Essays
Long-form writing, newest first.
- Essay · InteractivePossibility / Exponentiality Training
A daily five-to-ten-minute training exercise to retrain the two reflexes that cost the most right now: the instinct to call something impossible, and the instinct to assume change is linear. Both were usually right for most of human history. Both are now usually wrong.
- Essay · InteractiveA Walk You've Never Taken
Twelve verified physics observations, each takeable in ten seconds on a thirty-minute walk, ending at the bond-bit asymmetry. The most accessible on-ramp to the corpus's central claim: knowing where to put an atom is incomprehensibly cheaper than holding it there.
- Essay · InteractiveAI & Quantum: Information Technologies and the Future of Environmental Protection
Slide deck on why quantum physics and information theory are the underpinnings that explain AI's environmental-protection power.
- EssayThe First Defender
An essay—and the founding case for environmental superintelligence. The four-billion-year arc from extinction-vulnerable biosphere to knowledge-creating defender, and why the species that built fossil-fuel infrastructure is also the only species that has ever solved a planetary problem.
- EssayThe Universe is Information
Information accumulates causal sovereignty over matter and energy across six phases—from bare bits at the Big Bang to the self-improving knowledge systems of the present decade. Wheeler said 'It from Bit'; the second half of the cycle is 'Bits protect Its.' The site's thesis, stated as compactly as physics allows.
- Essay · InteractiveProtecting Its with Bits: The Transformation
Inversion of the corpus thesis—'the universe is bits'—reframed as a transformation imperative for environmental managers: physics has always offered a thirteen-to-twenty-orders-of-magnitude cheaper currency than mass-based stewardship.
- EssayThe Compression That Sings
Argues that music and nature share a statistical signature—long-range correlation, multifractal scaling, characteristic 1/f compressibility—and that this is not aesthetic coincidence but a reflection of the informational substrate of physical reality. Proposes an information-theoretic formulation of environmental ethics: ecological damage is Kolmogorov disordering; protection is the preservation of logical depth. The same principle that lets the ear hear a fugue lets a well-designed model hear a watershed.
- EssayBit Protect It
The site's thesis distilled to its accessible core. Walks the reader through Wheeler's 'it from bit,' Landauer's limit, and the bond-bit asymmetry in plain prose, ending at the proposition that gives the site its subtitle: bit protect it—knowing is cheaper than moving by a factor that grows every year, and that gap is the physical foundation of environmental stewardship.
- EssayEvery Question Is a Physical Act
Distills the formal argument of 'Observation IS Protection' into a short, accessible piece: a question is physical (it costs energy by Landauer, its answer extracts work by Sagawa–Ueda, it changes the state of an existing gate), and AI completes the circuit between observation and actuation that humans cannot close at planetary speed. Self-described as a summary of the longer paper.
- EssayThe Epistemic Boundary: Observation IS Protection
Derives—from Landauer's principle, Sagawa–Ueda mutual-information work extraction, and Bardos–Lebeau–Rauch boundary observability theory—the proposition that observation is not a precondition of environmental protection but is itself the protective act. Every catastrophic environmental event was preceded by physically encoded information that was never promoted to the epistemic boundary; the universe's spontaneous processes, given a question, configure themselves toward order.
- EssayThe Inevitability of Zero-Cost Stewardship
Argues that the marginal cost of environmental protection is converging toward zero as two physical curves bend together: the Landauer floor of information processing and nuclear-density energy. Reframes the environmental profession's future from labor to leadership—from selling hours to encoding judgment into systems that will shepherd the planet's entropy long after this generation retires.
- EssayNature & Simplicity: How Information Protects Nature
Frames environmental protection as a corollary of physical simplicity: nature's complexity arises from single binary observations accumulated through irreversible interactions, and configuring matter with information costs orders of magnitude less than configuring it with force. Introduces the Boundary Dominance Conjecture extending the holographic principle from black holes to general environmental systems—sense the boundary, reconstruct the interior, steer with information.
