This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a "posthuman" stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed.
Something most people aren't aware of, is that for most of human history - drugs, hard drugs, were all legal and available. It wasn't until they were made illegal that refined versions were created. Immediately after prohibiting a substance, the suppliers will attempt to maximize profit and minimize risk. This gives you crack, heroin, hell, even moonshine. From what I can tell, society was no worse off then, although some religious people might have had higher blood pressure.
If VIDEO GAMES are ever regulated because people lack the responsibility, disipline, and self control to participate in society, we are in very bad times. It is YOUR life. Not the states. You are supposed to be FREE. With freedom comes RESPONSIBILITY.
Social symptoms my ass. Prohibition is about control, nothing more, nothing less. Well, at least we don't have a drug problem anymore!
Thankfully, unlike the marijuana and poppy growers of old, the entertainment industry is a powerful lobby - there's not much to worry about when a game franchise like GTA has revenues in the hundreds of millions (billions?). Just look at booze and cigarettes; but remember, drug dealers are evil.
We'd be in trouble if they didn't get caught..
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Society works because if you're smart enough not to get caught, you're probably smart enough to make more money doing something productive and legal in society. Thus, the rational choice is to play by the rules.
I suspect if this were not true, society would rapidly decay into chaos.
Re:US $100 bills aren't that hard to counterfeit.
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By tracking serial numbers you could see how your currency is flowing.
Do you really want it possible to trace every item you buy? Cash is anonymous. I would become concerned if it was routine for governments to tie every dollar I withdraw from my bank account to my name. It's nobody's business what I do with my money but mine. Wouldn't this bother you?
Oh wait. If you don't like it, you must have something to hide. Where that line of reasoning ends up is not very pretty.
It's very easy to render that box useless. The law requires you to have airbags; it is very difficult to prove that an "electronics failure" happened before, after, or during an accident.
Hell, it'd even be pretty easy to load that box up with falsified information.
Fortunately, like Divx, I don't think Joe Sixpack is ignorant enough to fall for this one.
Obviously you don't know what YOU are talking about. Just because you have a buunch of scripts that is capable of cracking WEP does not mean you have a knowledge of why WEP is vunerable. WEP cannot be made totally secure (the claim was not made by me or the grandparent), however, many vendors have highly reduced the vulnerability of WEP
You are incorrect. One hole has been plugged; others appeared, some are still theoretical, and not all are widespread.
If you care, run a VPN and then it doesn't matter.
I had a 100LX.. I used it until the keys wore out. Needless to say, this was a lot. This unit was the ideal PDA/subnote; it ran DOS, had a lot of applications in ROM including lotus, had PCMCIA expandibility, ran for a WEEK off a set of AA batteries, did I mention it had the signature HP calculator keys - wonderful little guy. Weighed almost nothing. Durable case.
I had TurboC++ on it and I couldn't be happier. x86 compatible micro, I believe it was a 8088 derivative of some type.
The ideal upgrade to this would be to put in a Xscale CPU, one of those fancy transflective screens, and that's about it.
Oh yeah, I had that HP100LX almost 10 years ago now.:-)
If you can't find a job, why not make one? I thought America was the land of opportunity?
No, seriously. Is it that hard to start companies up? I live in an economically depressed area in Canada that makes the US look like a Mecca - unemployment rates are about 20%, yes, 20% here. Things would be very bad without the social programs Canada prides itself on. Yet there is a triving little manufacturing sector.
Want a tip? Find out how to make an existing company more efficient, thus profitable. Then go make a pitch. You might be suprised.
No end-user, to the best of my knowledge, has EVER been procecuted for a grey market reciever in Canada. I am not sure if you are Canadian, but I am, and there are A LOT OF PEOPLE up here with DirectTV dishes hanging off their houses. I believe people have been procecuted for selling them, but I cannot see any law being upheld in court that charged someone from recieving a satellite signal (that they even paid for) illegally.
Me, I'm going looking for one of these USB gismos. Like now.
I wrote some scripts while ago to record public radio (CBC) from the radio and download it into my mp3 player awhile ago.. this didn't require anything more exotic than a cron job on my linux server and a sound card. It sounded fine.
I fail to see how this could possibly be illegal. On the other hand, I don't live in the USA. What about if I connected it to my satellite reciever? A TIVO will work on that fine, and there's over a hundred radio stations on there.
Seriously. Anyone can do this with lame, mp3enc or something like that, a wav recorder, a command line interface to their mp3 player, and cron. Isn't unix cool?
