If we're talking about large scales of interconnection between these artificial neurons, optical signaling is clearly a good first step. Designing adequate wiring with conventional technology would be a nightmare.
Can you imagine using quantum entangled particles to communicate between neurons? Now that kind of brain would be off the hook!
A technological civilization is nothing like a mass extinction event. I find it deeply ironic that the title of this thread comes from someone so deeply clueless.
If a civilization pollutes its environment and destroys all the habitat that a multitude of species needs for survival, and does this worldwide, yes, it is absolutely causing a mass extinction event, with the additional curse of its sustained and delusional effort as opposed to a natural accident.
Your idea of clueless is interesting. There are so many examples of the unnatural extinctions of vital ecosystems in the present world that you have to be wilfully ignorant to make that statement. Will you people not get a clue until you can't get tuna on your plate, or will the mercury and lead levels prevent that too?
CO2 isn't a simple count of parts per million; it's got a sustained impact. The forests that died due to beetles swarming outside of their usual range won't come back right away, and the soil there will not just stay put waiting for them to come back. The methane hydrates at the bottom of the ocean that are melting and multiplying the greenhouse effect won't re-freeze. We're looking at positive feedback loops here.
Rises and falls of CO2 in the geological timeline take place over thousands of years and give some species a chance to adapt in time to survive the mass extinction events that usually go along with it. The only sign we have of something this drastic was a meteor impact in Siberia where large coal reserves once were; we have the evidence now that resulting volcanic activity burned that coal and released its carbon into the atmosphere. That's the only natural analogue I can think of for the massive industrial extraction of hundreds of millions of years worth of sequestered carbon dioxide and releasing it into the atmosphere, and while it was natural, the result was the Permian/Triassic extinction which killed over 90% of the extent species worldwide. The ecosystems took millenia to recover.
We have to change course soon. The previous recovery was from a natural disaster, not an industrial civilization that stops at nothing to fuel its growth and destroys habitat and releases large amounts of pollution while doing it. This is unprecedented. Y2K had the IT industry hauling ass to prevent serious problems, but this requires an unprecedented effort; otherwise, our generation will see the end of great many beautiful things, and most of us will perish for the lack of healthy ecosystems that we didn't assign a dollar value to.
You misunderstand. I feel it's an obligation to hand the world to our children at least as good as we found it, and presently, we're failing abysmally. No really, how can you have a child knowing full well you'd have to explain to them why your generation ran their world off the edge with the foot literally on the gas?
Is that scientists, on average, are not crazed alarmists. They work in a field full of cut-throat peer review where the one who truly, verifiably disproves the most long-standing stuff gets the recognition and the spoils. Their language is conservative, a wide range of speculation must be admitted for consideration but they're going to err on the side of caution.
There's nothing in nature short of a major mass extinction event to match what we're creating. I can't fathom why anyone's having kids. The kids we have already are truly screwed.
Who says you have to code in raw GObject C? Did you have a look at Vala, which is awfully similar to C#, or Genie, which is much like Python, but both of which compile through C+GObject down to machine code without a virtual machine? They're strikingly beautiful and lightweight.
Keyboard shortcuts. They're still a mess. I can't believe that anyone decided that hard-coding the Windows key would fly with the Linux crowd.
At this point, I say screw it. I want a standard keyboard shortcut interface. There's no reason why changing desktop environments should mean that the way I toggle windows between fullscreen and minimized, open/close windows and tabs, cut and paste totally changes. There's no reason I should have to define these common actions in every single app, or relearn them because someone decided that a Linux desktop should be *inflexible*. Linux was built by power users with their hands on the keyboard - why isn't this standardized as part of freedesktop.org?
I can work at a speed that's blinding to the mouse-bound when not tripping over these "improvements", and I'm not going to use something that hinders me.
With every major population growth story, you can guarantee there's going to be a lot of misanthropism, blaming the developing countries, so forth. Malthus is will be quoted. Then people will respond to that in anger, maintaining the false choice between insane growth and brutal population control.
