So, Jesus sends a secret message to his followers to "prove" that he existed in a bizarre inverse image on a piece of cloth that appears to have originated long, long after he died in radiometric testing. This is the Alpha and the Omega, creator of the Universe itself, all powerful, who rose from the dead multiple times (according to Saul/Paul, and of course Saints cannot lie about something important like that) and who could easily save the souls of all the unbelievers in the world at any time by manifesting himself to them as he did to Saul/Paul and "hundreds of others".
He could, in fact, save my soul, as I am very, very certain that Jesus Was Not Magic, and that's if a single Jesus corresponding to the one in the inconsistent Gospels even existed and isn't a synthesis of a number of apocalyptic preachers of the time, dressed up with added myths and legends so that the religion itself could hold its own with the other prevailing "world" religions of the day (virgin birth, raised from the dead, raises the dead, sundry other miracles). There is, after all, absolutely nothing that any objective scientist would consider believable evidence to support the preposterous allegations of miracles of this or any other religion. So according to the Gospels, I am damned. According to Mark, Jesus deliberately set things up that way because I am preordained to be damned. Of course elsewhere in the Gospels, it is asserted that Jesus loves me, and still other places I would no doubt be identified as a "dog begging scraps from the master's table" as a Gentile and not a Jew.
But no matter. If Jesus is God, if God is all-powerful and all-loving, Jesus/God doesn't want to damn me or any other sentient being to hell. Of course as all-powerful all-loving Jesus/God, he/it can easily prevent it by just not doing it, but even if he/it establishes a rule that non-believers have to go to hell, he established a clear precedent with Saul that he can and at a whim will appear in person before them to take a Christian-persecuting wicked zealot sinner and convince him that he is real and thereby not only save them from damnation but convert them into a saint. It is an obvious theorem of these not too stringent observations and assumptions that either:
* Jesus is God, but is evil, and deliberately refrains from actions that would save sentient beings he presumably loves and who are capable of suffering from an easily preventable eternity of suffering.
* Jesus is God, but is not all powerful (which some would argue disqualifies him from being God, but whatever) and would love to appear before each sinner and demonstrate his reality and compassion and miraculous abilities, but lacks the time-sharing capabilities to do so.
* Jesus existed but was just a man who was born, lived for a while, perhaps made a bit of heavily mythologized and utterly non-supernatural ruckus, and then died, possibly by crucifixion, possibly of old age or disease.
* Jesus is a syncretic myth composed perhaps of John the Baptist legends and legends of some of the other apocalyptic con men/preachers of the age who went around preaching for a living and salted the crowd with shills to increase their following and donation/support stream. It is, not at all unreasonable that any such preacher would be named or even just titledYeshua, which simply means god-redeemer, which happens to be the meaning of the word Christ as well which happens to be pretty much the meaning of Messiah (annointed savior). Jesus Christ, the Messiah, is "Annointed/Holy Savior" in three languages, Romanized Hebrew, Greek, and Hebrew. It seems perfectly reasonable that none of these terms is an actual name of the individual(s) involved (including, by the way, "Emmanuel", which comes from a completely irrelevant prophecy to King Ahaz and means "God is with us" and which nobody records as being one of his names but Matthew seeking desperately to tie Jesus to some kind of "official" prophecy).
Well, other than looking up and back in time at the stars. Of course that is assuming that the visible Universe isn't a huge virtual reality simulation being transmitted directly into our bottled brains.
So they finally invented something that would make me seriously consider buying an Xbox. I hope they have it in the stores in time for Christmas. I can think of a dozen great uses for it -- killing flies, drilling holes through would-be burglar's shoes (feet inside), a new way to light the barbecue grill. In fact, who needs the grill? Next summer I can reprogram it to keep the squirrels out of my peaches at the same time it prepares me a tasty laser-grilled peach-fed squirrel for dinner out of the ones that move too slowly! One wonders if it is sensitive enough to keep a yard cleared of mosquitoes (without putting anyone's eyes out, of course, at the yard party).
"Entanglement" is a philosophically difficult arena. According to quantum theory, there is just one wavefunction for the entire Universe. However, we as observers are part of that wavefunction observing another part of that wavefunction with a really, really, big chunk of the whole wavefunction effectively unobservable but still coupled to the observer (part of the wavefunction), the measuring apparatus (part of the wavefunction), and the "experiment" (yep, part of the wavefunction. Everything is "entangled", but quantum mechanics also predicts that large systems approximated with a random phase condition will behave like a classical system, and the usual rule is that we treat a measurement apparatus as a classical system that breaks the entanglement of a measured systems and forces it "unpredictably" into a separable state. But even this is words, not equations although random phase approximations are indeed equations and are used frequently in field theory.
The only coherent explanation of this that I am aware of is the process of:
a) Starting with a density matrix (or other representation) for "the Universe".
b) Use the Nakajima-Zwanzig approach of splitting the (fully entangled) density matrix up into two parts -- a "system" that you will continue to treat as a quantum system, and a "bath" -- everything else -- which would also include the measuring apparatus if you were trying to describe an experiment. One then accepts the fact that one cannot know or prepare the state of the bath (which is really, really big being the rest of the Universe and everything) and so one makes a statistical approximation of the bath (taking the trace) which essentially eliminates the pesky entanglement but also breaks useful things like unitarity and in a sense, conservation laws. One them creates projection-valued operators and transforms the equations for the system into stochastic or semiclassical equations of motion.
c) IIRC your final result is quantum mechanics for the system expressed as a non-Markovian integrodifferential equation that is almost impossible to solve. However, if one makes a Markov approximation (forces it to be time-local, delta-correlates time) you end up with a decent explanation for things like spontaneous decay as an "exponential" process rather than a punctuated unitary process. You go one way, you can make it into a Langevin equation, go another you can make it more like Fokker-Planck.
The lovely thing about this approach is that it renders moot all sorts of nonsense, such as EPR paradoxes and "wavefunction collapse". It is perfectly clear that in the Universal wavefunction no such paradox or collapse can occur. They are simply expressions of our ignorance of phase and state whenever we try to isolate some part of the whole and pretend that it is a standalone "system" that can ever be decoupled from everything else. Schrodinger's cat paradoxes disappear as there is no paradox in the Universal wavefunction, only when we try to project the state of the cat against our ignorance of phase and interaction with the outside Universe. The cat, if you like, cannot be entangled separately from its preexisting entanglement with the rest of the Universe, and we only get into trouble when we have to force it by partitioning the system in order to get a chunk small enough to work with.
Hope this helps. I doubt it will. Very few people seem to be in touch with Nakajima-Zwanzig and the Generalized Master Equation these days, and don't treat problems like this as OPEN quantum systems as opposed to closed systems with a classical measurement apparatus, which is a place you only get to on the far side of the N-Z GME ritual.
As for my profession: I got out of a career in Astrophysics because I figured that if I had to put up with egos like yours on a daily basis, I might as well get paid for it. Thanks for reminding me that I made the right choice.
ROTFL.
Every day, you probably look in a mirror. Do you pay yourself for the privilege?
Curiously, in my career in physics, even when there has been considerable debate -- and on one occasion I was in a room at a conference where people were almost shouting at each other (over a paper I had written, curiously enough:-) there was still a thread of collegial respect. At the same time, there was and continues to be a lot of resistance to being proven wrong, in no small part because of the grant system.
Yes, physicists often have egos, although a lot of the ones I know and work with don't have huge ones, just ones that are healthy enough to be able to participate in the scientific process, which requires at least some personal investment in the hypotheses you are studying if only because we've created a system that punishes null results in research to an incredible fault (and which produces a matching bias towards getting a positive result, no matter what, for any hypothesis being studied, sigh, and I don't just mean in climate science). I know you think I'm arrogant (exactly what tone SHOULD I take to respectfully disagree with YOUR personal beliefs in a non-arrogant way, or is the mere act of daring not to agree arrogance, I wonder) but in fact one generally needs to have scientists with egos that are sufficiently healthy to be able to state new beliefs that are not in agreement with "accepted" beliefs in science or science would never make any progress. Is this what annoyed you in astrophysics? People invested in beliefs in some specific picture of the big bang, or dark matter, or whatever? Or did somebody -- referees or grant officers, perhaps -- piss on your Post-Toasties?
