If the Carbon was extracted from the air to create the buckyballs then there is no problem with burning them...if they were extracted from oil we have an issue regardless.
Everyone assumes that these will be used for fuel cells, but why not use them for fusion?
I know one technique has been laser fusion. Target several lasers at one point and they reinforce each other. Then drop in a tiny sphere of fusion fuel surrounded by glass of plastic and the lasers cause the sphere to exploded both outward and in which increases the pressure enough to cause fusion.
This concept has to be more efficient with a VERY high pressure fuel. So we give our packed buckyballs a charge and electromagnetically shoot them into the center of the lasers and POOF you have fusion..
Also you should remember that CO2 is not "bad" per say.
It is only the addition of EXTRA CO2 that is bad. If we cracked the CO2 already in the air to make the fulerenes and then burned them it wouldn't add anything to the atmosphere at all.
While I haven't run the math, I think if you compress the hydrogen in Jupiter's core down to briefcase size you will find that it will keep going and form a nice little singularity....very easy to fit in a briefcase....shortly before it EATS the briefcase and then you...
Back of envelope math:
One earth mass will form a singularity at around 10 CC (or so I've heard)
Jupiter's core is about 10 earth masses (or so I've heard)
Ergo one Jupiter core will form a singularity at about 100 CC.
A small briefcase will hold 100 CC plus a little extra.
Only one questions remains...how will we get the core of Jupiter to LOOK like the report I was supposed to read last night?
100 watts/meter^2 (solar flux assuming a 100% conversion) is several orders of magnitude too low....you would need to provide each assembler a small nuclear power plant so it would have enough power to maintain itself AND create more.
Look at how much space solar needs to power an average home...
The world is extremely messy and active nanotech like would be necessary for the "Gray Goo" scenario are going to be very fragile.
Only in a highly controlled environment will they be practicle.
In order to be biologically uselfull they will need to be pliant and flexible. If they are pliant and flexible they won't have the tensile strength to move bones around.
Since muscle expansion and contraction is always referenced in the direction of force, the article disagrees with you.
The power stroke for a biological muscle is the contraction. While these "muscles" are interesting and could have many uses, powering limbs is not likely to be one in their current configuration.
To get nano scale replicators you would get an extremly complex molecule/molecule system and at the same time to manipulate it on an atom scale you would need very high energy concentrations.
One thing we know from biochem is that very large molecules (like DNA, proteins etc) don't last long in high energy environments.
Nanotech replicators will requier very controlled environments and very high energy working medium to function. Outside of thoes controlled conditions they would "starve" and fall apart.
Actually, if you review the uncertainty principle, you find that uncertainty includes more than just position and velocity but in the quantum world it also includes entanglement with the environment. Having entangled particles adds a great deal of uncertainty since you don't know what the other particel in the pair is experienceing.
This is actually Bohr's solution to one of Einstein's thought experiments, although phrased differently. (Read up on the light in the box)
Therefore, you are partially correct. I was clumbsy with my terminology. The HUP allows for an elimination of the observer effect. Therefore you can determine both the position AND velocity to an arbitraily high percision by increasingly entangling it with the universe.
In this way, my device COMPENSATES for the HEISENBERG uncertainty principle. It is a Heisenberg Compensator.
What does this mean? Honestly I don't know. I first ran across this experimental design in a Scientific American article about 15 years ago. I have seen references to it since then but never researched it more extensivly. With my 2 years of college physics and a healthy interest in applies quantum phsyics hobbies, I would guess that after measurment the particle will have an increase in the level of randomness. In addition, the amount of energy will increase exponentially, increasing the entropy in the universe to compensate.
But IANAP and my guess should be taken with a large grain of salt.
The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is not a physical "law" rather it is a summation of other observations and it has been "short-cutted"
Imagine, you May have a quantum entangled pair in a box. How do you know if the box is full? If you shine anything in you will disturb the pair. So you send a single photon through a beam spliter. One path is clear the other goes through the box. The beams then recombine to create an interference pattern. Since you slit the single photon, it has a 50/50 shot of sending the photon through the box.
