Tuesday, July 4, 2017

Electric auto-autos

By now you have heard about how self-driving (auto-autos) will run on batteries and with crowd-sourcing and crowd-funding and moore's law, etc will put an end to the private auto.

How much lithium mining will be needed? How much heat will be generated? Will all the "savings" go into more growth?

Answer. We got where we are by over-growing our numbers and over-using resources. All the technological progress simply made us more efficient at destroying the biosphere. We have smart phones and smart bombs, but we are just racing to extinction faster.

The answer is in the second law of thermodynamics. Energy used for life is just passing through from sun to space. Human activity puts that energy in the form of heat. Plant activity stores it.