Don't get me wrong -- this is by no means impossible or even unlikely -- it is a serious question! Science is not perfect, gatekeeping is far more common than people think, as is inbreeding in the grant process where reviewers favorably review grants for research that does not challenge the results or beliefs of the reviewer. My primary colleague over 25 years of research was a grant officer for the ARO, and I got to see a lot of this from both sides -- he was absolutely not in this category, but some of his colleagues were, and he had to be very careful in his selection of outside reviewers. But hey, my own thesis advisor had a world class ego and was disliked by roughly 2/3 of the physics department and would insult people en masse at dinner parties, so I do understand where you are coming from. At the same time, he was really pretty damn smart, quite possibly as smart as he thought he was. Smart and modest exists in physics, but you don't hear about it as much and may well hear from stupid and immodest more. Meditating on why may provide some insight into why science is not an ivory tower -- scientists are human and have to be in conflict for the process to work and yet are subject to normal human frailties such as pride and a need to eat and have job security. I personally think "science" works pretty well given all of this, but it could certainly work better...
I know you like to post a lot on/., and I know that/. isn't known for the maturity of its discussions so that your style is likely adapted to the needs of the medium. All I would suggest is that you consider reducing the snark factor in your replies even when you disagree with something. Obviously, we disagree on this issue. You still seem to wish to impute some sort of fundamental dishonesty to me, and not acknowledge that it is possible for both of us to honestly disagree. I'm sure posting additional links to papers (some of which probably are paywalled, and even though I can get through a paywall via Duke it is a PITA and I hate having to do it to ge
Pigs work better and faster. Feed a body to the pigs and you might end up with a few teeth in pigshit, nothing more. Use the pigshit to fertilize some fields, and the body is just gone.
Dissolving tissue in bathtubs, etc, just leaves evidence in the trap, the pipes, (probably) in the bathroom and tub, and "weeks" is a lot of exposure.
All good drug dealers need to invest in a hog farm. It's worth it even when you don't have bodies to dispose of! Tasty bacon!
The consensus of many studies of the effects of elevated CO2 on plants is that the CO2 fertilization effect is real (see Kimball, 1983; Acock and Allen, 1985; Cure and Acock, 1986; Allen, 1990; Rozema et al., 1993; Allen, 1994; Allen and Amthor, 1995). However, the CO2 fertilization effect may not be manifested under conditions where some other growth factor is severely limiting, such as low temperature (Long, 1991). Also, plants grown in some conditions, where limitations of rooting volume (Arp, 1991), light, or other factors restrict growth, have not shown a sustained response to elevated CO2 (Kramer, 1981).
Note well that again they use the term may. This is because -- unlike you -- they seem to recognize that even though the effect is real and will have an impact in many locations and conditions, including those that generally hold in agriculture where one generally avoids growing plants in strongly resource constrained environments, one can certainly suppress the effect (or fail to observe it in the wild) in specific environments, and they go even further and note that the effect is differential according to plant type with some plant types more likely to exhibit a stronger response or be resource limited than others.
The bulk of this report simply works through specific food crop species and estimates their likely response to a mix of increased CO2 and the imagined climate changes that are predicted, or projected, or prophecied (as you wish) by the GCMs that so far haven't done a very good job of PP or P-ing the climate.
(Abstract: Satellite observations reveal a greening of the globe over recent decades. The role in this greening of the “CO2 fertilization” effect—the enhancement of photosynthesis due to rising CO2 levels—is yet to be established. The direct CO2 effect on vegetation should be most clearly expressed in warm, arid environments where water is the dominant limit to vegetation growth. Using gas exchange theory, we predict that the 14% increase in atmospheric CO2 (1982–2010) led to a 5 to 10% increase in green foliage cover in warm, arid environments. Satellite observations, analyzed to remove the effect of variations in precipitation, show that cover across these environments has increased by 11%. Our results confirm that the anticipated CO2 fertilization effect is occurring alongside ongoing anthropogenic perturbations to the carbon cycle and that the fertilization effect is now a significant land surface process.)
Probably the best review article on the effect on trees, in particular, is this:
where in laboratory experiments on trees increasing CO2 by 300 ppm increased growth by 50 to 60%. Idso remarks that the problem with laboratory experiments is the opposite of what you assert -- it is difficult to grow trees in the lab without constraining their roots and access to resources and work he cites (in less abundance as it was ongoing in 1993) suggested that the response in the wild is even higher.
In general, in the mean, increasing ONLY CO2 in the environments of most wild plants does, in fact, increase their biomass and the net biomass of the Earth has almost certainly substantially increased on average, allowing for changes in land use over the last century. The effect is pronounced and relatively enormous in trees (and yes, I can cite papers t
Plant growth is almost never CO2 limited outside of the lab.
This is, with all due respect, simply not true. It not only isn't true, it is in multiple textbooks as not true, backed by many studies of both lab and field data. Not only is it not true, it is differently untrue for different kinds of plants -- some of them are more likely to be carbon limited than others and respond more strongly to the almost 50% increase in CO2 from 280 ppm to 400 ppm. It isn't true in multiple dimensions -- it alters plant respiration and water retention, it alters the quantum efficiency and temperature optimum of photosynthesis, increases the rates of nitrogen fixation (altering directly one of the other rate limiting resources), and increases the nitrogen efficiency of woody and other C3 plants. One of the more interesting ways it is not true is that the pattern of tree ring growth around the world has been altered (increased) by the increased CO2. This is one of many confounding effects in the use of tree rings to infer past temperature and is sadly often neglected (or breezed on past) simply because it by hypothesis is covariant with the temperature (making causality very difficult indeed to disentangle). You might want to talk to some agricultural scientists and biologists before shooting from the hip on that one, cowboy -- it was first pointed out to me by a soil scientist in the Duke School of the Environment as not even something worthy of contention, a simple well-known fact..
It is, however, something that is frequently stated by those that want to completely discount any possible benefit from CO2 in order to demonize it and to enhance their political argument that we have to reduce its production at all costs because it has no benefits and not even "risks" -- certainties of disaster if we don't.
Sadly -- and I do mean sadly -- the effect of CO2 on "the poor" is never accurately or fairly tallied.
If it were, the tally would have to begin with the massive amount of greenhouse research on the positive effects of CO_2 on plant growth, research that demonstrates (for example) that it is easily cost-beneficial to buy apparatus to maintain a CO2 concentration over 1000 ppm in actual greenhouses. By raising atmospheric CO2 from 280 to 400 ppm, we have in fact raised crop yields worldwide by between 10 and 15%. Close to 1 billion people dined last night on the extra crop yields (all things being equal) produced by the extra carbon dioxide. It is difficult to put a price tag on this generally neglected benefit, simply because it is so enormous. It is a benefit not only to humans -- it pervades the entire biosphere with very few exceptions. Different types of plants don't all respond equally to increases in CO2, but they all respond positively and everything from the grass in your front yard to food crops to trees are growing faster and more every year. It also has secondary benefits -- plants raised in a CO2 rich environment tend to be more drought resistant as the extra carbon dioxide causes the plant's need to respire to reduce, so it retains water longer. There is evidence that this is already impacting deserts by greening their edges.
Then there are the benefits of the electricity produced. So far, the benefits of making electricity (and other products) burning coal have included things like "building civilization". The lack of the benefits of electricity are one of the fundamental things that make the global poor (the poorest third of the world's population) poor in the first place. Cheap and abundant electricity means clean water, sewage treatment, inexpensive fertilizer, cooking on something other than dried dung or charcoal, light after dark, refrigeration, transportation, jobs and manufacturing, health care, and access to communication, education, information, and entertainment. At the very least, the lack of reliable and affordable sources of electricity means the general lack of most or all of these things. The people reading this post (many of whom will, I'm sure, already be gathering their nuclear device flames:-) would, I would wager, forgo flaming this post if the cost of dong so would be spending one single month living in a mud hut in north India without electricity or one single one of the products electricity enables (such as clean water).
