Close. Tetrachromatic women usually have color-blind male relatives. And it is related to the two sets of genes in the X chromosomes.
What I remember reading about implied that in each X chromosome the genes that produce the pigments have already been duplicated. they just aren't different yet.
Also tetrachromatic women do indeed see the world differently. The rainbow has more distinct colors than normal people see. So their brains are picking up on the different receptors and making use of that info - apparently without any genetic differences expressed in the neurons themselves.
"I believe the female tetrachromacy is a not exactly related to direct inheritance,... Females have inherited two copies of the X chromosome..."
How is that not direct inheritance? - granted, it is unlikely to lead to tetrachromatic males, but it is inheritance.
"However, it seems like the evolution of photocells with light-detecting pigments and the development of the proper neural pathways to interpret signals from the eye would be considerably more substantial achievements"
Any small mutation in the genes that produce the pigment, assuming that it still mostly works, will yeild a pigment that has a different color response. All that is required for humans to go from 3 to 4 color vision (and obslete RGB color space...) is for this mutation to be active in some, but not all cells. This could happen for instance if the gene gets doubled (two copies) and then one copy mutates. Both of these steps are common occurances.
Once there are cells with this different color range in the eye, the neurons will detect this different signal and will wire themselves to make some use of this new information with no genetic changes in the neurons themselves. That is just how neurons do things. Any random mutations that do make better use of this new color vision can now be selected for. This is basically the same process that the brain that got hooked up to the first eye would have gone through.
There is actually some speculation that this is in the process of happening in humans now. Some women have 4 color pigments. (search for tetrachromat for more info)
"A diversified approach allows many needs to be incrementally satisfied, and progress is much more attainable."
Also a diverse approach allows the flaws of one solution to be mitigated by another. Each solution has strong points, weak points and flaws. A single solution's flaws and weak points will usually limit it's progress to something far short of success. No body here is arguing that this laptop project should be done in place of all the other programs. That would likely be a complete failure.
The amount of money this project will divert from other aid projects is a small fraction of their total budget, and likely less than half the total cost of the laptop project. Consider this a pilot project. If it works, the payoff could be huge, if not, the cost was small, and probably worth what we will learn about the problems anyway.
That is more like it. Those who oppose this either stand to gain something if this fails, or stand to lose something if it succeeds. Those who think that food aid (for example) is more important will a) not donate to this and b) work on food aid.
" Good question. Why everyone isn't on this guy's side is beyond me
Because some people think there are more important things, like curing/controlling AIDS, building infrastructure, and enabling access to clean water. "
That explains why they are not helping him, but it does not explain why they are opposing him. And they are opposing him.
Ribosomes. If they are the same, or similar to one of the few types in earth-life, then it is almost impossible that they came from elsewhere. If they are different....
The specific example of height is a bad one. Asians who emmigrate to the US become taller within a few generations, without any new gentics. Apparently diet affects height quite a bit.
"public corporations are owned and by investors that have one single goal."
Not at all. investors, like any other large group of people, have lots of diverse goals. In practice though you can't satisfy all of these goals. Most are mutually exclusive to some extent. So it comes down to the least common denominator - max profits - like you said. It is the nature of corporate law that is the problem here, not the investors.
"I meant "small" compared to today's linear accellerators which are measured in kilometers."
Oh. Today's linear accelerators are optimised for high energy research. 0.9 c and more. While that would make aiming easier, it would be useless here, the power and efficiency is way too low. We need hundreds of millions of joules, not 0.25 joules worth of 30GeV particles. The design parameters here are very different. 200-500 meter long acclerators should be more than enough.
"In space you could accellerate to your desired speed, turn of the engines and drift towards your target with zero emissions."
First, that is very hard. Any vehicle, especially a manned one will generate heat. This heat must be dumped. You can control which direction the heat goes, but it has to go. Looking at it from more angles makes hiding much harder.
On the other hand, even if emmisions were droped to zero, space is not totally dark. There are stars. A moving object, even with no emmisions, can be racked by the stars it blocks. If the ship is traveling straight at you this is hard. This is why multiple angles would be so usefull.
