SYMBIOTIC SILICON AND CARBON

Carbon and Silicon in symbiosis under the entropic principle of information.
Human beings are the agents of change.

As is well known, carbon is a fundamental element in all known life on Earth, from microbes to elephants and whales and of course we human beings. Carbon is a tetravalent element, in that it has four electrons near its surface which can play roles as an ion in both acidic and alkaline chemicals as well as organic molecules that can be extended infinitely.

Silicon, like carbon, is a tetravalent element, although its ionization potentials are so high it does not easily form polymer chains. As a result, there are few species in the earth in which silicon plays any known significant role at all. The few species that use silicon in nature use it as a structural object, rather like a brick or paving stone, and some other species actually use small stones either to armor their shells, or as grinding stones in the gizzards and craws of some reptiles and birds.

But something new happened when human beings began to chip and flake flint into tools such as knives, spear points, and other sharp tools, and sandstone into grinding surfaces. Even more, when fire was tamed from wildfires to campfires and the firing of clay pots was discovered in some flash of inspiration, silicon was becoming a richly rewarding element to play and work with. Those discoveries are from some millions of years ago. Much more recently, the use of drawings, hieroglyphs, images, pictures and written languages created a distinctly different kind of relationship between the great cosmology in which the Earth existed, and the whole ensemble of carbon, plants and animals, human beings, fire, and silicon.

It is in this ensemble of all these things, that silicon is in a symbiotic relationship with carbon. The ensemble could be more properly described as a polybiotic relationship containing carbon and silicon, and that is a matter of terminology more properly in the domain of lexicographers.

About five thousand years ago a divergence took place, in which human development began to progress like a river flowing around an island in that river.

The most well known in the West is when the Scorpion King was founding the first Egyptian dynasty and constructing sandstone architectures that included not only houses but pyramids. The details are important though not here and they are richly intriguing history. One detail though seems formative. Emerging civilization in Egypt required wielding the executive power to accomplish architectural goals. In other words, those dynasties became willing to kill to get the job done. That is probably why the Scorpion King was shown with a scorpion floating above his head, and he was shown holding a club. The bug took the blame, for it is a lethal and ancient instinct quite familiar with the sand and its silicon.

Less well known was the emergence among Chinese Taoists, who were traditional philosophers primarily patriarchal in motive. They wanted to try a new approach, but one which did not question the way of nature, which they saw as the path or progression of Heaven. To them, all activities by human beings should be in the Order of Heaven.

The problem was that using sheer chance in deciding whether to take a left or right path where one might have a tiger, as might happen by tossing a coin, did not have a particularly good record in avoiding tigers.

However, the Chinese had developed writing and it was proving to be valuable. The approach taken by Taoists was to introduce an element between the use of chance and the natural world. By casting lots, the traveler would choose a passage in what was literally a primitive survival manual. Doing so made him refer to the far more subtle and energetically sensitive media of written words, and that made it far more likely the serious person would perceive more clearly what it was that made the possible choices different.

This technique is in use in survival training. If one is lost in the wilderness, it is best to read the manual, and if no specific problem is immediate, choose a passage or a few at random. There are likely to be periods of time when, trapped in the wilderness, a few moments might not present any particular threat or necessity, but can be used to familiarize with the general approach to survival. Reading English has that same sensitivity to energy that was so important to the early Taoists.

That's why one of the things that make it possible to deal well with money is an understanding of the writings in economics.

Since mankind began to work silicon, it has become one of the most intriguing, fascinating, and productive of developments in history. Human beings follow order, and the order of Heaven now comprehends a possibility of wielding silicon as efficiently as carbon or any other element, in the grandest and most comprehensive and noble of goals as well as in activities of local and temporal importance. Enthusiasm is high, and cement is cheap. Now our nation has vast plains and fields covered with cement, concrete, and rocks.

The problem can be more correctly understood if it is taken into account that entropy can be put on the right hand side of the equation as a prime mover, because in the case of the emergence of silicon, entropy is just that. Processes that affect and move silicon are the entropic, ordering, and chaos-reducing process of putting information into play in writings of dreams, plans, designs, knowledge, business, finance and other particulars of the processes of moving silicon from amorphous low order high entropy, chaotic masses in the Earth, into structured, high order, low entropy forms in human constructions. The result is essentially similar to patterns in crystallization, which may be exothermic or endothermic in that it may heat energy or absorb it. Either can be a driving gradient.

