You accumulate great wealth in a country (i.e. the established economic system gives you control over assets - the existence of private property on that scale being a purely legal construct) You leave the country. You leave a (possibly quite large) percentage of those assets behind in the form of an expatriation tax.
That worked well when humanity was scarce enough that only the choicest environments needed to be inhabited. That's no longer even remotely the case.
Surface area of the Earth (196 million mi^2)* percentage of surface that's land (29%)*percentage of land that's arable (10%) / # of humans (~10 billion, projected peak population) = 0.36 acres per person.
That's not nearly enough to reliably get the job done without backbreaking labor and a lot of good luck.
I'm trying to think of what other possible purpose is served for it to have an electronic screen at all, and am coming up blank. None of the other gizmos would seem to benefit from it, and it's not like you spend much time looking at your own license plate.
Now, an e-ink "bumper sticker" I could see - but a license plate? I can't think of any use that wouldn't seem right at home in a James Bond movie.
That's a third position that does indeed bear discussing in the face of the potential elimination of the need for manual labor within a few generations. I'm not even sure what you'd call it, and it's very different from the other two. Capitalism says the bulk of the value generated by society rightfully belongs to the organizers, those who have shown they can most effectively manage and accumulate capital. Communism says to the laborers, those who actually did all the work to make it real. And this other, I suppose, that no work had to be done, so everybody should benefit from the value.
Let's be clear though - the creation of art, the governing of society, the organization of production, the advancement of science and technology - that's all still work, and somebody has to do it or it won't get done. The only way we get a truly post-labor world is if we create fully autonomous self-maintaining robots sufficiently advanced to effectively reduce humanity to house pets, without actually being conscious (because then they would be people performing labor). And I would hope that very few people would actually want that if they took the time to really consider the implications.
What we are actually approaching is a world where one person with the right skills and assets can easily provide for all the material needs (and big slice of the desires) of hundreds, maybe many thousands others, and thus the vast majority of the population will find themselves becoming rather superfluous, while a tiny handful find themselves bearing the responsibility of maintaining the system for everybody else. It's going to be an interesting problem to deal with. I can hope that the working class will end up somewhere on the spectrum between rock stars and monks, while the fallow class will be well-managed, and discouraged from breeding excessively.
Hey, I'm a big fan of SpaceX, but how many *interplanetary* missions have they launched to date? Zero so far as I can tell, unless you count the high-risk Falcon Heavy test / Starman PR stunt. The closest they've gotten is a launch to the Earth-Sun L1 point, which is right at the edge of Earth-dominated gravitational space.(see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...)
You need a much bigger rocket for an interplanetary launch, and Falcon 9 just doesn't make the cut. Heavy might, once it's been well-tested. Meanwhile, we don't have even a single orbital refueling depot, which will almost certainly be the very first piece of interplanetary-specific infrastructure to be built.
And really, the BFR is looking like it will be the first rocket capable of handling any substantial interplanetary payload, greatly aided by the planned tanker-ships that will let it (hopefully relatively easily) refuel in high orbit with only a half-dozen additional launches.
Beaver dams are a completely different beast. For starters they're several orders of magnitude smaller (as they say, quantity has a quality all its own) , and the beavers create networks of safety/transportation streams into the surrounding landscape, irrigating the land and aiding the transfer of water into underground aquifers.
Don't even need to play the sound - just driving a couple strategically placed T-posts into the stream bed can do wonders for creating the sound cheaply and reliably. There's a team in... Oregon(?) that's had great luck preventing beavers from damning culverts and flooding out mountain roads simply by driving posts just downstream from the culvert.
So what? So you carry 10x the fuel you need for one cycle, big deal. It's not like it's significantly radioactive - if it were it would no longer exist after 4 billion years of laying around in the Earth. You just need to avoid packing it densely enough to go critical.
