Artificial Intelligence at best is what each word is defined in the dictionary, then put together. Simply put, NOT REAL, an imitation!
And that is exactly what artificial Intelligence is, an imitation we create, a part here, a part there. And of course it can be said that its an image of ourselves as we are the programmers, and the machine is in essence made out of what is in essence stone material of various types (not biological material.)
So, what you're saying is that we have real intelligence, and machines can only have pretend intelligence, based solely on some property unique to organic compounds? Or are you saying that if I hook up a bunch of neurons in such a way as to allow them to perform basic addition, the resulting math would somehow have the spark of intelligence, whereas the same output from a cluster of logic gates would just be an electric facsimilie?
The deception is in the hiding of the fact that its such an imitation of ourselves, artificial. The deception that its something more then we are. And it is this where the danger comes in. But it is like the building of the tower of babel, it won't work, it will fall. The reason is simple, we have yet to recognize correctly and apply such recognition on a wide scale what this tool we call a computer really is.
It is an abstraction machine upon which we apply abstraction physics.
First, you sound confused about the nature of the field of artificial intelligence. Nobody remotely familiar with the field is fooled by the current attempts at imitating human beings. Nor have the most successful applications of artificial intelligence used human-like approaches to reasoning.
"Artificial Intelligence" has a number of specific meanings, but none of them mean "fake". One is the simple problem of getting a computer to do a task that, if done by a human, would be considered "intelligent." The second, and much more ambitious project, is to have a computational device give the appearance of understanding the world as deeply as a human does. You can argue that it is or isn't possible (I strongly believe it is). But you're projecting your own confusion onto the whole effort with your current set of arguments.
With the correct understanding we don't face such danger of misunderstanding or deceptions that the machine is more then we are. As such there won't be any hype or unjustified claims.
Artificial intelligence is the by product of automating enought that the sum generated the appearance of human character in the reflection of its program processing.
I was confused. Then I clicked on your link. Then I became even more confused.
We are really much simpler than what most people want to believe. Kinda like the Human genome being found to not be any where near what level of complexity we thought or wanted to think we were.
At some point during the Human Genome Project, they decided that humans had approximately 30,000 genes, rather than 100,000. A handful of people who didn't understand basic genetics went around screaming about how this was a win for nurture in the nature vs. nurture debate. In reality, it didn't prove much of anything.
I'm running short on time, but I'll leave you with this thought: If each gene has only two versions, that allows for the possibility of 2^30000 different genetic combinations. That's a big number. Claiming that 30,000 genes makes us surprisingly simple is just unjustified.
Putting his butt on the line? No, putting your butt on the line would be saying, "15-20% of our employees aren't doing anything productive right now. But we're a clever company in a big field, so let's find something truly useful for them to do." The whole "lay off waves of employees and refocus on core competencies" thing is something every MBA learns in Driving Up Stock Prices 101. It's been shown pretty ineffective at improving companies' long term success prospects, but in investors minds, ruthless to employees == good for profits, so the practice continues.
That seems to be a different issue. As I mentioned elsewhere, oil isn't in direct competition with fusion, at least until electric cars get popular. More important, it's one thing to change gasoline in such a way as to make it better than competitors' products. It's another thing to assume that an oil company would happily invest in something that might undermine demand for its products.
Those who think the major players in the oil industry would make economically rational decisions regarding alternative energy are assuming that people are more rational than they really are. A better indicator would be to find out what the oil companies' lobbyists in Washington are actually going around asking for.
Why do you consider windmills to be "stupid, PR technology"? Or did you misspeak, and merely mean to convey that they were investing in windmills just because they are showy and PR-friendly? After all, it's possible for the technology to be sound, while also generating positive PR.
I disagree. If there seemed like a good chance of success, then sure they'd be interested. But they'd also be competing with dozens of other companies that have no stake in the current power generation infrastructure. Given a competition between one company that can get all that ROI free and clear, and another company that is going to get that ROI, but with the penalty of undermining their current cash cows, who is really going to want it more?
Rationally, the answer should be the oil company. If the Mr. Fusion business takes off, their model is going to be undermined whether or not they're profiting from the new technology. But corporations don't necessarily act rationally; they act the way the CEO tells them to act. So if upper management is convinced that fusion represents a threat, they're probably going to dismiss it and hope it never pans out.
That's not quite how it works. If a new fusion technology hit the market, its big competitor would be coal, not oil. Oil is used primarily for gasoline, for cars and fertilizer and plastics and such. So if a fusion plant comes on line, it won't do much to reduce the need for oil until people start building electric cars to take advantage of the cheap power.
The next question you have to consider: what exactly do you mean by "costs more than coal"? Are you including in coal costs the CO2 production, the digging up of mountains to get to the coal, the radioactive materials going out the smokestack? If you forced coal-fired plants to upgrade so that they produced almost no pollution, and forced coal extractors to restore the land after they extracted the coal, what would the cost of coal-based energy be then?