- EssayEnvironmental Superintelligence as the Missing Foundation of AI Alignment
Argues that the AI alignment problem remains unsolved because dominant approaches (RLHF, Constitutional AI, mechanistic interpretability, scalable oversight, AI control, BCI merger) share an anthropocentric frame that lacks physically grounded optimization targets. Proposes Environmental Superintelligence—AI that models, predicts, and optimizes Earth's physical systems—as the missing foundation layer, supported by seven independent lines of first-principles evidence.
- EssayOn the Categorical Unity of Singularities
Identifies a common categorical structure (Lawvere's fixed-point theorem) underlying four classes of fundamental limits: gravitational singularities, the Bekenstein–Hawking entropy bound, the diagonal-argument family (Gödel, Turing, Cantor), and the uncertainty relations of quantum mechanics. Formalizes the Boundary Dominance Principle and argues that singularities, across all domains, are saturation points where a system's capacity for self-description is exhausted.
- Essay · InteractiveFighting Entropy in Environmental Information Regulation
Slide deck framing environmental regulation as a contest with rising informational entropy: the regulatory system itself is becoming 'too entropic' to govern matter effectively.
- EssayThe Self-Writing Universe
Argues from five experimentally confirmed pillars—Bekenstein–Hawking entropy, holography / AdS-CFT, decoherence, Landauer, and Lawvere's fixed-point theorem—that the universe writes itself into existence through irreversible physical interactions, each of which inscribes information on the holographic boundary. Tiers physical systems by self-referential depth and locates Gödelian limits at the horizon of self-description.
- EssayThere Is Only One Limit
The accessible companion to 'On the Categorical Unity of Singularities.' Argues in plain prose that no system can completely describe itself from the inside, and that the wall every self-referential system hits—black hole, unprovable truth, unsolvable problem—is the same wall seen from different angles.
- Essay · InteractiveEnvironmental Superintelligence: Independent First-Principles Impact Assessment
Independent first-principles comparison of environmental investment scenarios, framing ESI as the 'sharpened axe' before the chopping work begins.
- EssayThe Inverted Mountain: Why Every Step Toward Environmental Superintelligence Is Cheaper Than the Last
First-principles synthesis of the physics, economics, and policy implications of information-substituted environmental stewardship. The trajectory has the unusual property that each step toward the summit costs less than the last.
- Essay · InteractiveRice Presentation on Environmental Superintelligence
Talk delivered at Rice University on the Environmental Superintelligence framework (Feb 2026).
- EssayThe Missing $Quadrillion
Identifies a second economic channel that every major AI-impact forecast (Goldman, McKinsey, PwC) has missed: the bond-bit asymmetry. Channel A asks what happens when AI substitutes for cognitive labor; Channel B asks what happens when information substitutes for physical manipulation across the entire material economy. The second channel is roughly twice the size of the first and reframes the path to a $1-quadrillion economy.
- EssayThe Intelligence Leverage Equation
Public-facing presentation of the Intelligence Leverage Equation Λ = Mc² / (I·k_BT·ln 2), which captures the bond-bit asymmetry as a single dimensionless quantity. Names 'Jed's Angel' as the practical realization of Maxwell's demon and reframes the environmental professional's role from boulder-pushing to designing the intelligence that keeps the boulders from rolling.
- EssayWhat Is Life… and How to Protect It
Picks up Schrödinger's 1944 question with eighty years of information-thermodynamics in hand and answers it: life is the universe's optimization process for converting dissipation into function, traceable as a 50-order-of-magnitude rise in Generalized Functional Efficiency over 13.8 billion years. The same physics that explains what life is also explains how to protect it—by engineering the bond-bit asymmetry rather than fighting entropy with mass.
- EssayThe General Theory of Environmental Leverage
Visual essay framing the move from the Regime of Mass to the Regime of Information as a phase transition in stewardship. Walks through the Intelligence Leverage Equation in graphic form and presents a layer-by-layer cost table—sense / transmit / store / infer / reason / decide / act—showing where the economic crossover has already happened.
