OK. Something interesting could happen earlier. But where? The Planck scale is the only significant point in current knowledge (well, about 4-5 decades ago isn't really current, but...). It's like looking for the next sub-atomic particle. Our current theories don't justify building something smaller than Neptune's orbit to act as an accelerator ring when looking for the next level of particle. (Some of them say it should be even larger.) It's quite likely that somewhere in there we'd find something interesting, but what? And how many EV does it need to generate?
FWIW I'd be all in favor of building a couple of telescopes 5 miles in diameter, putting them 180 degrees apart in Neptune's orbit, and carefully synching them so that their resolution could be combined. If it must be radiotelescopes rather than optical that would be too bad, but still worthwhile. The 5 miles diameter is for light gathering power. The separation is so that when they were synched together you have a long baseline for high resolution. This would allow us to directly check some of the "standard candles" that the astronomers have been using to figure distance. It would also allow us to directly see planets in other solar systems.
Do I expect that to happen? No. It would be incredibly valuable, and would let us verify many theories, and explore new ones, but it's too expensive, and we can't know that we'd find anything worthwhile before we do it.
If it hadn't been for the Higgs the current big accelerator wouldn't have been built. Now that it has been built it can be used to find lots of different things, and to test theories in lots of places where they couldn't previously be tested. But there's currently no big target for the next accelerator...not one that's reasonable to build. Perhaps one will turn up.
So. The Planck scale is out of experimental reach, but there's no reason to expect anything interesting before we get there. I'll agree that it's quite likely that if we looked we'd find something, but unless the tools we already have are powerful enough to yield strong hints of something within reasonable reach, it's not going to be built.
IIRC, the plank scale, or actually slightly above it, is where space-time is supposed to turn into a foam. (I'm not sure what is meant by "foam", but that was the term I read.) At any rate, the structure of space-time collapses. So it's not arbitrary, if the theories were properly based. (The theory was called Geometrodynamics. And I was reading about Wheeler's version. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... )
It's been a long time, so don't expect me to be able to even mount a defense, but the Planck length wasn't an arbitrary choice.
Sorry, i did misread. And it didn't matter to the major point. The thing is not going to be exposed where it would have any chance of having chemical reactions.
Warrants are one thing, but if a company refuses to admit that it's turned over any information, a NSL is more of a suspect than a warrant. And they don't demand any justification or allow any challenge.
When a company says they have successfully contested a warrant, that doesn't tell you the information is secure. Perhaps it is. But given the brazen abuse of NSLs there's no reason to believe that.
Were that to be the case, you'd need to worry about the gravity of neutrinos, as they are currently the least massive particle known. But good luck trying to measure the mass accurately, or trying to get one to change it's speed, or even bend its path.
Good paper. Anyone really interested should read it. But I feel he assumes continuity in places that I don't accept. (OTOH, I couldn't do a decent refutation, I just don't accept everything he says. Perhaps if I read it a few more times...)
I sort of tend to agree with you that everything is quantized at the Planck scale, but it's so small that I doubt we'll ever be able to check on it.
OTOH, I'm a finitist. I don't believe in infinities or infinitesimals. I think that they are calculation aids that have been hypothecated. I, therefore, don't think ANY continuous function accurately maps onto reality. Many of them, however, come close enough that you can't tell the difference.
To put it in other words, I believe the universe is digital, not analog. But we are parts of the universe, and so are the tools we use to observe it. And we are at a large enough scale above the level of granularity that we can't see the difference. (Just try to understand how small 10^-33 cm is.)
While there may be problems with fabrication, I don't think toxic compounds are going to be a problem. They want it to be small enough that they're going to need to shield it from atmospheric contact anyway. No dust, no water condensing, no chemical reactions. They need to avoid all of those in an experiment this sensitive.
I might wonder about the choice of osmium, though, as it *IS* difficult to work, and the techniques for working indium are far more developed (due to it's use in LEDs).
