Industrial Scalability

Production based on Theoretical Models of Reality

As processes scale up, there are factors about reality that converge and come to bite that are not obvious. Manufacturing is such a process, growth of any kind is such a process. People inherently grow and consume and, by sheer numbers alone, terrifyingly interact with and affect other processes that are not historically in step with human and human population rates of action. Synchrony and harmony is broken. Chains of interdependence, that previously may not even have been seen, are broken and crash down disastrously.

Trying to model the entities and characteristics involved is not trivial and proceeds from the viewpoint of a cartoon parody. Having even come close to some of the basic factors next requires thinking what to do with them and how to use them. What mechanisms might be going on?

These considerations might seem vague, but, as example, the International Monetary Fund, a global influencer on the Earth's population, also concerns itself seriously, with such apparently "cloud' thinking,

and has published on its website about this subject.

The Best is Not Good Enough

A basic, ultimately mathematical, method is to look for best solutions, best fits, or best average substitutions. The search for the best, the ideal, the acme, pinnacle, utter and prime solution is always predicated on the setting, the context and constraints in which and how the search is set. If a question is badly phrased, the best answer can be worse than useless.

A best answer in turn has to be looked at in terms of whether the question applies to a static or a dynamic situation and how wide a panorama has been included in order to search for a point on its horizon. If a target solution is to a moving problem, the target itself is moving.

Methods, Models and Individuals

The studies of Genetic Algorithms and its sibling branches such as Evolutionstrategie and Genetic Programming examine natural, artificial and synthetic based problems and use inspiration from nature to solve problems in many fields of study, manufacture, commerce and politics. Returning the compliment, inspiration from these algorithmic based studies can shed light on how nature seems to operate.

Populations of individuals are modelled responding to problems and set conditions. How well individuals respond is used to rate them and use them as the parents or bases for further generations.

One feature associated with the viability of populations of individuals in even modestly constrained environments is that idiosyncrasy of the individuals is time and again fundamentally crucial to the viability of offspring and the further existence of populations.

While aiming to control sustainability can concern itself with big numbers of individuals, it is vital not to overlook but to cherish the individuality of constituent members.

That sustainability can be an issue is partly because it is not a runaway process of guaranteed success. There are challenges and important factors to survival, there are constraints and limitations. Survival is an issue. If a local survival issue is overcome, how that is done may be highly specific and local. The local solution or optimum may be very limited and not transferrable. It is not a general or global survival solution. This kind of situation is where, putting forward only the current best candidates to a problem or survival design can be harmful in the long term, if other candidates or individuals are stopped from being available in a differently constrained setting. They may be better and the previous champions of no use at all. That could be disastrous.

A fragile population or community has been created, because it is composed of what is an army of super-clones, that has, relatively, low adaptability to changing conditions.

Cloning is an industrial scale process and intimately bound with techniques and economics of "scaling up". It makes for large perturbations, not firm guidance.

Finding environmentally based paths to human planetary survival ought never to stray from the scale of the wellbeing of the individual, if sustainability is to be fully embraced.

Why Bother

One thing we do know is that in nature, conditions change. We also know that there is not a lot of agreement on even basic, yet huge, forces and events in nature. There is flux, but why and where it is leading may be open to vigorous debate. Is there artificially accelerated climate change, or is it happening the way it is anyway? It would seem to be a minimal safety precaution to find what factors that if true are imperatives instead of options to our wellbeing and use them to drive industry towards a healthy planet.

More Factors to be Unfolded

The search for useful factors to understand sustainability is ultimately only bounded by the imagination of the searcher. Ways of thinking, tools and languages are like colours on a palette and the brushes used to create an image. Any description or analysis of sustainability, no matter how seemingly comprehensive, is still like a painting, a description, a translation of something bigger.

Approaches

Considering sustainability as a process, offers a way of analysing it. The aspects that a process may have can be proposed, examined and assessed for usefulness and validity.

Viability of process.

Balance.

Not enough, Just right, Too much.

Never enough, process gets used up, no processing or trickle feed dribbling through that will support further processes.

Good flux.

Back-log, trickle feed going forward, reservoir pooling back, process limitation.

Can process be restarted under same or different conditions.

No critical events.

If a critical event happens the process fails or stops and cannot be restarted.

There is a sense of process rate.

Alternative processes : is this an issue of any interest or value?

Indicators

Variability, Variance

Fractal dimension

Alphabet

Grammar

Considering a grammar, or a procedural system for operating an alphabet, as a part of a process that can itself be measured it can be interchanged to get comparison values. Such values would indicate the grammar and the alphabet and the process, so that there is an element of interconnectedness that may be difficult, but insightful, to assess.

Ridiculousness of Questions

Sustainability is a topic that engenders strong feelings and radically opposed views. How propositions of fact are examined is important and in particular the attitude of the questioner has to be considered as a factor in the research life of this subject.

Is the Earth flat, do cow farts dissolve the upper atmosphere?

Seemingly ridiculous questions, if they are truly that ridiculous, surely all the more deserve solid answers? Answering them convincingly should be really easy. Here are two examples of ridiculous questions that in retrospect were not ridiculous, but fascinating.

As regards attitude, perhaps instead such questions should have been viewed as weighty questions from the position of prospect. If attitude interferes with enquiry, there is the danger of missing and overlooking fundamental facts and possibilities.

Trilobite eyes

Trilobites are ancient marine fossils, that look a little bit like wood-lice. They appeared, as it were, in the fossil record, i.e. in stone, about 500 million years ago and lasted for about 250 million years, so as success goes, that is a good record. Trilobites were the earliest of creatures with already very well developed and complicated eyes. They have the oldest preserved visual system.

Over geological time on Earth, trilobites effectively functionally swapped eyes for hairs and /or other sensory organs and then possibly swapped hairs back for eyes. What may have been thought to be totally different creatures were instead related, yet morphologically different. To call them relatives might have been ridiculous, these were surely different beasts. Only by asking the very silly question, let's call it stupid, "are they related ?" could and did the highly informative and revealing answer "yes indeed, they are and how!" ever materialise. They are listed as separate species for sure and so there may be no direct genetic familial linkage, but their forms tell of linkage in terms of changing planetary conditions. The clarity of oceanic water went from clear to muddy, yet also seemed to have stayed clear in some places. Environmental pressures resulted in the growth and evolution of different forms that can in turn be used to infer aspect of the environmental conditions. A silly question unravels a lot of detailed knowledge.

Some Trilobite related links

https://foreninger.uio.no/ngf/FOS/pdfs/F&S_04_p007.pdf

https://arago.elte.hu/sites/default/files/TrilobiteEye_ASD.pdf

https://www.trilobites.life/trilobite-eyes.htm

https://www.amnh.org/research/paleontology/collections/fossil-invertebrate-collection/trilobite-website/the-trilobite-files/trilobite-eyes

https://www.trilobites.info/eyes.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilobite

Do continents move

One more example of the ridiculousness of a question whereby the American scientific brains of the day trashed a genius for a fool is that of Alfred Lothar Wegener. Continental drift?, continents move?, "are you unwell?". Well, continents do move, that's how you get volcanoes.

Plate Tectonics is now a hugely studied subject that would now seem conversely ever so silly to deny. What could be ridiculous has now changed, to a polar opposite view.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Wegener

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_tectonics

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