As a mad scientist whose hobby horse this is, I suggest desalinating river-scale quantities of seawater and piping them inland. The usual objection is that it would take several gigawatts of power per "reverse river": it takes lots of energy to separate water from salt, and lots more energy to move it uphill in quantity.
My answer to both questions is solar thermal energy. Sunshine provides a gigawatt of power per square kilometre; the question is how to transduce that into useful work in a cost-effective manner.
For fresh water transport, I suggest focusing large arrays of mirrors on the barrels of large (2-3 meter diameter) steam turbines. Here sunlight causes the steam expansion usually energized by coal or nuclear fission. It's an efficient use of energy, as there are no intermediate stages, storage or other conversions. Arrange fields of mirrors energizing a series of turbines from the sea shore to a high point from which water can gravity flow to where it's needed. A solar-driven heat exchanger condenses the steam at its destination.
For desalination, create a stream of freshwater steam as above, and inject seawater into it. The steam cools and shrinks somewhat, and the salt falls out for continuous mechanical collection. The cooler, smaller steam is re-energized by further turbine stages.
The few billion dollars this would cost are cheap compared to the several swimming pools per second it could deliver to inland water users.
If they put a bag around the iceberg while it's still in chilly water, it doesn't matter how much melts; you just have to tow the bag to the point of use. The main issue is preventing the bag from sinking due to fresh water's higher specific gravity than salt water.
- If the bag reflects sunlight it might slow the rate of melting.
- A siphon at the bottom of the bag could collect meltwater for separate shipment in tankers.
- Or if necessary just let the meltwater drain away.
- Once the bag arrives at the shallow waters near Dubai, it's okay for the bag to sink to the bottom as the ice melts. Fresh water can be extracted via hoses, again from the bottom of the bag, below the sea water which will presumably float to the top of the bag.
As there's likely to be an increasing amount of turbine maintenance work, it may become cost effective to replace large parts like rotor blades and generators via heavy-lift dirigible.
An area on the bottom of a thin laptop thermally coupled to the processor might allow higher clock rates when resting on a cold surface. This would have to be a large enough area to avoid the heat concentrations that have caused reproductive issues in the past, or be exposed intentionally by opening a panel. Aftermarket products mating with this conduction surface might be based on the cold water bottle, ice pack, or cooling fan.
As a complete chronological list of messages is valuable, an expert system could suggest probable importance via slightly emphasized font size, boldness, or more emphatic item background colour.
To make "smart suggestions" features more useful, lift the hood on the algorithm, name the content clusters that users appear to be interested in (likely requires human assistance) and allow users to edit the weights. There's no need for a funky graphical interface. Put up a 3 column table with cluster name, up to three links to examples the user watched / liked, and a slider for actual interest, preset at presumed value. Cluster name is a link to all examples: clicking it is not in itself an expression of interest.
In developed countries we've seen the birth rate decline over the last several decades. I suggest that young people are reacting to negative conditions for having kids, by having less kids. Student debt, declining real wages, the rising cost of housing, expensive medical insurance, politics, religion shown to be empty, cultural Marxism; all are perceived by the primitive layers of our brains as the kind of resource scarcity and adverse social conditions that make having kids unwise.
That even today's relatively poor people have more goods and better health care than the rich did a hundred years ago is irrelevant: the reptile layers of our brain translate our collective worry and disconnection into less offspring.
This is positive news, because the birth rate should rise if conditions improve. I ascribe the declining prosperity of recent decades to declining energy returned for energy invested in the extraction of fossil fuels, an effect ameliorated somewhat by automation's productivity increases. Things will continue to get worse until the exponential increase in cheap solar and wind energy overwhelms the decrease in the value of fossil energy; which should happen in the next few years. Once this happens, everyone will start getting wealthier fast, as increasing energy and automation will improve people's lifestyles in tandem.
Cheapening energy means financial security for the young, which leads to affordable housing, health care, food security, reduced conflict and increased social cohesion. Under these conditions, the birth rate will rise.
The longest great circle route they found on land is like the one Christopher Priest used in his science fiction story Inverted World in 1974. Perhaps it's obviously the longest route when you spend some time poring over a globe.
Ah, but in this case the computer doesn't have perfect knowledge. You have to spend minerals on scouts to discover what the enemy is doing. The more scouts you have looking at the enemy, the less high-value units you have for attack and defence.
Strongly agree. Given a choice between euthanasia and going into a nursing home, I'm opting for death with dignity. Here in Canada euthanasia is becoming legal under some circumstances, so hopefully the legal situation will have evolved into death-on-demand by the time I need it in 30 years or so.
