You have to distinguish between molten salt coolant and molten salt fuel. The latter of which are MSRE-type or LFTR-type designs. I don't think the criticisms you mentioned apply to the latter.
If you google 'molten salt reactor' there's plenty of research that has been done in this area. At the very least, pointing out your specific criticisms of molten salt reactors would lead to a more productive argument.
You're insane, but you have a point. The safety and security headaches this thing would cause would be formidable, even if it was only deployed in the USA. And there are newer, better nuclear technologies than PWR worth looking into. Frankly, I'm not in the least surprised, and quite happy, that they didn't get enough investors.
Marx talked of productivity increases, but what Marx didn't live to see was how dramatically productivity would actually increase over the twentieth century, to the point where so many paid workers would simply be laid off. About the wealth gap, he turned out to be more right than he could have ever foreseen.
In many countries in the world it's quite common for people to share stuff like taxi services and rooms and has been for decades. In many of these places the crime rate is far higher than in the United States. The huge contrast between the amount of distrust people seem to have for each other in America and the actual rate of crime (which is quite low and has been decreasing for decades) is pretty astounding.
Aside from the bandgap issue (which does have workarounds), you basically guessed correctly. It's really damn hard to make a large sheet of graphene that will stick to a substrate properly, won't spontaneously fold into a nanotube, and doesn't have faults in the crystal structure.
It's actually pretty amazing, in comparison, what we've been able to do with silicon. We can produce chips with areas measured in square centimeters that are _perfect_ crystals all the way through. No impurities (except what we add), no faults in the crystal structure, just countless trillions of silicon atoms all in the correct place. And then we can pattern this silicon with multiple layers of intricate patterns with nanometer precision. And we can do this on an industrial scale to result in a chip that you buy for a hundred bucks.
Actually this has been studied and in the most realistic scenario the density of the microwaves will be so diffuse that a bird could fly through without noticing anything but a slight warming, similar to how sunlight warms you up. In fact, due to the pleasant warmth the beam produces, a significant problem would be keeping cold birds in winter out of the beam!
Of course prolonged exposure to microwaves wouldn't be nice and could cause all sorts of internal organ problems, if you were standing directly under it for a significant period of time.
MAD works.. for the countries that have nukes. If you don't have a nuke, or aren't kissing the ass of a country that does, it's not mutually assured destruction, it's assured destruction.
Going with your herd analogy, the herd spends years chasing after dwindling water supplies until it finally goes extinct. Meanwhile, other organisms evolve that are better suited to the new drought conditions.
I wouldn't go so far as to call evolution sick and twisted. Evolution is just an optimization system that doesn't give a flying fuck about anything that doesn't increase the number of your offspring in the world. By the way, this is the mistake that social darwinists make - they think evolution is sacred and precious because it favors strength and intelligence, but evolution does no such thing. If evolution were a sentient being, it would be euphoric at its invention of insects and bacteria and tardigrades, and probably look at humans as some side project that didn't get very far before becoming self-destructive. A lot of people complain about the increasing number of stupid people in the world, because "intelligent people don't procreate". Even if that's true, that's evolution in action for you baby! Turns out, too much intelligence is destructive, better evolve some beings that are stupider and will shut up and procreate without asking too many questions.
Evolution doesn't need us, but the good news is that we don't need evolution. We've figured out alternate ways of survival and optimization, involving intelligence and ideas. I think we should spread our better ones to the stars, and leave our destructive evolutionary baggage at home.
while others don't. Taking a step back and looking at the big picture, there is only a finite demand for skilled people of any profession, and flooding any field with new talent rarely does anything but increase the ratio of poorly paid to well paid people. That's why I hate these "Oh my god people who do X make N amount of dollars, let's all do X!"
The real thing that matters when it comes to money is 1. Doing something that society needs, and 2. Doing it well. And unless you've studied philosophy or something, chances are there's someone out there who needs what you do.
BUT, can everyone be good at something? Obviously not. MOST people just aren't born with the talent and intelligence to be exceptional at anything. This is where we've been lied to, and is the main reality we're going to have to face if we want to deal with the world's problems realistically.
Those who would advocate AGW need to provide a solid convincing answer to one thing: the temperature of every planet in the solar system has increased, not just Earth's. I think we can agree there are no humans on Venus and Neptune cutting down trees and burning fossil fuels.