Now, if the box and it is empty then the beam(s) will create an interference pattern regardless of the path. If the box is full and the photon goes through the box then no light will be detected (and the entagled pair ruined). BUT if it goes down the open path and there is something in the box then there will be no interference pattern.
You have just shown that position of an object in the box without effecting it. You have just violated the HUP.
Now in the above design you have a 50/50 shot of sending the photon through the box. But as it turns out, so long as there is a "chance" that it COULD go through the box, the experiemnt still works. Therefore you can add additional beam splitters between the box and the 1st splitter, directing one side into the open path, increaing the success rate to and arbitrarily high level.
But there is a genetic basis for the fundamental structure of the brain...
True, we have to essentially figure out how to USE the signals we get from our senses, but the brain already has the basic structure to interpret your senses and do gross movement. (Or did your baby not move it's arms and legs when she was born?)
Therefore, the correct analogy would be the hardware necessary (including BIOS) AND the basic OS. You don't tell your AI how to "read" the internet, but you do tell it how to interpret the signals. So your AI knows that there is something out there and then figures out what it means and starts using it productivly.
Also remember that the "hardware" for the AI could be entierly software based...
You have an excellent point but are taking the analogy too far.
Actually, uranium is a renewable resource for all practicle purposes...
Uranium is actually fairly abundant, it is found in trace amounts in most soils and is actually fairly high in sea water.
All the math suggests that the uranium dissolivng into sea water will more than cover any we use for energy and continue to do this into the foreseeable future, especially if we start reprocessing the fuel. True there is a finite amount of Uranium in the earths crust and through our use as well as it's own native radioactivity, it will run out eventually. However I think we can safely consider 1+ billion years as a "renewable" resource.
The issue is extraction. You can't simply boil off the sea water to ge the uranium....the energy to boil the water is greater than the energy in the Uranium...we need to develop a resin or other chemical method for extraction whoch will make it dramatically cheaper to mine sea water than mine mountains.
The of course you could use Thorium which doesn't requer extensive processing, cannot go critical even under the absolute worst case senario and is one of the more common elements in the crust...not to mention producing waste that "only" lasts for 50-100 years.
Personally, I think the future will lead to solar satelites rather than nuclear for a variety of reasons I won't go into....but the BIGGEST problem with wind is that it is an eyesore. Wind farms LOOK ugly so people aren't likely to use them for large areas of the earth. On top of that, the technology is mature. It is highly unlikley you will get significantly beyond the current efficiency. Watt for watt, solar thermal plants are already a better use of the land than wind (higher energy production per acre and more consistent production in most areas). PV is still a "new" technology. It is not unreasonable to expect cheap cells with 50+% efficience by 2050 and with nano style rectifiers could even get to 80%. This adds up to 2.5 kw/h a day, everyday (this includes averaging for lost production due to cloud cover etc at 50% eff.)
we did for a very long time..read up on the "steady state universe."
But ironically, an all powerfull being, outside our universe, conflicts with no laws of physics...a steady state universe disagrees with direct observation and the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
The religious argument is that God has always existed and will always exist and therefore does not need a creator and does not raise the question of what came before..
If I recall my Greek mythology, Gia gave birth to the Titans, which were led by Cronus who is the father of Zeus, Poseidon, Hera, Hades and a few others. Cronus didn't want a successor so he ate every child Rhea (his wife and sister) had until Zeus, the youngest, who she hid until he grew up and rescued his siblings from the stomach of Cronus.
Zeus was the master of the heavens but he didn't create them:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Remember, hydrocarbons aren't "bad"
If the Carbon was extracted from the air to create the buckyballs then there is no problem with burning them...if they were extracted from oil we have an issue regardless.
ummm....I hope you are suggesting that we could pull it from Jupiter's core rather than treating the H2 we compress as an energy SOURCE.
Even pulling it from the core doesn't really help us. What would we use to oxidse it once we have burned ALL the Oxygen?
Can you go into more detail on what you are suggesting?
Everyone assumes that these will be used for fuel cells, but why not use them for fusion?
I know one technique has been laser fusion. Target several lasers at one point and they reinforce each other. Then drop in a tiny sphere of fusion fuel surrounded by glass of plastic and the lasers cause the sphere to exploded both outward and in which increases the pressure enough to cause fusion.
