Well the problem with that is that Venus's atmosphere is incredibly dense. If we could reduce that density to something aproximating terrestrial norms, then the heat on the surface would likely be a none issue (it would still be warmer than earth, but only due to solar proximity, not insulation).
However, I cannot for the life of me think of a feasible way to get rid of most of a planets atmosphere. You would need to move the gas offworld, or find some way to eliminate it. Somehow I doubt that pumping it into tanks and lauching them into the sun would work terribly well. If we put a black hole in orbit maybe...
You're probably right about the mass. In which case it is undoubtably a reaction drive. I would imagine though, that a more advanced design could serve both functions, although I wonder how much difference the mass of the CO makes during the first phase. Might add up to alot if the entire sail is coated with the stuff...
And, OT, I've heard both versions of the chicken joke. I prefer the one in my sig beacause of the combination of erotic/exotic. What you do with the chicken joke (or the chickens for that matter) is up to you:-)
You've forgotton that the same effect is happening to the emmiter. Say we place a flashlight in vacuum, and it emits a beam in one direction. The light bulb is actually emmiting light in all directions simultaniously, but the light is only escaping in the forward arc. The rest is reflected, or absorbed, by the backing in the flashlight, pushing it backwards via the same effect as the light impacting a solar sail pushed forwards. If no reaction effects apply to the light bulb filament, then the net thrust is opposite the amount of thrust provided by the beam were it applied to a light sail. If reaction effects apply to the filament, then it's still thrusting away from the beam opening, since the light is only leaving via that arc. So the laws of reaction still apply, regardless.
A laser is subject to the same effect, since lasers have mirrored backing (the light beam is parralel, but projects equally in both directions unless reflected).
>This design isn't a solar-sail. Rather it is a rocket that looks like a solar sail. >Just like any other rocket, the thrust comes from the thermal expansion of gasses pressing against the sail-shaped surface. The major >difference in this design is that the energy to heat the gasses comes not from chemical, nuclear or solar power onboard the craft but from on >off-board source on the ground. It is functionally identical to the Laser Launch concept.
Hehe, I was wondering when someone would bring this up. You're absolutly right about it being more like a rocket than a sail, but I would guess that this design could be used for both purposes. Solar sails launched via laser is an old idea in science fiction, and I think that using the gas coating/reaction approach used here would be compatible.
I wonder how much thrust, if any, this patricular "sail" gets from light pressure though... It's got a big honking microwave beam aimed at it, it must be either opaque or reflective to microwaves for the gas to boil, so at least _some_ thrust must be coming from light pressure.
Actually, light pressure would propel the lauching emmiter backwards, this is the principal governing light sails in general and photon drives as well. This light sail differs in that, as you rightly pointed out, it gains thrust from the surface CO boiling away. But a regular lightsail uses the pressure generated from reflecting light to accelerate, no gas emmisions required.
The laws of reaction still apply to the emiiter, but at these levels it should be negligable (most of the thrust on the other end is coming from the boiling gas). I don't know what kind of station-keeping thrusters would be needed for the emmiter if it were built in orbit, I assume it wouldn't be too difficult compared to the difficulty of building the emmiter in the first place.
TFA seems slowed by slashdoting at the moment (and I'm on dialup), but I would guess that putting the kind of emmiter in orbit that could provide that kind of output would be prohibitively expensive. We have a power grid here on earth already, why not use it to send the microwaves up and simply live with the reduced efficiency? I imagine that the cost of the extra energy would balance out the savings from not launching the microwave emmiter into orbit.
On the other hand, if we could build a solar array + microwave emmiter in orbit, we could use it to beam the power back to a recieving station on the earth's surface. We could build the orbital solar/microwave stations first, and then use one to send off a solar sail craft.
Depends, can you get it new? If not then, yeah, the OP's point stands.
Halo 2 in this context is a really bad example - it was released recently and thus is still available as a new game. You either missed the point or made a strawman argument - the emulator he's talking about is for a really old game that is long since out of production.