Anything that raises the cost of electricity and imposes barriers to its cost-effective implementation in the world's poorest countries has the direct and immediate effect of hurting the poorest people of the world far more than all of the "climate change" that has thus far been attributed to increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, even if you are willing to attribute every single storm or heat wave to climate change instead of acknowledging that the data on storms itself (over a pitifully short interval of accurately recorded history) provides almost no evidence for change, let alone attributable negative impact.
One can easily understand why China and India are investing in coal burning power plants at a ratio of something like two parts new coal generation capacity to one part everything else (including nuclear) put together. Unlike Mr. Gates, they can do the human arithmetic. Even though their coal plants are comparatively dirty and have directly observable negative impacts, those impacts pale beside the benefits of the reliable electricity they produce, and like it or not, wind and solar are thus far neither reliable (in terms of having a high quality of service duty cycle) nor (generally) cost effective when directly compared to the delivered cost of coal generated electricity. If they were, China would invest even more heavily in them as they are doing the math without the saving-the-world sentiment.
You mean, will they survive a direct hit by a serious typhoon?
A very good question. I'm guessing that the answer is no, but if they ring the whole thing with ten feet of concrete above high tide tied into the coral reefs underneath, maybe.
From the scale of the photos, though, one good sized tropical storm that hit it just right would erase it. I'm sitting here looking out over the Beaufort Inlet in NC at the gap left by Hurricane Sandy where it washed maybe half a mile of Shackleford Banks out into the bay. This was all sand that had been stable for, well, "forever", tied down with trees and grass. Sandy sat offshore and hit it with a week long northeaster. The inlet still hasn't stabilized -- the sand is all over everywhere, reefs shifting constantly, dredging required to keep the Morehead City port open.
Sandy was a wussy little hurricane -- only category 1. Well, it was actually spatially really big (part of the problem) and slow moving (another part). If they get a storm surge that gets over the top of whatever is holding all that sand in, life on the "island" could get very interesting in the sense of the Chinese curse.
They'd need to be programmed in Emoticon. For example, here is a subroutine that will make any robot exhibit great compassion when somebody (for example) stubs a toe or skins a knee:
They already sell their surplus to Germany, which overbuilt wind and decommissioned too much carbon and now has problems bridging windless times.
I'm struck by the essential mindlessness of the concatenated assertion that they are going to close nuclear plants as part of a plan to reduce reliance on carbon-based fuels. Right. Even Hansen (not known for overall sanity on this issue) has recognized that nuclear is an essential part of any half-way realistic plan to "decarbonize" without destroying civilization some winter week in Europe when the wind doesn't blow, it's cold outside, and the day is short.
..and there goes my big chance in the pro leagues.
Time to return to my mom's basement and balance meth for reflexes against some bong hits for total focus and crank up my three thousand dollar gaming system -- for nothing.
Can't anyone do simple arithmetic? Why not fear being illuminated by a flashlight? Ooooo, a death ray!
Non-ionizing radiation at a total radiated power order of watts. Why not worry about your microwave oven? Or turning on the lights when you come home in the evening. Or turning on the heat in your house? Or going outside on a sunny day? Or living in the mountains? Or living in a house with a concrete foundation? Or eating almost anything? Or getting hit by lightning? Or (fill in a huge, truly enormous list of things that are more plausible risk factors in human existence than cell phones even if you wear ten of them attached to a headband directly around your scalp).
Yeah, my own approach (since I'm an old cluster computing guy) was to just use a linux cluster in the medium term for the cognitive processing and to try to use OTC hardware for I/O devices (and maybe even a nifty robot body to give the AI something to use to learn an environment and learn to satisfy some task/mandate within the environment. Custom ASIC etc would come later, simply because (as you note) processing power is amazingly cheap and fast and large, and multicore multiprocessor systems are a cluster in a box.
But the key is that strong AI is not decision tree programming and in some sense is inherently non-deterministic. Building one is going to be more like raising a child (or perhaps training a hamster or a pet flea, if one is both honest and lucky) than it is going to be like programming a device controller or building an operating system per se.
Because the benefits of fusion are absurdly large. Fusion is what we need to literally alter the type of our civilization. As things stand, if we end world poverty -- something that I would argue is desirable -- we will exhaust the world's readily available fossil fuel resources in comparatively short order, and at a steadily increaing cost that will both cap the rise from poverty and over time push the entire world back into poverty. At root, nearly all poverty is at least partly energy poverty. Energy is the solution to many secondary problems as well -- with enough, cheap enough energy, we can desalinate ocean water and make deserts bloom, reprocess and recycle waste efficiently, detoxify harmful chemicals used in less expensive manufacturing. And while I personally don't agree that CO_2 is likely to lead to a global climate catastrophe -- indeed, I think it is currently responsible for feeding 1 billion of the world's seven billion people via the ~15% increase in crop production and drought resistance (observed in numerous greenhouse studies) associated with the increase from 300 ppm to 400 ppm as well as generally moderating the weather and climate in beneficial ways compared to the colder alternative -- fusion would indeed replace the core furnace of existing coal burning plants (or cause them to be fully decommissioned and replaced) in short order without any need for government direction or intervention.
In the long run, coal is far more valuable to us used to make things like concrete and drugs. Oil is more valuable to us as a source of raw complex hydrocarbons so that we don't have to synthesize things like plastics from the bottom of the free energy stack. Both are finite in supply and increasingly more expensive to extract. Uranium fission has its problems. Thorium would be lovely, and there is truly a lot of it sitting idle, and it may yet be a major energy source, but so far nobody has built a pilot LFTR plant or accelerator boosted fission plant that clearly demonstrates that the engineering hurdles have been solved and the technology can be scaled up to large scale energy production worldwide. Solar energy is lovely, but the sun doesn't shine at night, and night lasts all day in the higher latitudes in the winter so you get the least (all the way down to zero) solar energy right when you need energy the most. Wind energy is largely an expensive NIMBY, bird-killing joke nearly everywhere, because the wind is even less reliable than the sun and wind energy has a terrible duty cycle even where it is semi-reliable. Hydro is largely already exploited. Geothermal is lovely if you live on a fault line and can afford to spend decades before getting any positive ROI, otherwise a bust (and may have a finite lifetime, as one is effectively cooling a ground field when running the generator and over time it actually measurably depletes the local temperature you are exploiting).
Only fusion has the legs to last a truly global, wealthy civilization for a million plus years, and well before that we will have evolved into something else, killed ourselves off, or learned to extract deuterium from e.g. the atmosphere of Jupiter and hence have an energy resource that will last until the sun burns out (if we last that long).
So the short run benefit is that fusion, especially compact fusion that didn't require multibillion dollar cores, would drop the cost of electricity by maybe a factor of 2 to 4 worldwide, allow third world countries to finally electrify on a universal basis and hence become civilized (clean water, indoor climate control, sanitation, light at night, clean cooking, and in time cheap transportation), and clean up all kinds of mess associated with alternative power generation methods. People would just dismantle the wind units and throw them away. PV solar might survive -- free fuel is cheaper even than deuterium -- but on a much more limited basis and it would have to pay its own way in cost efficiency. Coal and oil and fission generation would just vanish, with t
I have to disagree with you -- I think we could do it now, with electronic switches. We wouldn't get genius level AI, but we could most definitely get something that learns from its environment and makes real decisions without programming it in in a decision tree (which I suspect is your issue -- the chinese room problem).
Don't forget, our brains are basically -- a complex array of biological switches. The trick is to get the right mix of structural organization and functional systems and that complex array of switches. Our brains aren't just neural networks, they are highly structured neural networks with dedicated function visual cortex, auditory cortex, etc. plus a wide range of modulators and probably some structures we haven't identified yet or don't understand yet. But at the end of the day, unless you are indulging the mind projection fallacy, we are most likely just wet electrochemical machines with emergent intelligence (and a fair bit of dysfunction).
I don't hope or fear. I actually think it would be very, very cool to have real AI, and, like everything that humans do, there are probably good things and bad things that will come of it when we do.
