I seem to recall monochromatic ones are around 60-70% efficient. And photosynthesis apparently does get a lot more efficient when you're not duplicating the IR, UV portions, or the green band (that photosynthesis misses) of sunlight.
Current solar-powered battery storage technology isn't adequate to sustain artificial light sources for two weeks at the time.
This is simply wrong. Rechargeable batteries can easily hold a charge longer than two weeks. And once you have that, you have the ability to sustain light sources on battery power for two weeks.
Thus, the most practical solution is simply to use some sort of Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator, not unlike the one powering the current Mars Science lab, to power the LEDs that will spur photosynthesis in lunar greenhouses.
No, it isn't. RTGs are limited by heat dissipation. Put enough isotope in one place and it heats up enough to melt. More and it'll eventually vaporize or perhaps even achieve criticality (such as the case with plutonium 238). A traditional nuclear plant scales better at high power levels.
So to get the scheme to work on a large scale, one needs a whole bunch of RTGs through the complex. That introduces all sorts of complexity issues.
Frankly, a better approach to me seems to be solar thermal with underground storage of heat. Heat up the fluid during the lunar day and draw down the heat during the lunar night.
Yet you are advocating not to have an agency that stops the shady practices that commercial credit card companies have done for decades. I say you are too focused on the wrong problem.
Don't get me wrong. I think such an organization is a colossal waste of society's resources (the credit card customer should be doing due diligence). But that's not what I've been arguing all along. That this organization could have been implemented in a democratic way rather than a way that attempts to put it out of reach of democratic processes or reform.
Recall the saying, "the ends justify the means"? Well, in my view, that saying isn't true. One can indeed have means that discredit the ends. This is such a case.
Both were created by acts of of Congress. So what is to stop Congress from gutting the CFPB of all power like they did with the CFTC?
The ignorance in this paragraph is remarkable. Congress should be able to gut the CFPB at any time just like any other regulatory agency. It is their power and prerogative as I noted before. That is the primary way we keep such organizations under control and aligned with the interests of US citizens and society.
From my point of view, what happened is that the politic elections of 2008 brought a quirky political faction to power which doesn't see that sort of power very often. Rather than pass sensible law with a few compromises which would have weathered an opposition regime, they forced through their agenda (at least as much as they could get their allies in US Congress to support) and tried some anti-democratic gimmicks to prevent that law from being reversed.
To be blunt here, nothing makes the CFPB any more special than any other regulatory agency. If it can't survive an onslaught from the Republicans, then it means that the US public didn't want that agency enough.
What do you mean ? The uncertainty principle of quantum theory is not enough for you ? That's the root of all 'chance'.
Of course not. It's an aspect of classical observation of a quantum system with noncommutative observables.
From a purely quantum viewpoint, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle simply doesn't exist and the system is purely deterministic, though perhaps not in a way that a purely quantum component can arbitrary predict (say due to complex chaotic behavior in the quantum system requiring more quantum information/structure to predict than a component of that system can have).
What makes more sense: that 4712784365435.36354231641801...32132132 is the only number that *really* exists, or that it exists as part of the Real numbers - a bigger, more inclusive but definitely much simpler entity?
The correct answer is "neither". Numbers do not have an existence in themselves.
Anything complex looks unlikely, arbitrary and absurd just by itself. Some people think the MWI is unjustified because it requires all these extra universes, but to me you still only have the one universe; it's just bigger, simpler, and makes much more sense.
As a possible model of reality, it has some parsimonious features, such as simplicity of overall description. But it also has features which aren't, such as the need for structure (the "many universes") which from our current point of view, do not exist in any sense of the word. We then have to describe the effects of that structure in terms of our universe, as observable internal structure rather than unobservable external structure.
With reality, I suspect the same principle applies. Everything that can exist does so, as it has no reason not to. Nothing makes sense without everything else, and any single thing *implies* everything else.
The only problem is that it doesn't make sense to say things exist which we can't observe either directly or through their effects on our observable universe.
The uncertainty principle is a very base of quantum theory and you cannot pretend it's not valid.
That phenomena says nothing about how the universe exists or possibly came about.
It introduces random chance into every chemical process, hence into biology at every step.
From our limited, classical viewpoints. It doesn't similarly introduce random chance for purely quantum objects (there's no quantum version of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle). A corresponding viewpoint from the quantum level is purely deterministic.
Neither is it evidence that the universe came about through random chance rather than purpose since the principle has nothing to say about that matter.
Enough evidence for you ?
I'm sorry, but it's not evidence of what you want.