Bullshit; there is no evidence supporting the idea that all planets are warming uniformly and at the same relative rate (which would be necessary for this idea). Any climate variations on other planets is perfectly well explained by proximity to the sun and natural environmental fluctuations. The warming of the Earth, on the other hand, is not explained by these factors. Besides, there's no evidence that the current epoch of warming of the Earth has tracked solar output (in fact there's no evidence that the sun's output has varied significantly, on average, in the past few millenia).
But it's curious how people would cling to the data on the climate on other planets - which is tenuous and sparse at best - and ignore the massive amount of evidence we have for Earth's climate, CO2 concentration, and the interlinking of these two.
And yes, ocean acidity is a huge problem and it's caused by CO2. In fact it's one of the main problems that our carbon emissions have caused.
Nice anecdote, but there's plenty scientific evidence pointing to the fact that children who go to day care have significant differences with those who do not, and the differences are negative. While they are slightly more cognitively stimulated because of the day care environment, they tend to be more aggressive and impulsive.
If it makes you feel any better, the idea would never happen anyway because the government would seriously oppose it with all force. The labor unions are gone and the only reason there are professional engineering and medical organizations is because people acknowledge the value of well-built bridges and experienced surgeons but no one really cares about bad code.
It's always this, isn't it? "Be realistic, it's a tough world, you can't get by being honest!"
I'm not judging people who do what they have to do to survive. But if you are faced with a choice between a $10k job that is honest and a $20k one that involves taking advantage of the poor and the weak and the less intelligent, and you choose the latter, you can't complain that the world is a tough place. You're the one making it a tough place. You are directly responsible, in part, for all the bad shit that happens in the world.
You are right that it's a pragmatic one. I would personally never have kids. If, however, the human population started seriously declining (we're talking a huge existential decline), they'd have a point. The people who were having kids would be shouldering the burden of sustaining society while all the rest would be mooching off of their services. In that case I'd support some kind of 'bachelor tax' to help those with children. But really, it'd have to be a huge population decline, like say a yearly -2% worldwide, before I'd support something like that.
Sadly this attitude is becoming so common people don't even recognize it's wrong. Take day care. As an institution, it was designed as a last-resort option for single mothers who were forced to work due to poverty. It was supported to large degree by charitable organizations. Now it's a booming business and caters to career women who think it's ok to stop being a parent when your kid is 24 months old. I can't imagine why people would deliberately stick their children into what is basically a part-time orphanage before they can even speak. Unless they were so poor they literally couldn't feed their kids without it.
We genuinely are bad at predicting the future of tech, but it's usually not because we're too fanciful. It's usually the opposite. Tech predictions usually fail because we're way too conservative. That's partly the reason behind this joke drawing in 1981. Now predictions about almost everything else - society, politics, and social adoption of tech - are usually way too optimistic. But tech predictions are way too pessimistic.
Here's my effort at a perhaps better future prediction: We'll have much better AI than we do today and it will know everything about everyone. Yet it will not be google, or anything like google, but a service catering to intelligence agencies. Poverty and destruction of the ecosystem will continue at a worse pace than it is going now. We will have the capability to cheaply explore other planets, but we won't actually have a colony on any planets. We'll have the capability to feed everyone in the world yet global hunger will still exist and maybe even be worse than it is today. Rich nations will be richer and poor nations will be poorer. Strong AI will eventually come about then promptly proceed to kill everyone. Not because it hates us, just for liebensraum.
Have a nice day.
I don't think it has to do with funding at all. I really think we're starting to bump against the limits of human brain power. The average physics student learns quantum theory and relativity during late undergrad or early postgrad (age range 20-25). 100 years ago this was cutting-edge stuff which the smartest minds on the planet were working on. Now they're required reading and preparation and considered simple compared to the years and years of learning that is yet to follow. Yet our brains haven't changed.
It's also the constraints of time and human biology. Take string theory. If you're an average researcher, it takes you a PhD (and usually a post-doc or research position) before you can actually start contributing back useful science. By that time, you're in your 30's, and only have a decade or so of actually useful brainpower left before you start your inevitable neural degeneration process. Most researchers peak before their 40's, in that after that they spend most of their time just supervising new students and doing very little work by themselves. The point is, there is so much to learn now that for most people there just isn't a long enough time window to be able to do something incredible and new.
Maybe all this will be solved once we get AI or some way of extending human brainpower. Maybe that's the next technological revolution that will enable the next scientific revolution. Who knows.
Slashdot Mirror
You have to distinguish between molten salt coolant and molten salt fuel. The latter of which are MSRE-type or LFTR-type designs. I don't think the criticisms you mentioned apply to the latter.