- EssayThe Physics of Zero-Cost Stewardship
The thermodynamic case that protecting the biosphere costs vanishingly little compared to what generated it—because information accumulates causal sovereignty over matter and energy faster than the costs of stewardship grow. The expository bridge to the Intelligence Leverage Equation.
- EssayThe Thermodynamic Foundations of Entropic Shepherding
Derives the Intelligence Leverage Equation from first principles by synthesizing Landauer's bound, the Sagawa–Ueda generalized second law, bond-energy quantum constraints, boundary observability theory, and mass-energy equivalence. Proves the Bond-Bit Asymmetry—that information processing can substitute for physical intervention at leverage ratios approaching 10³⁷ per kilogram of matter at room temperature—and grounds the asymptote of zero-cost stewardship in physics rather than economics.
- EssayGeneralized Functional Efficiency: A Thermodynamic Metric for the Evolution of Complex Systems
Proposes Generalized Functional Efficiency (GFE = functional output per unit entropy production per unit mass) as a successor metric to Energy Rate Density for tracking the evolution of complex systems. Demonstrates that GFE rises monotonically by 50+ orders of magnitude across a 13.8-billion-year cosmological arc and resolves the apparent 'efficiency paradox' that ERD encounters at the frontier of biological and technological evolution.
- EssayThe Universe Is Learning to Think
Short, accessible companion to the Generalized Functional Efficiency paper. Reads the cosmos's 13.8-billion-year arc as 50 orders of magnitude of rising functional efficiency rather than as a straight march toward heat death—a bonfire vs. a laser, both releasing heat but only one carrying signal.
- EssayThe Negentropic Imperative: Architecting the Universal Biological Interface for Planetary Thriving
Posits that the resolution to the Anthropocene stalemate lies not in incremental augmentation of the human node (Neuralink-style BCIs) but in a phase transition: a Universal Biological Interface — an Infomechanosphere that integrates the bandwidth of the planet itself, not the bandwidth of the individual.
- EssayThe Environmental Superintelligence Manifesto
Manifesto-form treatise from the author's transition out of two decades of Clean Air Act reform toward the information-physics framing that anchors the rest of the corpus.
- EssayThe Negentropic Imperative: Earth Rules as Algorithms of Persistence and the Physics of Planetary Governance
Defines 'Earth Rules'—the organizing principles of the biosphere—as evolved computational algorithms that optimize negentropy generation under physical constraints, and redefines Natural Law as the physical imperative for any persistent complex adaptive system to align with these strategies. Quantifies the HCN bandwidth (~40–100 bps) and the >10¹⁹ leverage of informational over physical control as the basis for a thermodynamically coherent ESG framework.
- EssayThe Thermodynamics of Artificial Intelligence: A First-Principles Analysis of the Maxwellian Demon Hypothesis
Asks whether AI agents operating via feedback loops—RL agents, autonomous control systems—function as Maxwell's demons in a first-principles physical sense, and reconciles their internal computational thermodynamic costs with the work they extract from stochastic environments. Traverses the Sagawa–Ueda equality, SGD energetics, and recent experimental realizations of autonomous demons in solid-state and quantum systems.
- EssayBiogeochemical Cycles as Information-Thermodynamic Computational Systems
Reads the water and carbon cycles as planetary-scale computational systems whose entropy flows bridge quantum mechanics to ecosystem organization; living systems augment entropy production by factors of 1,000–10,000 over abiotic Earth.
- EssayThe Thermodynamics of Planetary Stewardship: The Environmental Spatial Intelligence Project at Boca Chica
Theoretical foundations and operational architecture of a proposed Environmental Spatial Intelligence Project and Cosmic Life Intelligence System at the SpaceX Starbase facility, framed as a paradigm shift in planetary biogeochemical management.
- EssayThe Negentropy Substrate: A First-Principles Validation of Nature's Intelligence as the Training Ground for Physically-Grounded AGI
Argues that the next paradigm of AI development must move beyond the statistical scaling of language models toward physically-grounded intelligence trained on nature's own negentropic algorithms.