Still, even if indium would be easier, if they thought of osmium first, by the time they considered alternatives it might well not be worth the effort of changing. (And I'm not sure how much precision fabrication has been done with indium, so there might be *no* advantage. LEDs aren't exactly fabricated, after all.)
I guess the answer has to be "yes", as I once bought a pepsi. And I still remember: "Pepsi Cola hits the spot, 12 full ounces, that's a lot, twice as much for a nickel too, Pepsi Cola is the drink for you."
Of course, I didn't like the taste, so I only bought it once, but perhaps I never would have tried it if it hadn't been for the ad. (I don't recommend it, but my sister-in-law likes it. Who knows, you might find it better than catsup. And I understand it's good for cleaning gunk off of pans.)
But while I occasionally remember lots of ads, I rarely, if ever, remember an ad for something I often buy. Sort of like the advertisement for Pepsodent toothpaste included in South Pacific. ("Bloody Mary is the girl I love...and she don't use Pepsodent.) Does the company even exist anymore?
Sorry, but being attracted to "Attractive women with skimpy clothing" is the opposite of misogynistic. It may well be sexist, but that's a very different concept. Misogynistic is like professor 'enry 'iggens in My Fair Lady. (I bet the original in Pygmalion would be a better example, but nobody would know it.)
And I quote (excepts from his soliloquies): "Women are irrational, that's all there is to that!..." and "Why can't a woman, be more like a man?..." and "I'd be equally as willing for a dentist to be drilling as to ever let a woman in my life!"
We've got a different definition of "just fine", but I admit that Qt handling of unicode is much better documented, and can be made to do the job.
Of course unicode inherently has a problem because this idea of a single character doesn't map to codepoint...but Java, Python, Ruby (with a library), and D, at least, can handle the job. The language that I actually prefer is D, but it's lacking support for most libraries. E.g., to use SQLite one needs to use a very thin wrapper around the C header files. Java, Python, and Ruby lack even the concept of structs, however, and I want to directly read/write a struct to a binary file. In all of them there are ways to do this, but those ways are nearly as clumsy as the way unicode is handled in C. Rust appears to have the potential to handle all of this gracefully, and a large enough support team to quickly bring libraries on board. I just don't feel it's there yet, despite the current release being labeled 1.0. (They did say, however, as a part of the release announcement that what this meant was that now the language interface was stabilized I can sort of see why a language designer might designate that as 1.0, but as someone who is a user rather than a designer of languages that seems premature before the standard libraries are stabilized.)
As languages go, that's right out of the door. And I think they rushed the 1.0 release, because the standard libraries have some unpleasant holes...and not entirely in the documentation.
I'd settle for something good on how to use unicode with C OR C++. Saying "use ICU" doesn't help when there's no decent documentation on using ICU. After looking over the C++11 standard carefully, it looks as if it *is* possible to use unicode with C++, but it's still not clear how. Were I already an experienced C++ programmer, perhaps the discussion of facets would make sense. As it is...no. And there don't even seem to be any decent examples.
Most of the libraries for using unicode aren't sufficient for my needs. I need to be able to determine the general character class of each codepoint. (Actually, I only need the first letter of the general character class.) Every library seems to do this differently, and none do it intelligibly. This was easy in python, and feasible in Java (there were other reasons why those weren't preferred) but doing it in C++ *seems* not to be supported. The documentation says that it actually *is* suported, but how to do it is not obvious.
In Rust getting the character code is fairly easy, but walking a file directory seems to be unsupported. (Well, I think they supply all the pieces needed to build a directory path walker, but I'm not real sure. I keep ending up on paged marked "experimental" or "deprecated".)
That said, and if I can work my way past a few problems, Rust looks better than C because it allows owned data to be moved between threads. (Well, I think it does, and does it relatively simply.) C and C++ don't even have the concept of data dynamically becoming immutable. Thread local isn't the concept I'm after, though I need for all mutable data to be thread local...which is easy in Rust and difficult in C and C++. (Yes, I know you can do it. But you need to keep careful track of what needs to be marked thread local.)
