The last invention of an intelligent species in the universe is realistic simulation. That's it.
After that species degenerate without ever building the big stuff we can see.
That's the fate of self-made gods. I think we'll blow ourselves up first, though.
Or sweat to death with AGW.
There are no %100 efficient machines. All create waste heat from mechanical friction, or poorly contained chemical or electric processes.
The question is how much of this "limitless, clean electricity" will be created, and how much of it will go into the atmosphere as heat. If you can pump enough heat out of these fusion reactors and the appliances they drive, CO2 induced greenhouse will become irrelevant to global warming. Even if we were to scrub the entire atmosphere clean of greenhouse gases (and stop exhaling in the process), natural atmospheric water vapor would be enough to trap the tremendous excess waste heat of all these fusion reactors. The result would be increased global warming.
A workaround could be to use infrared satellites to monitor infrared heat and report "severe abusers". Every machine could have a waste calorie quota, and if you pass it, the man comes and takes Mr. Fusion away from you.
This is a condensed view of what the informed environmentalists express - at least those with whom I have discussed this topic. I haven't heard all the "wing nut" arguments, but this concern makes sense from a planetary thermodynamics view.
Limitless energy trapped on a planetary surface is a bad thing if you want to keep your biosphere intact.
Saturn is rotating slower:
And Saturn is rotating seven minutes more slowly than when probes measured its spin in the 70s and 80s - an observation experts cannot yet explain.
Great sci-fi where one of the main technologies "Conceptual Space" or communal wallpaper where large parties of people (like the bridge crew of their ship) equipped with these eye scanners create a seamless simulation. Nice to see Tech following in the track laid down by Fiction.
I wish submitting absentee ballots was a sure-fire way to overcome this electronic-voting madness. Here in Hawai'i they get counted, but in other places they may not even be counted at all if the results aren't close enough.
I'm a deputy registrar here in Hilo and I'll probably be working the polls on election day. I have to say I'm relieved, in that although we'll have one of these proprietary democracy-destroying machines at all polls, we'll also have the older, more reliable paper ballots in all precincts. If someone approaches me asking which method they should use, I won't hesitate to state my personal preference for analog.
David Brin wrote about these in his novel Earth. In the book, the government outfitted these receivers in jet fighters... until they started crashing them into mountainsides.
But the way he portrays household use of these things is awesome. I look forward to getting one to replace the old keyboard.
It really all depends on what you grew up with, and where. Analog more closely represents the "real world". The earth spins, and the shadow of your sundial spins around with it. It's cyclic as well, showing the whole period of sweep for 12 hours.
Digital watches always scream the same time: It's always NOW. NOW, NOW, NOW. There is no sense of future or past inherent in the digital watch. For people who grew up in a time when past events and future possibilities were important enough to receive attention whenever consulting the current time, the digital watch is lacking.
Finally, as an oceangoing navigator, there is something very basic about the analog chronometer that is completely lacking with those little LCD's. 12 Goes into 360 just fine, which can be handy when thinking in terms of time being relative to a circle on the globe. It just isn't as apparent on the digital watch. There are a bunch of short-cuts when figuring out position that just isn't suited for digital. Also, a wind-up chronometer is somewhat less likely to suffer EMP from close lightning.
Abundance is a mirage. You can't make something from nothing.
True, but when you're talking about a system that
involves, say, the energy output of a star (like our sun), for all
intents and purposes, energy gleaned directly from it is unlimited. You
can draw your "entropy box" right around the planet, ignoring the sun
for engineering/economics as a limitless supply of energy from nothing.
We only use a tiny, tiny fraction of the sun's energy.
This says nothing, however of where this energy goes
after we use it - usually back into the atmosphere as heat, which as we
are learning, we cannot afford to ignore.
My gedankenexperiment: stipulate that at some
point in the future we can manage to move all of our energy generation
to directly pull off of the solar largesse. There are many different
proposals for the means, some of them are even quite within our reach
now.
Would scarcity continue to be a limiting issue? Or would
it be the heat/waste pollution generated by overabundance of
energy/information. If heat/waste could be controlled, or recycled
into less harmful byproducts of our consumption, what would be the
limiting factor?
To make an anaology in terms of our present energy
economy: Are we going to suck the last drop of affordable oil/fossil
fuel out of the ground before we pollute the atmosphere beyond the
limit to sustain ourselves?
I purposely haven't addressed the usage of physical
matter (for food to make more people, for structural elements to build
houses to put them in, etc.), although with the promise of nanobuilders
and molecular beam epitaxy, it becomes largely an issue of how much
energy can be invested into manufacture, therefore physical good are
still a potential overabundance under the model of this thought
experiment. There's a lot on this at www.luf.org
So yes, you can't get something from nothing as
thermodynamics (not-so-gently) reminds us, but from the scale of
stellar bodies, we can get as much as we could want until the death of
our sun; this is an overabundance by any strech of the human
imagination.
