You are to hung up on fossilised carbon, which we don't need. Carbon that is exchanged between the biosphere and the atmosphere completes a full cycle in decades. You may want to take a quick glance at the carbon cycle.
Furthermore, if we stop using carbon as a fuel (Hydrogen economy) it will be even less of a problem.
I challange you to name at least a few resources that:
are absolutely vital to us.
are not renewable, even using more advance technology than we have today.
are not replacable by renewable resources.
are readily available in relatively close proximity in space.
When coal smoke spews out of a coal plant it doesn't fall back to the ground in a form that's usable by us again. And of course with sufficiently advanced technology (nanobots perhaps?) we could scour the landscape and fetch all those particles that came out of the coal and remake it, but it would require far, far more energy and resources to do this than you'd be able to get out of the coal.
Coal is a great example of a substance that is very easy to recycle. Any coal that we use (especially when we burn it) ends up as carbondioxide in the atmosphere, from where it is absorbed by plants and trees. Cut down the trees and you have it back.
In case you didn't know: the increasing carbondioxide levels due to use of fossile fuel is not because the carbon stays in the atomsphere, but because we have added more coal to the whole system. And since the amout of trees isn't increasing, it buffers up in the atmosphere.
Even though in a sustainable world we probably wouldn't be using coal its the same with any resources - no manufacturing processes are 100% efficient.
You think of it in the wrong way. It doesn't matter that the process isn't 100% efficient when we are talking about a closed system, since all loss will return to some other part of the system where it can be collected again.
As a side note: I actually think we will be using carbon as the main building material in the future, so it's a good thing it is so easily recycled.
Its an insignificant amount unless the world's population was about 10,000 or so.
Ofcourse, but I maintain we don't even require that.
And even if it was why would we want to restrict ourselves to a set standard of living, an economy where any wealth I make is wealth taken away from you and vice-versa.
And I have never said we should restrict ourselves. What I said was that it is not a matter of survival.
And for that matter, limited natural resources does not imply limited wealth. Wealth is more a matter of producing more advanced technology; generally the amount of resources needed to produce for example cell-phones etc. decreases as technology advances.
"The Earth's resources are dwindling and if we intend to survive the next two thousand years, we're going to have to find resources elsewhere to sustain ourselves. It's not soley a matter of scientific interest now, but a matter of survival."
And that is what I responded to; I was disputing the claim that we will not survive two millenia without resources from space. I believe you read more into my post that was meant to.
Even if we recycled to the max of our ability there would still be a significant shortfall - no recycling is 100% efficient so we need to get the extra from somewhere after earth's resources are run-down.
But all materials we use will sooner or later return to nature in some form. The Earth is a closed system, as long as we don't send anything out to space. (In fact, the amount of available matter actually increases by 3000 tonnes per year as meteorite debris falls down from space.) As I said before, all we need to do is to learn how to gather whatever substances we need.
Well, we were talking about the survival of mankind over several millenia, so:
1) If the population keeps growing, that surely means we are succeeding in surviving.
2) This is a matter of wealth, not survival.
3) Can you give any examples of vital resources that are permanently lost when used? Granted, if we plan to use fusion power we can run out of deuterium and tritium, but that would take billions of years if I'm not mistaken.
No, but you can get power out of trees and plants after they have collected the atoms in the smoke and made fule out of it again. It is just a matter of learning how to gather the resources again, after we have spread them out. In fact, many of the resources we use today, like metals, we have already gathered from minerals in Earth's crust. Ofcourse, energy is required to reverse most of the chemical reactions, but we have an abundance of energy thanks to the sun. I'm certain you will find it much more difficult to find resources somewhere in space and then somehow bring them here.
Or we could just learn to recycle the resources we have. Very few resources have left the Earth (a few space probes and some atmosphere mainly), so why do we need to bring more of them here?
Well, most of them are, but some of them are not. It was a while since I used OS X, but if I recall correctly it only took [some modifier key] + "/=" to type the not-equals sign. Quick as well as intuitive. Just because it is possible to imagine completely useless characters doesn't mean we ought to limit ourselves to ASCII.
Not standardized in the specifications of the language.
Wasn't the original question more in the lines of "why are they not standardized in the specifications of the language[s] yet"?
Consider the land that would become farmable. Canada, for example, would become a much more desirable place to live. And if I am not mistaken, higher temps would mean more overall evaporation/precipitation.