You are right that 3d space is much harder to defend than 2D. In practice this will at least partly be offset by sensor range. Subs can only hear at best a few dozen miles. Space is much clearer, we have the whole EM spectrum that we can use, and we have much better sensors for it already. That said, it is still a hard problem. On the other hand, this just emphasizes my original point - Space warfare is stealth, sensors, and long-range weapons. Not dogfights.
"If stealth technology would not suffice against the radars in that future you could of course pepper the system with radar drones and automated weapons platforms, even though the enemy knows where the radars are he'd have to disable at least some of them if he doesn't want to show up as a blip and that would notify you of his presence. Perhaps he'd even have to give his position away by firing his weapons which should give your weapons platforms plenty to shoot at."
I am sure that radar won't work here. Stealth is just too easy. It will be replaced with lots of very good passive sensors. Other than that, this sounds about right.
At c/2, the beam would cover 10,000 miles in just over 1/10 of a second. Anything accelerating fast enough to make hitting it hard is all engine, is not a threat, and will be out of fuel in a few seconds anyway. Effectively, the target is standing still, or at worst moving in a straight line. Don't forget the 0.05s lightspeed delay that your targeting sensors have though or you will miss... And how much do you expect the gas to expand in that 0.1 seconds, anyway?
"If you cause heat emissions the enemy will know your position (and can track it until your weapon has cooled down significantly)"
Dead right. you never want to do this. However, the heat I mentioned is what happens to the target when the beam hits, not the gun. (it may emit heat too, and you'll have to deal with that. I suggest putting something cold and shiny inbetween the gun and the enemy, with a small hole for the 'barrel')
"Can those really output enough to keep the weapons firing?"
According to Wikipedia 600-1200 MW is doable now. You may well be limited to a 1/10 duty cycle for your gun though... And we are accelerating micrograms to milligrams of hydrogen, not kilograms. just a few billion joules - at 1/10 duty cycle 1000MW is overkill.
Missiles. I didn't mean to imply that missels wouldn't work, or that they wouldn't need guidance. Just that active radar was a really bad idea. Lasers are still bad, but much better. And you won't want to use small accelerators, mostly 'cause they will cause more loss but also because there is little advantage to 'small' here.
How to defend a planet. Your question is mostly right here. If all your sensors are on the planet, your first clue that there is an intruder in the system will be his missiles hitting you. This is the same problem that the US and USSR had during the cold war. Balistic missile subs could be anywhere. The solution was attack subs, constantly on the prowl, and also stealthed. You would need lots of stealth spaceships scattered throughout the system, so the enemy never knows where your sensors are - this makes hiding from them much harder. Sure he is out of detection range from the planet at 200,000 miles, but not from that attack ship 500 miles off his starboard side, that he can't see (cause it is smaller? better stealth? better sensors?)
Most of our conversation has been on weapons, but stealth and sensors will be far more important. Have you ever read 'Hunt for Red October'?
Traveling at 1/2 c or better. Good luck with the dodge. And it is then just a very fast stream of gas, most of the effects on the target will be the same as charged particles. Heat, and lots of it. Better than a laser, as mirrors won't do squat. Of course it has to be aimed well, just like the laser would. But dodging it would be almost as hard as dodging the laser. As for the energy cost, any space-based warship will have fusion/fission or better power. Chemical explosives will be used only when there is no alternative. Way too low energy density.
The B-2 stealth bomber is almost invisible to radar. We are doing this now. Space-based warships don't need to fly in an atmosphere like the B-2 does, so stealth will be easier. You will never find a space-based warship on radar. Count on it. Radar-guided missiles won't work. Not only will they not see the target, but the radar signal tells the target exactally where it is. Just begging for an ion cannon, laser, or rail-gun shootdown. Or a dodge - closing speed has to be fast to avoid a shootdown. Manoeuvring at these speeds will take a lot of propellant, which means limited manoeuvring. an active radar lets the target start dodging way too soon, and the missile runs out of fuel.
Unless it's position is known anyway, (orbital platforms, asteriod based forts etc.) anything with active radar dies as soon as an enemy ship gets within 10,000 miles. Submarines almost never use their active sonar for the same reason.
I didn't give a lot of detail, I wasn't sure anyone cared. So here are some details. I have given this more thought than what my first post took...