In terms of consumption, the average Canadian needs a third less of resources, the average Italian 55% less - they don't lead a lifestyle substantially less comfortable than the US citizen. The average East Indian consumes an eleventh - yet in some parts of India where wealth is distributed sensibly, they have almost the same life expectancy and literacy rate.
There are, better yet, lifestyles that are eco-positive. It is possible for this world to be richer for all species as a result of the human presence, if done correctly. Some very startling theories about the pre-Columbian Amazon forest suggest that it was largely anthropogenic - that cultivation of the forest itself through biochar and seeding of food-bearing species yielded a win-win scenario for people and the environment.
It would be a grave mistake to ask what technology can do for this situation, instead of what's appropriate to do about it. *Appropriate* technology is important. For an example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sohI6vnWZmk
Anthropogenic climate change? Yes, put that away quick!
Because cutting down half the world's forests and polluting the waterways such that the natural carbon sinks are destroyed, and raising the carbon level from 280ppm to 390ppm inside of two centuries can't be expected to cause anything.
And if ecosystems can't evolve as fast as industry destroys their habitat, that disagrees with our expectation that they rush to meet industrial timescales, not geological. No fallout should be expected from this.
In the meantime, I'm going home to bake biscuits. I'll throw out half the dough, use half again the yeast, and bake it in a flash over a gas grill running as hot as I can get it. If they don't turn out like mom's, I'll blame natural causes.
And remember, since he doesn't believe in redistributing wealth, those who've profited over all the shenanigans to date and concentrated the wealth will have an open season on the rest of us the robber barons could only dream of!
The prospect of space, I think, will not be a test of human drive, but also of patience. We could blast off on a rocket and get a few people to the moon, but to land people elsewhere with supplies to last, we're going to need both less energy-intense, more gradual, affordable means of travel, and more ability to live off the "land" once there.
Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan's book Comet is instructive, I think. They propose using comets, which have abundant water ice, to plant genetically engineered trees which would grow to enormous sizes to gather faint starlight, and foster a habitat at the core. That could be interesting as a part of a lasting ecosystem. But that's nothing like Earth! This isn't a drive out through the desert, roaring along. The model to follow is the living one: gradual, adaptable, the vital processes running in parallel at low temperature.
This would take time. Life on the scale of space travel needs to move very, very slowly. If intelligent life is to go interstellar, I surmise we'll need to genetically engineer a number of species with a metabolism that can radically slow down for centuries or millenia. We'll need to consider cellular structures inspired by the extremophile bacteria Deinococcus Radiodurans which can survive 300x the radiation we can. The natives of Earth are bound to it, really: we evolved over billions of years for this planet and transplanting isn't in the cards for most of us. The adaptations on the fringes of life with intelligent intervention here are what it's going to take to survive out there.
Incidentally, If I am right about this, intelligence in space is a very slow, vast, patient thing. We're hummingbirds in a jungle compared to such beings. Perhaps SETI needs to think slow? I digress.
I think this approach is much more feasible. Adapting to cosmic conditions and cosmic time makes space seem possible.
They aren't even allowing "open flames" of various sorts on the sidewalk in front of the Federal Reserve building. A generator would be shut down by the police in a heartbeat. This is a highly pedestrian inner city and they're touchy about that.
A quick peek at Google Maps street view might have been more relevant.
What's with the armchair criticism? There's not a lot of space there. I walk past these guys every day: they've got a lot of things to communicate, and that means keeping cell phones and laptops charged for full time and part time protesters. There are good technical reasons for their choice: many of us are interested in clean energy and are protesting in part corporate pursuit of fossil fuels at all costs. They've lots of human energy and electrical outlets, not so much. The list goes on.
The key difference between the origins of the Tea Party and this nascent movement is that the former assumes an equality of social empowerment outside of government, and the latter recognizes drastic differences that is preventing government from serving people instead of power. Think about it. Libertarians say things that are great as long as there aren't great divides of power caused by poverty and privilege, hence they don't focus on ways to counteract those.
