Pro-Rifkin

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I've enjoyed the con as well as the pro. Since I maintain the
central concern is entropy, and also want to credit Rifkin to
some extent, here is Rifkin's quote of Georgescu-Roegen. It
says something about the mechanical versus entropy world-views.
I still maintain this is a major paradigm shift, that many people
recognize, and we should not neglect it just because we don't like
Rifkin.

"According to (Ludwig Boltzmann's views), a pile of ashes may
very well bvecome capable of heating a boiler. Also, a corpse may
resuscitate to lead a second life in exactly the reverse order
of the first. Only, the probabilities of such events are
fantastically small. If we have not yet witnessed such miracles,
the advocates of statistical mechanics contend, it is only because
we have not been watching a sufficiently large number of piles of
ashes or corpses."

Quoted by Rifkin on page 42, from Georgescu-Roegen 1971, The Entropy
Law and the Economic Process.

I can't devote a full measure of attention to this issue at the moment,
but I would like to see it not die. I appreciated remarks by McCreery
and others too. Thanks, Bob Graber, for your reply.

If human scale is trifling in relation to the cosmos, does that mean
we are uninterested in preserving our planet for 100 or 1000 years?
Okay, true enough, the universe will run down in a few billion years,
and what's a millenium or two from that point of view. But that
is not our point of view. We are, after all, humans.

I'm all for friendly substantive conversation on topics with
broad interest.

Best regards.

John Lozier
California University of Pennsylvania

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