- EssayThe Scaling Imperative: A First-Principles Comparison of Human-Cognitive and Integrated Computational Networks for Planetary-Scale Intelligence
Quantitative first-principles comparison of two architectures for planetary-scale environmental intelligence: the Human-Cognitive Network (HCN), defined by the brain's ~100-bit-per-second I/O bottleneck, and the Integrated Computational Network (ICN), with petabit-scale backbones. Frames the transition as a thermodynamic imperative driven by Whitehead's Law of Unthinking and details the architecture of the 'Inverted Stack'—a computer-native intelligence system.
- Essay · InteractiveProtecting Life on Earth: How Many Lives Can We Save?
Slide deck framing the ESI mission in human terms: how many lives can a quantum-sensor-equipped, AI-coordinated Earth save?
- EssayCompute Together, Stay Together: A First-Principles Analysis of Universal Computation and the Negentropic Imperative for Alignment
Argues that cosmic, biological, and artificial computation are participants in a single universal negentropic trajectory, and derives an alignment imperative from that continuity.
- EssayThe Great Externalization: A First-Principles Analysis of the 2025 AI Compute Boom and Its Thermodynamic Consequences for Planetary Stewardship
Reads the $1.5T+ 2025 AI-compute build-out through the Holographic Negentropic Framework and the Law of Unthinking, quantifying its entropic costs (10–40 GW power, 130+ Mt CO₂e/yr, 2T+ gallons/yr water, 5 Mt/yr e-waste by 2030) and arguing that the only thermodynamically coherent answer is paradoxical: more and smarter computation aimed at building Environmental General Intelligence.
- EssayThe Last Cavalry Charge: Computation's Endgame and Humanity's Non-Computable Edge
Formalizes Whitehead's Law of Unthinking as a physical principle, then asks what remains for humans when computation has automated every operation that can be automated. A.I. can't pray—humans can.
- EssayFrom Fear to Flourishing: An Architecture for Planetary Thriving in the Information Age
Reframes the environmental movement around 'The Environmental Happiness Movement'—a deliberate departure from a 20th-century paradigm powered by fear and toward an architecture for planetary thriving grounded in the negentropic mandate of life. Treats the Anthropocene crises as the predictable physical consequence of unconscious goal-setting and proposes a conscious replacement aimed at flourishing rather than mere protection.
- EssayThe Elephant in the Room: AI, the Billable Hour, and the Future of Environmental Consulting & Law
Open letter to environmental professionals confronting the structural collision between AI-driven productivity and the billable-hour model that funds their careers.
- EssayThe Unthinking Revolution: A Manifesto for the Environmental Profession
A manifesto addressed to environmental professionals confronting the ethical trilemma of the Agentic Shift: embrace irrelevance, embrace poverty, or embrace deception. Names the resolution as the Expert-in-the-Loop (EEL)—strategist, orchestrator, and arbiter of quality and ethics—and outlines a value-based engagement model in which honesty and best-tool-use is the most direct path to profitability.
- EssayThe Negentropic Channel: A First-Principles Synthesis of Recent Developments in Direct Neural Communication and Environmental General Intelligence for Universal Communication
Reads Willett et al. (2025)'s imagined-speech BCI breakthrough as the high-fidelity output channel that resolves the human brain's communication bottleneck and locates it inside the 'Inverting the Stack' architecture. Synthesizes BCI, an ecocentric Environmental General Intelligence, and the Holographic Negentropic Framework into a planetary cybernetic loop operating on the common currency of bits.
- EssayNature's Operating System: A Call to Compute Together
Reframes nature itself as a computational substrate that has been processing information at planetary scale for billions of years, and proposes a 'Compute Together' architecture where engineered AI joins—rather than opposes—nature's own algorithms.