This conclusion requires understanding that the entropy with which information is measured is a statistical quantity and it is fundamentally indistinct from the entropy in thermodynamic phenomena. As a result, it is most useful to understand thermodynamics as a field of statistical activity rather than through any other approach. Understanding of the purely mathematical interpretation of thermodynamics is becoming more complete and should lead to the same conclusions.

A few examples of the way human constructions transform relatively chaotic nature into ordered forms will be useful here.

Immense quantities of earth and its living plants and animals, including sentient beings, are transformed into fundamental dimensions of the action.

These dimensions are mass, length, area, frequency, velocity, momentum, energy and a few others.

Some of these processes reduce millions of tons of the Earth into slag in order to find a few kilograms of diamonds or gold.

Vast masses of chaotic rock, ore and earth are transformed each year into millions of tons of iron, aluminum, copper, zinc, and other pure elements or compounds such as cement and fertilizer. Mass is a fundamental dimension of the non-radiation forms of the action.

Each year million of miles of wire, rope, yarn, thread, flexible tubing, and other length goods are produced, by transforming the finite earth and its scarce living biosphere. Length is a fundamental subdimension of the action.

Each year millions of tons of material are consumed to produce sheets and areas of plasterboard, plywood, linoleum, carpet, roofing, window glass, sheet steel, screen, cardboard, paper, Formica and other laminates, and endless acres of highway and airport surface. Area is a fundamental subdimension of the action.

Millions of British Thermal Units, Horsepower-hours, and kilowatt-hours of energy are produced each year from either dynamic, potentially renewable resources such as wind, water and tides, or burning fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas. Energy is an external dimension of the action, and occurs also in radiation from stars and hot lava.

Huge quantities of traffic flow along roads, through the air, across the ocean, and along rails, which are practically designed to be examples of momentum - masses moving at velocities. These range from tiny bullets to cars, trucks, airplanes, ships, and railroad trains, Momentum is a fundamental subdimension of the action.

Vast quantities of frequency are pumped out each year by transmitters of radio and television signals as well as lamps and other specialized emitters of radiation throughout the spectrum. Frequency is a fundamental subdimension of the action.

Putting the emergence of silicon's symbiotic relationship to carbon together with the reduction of the planet to fundamental forms of the action, one sees a vital and essential need to have this scenario understood as a consequence of trying to interpret the entire cosmology as a subdomain of the constructions that have occurred since ancient Egypt. For five thousand years the western human cultures have been engaged in a colossal, coarse, and titanic misconstruction. The dynasties formed a pattern of boom and bust, each boom cycle containing a hell-bent- for-leather stampede toward dreamed-of and imaginary goals, with no other trammel than the exhaustion of the people, their resources, and the Earth.

At the present time, the slaughter of wildlife, the sentient beings of the oceans and land, is the currently being exhausted resource that seems likely to be the only possible cause of this dynasty's misconstruction.

Reaching the Moon was one of the goals, and it was an important goal that may be thought of as justifying the slaughter of sentient beings throughout the world, but because the Moon was attained, and it is not necessary to kill many sentient beings to reach the moon, the slaughter of seals, tuna, cod, herring, salmon, elephants and many other organisms is unconscionable and cannot be justified. Sadly, this concern does not seem likely to be respected by those who slaughter the world's wildlife.

Instead, this period of time in Earth's history is likely to be viewed as dominated by a species, which to be sure attained spaceflight, but at the cost of reducing itself to an infestation, with which the planet can, in the long run, do without. Malthusian or not, it has too much truth to ignore, for the evidence is in the piles of dead fish and mammals in every grocery store and supermarket, and these marketing forms are increasing with the population.

Look at tanks. One of the attainments of World War II was to litter the sands of Egypt and the Sudan with rusting iron tanks, like so many Martian bodies, when all that was really wanted was a safe spaceflight to Mars and return with some of that rusty red soil. Why on Earth is anybody driving around in a tank nowadays? Is it to force the planet Mars upon the populace, or through some amateurish conjuring, perhaps magically cause Mars to appear on Earth? Or they are driving around on the Earth like Diemos and Phobos, demons and fear, the two moons of Mars as that devolved planet became embedded in the Earth's gravitational configuration in human concepts.