I think the appeal of one side or the other has to do with one's experience of living in poverty, riches, or somewhere in the middle. Regardless, at least there's enough common ground between everyone that Wall Street is screwing over that the people are starting to unite.
First, most of the news outlets are highly incestuously owned by the shame shareholders and parent companies that are being protested against, and you're not going to see them give honest coverage of this new opposition. Get out to the nearest protest and ask people what they're there for.
Second, if you're going to combat a monopoly from within, you have to start with what's at hand. Simple, hard fact. Spotting brand names on cameras is not a real critique of what these protests are trying to achieve.
The real aristocracy does everything by proxy, by funding, by corporations, and by front organizations. The single most effective thing they ever did was to replace real state-issued money with bank-issued monetized debt. That's how you grab a nation by the balls without ever using physical force.
I appreciate that statement, because by the measures you've stated, the bulk of the protesters I've encountered are right on target. The Occupy San Francisco group is, after all, encamped in front of the Federal Reserve building, and "End the Fed" is playing really strongly with the sentiments I've encountered across their diverse political spectrum. As the numbers of people increase it's important to spread the information on what the Federal Reserve and fractional banking represent, and why it's the root of so much political corruption.
Why not use your considerable awareness to put together flyers with summaries and links to websites? The more people get out there with a refusal to settle for the oligarch's scraps, the more likely we'll get something done.
Extracting and releasing hundreds of millions of years' worth of sequestered CO2 in less than two centuries is not natural in the way you and I might think.
This may well have happened in nature before - the prevailing theory about the Permian-Triassic mass extinction event, the mother of them all which killed over 90% of all species living at that time, is that a comet hit what is now Siberia where huge coal deposits used to be, triggering volcanic activity which burned and released the bulk of that coal. That's natural as in a huge natural disaster.
What do they have in common? They all vanish after a few years, because once those communes get past a certain size, they become what they were trying to get away from. So they either stay small and completely under the radar, or they grow big and get absorbed by their environment.
You know, there's good reason to question that assumption. Intentional communities are still going strong, some of them are over 40 years old. The rash of failed experiments from the sixties didn't put the kibosh on the whole thing.
No, incorrect; the hardware of the 386SX was fully 32-bit internally. Its external buses and I/O were 16-bit, but it was designed to do this to require minimal adaption of motherboards designed for the 16-bit 286 while running all 32-bit 386 software. What you have here is an economy version of the real thing. This installation was more an exercise in sleuthing for properly compiled software, but the grandparent is correct, the hardware was designed to accomplish this.
But even if you don't think rising temperatures are a concern, the acidification of the oceans should amply serve that destroying forests and burning massive amounts of previously sequestered fossil fuel is a bad thing. If you feel up to living to see a sixth mass extinction including many shellfish, we're all set.
But would you argue that coal or uranium just arrive in a puff of magic at their powerplants? The supply chain and the impact on environment and health of non-renewable fuels are typically left out of the numbers by their advocates, but they're enormous factors.
This thing has a considerable edge in safety and maintenance costs. Its energy input is completely clean and in place. It won't break and flood a valley, send radioactive particles into the atmosphere, or push our country towards more risky deep-sea dwelling. We don't have to blow up mountains and leave vast swathes of land lifeless or polluted, we don't have to risk another Gulf of Mexico, we don't have to mine the freaking Grand Canyon. We can build this and with smart water harvesting get a food crop out of it too. Build thirty of these to match your 6000 MW top *gross* production, and I bet you in the long run they'll kick the crap out of fossil fuels for net energy production, possibly even before figuring the costs of cleaning up - or not cleaning up - all the pollution.
Most parts of America could benefit from this advice, which is what green building design advocates are saying. Clinton's just onto one of the most simple and direct talking points. It'd be one step towards passive solar design, which we'd all best apply, because doing otherwise is simply flagrant waste of energy spent fighting more energy that ought to be redirected instead.
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If we're talking about large scales of interconnection between these artificial neurons, optical signaling is clearly a good first step. Designing adequate wiring with conventional technology would be a nightmare.
