food and fuel

Decreases in locally-available free-energy/capita often result in loss of niche-network layer-multiplicity & genetic/memetic diversity.

Key elements to counter the impact of such reductions in the short term (likely to take place on a myriad of time scales), as well as the eventual global collapse likely in the long run, include:

• targeted support of subsystem correlations on multiple scales of space, time, and organization,

• constructive development of information resources in concert with collaborative action,

• and what else?

modernized maxim

There is no sustainably free lunch, i.e. all net surprisal extracts a cost in thermodynamic availability.

What's new here is that:

• we've added sustainably, since in the short run free lunches can be obtained from time to time but not in a steady-state fashion,

• thermodynamic availability (e.g. in bits) and net surprisal (KL-divergence) are used to restate the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics in way which applies nicely to complex non-equilibrium systems,

• and what else?

starsmoke droplets

Tiny interstellar-onion spaceships were filled with unlayered sheets of fresh-baked carbon atoms & delivered to our corner of the Milky Way.

This tasty tweet refers to recent laboratory study of micron-sized starsmoke spheres whose carbon atoms were cooked up in red giant stars across the early galaxy, condensed in those cool star atmospheres, and delivered to earth by primitive meteorites to be extracted by cosmochemists at U. Chicago and studied in labs of the midwest.

Many of your carbon atoms also arrived here in spaceships like this. Recent developments suggest a role for supercooled liquid carbon droplets in their process of formation.

closing the loop

Charity like first-aid can meet short-term needs, but strategic no-profit loans may be key to sustainability at home and abroad.

it's easy for cats

Most metazoans buffer correlations directed in/out from skin and gene-pool boundaries. Worrying about idea-pool boundaries too is not easy, even for organisms as talented as us!

expensive sci-fi

The "jump to lightspeed" might empty your gas tank quick, given that >40 Olympic pools of powder are needed to make a 45 slug relativistic.

survival symmetry

Ice floats so that aqueous life on our planet survives freezing water, thanks to the quantum preference of H2O molecules for 4 neighbors.