From what I have understood, you are partially mistaken. Coutries like Canada and Sweden (where I live) are really the only ones that would benefit. Areas where the majority of Earths population live would experience regular and severe droughts. I am not a climatologist (IANAC?), but that is what I have been told, anyway.
Temporarily disregarding the cost-benefit analysis (which I actually believe speaks in favour of reducing carbon emissions):
From a relativistic point of view nothing has any intrinsic value, hence, pure reason can never give motivation for any decision at all. There is no cost nor any benefit, if you will. So, somewhere in the bottom of your logic, there always has to be an axiom that stems solely from emotion.
You speak of the relevance of your own stake in the argument as something you will not refute, so in your case perhaps you put your own (or mankinds) survival as the only priority. I can respect that point of view, but I have never really met anyone that actually holds it, even when they believe they do. For example, do you skii? Or drive your car even when you don't absolutely must? Or do you smoke or eat food with a high percentage of fat? All these activities are based on emotions other than the desire to live (as in survive).
Although I agree with you that most people put way to little logic into their decisions, and generally act on emotions without any thought at all (that is why advertisement works), it is important to scrutinise one's own thinking equally well. For example, are you sure you're not basing your beliefs on the fact that acknowledging carbon emmisions as something really bad would make the western world (and the US in particular) the bad guy? It is certainly psycologically hurtfull, and something my subconscious eagerly tries to make me rationalise away.
By the way, I'm not that hard pressed to come up with a formula for why plants are more important than rocks. I would probably base it on entropy: plants are simply more complex than rocks. That is why a painting is more beatiful than an empty canvas (usually).
Yes, you can do that, but it is messy and takes a lot of time. With RFID tags you could do it without even having to open the trash bag, and the whole process could be automated and performed at a massive scale, and that makes the information cheap.
I'm not saying anyone would actually do that, but it is certainly feasible from a technological point of view.
It has always been possible to gather personal information about someone, if you have sufficient resources. Secret services all over the world do it routinely. The scary part is that such information could soon be available to anyone (large corporations anyway) for a couple of bucks.
On the other hand, one might ask why MS then bothered to develop a game console in the first place. Just producing an API for other hardware manufacturers is what they have done all along, and Sony isn't exactly famous for offering any extensive APIs for themselves.
At Gamefest 2005, they said they'd support all consoles with XNA - if other console manufacturers would let them. So no, it's not them trying to be proprietary.
Or they just said that, knowing that their competitors would never call the bluff.
And even if Sony let Microsoft port XNA to PS3, who is to say it wouldn't make the games run like crap on everything but Xbox/Windows, with MS claiming it is only because to Xbox is more powerful?
Fair enough, if done right it could work. I still believe it might be rather tricky to do it right, though.
My presupposition was that if the microwaves cause excruciating pain when unshielded, they would at least heat the nanotubes enough to set fire to the rest of the clothing, or even destroy the nanotubes.
Maybe they could be combined with a fashionable cooling fin hat. =P
Just because it is conductive it doesn't mean it wont heat up. Your skin may be shielded from the microwaves, but your nanotube clothing would cook you like an oven.
From the article:
Microwave radiation can be used to heat the nanotube sheets, so the researchers sealed a sheet between two plates of plexiglas with a few blasts from a kitchen microwave oven. This type of process could be used to make windows or transparent adhesive appliqués, say for heating car windows or perhaps the outer surfaces of airplanes, according to Baughman.
Doesn't both:
4. Make your own clothes. (This could even lead to "profit!!!")
5. Hire a tailor to make clothes for you. imply:
1. Don't shop at (those) stores at all. ?
People are willing to give up pretty much to satisfy their psychological need fore safety. Hence, if you want people to give up their freedoms and rights, make them feel insecure and offer security in exchange.
Why create a top domain specifically for mobile phones? I thought the top domain reflected the type of content a site has, or the type of organisation behind the content, not the device meant to access the content. To me it seems sort of like having a.ftp domain. Or are.mobi pages only meant to contain ring tones and such? Otherwise, what is the reason for it?
I haven't read the whole thread, so maybe I'm way out of context, but I'd still like to point one thing out:
That is where your mistake is. Science is not faith-based but fact-based. Faith has no room in the scientific process. Confidence in one's experiments or theory is only confidence and has to be tested to be considered valid.