No, there is absolutely NO evidence of design or purpose but there is a growing body of evidence it was chance and luck. If you can't find the scientific evidence for the chance probability, then you are not looking.
Again, no evidence provided, just assertions made.
So what do you want? A single post that will dispel all your utter ignorance (whether real or feigned) of physics and biology?
To be honest, I think it would be quite unique in the whole universe if you were able to dispel the particular ignorance which I readily admit to.
You honestly can't think of one single thing that might make someone think you're here because of senseless natural processes?
Honestly, no. Keep in mind that many senseless objects and natural processes have a purpose to them from our point of view, because we use them with purpose. Similarly, the cells of our bodies don't in themselves have any sort of sentience, but the whole does.
All equally valid and invalid. Which gets to the core of my original observation. The claims that the universe has a purpose to it or comes out of random chance both appear to be supernatural explanations. One needs some sort of evidence to make them something other than a whimsy of the moment.
But the evidence is that humans came about by chance, whether or not the universe as a whole was purposeful.
It is remarkable that I've received about ten direct replies to my post or followup messages, including several people claiming that such evidence exists, yet not one person has actually provided any of this alleged evidence.
So instead of just telling me evidence exists, give me this evidence so that I may judge for myself.
Is living in a better (and more expensive) neighborhood more important than having a parent home so that the kids don't need to be shuffled off to daycare after school?
If that means the difference between a good and crap school, then yes. And that's just in the narrow viewpoint of educating students. It can be a lot of money to throw away merely because you think the kid should have a different home environment.
And you'd have a valid point if one of the above scenarios were somehow much less likely than the other. In the case of the pink elephant, one scenerio is a lot more far fetched than the other.
But we don't know enough to even know if it would make sense to assign probabilities to the scenarios of this thread (the concepts may be ill-defined for reasons we don't currently understand), and it may well be impossible to know more about such things than we know now. Such are the limitations of human knowledge.
Going back to the original assertion of lack of evidence, where's the evidence that indicates a greater likelihood of the universe being created by chance rather than purpose?
I'm not sure if there will be any mud slinging about this before the election as I doubt the republicans want to draw attention to foreign affairs after Romney's rather terrible overseas trip and the fact his ticket has no foreign policy experience at all but still I can see it happen.
I on the other hand hope there's lots of mudslinging. There's no more truth or objectivity in placid campaigns than enraged ones. And the latter have a lot more spirit and engagement to them. Politeness is vastly overrated in politics anyway.
And "Romney's rather terrible overseas trip"? Ignoring that that's an awfully weak talking point, how is that worse than the typical Obama overseas trip? At least, he hasn't tried to insult his hosts or murmured the exact same platitudes to numerous different host countries.
There are several problems with the idea. First, public education is crap and already takes up too much time. If it were a full time job, students would already be putting in roughly 8-10 kid-years of work. And they'd get out a high school diploma which most places no longer respect and near-zero work experience. The schools already are in a great position to educate or train students. How about they use those opportunities first before sucking up more of our students' time?
Second, where's the time for long vacations going to come from? If the longest free period of time is three weeks, then you aren't going to be able to have vacations longer than that. That excludes, for example, my cool road trip with my family to Alaska along the Alaskan highway. It took us five weeks to do that.
And of course, this is all forced upon defenseless students. Just another cost of being alive and sucking air that doesn't need to be there.
In all our human experience, laws can only come from legislatures, from humans with minds. No human laws have ever arisen apart from human minds.
Law comes from human minds. Ok.
Is it logical to postulate that all the complex laws of nature came from something other than a mind? The question is whose mind? The vast majority of people on earth believe in some kind of God that created things. Only a small minority of people believe that we are here by chance.
So you're saying that one or more *human* minds created the laws that the universe operates under. Do you happen to have a copy of the legislation? It'd simplify scientific endeavors a great deal.
Ok then we should abolish the Federal Reserve then?
Think about it. They did after all just print somewhere in the neighborhood of 4 trillion dollars in order to prop up "too big to fail" banks and other such institutions.v Maybe their activities just aren't in the best interests of the US.
Did you read anything I wrote above? Congress interfered with the CFTC. It was not for the betterment of the country. It was for Wall Street who wanted no regulation or oversight. When it blew up in their faces, they got bailed out by the government and to this day resist any oversight or regulation despite that being the direct cause of the problems.
Yes, and you correctly read my reply. What makes you think the US would remain a democracy, if the regulatory agencies are placed out of reach of the voters and their proxies? It's bizarre how much effort is being expended to attempt an untouchable organization.