The radioactive "byproducts" of most fusion reactions are neutrons. They take a lot of shielding to contain them, but the joyous thing is that when you turn off the reaction, they're gone. There are no materials that need to be shipped off to Yucca Mountain to be guarded from evil terrorists for the next ten million years.
Remind me, which game was it that Behemoth was not a massive tower of fur and fangs that left your party needing a change of trousers? I mean, he's always filled up about half the battlefield. What more do you want?
> Scaling up a process tends to make it cheaper, not more expensive.
Generally true. If, however, we did the absurd and decided to scale this process to the point where it supplied our entire demand for oil, it seems like we'd quickly reach the limits of the "cheap" waste streams. At some point, we'd have to start manufacturing the organic waste (at which point it's not really waste).
Thanks for the response, especially the interesting response to my analogy. I'm still not sure about my feelings towards nuk-yoo-lar power. I could be swayed in either direction.
Cartels? OPEC only has limited control over world oil prices, because there are numerous other suppliers to choose from.
Special taxes? If you live in the U.S., the federal tax is 18.4 cents/gallon, and state taxes average about 22 (if Wikipedia is to be believed). Forty cents a gallon is not the difference between "cheap gas" and "expensive gas." If there are other taxes that are significantly inflating the price at the pump, I'd like to know what they are.[1]
Whatever. You're avoiding the broader point. Massive, massive sectors of our economy rely on oil being about as cheap as it is now. Transportation, agriculture, Wal-Mart, suburbs... it's huge. If the economic price for moving all that stuff and all those people goes up dramatically, it corresponds to a dramatic decline in our overall standard of living.
Nice. Ah, well. No more gratuitous than the crap I pull all the time.
> Oil has value to invidividuals, who make decisions about how much they are willing to pay for it, irrespective of its value "as a unit of energy".
See below.
> People buy things for all sorts of reasons. "One units worth of energy" is an amorphism, because oil is not fungible with other sources of energy.
If we were driving electric cars, it would be. Further, if oil extraction remains an energy negative endeavor for any significant amount of time, who outside the classic car crowd is going to want a gas-powered car? Those new electric models will be way cheaper to operate. So will the biodiesel ones, the hydrogen ones, and the ones powered by Ann Coulter's ego.
That's what your attempt at remedial economics seems to overlook: these "individual choices" don't occur in a vacuum. They're highly dependent on the options made available by society at large. When looked at from a societal perspective, the primary reason we extract oil is because it provides copious amounts of energy in a highly compact form.
> For example, let's say that everyone on the earth, other than one hospital, has converted to nuclear power. That one hospital uses gasoline, and your premature infant is in neonatal intensive care there. The amount you would pay for a gallon of gasoline for that hospital is dramatically different than its value as a "a unit of energy" to someone else.
Oh, come on now. Have some fun with the example. You're in the middle of a zombie uprising, and you have a thousand zombies surrounding the warehouse, and you've got a hummer with an empty gas tank. What would you pay for gas now?
Your scenario is about that realistic, because who is going to operate the extraction and refining operations necessary to fuel the hospital? What hospital is going to pay the premium to have its energy delivered in that form? In any realistic scenario, the hospital would have shut down or upgraded long before your expected answer ("everything I own") became plausible.
> Otherwise, no one would ever use candles, especially fancy scented ones which cost far more per unit of energy than they are worth.
Yes, but candles are used primarily for entertainment, not for lighting. The economics of candles as a primary light source just don't make sense any more. Those attempting to school others on economic principles should avoid conflating necessities with luxuries.
In the case of oil, sure there will be some demand for it as an energy store long after its value as an energy source is gone. But wherever possible, people are going to use something else. So trying to decouple its economic value (as perceived by all those rational actors that seem to live in economics textbooks and nowhere else) from its energy value seems like economic nitpicking that adds little value to this discussion.
Look at it this way. It's bad for the environment (at least in the CO2 sense and the digging-up-a-lotta-land sense and probably several others). It's not cheap. It will eventually run out. And once we've shifted to it, we're going to keep using it until something catastrophic forces us to switch again. By then we'll have enough smog to make your eyes water, ten times the CO2 in our atmosphere, and an infrastructure that is dependent on a steady supply of oil.
Maybe we should try skipping these stopgap measures and fund the hell out of fusion research and other clean energy sources. We've never had to transition away from our primary energy source before, and as every software engineering book will tell you, "If you don't have time to do it right, what makes you think you'll have time to do it over?"
Just a few questions on thermal depolymerization. First, do you have any idea how much more expensive the process will become once they try to scale up the process, and all the people who thought they were sitting on trash find out they're sitting on millions of cubic meters of cha-ching? Okay, that sounded like a rhetorical question, but it really wasn't. It seems to me that the success of the process depends entirely on how big our "organic waste reserves" really are.
