Tag: energy

What is Intelligence (and What “Superintelligence” Misses)?

Worth a read… sounds a good deal like what I’ve been saying out loud and thinking here in my posts on AI futures and the need for local imagination in steering technological innovation such as AI / AGI…

The Politics Of Superintelligence:

And beneath all of this, the environmental destruction accelerates as we continue to train large language models — a process that consumes enormous amounts of energy. When confronted with this ecological cost, AI companies point to hypothetical benefits, such as AGI solving climate change or optimizing energy systems. They use the future to justify the present, as though these speculative benefits should outweigh actual, ongoing damages. This temporal shell game, destroying the world to save it, would be comedic if the consequences weren’t so severe.

And just as it erodes the environment, AI also erodes democracy. Recommendation algorithms have long shaped political discourse, creating filter bubbles and amplifying extremism, but more recently, generative AI has flooded information spaces with synthetic content, making it impossible to distinguish truth from fabrication. The public sphere, the basis of democratic life, depends on people sharing enough common information to deliberate together….

What unites these diverse imaginaries — Indigenous data governance, worker-led data trusts, and Global South design projects — is a different understanding of intelligence itself. Rather than picturing intelligence as an abstract, disembodied capacity to optimize across all domains, they treat it as a relational and embodied capacity bound to specific contexts. They address real communities with real needs, not hypothetical humanity facing hypothetical machines. Precisely because they are grounded, they appear modest when set against the grandiosity of superintelligence, but existential risk makes every other concern look small by comparison. You can predict the ripostes: Why prioritize worker rights when work itself might soon disappear? Why consider environmental limits when AGI is imagined as capable of solving climate change on demand?

Quantum–Plasma Consciousness and the Ecology of the Cross

I’ve been thinking a good deal about plasma, physics, artificial intelligence, consciousness, and my ongoing work on The Ecology of the Cross, as all of those areas of my own interest are connected. After teaching AP Physics, Physics, Physical Science, Life Science, Earth and Space Science, and AP Environmental Science for the last 20 years or so, this feels like one of those frameworks that I’ve been building to for the last few decades.

So, here’s a longer paper exploring some of that, with a bibliography of recent scientific research and philosophical and theological insights that I’m pretty proud of (thanks, Zotero and Obsidian!).

Abstract

This paper develops a relational cosmology, quantum–plasma consciousness, that integrates recent insights from plasma astrophysics, quantum foundations, quantum biology, consciousness studies, and ecological theology. Across these disciplines, a shared picture is emerging: the universe is not composed of isolated substances but of dynamic, interdependent processes. Plasma research reveals that galaxy clusters and cosmic filaments are shaped by magnetized turbulence, feedback, and self-organization. Relational interpretations of quantum mechanics show that physical properties arise only through specific interactions, while quantum biology demonstrates how coherence and entanglement can be sustained in living systems. Together, these fields suggest that relationality and interiority are fundamental features of reality. The paper brings this scientific picture into dialogue with ecological theology through what I call The Ecology of the Cross. This cruciform cosmology interprets openness, rupture, and transformation, from quantum interactions to plasma reconnection and ecological succession, as intrinsic to creation’s unfolding. The Cross becomes a symbol of divine participation in the world’s vulnerable and continually renewing relational processes. By reframing consciousness as an intensified, self-reflexive mode of relational integration, and by situating ecological crisis and AI energy consumption within this relational ontology, the paper argues for an ethic of repairing relations and cultivating spiritual attunement to the interiorities of the Earth community.

PDF download below…

Quantum–Plasma Consciousness and the Ecology of the CrossDownload

AI Data Centers in Space

Solar energy is indeed everything (and perhaps the root of consciousness?)… this is a good step and we should be moving more of our energy grids into these types of frameworks (with local-focused receivers and transmitters here on the surface)… not just AI datacenters. I suspect we will in the coming decades with the push from AI (if the power brokers that have made and continue to make trillions from energy generation aren’t calling the shots)… 

Google CEO Sundar Pichai says we’re just a decade away from a new normal of extraterrestrial data centers:

CEO Sundar Pichai said in a Fox News interview on Sunday that Google will soon begin construction of AI data centers in space. The tech giant announced Project Suncatcher earlier this month, with the goal of finding more efficient ways to power energy-guzzling centers, in this case with solar power.

“One of our moonshots is to, how do we one day have data centers in space so that we can better harness the energy from the sun that is 100 trillion times more energy than what we produce on all of Earth today?” Pichai said.

Artificial Intelligence at the Crossroads of Science, Ethics, and Spirituality

I’ve been interested in seeing how corporate development of AI data centers (and their philosophies and ethical considerations) has dominated the conversation, rather than inviting in other local and metaphysical voices to help shape this important human endeavor. This paper explores some of those possibilities (PDF download available here…)

Artificial Intelligence at the Crossroads of ScienceDownload

Renewables Pass Coal’s Share in Global Electricity Generation

China is leading the way here in solar… It’s time for our leaders and economy here in the US to start waking up to reality. That won’t happen in the current scenario of our political landscape, obviously, but there needs to be intentional focusing on reducing consolidated power grid structures in favor of local (and flexible) sources of electricity and fuel (as well as our food supplies). 

Global Electricity Mid-Year Insights 2025 | Ember:

Solar and wind outpaced demand growth in the first half of 2025, as renewables overtook coal’s share in the global electricity mix…

Solar grew by a record 306 TWh (31%) in the first half of 2025. This increased solar’s share in the global electricity mix from 6.9% to 8.8%. China accounted for 55% of global solar generation growth, followed by the US (14%), the EU (12%), India (5.6%) and Brazil (3.2%), while the rest of the world contributed just 9%. Four countries generated over 25% of their electricity from solar, and at least 29 countries surpassed 10%, up from 22 countries in the same period last year and only 11 countries in H1-2021…

PDF Report availalbe here

Let’s Flood the Planet with Solar Panels

I have very similar thoughts about our growing energy needs and utilizing the very free and abundant (and powerful) resource that is energy being produced by our own star that floods our Earth with more than enough energy potential to get us out of the capitalistic and colonialist matrix that is the fossil fuel industry… a mesh of Whitehead Schedulers powered by solar energy would do wonders to transform the daily lives of humans and more-than-humans here on Earth…

Good read and idea (and stats, espeically out of Pakistan):

A Modest Proposal – by Bill McKibben – The Crucial Years

So let’s start at $2.5 trillion, the number for the panels alone, because, hey, Tik Tok videos. Is that an absurd number to imagine helping to pay? The International Monetary Fund reported recently that the world spends $7 trillion a year subsidizing fossil fuel. And all it gets us is the chance to buy more fossil fuel—the last line of Jacobson’s email makes it clear that even at the full price this would be a huge bargain. You save huge amounts of money because you don’t have to pay for fuel any more. Once the panels are up, sunshine is free. It changes everything.