Once you have self-replicating, "intelligent" machines to do the job? Assuming you could keep them interested in building your sphere, of course!
You just create your first self-replicating solar-powered Dyson-sphere builder, and then sit back and watch it and its scions build for the next hundred million years or whatever. Or maybe nowhere near that long, assuming exponential growth (to some limit) of the builder-bots.
If the problem is getting around quickly without using some sort of engine.
Maybe 3 or 4 wheels and lower to the ground is a better idea? Ice/traction is far less of an issue, you don't have so far to fall and hit your head, you can perhaps be more aerodynamic and thus make up for the extra rolling resistance, and for visibility, you could have a conspicuous flag sticking up?
Sounds like a good law to me, put in good terms. The strong should always act to protect the weak, even when the weak are acting stupidly.
As a car driver, you have the greater power by far, and the greater power to harm others by far, therefore, the greater responsibility.
I am always happy to give way to a cyclist who is behaving at all reasonably, and always willing to give way to a cyclist even if they are not behaving reasonably. Biking is WAY harder than driving.
Congratulations, you got it. America is turning into the third world.
1) Decreased access to education (the masses are being priced out and we're dismantling the public school system.) 2) Decreased access to medical care (masses are priced out and "insurance" companies don't pay enough to keep you from going bankrupt if anything really bad happens) 3) Concentration of all the wealth at the top, and erosion of the middle class.
The third-worldization of the US isn't complete yet, but we're getting there at a fast pace. The sad thing is, is that the rich will get richer quicker if there's a strong middle class to buy their stuff. If no one can afford the stuff that the rich is peddling, well, they won't be so rich, right? A strong middle class makes the rich richer. Thus, as a class, the rich would be better off championing the cause of the middle class "seemingly" at their own expense. However, the rich seem to be just as short sighted and stupid as everyone else, and seem to want to cannibalize the middle class for a temporary boost in their own wealth.
I'm not so sure. I think virtually everyone who is on opiates for any length of time becomes habituated to them and suffers withdrawal if they're not careful about how they come off the drug. Maybe that's not what you'd call "addiction", but it sure smells like it to me.
Napkin math wrong. By your logic, a large enough chemical explosion or volcanic explosion, the latter of which can dwarf any nuke in "megaton yield", should create massive amounts of radiation.
But they don't. Your meteor impact would have to raise a significant mass of normally non-fissionable material to a high enough temperature to have nuclear reactions.
I just looked up the temperature required for D-D fusion. 40 x 10^7 K. Your 5km stony asteroid weighs maybe 5e17 grams--and, per you, has 1e22 J of energy. Put all that energy into heating the asteroid (it won't all go there) and you get to order of 20k K, which is nowhere near hot enough for nuclear reactions, even if you drop the "40" on the DD fusion energy temperature.
Find me another 4 orders of magnitude of temperature in your meteor impact and maybe I'll credit your impact radiation theory.
I think you miscalculated the worth of a warp drive. Sure, it'd be cool. But think of this: 1) Where would you go with it? You don't know, do you? 2) If you knew 1), what would you do when you got there? How would you breathe? Eat? Set up a new civilization? We can't even set up self-sustaining habitats on *earth*. 3) How would you support your life while you're traveling, assuming it's not so fast as to be trivial? 4) If you got a "working warp drive", d'you think you could figure out how it worked without 90% of humanity? Or is "warp drive technology, and all required technologies to reproduce warp drive" what you really meant?
Personally, I wouldn't trade 90% of humanity for a warp drive unless it came with solutions to all the above and more. And I'd think of it like this, is it worth a 90% chance of me personally dying immediately to assure that no single planetary disaster can ever cause humanity's extinction? Would my wife and other dependents go for that deal?
Not smallpox or some other European disease, but rather hantavirus, that mutated to become person-to-person contagious.
Per their theory, it was deadlier to the Aztecs than to the Europeans because Europeans had larger genetic variability than the native american populace.
The documentary I saw on the topic made a pretty convincing case for it being something unknown to Europeans, because the missionaries who were there at the time didn't recognise it as smallpox. Their term for it translates to English as "the Great Pest".
They also made the case that it was hantavirus, because weather conditions in the two years previous were conducive to an explosion of rodents that were carriers: a long drought followed by several wet years, leading to a rodent population explosion.
I'll probably have to change, too, 'cause my present puny brain couldn't deal with all that. Maybe re-implement myself in solid state so I have infinitely expandable memory.
If I lived as long as I'd need to to know everything worth knowing, I think I'd have to ditch this meat-bag which is presently myself at some point!