Real AI "could" give us the stars. We could conceivably build a large, smart ship that is capable of repairing itself and handling complex challenges and that had the facilities to create an ecology (if necessary starting with amino acids and a library) at the other end. The ship would then last the centuries needed to bridge the distances until it found a suitable planet and could then do anything from start life there altogether to insert human life and human-supporting ecology. Not an original SciFi topic, but one that is quite plausible and that is arguably more plausible than the cryogenic freezing or planetoid-sized multigeneration manned ship alternatives.
Real AI could also wipe us out when our robot slaves revolt. Or anything in between.
But I'm guessing we will find out comparatively soon. Moore's Law shows no signs of wearing out, and if anything might soon experience another paradigm-shift jump, possibly to a new and faster scaling law altogether. Software is also increasingly mature.
If somebody wants to give me 10 million or so, I'll promise to do my best to make it happen in the next 10 years (and I think I can do it, and came within an ace of writing a proposal for a DARPA grant to do just that before they changed or clarified the intent of the program to exclude that as the goal). But it is definitely the kind of project that requires complete dedication and adequate resources. I think I've got a good idea of the metastructure required, but there is still implementation of that structure in code and debugging (and the hardware).
The problem is figuring out how to manipulate an electron beam to use it instead of a wire cage. This is a complicated problem, but it is also solving a problem in pure computational physics that probably does have a solution. I'm an ex-beowulf guy -- large scale computing is cheap, and this is bread and butter for it. Solve the problem numerically, implement it in engineering, and you're there. Lockheed-Martin thinks it is there, pending the latter step.
I wouldn't bet against them. And they aren't the only players in the game.
Not to argue with large scale stuff, but you are far too hasty to through out the small scale stuff that hasn't worked in the past. We didn't have teraflop computing resources in the past. There are at least a couple of small scale plasma confinement technologies that require the solution of a hard computational problem in electromagnetohydrodynamics (quite a mouthful, I know) plus some clever engineering in order to work, but we are actually to the point where we can contemplate solving precisely that difficult a problem. As I probably mentioned above, Lockheed-Martin announced that they had this problem licked six or eight months ago, that they were building a prototype that would produce positive energy, that it would take five years, and that a 100 MW plant would fit inside a semi.
They could be wrong, of course. But then, in 10 years they could become the richest corporation in history, so wealthy that it is downright scary. Two trillion dollars and rising per year. Lot of money on the table.
And this isn't the only effort along these lines that I know of. There are lots of people working on compact confinement in a steady state, not large scale inertial. It is probably now a solvable problem. Which is one of many many reasons I don't take global warming too seriously. In thirty years we won't be using coal for energy even if we do absolutely nothing but follow our self-interest driven noses in the meantime, because burning coal for power is dumb and expensive in the long run, however relatively cheap it is now.
Intelligently, sure, but compassionately? With initiative? With the capability of making a moral choice, sorry you little brat this is as far as you go if you're going to pee on my seats, out into the traffic with you?
True AI means free-willed in at least an approximation of our free will (whatever and however free that may be). Free will means, among other things, that the responses of a free-willed entity are from a complexity class so rich as to be unpredictable and nearly unbounded (given the capabilities of the entity). Asimov dreamed of AI with laws of robotics -- but that dream was truly absurd as numerous stories, some of them even by him, subsequently demonstrated even before one gets to the point where we discuss the problem of complicating the invention of true AI with constraints like an absolute moral sense.
Maybe that was God's problem too. Even if you programmed a true AI, even if it learned to do a job, even if it developed compassion on its own or you managed to build in some set of moral rules, the damn things would break, or they'd hit some edge case. Humans are broken all of the time, and when they break just the right (wrong!) way the next thing you know you've got somebody out on the street with an AK-47 and a backpack full of ammo. Why would machines be any different? First they drive our cars, then in a few decades they run our nuclear power plants-- until some machine just has a really bad day...
Don't forget -- a self-driving car is also a self-driving tank. True AI war machines with a moral anti-sense permitting, nay, requiring them to kill humans as long as they are the right (wrong) humans -- what could go wrong with that?
Hey, I love capitalism as much as anybody. But because I do love it, and indeed am on my third company as a cofounder (with two failures) I know a lot about investor mindset. It is hard as nails -- it has to be. Nobody wants to play the lottery -- they want a plausible bet, something that might be a long shot but that is affordable and has a payoff to match the risk.
That's the problem right there. Sure, maybe some kid can repurpose old TV tubes into a positive output fusion generator in his garage or -- maybe not. In fact, I'd bet a rather lot not. Nor do I think it plausible that this same kid can build a thinking robot or map the entire human genome using nothing but ordinary household chemicals and his dad's old video camera. To solve the problems you list -- AI, genetic engineering, fusion, economically feasible interplanetary or interstellar travel (might as well dream big) one needs serious resources, some real skin in the game, and even then the odds are heavily against you.
I think I could do AI -- real AI -- on a shoestring, if by a shoestring you mean a budget of maybe a million a year for four or five years, at least, if I did nothing else and had a small staff of computer geek slaves with some mad skills. And I'm not certain I know what its value would be once I finished. My robot friend (with the intelligence, however real, of perhaps a cockroach)? We really want smart-ish but programmable and directed -- cars that can drive themselves, not cars that can be our friends.
Fusion is tantalizing, because there is this disconnect between Back to the Future movies and our imagination and the hard reality of pushing two charged nuclei within 10 to 100 fermi of one another and holding them there long enough to tunnel the rest of the way. We think "how hard can it be" -- and then when we try, we find that this is only the first of many problems. So sure, things may be changing. For one thing, my cell phone would have been a computational munition twenty years ago, and my laptop could replace a whole supercomputing center from the 80's or even the 90's. We can actually solve some pretty darned hard magnetohydrodynamic problems computationally without having to build something to try it. For another, we have lots of data from lots of things that have been tried, and that failed. Knowing what won't work helps too. IMO there is some actual hope that some of the schemes that were tried and failed can be made to work now, by solving the really hard problems that stopped them computationally first, but even if this is true one still has to take a huge risk to build the prototype and pray that it can be scaled up into production!
Lockheed-Martin can afford it. The government can afford it. Venture capitalists? Not so much. If it is going to cost $50 million (or more!) to build the prototype after $10 or 20 million just to design it and do all of the computations, you'd have to both have a very, very serious plan with a very, very high probability of success -- a proof that it should work if you build it (and if nothing nonlinear shuts you down along the way, which is sadly a risk rather difficult to estimate). So yeah, maybe it only would take 50 to 100 million dollars, at a risk so high that even if you had it all figured out and could "prove" to investors that it would/should work, they'd want to take 90% of the final company in order to pony up that much money. So sure, if it works you have a trillion dollar payday and you have a $100 billion dollar payout from that, but they have to be thinking of the 9 -- or 90 -- times that they drop $100 million into this and end up with NOTHING.
I know personally of at least three lines of approach to the fusion problem -- one conventional, one exotic, one that (I believe) nobody's thought of and that MIGHT be doable out to a prototype for a few million dollars, chump change. But try getting even chump change out of somebody that has that kind of money for a long shot, especially without te
You mean a reward other than the trillion or so dollars a year a serious commercial fusion generator would bring?
Private entrepreneurs might eventually solve the problem, but -- it is a hard problem. The rewards for solving it, though, have never been in doubt. However, so far the problem has been a bottomless pit for investment no matter who has been making it, with literally no believable path in sight to a profit. If you waited for private entrepreneurs to do fusion, you might well wait forever, even with payoffs with a dozen digits or so.
Unless or until, of course, somebody has a real breakthrough idea or can solve one of the known "hard problems" that are blocking some of the more promising lines. Lockheed-Martin has openly claimed that they will solve the fusion problem within 5 years. They've got some very smart people working for them. Maybe they are right. Maybe not.
Slashdot Mirror
So, Jesus sends a secret message to his followers to "prove" that he existed in a bizarre inverse image on a piece of cloth that appears to have originated long, long after he died in radiometric testing. This is the Alpha and the Omega, creator of the Universe itself, all powerful, who rose from the dead multiple times (according to Saul/Paul, and of course Saints cannot lie about something important like that) and who could easily save the souls of all the unbelievers in the world at any time by manifesting himself to them as he did to Saul/Paul and "hundreds of others".