OTOH, I haven't written anything original in Rust yet. I'm still studying to be sure that all the pieces I need are actually present. I haven't yet checked database access, or whether I can actually transfer immutable structs between threads easily, or whether I'll need to Box them, etc. And I'm certainly making no comment on either its compilation speed or its execution speed. (I've only run small test programs that I copied.)
This got a bit too long, and I'm not THAT experienced with C++, much less Rust, but my current evaluation is that for certain classes of programs Rust is a superior choice, and for other classes C++ is superior.
P.S.: Rust has just been released at 1.0, and I think prematurely. The absence of a directory walker program (that isn't marked either experimental or deprecated) is on reason why. But it still looks like a very good language for certain classes of program, even though it needs considerable development.
I'm not asking for references from him because he's not trying to change the opinion I currently hold. You are.
Also, I'm not asking for references from him because I've seen references that essentially substantiated his claims from sources that I trust already. So it would be redundant.
I am willing to be convinced, but it will take references to sources that I can trust, and they'll need to be making relatively unambiguous statements.
You can do better with a topopolis, but neither would give you the results being investigated. (Actually, what I was proposing was a variation on a topopolis modified to give the results being investigated. You can must place the spaghetti strands in orbit, and they aren't long enough to encircle the star (probably only a few tens of miles per strand. So you can stack them parallel in orbit and use magnetic couplers to hold them in parallel. You'll need spacers because the strands (which are only a mile or two in diameter) rotate to provide gravity. I think you could also use similar coupler to link adjoining strands so that you could have sections that don't rotate and sections that are open to vacuum. Which means you need contact free linkages, therefore magnetic bearings.
FWIW, the Orbital you mentioned doesn't sound safe to me, as any mechanical failure could destroy the entire habitat. Even my proposed magnetic bearings are a bit dubious, and perhaps it would be better to use strands of strong line as well as the frictionless bearings, so that if there was a failure the lines could break and leave the *SECTION* of the habitat unharmed. (It's so designed that nothing that damages one strand would render the other strands unstable...but you might need to avoid... call it chaff radiating from the accident.)
One of the real benefits of the topopolis design is that not only can it be built in small pieces, but each piece is essentially independent of the other pieces modular orbital position. (You still need to carefully avoid collisions.) Of course this does mean that life support must be distributed into each section independently, but that's an advantage as it allows for vacuum manufacturing to happen in some sections, and zero-g manufacturing to happen in some sections, and still other sections to combine the two, or have high-g. Movement from one section to another linearly is relatively simple via a break-away tube (i.e., in case of accident it easily breaks away at one end). Movement at right angles to the orbit needs to be done via two zero-g (non-rotating) sections which can link adjacent strands. So it's slower and more circuitous.
But you can make a topopolis as large as you wish. If you have fusion power you could even have an electric elevator to the stars...well, half way. But that would require a non-attached section that was not in any kind of contact to the rest of the system....except, perhaps, being within a catapult distance (throwing and catching).
There's probably lots of other approaches that would work, but I am dubious about all large and simply connected structures. There is too much chance that one mechanical disaster could destroy the whole thing. (Even planets have that problem, see "Dinosaur Killer", but planets weren't designed as habitats.)
There was a music director that just about got fired for an implicit answer to that question: "Musicians to the left side of the room, vocalists to the right." (The department chair was a vocalist.)
The boundaries of all the arts are fuzzy. Anyone who makes a claim that something is, or is not, art is telling you more about their thought processes than about the physical universe. Or they could be being prescriptivist about the social universe. They aren't talking about anything even in principle physically measurable. It's like the definition of pornography. If it doesn't turn you on, it's not pornography, no matter what it does for someone else. (I'm *NOT* asserting that everything that turns you on is pornography. A wide boundary is all I feel comfortable even considering. Erotica is much more varied.)