Next question: is this going to take away material that used to be composted? Given the global warming implications, and the difficulties we're already having maintaining soil fertility, is it possible that a heavy shift towards this technology might drive up food prices?
Every time I hear people saying, "Don't worry about running out of resource A. We can just use resource B," I imagine a star that has just run out of hydrogen. To stave off collapse, it starts fusing helium, then carbon, then oxygen, as the pressure keeps increasing. Finally, there's nothing left but iron, which has the lowest binding energy of any element, so there is nothing left to fuse, no energy left to extract. That's when the collapse into a black hole happens.
Maybe before our society collapses, we'll stumble onto something that is energy rich, environmentally sound and massively scalable. Maybe fusion. Maybe space-based solar panels. A star's fate is predestined by its weight. To strain the analogy even further, our society's "weight" is governed by a mix of factors: population, the amount of resources each person is using, our ability to generate new resources (rather than simply burning through the easily available ones).
Another day, another stupid tangent. I think I had a point back there someplace. But it's late and I'm tired, so good luck finding it.:)
Technically, nothing you've said affects the peak oil theory, because as far as I know, the theory only deals with conventional extraction methods. Of course, that may be your point. Yes, there are alternative sources of oil, and we can't ignore them as we plan what to do next. Whether they can scale to meet current demand is an open issue, which can't be ignored either. But it seems wise to move away from oil as a fuel source as quickly as possible.
I say, bring on the electric cars. They're about as fuel-agnostic as you can get. From there we can power them by burning coal, uranium, the bodies of welfare recipients, whatever we decide makes for the best economic/environmental/social tradeoff. Going through all these contortions to keep us relying on black gold seems shortsighted.
Further, most of the contortions you list sound at least as environmentally problematic as conventional oil. Biodiesel from plankton? It's not as though the plankton wasn't already performing a valuable service by feeding the fish which ultimately feed us[1]. Ethanol from corn/sugarcane presents a problem, because it means we either have to eat less food[2] or put more land to agricultural use (I think we've already overextended ourselves in that regard), and most of our current agricultural output depends on--guess what--cheap oil for fertilizer.
All that oil, all that easily extracted energy, was an inheritance hundreds of millions of years in the making. And we're spending that inheritance like drunken frat boys. Glowing talk about alternatives does no good, because at some point we need to learn to live within our means, and the harder we party (GDP-wise) until that point comes, the bigger the jolt when our last credit card is finally declined.
[1] Now, if you want to talk about harvesting the algae blooms we've inflicted on big chunks of our oceans, that might be worthwhile.
[2] Very doable, since switching to a more vegetarian diet effectively means you're eating less.
The report conclusions don't strike me as impossibly optimistic, but they do strike me as optimistic. They agree that a peak is coming, and that we'll be able to increase capacity after the peak by relying more heavily on non-traditional sources like tar sands. Given the environmental carnage tar sands are going to create, I hope that never happens.[1]
One other thing to note: we can't get the report itself. Not without paying $1000 for it. Certainly that puts the people who like the report's findings in an enviable position: they can trumpet the conclusions, and it's very difficult for detractors to investigate the data and methods used to derive them.
Think about what that means. CERA's job is to provide the most accurate, evenhanded data possible to their paying customers. Us spectators are just going to have to trust that they're playing straight with us.
[1] First, there's all the drilling needed to heat a volume of earth (and freeze the area around it so that petroleum byproducts don't get into the water supply]. It's such an energy intensive process that you end up burning a barrel of oil for each barrel you extract, leading to twice as much CO2 being put in the atmosphere. Which is good, because CO2 makes for healthy trees, right?
"...too much work for some people?" You make that sound like some sort of moral failing, rather than an absolute, ironclad, brute fact that needs to be compensated for.
99.44% of the people on this forum are completely unqualified to perform their own independent estimations of remaining oil reserves. Those few who do know how to perform such calculations (and the far larger number who only think they know how) still have to rely on data generated by someone else. I'm not sure what you're asking us slackers to do. Devote our lives to learning both economics and petrogeology, just so we can verify the claims of this CERA group? Kidnap all the major oil executives and OPEC leaders and hold them at gunpoint until they admit to their actual reserve estimates (rather than the numbers they choose to give, which may or may not be the same thing)?
I guess once we've done all that, we can spend the rest of our lives trying to prove or disprove competing global warming claims. Sound absurd? That's because it is. At some point, you have to choose. You have to choose whether to buy the SUV or the hybrid. You have to choose whether to spend extra for the energy efficient fridge. You have to choose whether to believe CERA or the Peak Oil folks.