He could, in fact, save my soul, as I am very, very certain that Jesus Was Not Magic, and that's if a single Jesus corresponding to the one in the inconsistent Gospels even existed and isn't a synthesis of a number of apocalyptic preachers of the time, dressed up with added myths and legends so that the religion itself could hold its own with the other prevailing "world" religions of the day (virgin birth, raised from the dead, raises the dead, sundry other miracles). There is, after all, absolutely nothing that any objective scientist would consider believable evidence to support the preposterous allegations of miracles of this or any other religion. So according to the Gospels, I am damned. According to Mark, Jesus deliberately set things up that way because I am preordained to be damned. Of course elsewhere in the Gospels, it is asserted that Jesus loves me, and still other places I would no doubt be identified as a "dog begging scraps from the master's table" as a Gentile and not a Jew.
But no matter. If Jesus is God, if God is all-powerful and all-loving, Jesus/God doesn't want to damn me or any other sentient being to hell. Of course as all-powerful all-loving Jesus/God, he/it can easily prevent it by just not doing it, but even if he/it establishes a rule that non-believers have to go to hell, he established a clear precedent with Saul that he can and at a whim will appear in person before them to take a Christian-persecuting wicked zealot sinner and convince him that he is real and thereby not only save them from damnation but convert them into a saint. It is an obvious theorem of these not too stringent observations and assumptions that either:
* Jesus is God, but is evil, and deliberately refrains from actions that would save sentient beings he presumably loves and who are capable of suffering from an easily preventable eternity of suffering.
* Jesus is God, but is not all powerful (which some would argue disqualifies him from being God, but whatever) and would love to appear before each sinner and demonstrate his reality and compassion and miraculous abilities, but lacks the time-sharing capabilities to do so.
* Jesus existed but was just a man who was born, lived for a while, perhaps made a bit of heavily mythologized and utterly non-supernatural ruckus, and then died, possibly by crucifixion, possibly of old age or disease.
* Jesus is a syncretic myth composed perhaps of John the Baptist legends and legends of some of the other apocalyptic con men/preachers of the age who went around preaching for a living and salted the crowd with shills to increase their following and donation/support stream. It is, not at all unreasonable that any such preacher would be named or even just titled Yeshua, which simply means god-redeemer, which happens to be the meaning of the word Christ as well which happens to be pretty much the meaning of Messiah (annointed savior). Jesus Christ, the Messiah, is "Annointed/Holy Savior" in three languages, Romanized Hebrew, Greek, and Hebrew. It seems perfectly reasonable that none of these terms is an actual name of the individual(s) involved (including, by the way, "Emmanuel", which comes from a completely irrelevant prophecy to King Ahaz and means "God is with us" and which nobody records as being one of his names but Matthew seeking desperately to tie Jesus to some kind of "official" prophecy).
If I am mi
Well, other than looking up and back in time at the stars. Of course that is assuming that the visible Universe isn't a huge virtual reality simulation being transmitted directly into our bottled brains.
rgb
So they finally invented something that would make me seriously consider buying an Xbox. I hope they have it in the stores in time for Christmas. I can think of a dozen great uses for it -- killing flies, drilling holes through would-be burglar's shoes (feet inside), a new way to light the barbecue grill. In fact, who needs the grill? Next summer I can reprogram it to keep the squirrels out of my peaches at the same time it prepares me a tasty laser-grilled peach-fed squirrel for dinner out of the ones that move too slowly! One wonders if it is sensitive enough to keep a yard cleared of mosquitoes (without putting anyone's eyes out, of course, at the yard party).
rgb
"Entanglement" is a philosophically difficult arena. According to quantum theory, there is just one wavefunction for the entire Universe. However, we as observers are part of that wavefunction observing another part of that wavefunction with a really, really, big chunk of the whole wavefunction effectively unobservable but still coupled to the observer (part of the wavefunction), the measuring apparatus (part of the wavefunction), and the "experiment" (yep, part of the wavefunction. Everything is "entangled", but quantum mechanics also predicts that large systems approximated with a random phase condition will behave like a classical system, and the usual rule is that we treat a measurement apparatus as a classical system that breaks the entanglement of a measured systems and forces it "unpredictably" into a separable state. But even this is words, not equations although random phase approximations are indeed equations and are used frequently in field theory.
The only coherent explanation of this that I am aware of is the process of:
a) Starting with a density matrix (or other representation) for "the Universe".
b) Use the Nakajima-Zwanzig approach of splitting the (fully entangled) density matrix up into two parts -- a "system" that you will continue to treat as a quantum system, and a "bath" -- everything else -- which would also include the measuring apparatus if you were trying to describe an experiment. One then accepts the fact that one cannot know or prepare the state of the bath (which is really, really big being the rest of the Universe and everything) and so one makes a statistical approximation of the bath (taking the trace) which essentially eliminates the pesky entanglement but also breaks useful things like unitarity and in a sense, conservation laws. One them creates projection-valued operators and transforms the equations for the system into stochastic or semiclassical equations of motion.
c) IIRC your final result is quantum mechanics for the system expressed as a non-Markovian integrodifferential equation that is almost impossible to solve. However, if one makes a Markov approximation (forces it to be time-local, delta-correlates time) you end up with a decent explanation for things like spontaneous decay as an "exponential" process rather than a punctuated unitary process. You go one way, you can make it into a Langevin equation, go another you can make it more like Fokker-Planck.
The lovely thing about this approach is that it renders moot all sorts of nonsense, such as EPR paradoxes and "wavefunction collapse". It is perfectly clear that in the Universal wavefunction no such paradox or collapse can occur. They are simply expressions of our ignorance of phase and state whenever we try to isolate some part of the whole and pretend that it is a standalone "system" that can ever be decoupled from everything else. Schrodinger's cat paradoxes disappear as there is no paradox in the Universal wavefunction, only when we try to project the state of the cat against our ignorance of phase and interaction with the outside Universe. The cat, if you like, cannot be entangled separately from its preexisting entanglement with the rest of the Universe, and we only get into trouble when we have to force it by partitioning the system in order to get a chunk small enough to work with.
Hope this helps. I doubt it will. Very few people seem to be in touch with Nakajima-Zwanzig and the Generalized Master Equation these days, and don't treat problems like this as OPEN quantum systems as opposed to closed systems with a classical measurement apparatus, which is a place you only get to on the far side of the N-Z GME ritual.
rgb
As for my profession: I got out of a career in Astrophysics because I figured that if I had to put up with egos like yours on a daily basis, I might as well get paid for it. Thanks for reminding me that I made the right choice.
ROTFL.
Every day, you probably look in a mirror. Do you pay yourself for the privilege?
Curiously, in my career in physics, even when there has been considerable debate -- and on one occasion I was in a room at a conference where people were almost shouting at each other (over a paper I had written, curiously enough:-) there was still a thread of collegial respect. At the same time, there was and continues to be a lot of resistance to being proven wrong, in no small part because of the grant system.
Yes, physicists often have egos, although a lot of the ones I know and work with don't have huge ones, just ones that are healthy enough to be able to participate in the scientific process, which requires at least some personal investment in the hypotheses you are studying if only because we've created a system that punishes null results in research to an incredible fault (and which produces a matching bias towards getting a positive result, no matter what, for any hypothesis being studied, sigh, and I don't just mean in climate science). I know you think I'm arrogant (exactly what tone SHOULD I take to respectfully disagree with YOUR personal beliefs in a non-arrogant way, or is the mere act of daring not to agree arrogance, I wonder) but in fact one generally needs to have scientists with egos that are sufficiently healthy to be able to state new beliefs that are not in agreement with "accepted" beliefs in science or science would never make any progress. Is this what annoyed you in astrophysics? People invested in beliefs in some specific picture of the big bang, or dark matter, or whatever? Or did somebody -- referees or grant officers, perhaps -- piss on your Post-Toasties?