He really needs to do a bit more study of biology and climatology, but he doesn't seem to be a rabid denier, just someone too arrogant to feel that he needs to study before pontificating outside of his specialty.
References please. Also, land based temperatures are the most important for many purposes (e.g., predicting crop failures). It's true you said "land based measurements" rather than "temperatures on land", and perhaps I mistranslated that.
This is weather rather than climate, but locally it hasn't been this hot in any October within memory. That may bias my willingness to believe you...but I'd need hard evidence before I credited your assertions against the assertions that I've read in places like Science News.
Not in that article he didn't. He said the models were now precise enough to show that they aren't correct, which is a *very* different statement. Different enough that what he said was true and your paraphrase was false.
That said, it's true that he doesn't consider CO2 rise to be a problem, outside of a few minor things like causing the oceans to rise. I disagree with him, but neither of us are either climatologists or biologists (and esp. marine biologists).
P.S.: Anyone who thought that the climatologists believed their modes wasn't paying attention. What they believe is that the ensemble of predictions made by the models that don't widely diverge in prediction is the best prediction we can make.
Remember, climate, like weather, though to a lesser extent, is a chaotic phenomenon composed of multiple chaotic phenomena. It is more predictable because it has more stable attractors, but it doesn't lead itself to exact predictions and we don't yet understand where all to attractors are, or what transition state exist. The ensemble predictions aren't satisfactory, but we may NEVER be able to do better.
Well, the description in the summary doesn't model a reasonable way to build a Dyson Sphere...and takes the name much too literally. You need to build it in a way that will be dynamically stable, so forget huge sheets of material. What you need are flexible rings that can be loosely joined in orbit. (Remember, the RingWorld is Unstable, so you don't want a rigid ring, and not a solid one. And Dyson Spheres are worse.)
So what you need to think of is huge strings of spaghetti in orbit, not long enough to reach 1/3 of the way around the sun, but loosely joined (probably magnetic coupling) to other strands so the whole thing is flexible. Even so this process will only allow you to build a belt around the star. So the next step is to build a belt at a different angle of rotation and a different distance from the star. And you build this in pieces, as you need living room (or energy). You maintain every piece of it in orbit, unless you want to detach a part of it and send it climbing into interstellar space. That part will need to be powered against gravity, so it might be best to have it climb directly up from one of the suns poles...and possibly to start it a bit far out, say Mars or Jupiter orbit equivalence. It could be an electrical catapult with both sending and receiving capabilities. This would let you catch harvested Oort cloud material for use in extending the system...or possibly even chunks from a minor free planet.
Remember, you can't build a Dyson Sphere with only the material in one solar system. You can't even build a RingWorld.
But does their reference counting break circular lists? I know it can be done, but doing so increases the cost. (And circular lists can maintain multiple pointers to each element, so you really need to check that there are no external references to the clump. And if you do that you're already almost doing a garbage collector.)
I agree that there will be a big pressure towards fully automated vehicles. But not all trucks are long haul, and many of them already spend a lot of time just sitting in a lot. So it's not a large as you appear to be estimating.
That said, I think it's going to be quite strong enough to push things in the direction of full automation, and that will have benefits to individuals and families as well as for companies. But it's only fair to admit that there will also be drawbacks.
Everything you said is true, but you're forgetting things like crop failure, weapons maintenance, protection of your hunting grounds against intruders, etc.
FWIW, people on the average live a lot longer and are healthy for a lot longer under modern conditions than they were before urban living became the norm. (Say, 1860.) And people *then* lived a lot longer and were healthy for a lot longer than people with minimal urbanization. (Say 1600.) And people then lived a lot longer and were healthy for a lot longer than people with essentially no urbanization. (See Hobbs, The Leviathan http://socserv2.socsci.mcmaste... , "Nasty, brutish, and short" ).
Slashdot Mirror
If I've read correctly, there's a bit of argument about that "reliably handle" part.