And your explanation above needs to consider the role that the Federal Reserve and other central banks played in the mess. Keep in mind that their years of easy credit coupled with extremely low reserve requirements (that plus accounting standards are the only regulation the financial world needs) were the primary engine for the creation of the real estate bubble, not the morass of poorly thought out finance law that passes for regulation in the developed world.
So what? That's the prerogative of Congress to do so.
Lassiez Faire to the bitter end I see.
"Democracy" not "laissez faire". The government is corrupt merely because that's what large, unaccountable governments do.
Okay the which agency? Please tell us which one should have been in charge of it. For each agency you name, there will be reasons why that agency was not selected.
Department of the Treasury or Department of Commerce. I don't care which.
Then how do you plan to enforce any of the laws that Congress enacted. There is no such organization today.
The US president has been tasked by the US Constitution with overseeing the regulations and bureaucracies mandated and paid for by Congress.
The minimum connection was for independence as it is part of the Federal Reserve.
And why is that considered a good thing?
If there was a dependence, then politics could interfere with their decisions
As it should be. The CFPB is a political body making political decisions. It should be interfered with routinely by elected politicians who should be overseeing its activities directly, just as happens with most other federal government bureaucracies.
Under the rules set by Congress, her agency was to oversee derivatives. Pushed by powerful lobbies and Alan Greenspan, Congress stripped her agency of any power.
So what? That's the prerogative of Congress to do so.
No, there is no single agency that had the authority to do anything about the shady practices of the credit card companies. The agency was created to consolidate different aspects of different agencies for this single purpose.
So what? It would have been trivial to allocate such powers to an existing agency rather than create a new one with novel powers and immunities.
Slashdot Mirror
And as to numbers, in a kind of Platonistic way, I'd say they do exist.
The only problem with that is that Platonic existence is not existence.
That phenomena says nothing about how the universe exists or possibly came about.
That wasn't your question.
Or happened on purpose as the case may be. Without evidence one way or another, there's no point to taking a stand on the issue.
Random fluctuation in the base state of the vacuum are suspected in the birth of the universe.
We see random fluctuations because of the way we see the universe. Those random fluctuations don't exist in a purely quantum viewpoint.
Further, suspicion isn't evidence.
Again, where is the evidence?
I seem to recall monochromatic ones are around 60-70% efficient. And photosynthesis apparently does get a lot more efficient when you're not duplicating the IR, UV portions, or the green band (that photosynthesis misses) of sunlight.
Current solar-powered battery storage technology isn't adequate to sustain artificial light sources for two weeks at the time.
This is simply wrong. Rechargeable batteries can easily hold a charge longer than two weeks. And once you have that, you have the ability to sustain light sources on battery power for two weeks.
Thus, the most practical solution is simply to use some sort of Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator, not unlike the one powering the current Mars Science lab, to power the LEDs that will spur photosynthesis in lunar greenhouses.
No, it isn't. RTGs are limited by heat dissipation. Put enough isotope in one place and it heats up enough to melt. More and it'll eventually vaporize or perhaps even achieve criticality (such as the case with plutonium 238). A traditional nuclear plant scales better at high power levels.
So to get the scheme to work on a large scale, one needs a whole bunch of RTGs through the complex. That introduces all sorts of complexity issues.
Frankly, a better approach to me seems to be solar thermal with underground storage of heat. Heat up the fluid during the lunar day and draw down the heat during the lunar night.
Yet you are advocating not to have an agency that stops the shady practices that commercial credit card companies have done for decades. I say you are too focused on the wrong problem.
Don't get me wrong. I think such an organization is a colossal waste of society's resources (the credit card customer should be doing due diligence). But that's not what I've been arguing all along. That this organization could have been implemented in a democratic way rather than a way that attempts to put it out of reach of democratic processes or reform.
Recall the saying, "the ends justify the means"? Well, in my view, that saying isn't true. One can indeed have means that discredit the ends. This is such a case.
Both were created by acts of of Congress. So what is to stop Congress from gutting the CFPB of all power like they did with the CFTC?
The ignorance in this paragraph is remarkable. Congress should be able to gut the CFPB at any time just like any other regulatory agency. It is their power and prerogative as I noted before. That is the primary way we keep such organizations under control and aligned with the interests of US citizens and society.
From my point of view, what happened is that the politic elections of 2008 brought a quirky political faction to power which doesn't see that sort of power very often. Rather than pass sensible law with a few compromises which would have weathered an opposition regime, they forced through their agenda (at least as much as they could get their allies in US Congress to support) and tried some anti-democratic gimmicks to prevent that law from being reversed.