You're right, there is no better metric for deciding whether an expert is telling the truth than knowing the subject matter as well as the expert does. I guess that works out fine for people who have infinite cranial capacity, master any doctorate-level subject in days, and just plain know everything about everything. The rest of us? We have to learn what we can within the limits of our own understanding, increase our knowledge when it seems important to do so, then come to a conclusion that governs our behavior.
In other words, experts are experts precisely because they have understanding that exceeds that of the vast majority of the population. The aforementioned vast majority, though not experts, still need to be able to judge the accuracy of expert pronouncements. If you find the idea of a "trust metric" to be absurd, then what is your alternative? On the other hand, if you do use such a trust metric, then why do you believe that "who paid who" shouldn't enter into it?
The more you talk, the more your rantings take on a conspiracy theory edge. You're claiming that there is a way to dramatically lower the costs of putting material into orbit. You're claiming it can be built with off-the-shelf parts today. You're claiming that the whole shebang could be built for less than a year's worth of NASA operating budget.
Do you realize that you sound like one of those people who talk about Ford sitting on the plans for a car that can run on water?
If these groups have done the research, investigated the feasibility, etc., then you should just link to them and let us come to our own decisions.
A rocket engine isn't like a car engine. Where a car engine is a big block of metal that adds significant weight to a car, a rocket engine is basically a bunch of fuel secured in a tinfoil wrapper.
Now, if you're claiming that ground-based lasers can get the velocity of the exhaust up higher than chemical ignition on the rocket itself, then there might be some promise to this. But the system you're describing, you still have to carry the fuel with you, and that means ultimately it has to be less efficient than a space elevator could be.
So, let me get this straight: You're claiming that a space elevator is worthless because it has "a fiendishly complicated assembly process," and because it takes a lot of energy to create materials for the tether. Hmm... complex and energy-intensive to manufacture... guess that's why we don't use silicon chips either.
You're also touting your system for its superior military uses (read: ability to kill people). Yay.
Finally, despite your claims to the contrary, energy has always been the limiting factor in space travel. Current rocketry systems are inefficient precisely because they have to take the energy needed to deliver X newtons to the payload, and put it in a self-contained package that itself has to be lifted. You take away the need to carry that energy as part of the payload, and the need to deliver that energy over the course of minutes instead of days (so gravity doesn't yank you back down), and your costs plummet.
The capacity of a space elevator is not necessarily "low". Rather, it depends on the size and weight of the cable, and the strength of it. If the materials end up only strong enough to support themselves, then it's zero capacity. If the cable can support ten, twenty, or a hundred times its weight, then it's very high capacity.
Nobody has ever proposed basing an elevator in the U.S., so I'm not sure why you're bringing it up. If you want a fixed base station, it has to be located very near the equator. The orbits just don't work out any other way.
As far as I know, the space elevator has greater potential for moving stuff into space cheaply than any other technology on the drawing board. Now you come in here, loudly proclaiming it to be a dead end, and swearing that everyone is foolish for not adopting this laser launcher approach of yours. While I'm sympathetic to the idea that there might be a better way, and it doesn't sound utterly implausible (insofar as I can decipher your actual description), we're skeptical. You haven't claimed any relevant qualifications that would lead us to trust your judgments, you don't cite any ongoing research into this alternative system, and some of your ideas about the space elevator seem to be loudly and vocally argued from a position of extreme ignorance.
I think you're right; it's just too much for a one semester class. My CS program did a semester-long final project. They wanted realistic specs, documentation, and QA. Given the small team and the rather limited scope of the project itself, there just wasn't time for all the work we poured into documentation to pay any real dividends. At first we joked about them being "write only" documents. But half way through it, we realized that we weren't joking.
It might have been more realistic if the project was expanded out to a year. Five months, though? Nah.
The class did do some things very right. The teams got linked up with people in industry, who gave project proposals and accepted bids. The people in industry became the customers. I ended up getting a very generous internship with the company I built the project for, so my program was definitely working to get us opportunities.
I'm still not clear about how solar power stacks up as a primary power generation system. But it's not nearly as dire as you're claiming.
The first thing to remember is that people usually go down when the sun does (give or take). During the day, when solar power is producing the most, people are up and running, working in their power hungry manufacturing plants and cubicle farms. That's when we need the most energy, so when it comes time to decide whether to build a new coal-fired plant, and it's only needed to handle peak capacity, rather than baseline, then solar is a great alternative.
The next thing to remember is that we have an electrical grid that can shunt solar power thousands of miles from where it's being produced. If it's cloudy one day, you can often get energy from elsewhere. Nor does solar power disappear "randomly". It disappears once a day. Solar continues to produce when it's cloudy, just at a reduced output.
Also, windfarms have a completely different energy production profile. Solar can produce power when it's not windy, and wind can produce at night. Taken by itself, this doesn't ensure a reliable supply, but when you realize you're working with numerous, geographically distributed installations, the picture becomes rosier. Throw in LNG power plants (which are supposed to be able to turn on and off much faster than standard plants), and I would guess you have a pretty viable system.