Slashdot Mirror
The last invention of an intelligent species in the universe is realistic simulation. That's it. After that species degenerate without ever building the big stuff we can see. That's the fate of self-made gods. I think we'll blow ourselves up first, though. Or sweat to death with AGW.
There are no %100 efficient machines. All create waste heat from mechanical friction, or poorly contained chemical or electric processes.
The question is how much of this "limitless, clean electricity" will be created, and how much of it will go into the atmosphere as heat. If you can pump enough heat out of these fusion reactors and the appliances they drive, CO2 induced greenhouse will become irrelevant to global warming. Even if we were to scrub the entire atmosphere clean of greenhouse gases (and stop exhaling in the process), natural atmospheric water vapor would be enough to trap the tremendous excess waste heat of all these fusion reactors. The result would be increased global warming.
A workaround could be to use infrared satellites to monitor infrared heat and report "severe abusers". Every machine could have a waste calorie quota, and if you pass it, the man comes and takes Mr. Fusion away from you.
This is a condensed view of what the informed environmentalists express - at least those with whom I have discussed this topic. I haven't heard all the "wing nut" arguments, but this concern makes sense from a planetary thermodynamics view.
Limitless energy trapped on a planetary surface is a bad thing if you want to keep your biosphere intact.
Saturn is rotating slower: And Saturn is rotating seven minutes more slowly than when probes measured its spin in the 70s and 80s - an observation experts cannot yet explain.
Funny, I don't *feel* any closer to Transcendence.
Great sci-fi where one of the main technologies "Conceptual Space" or communal wallpaper where large parties of people (like the bridge crew of their ship) equipped with these eye scanners create a seamless simulation. Nice to see Tech following in the track laid down by Fiction.
I wish submitting absentee ballots was a sure-fire way to overcome this electronic-voting madness. Here in Hawai'i they get counted, but in other places they may not even be counted at all if the results aren't close enough. I'm a deputy registrar here in Hilo and I'll probably be working the polls on election day. I have to say I'm relieved, in that although we'll have one of these proprietary democracy-destroying machines at all polls, we'll also have the older, more reliable paper ballots in all precincts. If someone approaches me asking which method they should use, I won't hesitate to state my personal preference for analog.
David Brin wrote about these in his novel Earth. In the book, the government outfitted these receivers in jet fighters... until they started crashing them into mountainsides. But the way he portrays household use of these things is awesome. I look forward to getting one to replace the old keyboard.
It really all depends on what you grew up with, and where. Analog more closely represents the "real world". The earth spins, and the shadow of your sundial spins around with it. It's cyclic as well, showing the whole period of sweep for 12 hours.
Digital watches always scream the same time: It's always NOW. NOW, NOW, NOW. There is no sense of future or past inherent in the digital watch. For people who grew up in a time when past events and future possibilities were important enough to receive attention whenever consulting the current time, the digital watch is lacking.
Finally, as an oceangoing navigator, there is something very basic about the analog chronometer that is completely lacking with those little LCD's. 12 Goes into 360 just fine, which can be handy when thinking in terms of time being relative to a circle on the globe. It just isn't as apparent on the digital watch. There are a bunch of short-cuts when figuring out position that just isn't suited for digital. Also, a wind-up chronometer is somewhat less likely to suffer EMP from close lightning.
Abundance is a mirage. You can't make something from nothing.
True, but when you're talking about a system that involves, say, the energy output of a star (like our sun), for all intents and purposes, energy gleaned directly from it is unlimited. You can draw your "entropy box" right around the planet, ignoring the sun for engineering/economics as a limitless supply of energy from nothing. We only use a tiny, tiny fraction of the sun's energy.
This says nothing, however of where this energy goes after we use it - usually back into the atmosphere as heat, which as we are learning, we cannot afford to ignore.
My gedankenexperiment: stipulate that at some point in the future we can manage to move all of our energy generation to directly pull off of the solar largesse. There are many different proposals for the means, some of them are even quite within our reach now.
Would scarcity continue to be a limiting issue? Or would it be the heat/waste pollution generated by overabundance of energy/information. If heat/waste could be controlled, or recycled into less harmful byproducts of our consumption, what would be the limiting factor?
To make an anaology in terms of our present energy economy: Are we going to suck the last drop of affordable oil/fossil fuel out of the ground before we pollute the atmosphere beyond the limit to sustain ourselves?
I purposely haven't addressed the usage of physical matter (for food to make more people, for structural elements to build houses to put them in, etc.), although with the promise of nanobuilders and molecular beam epitaxy, it becomes largely an issue of how much energy can be invested into manufacture, therefore physical good are still a potential overabundance under the model of this thought experiment. There's a lot on this at www.luf.org
So yes, you can't get something from nothing as thermodynamics (not-so-gently) reminds us, but from the scale of stellar bodies, we can get as much as we could want until the death of our sun; this is an overabundance by any strech of the human imagination.