Can you imagine using quantum entangled particles to communicate between neurons? Now that kind of brain would be off the hook!
I've got another one for you. The muscles needed to interact with the simulation, they can run on mostly or all vegetables!
A technological civilization is nothing like a mass extinction event. I find it deeply ironic that the title of this thread comes from someone so deeply clueless.
If a civilization pollutes its environment and destroys all the habitat that a multitude of species needs for survival, and does this worldwide, yes, it is absolutely causing a mass extinction event, with the additional curse of its sustained and delusional effort as opposed to a natural accident.
Your idea of clueless is interesting. There are so many examples of the unnatural extinctions of vital ecosystems in the present world that you have to be wilfully ignorant to make that statement. Will you people not get a clue until you can't get tuna on your plate, or will the mercury and lead levels prevent that too?
CO2 isn't a simple count of parts per million; it's got a sustained impact. The forests that died due to beetles swarming outside of their usual range won't come back right away, and the soil there will not just stay put waiting for them to come back. The methane hydrates at the bottom of the ocean that are melting and multiplying the greenhouse effect won't re-freeze. We're looking at positive feedback loops here.
Rises and falls of CO2 in the geological timeline take place over thousands of years and give some species a chance to adapt in time to survive the mass extinction events that usually go along with it. The only sign we have of something this drastic was a meteor impact in Siberia where large coal reserves once were; we have the evidence now that resulting volcanic activity burned that coal and released its carbon into the atmosphere. That's the only natural analogue I can think of for the massive industrial extraction of hundreds of millions of years worth of sequestered carbon dioxide and releasing it into the atmosphere, and while it was natural, the result was the Permian/Triassic extinction which killed over 90% of the extent species worldwide. The ecosystems took millenia to recover.
We have to change course soon. The previous recovery was from a natural disaster, not an industrial civilization that stops at nothing to fuel its growth and destroys habitat and releases large amounts of pollution while doing it. This is unprecedented. Y2K had the IT industry hauling ass to prevent serious problems, but this requires an unprecedented effort; otherwise, our generation will see the end of great many beautiful things, and most of us will perish for the lack of healthy ecosystems that we didn't assign a dollar value to.
You misunderstand. I feel it's an obligation to hand the world to our children at least as good as we found it, and presently, we're failing abysmally. No really, how can you have a child knowing full well you'd have to explain to them why your generation ran their world off the edge with the foot literally on the gas?
Is that scientists, on average, are not crazed alarmists. They work in a field full of cut-throat peer review where the one who truly, verifiably disproves the most long-standing stuff gets the recognition and the spoils. Their language is conservative, a wide range of speculation must be admitted for consideration but they're going to err on the side of caution.
There's nothing in nature short of a major mass extinction event to match what we're creating. I can't fathom why anyone's having kids. The kids we have already are truly screwed.
Who says you have to code in raw GObject C? Did you have a look at Vala, which is awfully similar to C#, or Genie, which is much like Python, but both of which compile through C+GObject down to machine code without a virtual machine? They're strikingly beautiful and lightweight.
Keyboard shortcuts. They're still a mess. I can't believe that anyone decided that hard-coding the Windows key would fly with the Linux crowd.
At this point, I say screw it. I want a standard keyboard shortcut interface. There's no reason why changing desktop environments should mean that the way I toggle windows between fullscreen and minimized, open/close windows and tabs, cut and paste totally changes. There's no reason I should have to define these common actions in every single app, or relearn them because someone decided that a Linux desktop should be *inflexible*. Linux was built by power users with their hands on the keyboard - why isn't this standardized as part of freedesktop.org?
I can work at a speed that's blinding to the mouse-bound when not tripping over these "improvements", and I'm not going to use something that hinders me.
With every major population growth story, you can guarantee there's going to be a lot of misanthropism, blaming the developing countries, so forth. Malthus is will be quoted. Then people will respond to that in anger, maintaining the false choice between insane growth and brutal population control.
