Human Gravity: An Engineer’s Analysis of Society-Government Relations

CHAPTER 1

Constraint

Humanity

exists in a finite constraint. No matter how far we have reached out in space, we are still surrounded by impenetrable finite barriers. These impenetrable boundaries are not geographical or astronomical; they constitute the laws governing the operation of the universe.

There are four of these unyielding constraints for humanity. If the thought of gravity as one of those constraints crosses your mind, wouldn’t it be neat to develop an anti-gravity device—well, forget about it. We already have rockets, jets, cranes, winches, escalators, elevators, and countless other anti-gravity devices at our disposal. What we have not perfected is the portable, infinite supply of free energy (to be discussed later) from which we can extract work to operate these devices.

No, the four unyielding constraints, in no particular order, are the speed of light, conservation of energy and matter, the inefficiency of converting heat energy into work, and the basis of all economic science, the law of demand. We cannot come up with any device to undo these constraints. This set of constraints defines our unyielding, finite boundary.

For example, even though there is glamor associated with traveling between far distant parts of the galaxy in computer-generated movie fantasy spaceships traveling faster than the speed of light, humanity has yet to make a small amount of hydrogen atoms travel inside the toroidal path of the giant particle accelerator at CERN at the speed of light, in spite of the now trillions of electron-volts of energy scientists and engineers are able to deliver to them. While warp drive may be a theoretical possibility, we just haven’t found the Lear Jet-sized engine technology to propel a craft from zero to 186,000 miles per second, as in Star Wars or any comparable cinematic space adventure. For the moment, we are constrained by the speed of light as demonstrated by the good Dr. Albert Einstein courtesy of his Special Relativity Theory.

And speaking of this theory, we come upon another of the four constraints, his famous equation E=mc². In the mid-1800s, it was found that mass, within the ability to measure it, cannot be created or destroyed. Similarly, experiments showed energy could change its form, but the total energy of a system always had to be conserved. In my realm, these are the bases for solving most chemical engineering situations. Einstein’s enduring brilliance was bringing the two conservation requirements under one roof. We now say that mass and energy cannot be created or destroyed, only converted from one form to another.

The constraint most mystifying and frustrating is the inefficiency of converting heat to work. In science we call it the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The First Law is the mass and energy conservation constraint. If we said thermodynamics was a gambling casino, the First Law of the house would be, You can’t win. The Second Law of the house would read, You can’t break even.

House rules at the thermodynamic casino will not allow you to ever go away with more than what you started with and will in fact prevent you from getting back anything you lost.

Simply put, the Law of Demand states that the more abundant something is, the lower the cost to obtain it. Dirt may be dirt cheap in the middle of Iowa, but it would be a prized commodity on volcanic rock in the middle of the Pacific. Sand may be cheap in the Middle East, but highly prized on Miami Beach. An original Van Gogh will NEVER be cheap!

Dealing with constraint and finiteness defines almost all of human activity. Will there be enough food on the shelf at the store? Will my children have warm clothes to go to school this winter? Will I have to give up gas or paying the mortgage or the property tax bill this month? Will I be able to make the next payroll? Our lives, our survival, our futures are one of dealing with constraint.

Humanity deals with constraint differently than plants or animals. Plants and animals cannot model constraint. The particle physicist is concerned with the speed of light when modeling particle energy and trajectory; the animal neither computes the speed or trajectory of prey nor plans the hunt based on those speed and trajectory models.

Plants build nutrient collection systems, leaves and roots, but can’t model a nutrient supply and distribution system for itself and other plants. Plants and animals can’t trade the value of scarce items; they take control of the resource or die trying. Unlike plants and animals that can’t model and manipulate scarcity, human society is an activity in the planning and execution of the management of finite resources.

Our behavior in modeling, managing, and manipulating scarcity, in dealing with finiteness, will help us construct dimensions to understand the structural attributes of a society. These dimensions can then be examined using conventional engineering models to develop the bases for the Free Society and the Managed Society. From there we can then use situations in finite limitations to show how the two types of societies achieve their ends.

CHAPTER 2

Organization of Society Within a Finite Boundary

Early

Development

For early people, being born in a certain location was the most significant event of their lives. The location of their birth dictated much of what a person would experience thereafter until death. Location! Location! Location! A real estate seller’s call may seduce us to seek that broad ocean view, or a little hideaway cabin up in the mountains, but for humanity’s ancestors, location dictated the source of all things necessary for survival. What you ate, what you covered yourself with, how you sheltered yourself from the elements, and how your society organized itself was all about the seemingly finite boundary surrounding one’s birthplace.

