Gasifier Experimenters Kit

Untitled DocumentSent: 12/20From: Nesdon boothSubject: Re: the mechabolic projectMaybe it will need to be scaled back, but I really think the idea of trying to make energy policy more comprehensible bymodeling it as metabolism is truely inspired. I look at the way we cut our power consumption in the yard when the pEEfomaticwas installed, and how that feedback of systems that we normally keep invisible is a powerful interpretive tool to understandand control them. And this project which models machine energy conversion as biologic metabolism anabolism and catabolismis jsut such a tool.. . .It is Gaia theory that I imagine in all this. Gaia gets a bit of a bum rap from the scientific community as it was so quickly takenup by the oobie dooers, and Lovelock hit the metaphor of one global cell a bit too hard. But his idea for Gaia came out of hiswork for the Viking Mars Landers. He worked on ways to distinguish between biological and geological chemical processes. Itis interesting that the results from Viking are still ambiguous.His central epiphany was the our atmosphere is extremely unstable chemically, and by all rights should have evolved to verystable atmosheres like mars and venus both have. But ice cores and other data all suggest that our atmosphere has beenincredibly stable over a very long periods, in fact more stable than many of the important inputs, such as insolance, which varyin both short and long term trends would suggest. His inevitable and I think correct conclusion was that collectively, life onearth has coevolved with the soil and the atmosphere to form a homeostatic system whereby crucial compounds are maintainedat optimum levels for the continuation of life. This is surprisingly analogous to what living things in fact do within their tissues.It does look very much like the global ecosystem functions in many ways like a single large organism.He suggested a thought experiment he called Daisy World, whereby populations of daisies (good old asteraceas) with white andblack indviuals might evolve to vary the proportion of white to black to compensate for the historic change in insolence (a star'soutput grows steadily over time, up to a point) by altering the albedo (more black and more heat is absorbed, more white andmore heat is reflected) and thereby maintaining a constant pro-daisy local temperature.In unfathomably complex ways we all collaborate (I think the soil bacteria and phytoplankton still have a little edge on us, butnot for long) to make this world inhabitable. All of the engines we have built, we have built essentially as cyborgs, to augmentour natual human functions. Since they are all conceived in this anthropomorphic process, and then must function within thislifelike global ecosystem, they are fairly literally part of the metabolic functions of Gaia.That's why I think this Mech-A-Bolic thing is such a damned good idea. I'm not sure how to make it doable. I will certianly putmy rhetorical shoulder against the Bmorg wheel and help however else I can.Nesdonhttp://whatiamupto.com/mechabolic/mechabolicthesis.html (6 of 9) [10/9/2008 08:16:56]