This concept has to be more efficient with a VERY high pressure fuel. So we give our packed buckyballs a charge and electromagnetically shoot them into the center of the lasers and POOF you have fusion..
Just a thought, any comments?
Also you should remember that CO2 is not "bad" per say.
It is only the addition of EXTRA CO2 that is bad. If we cracked the CO2 already in the air to make the fulerenes and then burned them it wouldn't add anything to the atmosphere at all.
While I haven't run the math, I think if you compress the hydrogen in Jupiter's core down to briefcase size you will find that it will keep going and form a nice little singularity....very easy to fit in a briefcase....shortly before it EATS the briefcase and then you...
Back of envelope math:
One earth mass will form a singularity at around 10 CC (or so I've heard)
Jupiter's core is about 10 earth masses (or so I've heard)
Ergo one Jupiter core will form a singularity at about 100 CC.
A small briefcase will hold 100 CC plus a little extra.
Only one questions remains...how will we get the core of Jupiter to LOOK like the report I was supposed to read last night?
100 watts/meter^2 (solar flux assuming a 100% conversion) is several orders of magnitude too low....you would need to provide each assembler a small nuclear power plant so it would have enough power to maintain itself AND create more.
Look at how much space solar needs to power an average home...
The world is extremely messy and active nanotech like would be necessary for the "Gray Goo" scenario are going to be very fragile.
Only in a highly controlled environment will they be practicle.
It is the "How do you push rope" question.
In order to be biologically uselfull they will need to be pliant and flexible. If they are pliant and flexible they won't have the tensile strength to move bones around.
Since muscle expansion and contraction is always referenced in the direction of force, the article disagrees with you.
The power stroke for a biological muscle is the contraction. While these "muscles" are interesting and could have many uses, powering limbs is not likely to be one in their current configuration.
Nah, Grey Goo is thermodynamically impossible...
To get nano scale replicators you would get an extremly complex molecule/molecule system and at the same time to manipulate it on an atom scale you would need very high energy concentrations.
One thing we know from biochem is that very large molecules (like DNA, proteins etc) don't last long in high energy environments.
Nanotech replicators will requier very controlled environments and very high energy working medium to function. Outside of thoes controlled conditions they would "starve" and fall apart.
Actually, if you review the uncertainty principle, you find that uncertainty includes more than just position and velocity but in the quantum world it also includes entanglement with the environment. Having entangled particles adds a great deal of uncertainty since you don't know what the other particel in the pair is experienceing.
This is actually Bohr's solution to one of Einstein's thought experiments, although phrased differently. (Read up on the light in the box)
Therefore, you are partially correct. I was clumbsy with my terminology. The HUP allows for an elimination of the observer effect. Therefore you can determine both the position AND velocity to an arbitraily high percision by increasingly entangling it with the universe.
In this way, my device COMPENSATES for the HEISENBERG uncertainty principle. It is a Heisenberg Compensator.
What does this mean? Honestly I don't know. I first ran across this experimental design in a Scientific American article about 15 years ago. I have seen references to it since then but never researched it more extensivly. With my 2 years of college physics and a healthy interest in applies quantum phsyics hobbies, I would guess that after measurment the particle will have an increase in the level of randomness. In addition, the amount of energy will increase exponentially, increasing the entropy in the universe to compensate.
But IANAP and my guess should be taken with a large grain of salt.
The observer effect is a direct result of the connection between position and velocity.
My design has determined the position of an object (within the box) without effecting the speed whatso ever since I haven't interacted with it.
Who Killed the Electric car??
Answer:
The great depression!
The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is not a physical "law" rather it is a summation of other observations and it has been "short-cutted"
Imagine, you May have a quantum entangled pair in a box. How do you know if the box is full? If you shine anything in you will disturb the pair. So you send a single photon through a beam spliter. One path is clear the other goes through the box. The beams then recombine to create an interference pattern. Since you slit the single photon, it has a 50/50 shot of sending the photon through the box.
Now, if the box and it is empty then the beam(s) will create an interference pattern regardless of the path. If the box is full and the photon goes through the box then no light will be detected (and the entagled pair ruined). BUT if it goes down the open path and there is something in the box then there will be no interference pattern.