Many people would tell you to draw the line where your actions begin to affect others. "My right to swing my fist ends where your face begins" is typical of this form of libertarianism. So porn is OK, flashing a bus full of nuns is not:-) Actually, a better serious example would be how sex between consenting adults is no business of the state, whereas the moment consent is violated or in question the law has the duty to intervene. Thus anti-sodomy laws are not considered ok from a personal freedoms standpoint, but laws prohibiting rape, pedophilia and sexual assault are fine.
>Even if we use your defination of terrorism, wouldn't the fact that the plane was a civilian plane make crashing it terrorism? Civilian hostages were taken.
That's actually a really good point. You could argue that they were using human shields, which takes the hijackers into the clearcut territory of terrorism.
However, the point several people in this thread have made, and that the gp was making, is that the US government has distorted the definition of terrorism. What is a terrorist now? It's someone who does or plans some violent act that the gov't under this administration doesn't like. So Iraqi insurgent forces are "terrorists", which is as much newspeak as calling them "freedom fighters", only in the other direction. It's a PR thing; call 'em terrorists and people will associate them with 9/11, or al-Queda or whatever. Although I would say that some of the Iraqi insurgents have crossed the line, the people who beheaded aid workers are terrorists in my books...
Those are things like costume slipups and continuity errors. In the context of a game those are not "bugs"; they're rarely even noticed.
If, in a game, someone's clothing changed between two levels with no plausible explanation that didn't violate continuity, would it count as a bug? That's the sort of thing you linked to in IMDB, and it doesn't fit the definiton of a software bug. "Bug" in the context of software means something that prevents the program from executing properly, like a crash bug, or a rendering anomaly.
The equivalent in a movie would be a random BSOD in the middle of a fight scene, or a character's body clipping into a wall and getting stuck. Obviously this is a rare occurence:-)
That is a false comparison. Movies are an established form of entertainment, and have a fairly well laid out production arc. Hardware considerations are a non issue, and neither are alpha and beta testing (and yes, I know about test screenings, and they just don't compare for difficulty). When was the last time you saw a "bugged" movie? Design in a movie is what's done before production; you don't write the script after you've started filming. Conversly, game design is what take up much of the production time, meaning that the number of variables you need to take into account is greater.
Finally, I would rather _not_ see the game industry become the next hollywood. Games are already too formulaic for my taste, and speeding up production in order to give a predictable product faster, *cough* EA *cough*, does not sound like an improvement.
So we'll start using uranium and biodiesel, and in the long term maybe hydrogen, fusion or non-uranium fissile fuel.
So what was your point exactly?
There will always be a fuel source running out, there will always be a looming humanitarian crisis. There will be war, in five years or fifty or five hundred. There are always national powers rising and others failing; nationialism replaces religion, replaces tribalism, replaces greed. Human history dictates this. Barring $event (where $event refers to some never-before-seen shift like tranhumanism, interstellar spaceflight or extintion) these emergencies are always going to be the facts of our world.
Does this mean we should abandon everthing not related to solving the myriad dangers we now face? In fact, who's to say that pure scientific research won't somehow connect to solving seemingly unrelated problems? Medical technology has come out of unrelated space reseach in the past. Should we drop everything and focus on oil? What about nuclear proliferation, or the AIDS epidemic? What about impending global ecological disasters? Your problem is not the be all and end all, nor is it unsolvable without panicking. Space research, and other pure science endeavors, benefit us as a species, even if they never yield anything. And the peak oil problem is an economic and technological one, not a scientific one; modern tech and the global will to use it can get us out of this crisis.
Untrue. The basic premise of the greenhouse effect is sound; cabon dioxide/monoxide, water vapour and gaseous hydrocarbons trap heat in the same IR range that the earth radiates away its excess heat in. None of this is in debate, or yet to be proven. Without a greenhouse effect, and assuming a nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere, we'd be freezing our asses off. At least one theory wrt the ice age suggests that global cooling can occur if greenhouse gass levels fall.
What is in question is not the theory of greenhouse gasses, or global warming itself, but rather the degree of warming and the degree that can be attributed to human activity. Saying that it's as scientific as astrology is just FUD.
Assuming that human release of greenhouse gasses is causing an increase in temperature, or will cause such an increase in the future, requires two assumtions. First, we must be able to release enough CO2 to cause an appreaciable rise in temperature. Second, our contribution must be enough, in and of itself, to cause a rise in temperature; if the warming can be attributed to methane or solar output, then the greenhouse effect caused by us is secondary. In other words, it's not that global warming can or can't happen, it's whether or not we need to worry about it, given our present technology.
