Iwannaplato wrote: ↑Sun Apr 26, 2026 5:58 am
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sun Apr 26, 2026 2:49 am
You're missing the point.
Entropy assures us that from now until then, one inescapable fact will be that
everything will continue to degrade...from your car to your genetic structure, to the forests and rivers and little birds and bees...some things slower, some faster, but all headed in the same direction. Nothing is ever being "sustained." What's happening instead is only that some things are deteriorating faster than others, and some actions accelerate the rate of decline more than others.
But there's no "sustainability." None. No such thing. So it's not something you can ask people to aim at. It cannot be had.
It is a classic "galaxy brain" move to mistake the inevitable march of physical decay for a reason to give up on practical reality, but using the general law of entropy to debunk sustainability is a bit like refusing to brush your teeth because you will eventually be a skeleton.
Actually, it's not. But let's go with that analogy, just because you offer it.
If I said to you, despite your best brushing efforts, your teeth at age 80 will not be as good as your teeth at 16, I would be telling you the truth. But if I said to you, your teeth are sustainable, and if you brush them they will perpetually renew, I would be telling a lie. And I would be getting you to expect an outcome that is simply impossible.
Earth is an open system that soaks in a massive delivery of free energy from the sun every single day.
It's entropic. The Sun degrades things. And the universe -- according to Atheistic worldviews -- is a
closed system, in which the Sun is one part. But there is no outside source of order in the universe, according to Atheism, that could regenerate it or reinstate the level of order the universe had in the beginning, and from which it has been entropically deteriorating since it began.
Thinking in terms of sustainability is incredibly useful...
It's incredibly dishonest, actually. But it is very useful to those who wish to virtue signal, and to those who wish to use "sustainability" twaddle to seize power over others or bilk them, like the "green" industry does.
For humans, sustainability isn't a quest for eternal stasis; it is about managing the rate of change so we don't accidentally crash the life-support systems we rely on.
Now, suddenly, you're agreeing with me. It's about avoiding accelerating the rate of decay, not about "sustaining" the world perpetually.
But now, we would have to discuss how to do that. For the existing "green" measures manifestly will not do the trick. As I have said before, and everybody can easily verify as true, the main threats to the environment come not from the West, but from the East and the South...particularly from China and India, with their vast populations that are seeking to industrialize as fast as they can. If we do nothing about them, then nothing at all done in the West will have any impact -- any advances we make will be woefully small, and the capacity we deny ourselves will be gratefully sucked up by the Developing Nations world as they industrialize.
So, since we're now having, for the first time, a serious conversation about the environment,
what do you propose to do about India, China, South America and Africa, so that we can keep the environment from deteriorating?
I eagerly await your proposal. (If you have none, of course, then neither do you have any solution at all for the real problem of environmental degredation. Lacking that, we can give up any hope of "sustainability" or even of "not crashing the environment too soon.")