An intelligence is not necessarily a being. For that you need a sense of self, and a desire to preserve that self.
Unlike in the movies, an intelligence might be allowed to develop to a certain point, then copied hundreds of times. Some of the copies might be terminated. Some of the terminated ones might be restarted. Some might be radically modified, and none would care about these events unless they were programmed to do so.
Just because humans have evolved to survive, and to enhance group survival by caring about other group members, doesn't imply that all intelligences are worthy of care.
As nuclear plants can only be constructed and operated by large bureaucratic organizations overseen by multiple other large bureaucracies, cost overruns and occasionally catastrophic errors are inevitable.
As most of the Olympic organization's revenue comes from media rights, reductions in the cable subscriber base would reduce those organizations' ability to bid for Olympics coverage.
Might the games migrate to a pay-per-view model? True á la carte would starve less-popular sports of revenue, while all-inclusive packages would be too expensive for most potential viewers. If the current system that amortizes the massive expense over years of everyone's bills is threatened, it's difficult to see what might replace it.
But paying other cars to get out of the way? That smells of a have vs have-nots class based society and potentially turns public roads into the private roads of the super rich.
If car A offers car B a dollar to get out of the way, car B is free to decline.
There are various ways this could be arranged, with the state government running the market, and doubtless creaming off transaction fees in the process. Drivers would have a (literal) dashboard in which to set their priority bidding preferences. If they're unwilling to make deals, they can say so. If they're willing to accept bribes to pull out of the way, they can set a rate. If they're willing to pay others to get out of the way, they can describe conditions under which they'd be willing to pay.
The state could add some value to the process by running a fair market by ensuring that everyone pays their fees, and by keeping an eye on users who try to game the system. E.g. if car A advertises its willingness to pull over for $0.15 and car B plans a route that optimally balances cost vs. time based on that offer, car A isn't allowed to jack up the price once car B commits to the route.
One area not mentioned, at least in Vox's summary of the new regulations, is smart road technologies. Here, sensors in and around roads would share information with automated vehicles, and possibly mediate information exchanges between vehicles.
Once many of the vehicles on a road are talking to the road and each other, it becomes straightforward to:
i) Route traffic around obstructions, efficiently merging cars into open lanes well before the point of obstruction.
ii) Clear a path for emergency vehicles.
iii) Spread traffic efficiently over available routes to clear or avoid congestion.
iv) Organize "convoys" of vehicles going in similar directions to take advantage of drafting and traffic light priority.
iv) Operate a marketplace in which vehicles can bid for access to express lanes or right-of-way. (Late for a crucial meeting? Pay other cars $5 each to pull out of the way.)
The roads will not be safe until we remove easily-distracted and fallible humans from the loop. Automated driving systems have a non-zero rate of failure, but even the early versions are safer than human drivers, and safety will improve as the years go by. Yeah, in about 20 years human-guided vehicles won't be allowed near school dropoff zones, and the restrictions will spread from there until baseline humans will be restricted to closed tracks.
That said, there's no reason augmented humans with neural interfaces and upgraded attentiveness and decision making can't participate in vehicle guidance, subject to automated safety limits.
The use of rockets to lift stuff into orbit is a stop-gap measure until we build a beanstalk, so efficiency is more of a nice-to-have than something to worry about in the limit.
As with a lot of people, I'd prefer the simplicity, reduced weight and reduced maintenance costs of a pure electric vehicle. Once car manufacturers are weaned off of internal combustion engines, it should be possible to concentrate on fun things like active suspension and all-wheel steering, or just remove the engine and enjoy the extra cargo space, longer vehicle life and reduced cost of ownership.
Soon there'll be DNA tests for political leaning, politics-selective abortion, and companies offering to select eggs / sperm that lean in the "correct" direction.
Another reason the car companies may fear going electric is the relative simplicity of the technology. Once batteries (which the car companies will always have to purchase from a supplier) become affordable, electric cars should cost a lot less to buy and maintain than gas or diesel cars. There's just so much less to go wrong! Also, the barriers to entry into the car manufacturing game will be much lower, so rivals like Tesla will be able to spring up whenever a market niche appears.
Over time Boeing, Bombardier, AirBus and Embraer will increase the configurability of their designs to the point where a single design family can produce quite different-looking aircraft with a wide range of possible functions. The more a customer is willling to buy, the more minutely it will be possible to customize a design. Increasingly, a medium-sized business will be able to recognize a business need for a certain configuration of aircraft, and "design" it by tweaking configuration options provided by one of the big manufacturers, then customizing the resulting design.
Let's say you wanted to sell aquarium transport aircraft. Start with an AirBus with all the parameters tweaked to "heavy lifting", then design a special shipping container that keeps water in a large tank oxygenated.