I recall reading that one can culture beneficial bacteria in your mouth that outcompete the bacteria that cause tooth decay and gingivitis. No cavities again ever. For some reason dentists don't seem to be pushing this treatment, wonder why.
Indeed, I'd rather be using lotions/whatever with beneficial bacteria cultures in them than anti-bacterial stuff.
Probiotics are a main selling point of yogurt, we may as well promote the ones that help us rather than try to poison everything, period.
I think antibiotic treatments should always come paired with probiotic therapy to rebuild beneficial flora that you should not have killed.... And deaths from clostridium dificile bear this out.
Other gases or something else to burn? Like wood, for example? Or a person, or that person's clothes/hair/skin?
However, apparently some source of ignition is still required. I found a reference which said people will have bad effects from breathing 100% oxygen at standard pressure, but someone breathing 100% nitrogen for an hour will be dead. Also, someone breathing 100% oxygen at reduced pressure will have no problems at all.
This guy's mistake is selecting too few winners and giving them too much.
If he wants to promote the field, he needs to make the rewards more broadly available: i.e., instead of 3, $3M awards, how about 300 $30,000 awards? It's enough to provide good incentive while not removing the need of the winners to ever have to work again!
That's the problem with the current economic model. A few "winners" at the top and everyone else lives on the crumbs. Consider, those "winners" are maybe only.1% better than the next guy below him.
But the next guy below him? His reward is NOTHING, not $2M.
How about you make "winners" out of the top 50% instead instead of just the infinitesimal ever-so-slightly-better????
People will always NEED things, but if they've no money, they can't buy them, and if they've no means of production, nor any job to work at, they can't trade for them either. There're plenty of people on this planet who NEED things but don't get them.
When there's no more employment to be had, because all the jobs are automated, the masses will live at the sufferance of those who control the money, the means of production. Unless of course, society changes.
What no one seems to get is that the rich are rich because they're satisfying the demand of all the non-rich. They're manufacturing stuff, entertaining, etc.
What happens to the rich when no one has any money to buy what they're selling because no one has a job?
The rich are rich on everyone else's shoulders. Weaken the middle class, and you weaken the rich, too.
Ah, I didn't realize you were in Brazil. You get more and better varieties of banana because it doesn't have to be shipped to non-tropics.
You'll always have good bananas. The Cavendish is peculiar in that it is pretty good and it can be kept refrigerated in container ships just long enough that it shows up in non-tropical regions in good shape. This makes it the workhorse banana for exports. Actually, the Cavendish is the 3rd banana used in this way: the previous two varieties suffered the same fate that the Cavendish is suffering now: getting wiped out by disease. The difference is that the industry doesn't, as yet, have a replacement for the Cavendish. (Last I heard.)
I agree with you about the insecticides, better to use biological controls if at all possible, and best to have resistant varieties. I don't think governments spend nearly enough securing the food supply by developing new/resistant varieties: it is a very bad idea to leave it to for-profit companies like Monsanto.
It's the Cavendish banana, the common store variety, which is getting wiped out. None of the other banana varieties have the same nice properties that make them great for shipping and sale.
While there are resistant bananas, none of them have the same commercial value as the Cavendish banana.
I wasn't aware of any commercial citrus that are resistant to citrus greening: perhaps I was mislead by the article I read, which implied that there were *no* commercial varieties that are resistant. I turned up a few references to GMO resistant varieties: these may take over. Also, I found an article that listed that the psyllid which spreads citrus greening is developing pesticide resistance.
I'm glad to hear there are resistant varieties of cacao: I'll bet that none of these is quite as nice as the non-resistant mainstream variety.
All of what you say goes to supporting my point, though. We need more varieties of foods because the mainstream ones are being decimated.
Slashdot Mirror
Once you have self-replicating, "intelligent" machines to do the job?
Assuming you could keep them interested in building your sphere, of course!
You just create your first self-replicating solar-powered Dyson-sphere builder, and then sit back and watch it and its scions build for the next hundred million years or whatever. Or maybe nowhere near that long, assuming exponential growth (to some limit) of the builder-bots.
Another example of the power of the Singularity?
--PM
If the problem is getting around quickly without using some sort of engine.
Maybe 3 or 4 wheels and lower to the ground is a better idea? Ice/traction is far less of an issue, you don't have so far to fall and hit your head, you can perhaps be more aerodynamic and thus make up for the extra rolling resistance, and for visibility, you could have a conspicuous flag sticking up?