In terms of consumption, the average Canadian needs a third less of resources, the average Italian 55% less - they don't lead a lifestyle substantially less comfortable than the US citizen. The average East Indian consumes an eleventh - yet in some parts of India where wealth is distributed sensibly, they have almost the same life expectancy and literacy rate.
There are, better yet, lifestyles that are eco-positive. It is possible for this world to be richer for all species as a result of the human presence, if done correctly. Some very startling theories about the pre-Columbian Amazon forest suggest that it was largely anthropogenic - that cultivation of the forest itself through biochar and seeding of food-bearing species yielded a win-win scenario for people and the environment.
It would be a grave mistake to ask what technology can do for this situation, instead of what's appropriate to do about it. *Appropriate* technology is important. For an example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sohI6vnWZmk
Anthropogenic climate change? Yes, put that away quick!
Because cutting down half the world's forests and polluting the waterways such that the natural carbon sinks are destroyed, and raising the carbon level from 280ppm to 390ppm inside of two centuries can't be expected to cause anything.
And if ecosystems can't evolve as fast as industry destroys their habitat, that disagrees with our expectation that they rush to meet industrial timescales, not geological. No fallout should be expected from this.
In the meantime, I'm going home to bake biscuits. I'll throw out half the dough, use half again the yeast, and bake it in a flash over a gas grill running as hot as I can get it. If they don't turn out like mom's, I'll blame natural causes.
And remember, since he doesn't believe in redistributing wealth, those who've profited over all the shenanigans to date and concentrated the wealth will have an open season on the rest of us the robber barons could only dream of!
The prospect of space, I think, will not be a test of human drive, but also of patience. We could blast off on a rocket and get a few people to the moon, but to land people elsewhere with supplies to last, we're going to need both less energy-intense, more gradual, affordable means of travel, and more ability to live off the "land" once there.
Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan's book Comet is instructive, I think. They propose using comets, which have abundant water ice, to plant genetically engineered trees which would grow to enormous sizes to gather faint starlight, and foster a habitat at the core. That could be interesting as a part of a lasting ecosystem. But that's nothing like Earth! This isn't a drive out through the desert, roaring along. The model to follow is the living one: gradual, adaptable, the vital processes running in parallel at low temperature.
This would take time. Life on the scale of space travel needs to move very, very slowly. If intelligent life is to go interstellar, I surmise we'll need to genetically engineer a number of species with a metabolism that can radically slow down for centuries or millenia. We'll need to consider cellular structures inspired by the extremophile bacteria Deinococcus Radiodurans which can survive 300x the radiation we can. The natives of Earth are bound to it, really: we evolved over billions of years for this planet and transplanting isn't in the cards for most of us. The adaptations on the fringes of life with intelligent intervention here are what it's going to take to survive out there.
Incidentally, If I am right about this, intelligence in space is a very slow, vast, patient thing. We're hummingbirds in a jungle compared to such beings. Perhaps SETI needs to think slow? I digress.
I think this approach is much more feasible. Adapting to cosmic conditions and cosmic time makes space seem possible.
They aren't even allowing "open flames" of various sorts on the sidewalk in front of the Federal Reserve building. A generator would be shut down by the police in a heartbeat. This is a highly pedestrian inner city and they're touchy about that.
A quick peek at Google Maps street view might have been more relevant.
What's with the armchair criticism? There's not a lot of space there. I walk past these guys every day: they've got a lot of things to communicate, and that means keeping cell phones and laptops charged for full time and part time protesters. There are good technical reasons for their choice: many of us are interested in clean energy and are protesting in part corporate pursuit of fossil fuels at all costs. They've lots of human energy and electrical outlets, not so much. The list goes on.
The key difference between the origins of the Tea Party and this nascent movement is that the former assumes an equality of social empowerment outside of government, and the latter recognizes drastic differences that is preventing government from serving people instead of power. Think about it. Libertarians say things that are great as long as there aren't great divides of power caused by poverty and privilege, hence they don't focus on ways to counteract those.
I think the appeal of one side or the other has to do with one's experience of living in poverty, riches, or somewhere in the middle. Regardless, at least there's enough common ground between everyone that Wall Street is screwing over that the people are starting to unite.