In the same way, it will be possible to become a small car manufacturer by tweaking parameters and customizing a platform sold by a big manufacturer.
Ever since the industrial revolution, the cost of raw materials has tended to fall, and the cost of turning raw materials into food and goods has also tended to decrease.
In a world in which more and more of the real work is done by machines, the challenge becomes how to divide the spoils.
One effect we're already seeing is a growing service sector. As a society we can afford to feed more hair dressers because food is becoming cheaper.
It will also become possible to make previously untenable economic models work, because an efficient wealth distribution model is unnecessary if you have efficient production and distribution.
Machines multiply human effort. If it gets to the point where the effort of a few can feed, house and clothe everyone else, everyone else no longer needs to behave rationally. They can lie in hammocks, organize themselves into previously untenable communal social structures, or go to the moon because it's fun.
Back when the US space program was at its height in the early 70's, racism and bigotry were even larger problems in that country than they are now.
Going to the moon may not have solved those problems directly, but perhaps it demonstrated that humanity can evolve and achieve goals we set ourselves.
The rationale for a caste system is fear of change. Space exploration is as much about embracing change as a national way of life as it is about rupee-generating research benefits.
Although a number of non-technical solutions to the "pipes freezing while homeowner's away" problem have been posted, no-one's come up with what the guy seems to be asking for: an affordable, easy way to monitor and control household devices from one's home computer.
A general-purpose "home interface" would be useful for all kinds of things if it were sufficiently easy to use. One workable design for such a system would be as a network of cheap boxes that could be set up in each room and networked with 10 Mbit ethernet, which must be pretty cheap now. The boxes would come in standard sizes. Each one would plug into the wall current and have a number of software-controlled 120 volt power outlets and general-purpose sensor inputs. The company selling the room boxes could publish a sensor input specification and prime the pump by selling light, temperature and motion detectors compatible with the inputs on the room boxes.
Back at the computer, the whole network could be monitored and controlled with a scriptable background application. On a Mac, you'd just give the thing an AppleScript interface. The UNIX/Linux driver would have a family of little shell programs that would send it signals. The Windows version would need a monolithic driver application, but c'est la vie.
If anyone knows of such a solution, I'd be interested in hearing about it.
Slashdot Mirror
As a mad scientist whose hobby horse this is, I suggest desalinating river-scale quantities of seawater and piping them inland. The usual objection is that it would take several gigawatts of power per "reverse river": it takes lots of energy to separate water from salt, and lots more energy to move it uphill in quantity.
My answer to both questions is solar thermal energy. Sunshine provides a gigawatt of power per square kilometre; the question is how to transduce that into useful work in a cost-effective manner.
For fresh water transport, I suggest focusing large arrays of mirrors on the barrels of large (2-3 meter diameter) steam turbines. Here sunlight causes the steam expansion usually energized by coal or nuclear fission. It's an efficient use of energy, as there are no intermediate stages, storage or other conversions. Arrange fields of mirrors energizing a series of turbines from the sea shore to a high point from which water can gravity flow to where it's needed. A solar-driven heat exchanger condenses the steam at its destination.
For desalination, create a stream of freshwater steam as above, and inject seawater into it. The steam cools and shrinks somewhat, and the salt falls out for continuous mechanical collection. The cooler, smaller steam is re-energized by further turbine stages.
The few billion dollars this would cost are cheap compared to the several swimming pools per second it could deliver to inland water users.
If they put a bag around the iceberg while it's still in chilly water, it doesn't matter how much melts; you just have to tow the bag to the point of use. The main issue is preventing the bag from sinking due to fresh water's higher specific gravity than salt water.
- If the bag reflects sunlight it might slow the rate of melting.
- A siphon at the bottom of the bag could collect meltwater for separate shipment in tankers.
- Or if necessary just let the meltwater drain away.
- Once the bag arrives at the shallow waters near Dubai, it's okay for the bag to sink to the bottom as the ice melts. Fresh water can be extracted via hoses, again from the bottom of the bag, below the sea water which will presumably float to the top of the bag.
As there's likely to be an increasing amount of turbine maintenance work, it may become cost effective to replace large parts like rotor blades and generators via heavy-lift dirigible.
They can live in re-purposed turbine towers. Cut some holes for windows, weld in floors here and there, and you're set!
An area on the bottom of a thin laptop thermally coupled to the processor might allow higher clock rates when resting on a cold surface. This would have to be a large enough area to avoid the heat concentrations that have caused reproductive issues in the past, or be exposed intentionally by opening a panel. Aftermarket products mating with this conduction surface might be based on the cold water bottle, ice pack, or cooling fan.