OK. Something interesting could happen earlier. But where? The Planck scale is the only significant point in current knowledge (well, about 4-5 decades ago isn't really current, but...). It's like looking for the next sub-atomic particle. Our current theories don't justify building something smaller than Neptune's orbit to act as an accelerator ring when looking for the next level of particle. (Some of them say it should be even larger.) It's quite likely that somewhere in there we'd find something interesting, but what? And how many EV does it need to generate?
FWIW I'd be all in favor of building a couple of telescopes 5 miles in diameter, putting them 180 degrees apart in Neptune's orbit, and carefully synching them so that their resolution could be combined. If it must be radiotelescopes rather than optical that would be too bad, but still worthwhile. The 5 miles diameter is for light gathering power. The separation is so that when they were synched together you have a long baseline for high resolution. This would allow us to directly check some of the "standard candles" that the astronomers have been using to figure distance. It would also allow us to directly see planets in other solar systems.
Do I expect that to happen? No. It would be incredibly valuable, and would let us verify many theories, and explore new ones, but it's too expensive, and we can't know that we'd find anything worthwhile before we do it.
If it hadn't been for the Higgs the current big accelerator wouldn't have been built. Now that it has been built it can be used to find lots of different things, and to test theories in lots of places where they couldn't previously be tested. But there's currently no big target for the next accelerator...not one that's reasonable to build. Perhaps one will turn up.
So. The Planck scale is out of experimental reach, but there's no reason to expect anything interesting before we get there. I'll agree that it's quite likely that if we looked we'd find something, but unless the tools we already have are powerful enough to yield strong hints of something within reasonable reach, it's not going to be built.
Perhaps someone will find another approach.
IIRC, the plank scale, or actually slightly above it, is where space-time is supposed to turn into a foam. (I'm not sure what is meant by "foam", but that was the term I read.) At any rate, the structure of space-time collapses. So it's not arbitrary, if the theories were properly based. (The theory was called Geometrodynamics. And I was reading about Wheeler's version. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... )
It's been a long time, so don't expect me to be able to even mount a defense, but the Planck length wasn't an arbitrary choice.
Sorry, i did misread. And it didn't matter to the major point. The thing is not going to be exposed where it would have any chance of having chemical reactions.
Warrants are one thing, but if a company refuses to admit that it's turned over any information, a NSL is more of a suspect than a warrant. And they don't demand any justification or allow any challenge.
When a company says they have successfully contested a warrant, that doesn't tell you the information is secure. Perhaps it is. But given the brazen abuse of NSLs there's no reason to believe that.
Were that to be the case, you'd need to worry about the gravity of neutrinos, as they are currently the least massive particle known. But good luck trying to measure the mass accurately, or trying to get one to change it's speed, or even bend its path.
Good paper. Anyone really interested should read it. But I feel he assumes continuity in places that I don't accept. (OTOH, I couldn't do a decent refutation, I just don't accept everything he says. Perhaps if I read it a few more times...)
Maybe.
I sort of tend to agree with you that everything is quantized at the Planck scale, but it's so small that I doubt we'll ever be able to check on it.
OTOH, I'm a finitist. I don't believe in infinities or infinitesimals. I think that they are calculation aids that have been hypothecated. I, therefore, don't think ANY continuous function accurately maps onto reality. Many of them, however, come close enough that you can't tell the difference.
To put it in other words, I believe the universe is digital, not analog. But we are parts of the universe, and so are the tools we use to observe it. And we are at a large enough scale above the level of granularity that we can't see the difference. (Just try to understand how small 10^-33 cm is.)
While there may be problems with fabrication, I don't think toxic compounds are going to be a problem. They want it to be small enough that they're going to need to shield it from atmospheric contact anyway. No dust, no water condensing, no chemical reactions. They need to avoid all of those in an experiment this sensitive.
I might wonder about the choice of osmium, though, as it *IS* difficult to work, and the techniques for working indium are far more developed (due to it's use in LEDs).
