My being a computer repairs engineer for many years has taught me some clear lessons about my approach to technical issues.
If a computer begins malfunctioning erratically or operates extremely slowly & is more than 5 or so years old, I have begin with checking the state of its hard drive especially if it is an older type spinning platen type.
The platens of those drives are where all Operating system files, software & often the users data is stored. It is vital that this is reliably stored on sectors that work well enough to allow reading & writing from them at speeds that don’t slow down the computer because of misreads or writes.
Therefore the physical platens media has to be in good condition as well as the reading & writing heads & servo motors that actuate the heads across the disk platen.
Being a physical device it is constructed to very high precision accuracy, no approximations can be tolerated or it is slow or malfunctions. All parts must be constructed from high quality materials.
What has this to do with our Earth?
Like a computer our shared planet Earth is also a vastly complex system, but has the clear distinction of also being a life supporting & evolutionary system.
It has features that nearby planets don’t have such as lots of surface water, an atmosphere that carbon based life forms including human need to breathe, fertile soils that support complex life forms. All of these features interact through a combination of lunar gravity, solar energy & planet rotation, seasons because of it orbiting a sun with a tilted axis of rotation. From those, although the planets climate can vary through ice ages to much higher temperatures that affect life forms, it always stays withing certain physical limits.
The evolution, succession & die back of species goes on within those Earth limits generally, though in a few cases the success of a specie might itself affect the planets climate directly.
Some might see all of that natural automation as vastly superior to a simple computer or network of computers that has no means within it of evolution. It simply runs programmes, though now a so called superior form of ‘digital intelligence’ (A.I.) is being shouted about that is possibly capable of self evolution of ‘intelligent thought’ in some form, but it remains to be seen what that might become.
For example, can an A.I. that has never been gestated inside its creators body, then born into a completely different environment, gone through 18 years of growth during which it is shown how to do things, educated, becomes faster & taller, goes through massive hormone emergence changes & powerful influences & does all of that within social constraints & beliefs, ever be able to perceive the world as humans have & do?
I won’t further the discussion into whether or not the collective human view of our Earth & us on it is a healthy one, but suffice to say that our weather patterns now tell us our views of our Earth lack clear vision!
Back to the physicals.
If I am working on a computer that is malfunctioning and see that it has delayed or unreliable responses I can run programmes that will search for & fix software read/write errors on the hard drive. Sometimes these happen from power blips during the computers use or some other temporary anomaly and so these faults can be found & corrected. Sometimes only small areas of the disk are in some way not up to standard & so the fix software can move the software or data from them to another area that is still good. This can get a computer back up to speed, though if some disc sectors are flagged as faulty it could be an early warning that more disk media or heads performance is degrading.
Should that reoccur than the only course of action is to look to replace the entire hard drive device because only a manufacturer of them has the replacement parts and clean room facilities that would be required.
Planet Earth is like a huge global storage medium. Its complex life forms exist because they all rely upon the existence & interactions of less complex life forms.
All of our food comes from what we regard as lower life forms. Whether land animal, land plant, marine fish or mammal, we cannot feed ourselves without lesser life forms that themselves need to live within balanced ecological systems.
Humans now interfere with natural balanced ecologies all of the time and at massive scale, this is particularly so during the past 30 years. We are always trying to maximise getting more out from the Earth while giving less to achieve it. This super efficient pursuit includes forcing the pace of nature and that acts in defiance of any calls to accept that our planets natural cycles are fairly fixed, and that it is from those that humans have evolved. It is our origin & that grew from the origin of species we rely on to exist.
So if we consider the complex Earth life forms as like software that live upon a physical storage media (our Earth) and acknowledge that this being undamaged is critical to the continued existence of all life forms, (particularly so the more complex ones), then we see we are in a show stopper of a problem. And despite the absurd dreams of 3 super rich rocket men, we haven’t a suitable planet we all can just move to. maybe they can with their close circles but it won’t end well with only a mono-mindset & no underlings to talk to.
Despite beliefs there seems to be no Earth manufacturer we can contact to get a quote to fix the physical Earth media from human neglect. And human life is not viable if separated from lesser life forms just because we wrongly choose to ‘go it alone’ via technologies instead, that notion is foolish & uneducated.
And before any thoughts of using planet scale technical fixes come to the fore front, just consider this.
If I run the ‘fix’ software on a computers hard drive then the performance can be improved, but for how long? Always there will be a degradation in the physical drive to some extent. Once the physical media is degrading it is only a matter of time until it fails again and those failures will increase in frequency over time.
I’m seeing A.I. & other ‘saviour technologies’ that the press/TV pack love to glorify as no more than software fix programmes that can only buy a little time more on a dying planet media.
Fixing our Earth ourselves by comparison is far easier to deal with despite its size, because that has its own fully automatic fixing routines. All we have to do is decide to live our lives much less harmfully staying withing its own natural boundaries & it will do all of the rest for us.
I have said for many years that humans are the masters of production, but only the students of consequences, see the story of the Sorcerers Apprentice).
Accepting that is so would be the first small step in becoming responsible citizens of our planet who decided to sacrifice their silly toys & hedonist/ego-madness ways in favour of sustaining all life on Earth, including their own.
<<WARNING The Earth System is Becoming UNSTABLE >>
Please Re-boot Civilisation, then log in using the ‘Sustainable Only’ account option.
Thank you.
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