As a complete chronological list of messages is valuable, an expert system could suggest probable importance via slightly emphasized font size, boldness, or more emphatic item background colour.
To make "smart suggestions" features more useful, lift the hood on the algorithm, name the content clusters that users appear to be interested in (likely requires human assistance) and allow users to edit the weights. There's no need for a funky graphical interface. Put up a 3 column table with cluster name, up to three links to examples the user watched / liked, and a slider for actual interest, preset at presumed value. Cluster name is a link to all examples: clicking it is not in itself an expression of interest.
In developed countries we've seen the birth rate decline over the last several decades. I suggest that young people are reacting to negative conditions for having kids, by having less kids. Student debt, declining real wages, the rising cost of housing, expensive medical insurance, politics, religion shown to be empty, cultural Marxism; all are perceived by the primitive layers of our brains as the kind of resource scarcity and adverse social conditions that make having kids unwise.
That even today's relatively poor people have more goods and better health care than the rich did a hundred years ago is irrelevant: the reptile layers of our brain translate our collective worry and disconnection into less offspring.
This is positive news, because the birth rate should rise if conditions improve. I ascribe the declining prosperity of recent decades to declining energy returned for energy invested in the extraction of fossil fuels, an effect ameliorated somewhat by automation's productivity increases. Things will continue to get worse until the exponential increase in cheap solar and wind energy overwhelms the decrease in the value of fossil energy; which should happen in the next few years. Once this happens, everyone will start getting wealthier fast, as increasing energy and automation will improve people's lifestyles in tandem.
Cheapening energy means financial security for the young, which leads to affordable housing, health care, food security, reduced conflict and increased social cohesion. Under these conditions, the birth rate will rise.
The longest great circle route they found on land is like the one Christopher Priest used in his science fiction story Inverted World in 1974. Perhaps it's obviously the longest route when you spend some time poring over a globe.
Ah, but in this case the computer doesn't have perfect knowledge. You have to spend minerals on scouts to discover what the enemy is doing. The more scouts you have looking at the enemy, the less high-value units you have for attack and defence.
Strongly agree. Given a choice between euthanasia and going into a nursing home, I'm opting for death with dignity. Here in Canada euthanasia is becoming legal under some circumstances, so hopefully the legal situation will have evolved into death-on-demand by the time I need it in 30 years or so.
An intelligence is not necessarily a being. For that you need a sense of self, and a desire to preserve that self. Unlike in the movies, an intelligence might be allowed to develop to a certain point, then copied hundreds of times. Some of the copies might be terminated. Some of the terminated ones might be restarted. Some might be radically modified, and none would care about these events unless they were programmed to do so. Just because humans have evolved to survive, and to enhance group survival by caring about other group members, doesn't imply that all intelligences are worthy of care.
As nuclear plants can only be constructed and operated by large bureaucratic organizations overseen by multiple other large bureaucracies, cost overruns and occasionally catastrophic errors are inevitable.
As most of the Olympic organization's revenue comes from media rights, reductions in the cable subscriber base would reduce those organizations' ability to bid for Olympics coverage.
Might the games migrate to a pay-per-view model? True á la carte would starve less-popular sports of revenue, while all-inclusive packages would be too expensive for most potential viewers. If the current system that amortizes the massive expense over years of everyone's bills is threatened, it's difficult to see what might replace it.
But paying other cars to get out of the way? That smells of a have vs have-nots class based society and potentially turns public roads into the private roads of the super rich.
If car A offers car B a dollar to get out of the way, car B is free to decline.
There are various ways this could be arranged, with the state government running the market, and doubtless creaming off transaction fees in the process. Drivers would have a (literal) dashboard in which to set their priority bidding preferences. If they're unwilling to make deals, they can say so. If they're willing to accept bribes to pull out of the way, they can set a rate. If they're willing to pay others to get out of the way, they can describe conditions under which they'd be willing to pay.
The state could add some value to the process by running a fair market by ensuring that everyone pays their fees, and by keeping an eye on users who try to game the system. E.g. if car A advertises its willingness to pull over for $0.15 and car B plans a route that optimally balances cost vs. time based on that offer, car A isn't allowed to jack up the price once car B commits to the route.
One area not mentioned, at least in Vox's summary of the new regulations, is smart road technologies. Here, sensors in and around roads would share information with automated vehicles, and possibly mediate information exchanges between vehicles. Once many of the vehicles on a road are talking to the road and each other, it becomes straightforward to: i) Route traffic around obstructions, efficiently merging cars into open lanes well before the point of obstruction. ii) Clear a path for emergency vehicles. iii) Spread traffic efficiently over available routes to clear or avoid congestion. iv) Organize "convoys" of vehicles going in similar directions to take advantage of drafting and traffic light priority. iv) Operate a marketplace in which vehicles can bid for access to express lanes or right-of-way. (Late for a crucial meeting? Pay other cars $5 each to pull out of the way.)