Finally, if we're overreliant on solar, nighttime electricity will become more expensive, and the market can adjust for that. For example, replacing old streetlights and domestic lightbulbs would eliminate a lot of need for nighttime energy. High performance computing clusters could shut down at night. People could turn of the television, sit down with their kids, and hit them.
Slashdot Mirror
I submit that you have absolutely no clue what you're talking about.
Everything I can find says that wind farms eventually create between 20 and 40 times the energy needed to build them. 40 times over, 50 times over, 17-39 times over.
Your sources?
First, you sound confused about the nature of the field of artificial intelligence. Nobody remotely familiar with the field is fooled by the current attempts at imitating human beings. Nor have the most successful applications of artificial intelligence used human-like approaches to reasoning.
"Artificial Intelligence" has a number of specific meanings, but none of them mean "fake". One is the simple problem of getting a computer to do a task that, if done by a human, would be considered "intelligent." The second, and much more ambitious project, is to have a computational device give the appearance of understanding the world as deeply as a human does. You can argue that it is or isn't possible (I strongly believe it is). But you're projecting your own confusion onto the whole effort with your current set of arguments.
I was confused. Then I clicked on your link. Then I became even more confused.
At some point during the Human Genome Project, they decided that humans had approximately 30,000 genes, rather than 100,000. A handful of people who didn't understand basic genetics went around screaming about how this was a win for nurture in the nature vs. nurture debate. In reality, it didn't prove much of anything.
I'm running short on time, but I'll leave you with this thought: If each gene has only two versions, that allows for the possibility of 2^30000 different genetic combinations. That's a big number. Claiming that 30,000 genes makes us surprisingly simple is just unjustified.
Putting his butt on the line? No, putting your butt on the line would be saying, "15-20% of our employees aren't doing anything productive right now. But we're a clever company in a big field, so let's find something truly useful for them to do." The whole "lay off waves of employees and refocus on core competencies" thing is something every MBA learns in Driving Up Stock Prices 101. It's been shown pretty ineffective at improving companies' long term success prospects, but in investors minds, ruthless to employees == good for profits, so the practice continues.
Imagine this process, but done to the iPod itself. :)
That seems to be a different issue. As I mentioned elsewhere, oil isn't in direct competition with fusion, at least until electric cars get popular. More important, it's one thing to change gasoline in such a way as to make it better than competitors' products. It's another thing to assume that an oil company would happily invest in something that might undermine demand for its products.
Those who think the major players in the oil industry would make economically rational decisions regarding alternative energy are assuming that people are more rational than they really are. A better indicator would be to find out what the oil companies' lobbyists in Washington are actually going around asking for.
Why do you consider windmills to be "stupid, PR technology"? Or did you misspeak, and merely mean to convey that they were investing in windmills just because they are showy and PR-friendly? After all, it's possible for the technology to be sound, while also generating positive PR.
I disagree. If there seemed like a good chance of success, then sure they'd be interested. But they'd also be competing with dozens of other companies that have no stake in the current power generation infrastructure. Given a competition between one company that can get all that ROI free and clear, and another company that is going to get that ROI, but with the penalty of undermining their current cash cows, who is really going to want it more?
Rationally, the answer should be the oil company. If the Mr. Fusion business takes off, their model is going to be undermined whether or not they're profiting from the new technology. But corporations don't necessarily act rationally; they act the way the CEO tells them to act. So if upper management is convinced that fusion represents a threat, they're probably going to dismiss it and hope it never pans out.
That's not quite how it works. If a new fusion technology hit the market, its big competitor would be coal, not oil. Oil is used primarily for gasoline, for cars and fertilizer and plastics and such. So if a fusion plant comes on line, it won't do much to reduce the need for oil until people start building electric cars to take advantage of the cheap power.
The next question you have to consider: what exactly do you mean by "costs more than coal"? Are you including in coal costs the CO2 production, the digging up of mountains to get to the coal, the radioactive materials going out the smokestack? If you forced coal-fired plants to upgrade so that they produced almost no pollution, and forced coal extractors to restore the land after they extracted the coal, what would the cost of coal-based energy be then?
The radioactive "byproducts" of most fusion reactions are neutrons. They take a lot of shielding to contain them, but the joyous thing is that when you turn off the reaction, they're gone. There are no materials that need to be shipped off to Yucca Mountain to be guarded from evil terrorists for the next ten million years.
Remind me, which game was it that Behemoth was not a massive tower of fur and fangs that left your party needing a change of trousers? I mean, he's always filled up about half the battlefield. What more do you want?
> and Fran is Chewbacca.
This is the exact point where the milk went out my nose and hit the screen. Damn you!
> Scaling up a process tends to make it cheaper, not more expensive.