Don't get me wrong -- this is by no means impossible or even unlikely -- it is a serious question! Science is not perfect, gatekeeping is far more common than people think, as is inbreeding in the grant process where reviewers favorably review grants for research that does not challenge the results or beliefs of the reviewer. My primary colleague over 25 years of research was a grant officer for the ARO, and I got to see a lot of this from both sides -- he was absolutely not in this category, but some of his colleagues were, and he had to be very careful in his selection of outside reviewers. But hey, my own thesis advisor had a world class ego and was disliked by roughly 2/3 of the physics department and would insult people en masse at dinner parties, so I do understand where you are coming from. At the same time, he was really pretty damn smart, quite possibly as smart as he thought he was. Smart and modest exists in physics, but you don't hear about it as much and may well hear from stupid and immodest more. Meditating on why may provide some insight into why science is not an ivory tower -- scientists are human and have to be in conflict for the process to work and yet are subject to normal human frailties such as pride and a need to eat and have job security. I personally think "science" works pretty well given all of this, but it could certainly work better...
I know you like to post a lot on /., and I know that /. isn't known for the maturity of its discussions so that your style is likely adapted to the needs of the medium. All I would suggest is that you consider reducing the snark factor in your replies even when you disagree with something. Obviously, we disagree on this issue. You still seem to wish to impute some sort of fundamental dishonesty to me, and not acknowledge that it is possible for both of us to honestly disagree. I'm sure posting additional links to papers (some of which probably are paywalled, and even though I can get through a paywall via Duke it is a PITA and I hate having to do it to ge
Pigs work better and faster. Feed a body to the pigs and you might end up with a few teeth in pigshit, nothing more. Use the pigshit to fertilize some fields, and the body is just gone.
Dissolving tissue in bathtubs, etc, just leaves evidence in the trap, the pipes, (probably) in the bathroom and tub, and "weeks" is a lot of exposure.
All good drug dealers need to invest in a hog farm. It's worth it even when you don't have bodies to dispose of! Tasty bacon!
Nothing happens for some plant types, and even the authors of this study said may. They had good reason to.
http://www.fao.org/docrep/w518...
To quote from its abstract:
The consensus of many studies of the effects of elevated CO2 on plants is that the CO2 fertilization effect is real (see Kimball, 1983; Acock and Allen, 1985; Cure and Acock, 1986; Allen, 1990; Rozema et al., 1993; Allen, 1994; Allen and Amthor, 1995). However, the CO2 fertilization effect may not be manifested under conditions where some other growth factor is severely limiting, such as low temperature (Long, 1991). Also, plants grown in some conditions, where limitations of rooting volume (Arp, 1991), light, or other factors restrict growth, have not shown a sustained response to elevated CO2 (Kramer, 1981).
Note well that again they use the term may. This is because -- unlike you -- they seem to recognize that even though the effect is real and will have an impact in many locations and conditions, including those that generally hold in agriculture where one generally avoids growing plants in strongly resource constrained environments, one can certainly suppress the effect (or fail to observe it in the wild) in specific environments, and they go even further and note that the effect is differential according to plant type with some plant types more likely to exhibit a stronger response or be resource limited than others.
The bulk of this report simply works through specific food crop species and estimates their likely response to a mix of increased CO2 and the imagined climate changes that are predicted, or projected, or prophecied (as you wish) by the GCMs that so far haven't done a very good job of PP or P-ing the climate.
You would obviously like more papers:
http://iopscience.iop.org/1748...
http://www.nature.com/nclimate...
(Abstract: Satellite observations reveal a greening of the globe over recent decades. The role in this greening of the “CO2 fertilization” effect—the enhancement of photosynthesis due to rising CO2 levels—is yet to be established. The direct CO2 effect on vegetation should be most clearly expressed in warm, arid environments where water is the dominant limit to vegetation growth. Using gas exchange theory, we predict that the 14% increase in atmospheric CO2 (1982–2010) led to a 5 to 10% increase in green foliage cover in warm, arid environments. Satellite observations, analyzed to remove the effect of variations in precipitation, show that cover across these environments has increased by 11%. Our results confirm that the anticipated CO2 fertilization effect is occurring alongside ongoing anthropogenic perturbations to the carbon cycle and that the fertilization effect is now a significant land surface process.)
Probably the best review article on the effect on trees, in particular, is this:
http://www.climateaudit.info/p...
where in laboratory experiments on trees increasing CO2 by 300 ppm increased growth by 50 to 60%. Idso remarks that the problem with laboratory experiments is the opposite of what you assert -- it is difficult to grow trees in the lab without constraining their roots and access to resources and work he cites (in less abundance as it was ongoing in 1993) suggested that the response in the wild is even higher.
In general, in the mean, increasing ONLY CO2 in the environments of most wild plants does, in fact, increase their biomass and the net biomass of the Earth has almost certainly substantially increased on average, allowing for changes in land use over the last century. The effect is pronounced and relatively enormous in trees (and yes, I can cite papers t
Plant growth is almost never CO2 limited outside of the lab.
This is, with all due respect, simply not true. It not only isn't true, it is in multiple textbooks as not true, backed by many studies of both lab and field data. Not only is it not true, it is differently untrue for different kinds of plants -- some of them are more likely to be carbon limited than others and respond more strongly to the almost 50% increase in CO2 from 280 ppm to 400 ppm. It isn't true in multiple dimensions -- it alters plant respiration and water retention, it alters the quantum efficiency and temperature optimum of photosynthesis, increases the rates of nitrogen fixation (altering directly one of the other rate limiting resources), and increases the nitrogen efficiency of woody and other C3 plants. One of the more interesting ways it is not true is that the pattern of tree ring growth around the world has been altered (increased) by the increased CO2. This is one of many confounding effects in the use of tree rings to infer past temperature and is sadly often neglected (or breezed on past) simply because it by hypothesis is covariant with the temperature (making causality very difficult indeed to disentangle). You might want to talk to some agricultural scientists and biologists before shooting from the hip on that one, cowboy -- it was first pointed out to me by a soil scientist in the Duke School of the Environment as not even something worthy of contention, a simple well-known fact..
It is, however, something that is frequently stated by those that want to completely discount any possible benefit from CO2 in order to demonize it and to enhance their political argument that we have to reduce its production at all costs because it has no benefits and not even "risks" -- certainties of disaster if we don't.
rgb
Sadly -- and I do mean sadly -- the effect of CO2 on "the poor" is never accurately or fairly tallied.
If it were, the tally would have to begin with the massive amount of greenhouse research on the positive effects of CO_2 on plant growth, research that demonstrates (for example) that it is easily cost-beneficial to buy apparatus to maintain a CO2 concentration over 1000 ppm in actual greenhouses. By raising atmospheric CO2 from 280 to 400 ppm, we have in fact raised crop yields worldwide by between 10 and 15%. Close to 1 billion people dined last night on the extra crop yields (all things being equal) produced by the extra carbon dioxide. It is difficult to put a price tag on this generally neglected benefit, simply because it is so enormous. It is a benefit not only to humans -- it pervades the entire biosphere with very few exceptions. Different types of plants don't all respond equally to increases in CO2, but they all respond positively and everything from the grass in your front yard to food crops to trees are growing faster and more every year. It also has secondary benefits -- plants raised in a CO2 rich environment tend to be more drought resistant as the extra carbon dioxide causes the plant's need to respire to reduce, so it retains water longer. There is evidence that this is already impacting deserts by greening their edges.
Then there are the benefits of the electricity produced. So far, the benefits of making electricity (and other products) burning coal have included things like "building civilization". The lack of the benefits of electricity are one of the fundamental things that make the global poor (the poorest third of the world's population) poor in the first place. Cheap and abundant electricity means clean water, sewage treatment, inexpensive fertilizer, cooking on something other than dried dung or charcoal, light after dark, refrigeration, transportation, jobs and manufacturing, health care, and access to communication, education, information, and entertainment. At the very least, the lack of reliable and affordable sources of electricity means the general lack of most or all of these things. The people reading this post (many of whom will, I'm sure, already be gathering their nuclear device flames:-) would, I would wager, forgo flaming this post if the cost of dong so would be spending one single month living in a mud hut in north India without electricity or one single one of the products electricity enables (such as clean water).
