, unlike money, cannot be stored.
That is why the biosphere as a whole, where plants are the primary producers, cannot become a centralized system.
Of course, solar energy can be converted to plant biomass (and then concentrated). But that is another story.
This a quite fun way to understand why and how LIFE has the upper hand! Thank you. Now to get humans to value LIFE….
We are Nature, and, hence, part of this regulation system ... 🤔
Global Neoliberalism, driving resource exhaustion, however, is an aberration, is it not?
Yes greed and ignorance unfortunately disrupts the balance and in some cases nature is often prepared to wipe the sIate clean once again and start over with few or non of us
This is an important topic. Not everything that exists in Nature is part of the regulation system. Indeed, every algorithm is prone to errors during copying. As long as the number of errors does not exceed a certain limit, the algorithm remains functionable. So the question is, are we part of the algorithm or are we one of its (fatal?) errors?
It might be said that Nature thinks and decides and operates on a simple principle of meeting the physical needs of all living beings, including human beings.
Good work!. You're spot on. Nature internally and externally is programmed to continue its own existence. Unfortunately Also are the greedy humans that keep reappearing throughout the eons of time and try as they,we may to coopt and disrupt the natural processing.
Destruction of forest balance by over logging, destruction of the vital coronary arteries(Rivers of our planet) by damming the major river waterways going into our oceans, thus starving all,all marine life of vital nutrients and robbing the foundation to all life, silica. Hydrodamtruth.org
Thanks Anastassia. Merry late Christmas.
I will excerpt this in my blog with a link.
Thank You, John. You are very welcome!
A super computer is only as good as its memory so a study of the genetic code stored in the DNA of every organism vs the memory of a super computer could offer interesting insight as to the actual usefulness of computational power. I agree right now we are putting in peril the stored memory of millions of years of life in the DNA of every organism and would guess the memory of experience is of equal scale to the computational scale.
According to our estimates (see Fig. 2 in https://bioticregulation.ru/ab.php?id=info02 ), the store of genetic information of the biosphere and the store of information in our present civilization are comparable, at around 10^16 bit.
The rate of technological progress, 10^7 bit/sec, outpaces the rate of evolutionary change, 1 bit/sec, by a wide margin.
The rate of information processing by the biosphere is, on the contrary, significantly larger than that of the civilization, 10^35 versus 10^16 bit/sec, as I discussed in my post.
So the main thing is not the amount of information stored, nor how rapidly it changes, but WHAT is this information. Is it about how to deplete the resources most rapidly, as our civilization does, or is it about how to persist over time, as Life does.
This second algorithm of persistence is much more complex as it includes information about the environment that we humans don't know. Running this (unknown to us) algorithm apparently requires huge information processing power (that we don't have). That is why our only solution is to let Life work for us. This means that we must leave a significant area of the planet untouched.
Evolutionary change time scale? when a million or a billion steps are needed to work toward a change, you say this obeys the second law of thermal dynamics but are we not gaining knowledge with each step? are we measuring the progress or the work that goes into it? and what is order in a natural system but the ability to increase ways in which to interact. In relation to the genome of species 99.9% is the same and 0.1% is different between humans which equates to 3 million variants per individual . if this is roughly equal between all living organisms the amount of possibilities ie the store of knowledge I would say would be vastly greater than the store of human knowledge. I totally agree that we should be doing our best to decrease our impact on our natural systems. Many thanks
"0.1% is different between humans which equates to 3 million variants per individual" -- but this is not our useful information. Rather, these are mutational substitutions representing the erosion of information in the course of its copying. All that is good and meaningful is our common. Like health is uniform, but diseases are all different. So when we calculate the amount of meaningful DNA information in the biosphere, we should not take the intraspecific genetic polymorphism into account.
One algorithm to rule them all . . . Nature!
Anastassia, thank you for posting about this. It's great to have the data behind what we intuitively already feel is the case.
What I'd add is that we know nature is a consciousness. To be this, it might require the extra processing power. Just a thought.
Vincent, as with intelligence, consciousness is a loaded term primarily related to humans. From my perspective, Nature is so much more complex that assigning consciousness to it may not do a proper credit to that complexity.
Thank you Anastassia, any term yes will be framed and in this way will limit what we are discussing. Definitely in spending time with Indigenous Peoples in the rainforest,the consciousness I experienced was very different of which human consciousness, as Indigenous Peoples are well aware, is a small subset.
Great article Anastassia.
One might characterize the information-processing capabilities you describe as a form of intelligence hard-wired into the biosphere as a whole through billions of years of evolution. Sustainability might turn out to be an extremely simple information-based process for scaling back the human-created things-we-extract flows & pollution flows that are disturbing natural ecosystems beyond their self-repair point, and allowing the biotic regulation of the environment to stabilize the ecological crises (including the climate crisis) as a whole.
Good summary! "Sustainability might turn out to be an extremely simple information-based process for scaling back the human-created things-we-extract flows & pollution flows that are disturbing natural ecosystems beyond their self-repair point, and allowing the biotic regulation of the environment to stabilize the ecological crises (including the climate crisis) as a whole"
I agree that in a way that is very simple. What we still need to realize that this is our only way to sustainability. We cannot reach sustainability in any other way except relying on healthy natural ecosystems. In a way, we are still trying to create perpetuum mobiles (circular economy and the like). At a certain point we will see that they just don't work.
Intelligence is a loaded and somewhat ambiguous term, so I am trying not to use it when talking about biotic regulation.
Fascinating perspective. In the end, everything life-based is the result of processing of information, whether done by a human made computer or through biological processes. I wonder if it could apply to inorganic processes.
This notion of the universality of computing has been formalized in the paradigm of physical reservoir computing, where "computation" comprises the extraction of a useful pattern from the reverberation of an input through a nonlinear "reservoir". The properties of an ideal reservoir are recognized to be exactly the properties of living organisms and meta-organisms. The crux of the issue is that the modality of computing - the questions asked and the answers bought- is fundamentally different than in digital computing, and requires a different state of consciousness.
Thank you for the thoughtful article.
Are you familiar with the association induction hypothesis of the cell by the late and great Gilbert Ling? He too brings a brilliant reorientation to the energetics of life