Besides which, just because it takes decades to get to deep space today, when we have basically zero interplanetary transport infrastructure (every launch is a one-off, using disposable rockets designed primarily for orbital missions), doesn't mean that is some sort of natural limit on the transportation times involved. High-thrust nuclear powered ion drives look like a winning option, but there's just not a whole lot of incentive to develop them until there's demand for high-speed interplanetary transportation.
Plus, once we've gone legitimately interplanetary, we're unlikely to be getting raw materials like fuel from Earth.
As I recall it's not from deep ocean basins, but red surface algae that displaces the normal blue-green variety over some unknown period of time. It should mix into the atmosphere just fine. Maybe stay away from the coasts. Our ancestors survived several such events, there's a good chance that the genes that made it possible still linger in at least some of the population.
> But it does raise the question of whether it is actually possible to implement correctly or not, since each failure to do so makes that seem less likely.
It certainly does raise the question. But if an incoming regime never had any intention of being communist beyond riding the banner into power, does that really count against its possibility, rather than more specifically to the credibility of those claiming to be its champions?
Let me put it this way - given the track record I would be vehemently opposed to *anyone* rallying support on a communist platform. But I also think the basic ideals of the relative worth of the working class are worth holding up as a counterbalance to the Gilded Age ideals inherent in unregulated free market capitalism. Either extreme seems to lead to the masses being miserable, and that when we balance somewhere in between everyone prospers. But that's hard to do when one ideal has been demonized.
No, cancer is it's own thing - a cell-line that rebels against the body's constraints in favor of personal immortality. Healing in contrast requires cells to carefully integrate themselves into the existing lattice. And a core problem in that regard appears to be the formation of scar tissue, which "patches things up" quickly, but also prevents new cells from properly integrating.
I agree that fascism has often prospered under a banner of communism - but can you cite even one instance of a nation that was actually even remotely communist, rather than just using the name as a convenient mask?
Remember, one of the key tenets of communism is that the workers own the means of production, and that is wholly incompatible with the government owning said means, unless you can make a strong case that the workers truly own the government.
Personally, I can think of only a small handful of countries (Iceland comes to mind) that could make an even remotely plausible claim to having a government truly owned by the workers. Certainly China, Russia, the United States, etc. could not.
There is a fair amount of lithium on Earth, but it's well down the list, coming in at the 25th most common element in the Earth's crust, or 20mg per kg. Worse, it's almost always found in extremely low concentrations, meaning it will mostly require intensive (and expensive) mining and processing to extract.
I didn't realize Li-Ion had such a dramatic cycle advantage over lead-acid - though presumably that's very dependent on manufacturing technique: most of what I'm finding is citing 5000 deep-discharge cycles for Li-Ion versus 600 for lead-acid. Meanwhile, the new battery I got for my phone about this time last year is already down to about half of it's original capacity, not even 300 cycles later.
Unfortunately, as soon as electric cars start going mainstream, they will easily consume all available production for decades - we can always build more battery production plants (and recycling - that's going to be a huge factor too), but the economies of scale will begin to diminish rapidly. And it's not at all clear that there's enough lithium on the planet to satisfy the demand for a global conversion to EVs, especially if harvested in an ecologically responsible manner.
Using Li-Ion batteris for the grid for now, as we're jump-starting the transition, does indeed make sense, but soon enough we're going to want batteries whose compromises have been optimized for grid applications, where size and weight don't matter and amortized cost-per-Wh-per-year is king. Liquid metal batteries seem promising in that regard - the operating temperatures means they're no good for mobile applications, and present difficulties even for home-scale use, but the enormous currents they can handle, as well as the fact that they're very simple to build from common materials, and effectively immortal, makes them far preferable to Li-Ion batteries (whose life span is laughably short). It's really hard for battery-killing structures to form when the operating temperature is well above the melting point of the electrodes.
And of course there's other technologies as well - Aquion seems to be having some trouble getting off the ground, but their non-toxic salt-water battery technology promises to cost comparable to lead-acid at scale, without the toxicity of lead or the dependence on rare elements like lithium. Heck, even lead-acid batteries are better suited to grid-scale applications than Li-Ion - They're cheaper for the same capacity, and can have a considerably longer working life, lowering the amortized cost even further.