Science is mostly based on empiricism---the assumption that statements can be made about the world based on previous observations. Empiricism is in itself arbitrary, however. Believing that it works is, strictly speaking, a matter of faith.
Call it brainOS or whatever. It operates your body, duh. It interacts with the "kernel" being your contience or what you perceive as "you".
I think it's more like a microkernel OS where the kernel is the reptile brain and your conciousness a user space process (or possibly a combination of such).
It's funny you mention research papers. In fact, I am working on a research paper at this moment, and have found it very useful to have an optical fiber plugged into my computer, since it allows me to transfer simulation data (several GB) between the university and my home computer.
Slashdot Mirror
Furthermore, if we stop using carbon as a fuel (Hydrogen economy) it will be even less of a problem.
I challange you to name at least a few resources that:
Coal is a great example of a substance that is very easy to recycle. Any coal that we use (especially when we burn it) ends up as carbondioxide in the atmosphere, from where it is absorbed by plants and trees. Cut down the trees and you have it back.
In case you didn't know: the increasing carbondioxide levels due to use of fossile fuel is not because the carbon stays in the atomsphere, but because we have added more coal to the whole system. And since the amout of trees isn't increasing, it buffers up in the atmosphere.
Even though in a sustainable world we probably wouldn't be using coal its the same with any resources - no manufacturing processes are 100% efficient.
You think of it in the wrong way. It doesn't matter that the process isn't 100% efficient when we are talking about a closed system, since all loss will return to some other part of the system where it can be collected again.
As a side note: I actually think we will be using carbon as the main building material in the future, so it's a good thing it is so easily recycled.
Its an insignificant amount unless the world's population was about 10,000 or so.
Ofcourse, but I maintain we don't even require that.
And even if it was why would we want to restrict ourselves to a set standard of living, an economy where any wealth I make is wealth taken away from you and vice-versa.
And I have never said we should restrict ourselves. What I said was that it is not a matter of survival. And for that matter, limited natural resources does not imply limited wealth. Wealth is more a matter of producing more advanced technology; generally the amount of resources needed to produce for example cell-phones etc. decreases as technology advances.
The original poster did:
"The Earth's resources are dwindling and if we intend to survive the next two thousand years, we're going to have to find resources elsewhere to sustain ourselves. It's not soley a matter of scientific interest now, but a matter of survival."
And that is what I responded to; I was disputing the claim that we will not survive two millenia without resources from space. I believe you read more into my post that was meant to.
Even if we recycled to the max of our ability there would still be a significant shortfall - no recycling is 100% efficient so we need to get the extra from somewhere after earth's resources are run-down.
But all materials we use will sooner or later return to nature in some form. The Earth is a closed system, as long as we don't send anything out to space. (In fact, the amount of available matter actually increases by 3000 tonnes per year as meteorite debris falls down from space.) As I said before, all we need to do is to learn how to gather whatever substances we need.
Well, we were talking about the survival of mankind over several millenia, so:
1) If the population keeps growing, that surely means we are succeeding in surviving.
2) This is a matter of wealth, not survival.
3) Can you give any examples of vital resources that are permanently lost when used? Granted, if we plan to use fusion power we can run out of deuterium and tritium, but that would take billions of years if I'm not mistaken.
No, but you can get power out of trees and plants after they have collected the atoms in the smoke and made fule out of it again. It is just a matter of learning how to gather the resources again, after we have spread them out. In fact, many of the resources we use today, like metals, we have already gathered from minerals in Earth's crust. Ofcourse, energy is required to reverse most of the chemical reactions, but we have an abundance of energy thanks to the sun. I'm certain you will find it much more difficult to find resources somewhere in space and then somehow bring them here.
Or we could just learn to recycle the resources we have. Very few resources have left the Earth (a few space probes and some atmosphere mainly), so why do we need to bring more of them here?
Well, most of them are, but some of them are not. It was a while since I used OS X, but if I recall correctly it only took [some modifier key] + "/=" to type the not-equals sign. Quick as well as intuitive. Just because it is possible to imagine completely useless characters doesn't mean we ought to limit ourselves to ASCII.
Not standardized in the specifications of the language.
Wasn't the original question more in the lines of "why are they not standardized in the specifications of the language[s] yet"?