To be blunt here, nothing makes the CFPB any more special than any other regulatory agency. If it can't survive an onslaught from the Republicans, then it means that the US public didn't want that agency enough.
What do you mean ? The uncertainty principle of quantum theory is not enough for you ? That's the root of all 'chance'.
Of course not. It's an aspect of classical observation of a quantum system with noncommutative observables.
From a purely quantum viewpoint, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle simply doesn't exist and the system is purely deterministic, though perhaps not in a way that a purely quantum component can arbitrary predict (say due to complex chaotic behavior in the quantum system requiring more quantum information/structure to predict than a component of that system can have).
What makes more sense: that 4712784365435.36354231641801...32132132 is the only number that *really* exists, or that it exists as part of the Real numbers - a bigger, more inclusive but definitely much simpler entity?
The correct answer is "neither". Numbers do not have an existence in themselves.
Anything complex looks unlikely, arbitrary and absurd just by itself. Some people think the MWI is unjustified because it requires all these extra universes, but to me you still only have the one universe; it's just bigger, simpler, and makes much more sense.
As a possible model of reality, it has some parsimonious features, such as simplicity of overall description. But it also has features which aren't, such as the need for structure (the "many universes") which from our current point of view, do not exist in any sense of the word. We then have to describe the effects of that structure in terms of our universe, as observable internal structure rather than unobservable external structure.
With reality, I suspect the same principle applies. Everything that can exist does so, as it has no reason not to. Nothing makes sense without everything else, and any single thing *implies* everything else.
The only problem is that it doesn't make sense to say things exist which we can't observe either directly or through their effects on our observable universe.
The uncertainty principle is a very base of quantum theory and you cannot pretend it's not valid.
That phenomena says nothing about how the universe exists or possibly came about.
It introduces random chance into every chemical process, hence into biology at every step.
From our limited, classical viewpoints. It doesn't similarly introduce random chance for purely quantum objects (there's no quantum version of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle). A corresponding viewpoint from the quantum level is purely deterministic.
Neither is it evidence that the universe came about through random chance rather than purpose since the principle has nothing to say about that matter.
Enough evidence for you ?
I'm sorry, but it's not evidence of what you want.
No, there is absolutely NO evidence of design or purpose but there is a growing body of evidence it was chance and luck. If you can't find the scientific evidence for the chance probability, then you are not looking.
Again, no evidence provided, just assertions made.
So what do you want? A single post that will dispel all your utter ignorance (whether real or feigned) of physics and biology?
To be honest, I think it would be quite unique in the whole universe if you were able to dispel the particular ignorance which I readily admit to.
You honestly can't think of one single thing that might make someone think you're here because of senseless natural processes?
Honestly, no. Keep in mind that many senseless objects and natural processes have a purpose to them from our point of view, because we use them with purpose. Similarly, the cells of our bodies don't in themselves have any sort of sentience, but the whole does.
What grade are you in?
PhD in Mathematics.
All equally valid and invalid. Which gets to the core of my original observation. The claims that the universe has a purpose to it or comes out of random chance both appear to be supernatural explanations. One needs some sort of evidence to make them something other than a whimsy of the moment.
But the evidence is that humans came about by chance, whether or not the universe as a whole was purposeful.
It is remarkable that I've received about ten direct replies to my post or followup messages, including several people claiming that such evidence exists, yet not one person has actually provided any of this alleged evidence.
So instead of just telling me evidence exists, give me this evidence so that I may judge for myself.
Is living in a better (and more expensive) neighborhood more important than having a parent home so that the kids don't need to be shuffled off to daycare after school?
If that means the difference between a good and crap school, then yes. And that's just in the narrow viewpoint of educating students. It can be a lot of money to throw away merely because you think the kid should have a different home environment.
Well, they aren't kids any more... legally. So it's adult abuse and totally legit.
Yeah, preventing child abuse is such a controlling, liberal notion put forth by dicks.
Pretty much. Do it for the kids!
And you'd have a valid point if one of the above scenarios were somehow much less likely than the other. In the case of the pink elephant, one scenerio is a lot more far fetched than the other.
But we don't know enough to even know if it would make sense to assign probabilities to the scenarios of this thread (the concepts may be ill-defined for reasons we don't currently understand), and it may well be impossible to know more about such things than we know now. Such are the limitations of human knowledge.
Going back to the original assertion of lack of evidence, where's the evidence that indicates a greater likelihood of the universe being created by chance rather than purpose?
I'm not sure if there will be any mud slinging about this before the election as I doubt the republicans want to draw attention to foreign affairs after Romney's rather terrible overseas trip and the fact his ticket has no foreign policy experience at all but still I can see it happen.