If you google 'molten salt reactor' there's plenty of research that has been done in this area. At the very least, pointing out your specific criticisms of molten salt reactors would lead to a more productive argument.
You're insane, but you have a point. The safety and security headaches this thing would cause would be formidable, even if it was only deployed in the USA. And there are newer, better nuclear technologies than PWR worth looking into. Frankly, I'm not in the least surprised, and quite happy, that they didn't get enough investors.
Maybe I just explained myself badly. What I meant was that Marx was right, and far more right than even he could have ever foreseen.
Marx talked of productivity increases, but what Marx didn't live to see was how dramatically productivity would actually increase over the twentieth century, to the point where so many paid workers would simply be laid off. About the wealth gap, he turned out to be more right than he could have ever foreseen.
In many countries in the world it's quite common for people to share stuff like taxi services and rooms and has been for decades. In many of these places the crime rate is far higher than in the United States. The huge contrast between the amount of distrust people seem to have for each other in America and the actual rate of crime (which is quite low and has been decreasing for decades) is pretty astounding.
Aside from the bandgap issue (which does have workarounds), you basically guessed correctly. It's really damn hard to make a large sheet of graphene that will stick to a substrate properly, won't spontaneously fold into a nanotube, and doesn't have faults in the crystal structure.
It's actually pretty amazing, in comparison, what we've been able to do with silicon. We can produce chips with areas measured in square centimeters that are _perfect_ crystals all the way through. No impurities (except what we add), no faults in the crystal structure, just countless trillions of silicon atoms all in the correct place. And then we can pattern this silicon with multiple layers of intricate patterns with nanometer precision. And we can do this on an industrial scale to result in a chip that you buy for a hundred bucks.
Actually this has been studied and in the most realistic scenario the density of the microwaves will be so diffuse that a bird could fly through without noticing anything but a slight warming, similar to how sunlight warms you up. In fact, due to the pleasant warmth the beam produces, a significant problem would be keeping cold birds in winter out of the beam!
Of course prolonged exposure to microwaves wouldn't be nice and could cause all sorts of internal organ problems, if you were standing directly under it for a significant period of time.
MAD works.. for the countries that have nukes. If you don't have a nuke, or aren't kissing the ass of a country that does, it's not mutually assured destruction, it's assured destruction.
Going with your herd analogy, the herd spends years chasing after dwindling water supplies until it finally goes extinct. Meanwhile, other organisms evolve that are better suited to the new drought conditions.
I wouldn't go so far as to call evolution sick and twisted. Evolution is just an optimization system that doesn't give a flying fuck about anything that doesn't increase the number of your offspring in the world. By the way, this is the mistake that social darwinists make - they think evolution is sacred and precious because it favors strength and intelligence, but evolution does no such thing. If evolution were a sentient being, it would be euphoric at its invention of insects and bacteria and tardigrades, and probably look at humans as some side project that didn't get very far before becoming self-destructive. A lot of people complain about the increasing number of stupid people in the world, because "intelligent people don't procreate". Even if that's true, that's evolution in action for you baby! Turns out, too much intelligence is destructive, better evolve some beings that are stupider and will shut up and procreate without asking too many questions.
Evolution doesn't need us, but the good news is that we don't need evolution. We've figured out alternate ways of survival and optimization, involving intelligence and ideas. I think we should spread our better ones to the stars, and leave our destructive evolutionary baggage at home.
while others don't. Taking a step back and looking at the big picture, there is only a finite demand for skilled people of any profession, and flooding any field with new talent rarely does anything but increase the ratio of poorly paid to well paid people. That's why I hate these "Oh my god people who do X make N amount of dollars, let's all do X!"
The real thing that matters when it comes to money is 1. Doing something that society needs, and 2. Doing it well. And unless you've studied philosophy or something, chances are there's someone out there who needs what you do.
BUT, can everyone be good at something? Obviously not. MOST people just aren't born with the talent and intelligence to be exceptional at anything. This is where we've been lied to, and is the main reality we're going to have to face if we want to deal with the world's problems realistically.
Those who would advocate AGW need to provide a solid convincing answer to one thing: the temperature of every planet in the solar system has increased, not just Earth's. I think we can agree there are no humans on Venus and Neptune cutting down trees and burning fossil fuels.