The article states that 75% of peer-reviewed scientists, who are far more informed about these phenomina than you, believe that both of the assumtions are valid, and that we need to worry. Disagree all you want, but dismissing the matter out-of-hand based on a layman's understanding of the earth's climate, is arrogant and foolish.
By saying we "should" die, you are passing a moral judgement, whether you mean to or not. Yes, we are all going to die. Yeah, nothing lasts forever. But the fact that this is the normal natural order automatically makes it good?
I would tend to argue that it is the sort of emphasis on the immediate that you refer to WRT your daughter that also makes us short sighted. If living longer made us more concerned about the future, since we'll be living with the consequences of our actions, wouldn't that be a good thing for the rest of the human race? As it stands the only reason we have for not completely squandering the resources of the present is the idea that our descendants will have to live in the world we leave them. If we ourselves knew that we would live with those same consequences, would we be so wasteful? Would we leave so little?
There are selfish reasons for wanting to live forever, but there are also more pragmatic reasons. I don't think I'm better than the rest of humanity (although, highschool made me wonder about the state of us apes...), but I also think that the worst elements in the human race are the ones who see nothing but a short mortal life without any sense of responsibility for the future. Such a viewpoint is only possible when you don't have a long term outlook, which immortality would tend to force. The selfish who only want to live forever would be faced with the prospect of facing the world they help create. This would be a good thing. It would also be far easier than trying to alter the facts of greedy human nature that have persisted for all of history.
There is room in the future for me, there is room for your daughter and there is room for a 1977 beater. Said future will benefit from an immortal outlook, which technology might someday give us. I would be in favour of "curing" aging, even if I didn't live to see it.
So you think we'll be able to solve telomere aging on a genetic level, organ failure, neurological aging, long term development of cancer...
And we won't be able to extend our reproductive lifespan?
Come on, if we could develop cloning technology, or even some form of cellular repair nanotechnology, surely we could find a way to provide more gametes. Actually, some form of cybernetic tech which continously repairs the effect of aging could have birth control built in. Several sci-fi writers have put forward the concept of conscious control of fertility as an engineered solution to overpopulation, and I see no reason it couldn't be incorporated here. Actually, some sort of nano-cybernetic augmentation as a form of immortality, with other benefits included in the package such as bodily self-repair and birth control, would be kinda cool.
Except that the rate of population growth has slowed during the past hundred years. Western countries are now below replacement level fertility, some parts of western europe are even experiencing negative population growth (fewer are born or immigrate than die or emigrate).
The reason seems to be modern medicine and technology, not to mention the wealth needed to pay for them. Once the need to reproduce a dozen times to see some of your children survive is gone, and sex can be had without pregnancy, why would the population grow? Cultural inertia and immigration from other countries and cultures needs to be taken into account, but that isn't an issue WRT immortality.
Assuming we could raise the standard of living of the rest of the world to our level, and assuming that their various cultures adapted as fast as or faster than ours did, then the rate of population growth would stabilize. We would need to fix our industrial waste problems first (bluntly, the planet can't take another two or three industrial revolutions). If we could do it though, why would immortality cause any population problems? People would feel no pressure to have children early, there'd be no biological clock, and after a few centuries our numbers would likely be in decline.
The only problem I see is the stagnantation you describe. But that is a problem for another day. And while I can see there being issues with social stratification, and poorer people and countries being excluded, in the long run things would work themselves out. Poor nations don't remain impoverished forever, and when dealing with immortality, we would start seeing the long term.
The genes you are referring to are called "telomeres", and yes they do govern cellular aging. As for sperm, they don't divide, but rather are produced by division of a class of cell (which remains in the testes). Sperm have only half the requisite genes for replication, eggs in women have the other half (not counting mitochondria).
Aging in this context is probably an evolved response to uncontrolled division of cells. Cancer occurs when cells "forget" to stop replicating. Also, living forever doesn't make sense from an evolutionary perspective; reproduction matters more than lifespan (natural selection only applies to your genes, not you yourself).
