The Nature of Civics
Requisites for the state of science to exist include inclusiveness; openness and sharing; inquiry, wonder and forgiveness; honesty and trust; generosity of time and reflection. All these are the qualities of compassion. It is our experience of the state of compassion that enables us to enjoy the state of science, which in turn enables us develop all manner of sustaining arts (skills) i.e. civics.
Civics of Solar-Electrical Systems
All forms of energy, including all solar and electrical systems are information, which is a paradox: any form is informed by the universal information even as it informs all.
Hence, for instance, the prime value of any electrical system is its information.
The nuts, bolts, wires, waves, transformers, transmitters, receivers etc are of relatively little value, as are the reticulated electrical products. Any electrical system is primarily an information system.
Thus it is necessary that the civics of information prevails if individuals and their communities are to make sustainable uses of their local solar-electrical potential. Some of the requisites for such civics to prevail include the following conditions:
- Language Every person gives care to ensuring their language embraces the principles of physics.
- Information Every person is accorded the rights of a citizen, including the right to own the information of his or her electrical system or device, whether it is wire or wireless. Examples include biomass systems, solar panels, heat-pumps, refrigerators, landline phones, cellphones and dwelling meters. Such personal information may not be traded in anyway without the knowledge and approval of the citizen.
- Stewardship Every community acts as stewards of their local solar-electrical potential, ensuring it is conserved and is used optimally to provide the food, fresh water, shelter, warming, lighting, communication, transport and other basic needs of all members of the community.
Stewardship also involves ensuring local solar-electrical systems complement the systems of other communities so all humankind is sustained. - Community Civil rights and responsibilities prevail when personal and community solar-electrical systems are interconnected. It is the common consensus that such interconnection is for the mutual benefit of all human beings, not a few individuals. Every citizen retains the right to directly vote how the information of their local community system is used so this objective of mutual benefit is realized. See New Zealand example
- Conservation The conservation of solar-electrical potential is enshrined in legislation ensuring that all dwellings are designed and sited so their occupants can maximize their sustainable use of their local solar potential. For instance, no person may block another person’s access to our sun. Dwellings are designed and sited to maximize their solar potential.
- Accounting As part of its general accounting requirements, every community audits and provides an annual report of the degree that each dwelling in the community conserves its full solar-electrical potential.
When we enjoy these requisites of compassion, our language acts to ensure our solar-electrical is manifest as sustaining forces in our lives.
The Importance of our Solar-Electric Potential
For nearly all our existence up till the 16th C, the global population of human beings was fewer than half a billion people and we were primarily solar-electrical beings. Our main source of sustenance was living biomass, the direct product of photosynthesis.
Now number of humans is more than 7 billion and we are primarily mineral beings and creatures of combustion. Our main source of sustenance is fossilized biomass, a store of carbon that took hundreds of millions of years to form during unique eons.
Our combustion of mineral oil, mineral gas and coal provides most of the transport, cultivation, fertilizer, harvesting and storage required to sustain our unprecedented multitude of people. It has also supercharged our capacity to make both waste and warfare to the point we now have the capacity to destroy most of humankind in a day.
This combustion revolution has generated unsustainable languages (including English) and an Anthropocene that now imperils us all. Our extraordinary, wasteful combustion is rapidly depleting these invaluable minerals and converting their amazing wealth potential into pollution and life-threatening changes to climate balances. The brief, radical era of cheaply extracted minerals and our gross combustion has now passed.
A Prayer – Lift Up Mine Eyes
The time has come for all of us mineral addicts to cease our obsessive focus on the ground underneath us and lift up our eyes to the splendor of the heavens.
Let our minds be opened in wonderment to the bounteous nature of the universe.
Let our spirits be lifted in amazement at the dance of the myriad, flowing cloud forms that sustain life on this planet.
Let us be humbled in compassion at the miscellany of colourful, living forms that inhabit the folds of the Earth.