I wonder if this is correllated in any way to the percentage of people that get seasick.. luckily, I don't, and I spent a summer many moons ago working in a VR lab - no ill effects from much HMD time. I know people who couldn't use the gear at all because it'd be instant spew time though.
One thing is, after long enough, your body adapts to the feeling. It is just unpleasant until that point.
Most customers will benefit but soome (eg. less profitable customers in outlying areas) will lose out.
Hahahaha! I take it you don't live in an outlying area.
My exchange was one of the last in NORTH AMERICA to be moved off an old switch that used in band signalling. While some might understand this provided much amusement in my youth, we didn't get private lines until about 1992 if I remember right. The line quality is BAD here.
Dispite millions? being promised and provided for broadband development in Rural areas by the Canadian government, my estimated date for DSL arrival is on a geological timeframe. Luckily, the terrain here is such I might be able to get a 802.11 link to a benevolant soul in the next year or so.
Where do I live? About 30 minutes outside a major center. Not the middle of nowhere. Basic service is what the law says I get, and basic service is what I get.
Here'e to hoping for the ability to get an affordable cell-based broadband connection. Two way satellite is still out of the question.
I've given up on desktop linux for now. Mac has hardware that works, and is a good compromise. If it says on the box it'll work, it works.
Linux is great on servers and embedded - a lifesaver in many cases. As soon as you need to do custom hardware integration, it's not worth the headaches. I'm in the process of a very ambitious project that requries high resolution digital imaging - linux isn't an option, there are no drivers period for any of the cameras. Hello, windows. Windows even works pretty good, focused on a single task.
For linux to get this, the best hope is devices that adhere to some sort of standard for interoperability with host PCs. I remember buying hardware and getting schematics, once upon a time, but I think those days are over.
Another possibility is the legislate any consumer device sold on the market must publish it's communication API. This seems unworkable, but it's how cars work now - and there are lots of people who would like to change this. (OBD) It's kind of funny; when framed in terms of cars, most politicians can understand the problem - they wouldn't want to be 0wn3d by GM after shelling out big money. Why should expensive computer hardware be any different?
How could you be so short sighted and/or STUPID to not realize that the keys are possibly the best trademark of those old HP calculators? I don't know what the logic was there. I had hoped they brought them back.
My reasoning behind the tungsten emulation was that no keys > crappy keys.:(
Maybe I'll engineer a little keypad for the Palm for numeric entry you can put side by side, like the old HP business calcs.
- Simple economics, if it's cheaper to use the faster processor and emulate the other one, it doesn't matter. Recoding for native operation may not have been possible. This is related to my second point:
- All glitches and problems with the existing design are well documented and hammered out. It may not have been feasible as I suspect there is a lot of verification that happens on these guys before they ship. If the calculator has been painstakenly debugged on one processor, it may very well be easier to insure 100% emulation than re-test all the functions.
Can anyone confirm that this calculator has the trademark keys - the 49 didn't - and I noticed they switched back to plastic. My 48 is dying and I have pretty much decided to get a tungsten T3 running power48 to replace it, but this would be far superior.
Don't buy them, and email the publisher telling them what you DID buy - and explain why.
If enough people do that, then it'll go away. Failing that, give this a little while and it'll be cracked like all the rest. I hate and loathe having to keep CD's handy to play games, it's a pain in the butt when you want to do 15 minutes of fragging - it takes longer than that for me to find the cds!
Savvy publishers are aware some level of piracy helps, and doesn't hurt, overall sales. I rarely buy a game without trying the thing first, and I don't buy a game for the most part that a lot of my friends haven't tried either. I got burned way to many times, most recently on the steaming pile that is EA's attempt at a F1 simulator.:(
Went off like a very large firecracker. Bits of CD everywhere. You can probably cause it to happen by making cuts from the center of a CD to the outside along the radius. A few of those will weaken it enough (maybe one) to fail in higher speed drives.
I'm intrigued.. but I might put off my impending purchase of a T3. Looking at it for the sole purpose of running power48, as my real hp48 finally is showing wear on the buttons.
However, I have a bluetooth SD card, and the thing is almost useless for practical use - you can't just leave the card in there, because it sticks up about a centimeter or so and is very flimsy looking. It routinely pops out of place if you put it in your pocket with the SD card inserted.
Forget using any hard case or belt case with the SD card inserted. If you have to take it off, it defeats the purpose! (I'd love something like this for a home-pager setup on my 802.11 network).
I don't see any pictures in the press release.. but I think I'll be waiting for a T4, with 802.11 built into the device.