The roads will not be safe until we remove easily-distracted and fallible humans from the loop. Automated driving systems have a non-zero rate of failure, but even the early versions are safer than human drivers, and safety will improve as the years go by. Yeah, in about 20 years human-guided vehicles won't be allowed near school dropoff zones, and the restrictions will spread from there until baseline humans will be restricted to closed tracks. That said, there's no reason augmented humans with neural interfaces and upgraded attentiveness and decision making can't participate in vehicle guidance, subject to automated safety limits.
The use of rockets to lift stuff into orbit is a stop-gap measure until we build a beanstalk, so efficiency is more of a nice-to-have than something to worry about in the limit.
As with a lot of people, I'd prefer the simplicity, reduced weight and reduced maintenance costs of a pure electric vehicle. Once car manufacturers are weaned off of internal combustion engines, it should be possible to concentrate on fun things like active suspension and all-wheel steering, or just remove the engine and enjoy the extra cargo space, longer vehicle life and reduced cost of ownership.
Soon there'll be DNA tests for political leaning, politics-selective abortion, and companies offering to select eggs / sperm that lean in the "correct" direction.
Another reason the car companies may fear going electric is the relative simplicity of the technology. Once batteries (which the car companies will always have to purchase from a supplier) become affordable, electric cars should cost a lot less to buy and maintain than gas or diesel cars. There's just so much less to go wrong! Also, the barriers to entry into the car manufacturing game will be much lower, so rivals like Tesla will be able to spring up whenever a market niche appears.
Over time Boeing, Bombardier, AirBus and Embraer will increase the configurability of their designs to the point where a single design family can produce quite different-looking aircraft with a wide range of possible functions. The more a customer is willling to buy, the more minutely it will be possible to customize a design. Increasingly, a medium-sized business will be able to recognize a business need for a certain configuration of aircraft, and "design" it by tweaking configuration options provided by one of the big manufacturers, then customizing the resulting design.
Let's say you wanted to sell aquarium transport aircraft. Start with an AirBus with all the parameters tweaked to "heavy lifting", then design a special shipping container that keeps water in a large tank oxygenated.
In the same way, it will be possible to become a small car manufacturer by tweaking parameters and customizing a platform sold by a big manufacturer.
Ever since the industrial revolution, the cost of raw materials has tended to fall, and the cost of turning raw materials into food and goods has also tended to decrease.
In a world in which more and more of the real work is done by machines, the challenge becomes how to divide the spoils.
One effect we're already seeing is a growing service sector. As a society we can afford to feed more hair dressers because food is becoming cheaper.
It will also become possible to make previously untenable economic models work, because an efficient wealth distribution model is unnecessary if you have efficient production and distribution.
Machines multiply human effort. If it gets to the point where the effort of a few can feed, house and clothe everyone else, everyone else no longer needs to behave rationally. They can lie in hammocks, organize themselves into previously untenable communal social structures, or go to the moon because it's fun.
Back when the US space program was at its height in the early 70's, racism and bigotry were even larger problems in that country than they are now. Going to the moon may not have solved those problems directly, but perhaps it demonstrated that humanity can evolve and achieve goals we set ourselves. The rationale for a caste system is fear of change. Space exploration is as much about embracing change as a national way of life as it is about rupee-generating research benefits.
Although a number of non-technical solutions to the "pipes freezing while homeowner's away" problem have been posted, no-one's come up with what the guy seems to be asking for: an affordable, easy way to monitor and control household devices from one's home computer.
A general-purpose "home interface" would be useful for all kinds of things if it were sufficiently easy to use. One workable design for such a system would be as a network of cheap boxes that could be set up in each room and networked with 10 Mbit ethernet, which must be pretty cheap now. The boxes would come in standard sizes. Each one would plug into the wall current and have a number of software-controlled 120 volt power outlets and general-purpose sensor inputs. The company selling the room boxes could publish a sensor input specification and prime the pump by selling light, temperature and motion detectors compatible with the inputs on the room boxes.
Back at the computer, the whole network could be monitored and controlled with a scriptable background application. On a Mac, you'd just give the thing an AppleScript interface. The UNIX/Linux driver would have a family of little shell programs that would send it signals. The Windows version would need a monolithic driver application, but c'est la vie.
If anyone knows of such a solution, I'd be interested in hearing about it.