Bullshit; there is no evidence supporting the idea that all planets are warming uniformly and at the same relative rate (which would be necessary for this idea). Any climate variations on other planets is perfectly well explained by proximity to the sun and natural environmental fluctuations. The warming of the Earth, on the other hand, is not explained by these factors. Besides, there's no evidence that the current epoch of warming of the Earth has tracked solar output (in fact there's no evidence that the sun's output has varied significantly, on average, in the past few millenia).
But it's curious how people would cling to the data on the climate on other planets - which is tenuous and sparse at best - and ignore the massive amount of evidence we have for Earth's climate, CO2 concentration, and the interlinking of these two.
And yes, ocean acidity is a huge problem and it's caused by CO2. In fact it's one of the main problems that our carbon emissions have caused.
Nice anecdote, but there's plenty scientific evidence pointing to the fact that children who go to day care have significant differences with those who do not, and the differences are negative. While they are slightly more cognitively stimulated because of the day care environment, they tend to be more aggressive and impulsive.
If it makes you feel any better, the idea would never happen anyway because the government would seriously oppose it with all force. The labor unions are gone and the only reason there are professional engineering and medical organizations is because people acknowledge the value of well-built bridges and experienced surgeons but no one really cares about bad code.
It's always this, isn't it? "Be realistic, it's a tough world, you can't get by being honest!" I'm not judging people who do what they have to do to survive. But if you are faced with a choice between a $10k job that is honest and a $20k one that involves taking advantage of the poor and the weak and the less intelligent, and you choose the latter, you can't complain that the world is a tough place. You're the one making it a tough place. You are directly responsible, in part, for all the bad shit that happens in the world.
mimicry
"All the good men are married or gay" is code for "My standards are now astronomically high and I have nothing to offer."
You are right that it's a pragmatic one. I would personally never have kids. If, however, the human population started seriously declining (we're talking a huge existential decline), they'd have a point. The people who were having kids would be shouldering the burden of sustaining society while all the rest would be mooching off of their services. In that case I'd support some kind of 'bachelor tax' to help those with children. But really, it'd have to be a huge population decline, like say a yearly -2% worldwide, before I'd support something like that.
Sadly this attitude is becoming so common people don't even recognize it's wrong. Take day care. As an institution, it was designed as a last-resort option for single mothers who were forced to work due to poverty. It was supported to large degree by charitable organizations. Now it's a booming business and caters to career women who think it's ok to stop being a parent when your kid is 24 months old. I can't imagine why people would deliberately stick their children into what is basically a part-time orphanage before they can even speak. Unless they were so poor they literally couldn't feed their kids without it.
That only forms a small part of the issue. The connection between the wealthy and the politicians goes far above and beyond that.
We genuinely are bad at predicting the future of tech, but it's usually not because we're too fanciful. It's usually the opposite. Tech predictions usually fail because we're way too conservative. That's partly the reason behind this joke drawing in 1981. Now predictions about almost everything else - society, politics, and social adoption of tech - are usually way too optimistic. But tech predictions are way too pessimistic. Here's my effort at a perhaps better future prediction: We'll have much better AI than we do today and it will know everything about everyone. Yet it will not be google, or anything like google, but a service catering to intelligence agencies. Poverty and destruction of the ecosystem will continue at a worse pace than it is going now. We will have the capability to cheaply explore other planets, but we won't actually have a colony on any planets. We'll have the capability to feed everyone in the world yet global hunger will still exist and maybe even be worse than it is today. Rich nations will be richer and poor nations will be poorer. Strong AI will eventually come about then promptly proceed to kill everyone. Not because it hates us, just for liebensraum. Have a nice day.
I don't think it has to do with funding at all. I really think we're starting to bump against the limits of human brain power. The average physics student learns quantum theory and relativity during late undergrad or early postgrad (age range 20-25). 100 years ago this was cutting-edge stuff which the smartest minds on the planet were working on. Now they're required reading and preparation and considered simple compared to the years and years of learning that is yet to follow. Yet our brains haven't changed. It's also the constraints of time and human biology. Take string theory. If you're an average researcher, it takes you a PhD (and usually a post-doc or research position) before you can actually start contributing back useful science. By that time, you're in your 30's, and only have a decade or so of actually useful brainpower left before you start your inevitable neural degeneration process. Most researchers peak before their 40's, in that after that they spend most of their time just supervising new students and doing very little work by themselves. The point is, there is so much to learn now that for most people there just isn't a long enough time window to be able to do something incredible and new. Maybe all this will be solved once we get AI or some way of extending human brainpower. Maybe that's the next technological revolution that will enable the next scientific revolution. Who knows.