I agree that mastering consciousness and thought, and understanding the human brain will be one of the next great frontiers of science, and with that mastery ought to eventually come much better ability to simulate it in silico.
We may not need to understand it to simulate it. The genome has been decoded, and the biochemical processes are on their way to becoming very well understood. Once you know those two things, you can simulate the whole deal in a computer of sufficient capacity.
It may take awhile before we simulate a whole human, but I would be suprised if I didn't live to see this being done on simpler life.
This is a problem that may not need solving. Our brains are seninent and exist. Once sufficient computing power - be it classical, quantum, or other - exists, then it is reasonable to assume that something comparable to our brain except artificial can be built. We even have a pretty good start on this one, the decoded genome. If you have enough computing power, you could just simulate the whole deal starting with DNA. Efficient no, but effective. People are starting down this road with projects like Blue Gene and the distributed cousins (folding @ home).
Based on the fact we and many thousands of sentient creatures exist of varying complexity already, this is only a matter of time. To think otherwise implies there is something magical about how we work - and there is no evidence for that.
Once an artificial AI has been created, it is free to improve upon both it's knowledge and architecture in real time. This feeds back on itself, and results in the "singularity" that people are talking about here. No other great achivements are needed; just an AI that is a little teeny bit smarter than your average human.
It is reasonable to assume once this AI has been created, then it can go to work on issues like Quantum Gravity and who knows what else. An AI doesn't have to die (Ever), and can propagate at the speed of light. Robots are much hardier space explorers than we are. In effect, it is the last invention man needs to make.
People thought the genome would take decades or longer to sequence. They were wrong. I suspect a lot of people are wrong about AI, too. Neural networks are very interesting things, and the hardware to experiment with them in real time (reconfigurable FPGAs and large computer memories) is just becoming available to low-budget and self-funded researchers. (yay!)
And, more fundamentally, we haven't solved the problem of our own natures. Every time we have a technological breakthrough the first thing we worry about is someone using it to blow us all up. The "Star Trek" ideal that Earth will eventually be a unified planet is, well, just turn on the news, folks...
I am not optimistic about the survival of humanity. This is independant of the singularity; one may have nothing to do with the other. In my eyes; it's a big race to see what happens first; some sort of singularity event that changes everything, or us running out of energy resources and lowering our populations to sustainable levels through global warfare. However, I'm a cynic. YMMV.
Indeed it does. How long do you think it would take to build enough nuclear power plants to make up for the current domestic consumption provided by oil? Half that amount? This is why a lot of environmentalists are saying we need to start building nuclear plants, and start building them yesterday.
And you're neglecting the power draw from cracking plants, the energy used during the transportation of the oil, and the fact that internal combustion engines are around 25% efficient. All incur losses to your quoted 10/8:1 ratio.
Even so, we'll assume 50% of the 20 MMBD is waste heat in processing. Is there an alternative that can provide even 10 MMBD?
According to you then we cannot move because only dino oil takes less energy to produce than what it can give out....
Only oil can provide the volumes of energy I am talking about above. That energy heats, powers, and moves industrial society. Also, you should follow the food chain; oil provides the means for mass agriculture and mass transport - both fertilizer and equipment - that feed you and make you move.
Guess what...how were we moving on our feet before rock oil....on animal power..and yes it it takes less energy to produce food than it gives out to us otherwise we would have been dead long ago...
Sure. With 200-300 million people total on the planet, living a primitive agriarian existance. The numbers are drastically different with 6 billion people, and only about 1/5th of those consume serious quantities of energy at all. Society as we know it is powered by oil.
First of all, you are assuming that you need to use oil to create an alternative fuel.
No, I am assuming you need an alternative fuel that can meet the current role of oil in western society. I am also stating the fact you need to use a alternative fuel technology that generates an energy profit, and enough of an energy profit to meet the same energy as is provided by the domestic demand for oil.
No alternative energy technology I am aware of is practical when judeged with this metric. I would love for someone to point me to a thermodynamic analysis that shows different, where all costs of production have been taken into account.
The reason I converted oil into stateless energy is to make a point; there are no options I am aware of that can replace the easily-transported and stored 20 MMBD consumption of the US, in terms of the energy contained in those 20 MMBD.
In order for equipment to be running all on ethanol or biodiesel, the ethanol or biodiesel needs to be produced at a realistic energy profit, and ideally one comparable to the 10:1 ratio oil provides, and be practical to do so in volumes comparable to oil.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.simulation-argument.com/
This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a "posthuman" stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed.