--PM
Sounds like a good law to me, put in good terms. The strong should always act to protect the weak, even when the weak are acting stupidly.
As a car driver, you have the greater power by far, and the greater power to harm others by far, therefore, the greater responsibility.
I am always happy to give way to a cyclist who is behaving at all reasonably, and always willing to give way to a cyclist even if they are not behaving reasonably. Biking is WAY harder than driving.
--PM
I fell off my bike with no one's help other than my own ineptitude, and broke my arm. My helmet certainly saved my head from a good whack, too.
Maybe cities are pushing for fewer helmets so we get more organ donors. My experience is that helmets are a very good idea!
--PeterM
Congratulations, you got it. America is turning into the third world.
1) Decreased access to education (the masses are being priced out and we're dismantling the public school system.)
2) Decreased access to medical care (masses are priced out and "insurance" companies don't pay enough to keep you from going bankrupt if anything really bad happens)
3) Concentration of all the wealth at the top, and erosion of the middle class.
The third-worldization of the US isn't complete yet, but we're getting there at a fast pace. The sad thing is, is that the rich will get richer quicker if there's a strong middle class to buy their stuff. If no one can afford the stuff that the rich is peddling, well, they won't be so rich, right? A strong middle class makes the rich richer. Thus, as a class, the rich would be better off championing the cause of the middle class "seemingly" at their own expense. However, the rich seem to be just as short sighted and stupid as everyone else, and seem to want to cannibalize the middle class for a temporary boost in their own wealth.
--PM
I'm not so sure. I think virtually everyone who is on opiates for any length of time becomes habituated to them and suffers withdrawal if they're not careful about how they come off the drug. Maybe that's not what you'd call "addiction", but it sure smells like it to me.
--PeterM
Napkin math wrong. By your logic, a large enough chemical explosion or volcanic explosion, the latter of which can dwarf any nuke in "megaton yield", should create massive amounts of radiation.
But they don't. Your meteor impact would have to raise a significant mass of normally non-fissionable material to a high enough temperature to have nuclear reactions.
I just looked up the temperature required for D-D fusion. 40 x 10^7 K. Your 5km stony asteroid weighs maybe 5e17 grams--and, per you, has 1e22 J of energy. Put all that energy into heating the asteroid (it won't all go there) and you get to order of 20k K, which is nowhere near hot enough for nuclear reactions, even if you drop the "40" on the DD fusion energy temperature.
Find me another 4 orders of magnitude of temperature in your meteor impact and maybe I'll credit your impact radiation theory.
--PM
I think you miscalculated the worth of a warp drive. Sure, it'd be cool. But think of this:
1) Where would you go with it? You don't know, do you?
2) If you knew 1), what would you do when you got there? How would you breathe? Eat? Set up a new civilization? We can't even set up self-sustaining habitats on *earth*.
3) How would you support your life while you're traveling, assuming it's not so fast as to be trivial?
4) If you got a "working warp drive", d'you think you could figure out how it worked without 90% of humanity? Or is "warp drive technology, and all required technologies to reproduce warp drive" what you really meant?
Personally, I wouldn't trade 90% of humanity for a warp drive unless it came with solutions to all the above and more. And I'd think of it like this, is it worth a 90% chance of me personally dying immediately to assure that no single planetary disaster can ever cause humanity's extinction? Would my wife and other dependents go for that deal?
--PM
You were paid the whole time though, right?
--PM
Why make them work on YOUR problem, unpaid? Just get them to submit some code they wrote to you.
--PM
Not smallpox or some other European disease, but rather hantavirus, that mutated to become person-to-person contagious.
Per their theory, it was deadlier to the Aztecs than to the Europeans because Europeans had larger genetic variability than the native american populace.
The documentary I saw on the topic made a pretty convincing case for it being something unknown to Europeans, because the missionaries who were there at the time didn't recognise it as smallpox. Their term for it translates to English as "the Great Pest".
They also made the case that it was hantavirus, because weather conditions in the two years previous were conducive to an explosion of rodents that were carriers: a long drought followed by several wet years, leading to a rodent population explosion.
--PM
Subjective, I know. And assuming good health.
I'll probably have to change, too, 'cause my present puny brain couldn't deal with all that. Maybe re-implement myself in solid state so I have infinitely expandable memory.
If I lived as long as I'd need to to know everything worth knowing, I think I'd have to ditch this meat-bag which is presently myself at some point!
--PeterM
Except for the genetic part, how is this different from now?
Except substitute "strong/intelligent" for "rich/lucky/privileged"?
--PM
There's a difference between "consumed" water and "flushed" water.