Lasers lose focus because of the optics. Bigger and better optics are the answer. Start at 20 meters or so in diameter. That plus our best tolerances should be enough for a range of 500 miles or more (a couple thousand would be better..) So they won't fit on anything smaller than a battleship. So what. 1GW of power for 10s would do damage to anything, even spread over 4 sq meters. (still 250k times sunlight at 1 AU). Besides, even a strong searchlight can cook cameras etc, and a blind target is a soon to be dead one. I am no laser expert, but this sounds doable.
Nukes. No blast? Add a few dozen tons of shrapnel (your guidance still better be good...) On the other hand, there are other ways to kill a spaceship than blowing it up. Radiation still kills stuff. That is mostly what I had in mind anyway. Could you find a way to aim the radiation... ? Shaped charge nukes??? Perhaps nukes are better suited for minefields.
Current anti-missile missiles are already fired from hundreds if not thousands of miles away. And they are all kinetic energy weapons. No warhead, they just hit the target at closing speeds of 2-6 thousand mph. Now all you have to do is make it invisible to radar, small profile, control it's temperature (so it does not show up vs. the background) and paint it black. It can't be easy to see a black football against a black background at 100 miles. And in space, a closing speed of 100 miles/second should be easy. To dodge this, you need to spot it, determine it's path, and move in one second. Not easy. Neither would the guidance system...
Hmm.. At one metric ton, assuming my math is good, that speed equals 2.8 kilotones TNT of energy. Ouch.
Ion beams. They start charged. them you merge 2 of them. It is called a neutral beam then. Better have it focused before they merge... (google for more info)
Space warships (if they ever happen) will be big. Star Destroyer size. Not X-wings.
Other weapons would be lasers and ion cannons. Things that travel at or near the speed of light, so there is no warning at all. I think missiles would be hard to use. Ranges would typically be on the order of thousands of miles. Still, fire a dozen of your stealth missiles and quietly leave, letting the missiles arrive at thier target two days later... nukes and kinetic energy weapons would rule I think. Similar to anti-balistic missile defences.
Re:I had been looking forward to the B5 game.
on
Cut Down In Their Prime
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Sounds about right. My guess is that any real space combat will look al lot more like submarine warfare than air-to-air combat. Fat on stealth, sensors and long range weapons.
Long before England's biomass exceeded that of the universe it would come up against another hard limit. It can't increase volume faster than (1.33)*pi*c^3 or that of a sphere expanding it's radius at the speed of light. It would certainly create a black hole long before this, and stop growing due to population increases.;-)
Your basic point is correct. No exponential growth rate of anything is sustainable forever.
"and humanity itself, will limit its growth eventually. The only question is whether it is done with intelligence and forethought, or through catastrophe."
No, there is another equally important question, at least in the context of global warming. That is 'When will our energy use stop growing?' An answer of about 100 years means that we must have new carbon neutral source(s) of energy equal to 2-3 times our current fossil fuel useage (and these are minimums, the real numbers are likely higher) or we face certain global warming. (again assuming the global warming crowd is roughly correct) This assumes double or triple energy efficiencies at a minimum, and all current carbon neutral sources grow at the same rate that energy use does - this growth does not count as 'new'.
If wind/solar can do this, great. They can't with current tech. Future tech??? unknown. Nuclear, coal w/carbon sequestration, and possibly geothermal seem to me the only other options, and nuclear is the only one developed enough to start building now.
I personally do not see energy use peaking in less than 300 years, barring the catastrophy you mentioned. Energy use by then would be at least 16x current levels, and 160x or even 1600x very possible. ( 5% per year for 200 years is about 17,000x!!!) By then we will have solved the problem (fusion, fast breeders, geothermal, 80%+ efficient solar...) or destroyed the planet[1] and likely ourselves.
[1]this of course means the planet can no longer support humans, not 'the earth goes the way of Alderaan.'
This is dirt simple. There are switches for lamps, you cut the power cord, and clamp the two ends into the switch. quick, simple, and no tools except whatever you used to cut the cord. No need to open the case at all. What parts were you thinking of?
CH4 isn't that nice for cars, (though it does work - better than H2) Methanol works better. NASCAR cars run on it, it is liquid, and it can be made out of CO2, water and hydrogen. The process is not all that efficient, but if you use nuclear for it...