Something most people aren't aware of, is that for most of human history - drugs, hard drugs, were all legal and available. It wasn't until they were made illegal that refined versions were created. Immediately after prohibiting a substance, the suppliers will attempt to maximize profit and minimize risk. This gives you crack, heroin, hell, even moonshine. From what I can tell, society was no worse off then, although some religious people might have had higher blood pressure.
If VIDEO GAMES are ever regulated because people lack the responsibility, disipline, and self control to participate in society, we are in very bad times. It is YOUR life. Not the states. You are supposed to be FREE. With freedom comes RESPONSIBILITY.
Social symptoms my ass. Prohibition is about control, nothing more, nothing less. Well, at least we don't have a drug problem anymore!
Thankfully, unlike the marijuana and poppy growers of old, the entertainment industry is a powerful lobby - there's not much to worry about when a game franchise like GTA has revenues in the hundreds of millions (billions?). Just look at booze and cigarettes; but remember, drug dealers are evil.
Society works because if you're smart enough not to get caught, you're probably smart enough to make more money doing something productive and legal in society. Thus, the rational choice is to play by the rules.
I suspect if this were not true, society would rapidly decay into chaos.
By tracking serial numbers you could see how your currency is flowing.
Do you really want it possible to trace every item you buy? Cash is anonymous. I would become concerned if it was routine for governments to tie every dollar I withdraw from my bank account to my name. It's nobody's business what I do with my money but mine. Wouldn't this bother you?
Oh wait. If you don't like it, you must have something to hide. Where that line of reasoning ends up is not very pretty.
It's very easy to render that box useless. The law requires you to have airbags; it is very difficult to prove that an "electronics failure" happened before, after, or during an accident.
Hell, it'd even be pretty easy to load that box up with falsified information.
Fortunately, like Divx, I don't think Joe Sixpack is ignorant enough to fall for this one.
Obviously you don't know what YOU are talking about. Just because you have a buunch of scripts that is capable of cracking WEP does not mean you have a knowledge of why WEP is vunerable. WEP cannot be made totally secure (the claim was not made by me or the grandparent), however, many vendors have highly reduced the vulnerability of WEP
You are incorrect. One hole has been plugged; others appeared, some are still theoretical, and not all are widespread.
If you care, run a VPN and then it doesn't matter.
I had a 100LX.. I used it until the keys wore out. Needless to say, this was a lot. This unit was the ideal PDA/subnote; it ran DOS, had a lot of applications in ROM including lotus, had PCMCIA expandibility, ran for a WEEK off a set of AA batteries, did I mention it had the signature HP calculator keys - wonderful little guy. Weighed almost nothing. Durable case.
:-)
I had TurboC++ on it and I couldn't be happier. x86 compatible micro, I believe it was a 8088 derivative of some type.
The ideal upgrade to this would be to put in a Xscale CPU, one of those fancy transflective screens, and that's about it.
Oh yeah, I had that HP100LX almost 10 years ago now.
If you can't find a job, why not make one? I thought America was the land of opportunity?
No, seriously. Is it that hard to start companies up? I live in an economically depressed area in Canada that makes the US look like a Mecca - unemployment rates are about 20%, yes, 20% here. Things would be very bad without the social programs Canada prides itself on. Yet there is a triving little manufacturing sector.
Want a tip? Find out how to make an existing company more efficient, thus profitable. Then go make a pitch. You might be suprised.
What law has he broken, then?
No end-user, to the best of my knowledge, has EVER been procecuted for a grey market reciever in Canada. I am not sure if you are Canadian, but I am, and there are A LOT OF PEOPLE up here with DirectTV dishes hanging off their houses. I believe people have been procecuted for selling them, but I cannot see any law being upheld in court that charged someone from recieving a satellite signal (that they even paid for) illegally.
Me, I'm going looking for one of these USB gismos. Like now.
I wrote some scripts while ago to record public radio (CBC) from the radio and download it into my mp3 player awhile ago.. this didn't require anything more exotic than a cron job on my linux server and a sound card. It sounded fine.
I fail to see how this could possibly be illegal. On the other hand, I don't live in the USA. What about if I connected it to my satellite reciever? A TIVO will work on that fine, and there's over a hundred radio stations on there.
Seriously. Anyone can do this with lame, mp3enc or something like that, a wav recorder, a command line interface to their mp3 player, and cron. Isn't unix cool?
I wonder if this is correllated in any way to the percentage of people that get seasick.. luckily, I don't, and I spent a summer many moons ago working in a VR lab - no ill effects from much HMD time. I know people who couldn't use the gear at all because it'd be instant spew time though.