Ancient people may not have understood the four immutable barriers constraining all humanity. They only understood that infinite supplies of the things necessary to survive were not available. At least they did not have to worry about being held back by the speed of light keeping them from traveling across the galaxy as there was no such understanding of the concept. It is likely though, if there were an alien civilization aware that they could awe and transform the brutes running around the planet Earth in ancient times, the speed of light likely prevented these ancient aliens from violating the Star Trek Prime Directive not to interfere with our development.

It’s also certain that an artificial method of assigning and trading value, money, didn’t begin right away, so despite the Law of Demand being a valid constraint, it was simply not a consideration. The finite boundaries were set mainly by constraints of energy and mass conservation and of inefficiency in converting heat to work.

For example, buffalo simply do not spontaneously become buffalo steaks and fur hats and clothes, either without a supply of buffalo (first law), or without converting the energy of the buffalo steaks to catch, kill, skin, tan the hide, or butcher the buffalo for buffalo steaks (second law).

If the supply of buffalo became scarce, or skills were developed to turn buffalo into more desirable items, or the buffalo by-products could be used to acquire clay pots or arrowheads, the Law of Demand assumed its place among the unyielding barriers.

Fulfilling desires challenged by finite boundaries

Development of skills inside this finite boundary again differentiate humans from plants and animals. Animals do not develop new ways to hunt and kill prey or locate supplies of plants and water; they use the same methods today as they did yesterday. Essentially, since desire for the animal stays relatively constant (food, shelter, and propagation), the skills to fulfill the desire stay relatively constant.

Speaking of buffalo, let’s consider a pride of lions. The lions locate a water buffalo (different continent, of course), they surround, attack, and kill the water buffalo, and they eat the water buffalo. Let’s assume the lion wants to maintain a steady state that is relatively constant weight and strength to hunt. Drawing an arbitrary box around the lion and applying the steady state mass conservation law for the box, we have:

In-Out=Accumulation=0 (2.1)

Water buffalo eaten, water drank, and oxygen from the atmosphere make up In; digestion waste, urine, sweat, and carbon dioxide and water in the exhaled breath make up Out. The only desire the lion has to fulfill is the first law balance on a daily basis.

Looking at the energy consumption of the lion, nature documentaries show that lions are generally a lazy lot for most of the day. It’s obvious that the combustion of water buffalo in the lion is not all converted into work, running, jumping, biting, or wrestling the water buffalo. The lion heat engine spends most of the day digesting the water buffalo, losing body heat to the atmosphere, repairing damaged body parts, and controlling the desire mechanism. As dictated by the second law, we say that the lion heat engine does not convert all the energy from the digested water buffalo into the acts of hunting, catching, and killing the water buffalo. Lion desire must take this inefficiency into account.

If there is a shortage of water buffalo, the lion could turn to other prey, but hunting other prey does not represent an improvement in efficiency or maintenance of healthy body mass. The lion simply responds by locating zebra, antelope, or wildebeest to fulfill the lion’s first and second law requirements. If there is a shortage of prey, lions respond to the law of demand by allocating killed prey to the most important members of the pride: the male head of the pride and the best-hunting females.

So, unlike the fulfillment of desire that the animal seeks, humans have developed a desire for much more than the basic acquisition of material and energy to do the same thing over and over. From bows and flint arrowhead, human desire has created high muzzle velocity rifles with telescopic sights for hunting. No longer do we have to surround the herd of prey; humans raise herds in convenient enclosures for providing the food to run the human heat engine. Human society has structured itself to fulfill nearly limitless desires within the constraints of the finite boundary.

Human ingenuity inside the unyielding boundary transforms mundane subsistence living into living in abundance. This is one of the first things we observe when comparing the Managed Society to the Free Society.

Dealing with certainty (finite) and uncertainty (unbound)

Differentiation of societal types starts with how a group of people deal with their finite constraints. How do we go from feeding seven billion to feeding 10 billion people? Will the speed of light someday limit the top-end speed of communications? Can we improve the efficiency of motors to get 100 miles per gallon without losing the comfort and style of the cars we drive now? The Thomas Malthus–Paul Ehrlich school of finite thinking says that we are doomed to the finite limits of land and availability of free energy for machinery to do work. The Thomas Edison–Steve Jobs school of limitless possibility does not agree.

In the area of the company where I worked for thirty-five years, we had a saying of innovate or evaporate. In order to survive as an organization, providing free energy to the public to do work (fuel for cars, trucks, planes, trains, farm equipment, ships, etc.), we had to constantly work to improve our production, refining, and transportation of these fuels to meet ever-growing demands.