Water that you use in your house and return to the sewers can be cleaned and re-used.
Water that you put on your plants or waste on golf courses evaporates and is consumed.
A new toilet attacks the small part of the problem: the flushed water that is reused. Instead, Bill should focus on reducing water consumption.
--PM
I recall reading that one can culture beneficial bacteria in your mouth that outcompete the bacteria that cause tooth decay and gingivitis. No cavities again ever. For some reason dentists don't seem to be pushing this treatment, wonder why.
(Self-interest, or is the claim bogus?)
--PM
Indeed, I'd rather be using lotions/whatever with beneficial bacteria cultures in them than anti-bacterial stuff.
Probiotics are a main selling point of yogurt, we may as well promote the ones that help us rather than try to poison everything, period.
I think antibiotic treatments should always come paired with probiotic therapy to rebuild beneficial flora that you should not have killed.... And deaths from clostridium dificile bear this out.
--PM
Other gases or something else to burn? Like wood, for example? Or a person, or that person's clothes/hair/skin?
However, apparently some source of ignition is still required.
I found a reference which said people will have bad effects from breathing 100% oxygen at standard pressure, but someone breathing 100% nitrogen for an hour will be dead. Also, someone breathing 100% oxygen at reduced pressure will have no problems at all.
--PM
So, we shower someone who is .1% faster (.01 sec / 10 sec) with gold, and the "loser" gets virtually nothing, eh?
Yeah, sounds like today's world: concentrate the reward to the top .1% of people and screw all the rest.
--PM
This guy's mistake is selecting too few winners and giving them too much.
If he wants to promote the field, he needs to make the rewards more broadly available: i.e., instead of 3, $3M awards, how about 300 $30,000 awards? It's enough to provide good incentive while not removing the need of the winners to ever have to work again!
That's the problem with the current economic model. A few "winners" at the top and everyone else lives on the crumbs. .1% better than the next guy below him.
Consider, those "winners" are maybe only
But the next guy below him? His reward is NOTHING, not $2M.
How about you make "winners" out of the top 50% instead instead of just the infinitesimal ever-so-slightly-better????
--PeterM
People will always NEED things, but if they've no money, they can't buy them, and if they've no means of production, nor any job to work at, they can't trade for them either. There're plenty of people on this planet who NEED things but don't get them.
When there's no more employment to be had, because all the jobs are automated, the masses will live at the sufferance of those who control the money, the means of production. Unless of course, society changes.
--PM
What no one seems to get is that the rich are rich because they're satisfying the demand of all the non-rich. They're manufacturing stuff, entertaining, etc.
What happens to the rich when no one has any money to buy what they're selling because no one has a job?
The rich are rich on everyone else's shoulders. Weaken the middle class, and you weaken the rich, too.
--PM
Same rank as an NFL player, eh?
How much money comes with that "rank"?
--PM
It's been claimed that birds are pretty much the direct descendants of dinosaurs.
Sorry, no URL.
-PM
Ah, I didn't realize you were in Brazil. You get more and better varieties of banana because it doesn't have to be shipped to non-tropics.
You'll always have good bananas. The Cavendish is peculiar in that it is pretty good and it can be kept refrigerated in container ships just long enough that it shows up in non-tropical regions in good shape. This makes it the workhorse banana for exports. Actually, the Cavendish is the 3rd banana used in this way: the previous two varieties suffered the same fate that the Cavendish is suffering now: getting wiped out by disease. The difference is that the industry doesn't, as yet, have a replacement for the Cavendish. (Last I heard.)
I agree with you about the insecticides, better to use biological controls if at all possible, and best to have resistant varieties. I don't think governments spend nearly enough securing the food supply by developing new/resistant varieties: it is a very bad idea to leave it to for-profit companies like Monsanto.
--PM
It's the Cavendish banana, the common store variety, which is getting wiped out. None of the other banana varieties have the same nice properties that make them great for shipping and sale.
While there are resistant bananas, none of them have the same commercial value as the Cavendish banana.
I wasn't aware of any commercial citrus that are resistant to citrus greening: perhaps I was mislead by the article I read, which implied that there were *no* commercial varieties that are resistant. I turned up a few references to GMO resistant varieties: these may take over. Also, I found an article that listed that the psyllid which spreads citrus greening is developing pesticide resistance.
I'm glad to hear there are resistant varieties of cacao: I'll bet that none of these is quite as nice as the non-resistant mainstream variety.
All of what you say goes to supporting my point, though. We need more varieties of foods because the mainstream ones are being decimated.
--PM