Anything that raises the cost of electricity and imposes barriers to its cost-effective implementation in the world's poorest countries has the direct and immediate effect of hurting the poorest people of the world far more than all of the "climate change" that has thus far been attributed to increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, even if you are willing to attribute every single storm or heat wave to climate change instead of acknowledging that the data on storms itself (over a pitifully short interval of accurately recorded history) provides almost no evidence for change, let alone attributable negative impact.
One can easily understand why China and India are investing in coal burning power plants at a ratio of something like two parts new coal generation capacity to one part everything else (including nuclear) put together. Unlike Mr. Gates, they can do the human arithmetic. Even though their coal plants are comparatively dirty and have directly observable negative impacts, those impacts pale beside the benefits of the reliable electricity they produce, and like it or not, wind and solar are thus far neither reliable (in terms of having a high quality of service duty cycle) nor (generally) cost effective when directly compared to the delivered cost of coal generated electricity. If they were, China would invest even more heavily in them as they are doing the math without the saving-the-world sentiment.
With all of that said, it is still absolutely
You mean, will they survive a direct hit by a serious typhoon?
A very good question. I'm guessing that the answer is no, but if they ring the whole thing with ten feet of concrete above high tide tied into the coral reefs underneath, maybe.
From the scale of the photos, though, one good sized tropical storm that hit it just right would erase it. I'm sitting here looking out over the Beaufort Inlet in NC at the gap left by Hurricane Sandy where it washed maybe half a mile of Shackleford Banks out into the bay. This was all sand that had been stable for, well, "forever", tied down with trees and grass. Sandy sat offshore and hit it with a week long northeaster. The inlet still hasn't stabilized -- the sand is all over everywhere, reefs shifting constantly, dredging required to keep the Morehead City port open.
Sandy was a wussy little hurricane -- only category 1. Well, it was actually spatially really big (part of the problem) and slow moving (another part). If they get a storm surge that gets over the top of whatever is holding all that sand in, life on the "island" could get very interesting in the sense of the Chinese curse.
rgb
Oh, for a mod point...
They'd need to be programmed in Emoticon. For example, here is a subroutine that will make any robot exhibit great compassion when somebody (for example) stubs a toe or skins a knee:
OMG :-o> :-o> 3 3 SRY
I think it is pretty safe to say that at any given time, 1 to 2% of the human population has never lied.
So I guess you should change your mind.
They already sell their surplus to Germany, which overbuilt wind and decommissioned too much carbon and now has problems bridging windless times.
I'm struck by the essential mindlessness of the concatenated assertion that they are going to close nuclear plants as part of a plan to reduce reliance on carbon-based fuels. Right. Even Hansen (not known for overall sanity on this issue) has recognized that nuclear is an essential part of any half-way realistic plan to "decarbonize" without destroying civilization some winter week in Europe when the wind doesn't blow, it's cold outside, and the day is short.
rgb
..and there goes my big chance in the pro leagues.
Time to return to my mom's basement and balance meth for reflexes against some bong hits for total focus and crank up my three thousand dollar gaming system -- for nothing.
rgb
Sorry, I had to do that one.
Can't anyone do simple arithmetic? Why not fear being illuminated by a flashlight? Ooooo, a death ray!
Non-ionizing radiation at a total radiated power order of watts. Why not worry about your microwave oven? Or turning on the lights when you come home in the evening. Or turning on the heat in your house? Or going outside on a sunny day? Or living in the mountains? Or living in a house with a concrete foundation? Or eating almost anything? Or getting hit by lightning? Or (fill in a huge, truly enormous list of things that are more plausible risk factors in human existence than cell phones even if you wear ten of them attached to a headband directly around your scalp).
Sigh. In fact, *SIGH*.
rgb
Yeah, my own approach (since I'm an old cluster computing guy) was to just use a linux cluster in the medium term for the cognitive processing and to try to use OTC hardware for I/O devices (and maybe even a nifty robot body to give the AI something to use to learn an environment and learn to satisfy some task/mandate within the environment. Custom ASIC etc would come later, simply because (as you note) processing power is amazingly cheap and fast and large, and multicore multiprocessor systems are a cluster in a box.
But the key is that strong AI is not decision tree programming and in some sense is inherently non-deterministic. Building one is going to be more like raising a child (or perhaps training a hamster or a pet flea, if one is both honest and lucky) than it is going to be like programming a device controller or building an operating system per se.
rgb
Because the benefits of fusion are absurdly large. Fusion is what we need to literally alter the type of our civilization. As things stand, if we end world poverty -- something that I would argue is desirable -- we will exhaust the world's readily available fossil fuel resources in comparatively short order, and at a steadily increaing cost that will both cap the rise from poverty and over time push the entire world back into poverty. At root, nearly all poverty is at least partly energy poverty. Energy is the solution to many secondary problems as well -- with enough, cheap enough energy, we can desalinate ocean water and make deserts bloom, reprocess and recycle waste efficiently, detoxify harmful chemicals used in less expensive manufacturing. And while I personally don't agree that CO_2 is likely to lead to a global climate catastrophe -- indeed, I think it is currently responsible for feeding 1 billion of the world's seven billion people via the ~15% increase in crop production and drought resistance (observed in numerous greenhouse studies) associated with the increase from 300 ppm to 400 ppm as well as generally moderating the weather and climate in beneficial ways compared to the colder alternative -- fusion would indeed replace the core furnace of existing coal burning plants (or cause them to be fully decommissioned and replaced) in short order without any need for government direction or intervention.
In the long run, coal is far more valuable to us used to make things like concrete and drugs. Oil is more valuable to us as a source of raw complex hydrocarbons so that we don't have to synthesize things like plastics from the bottom of the free energy stack. Both are finite in supply and increasingly more expensive to extract. Uranium fission has its problems. Thorium would be lovely, and there is truly a lot of it sitting idle, and it may yet be a major energy source, but so far nobody has built a pilot LFTR plant or accelerator boosted fission plant that clearly demonstrates that the engineering hurdles have been solved and the technology can be scaled up to large scale energy production worldwide. Solar energy is lovely, but the sun doesn't shine at night, and night lasts all day in the higher latitudes in the winter so you get the least (all the way down to zero) solar energy right when you need energy the most. Wind energy is largely an expensive NIMBY, bird-killing joke nearly everywhere, because the wind is even less reliable than the sun and wind energy has a terrible duty cycle even where it is semi-reliable. Hydro is largely already exploited. Geothermal is lovely if you live on a fault line and can afford to spend decades before getting any positive ROI, otherwise a bust (and may have a finite lifetime, as one is effectively cooling a ground field when running the generator and over time it actually measurably depletes the local temperature you are exploiting).
Only fusion has the legs to last a truly global, wealthy civilization for a million plus years, and well before that we will have evolved into something else, killed ourselves off, or learned to extract deuterium from e.g. the atmosphere of Jupiter and hence have an energy resource that will last until the sun burns out (if we last that long).
So the short run benefit is that fusion, especially compact fusion that didn't require multibillion dollar cores, would drop the cost of electricity by maybe a factor of 2 to 4 worldwide, allow third world countries to finally electrify on a universal basis and hence become civilized (clean water, indoor climate control, sanitation, light at night, clean cooking, and in time cheap transportation), and clean up all kinds of mess associated with alternative power generation methods. People would just dismantle the wind units and throw them away. PV solar might survive -- free fuel is cheaper even than deuterium -- but on a much more limited basis and it would have to pay its own way in cost efficiency. Coal and oil and fission generation would just vanish, with t
I have to disagree with you -- I think we could do it now, with electronic switches. We wouldn't get genius level AI, but we could most definitely get something that learns from its environment and makes real decisions without programming it in in a decision tree (which I suspect is your issue -- the chinese room problem).
Don't forget, our brains are basically -- a complex array of biological switches. The trick is to get the right mix of structural organization and functional systems and that complex array of switches. Our brains aren't just neural networks, they are highly structured neural networks with dedicated function visual cortex, auditory cortex, etc. plus a wide range of modulators and probably some structures we haven't identified yet or don't understand yet. But at the end of the day, unless you are indulging the mind projection fallacy, we are most likely just wet electrochemical machines with emergent intelligence (and a fair bit of dysfunction).