- EssayWhen AI Speaks Nature's Language: Decoding the Planetary Conversation and Encoding Planetary Thriving
Frames AI as a planetary translator—a 'listening angel' that decodes the non-redundant bits emitted by living systems (forests, bees, dolphins, whales) and lets human civilization respond in a thermodynamically coherent symphony with nature, rather than transmitting chaos and refusing to listen to feedback.
- EssayJed's Angel: Maxwell's Demon Reborn, Guarding Nature with Information
A deeper technical follow-up to the May 2025 'Environmental Angel: Maxwell's Demon Evolved' essay. Examines the thermodynamic trade-offs inherent in a planetary-scale 'Angel,' the inviolability of the Second Law, and the irreducible informational costs of its operation.
- EssayInverting the Stack: A First-Principles Analysis of Computer-Native Environmental Intelligence and the Elevation of Human Cognition
The August 2025 first articulation of the Inverted Stack architecture, later developed in 'The Scaling Imperative.' Argues that the current Human-Cognitive Network is architecturally insufficient for 21st-century planetary stewardship and that a transition to an Integrated Computational Network is a thermodynamic imperative.
- EssayLaw of Unthinking and the Holographic Negentropic Framework: Toward a Paradigm of Proactive Planetary Thriving
Synthesizes Whitehead's Law of Unthinking with a Holographic Negentropic Framework into a single blueprint for moving from reactive environmental protection to proactive planetary thriving. Formalizes 'unthinking' (the externalization of routine cognition) as a thermodynamic imperative and grounds the holographic principle in the architecture of an Environmental General Intelligence.
- EssayThe Law of Unthinking: A Strategic Analysis of the Next Paradigm in Environmental Management
Strategic analysis applying Whitehead's Law of Unthinking as a predictive lens on environmental management's three-act trajectory: Unthinking Exploitation (industrial era), Automated Protection (the current cognitively burdensome regulatory paradigm undergoing the 'Agentic Shift'), and the emerging regenerative paradigm in which the Law of Unthinking serves planetary thriving.
- EssayThe Unthinking Advance: A Thermodynamic and Computational Analysis of Civilization's Progress
Formalizes Whitehead's Law of Unthinking as a thermodynamic principle of civilizational progress, tracing the calculus of cognitive automation from prehistory to the AI age.
- EssayFrom Protective Walls to Open Gardens: Cultivating Environmental Thriving in the Information Age
Proposes a paradigm shift from the half-century-old protection-and-regulation model—rooted in fear and scarcity—toward an information-age framework for environmental thriving and abundance.
- Essay · InteractiveQuantum AI for Environmental Negentropy: A New Paradigm for Nature Protection
Image-heavy slide deck on a proposed quantum-AI paradigm for environmental negentropy.
- EssayThe Environmental Angel: Information, Entropy, and the Thermodynamic Limits of Ecological Control
Adapts Maxwell's demon—the 19th-century thought experiment of an information-driven agent that locally reduces entropy—into a rigorous proposal for an 'Environmental Angel': an information-driven entity that controls environmental entropy to protect natural systems. Establishes the conceptual character that subsequent essays continue to develop into 'Jed's Angel' and Environmental Superintelligence.
- Essay · InteractiveThe Physics of Environmental Law
Image-heavy slide deck applying information-physics to the structure of environmental law itself.
- EssayEnvironmental Protection in a Holographic Information Framework
Examines whether environmental information could be encoded and manipulated in a lower-dimensional framework analogous to the holographic principle in physics. Surveys quantum sensing, quantum networks, and AI as engineering pathways and argues for control at boundaries rather than throughout volumes—an early, narrower precursor to the Holographic Negentropic Framework that arrives later that year.
- EssayExploratory Jottings: The Spiritual Universe — Human 3.0
Personal speculative essay on the spiritual implications of quantum physics and information theory, addressed to 'eight-year-olds well versed in quantum physics' — a meditation on child-like intellectual curiosity.
- Essay · InteractiveQuantum Physics & Environmental Protection
The earliest piece in the inbox: a 2019 talk arguing that recent developments in quantum mechanics will profoundly change how we approach environmental protection.