Still, even if indium would be easier, if they thought of osmium first, by the time they considered alternatives it might well not be worth the effort of changing. (And I'm not sure how much precision fabrication has been done with indium, so there might be *no* advantage. LEDs aren't exactly fabricated, after all.)
Another question is "Are ads EVER effective?"
I guess the answer has to be "yes", as I once bought a pepsi. And I still remember:
"Pepsi Cola hits the spot,
12 full ounces, that's a lot,
twice as much for a nickel too,
Pepsi Cola is the drink for you."
Of course, I didn't like the taste, so I only bought it once, but perhaps I never would have tried it if it hadn't been for the ad. (I don't recommend it, but my sister-in-law likes it. Who knows, you might find it better than catsup. And I understand it's good for cleaning gunk off of pans.)
But while I occasionally remember lots of ads, I rarely, if ever, remember an ad for something I often buy. Sort of like the advertisement for Pepsodent toothpaste included in South Pacific. ("Bloody Mary is the girl I love...and she don't use Pepsodent.) Does the company even exist anymore?
Sorry, but being attracted to "Attractive women with skimpy clothing" is the opposite of misogynistic. It may well be sexist, but that's a very different concept. Misogynistic is like professor 'enry 'iggens in My Fair Lady. (I bet the original in Pygmalion would be a better example, but nobody would know it.)
And I quote (excepts from his soliloquies):
"Women are irrational, that's all there is to that!..."
and
"Why can't a woman, be more like a man?..."
and
"I'd be equally as willing for a dentist to be drilling as to ever let a woman in my life!"
Yes, but while I don't consider his reaction to be too late, I consider it to be so insufficient as to be an additional insult.
We've got a different definition of "just fine", but I admit that Qt handling of unicode is much better documented, and can be made to do the job.
Of course unicode inherently has a problem because this idea of a single character doesn't map to codepoint...but Java, Python, Ruby (with a library), and D, at least, can handle the job. The language that I actually prefer is D, but it's lacking support for most libraries. E.g., to use SQLite one needs to use a very thin wrapper around the C header files. Java, Python, and Ruby lack even the concept of structs, however, and I want to directly read/write a struct to a binary file. In all of them there are ways to do this, but those ways are nearly as clumsy as the way unicode is handled in C. Rust appears to have the potential to handle all of this gracefully, and a large enough support team to quickly bring libraries on board. I just don't feel it's there yet, despite the current release being labeled 1.0. (They did say, however, as a part of the release announcement that what this meant was that now the language interface was stabilized I can sort of see why a language designer might designate that as 1.0, but as someone who is a user rather than a designer of languages that seems premature before the standard libraries are stabilized.)
As languages go, that's right out of the door. And I think they rushed the 1.0 release, because the standard libraries have some unpleasant holes...and not entirely in the documentation.
I'd settle for something good on how to use unicode with C OR C++. Saying "use ICU" doesn't help when there's no decent documentation on using ICU. After looking over the C++11 standard carefully, it looks as if it *is* possible to use unicode with C++, but it's still not clear how. Were I already an experienced C++ programmer, perhaps the discussion of facets would make sense. As it is...no. And there don't even seem to be any decent examples.
Most of the libraries for using unicode aren't sufficient for my needs. I need to be able to determine the general character class of each codepoint. (Actually, I only need the first letter of the general character class.) Every library seems to do this differently, and none do it intelligibly. This was easy in python, and feasible in Java (there were other reasons why those weren't preferred) but doing it in C++ *seems* not to be supported. The documentation says that it actually *is* suported, but how to do it is not obvious.
In Rust getting the character code is fairly easy, but walking a file directory seems to be unsupported. (Well, I think they supply all the pieces needed to build a directory path walker, but I'm not real sure. I keep ending up on paged marked "experimental" or "deprecated".)