One thing is, after long enough, your body adapts to the feeling. It is just unpleasant until that point.
Most customers will benefit but soome (eg. less profitable customers in outlying areas) will lose out.
Hahahaha! I take it you don't live in an outlying area.
My exchange was one of the last in NORTH AMERICA to be moved off an old switch that used in band signalling. While some might understand this provided much amusement in my youth, we didn't get private lines until about 1992 if I remember right. The line quality is BAD here.
Dispite millions? being promised and provided for broadband development in Rural areas by the Canadian government, my estimated date for DSL arrival is on a geological timeframe. Luckily, the terrain here is such I might be able to get a 802.11 link to a benevolant soul in the next year or so.
Where do I live? About 30 minutes outside a major center. Not the middle of nowhere. Basic service is what the law says I get, and basic service is what I get.
Here'e to hoping for the ability to get an affordable cell-based broadband connection. Two way satellite is still out of the question.
I've given up on desktop linux for now. Mac has hardware that works, and is a good compromise. If it says on the box it'll work, it works.
Linux is great on servers and embedded - a lifesaver in many cases. As soon as you need to do custom hardware integration, it's not worth the headaches. I'm in the process of a very ambitious project that requries high resolution digital imaging - linux isn't an option, there are no drivers period for any of the cameras. Hello, windows. Windows even works pretty good, focused on a single task.
For linux to get this, the best hope is devices that adhere to some sort of standard for interoperability with host PCs. I remember buying hardware and getting schematics, once upon a time, but I think those days are over.
Another possibility is the legislate any consumer device sold on the market must publish it's communication API. This seems unworkable, but it's how cars work now - and there are lots of people who would like to change this. (OBD) It's kind of funny; when framed in terms of cars, most politicians can understand the problem - they wouldn't want to be 0wn3d by GM after shelling out big money. Why should expensive computer hardware be any different?
How could you be so short sighted and/or STUPID to not realize that the keys are possibly the best trademark of those old HP calculators? I don't know what the logic was there. I had hoped they brought them back.
:(
My reasoning behind the tungsten emulation was that no keys > crappy keys.
Maybe I'll engineer a little keypad for the Palm for numeric entry you can put side by side, like the old HP business calcs.
I suspect it was one of the two:
- Simple economics, if it's cheaper to use the faster processor and emulate the other one, it doesn't matter. Recoding for native operation may not have been possible. This is related to my second point:
- All glitches and problems with the existing design are well documented and hammered out. It may not have been feasible as I suspect there is a lot of verification that happens on these guys before they ship. If the calculator has been painstakenly debugged on one processor, it may very well be easier to insure 100% emulation than re-test all the functions.
Can anyone confirm that this calculator has the trademark keys - the 49 didn't - and I noticed they switched back to plastic. My 48 is dying and I have pretty much decided to get a tungsten T3 running power48 to replace it, but this would be far superior.
Don't buy them, and email the publisher telling them what you DID buy - and explain why.
:(
If enough people do that, then it'll go away. Failing that, give this a little while and it'll be cracked like all the rest. I hate and loathe having to keep CD's handy to play games, it's a pain in the butt when you want to do 15 minutes of fragging - it takes longer than that for me to find the cds!
Savvy publishers are aware some level of piracy helps, and doesn't hurt, overall sales. I rarely buy a game without trying the thing first, and I don't buy a game for the most part that a lot of my friends haven't tried either. I got burned way to many times, most recently on the steaming pile that is EA's attempt at a F1 simulator.
Went off like a very large firecracker. Bits of CD everywhere. You can probably cause it to happen by making cuts from the center of a CD to the outside along the radius. A few of those will weaken it enough (maybe one) to fail in higher speed drives.
I'm intrigued.. but I might put off my impending purchase of a T3. Looking at it for the sole purpose of running power48, as my real hp48 finally is showing wear on the buttons.
However, I have a bluetooth SD card, and the thing is almost useless for practical use - you can't just leave the card in there, because it sticks up about a centimeter or so and is very flimsy looking. It routinely pops out of place if you put it in your pocket with the SD card inserted.
Forget using any hard case or belt case with the SD card inserted. If you have to take it off, it defeats the purpose! (I'd love something like this for a home-pager setup on my 802.11 network).
I don't see any pictures in the press release.. but I think I'll be waiting for a T4, with 802.11 built into the device.