"The quickiest easiest results would be from doubling gas mileage and requiring energy efficent light bulbs. Another would be improving insulation on buildings."
These are one-time improvements. A growth rate of 2% will double in 35 years. If England is growing at 2% a year, then doubling the gas mileage simply puts the problem off 35 years. Oil will have peaked in 35 years (probably sooner..) The first doubling of gas mileage may be easy, but each succesive doubling gets exponentially harder. It can't keep up.
The same logic goes for better insulation and efficient lightbulbs. Conservation and better efficiency are not long term solutions, practically they just break even for a little while.
One possible exception to this: Germany and other parts of Europe no longer have replacement birthrates. This means without immigration they are not growing. If England can achieve this, and ban immigration, and go carbon neutral by conservation, then - for england - they are done. As a practical matter they would also be on their way to extinction.
If the global warming crowd is roughly correct, and we have just a decade or two to significantly reduce CO2 emmisions (or face global catastrophy), then, since we have a [1]global growth rate of more than 2%, we have about that much time to come up with carbon neutral energy sources, - in excess of what we already have - that equal roughly double our current fossil fuel sources. All of them. Coal, Oil, rain forests (that we do not replace)...
I see no way to do this without a huge increase in nuclear, or possibly carbon sequestration on coal, and this on top of lots of wind solar and biomass. Greater efficiency? One quarter energy use on everything, at a minimum, and then we have to have some alternatives coming online in 20 years or we just put off the problem, and not even long enough to pass it on to our kids.
[1] If nobody grew at all except China, we would still have greater than 1% per year growth. 2% is low for most places outside of western europe.
That possibility can be checked out. If some kind of copy error grabbed some host DNA, then we can compare that DNA to known cell families and we can then infer when this copy error occured. The article implied that if this happened, it occured around or even before eukaryotes, bacteria, and archaea split off from their common ancestor.
"Mimi, it turns out, belongs to its own distinct and extremely ancient lineage of large DNA viruses."
If viruses did not devolve from cells, then they started after them, as they depend on them to exist. It is unlikely that mimivirus decended from modern-looking viruses as it seems to be as old or older than them.
Only your third point looks valid to me. The Mimivirus has genes in common to both viruses and other cells.
"Claverie found genes for such things as the translation of proteins, DNA repair enzymes, and other types of protein. Those functions were thought to be the exclusive province of more complex cellular organisms."
"certain signature Mimi genes, such as those that code for the production of the soccer-ball shape of its capsid (an outer protein coat common to all viruses), have been conserved in viruses that infect organisms from all three of the domains, particularly in eukaryotes."
With this information your points one and two are based on hard evidence and few assumptions (like common decent etc, assumptions common to all evolutionary theories)
Slashdot Mirror
Ribosomes are not proteins. They are mostly RNA with some proteins grafted on. This image shows this fairly clearly.
(See here for more info. Especially the 'Implications' part)
What I remember reading about implied that in each X chromosome the genes that produce the pigments have already been duplicated. they just aren't different yet.
Also tetrachromatic women do indeed see the world differently. The rainbow has more distinct colors than normal people see. So their brains are picking up on the different receptors and making use of that info - apparently without any genetic differences expressed in the neurons themselves.
"I believe the female tetrachromacy is a not exactly related to direct inheritance, ... Females have inherited two copies of the X chromosome..."
How is that not direct inheritance? - granted, it is unlikely to lead to tetrachromatic males, but it is inheritance.
"However, it seems like the evolution of photocells with light-detecting pigments and the development of the proper neural pathways to interpret signals from the eye would be considerably more substantial achievements"
Any small mutation in the genes that produce the pigment, assuming that it still mostly works, will yeild a pigment that has a different color response. All that is required for humans to go from 3 to 4 color vision (and obslete RGB color space...) is for this mutation to be active in some, but not all cells. This could happen for instance if the gene gets doubled (two copies) and then one copy mutates. Both of these steps are common occurances.
Once there are cells with this different color range in the eye, the neurons will detect this different signal and will wire themselves to make some use of this new information with no genetic changes in the neurons themselves. That is just how neurons do things. Any random mutations that do make better use of this new color vision can now be selected for. This is basically the same process that the brain that got hooked up to the first eye would have gone through.