Generally true. If, however, we did the absurd and decided to scale this process to the point where it supplied our entire demand for oil, it seems like we'd quickly reach the limits of the "cheap" waste streams. At some point, we'd have to start manufacturing the organic waste (at which point it's not really waste).
Thanks for the response, especially the interesting response to my analogy. I'm still not sure about my feelings towards nuk-yoo-lar power. I could be swayed in either direction.
Cartels? OPEC only has limited control over world oil prices, because there are numerous other suppliers to choose from.
Special taxes? If you live in the U.S., the federal tax is 18.4 cents/gallon, and state taxes average about 22 (if Wikipedia is to be believed). Forty cents a gallon is not the difference between "cheap gas" and "expensive gas." If there are other taxes that are significantly inflating the price at the pump, I'd like to know what they are.[1]
Whatever. You're avoiding the broader point. Massive, massive sectors of our economy rely on oil being about as cheap as it is now. Transportation, agriculture, Wal-Mart, suburbs... it's huge. If the economic price for moving all that stuff and all those people goes up dramatically, it corresponds to a dramatic decline in our overall standard of living.
[1] California Prop. 87 failed, so that's not it.
> Hmm. You are underinformed.
Nice. Ah, well. No more gratuitous than the crap I pull all the time.
> Oil has value to invidividuals, who make decisions about how much they are willing to pay for it, irrespective of its value "as a unit of energy".
See below.
> People buy things for all sorts of reasons. "One units worth of energy" is an amorphism, because oil is not fungible with other sources of energy.
If we were driving electric cars, it would be. Further, if oil extraction remains an energy negative endeavor for any significant amount of time, who outside the classic car crowd is going to want a gas-powered car? Those new electric models will be way cheaper to operate. So will the biodiesel ones, the hydrogen ones, and the ones powered by Ann Coulter's ego.
That's what your attempt at remedial economics seems to overlook: these "individual choices" don't occur in a vacuum. They're highly dependent on the options made available by society at large. When looked at from a societal perspective, the primary reason we extract oil is because it provides copious amounts of energy in a highly compact form.
> For example, let's say that everyone on the earth, other than one hospital, has converted to nuclear power. That one hospital uses gasoline, and your premature infant is in neonatal intensive care there. The amount you would pay for a gallon of gasoline for that hospital is dramatically different than its value as a "a unit of energy" to someone else.
Oh, come on now. Have some fun with the example. You're in the middle of a zombie uprising, and you have a thousand zombies surrounding the warehouse, and you've got a hummer with an empty gas tank. What would you pay for gas now?
Your scenario is about that realistic, because who is going to operate the extraction and refining operations necessary to fuel the hospital? What hospital is going to pay the premium to have its energy delivered in that form? In any realistic scenario, the hospital would have shut down or upgraded long before your expected answer ("everything I own") became plausible.
> Otherwise, no one would ever use candles, especially fancy scented ones which cost far more per unit of energy than they are worth.
Yes, but candles are used primarily for entertainment, not for lighting. The economics of candles as a primary light source just don't make sense any more. Those attempting to school others on economic principles should avoid conflating necessities with luxuries.
In the case of oil, sure there will be some demand for it as an energy store long after its value as an energy source is gone. But wherever possible, people are going to use something else. So trying to decouple its economic value (as perceived by all those rational actors that seem to live in economics textbooks and nowhere else) from its energy value seems like economic nitpicking that adds little value to this discussion.
> But hey, thanks for playing!
[Snip even snarkier response. Sorry.]
Coal liquefaction, huh? I have one question.
Why bother?
Look at it this way. It's bad for the environment (at least in the CO2 sense and the digging-up-a-lotta-land sense and probably several others). It's not cheap. It will eventually run out. And once we've shifted to it, we're going to keep using it until something catastrophic forces us to switch again. By then we'll have enough smog to make your eyes water, ten times the CO2 in our atmosphere, and an infrastructure that is dependent on a steady supply of oil.
Maybe we should try skipping these stopgap measures and fund the hell out of fusion research and other clean energy sources. We've never had to transition away from our primary energy source before, and as every software engineering book will tell you, "If you don't have time to do it right, what makes you think you'll have time to do it over?"
Just a few questions on thermal depolymerization. First, do you have any idea how much more expensive the process will become once they try to scale up the process, and all the people who thought they were sitting on trash find out they're sitting on millions of cubic meters of cha-ching? Okay, that sounded like a rhetorical question, but it really wasn't. It seems to me that the success of the process depends entirely on how big our "organic waste reserves" really are.
:)
Next question: is this going to take away material that used to be composted? Given the global warming implications, and the difficulties we're already having maintaining soil fertility, is it possible that a heavy shift towards this technology might drive up food prices?