I agree that mastering consciousness and thought, and understanding the human brain will be one of the next great frontiers of science, and with that mastery ought to eventually come much better ability to simulate it in silico.
We may not need to understand it to simulate it. The genome has been decoded, and the biochemical processes are on their way to becoming very well understood. Once you know those two things, you can simulate the whole deal in a computer of sufficient capacity.
It may take awhile before we simulate a whole human, but I would be suprised if I didn't live to see this being done on simpler life.
We haven't solved the strong AI problem (P=NP).
This is a problem that may not need solving. Our brains are seninent and exist. Once sufficient computing power - be it classical, quantum, or other - exists, then it is reasonable to assume that something comparable to our brain except artificial can be built. We even have a pretty good start on this one, the decoded genome. If you have enough computing power, you could just simulate the whole deal starting with DNA. Efficient no, but effective. People are starting down this road with projects like Blue Gene and the distributed cousins (folding @ home).
Based on the fact we and many thousands of sentient creatures exist of varying complexity already, this is only a matter of time. To think otherwise implies there is something magical about how we work - and there is no evidence for that.
Once an artificial AI has been created, it is free to improve upon both it's knowledge and architecture in real time. This feeds back on itself, and results in the "singularity" that people are talking about here. No other great achivements are needed; just an AI that is a little teeny bit smarter than your average human.
It is reasonable to assume once this AI has been created, then it can go to work on issues like Quantum Gravity and who knows what else. An AI doesn't have to die (Ever), and can propagate at the speed of light. Robots are much hardier space explorers than we are. In effect, it is the last invention man needs to make.
People thought the genome would take decades or longer to sequence. They were wrong. I suspect a lot of people are wrong about AI, too. Neural networks are very interesting things, and the hardware to experiment with them in real time (reconfigurable FPGAs and large computer memories) is just becoming available to low-budget and self-funded researchers. (yay!)
And, more fundamentally, we haven't solved the problem of our own
natures. Every time we have a technological breakthrough the first
thing we worry about is someone using it to blow us all up. The "Star
Trek" ideal that Earth will eventually be a unified planet is, well,
just turn on the news, folks...
I am not optimistic about the survival of humanity. This is independant of the singularity; one may have nothing to do with the other. In my eyes; it's a big race to see what happens first; some sort of singularity event that changes everything, or us running out of energy resources and lowering our populations to sustainable levels through global warfare. However, I'm a cynic. YMMV.
Boy, they weren't kidding, were they.
Uranium. Beats the shit out of it.
Indeed it does. How long do you think it would take to build enough nuclear power plants to make up for the current domestic consumption provided by oil? Half that amount? This is why a lot of environmentalists are saying we need to start building nuclear plants, and start building them yesterday.
And you're neglecting the power draw from cracking plants, the energy used during the transportation of the oil, and the fact that internal combustion engines are around 25% efficient. All incur losses to your quoted 10/8:1 ratio.
Even so, we'll assume 50% of the 20 MMBD is waste heat in processing. Is there an alternative that can provide even 10 MMBD?
According to you then we cannot move because only dino oil takes less energy to produce than what it can give out....
Only oil can provide the volumes of energy I am talking about above. That energy heats, powers, and moves industrial society. Also, you should follow the food chain; oil provides the means for mass agriculture and mass transport - both fertilizer and equipment - that feed you and make you move.
Guess what...how were we moving on our feet before rock oil....on animal power..and yes it it takes less energy to produce food than it gives out to us otherwise we would have been dead long ago...
Sure. With 200-300 million people total on the planet, living a primitive agriarian existance. The numbers are drastically different with 6 billion people, and only about 1/5th of those consume serious quantities of energy at all. Society as we know it is powered by oil.
First of all, you are assuming that you need to use oil to create an alternative fuel.
No, I am assuming you need an alternative fuel that can meet the current role of oil in western society. I am also stating the fact you need to use a alternative fuel technology that generates an energy profit, and enough of an energy profit to meet the same energy as is provided by the domestic demand for oil.
No alternative energy technology I am aware of is practical when judeged with this metric. I would love for someone to point me to a thermodynamic analysis that shows different, where all costs of production have been taken into account.
The reason I converted oil into stateless energy is to make a point; there are no options I am aware of that can replace the easily-transported and stored 20 MMBD consumption of the US, in terms of the energy contained in those 20 MMBD.
In order for equipment to be running all on ethanol or biodiesel, the ethanol or biodiesel needs to be produced at a realistic energy profit, and ideally one comparable to the 10:1 ratio oil provides, and be practical to do so in volumes comparable to oil.