There is actually some speculation that this is in the process of happening in humans now. Some women have 4 color pigments. (search for tetrachromat for more info)
Also a diverse approach allows the flaws of one solution to be mitigated by another. Each solution has strong points, weak points and flaws. A single solution's flaws and weak points will usually limit it's progress to something far short of success. No body here is arguing that this laptop project should be done in place of all the other programs. That would likely be a complete failure.
The amount of money this project will divert from other aid projects is a small fraction of their total budget, and likely less than half the total cost of the laptop project. Consider this a pilot project. If it works, the payoff could be huge, if not, the cost was small, and probably worth what we will learn about the problems anyway.
That is more like it. Those who oppose this either stand to gain something if this fails, or stand to lose something if it succeeds. Those who think that food aid (for example) is more important will a) not donate to this and b) work on food aid.
That explains why they are not helping him, but it does not explain why they are opposing him. And they are opposing him.
It is not like the real thing would be a problem. Just give them a kite and tell them to fly it into the nearest thunderstorm. Problem(s) solved.
Ribosomes. If they are the same, or similar to one of the few types in earth-life, then it is almost impossible that they came from elsewhere. If they are different....
try 'sudo -s'
This is about the same as su.
The specific example of height is a bad one. Asians who emmigrate to the US become taller within a few generations, without any new gentics. Apparently diet affects height quite a bit.
Not at all. investors, like any other large group of people, have lots of diverse goals. In practice though you can't satisfy all of these goals. Most are mutually exclusive to some extent. So it comes down to the least common denominator - max profits - like you said. It is the nature of corporate law that is the problem here, not the investors.
Oh. Today's linear accelerators are optimised for high energy research. 0.9 c and more. While that would make aiming easier, it would be useless here, the power and efficiency is way too low. We need hundreds of millions of joules, not 0.25 joules worth of 30GeV particles. The design parameters here are very different. 200-500 meter long acclerators should be more than enough.
"In space you could accellerate to your desired speed, turn of the engines and drift towards your target with zero emissions."
First, that is very hard. Any vehicle, especially a manned one will generate heat. This heat must be dumped. You can control which direction the heat goes, but it has to go. Looking at it from more angles makes hiding much harder.
On the other hand, even if emmisions were droped to zero, space is not totally dark. There are stars. A moving object, even with no emmisions, can be racked by the stars it blocks. If the ship is traveling straight at you this is hard. This is why multiple angles would be so usefull.
You are right that 3d space is much harder to defend than 2D. In practice this will at least partly be offset by sensor range. Subs can only hear at best a few dozen miles. Space is much clearer, we have the whole EM spectrum that we can use, and we have much better sensors for it already. That said, it is still a hard problem. On the other hand, this just emphasizes my original point - Space warfare is stealth, sensors, and long-range weapons. Not dogfights.
"If stealth technology would not suffice against the radars in that future you could of course pepper the system with radar drones and automated weapons platforms, even though the enemy knows where the radars are he'd have to disable at least some of them if he doesn't want to show up as a blip and that would notify you of his presence. Perhaps he'd even have to give his position away by firing his weapons which should give your weapons platforms plenty to shoot at."
I am sure that radar won't work here. Stealth is just too easy. It will be replaced with lots of very good passive sensors. Other than that, this sounds about right.
"If you cause heat emissions the enemy will know your position (and can track it until your weapon has cooled down significantly)"
Dead right. you never want to do this. However, the heat I mentioned is what happens to the target when the beam hits, not the gun. (it may emit heat too, and you'll have to deal with that. I suggest putting something cold and shiny inbetween the gun and the enemy, with a small hole for the 'barrel')
"Can those really output enough to keep the weapons firing?"
According to Wikipedia 600-1200 MW is doable now. You may well be limited to a 1/10 duty cycle for your gun though... And we are accelerating micrograms to milligrams of hydrogen, not kilograms. just a few billion joules - at 1/10 duty cycle 1000MW is overkill.
Missiles. I didn't mean to imply that missels wouldn't work, or that they wouldn't need guidance. Just that active radar was a really bad idea. Lasers are still bad, but much better. And you won't want to use small accelerators, mostly 'cause they will cause more loss but also because there is little advantage to 'small' here.
