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Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

Read Debates, a new Web-only feature culled from Readers' Opinions, published every Thursday.

fredmoore - 10:28am Jul 29, 2003 EST (# 13177 of 13267)

Gisterme,

Like I said earlier, it would be nice if we could come up with a better term .... but not 'untropy' its too 'dis'. However since the aim of life is to concentrate low entropy, and EMERGY build up in living systems is equivalent to low entropy then we can say that life seeks to build up its EMERGY maximally. Where the problem lies is that EMERGY is by definition, unavailable since it is fixed in the subject system. What we look for to build our EMERGY base is available energy. As far as I can see though, if a system has high EMERGY then it necessarily has high available energy as it has low entropy. Perhaps the confusion has to do with the fact that we don't seek high EMERGY items like oceans, where the EMERGY is spread over a huge volume, but rather high EMERGY items where the EMERGY is dense, like food or lumps of coal.

Nevertheless the issue that all life seeks EMERGY (ie a high personal EMERGY level) remains true and it is also true that a KAEP will allow all nations a tenable pathway to maximising the EMERGY of their citizens and their environments.

Your questions:

1. "...Who says they (emjoules) are only past tense"..."

Yes EMERGY is defined as the solar+tidal+geo energy used up directly or indirectly to make a service or product = past tense. But the resultant service or product now has lower entropy than before and that makes it a potentially useful input for living systems (provided the emergy density is high and not diffuse).

2. "...Its resultant EMERGY when it is consumed is not only a record of its thermodynamic inputs, it must also be [related to (correction)] the amount of available energy that can be obtained from it..."

How does that differ from energy potential in the traditional sense? Don't we know how many BTU buring a pound of coal or gasoline will produce...how many joules they can release under various burning conditions?

It differs in that:

the btu from burning coal === low entropy transferred + waste heat + high entropy from the pollutants produced during combustion.

The EMERGY involved is just the amount of the original solar+tidal+geological low entropy transferred and is effectively ( if my understanding is correct) the first term in the above equation.

3."how do you expend emjoules and not expend joules?".

Again, btujoules = emjoules + waste joules + pollutant joules

An interesting aside here: Erwin Schrodinger (1945) described life as a system in steady state disequilibrium that maintains a constant distance from equilibrium (death) by feeding on low entropy inputs from its environment. As a corollary, an organism cannot live in a medium of its own waste.

4.How does wanting maximum emergy differ from wanting maximum energy efficiency?

Clearly what we want is to decrease our entropy as far as our physiological system will allow. That may produce a state of maximum energy efficiency as a side effect but it is the process of seeking low entropy (high EMERGY) which is the real aim of life.

PS I am looking at some Brazillian case studies on EMERGY and Ecology. There are some fine points about Odum's theory that will be useful to know about. But as far as KAEP is concerned it is crystal clear that the only important consideration is that living systems seek to maximise their low entropy. In as much as EMERGY is an easily stated and PR sensitive term for that concept I continue to use it.

gisterme - 01:57pm Jul 29, 2003 EST (# 13178 of 13267)

Robert...

Enjoy your vacation.

gisterme - 01:24am Jul 30, 2003 EST (# 13179 of 13267)

Fred...

"Untropy" was just something I threw out to make a point. If anything I've said so far should be considered "rhetorical" that would probably top the list. By my best estimation, I've got all of a couple of thousand milliseconds invested in that term. 'Wasn't trying to create some sort of bandwagon by saying that. :o) It surprises me that you took that statement as seriously as you apparantly did.

fredmoore - 07:33am Jul 30, 2003 EST (# 13180 of 13267)

Gisterme,

Yes sir, what we all really want is UNTROPY and that starts UN and that rhymes with FUN and that stands for KAEP. Yes sir we got Big KAEP FUN right here in MD city central!

Hope that clarifies. :0)

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