Yes, water vapor can store more heat than dry air at the same temperature - which actually means it lowers the temperature for the same amount of heat. That's not the problem.
The problem is that greenhouse gasses scatter thermal infrared radiation, slowing the rate at which heat can be radiated from the planet's surface away into space by bouncing much of it back at the surface to be reabsorbed. That causes the temperature of the surface to slowly increase until the rate of radiated energy escaping the atmosphere again matches the rate at which energy is absorbed from the sun.
Meanwhile the Sun is hot enough that it's energy is mostly radiated in the visible spectrum, and so incoming energy is mostly unaffected by greenhouse gasses.
There's also refillable batteries to consider - several people are working on various liquid-electrolyte batteries where the spent electrolyte could be easily replaced with fresh, fully-charged electrolyte, allowing the spent electrolyte to be leisurely recharged at the fueling center.
That's what the lights on the moon are for, to replace the input from the sun. Output needs only be an infinitesimal fraction of that of the sun, since only an infinitesimal fraction of the sun's output reaches Earth.
Total solar input to Earth's upper atmosphere ~= 1368W/m^2 * pi*(*3.6*10^6m^2) = 5.6*10^16W and by e=mc^2, 1kg = ~9*10^16 Ws So, with mass-energy conversion we'd need to consume about 0.6 kg/second of mass, or ~20 million kg/year And the mass of the moon is 7.3*10^22 kilograms, so it would provide sufficient energy for 3.7*10^15 years
Just to put that in proper perspective, the current age of the universe is only ~14*10^9 years, so the moon's mass could support a sun-grade input to the Earth for a million times the age of the universe. Of course mass-energy conversion is unlikely to be 100% efficient, but with those kinds of numbers even 0.000001% efficiency would be plenty to cross between stars.
Granted, we couldn't hope to do such a thing today, but in a hundred million years from now? 12,000 years ago we were still in the stone age - where will be after 10,000x as long?
>While we may pay for metered electricity, the power plants cant just drop their generation by 0.000001% when you turn off your light when you go to bed. They are still generating power.
Actually, no. When you turn off your light he power company does indeed need to reduce its production accordingly, unless they have battery buffers involved somewhere. Every watt flowing into the system *will* flow back out again - as heat buildup and exploding infrastructure if nothing else. And the power company tends to prefer not dealing with that.
Sadly natural gas is, in practice, a pretty terrible option. It could be a big improvement over coal and other hydrocarbons, but only if you can keep atmospheric leakage fairly low. I seem to recall that ~12% leakage is the break-even point where the much more potent greenhouse effect of methane counteracts the lower CO2 emissions. Unfortunately, in the U.S. at least, natural gas supply line leakage is at something like 30-40%, so using it contributes far more to climate change than even coal does.
Unfortunately, plants grown in elevated-co2 environments are considerably less nutritious. Lots of energy-rich carbohydrates produced from all that CO2, but "not enough calories" isn't exactly a problem with most of the worlds diet.
Doesn't matter. What would matter is if people that actually commercialized their technology wanted to hire supertankers to haul bicarbonate out to a sufficient distance to diffuse the alkalinity, rather than just dumping it where it was produced. And we all know that profit-driven corporations are big fans of responsible behavior that hurts profits.
Actually it does. It's almost impossible to meaningfully extrapolate from one data point (such as our own existence), but if life arose dozens or hundreds of times in the galaxy in the time since it arose here on Earth, then we would have a decent estimate of the probability of life arising in a given set of circumstances - and since those circumstances were around for a billion years before our planet existed, we would reasonably expect to see life a billion years older than us.
Slashdot Mirror
Try again. They said $600 for 16mb of ram (4x4mb), putting them exactly in line with your "counter-" estimate.