First, most of the news outlets are highly incestuously owned by the shame shareholders and parent companies that are being protested against, and you're not going to see them give honest coverage of this new opposition. Get out to the nearest protest and ask people what they're there for.
Second, if you're going to combat a monopoly from within, you have to start with what's at hand. Simple, hard fact. Spotting brand names on cameras is not a real critique of what these protests are trying to achieve.
False choice: end with a whimper or end with a bang. That seems to encourage inaction, which is the one course where defeat is 100% guaranteed.
The real aristocracy does everything by proxy, by funding, by corporations, and by front organizations. The single most effective thing they ever did was to replace real state-issued money with bank-issued monetized debt. That's how you grab a nation by the balls without ever using physical force.
I appreciate that statement, because by the measures you've stated, the bulk of the protesters I've encountered are right on target. The Occupy San Francisco group is, after all, encamped in front of the Federal Reserve building, and "End the Fed" is playing really strongly with the sentiments I've encountered across their diverse political spectrum. As the numbers of people increase it's important to spread the information on what the Federal Reserve and fractional banking represent, and why it's the root of so much political corruption.
Why not use your considerable awareness to put together flyers with summaries and links to websites? The more people get out there with a refusal to settle for the oligarch's scraps, the more likely we'll get something done.
Extracting and releasing hundreds of millions of years' worth of sequestered CO2 in less than two centuries is not natural in the way you and I might think.
This may well have happened in nature before - the prevailing theory about the Permian-Triassic mass extinction event, the mother of them all which killed over 90% of all species living at that time, is that a comet hit what is now Siberia where huge coal deposits used to be, triggering volcanic activity which burned and released the bulk of that coal. That's natural as in a huge natural disaster.
A disaster is precisely what we're looking at.
What do they have in common? They all vanish after a few years, because once those communes get past a certain size, they become what they were trying to get away from. So they either stay small and completely under the radar, or they grow big and get absorbed by their environment.
You know, there's good reason to question that assumption. Intentional communities are still going strong, some of them are over 40 years old. The rash of failed experiments from the sixties didn't put the kibosh on the whole thing.
No, incorrect; the hardware of the 386SX was fully 32-bit internally. Its external buses and I/O were 16-bit, but it was designed to do this to require minimal adaption of motherboards designed for the 16-bit 286 while running all 32-bit 386 software. What you have here is an economy version of the real thing. This installation was more an exercise in sleuthing for properly compiled software, but the grandparent is correct, the hardware was designed to accomplish this.
But even if you don't think rising temperatures are a concern, the acidification of the oceans should amply serve that destroying forests and burning massive amounts of previously sequestered fossil fuel is a bad thing. If you feel up to living to see a sixth mass extinction including many shellfish, we're all set.
http://www.ocean-acidification.net/FAQacidity.html
s/dwelling/drilling, though there are people advocating that too.
But would you argue that coal or uranium just arrive in a puff of magic at their powerplants? The supply chain and the impact on environment and health of non-renewable fuels are typically left out of the numbers by their advocates, but they're enormous factors.
This thing has a considerable edge in safety and maintenance costs. Its energy input is completely clean and in place. It won't break and flood a valley, send radioactive particles into the atmosphere, or push our country towards more risky deep-sea dwelling. We don't have to blow up mountains and leave vast swathes of land lifeless or polluted, we don't have to risk another Gulf of Mexico, we don't have to mine the freaking Grand Canyon. We can build this and with smart water harvesting get a food crop out of it too. Build thirty of these to match your 6000 MW top *gross* production, and I bet you in the long run they'll kick the crap out of fossil fuels for net energy production, possibly even before figuring the costs of cleaning up - or not cleaning up - all the pollution.
Most parts of America could benefit from this advice, which is what green building design advocates are saying. Clinton's just onto one of the most simple and direct talking points. It'd be one step towards passive solar design, which we'd all best apply, because doing otherwise is simply flagrant waste of energy spent fighting more energy that ought to be redirected instead.