Every time I hear people saying, "Don't worry about running out of resource A. We can just use resource B," I imagine a star that has just run out of hydrogen. To stave off collapse, it starts fusing helium, then carbon, then oxygen, as the pressure keeps increasing. Finally, there's nothing left but iron, which has the lowest binding energy of any element, so there is nothing left to fuse, no energy left to extract. That's when the collapse into a black hole happens.
Maybe before our society collapses, we'll stumble onto something that is energy rich, environmentally sound and massively scalable. Maybe fusion. Maybe space-based solar panels. A star's fate is predestined by its weight. To strain the analogy even further, our society's "weight" is governed by a mix of factors: population, the amount of resources each person is using, our ability to generate new resources (rather than simply burning through the easily available ones).
Another day, another stupid tangent. I think I had a point back there someplace. But it's late and I'm tired, so good luck finding it.
Technically, nothing you've said affects the peak oil theory, because as far as I know, the theory only deals with conventional extraction methods. Of course, that may be your point. Yes, there are alternative sources of oil, and we can't ignore them as we plan what to do next. Whether they can scale to meet current demand is an open issue, which can't be ignored either. But it seems wise to move away from oil as a fuel source as quickly as possible.
I say, bring on the electric cars. They're about as fuel-agnostic as you can get. From there we can power them by burning coal, uranium, the bodies of welfare recipients, whatever we decide makes for the best economic/environmental/social tradeoff. Going through all these contortions to keep us relying on black gold seems shortsighted.
Further, most of the contortions you list sound at least as environmentally problematic as conventional oil. Biodiesel from plankton? It's not as though the plankton wasn't already performing a valuable service by feeding the fish which ultimately feed us[1]. Ethanol from corn/sugarcane presents a problem, because it means we either have to eat less food[2] or put more land to agricultural use (I think we've already overextended ourselves in that regard), and most of our current agricultural output depends on--guess what--cheap oil for fertilizer.
All that oil, all that easily extracted energy, was an inheritance hundreds of millions of years in the making. And we're spending that inheritance like drunken frat boys. Glowing talk about alternatives does no good, because at some point we need to learn to live within our means, and the harder we party (GDP-wise) until that point comes, the bigger the jolt when our last credit card is finally declined.
[1] Now, if you want to talk about harvesting the algae blooms we've inflicted on big chunks of our oceans, that might be worthwhile.
[2] Very doable, since switching to a more vegetarian diet effectively means you're eating less.
The report conclusions don't strike me as impossibly optimistic, but they do strike me as optimistic. They agree that a peak is coming, and that we'll be able to increase capacity after the peak by relying more heavily on non-traditional sources like tar sands. Given the environmental carnage tar sands are going to create, I hope that never happens.[1]
One other thing to note: we can't get the report itself. Not without paying $1000 for it. Certainly that puts the people who like the report's findings in an enviable position: they can trumpet the conclusions, and it's very difficult for detractors to investigate the data and methods used to derive them.
Think about what that means. CERA's job is to provide the most accurate, evenhanded data possible to their paying customers. Us spectators are just going to have to trust that they're playing straight with us.
[1] First, there's all the drilling needed to heat a volume of earth (and freeze the area around it so that petroleum byproducts don't get into the water supply]. It's such an energy intensive process that you end up burning a barrel of oil for each barrel you extract, leading to twice as much CO2 being put in the atmosphere. Which is good, because CO2 makes for healthy trees, right?
"...too much work for some people?" You make that sound like some sort of moral failing, rather than an absolute, ironclad, brute fact that needs to be compensated for.
99.44% of the people on this forum are completely unqualified to perform their own independent estimations of remaining oil reserves. Those few who do know how to perform such calculations (and the far larger number who only think they know how) still have to rely on data generated by someone else. I'm not sure what you're asking us slackers to do. Devote our lives to learning both economics and petrogeology, just so we can verify the claims of this CERA group? Kidnap all the major oil executives and OPEC leaders and hold them at gunpoint until they admit to their actual reserve estimates (rather than the numbers they choose to give, which may or may not be the same thing)?
I guess once we've done all that, we can spend the rest of our lives trying to prove or disprove competing global warming claims. Sound absurd? That's because it is. At some point, you have to choose. You have to choose whether to buy the SUV or the hybrid. You have to choose whether to spend extra for the energy efficient fridge. You have to choose whether to believe CERA or the Peak Oil folks.
You're right, there is no better metric for deciding whether an expert is telling the truth than knowing the subject matter as well as the expert does. I guess that works out fine for people who have infinite cranial capacity, master any doctorate-level subject in days, and just plain know everything about everything. The rest of us? We have to learn what we can within the limits of our own understanding, increase our knowledge when it seems important to do so, then come to a conclusion that governs our behavior.
In other words, experts are experts precisely because they have understanding that exceeds that of the vast majority of the population. The aforementioned vast majority, though not experts, still need to be able to judge the accuracy of expert pronouncements. If you find the idea of a "trust metric" to be absurd, then what is your alternative? On the other hand, if you do use such a trust metric, then why do you believe that "who paid who" shouldn't enter into it?