Then you need to redesign your reactor or your fuel storage. There's absolutely no reason nuclear fuel should go "stale" while in storage.
How is it "collecting taxes for other nations"?
You accumulate great wealth in a country (i.e. the established economic system gives you control over assets - the existence of private property on that scale being a purely legal construct)
You leave the country.
You leave a (possibly quite large) percentage of those assets behind in the form of an expatriation tax.
That's why expatriation taxes exist.
That worked well when humanity was scarce enough that only the choicest environments needed to be inhabited. That's no longer even remotely the case.
Surface area of the Earth (196 million mi^2)* percentage of surface that's land (29%)*percentage of land that's arable (10%) / # of humans (~10 billion, projected peak population) = 0.36 acres per person.
That's not nearly enough to reliably get the job done without backbreaking labor and a lot of good luck.
I'm trying to think of what other possible purpose is served for it to have an electronic screen at all, and am coming up blank. None of the other gizmos would seem to benefit from it, and it's not like you spend much time looking at your own license plate.
Now, an e-ink "bumper sticker" I could see - but a license plate? I can't think of any use that wouldn't seem right at home in a James Bond movie.
That's a third position that does indeed bear discussing in the face of the potential elimination of the need for manual labor within a few generations. I'm not even sure what you'd call it, and it's very different from the other two. Capitalism says the bulk of the value generated by society rightfully belongs to the organizers, those who have shown they can most effectively manage and accumulate capital. Communism says to the laborers, those who actually did all the work to make it real. And this other, I suppose, that no work had to be done, so everybody should benefit from the value.
Let's be clear though - the creation of art, the governing of society, the organization of production, the advancement of science and technology - that's all still work, and somebody has to do it or it won't get done. The only way we get a truly post-labor world is if we create fully autonomous self-maintaining robots sufficiently advanced to effectively reduce humanity to house pets, without actually being conscious (because then they would be people performing labor). And I would hope that very few people would actually want that if they took the time to really consider the implications.
What we are actually approaching is a world where one person with the right skills and assets can easily provide for all the material needs (and big slice of the desires) of hundreds, maybe many thousands others, and thus the vast majority of the population will find themselves becoming rather superfluous, while a tiny handful find themselves bearing the responsibility of maintaining the system for everybody else. It's going to be an interesting problem to deal with. I can hope that the working class will end up somewhere on the spectrum between rock stars and monks, while the fallow class will be well-managed, and discouraged from breeding excessively.
Hey, I'm a big fan of SpaceX, but how many *interplanetary* missions have they launched to date? Zero so far as I can tell, unless you count the high-risk Falcon Heavy test / Starman PR stunt. The closest they've gotten is a launch to the Earth-Sun L1 point, which is right at the edge of Earth-dominated gravitational space.(see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...)
You need a much bigger rocket for an interplanetary launch, and Falcon 9 just doesn't make the cut. Heavy might, once it's been well-tested. Meanwhile, we don't have even a single orbital refueling depot, which will almost certainly be the very first piece of interplanetary-specific infrastructure to be built.
And really, the BFR is looking like it will be the first rocket capable of handling any substantial interplanetary payload, greatly aided by the planned tanker-ships that will let it (hopefully relatively easily) refuel in high orbit with only a half-dozen additional launches.
Beaver dams are a completely different beast. For starters they're several orders of magnitude smaller (as they say, quantity has a quality all its own) , and the beavers create networks of safety/transportation streams into the surrounding landscape, irrigating the land and aiding the transfer of water into underground aquifers.
Don't even need to play the sound - just driving a couple strategically placed T-posts into the stream bed can do wonders for creating the sound cheaply and reliably. There's a team in... Oregon(?) that's had great luck preventing beavers from damning culverts and flooding out mountain roads simply by driving posts just downstream from the culvert.
So what? So you carry 10x the fuel you need for one cycle, big deal. It's not like it's significantly radioactive - if it were it would no longer exist after 4 billion years of laying around in the Earth. You just need to avoid packing it densely enough to go critical.