From what I have understood, you are partially mistaken. Coutries like Canada and Sweden (where I live) are really the only ones that would benefit. Areas where the majority of Earths population live would experience regular and severe droughts. I am not a climatologist (IANAC?), but that is what I have been told, anyway.
From a relativistic point of view nothing has any intrinsic value, hence, pure reason can never give motivation for any decision at all. There is no cost nor any benefit, if you will. So, somewhere in the bottom of your logic, there always has to be an axiom that stems solely from emotion.
You speak of the relevance of your own stake in the argument as something you will not refute, so in your case perhaps you put your own (or mankinds) survival as the only priority. I can respect that point of view, but I have never really met anyone that actually holds it, even when they believe they do. For example, do you skii? Or drive your car even when you don't absolutely must? Or do you smoke or eat food with a high percentage of fat? All these activities are based on emotions other than the desire to live (as in survive).
Although I agree with you that most people put way to little logic into their decisions, and generally act on emotions without any thought at all (that is why advertisement works), it is important to scrutinise one's own thinking equally well. For example, are you sure you're not basing your beliefs on the fact that acknowledging carbon emmisions as something really bad would make the western world (and the US in particular) the bad guy? It is certainly psycologically hurtfull, and something my subconscious eagerly tries to make me rationalise away.
By the way, I'm not that hard pressed to come up with a formula for why plants are more important than rocks. I would probably base it on entropy: plants are simply more complex than rocks. That is why a painting is more beatiful than an empty canvas (usually).
I'm not saying anyone would actually do that, but it is certainly feasible from a technological point of view.
It has always been possible to gather personal information about someone, if you have sufficient resources. Secret services all over the world do it routinely. The scary part is that such information could soon be available to anyone (large corporations anyway) for a couple of bucks.
On the other hand, one might ask why MS then bothered to develop a game console in the first place. Just producing an API for other hardware manufacturers is what they have done all along, and Sony isn't exactly famous for offering any extensive APIs for themselves.
Obviously I just replied to a joke. =P
Or they just said that, knowing that their competitors would never call the bluff.
And even if Sony let Microsoft port XNA to PS3, who is to say it wouldn't make the games run like crap on everything but Xbox/Windows, with MS claiming it is only because to Xbox is more powerful?
Fair enough, if done right it could work. I still believe it might be rather tricky to do it right, though. My presupposition was that if the microwaves cause excruciating pain when unshielded, they would at least heat the nanotubes enough to set fire to the rest of the clothing, or even destroy the nanotubes. Maybe they could be combined with a fashionable cooling fin hat. =P
From the article:
Microwave radiation can be used to heat the nanotube sheets, so the researchers sealed a sheet between two plates of plexiglas with a few blasts from a kitchen microwave oven. This type of process could be used to make windows or transparent adhesive appliqués, say for heating car windows or perhaps the outer surfaces of airplanes, according to Baughman.
Just make sure you don't wear it while rioting.
Doesn't both:
4. Make your own clothes. (This could even lead to "profit!!!")
5. Hire a tailor to make clothes for you.
imply:
1. Don't shop at (those) stores at all.
?
It can probably still be regarded as noise though.
Indeed. Imagine if they would have called it Microsoft Google. That would have been confusing for sure.
People are willing to give up pretty much to satisfy their psychological need fore safety. Hence, if you want people to give up their freedoms and rights, make them feel insecure and offer security in exchange.
Why create a top domain specifically for mobile phones? I thought the top domain reflected the type of content a site has, or the type of organisation behind the content, not the device meant to access the content. To me it seems sort of like having a .ftp domain. Or are .mobi pages only meant to contain ring tones and such? Otherwise, what is the reason for it?
Yes, that is exactly what I said. You are responding to a statement I cited from the GP.
That is where your mistake is. Science is not faith-based but fact-based. Faith has no room in the scientific process. Confidence in one's experiments or theory is only confidence and has to be tested to be considered valid.
Science is mostly based on empiricism---the assumption that statements can be made about the world based on previous observations. Empiricism is in itself arbitrary, however. Believing that it works is, strictly speaking, a matter of faith.
I think it's more like a microkernel OS where the kernel is the reptile brain and your conciousness a user space process (or possibly a combination of such).
It's funny you mention research papers. In fact, I am working on a research paper at this moment, and have found it very useful to have an optical fiber plugged into my computer, since it allows me to transfer simulation data (several GB) between the university and my home computer.