That said, and if I can work my way past a few problems, Rust looks better than C because it allows owned data to be moved between threads. (Well, I think it does, and does it relatively simply.) C and C++ don't even have the concept of data dynamically becoming immutable. Thread local isn't the concept I'm after, though I need for all mutable data to be thread local...which is easy in Rust and difficult in C and C++. (Yes, I know you can do it. But you need to keep careful track of what needs to be marked thread local.)
OTOH, I haven't written anything original in Rust yet. I'm still studying to be sure that all the pieces I need are actually present. I haven't yet checked database access, or whether I can actually transfer immutable structs between threads easily, or whether I'll need to Box them, etc. And I'm certainly making no comment on either its compilation speed or its execution speed. (I've only run small test programs that I copied.)
This got a bit too long, and I'm not THAT experienced with C++, much less Rust, but my current evaluation is that for certain classes of programs Rust is a superior choice, and for other classes C++ is superior.
P.S.: Rust has just been released at 1.0, and I think prematurely. The absence of a directory walker program (that isn't marked either experimental or deprecated) is on reason why. But it still looks like a very good language for certain classes of program, even though it needs considerable development.
I'm not asking for references from him because he's not trying to change the opinion I currently hold. You are.
Also, I'm not asking for references from him because I've seen references that essentially substantiated his claims from sources that I trust already. So it would be redundant.
I am willing to be convinced, but it will take references to sources that I can trust, and they'll need to be making relatively unambiguous statements.
You can do better with a topopolis, but neither would give you the results being investigated. (Actually, what I was proposing was a variation on a topopolis modified to give the results being investigated. You can must place the spaghetti strands in orbit, and they aren't long enough to encircle the star (probably only a few tens of miles per strand. So you can stack them parallel in orbit and use magnetic couplers to hold them in parallel. You'll need spacers because the strands (which are only a mile or two in diameter) rotate to provide gravity. I think you could also use similar coupler to link adjoining strands so that you could have sections that don't rotate and sections that are open to vacuum. Which means you need contact free linkages, therefore magnetic bearings.
FWIW, the Orbital you mentioned doesn't sound safe to me, as any mechanical failure could destroy the entire habitat. Even my proposed magnetic bearings are a bit dubious, and perhaps it would be better to use strands of strong line as well as the frictionless bearings, so that if there was a failure the lines could break and leave the *SECTION* of the habitat unharmed. (It's so designed that nothing that damages one strand would render the other strands unstable...but you might need to avoid ... call it chaff radiating from the accident.)
One of the real benefits of the topopolis design is that not only can it be built in small pieces, but each piece is essentially independent of the other pieces modular orbital position. (You still need to carefully avoid collisions.) Of course this does mean that life support must be distributed into each section independently, but that's an advantage as it allows for vacuum manufacturing to happen in some sections, and zero-g manufacturing to happen in some sections, and still other sections to combine the two, or have high-g. Movement from one section to another linearly is relatively simple via a break-away tube (i.e., in case of accident it easily breaks away at one end). Movement at right angles to the orbit needs to be done via two zero-g (non-rotating) sections which can link adjacent strands. So it's slower and more circuitous.
But you can make a topopolis as large as you wish. If you have fusion power you could even have an electric elevator to the stars...well, half way. But that would require a non-attached section that was not in any kind of contact to the rest of the system....except, perhaps, being within a catapult distance (throwing and catching).
There's probably lots of other approaches that would work, but I am dubious about all large and simply connected structures. There is too much chance that one mechanical disaster could destroy the whole thing. (Even planets have that problem, see "Dinosaur Killer", but planets weren't designed as habitats.)
There was a music director that just about got fired for an implicit answer to that question: "Musicians to the left side of the room, vocalists to the right." (The department chair was a vocalist.)
The boundaries of all the arts are fuzzy. Anyone who makes a claim that something is, or is not, art is telling you more about their thought processes than about the physical universe. Or they could be being prescriptivist about the social universe. They aren't talking about anything even in principle physically measurable. It's like the definition of pornography. If it doesn't turn you on, it's not pornography, no matter what it does for someone else. (I'm *NOT* asserting that everything that turns you on is pornography. A wide boundary is all I feel comfortable even considering. Erotica is much more varied.)