Let us be reminded in the sun and all the potent flows and exquisite balances of solar-energy enabling each life form.
Especially let us be refreshed in our solar-electrical potential at this time of impending self-destruction.
See below a specific example of how we can be reminded in photosynthesis and opened to our wonderful solar-electrical potential. First a brief discussion of how we can avail ourselves of the wisdom of the principles of physics and enjoy true hope.
A Sustaining Principle of Energy:
True hope resides in symbol use that embraces the reality of continuous, universal change and personal stewardship.
Delusive hope (misery) resides in symbol use that denies this reality.
This principle arises from the Conservation of Energy Principle. It enables us in practical, compassionate way to transcend the incredible deceits of the ego and the limitations of thought and paradox.
It reminds us that a symbol use simultaneously generates and reflects the state of the user. Any living form, including a human being, is its unique symbol.
We are better sustained when our language reflects and expresses the unique qualities of any form.
In practical terms this means we constantly rectify our exclusive use of (English) words and search ways to make our language inclusive. In this instance, we are seeking insight and sustenance in our solar-electrical potential.
True Hope Language of Solar Phenomena
A star is a luminous sphere of plasma held together by its own gravity. There are almost countless stars in the sky, the nearest one to Earth being symbolized as “our sun ” or “The Sun ” – the latter symbol arising from Proto-Indo-European *s(u)wen-, alternative form of root *sawel- “the sun.”
This exclusive use of“the sun.” perhaps reflects the fact that people three millennia ago might not have been able to see that our planetary system is just one of myriad such systems with a star at their centre. Our sun is just one of many such suns in our universe i.e. stars with planets orbiting around them.
Stars can be understood as a self-sustaining dynamos that convert convective motion and differential rotation within the star to electric-magnetic energy. As with all, electric-magnetic energy is paradox: it is continuous even as it is discrete. Stars radiate it in continuous form (waves) and photons (particles). We perceive this paradox of radiation as “sunlight”.
The “light” symbol arises from the PIE root *leuk- “light, brightness”. Until the advent of modern measuring instruments our ability to measure radiation was restricted to the few wavelengths we could see with our eyes and feel with our bodies.
Visible waves are radiation reflected from our surroundings – all things absorb and reflect in a unique way. Our English culture symbolizes each frequency as blue, red, green, yellow etc. We symbolize the frequency of the invisible waves we sense as warm, hot, boiling, burning etc.
Modern measuring devices extend and challenge our notions of light. For instance, infrared devices enable us to “see” warmer bodies in the dark .
We can detect and measure far greater range of electric-magnetic waves now. Each frequency offers unique insights into the physics of the universe, the potential of energy.
Planets like Earth with a liquid interior that can conduct electricity are also dynamos. The exquisite interplay of our planet’s electric-magnetic field with our sun’s radiation enables life to exist on Earth.
True hope occurs when we give care to symbolizing the nature of each frequency of that radiation and acting as stewards of it. We are better able to live in harmony with the atmospheric flows and balances that sustain us.
True hope occurs when we are humble and embrace the vagaries of our ego and our perceptions.
For instance, we perceive our sun as yellow-orange though its dominant radiation is in the green-blue frequency. Why might this illusion be insightful? We are reminded our moods and perceptions of reality vary like the clouds in the sky. We assume less and see more. We might ask why plants reflect green and absorb other colour frequencies? We begin to see them as non-green from a solar-electrical perspective and this opens up unrealized possibilities.
True Hope Language of Electrical Phenomena
Our contemporary Anglosphere Culture is founded in this impoverishing, ego-driven, delusive hope: Energy = Fossil Fuels = Power = Electricity = Bulk-generated Electrical Products. This is profound non-science.
Language based in the great principles of physics reveals a vast richness of sustaining possibilities and generates true hope . The state of science enables the following insights :
Energy is the universal potential, all of which is active.
Power is a measure – the measure of the rate at which the universal potential is manifest.