How to defend a planet. Your question is mostly right here. If all your sensors are on the planet, your first clue that there is an intruder in the system will be his missiles hitting you. This is the same problem that the US and USSR had during the cold war. Balistic missile subs could be anywhere. The solution was attack subs, constantly on the prowl, and also stealthed. You would need lots of stealth spaceships scattered throughout the system, so the enemy never knows where your sensors are - this makes hiding from them much harder. Sure he is out of detection range from the planet at 200,000 miles, but not from that attack ship 500 miles off his starboard side, that he can't see (cause it is smaller? better stealth? better sensors?)
Most of our conversation has been on weapons, but stealth and sensors will be far more important. Have you ever read 'Hunt for Red October'?
Traveling at 1/2 c or better. Good luck with the dodge. And it is then just a very fast stream of gas, most of the effects on the target will be the same as charged particles. Heat, and lots of it. Better than a laser, as mirrors won't do squat. Of course it has to be aimed well, just like the laser would. But dodging it would be almost as hard as dodging the laser. As for the energy cost, any space-based warship will have fusion/fission or better power. Chemical explosives will be used only when there is no alternative. Way too low energy density.
The B-2 stealth bomber is almost invisible to radar. We are doing this now. Space-based warships don't need to fly in an atmosphere like the B-2 does, so stealth will be easier. You will never find a space-based warship on radar. Count on it. Radar-guided missiles won't work. Not only will they not see the target, but the radar signal tells the target exactally where it is. Just begging for an ion cannon, laser, or rail-gun shootdown. Or a dodge - closing speed has to be fast to avoid a shootdown. Manoeuvring at these speeds will take a lot of propellant, which means limited manoeuvring. an active radar lets the target start dodging way too soon, and the missile runs out of fuel.
Unless it's position is known anyway, (orbital platforms, asteriod based forts etc.) anything with active radar dies as soon as an enemy ship gets within 10,000 miles. Submarines almost never use their active sonar for the same reason.
Lasers lose focus because of the optics. Bigger and better optics are the answer. Start at 20 meters or so in diameter. That plus our best tolerances should be enough for a range of 500 miles or more (a couple thousand would be better..) So they won't fit on anything smaller than a battleship. So what. 1GW of power for 10s would do damage to anything, even spread over 4 sq meters. (still 250k times sunlight at 1 AU). Besides, even a strong searchlight can cook cameras etc, and a blind target is a soon to be dead one. I am no laser expert, but this sounds doable.
Nukes. No blast? Add a few dozen tons of shrapnel (your guidance still better be good...) On the other hand, there are other ways to kill a spaceship than blowing it up. Radiation still kills stuff. That is mostly what I had in mind anyway. Could you find a way to aim the radiation... ? Shaped charge nukes??? Perhaps nukes are better suited for minefields.
Current anti-missile missiles are already fired from hundreds if not thousands of miles away. And they are all kinetic energy weapons. No warhead, they just hit the target at closing speeds of 2-6 thousand mph. Now all you have to do is make it invisible to radar, small profile, control it's temperature (so it does not show up vs. the background) and paint it black. It can't be easy to see a black football against a black background at 100 miles. And in space, a closing speed of 100 miles/second should be easy. To dodge this, you need to spot it, determine it's path, and move in one second. Not easy. Neither would the guidance system...
Hmm.. At one metric ton, assuming my math is good, that speed equals 2.8 kilotones TNT of energy. Ouch.
Ion beams. They start charged. them you merge 2 of them. It is called a neutral beam then. Better have it focused before they merge... (google for more info)
Space warships (if they ever happen) will be big. Star Destroyer size. Not X-wings.
Other weapons would be lasers and ion cannons. Things that travel at or near the speed of light, so there is no warning at all. I think missiles would be hard to use. Ranges would typically be on the order of thousands of miles. Still, fire a dozen of your stealth missiles and quietly leave, letting the missiles arrive at thier target two days later... nukes and kinetic energy weapons would rule I think. Similar to anti-balistic missile defences.
Sounds about right. My guess is that any real space combat will look al lot more like submarine warfare than air-to-air combat. Fat on stealth, sensors and long range weapons.