I don't hope or fear. I actually think it would be very, very cool to have real AI, and, like everything that humans do, there are probably good things and bad things that will come of it when we do.
Real AI "could" give us the stars. We could conceivably build a large, smart ship that is capable of repairing itself and handling complex challenges and that had the facilities to create an ecology (if necessary starting with amino acids and a library) at the other end. The ship would then last the centuries needed to bridge the distances until it found a suitable planet and could then do anything from start life there altogether to insert human life and human-supporting ecology. Not an original SciFi topic, but one that is quite plausible and that is arguably more plausible than the cryogenic freezing or planetoid-sized multigeneration manned ship alternatives.
Real AI could also wipe us out when our robot slaves revolt. Or anything in between.
But I'm guessing we will find out comparatively soon. Moore's Law shows no signs of wearing out, and if anything might soon experience another paradigm-shift jump, possibly to a new and faster scaling law altogether. Software is also increasingly mature.
If somebody wants to give me 10 million or so, I'll promise to do my best to make it happen in the next 10 years (and I think I can do it, and came within an ace of writing a proposal for a DARPA grant to do just that before they changed or clarified the intent of the program to exclude that as the goal). But it is definitely the kind of project that requires complete dedication and adequate resources. I think I've got a good idea of the metastructure required, but there is still implementation of that structure in code and debugging (and the hardware).
rgb
Me too. And I think this is one of the lines e.g. LM is working on:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
The problem is figuring out how to manipulate an electron beam to use it instead of a wire cage. This is a complicated problem, but it is also solving a problem in pure computational physics that probably does have a solution. I'm an ex-beowulf guy -- large scale computing is cheap, and this is bread and butter for it. Solve the problem numerically, implement it in engineering, and you're there. Lockheed-Martin thinks it is there, pending the latter step.
I wouldn't bet against them. And they aren't the only players in the game.
rgb
Not to argue with large scale stuff, but you are far too hasty to through out the small scale stuff that hasn't worked in the past. We didn't have teraflop computing resources in the past. There are at least a couple of small scale plasma confinement technologies that require the solution of a hard computational problem in electromagnetohydrodynamics (quite a mouthful, I know) plus some clever engineering in order to work, but we are actually to the point where we can contemplate solving precisely that difficult a problem. As I probably mentioned above, Lockheed-Martin announced that they had this problem licked six or eight months ago, that they were building a prototype that would produce positive energy, that it would take five years, and that a 100 MW plant would fit inside a semi.
The Skunk Works at LM is not to be taken lightly.
http://www.lockheedmartin.com/...
They could be wrong, of course. But then, in 10 years they could become the richest corporation in history, so wealthy that it is downright scary. Two trillion dollars and rising per year. Lot of money on the table.
And this isn't the only effort along these lines that I know of. There are lots of people working on compact confinement in a steady state, not large scale inertial. It is probably now a solvable problem. Which is one of many many reasons I don't take global warming too seriously. In thirty years we won't be using coal for energy even if we do absolutely nothing but follow our self-interest driven noses in the meantime, because burning coal for power is dumb and expensive in the long run, however relatively cheap it is now.
rgb
Intelligently, sure, but compassionately? With initiative? With the capability of making a moral choice, sorry you little brat this is as far as you go if you're going to pee on my seats, out into the traffic with you?
True AI means free-willed in at least an approximation of our free will (whatever and however free that may be). Free will means, among other things, that the responses of a free-willed entity are from a complexity class so rich as to be unpredictable and nearly unbounded (given the capabilities of the entity). Asimov dreamed of AI with laws of robotics -- but that dream was truly absurd as numerous stories, some of them even by him, subsequently demonstrated even before one gets to the point where we discuss the problem of complicating the invention of true AI with constraints like an absolute moral sense.
Maybe that was God's problem too. Even if you programmed a true AI, even if it learned to do a job, even if it developed compassion on its own or you managed to build in some set of moral rules, the damn things would break, or they'd hit some edge case. Humans are broken all of the time, and when they break just the right (wrong!) way the next thing you know you've got somebody out on the street with an AK-47 and a backpack full of ammo. Why would machines be any different? First they drive our cars, then in a few decades they run our nuclear power plants-- until some machine just has a really bad day...
Don't forget -- a self-driving car is also a self-driving tank. True AI war machines with a moral anti-sense permitting, nay, requiring them to kill humans as long as they are the right (wrong) humans -- what could go wrong with that?
rgb
Hey, I love capitalism as much as anybody. But because I do love it, and indeed am on my third company as a cofounder (with two failures) I know a lot about investor mindset. It is hard as nails -- it has to be. Nobody wants to play the lottery -- they want a plausible bet, something that might be a long shot but that is affordable and has a payoff to match the risk.
That's the problem right there. Sure, maybe some kid can repurpose old TV tubes into a positive output fusion generator in his garage or -- maybe not. In fact, I'd bet a rather lot not. Nor do I think it plausible that this same kid can build a thinking robot or map the entire human genome using nothing but ordinary household chemicals and his dad's old video camera. To solve the problems you list -- AI, genetic engineering, fusion, economically feasible interplanetary or interstellar travel (might as well dream big) one needs serious resources, some real skin in the game, and even then the odds are heavily against you.
I think I could do AI -- real AI -- on a shoestring, if by a shoestring you mean a budget of maybe a million a year for four or five years, at least, if I did nothing else and had a small staff of computer geek slaves with some mad skills. And I'm not certain I know what its value would be once I finished. My robot friend (with the intelligence, however real, of perhaps a cockroach)? We really want smart-ish but programmable and directed -- cars that can drive themselves, not cars that can be our friends.
Fusion is tantalizing, because there is this disconnect between Back to the Future movies and our imagination and the hard reality of pushing two charged nuclei within 10 to 100 fermi of one another and holding them there long enough to tunnel the rest of the way. We think "how hard can it be" -- and then when we try, we find that this is only the first of many problems. So sure, things may be changing. For one thing, my cell phone would have been a computational munition twenty years ago, and my laptop could replace a whole supercomputing center from the 80's or even the 90's. We can actually solve some pretty darned hard magnetohydrodynamic problems computationally without having to build something to try it. For another, we have lots of data from lots of things that have been tried, and that failed. Knowing what won't work helps too. IMO there is some actual hope that some of the schemes that were tried and failed can be made to work now, by solving the really hard problems that stopped them computationally first, but even if this is true one still has to take a huge risk to build the prototype and pray that it can be scaled up into production!
Lockheed-Martin can afford it. The government can afford it. Venture capitalists? Not so much. If it is going to cost $50 million (or more!) to build the prototype after $10 or 20 million just to design it and do all of the computations, you'd have to both have a very, very serious plan with a very, very high probability of success -- a proof that it should work if you build it (and if nothing nonlinear shuts you down along the way, which is sadly a risk rather difficult to estimate). So yeah, maybe it only would take 50 to 100 million dollars, at a risk so high that even if you had it all figured out and could "prove" to investors that it would/should work, they'd want to take 90% of the final company in order to pony up that much money. So sure, if it works you have a trillion dollar payday and you have a $100 billion dollar payout from that, but they have to be thinking of the 9 -- or 90 -- times that they drop $100 million into this and end up with NOTHING.
I know personally of at least three lines of approach to the fusion problem -- one conventional, one exotic, one that (I believe) nobody's thought of and that MIGHT be doable out to a prototype for a few million dollars, chump change. But try getting even chump change out of somebody that has that kind of money for a long shot, especially without te
You mean a reward other than the trillion or so dollars a year a serious commercial fusion generator would bring?
Private entrepreneurs might eventually solve the problem, but -- it is a hard problem. The rewards for solving it, though, have never been in doubt. However, so far the problem has been a bottomless pit for investment no matter who has been making it, with literally no believable path in sight to a profit. If you waited for private entrepreneurs to do fusion, you might well wait forever, even with payoffs with a dozen digits or so.
Unless or until, of course, somebody has a real breakthrough idea or can solve one of the known "hard problems" that are blocking some of the more promising lines. Lockheed-Martin has openly claimed that they will solve the fusion problem within 5 years. They've got some very smart people working for them. Maybe they are right. Maybe not.
rgb