Besides which, just because it takes decades to get to deep space today, when we have basically zero interplanetary transport infrastructure (every launch is a one-off, using disposable rockets designed primarily for orbital missions), doesn't mean that is some sort of natural limit on the transportation times involved. High-thrust nuclear powered ion drives look like a winning option, but there's just not a whole lot of incentive to develop them until there's demand for high-speed interplanetary transportation.
Plus, once we've gone legitimately interplanetary, we're unlikely to be getting raw materials like fuel from Earth.
As I recall it's not from deep ocean basins, but red surface algae that displaces the normal blue-green variety over some unknown period of time. It should mix into the atmosphere just fine. Maybe stay away from the coasts. Our ancestors survived several such events, there's a good chance that the genes that made it possible still linger in at least some of the population.
Well said.
> But it does raise the question of whether it is actually possible to implement correctly or not, since each failure to do so makes that seem less likely.
It certainly does raise the question. But if an incoming regime never had any intention of being communist beyond riding the banner into power, does that really count against its possibility, rather than more specifically to the credibility of those claiming to be its champions?
Let me put it this way - given the track record I would be vehemently opposed to *anyone* rallying support on a communist platform. But I also think the basic ideals of the relative worth of the working class are worth holding up as a counterbalance to the Gilded Age ideals inherent in unregulated free market capitalism. Either extreme seems to lead to the masses being miserable, and that when we balance somewhere in between everyone prospers. But that's hard to do when one ideal has been demonized.
No, cancer is it's own thing - a cell-line that rebels against the body's constraints in favor of personal immortality. Healing in contrast requires cells to carefully integrate themselves into the existing lattice. And a core problem in that regard appears to be the formation of scar tissue, which "patches things up" quickly, but also prevents new cells from properly integrating.
I agree that fascism has often prospered under a banner of communism - but can you cite even one instance of a nation that was actually even remotely communist, rather than just using the name as a convenient mask?
Remember, one of the key tenets of communism is that the workers own the means of production, and that is wholly incompatible with the government owning said means, unless you can make a strong case that the workers truly own the government.
Personally, I can think of only a small handful of countries (Iceland comes to mind) that could make an even remotely plausible claim to having a government truly owned by the workers. Certainly China, Russia, the United States, etc. could not.
There is a fair amount of lithium on Earth, but it's well down the list, coming in at the 25th most common element in the Earth's crust, or 20mg per kg. Worse, it's almost always found in extremely low concentrations, meaning it will mostly require intensive (and expensive) mining and processing to extract.
I didn't realize Li-Ion had such a dramatic cycle advantage over lead-acid - though presumably that's very dependent on manufacturing technique: most of what I'm finding is citing 5000 deep-discharge cycles for Li-Ion versus 600 for lead-acid. Meanwhile, the new battery I got for my phone about this time last year is already down to about half of it's original capacity, not even 300 cycles later.
Unfortunately, as soon as electric cars start going mainstream, they will easily consume all available production for decades - we can always build more battery production plants (and recycling - that's going to be a huge factor too), but the economies of scale will begin to diminish rapidly. And it's not at all clear that there's enough lithium on the planet to satisfy the demand for a global conversion to EVs, especially if harvested in an ecologically responsible manner.
Using Li-Ion batteris for the grid for now, as we're jump-starting the transition, does indeed make sense, but soon enough we're going to want batteries whose compromises have been optimized for grid applications, where size and weight don't matter and amortized cost-per-Wh-per-year is king. Liquid metal batteries seem promising in that regard - the operating temperatures means they're no good for mobile applications, and present difficulties even for home-scale use, but the enormous currents they can handle, as well as the fact that they're very simple to build from common materials, and effectively immortal, makes them far preferable to Li-Ion batteries (whose life span is laughably short). It's really hard for battery-killing structures to form when the operating temperature is well above the melting point of the electrodes.