He really needs to do a bit more study of biology and climatology, but he doesn't seem to be a rabid denier, just someone too arrogant to feel that he needs to study before pontificating outside of his specialty.
References please.
Also, land based temperatures are the most important for many purposes (e.g., predicting crop failures). It's true you said "land based measurements" rather than "temperatures on land", and perhaps I mistranslated that.
This is weather rather than climate, but locally it hasn't been this hot in any October within memory. That may bias my willingness to believe you...but I'd need hard evidence before I credited your assertions against the assertions that I've read in places like Science News.
Not in that article he didn't. He said the models were now precise enough to show that they aren't correct, which is a *very* different statement. Different enough that what he said was true and your paraphrase was false.
That said, it's true that he doesn't consider CO2 rise to be a problem, outside of a few minor things like causing the oceans to rise. I disagree with him, but neither of us are either climatologists or biologists (and esp. marine biologists).
P.S.: Anyone who thought that the climatologists believed their modes wasn't paying attention. What they believe is that the ensemble of predictions made by the models that don't widely diverge in prediction is the best prediction we can make.
Remember, climate, like weather, though to a lesser extent, is a chaotic phenomenon composed of multiple chaotic phenomena. It is more predictable because it has more stable attractors, but it doesn't lead itself to exact predictions and we don't yet understand where all to attractors are, or what transition state exist. The ensemble predictions aren't satisfactory, but we may NEVER be able to do better.
Well, the description in the summary doesn't model a reasonable way to build a Dyson Sphere...and takes the name much too literally. You need to build it in a way that will be dynamically stable, so forget huge sheets of material. What you need are flexible rings that can be loosely joined in orbit. (Remember, the RingWorld is Unstable, so you don't want a rigid ring, and not a solid one. And Dyson Spheres are worse.)
So what you need to think of is huge strings of spaghetti in orbit, not long enough to reach 1/3 of the way around the sun, but loosely joined (probably magnetic coupling) to other strands so the whole thing is flexible. Even so this process will only allow you to build a belt around the star. So the next step is to build a belt at a different angle of rotation and a different distance from the star. And you build this in pieces, as you need living room (or energy). You maintain every piece of it in orbit, unless you want to detach a part of it and send it climbing into interstellar space. That part will need to be powered against gravity, so it might be best to have it climb directly up from one of the suns poles...and possibly to start it a bit far out, say Mars or Jupiter orbit equivalence. It could be an electrical catapult with both sending and receiving capabilities. This would let you catch harvested Oort cloud material for use in extending the system...or possibly even chunks from a minor free planet.
Remember, you can't build a Dyson Sphere with only the material in one solar system. You can't even build a RingWorld.
But does their reference counting break circular lists? I know it can be done, but doing so increases the cost. (And circular lists can maintain multiple pointers to each element, so you really need to check that there are no external references to the clump. And if you do that you're already almost doing a garbage collector.)
I agree that there will be a big pressure towards fully automated vehicles. But not all trucks are long haul, and many of them already spend a lot of time just sitting in a lot. So it's not a large as you appear to be estimating.
That said, I think it's going to be quite strong enough to push things in the direction of full automation, and that will have benefits to individuals and families as well as for companies. But it's only fair to admit that there will also be drawbacks.
Everything you said is true, but you're forgetting things like crop failure, weapons maintenance, protection of your hunting grounds against intruders, etc.
FWIW, people on the average live a lot longer and are healthy for a lot longer under modern conditions than they were before urban living became the norm. (Say, 1860.) And people *then* lived a lot longer and were healthy for a lot longer than people with minimal urbanization. (Say 1600.) And people then lived a lot longer and were healthy for a lot longer than people with essentially no urbanization. (See Hobbs, The Leviathan http://socserv2.socsci.mcmaste... , "Nasty, brutish, and short" ).