You have just shown that position of an object in the box without effecting it. You have just violated the HUP.
Now in the above design you have a 50/50 shot of sending the photon through the box. But as it turns out, so long as there is a "chance" that it COULD go through the box, the experiemnt still works. Therefore you can add additional beam splitters between the box and the 1st splitter, directing one side into the open path, increaing the success rate to and arbitrarily high level.
offhand I'd say around 2.5 million years ;-)
or if you look at it another way maybe 5-10 years
take your pick
But there is a genetic basis for the fundamental structure of the brain...
True, we have to essentially figure out how to USE the signals we get from our senses, but the brain already has the basic structure to interpret your senses and do gross movement. (Or did your baby not move it's arms and legs when she was born?)
Therefore, the correct analogy would be the hardware necessary (including BIOS) AND the basic OS. You don't tell your AI how to "read" the internet, but you do tell it how to interpret the signals. So your AI knows that there is something out there and then figures out what it means and starts using it productivly.
Also remember that the "hardware" for the AI could be entierly software based...
You have an excellent point but are taking the analogy too far.
...want the history books to report that the FIRST AI was a Rascal?
Actually, uranium is a renewable resource for all practicle purposes...
Uranium is actually fairly abundant, it is found in trace amounts in most soils and is actually fairly high in sea water.
All the math suggests that the uranium dissolivng into sea water will more than cover any we use for energy and continue to do this into the foreseeable future, especially if we start reprocessing the fuel. True there is a finite amount of Uranium in the earths crust and through our use as well as it's own native radioactivity, it will run out eventually. However I think we can safely consider 1+ billion years as a "renewable" resource.
The issue is extraction. You can't simply boil off the sea water to ge the uranium....the energy to boil the water is greater than the energy in the Uranium...we need to develop a resin or other chemical method for extraction whoch will make it dramatically cheaper to mine sea water than mine mountains.
The of course you could use Thorium which doesn't requer extensive processing, cannot go critical even under the absolute worst case senario and is one of the more common elements in the crust...not to mention producing waste that "only" lasts for 50-100 years.
Personally, I think the future will lead to solar satelites rather than nuclear for a variety of reasons I won't go into....but the BIGGEST problem with wind is that it is an eyesore. Wind farms LOOK ugly so people aren't likely to use them for large areas of the earth. On top of that, the technology is mature. It is highly unlikley you will get significantly beyond the current efficiency. Watt for watt, solar thermal plants are already a better use of the land than wind (higher energy production per acre and more consistent production in most areas). PV is still a "new" technology. It is not unreasonable to expect cheap cells with 50+% efficience by 2050 and with nano style rectifiers could even get to 80%. This adds up to 2.5 kw/h a day, everyday (this includes averaging for lost production due to cloud cover etc at 50% eff.)
So can I get the pacemaker make a heartbeat sound like the jumping sound effect....
"nah nah nah nahhhhhhhhh"
that listening to that music DOES make you "square"!!!
However the atheists who rely on science find that they can't make that argument. The universe IS winding down (thermodynamics).
we did for a very long time..read up on the "steady state universe."
But ironically, an all powerfull being, outside our universe, conflicts with no laws of physics...a steady state universe disagrees with direct observation and the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
#1 Why would it be dust? Most explosions don't pulverize anything....your 50 KG of Pu will fall to earth as chunks...
#2 your 50KG of plutonium dust would cause no appreciable increase in the background radiation levels.
Can you suggest a different power means? The only three options availible right now are solar, chemical or nuclear....you pick
The religious argument is that God has always existed and will always exist and therefore does not need a creator and does not raise the question of what came before..
While unprovable, it is at least consistent.
But Zeus DIDN'T create the Universe...
:-)
If I recall my Greek mythology, Gia gave birth to the Titans, which were led by Cronus who is the father of Zeus, Poseidon, Hera, Hades and a few others. Cronus didn't want a successor so he ate every child Rhea (his wife and sister) had until Zeus, the youngest, who she hid until he grew up and rescued his siblings from the stomach of Cronus.
Zeus was the master of the heavens but he didn't create them
The parent was unfairly modded down and they have some very good points.