And of course there's other technologies as well - Aquion seems to be having some trouble getting off the ground, but their non-toxic salt-water battery technology promises to cost comparable to lead-acid at scale, without the toxicity of lead or the dependence on rare elements like lithium. Heck, even lead-acid batteries are better suited to grid-scale applications than Li-Ion - They're cheaper for the same capacity, and can have a considerably longer working life, lowering the amortized cost even further.
Yes, water vapor can store more heat than dry air at the same temperature - which actually means it lowers the temperature for the same amount of heat. That's not the problem.
The problem is that greenhouse gasses scatter thermal infrared radiation, slowing the rate at which heat can be radiated from the planet's surface away into space by bouncing much of it back at the surface to be reabsorbed. That causes the temperature of the surface to slowly increase until the rate of radiated energy escaping the atmosphere again matches the rate at which energy is absorbed from the sun.
Meanwhile the Sun is hot enough that it's energy is mostly radiated in the visible spectrum, and so incoming energy is mostly unaffected by greenhouse gasses.
There's also refillable batteries to consider - several people are working on various liquid-electrolyte batteries where the spent electrolyte could be easily replaced with fresh, fully-charged electrolyte, allowing the spent electrolyte to be leisurely recharged at the fueling center.
That's what the lights on the moon are for, to replace the input from the sun. Output needs only be an infinitesimal fraction of that of the sun, since only an infinitesimal fraction of the sun's output reaches Earth.
Total solar input to Earth's upper atmosphere ~= 1368W/m^2 * pi*(*3.6*10^6m^2) = 5.6*10^16W
and by e=mc^2, 1kg = ~9*10^16 Ws
So, with mass-energy conversion we'd need to consume about 0.6 kg/second of mass, or ~20 million kg/year
And the mass of the moon is 7.3*10^22 kilograms, so it would provide sufficient energy for 3.7*10^15 years
Just to put that in proper perspective, the current age of the universe is only ~14*10^9 years, so the moon's mass could support a sun-grade input to the Earth for a million times the age of the universe. Of course mass-energy conversion is unlikely to be 100% efficient, but with those kinds of numbers even 0.000001% efficiency would be plenty to cross between stars.
Granted, we couldn't hope to do such a thing today, but in a hundred million years from now? 12,000 years ago we were still in the stone age - where will be after 10,000x as long?
>While we may pay for metered electricity, the power plants cant just drop their generation by 0.000001% when you turn off your light when you go to bed. They are still generating power.
Actually, no. When you turn off your light he power company does indeed need to reduce its production accordingly, unless they have battery buffers involved somewhere. Every watt flowing into the system *will* flow back out again - as heat buildup and exploding infrastructure if nothing else. And the power company tends to prefer not dealing with that.
Sadly natural gas is, in practice, a pretty terrible option. It could be a big improvement over coal and other hydrocarbons, but only if you can keep atmospheric leakage fairly low. I seem to recall that ~12% leakage is the break-even point where the much more potent greenhouse effect of methane counteracts the lower CO2 emissions. Unfortunately, in the U.S. at least, natural gas supply line leakage is at something like 30-40%, so using it contributes far more to climate change than even coal does.
Unfortunately, plants grown in elevated-co2 environments are considerably less nutritious. Lots of energy-rich carbohydrates produced from all that CO2, but "not enough calories" isn't exactly a problem with most of the worlds diet.
Doesn't matter. What would matter is if people that actually commercialized their technology wanted to hire supertankers to haul bicarbonate out to a sufficient distance to diffuse the alkalinity, rather than just dumping it where it was produced. And we all know that profit-driven corporations are big fans of responsible behavior that hurts profits.
Actually it does. It's almost impossible to meaningfully extrapolate from one data point (such as our own existence), but if life arose dozens or hundreds of times in the galaxy in the time since it arose here on Earth, then we would have a decent estimate of the probability of life arising in a given set of circumstances - and since those circumstances were around for a billion years before our planet existed, we would reasonably expect to see life a billion years older than us.