Energy

Energy, here on earth, is apparently finite.  We power things with oil and natural gas which is a finite resource held within the bounds of the sphere that we live on.  In the world of the future though, we anticipate getting this energy from the sun, a large glowing sphere nearby.  You could imagine though that solar energy is also finite in the sense that the earth has a finite surface area with which to capture the solar energy.  Could it be in the future that our resource demands are so great that we would admonish people who were wasting solar energy?  Why isn't that square meter being used to capture solar energy or being used to power the photosynthesis for plant xyz?  What a waste, such a shame!

Say what?

Great article from Paul Graham - http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html.  It's from 2004.  It's timeless.  The man is a genius.  Or maybe he is totally wrong and I just agree with him.  Read the article.

Edit:  Interesting somewhat related article I was directed to.  https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/21/against-murderism/

Maintenance?

Now this is an interesting read.  http://themaintainers.org/blog/2019/7/30/why-do-people-neglect-maintenance.  I often see a sort of tension between maintaining something and ignoring it and replacing it after a period of time.  It's almost as if we think that one strategy is universally better than the other.  Really we should be thinking about characteristics that make it a better choice in some cases.

Smart coral polyps?

From https://phys.org/news/2019-10-dead-corals-regrow-fatal.html

But the researchers found that in 38 percent of the impacted colonies, the polyps had devised a survival strategy: shrinking their dimensions, partly abandoning their original skeleton, and gradually, over a period of several years, growing back and starting a new skeleton.

Should I actually read that as the polyps that did not shrink died off whereas those that were able to shrink survived and were  able to survive and grow back over a period of years?  Some polyps shrink due to the problems, some just die off?  Guess which ones we see around after a longer period of time?

This is just like the cats that died when exposed to sunlight.  Those all died off and were not able to reproduce and we are not aware of them at all since all we have left are cats that are OK with sunlight.