Gotcha - the simple and easy won't work in your case. Good luck on your modding.
Your basic point is correct. No exponential growth rate of anything is sustainable forever.
"and humanity itself, will limit its growth eventually. The only question is whether it is done with intelligence and forethought, or through catastrophe."
No, there is another equally important question, at least in the context of global warming. That is 'When will our energy use stop growing?' An answer of about 100 years means that we must have new carbon neutral source(s) of energy equal to 2-3 times our current fossil fuel useage (and these are minimums, the real numbers are likely higher) or we face certain global warming. (again assuming the global warming crowd is roughly correct) This assumes double or triple energy efficiencies at a minimum, and all current carbon neutral sources grow at the same rate that energy use does - this growth does not count as 'new'.
If wind/solar can do this, great. They can't with current tech. Future tech??? unknown. Nuclear, coal w/carbon sequestration, and possibly geothermal seem to me the only other options, and nuclear is the only one developed enough to start building now.
I personally do not see energy use peaking in less than 300 years, barring the catastrophy you mentioned. Energy use by then would be at least 16x current levels, and 160x or even 1600x very possible. ( 5% per year for 200 years is about 17,000x!!!) By then we will have solved the problem (fusion, fast breeders, geothermal, 80%+ efficient solar...) or destroyed the planet[1] and likely ourselves.
[1]this of course means the planet can no longer support humans, not 'the earth goes the way of Alderaan.'
This is dirt simple. There are switches for lamps, you cut the power cord, and clamp the two ends into the switch. quick, simple, and no tools except whatever you used to cut the cord. No need to open the case at all. What parts were you thinking of?
CH4 isn't that nice for cars, (though it does work - better than H2) Methanol works better. NASCAR cars run on it, it is liquid, and it can be made out of CO2, water and hydrogen. The process is not all that efficient, but if you use nuclear for it...
These are one-time improvements. A growth rate of 2% will double in 35 years. If England is growing at 2% a year, then doubling the gas mileage simply puts the problem off 35 years. Oil will have peaked in 35 years (probably sooner..) The first doubling of gas mileage may be easy, but each succesive doubling gets exponentially harder. It can't keep up.
The same logic goes for better insulation and efficient lightbulbs. Conservation and better efficiency are not long term solutions, practically they just break even for a little while.
One possible exception to this: Germany and other parts of Europe no longer have replacement birthrates. This means without immigration they are not growing. If England can achieve this, and ban immigration, and go carbon neutral by conservation, then - for england - they are done. As a practical matter they would also be on their way to extinction.
If the global warming crowd is roughly correct, and we have just a decade or two to significantly reduce CO2 emmisions (or face global catastrophy), then, since we have a [1]global growth rate of more than 2%, we have about that much time to come up with carbon neutral energy sources, - in excess of what we already have - that equal roughly double our current fossil fuel sources. All of them. Coal, Oil, rain forests (that we do not replace) ...
I see no way to do this without a huge increase in nuclear, or possibly carbon sequestration on coal, and this on top of lots of wind solar and biomass. Greater efficiency? One quarter energy use on everything, at a minimum, and then we have to have some alternatives coming online in 20 years or we just put off the problem, and not even long enough to pass it on to our kids.
[1] If nobody grew at all except China, we would still have greater than 1% per year growth. 2% is low for most places outside of western europe.
The thing is 1/2 km in diameter. it's effect on the tides, even if we put it into LEO, is almost nill.
"Mimi, it turns out, belongs to its own distinct and extremely ancient lineage of large DNA viruses."
If viruses did not devolve from cells, then they started after them, as they depend on them to exist. It is unlikely that mimivirus decended from modern-looking viruses as it seems to be as old or older than them.
"Claverie found genes for such things as the translation of proteins, DNA repair enzymes, and other types of protein. Those functions were thought to be the exclusive province of more complex cellular organisms."
"certain signature Mimi genes, such as those that code for the production of the soccer-ball shape of its capsid (an outer protein coat common to all viruses), have been conserved in viruses that infect organisms from all three of the domains, particularly in eukaryotes."
With this information your points one and two are based on hard evidence and few assumptions (like common decent etc, assumptions common to all evolutionary theories)