I on the other hand hope there's lots of mudslinging. There's no more truth or objectivity in placid campaigns than enraged ones. And the latter have a lot more spirit and engagement to them. Politeness is vastly overrated in politics anyway.
And "Romney's rather terrible overseas trip"? Ignoring that that's an awfully weak talking point, how is that worse than the typical Obama overseas trip? At least, he hasn't tried to insult his hosts or murmured the exact same platitudes to numerous different host countries.
There are several problems with the idea. First, public education is crap and already takes up too much time. If it were a full time job, students would already be putting in roughly 8-10 kid-years of work. And they'd get out a high school diploma which most places no longer respect and near-zero work experience. The schools already are in a great position to educate or train students. How about they use those opportunities first before sucking up more of our students' time?
Second, where's the time for long vacations going to come from? If the longest free period of time is three weeks, then you aren't going to be able to have vacations longer than that. That excludes, for example, my cool road trip with my family to Alaska along the Alaskan highway. It took us five weeks to do that.
And of course, this is all forced upon defenseless students. Just another cost of being alive and sucking air that doesn't need to be there.
In all our human experience, laws can only come from legislatures, from humans with minds. No human laws have ever arisen apart from human minds.
Law comes from human minds. Ok.
Is it logical to postulate that all the complex laws of nature came from something other than a mind? The question is whose mind? The vast majority of people on earth believe in some kind of God that created things. Only a small minority of people believe that we are here by chance.
So you're saying that one or more *human* minds created the laws that the universe operates under. Do you happen to have a copy of the legislation? It'd simplify scientific endeavors a great deal.
Ok then we should abolish the Federal Reserve then?
Think about it. They did after all just print somewhere in the neighborhood of 4 trillion dollars in order to prop up "too big to fail" banks and other such institutions.v Maybe their activities just aren't in the best interests of the US.
Did you read anything I wrote above? Congress interfered with the CFTC. It was not for the betterment of the country. It was for Wall Street who wanted no regulation or oversight. When it blew up in their faces, they got bailed out by the government and to this day resist any oversight or regulation despite that being the direct cause of the problems.
Yes, and you correctly read my reply. What makes you think the US would remain a democracy, if the regulatory agencies are placed out of reach of the voters and their proxies? It's bizarre how much effort is being expended to attempt an untouchable organization.
And your explanation above needs to consider the role that the Federal Reserve and other central banks played in the mess. Keep in mind that their years of easy credit coupled with extremely low reserve requirements (that plus accounting standards are the only regulation the financial world needs) were the primary engine for the creation of the real estate bubble, not the morass of poorly thought out finance law that passes for regulation in the developed world.
So what? That's the prerogative of Congress to do so.
Lassiez Faire to the bitter end I see.
"Democracy" not "laissez faire". The government is corrupt merely because that's what large, unaccountable governments do.
Okay the which agency? Please tell us which one should have been in charge of it. For each agency you name, there will be reasons why that agency was not selected.
Department of the Treasury or Department of Commerce. I don't care which.
The universe just is and there is nothing we can say about why, it just is. It like asking what is the first number.
Exactly. Except that asking what the "first number" is can actually be a well-defined question. You just have to establish the ordering.
Currently there is a LOT of evidence that we arose mainly by chance, and no evidence that anything other than natural processes lead to our existence.
Except, of course, that there's no natural explanation for existence. Or even a scrap of that "LOT of evidence".
All evidence points to chance, not design
Again. What evidence? Saying there's evidence is not the same as there being evidence.
Well, I already gave a partial answer to that. If there's no way to determine a purpose empirically, then there's really no reason to ask why.
Then how do you plan to enforce any of the laws that Congress enacted. There is no such organization today.
The US president has been tasked by the US Constitution with overseeing the regulations and bureaucracies mandated and paid for by Congress.
The minimum connection was for independence as it is part of the Federal Reserve.
And why is that considered a good thing?
If there was a dependence, then politics could interfere with their decisions
As it should be. The CFPB is a political body making political decisions. It should be interfered with routinely by elected politicians who should be overseeing its activities directly, just as happens with most other federal government bureaucracies.
Under the rules set by Congress, her agency was to oversee derivatives. Pushed by powerful lobbies and Alan Greenspan, Congress stripped her agency of any power.
So what? That's the prerogative of Congress to do so.
No, there is no single agency that had the authority to do anything about the shady practices of the credit card companies. The agency was created to consolidate different aspects of different agencies for this single purpose.
So what? It would have been trivial to allocate such powers to an existing agency rather than create a new one with novel powers and immunities.