“Fossil Fuels” are finite forms of energy, just one small set of the huge array of possible ways we can use and conserve fossilized biomass.
Electricity does not exist though myriad electrical phenomena do, each with its unique characteristics.
Bulk-generated electrical products are finite forms of energy, just a few of myriad possible electrical products, such as dwelling-generated, community-generated, body-generated, plant generated and other electrical products.
The above Sustainable Principle of Energy reminds us true hope resides in giving care to symbolize all phenomena according to their unique characteristics. As with all things, electrical phenomena involve paradox – the electrical potential involves both flows of energy at the speed of light and static states, both visible and invisible states; both silent and thunderous states; and so on.
William J Beaty reminds us of the range of electrical phenomena that exist. Each form has unique, paradoxical properties. Each electrical form prompts unique questions. For instance, we can ask what is electric charge? electrical energy? electrons? electric current? an imbalance of charge? electric field? voltage? electric power? a spark? electromagnetism? electrical science? electrodynamics? electrostatics? electrical phenomena?…
All are electrical and none is electricity.
Photosynthesis: A Great Reminder of our Solar Electrical Potential
There are many types of photosynthesis. At school we are taught the most general process. Our teachers tend to explain it from a chemical perspective, as in this Wiki:
Photosynthesis is a process used by plants and other organisms to convert light energy into chemical energy that can later be released to fuel the organisms’ activities (energy transformation).
We learn that in the process a plant inhales carbon dioxide and exhales oxygen. We learn photosynthesis enables us to exist. The oxygen in the atmosphere enables us to breathe and we eat the plants for food.
All things can be understood from many perspectives, including from an electrical perspective. Our teachers tend not to communicate photosynthesis from an electrical point of view, which is why many of us fail to understand and appreciate the amazing potential of photosynthesis. We are illiterate from an electrical perspective. This article in Mother Nature Network hints at our solar-electrical potential:
…”Thanks to eons of evolution, most plants operate at 100 percent quantum efficiency, meaning they produce an equal number of electrons for every photon of sunlight they capture in photosynthesis. An average coal-fired power plant, meanwhile, only operates at about 28 percent efficiency, and it carries extra baggage like mercury and carbon dioxide emissions. Even our best large-scale imitations of photosynthesis — photovoltaic solar panels — typically operate at efficiency levels of just 12 to 17 percent.
…In photosynthesis, plants use the energy from sunlight to split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. This yields electrons, which then help the plant make sugars that fuel its growth and reproduction.
“We have developed a way to interrupt photosynthesis so that we can capture the electrons before the plant uses them to make these sugars,” study co-author and UGA engineering professor Ramaraja Ramasamy says…”
Research such as this opens us in all manner of ways to possibilities of using the photosynthesis process to transform solar energy into useful electrical products:
We begin to see amazing electrical systems all around us, which are the plants that surround us. We become aware that their altered electrical potential alters our electrical potential when we hear, see and eat them.
In observing the myriad ingenious ways that plants reach up and avail the benefits of Earth’s sun, we are reminded of its great potential to sustain us. We learn from plants how we can design our dwellings, use devices, develop our gardens and, in general, adapt our lives so we can make optimal use our wonderful solar potential.
We are humbled as we become aware of the wisdom inherent in each plant’s information system. We cease our striving to manipulate the information system of living matter so it accords with our ego-driven vision. We begin asking what each form of life may teach us about sustainable living in the sun.
We become liberated as we realize the information inherent in the solar-electrical systems that form our ecology.
This is because we can better transcend the paradox of information when we are mindful of the prolific array of sustaining symbols that living forms employ to exist and procreate.
Summary
Each symbol of solar and electrical phenomena that we craft in truthful way provides us with fascinating perspectives and insights into the nature of our solar and electrical beings. Each careful symbol enables us to conserve and enjoy the vast riches of our solar-electrical potential in sustaining ways.
Non-civics: Denying our Solar-Electrical (A case study)