The more you talk, the more your rantings take on a conspiracy theory edge. You're claiming that there is a way to dramatically lower the costs of putting material into orbit. You're claiming it can be built with off-the-shelf parts today. You're claiming that the whole shebang could be built for less than a year's worth of NASA operating budget.
Do you realize that you sound like one of those people who talk about Ford sitting on the plans for a car that can run on water?
If these groups have done the research, investigated the feasibility, etc., then you should just link to them and let us come to our own decisions.
A rocket engine isn't like a car engine. Where a car engine is a big block of metal that adds significant weight to a car, a rocket engine is basically a bunch of fuel secured in a tinfoil wrapper.
Now, if you're claiming that ground-based lasers can get the velocity of the exhaust up higher than chemical ignition on the rocket itself, then there might be some promise to this. But the system you're describing, you still have to carry the fuel with you, and that means ultimately it has to be less efficient than a space elevator could be.
So, let me get this straight: You're claiming that a space elevator is worthless because it has "a fiendishly complicated assembly process," and because it takes a lot of energy to create materials for the tether. Hmm... complex and energy-intensive to manufacture... guess that's why we don't use silicon chips either.
You're also touting your system for its superior military uses (read: ability to kill people). Yay.
Finally, despite your claims to the contrary, energy has always been the limiting factor in space travel. Current rocketry systems are inefficient precisely because they have to take the energy needed to deliver X newtons to the payload, and put it in a self-contained package that itself has to be lifted. You take away the need to carry that energy as part of the payload, and the need to deliver that energy over the course of minutes instead of days (so gravity doesn't yank you back down), and your costs plummet.
The capacity of a space elevator is not necessarily "low". Rather, it depends on the size and weight of the cable, and the strength of it. If the materials end up only strong enough to support themselves, then it's zero capacity. If the cable can support ten, twenty, or a hundred times its weight, then it's very high capacity.
Nobody has ever proposed basing an elevator in the U.S., so I'm not sure why you're bringing it up. If you want a fixed base station, it has to be located very near the equator. The orbits just don't work out any other way.
As far as I know, the space elevator has greater potential for moving stuff into space cheaply than any other technology on the drawing board. Now you come in here, loudly proclaiming it to be a dead end, and swearing that everyone is foolish for not adopting this laser launcher approach of yours. While I'm sympathetic to the idea that there might be a better way, and it doesn't sound utterly implausible (insofar as I can decipher your actual description), we're skeptical. You haven't claimed any relevant qualifications that would lead us to trust your judgments, you don't cite any ongoing research into this alternative system, and some of your ideas about the space elevator seem to be loudly and vocally argued from a position of extreme ignorance.
Do better, or expect to be ignored.
Maybe she decided to vote for the better candidate.
I think you're right; it's just too much for a one semester class. My CS program did a semester-long final project. They wanted realistic specs, documentation, and QA. Given the small team and the rather limited scope of the project itself, there just wasn't time for all the work we poured into documentation to pay any real dividends. At first we joked about them being "write only" documents. But half way through it, we realized that we weren't joking.
It might have been more realistic if the project was expanded out to a year. Five months, though? Nah.
The class did do some things very right. The teams got linked up with people in industry, who gave project proposals and accepted bids. The people in industry became the customers. I ended up getting a very generous internship with the company I built the project for, so my program was definitely working to get us opportunities.
You smart. I like cheese.
I'm still not clear about how solar power stacks up as a primary power generation system. But it's not nearly as dire as you're claiming.
The first thing to remember is that people usually go down when the sun does (give or take). During the day, when solar power is producing the most, people are up and running, working in their power hungry manufacturing plants and cubicle farms. That's when we need the most energy, so when it comes time to decide whether to build a new coal-fired plant, and it's only needed to handle peak capacity, rather than baseline, then solar is a great alternative.
The next thing to remember is that we have an electrical grid that can shunt solar power thousands of miles from where it's being produced. If it's cloudy one day, you can often get energy from elsewhere. Nor does solar power disappear "randomly". It disappears once a day. Solar continues to produce when it's cloudy, just at a reduced output.
Also, windfarms have a completely different energy production profile. Solar can produce power when it's not windy, and wind can produce at night. Taken by itself, this doesn't ensure a reliable supply, but when you realize you're working with numerous, geographically distributed installations, the picture becomes rosier. Throw in LNG power plants (which are supposed to be able to turn on and off much faster than standard plants), and I would guess you have a pretty viable system.
Finally, if we're overreliant on solar, nighttime electricity will become more expensive, and the market can adjust for that. For example, replacing old streetlights and domestic lightbulbs would eliminate a lot of need for nighttime energy. High performance computing clusters could shut down at night. People could turn of the television, sit down with their kids, and hit them.