Actually, my point about thermodynamics had to do with the viability of alternative energy in terms of local generation of power.
To clarify: distributed solar is a good idea, along the lines of solar shingles and hot water heating. But it will only alleviate the pressure on the grid, and even then it will only work in places where sunlight can be relied upon. Tidal and hydro will work, where tides and rivers allow. Geothermal will work where existing vents are present. Centralized passive power in general is a good idea, where conditions allow.
None of these methods are in question, and none requires complicated technology. But how would you deal with a location that lacked accessible passive power to tap? Or an area that used far more power than it could ever draw from the environment? How would you deal with vehicle power requirements? Transporting that power via, say, a non-nuclear, non-oil, hydrogen economy would be grossly inefficient. Not only are you dealing with transport costs, which apply to fossil fuels too, you're dealing with producing the stuff in the first place. Transmitting the energy over power lines makes little sense if the producer and consumer aren't even on the same continent. We need power plants that can be built to specification anywhere, and such plants invariable burn some sort of fuel.
I don't buy the argument that waste heat from fission or fusion will be a global issue; the amount of heat energy released in the past fifty years by nuclear weapons tests was greater than the amount of heat leaked from power plants. I also don't think that fusion or fission using fuel has any bearing on them being non-renewable. I doubt we could seriously dent the quantities of fissile material available to us before we get fusion operational, and calling fusion non-renewable when it uses _hydrogen_ isotopes is like calling solar energy non-renewable because the sun will eventually burn out.
We both agree that nuclear energy is hazardous and renewables are a good approach to getting humanity off the fossil fuel and nuke teat. But I'm saying that until we can rely on those energy sources, plus fusion power, we'll need to accept either nuclear or coal. And nuclear plants, while nasty in many respects, are the lesser evil, hands down. This isn't a matter of solar, hydro et al not being any good; it's a matter of them being good enough.
Never said those wouldn't work. By "passive" power, I mean power sources that harness energy in the environment and convert it to electricity (ie hydro - running water).
But I'm Canadian. Can you imagine trying to build solar plants in Nova Scotia? Or costal power in Alberta?:-)
This actually illustrates my point nicely; you're Austrailian, and Austrailia has numerous passive energy sources to tap. We do too (in Ontario and Quebec, most of the power is hyrdo), but they're all very regional (as, undoubtably, are yours). We will need centralized, active (ie fuel using) power, no matter what steps are taken towards conservation. The same applies throuhgout most of the developed world.
Given any possible technology to fill that role, I'd pick fusion. Lacking fusion, and leaving only fossil fuels and nuclear, I'd pick nuclear as the lesser evil. I'm all for alternative energy using passive means of generation. But, I'm a realist about our power requirements and our present ability to meet them. We should put money into alternative energy projects, and fusion power, and more effecient technology like hybrid cars. But until we get there, I'm pro nuclear for pragmatic reasons.
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>Where would you move that is completely safe?
:-)
About 6 feet underground ought to do it
More importantly, where can I get these robot girls? And will they run linux?
:-) )
(just kidding - we all know that there's no such thing as a girl
Well the problem with that is that Venus's atmosphere is incredibly dense. If we could reduce that density to something aproximating terrestrial norms, then the heat on the surface would likely be a none issue (it would still be warmer than earth, but only due to solar proximity, not insulation).
However, I cannot for the life of me think of a feasible way to get rid of most of a planets atmosphere. You would need to move the gas offworld, or find some way to eliminate it. Somehow I doubt that pumping it into tanks and lauching them into the sun would work terribly well. If we put a black hole in orbit maybe...
>>"What you do with the chicken joke (or the chickens for that matter) is up to you"
:-P
>In some states.
Mental states?
You're probably right about the mass. In which case it is undoubtably a reaction drive. I would imagine though, that a more advanced design could serve both functions, although I wonder how much difference the mass of the CO makes during the first phase. Might add up to alot if the entire sail is coated with the stuff...
:-)
And, OT, I've heard both versions of the chicken joke. I prefer the one in my sig beacause of the combination of erotic/exotic. What you do with the chicken joke (or the chickens for that matter) is up to you
Hate to go offtopic but...
You've forgotton that the same effect is happening to the emmiter. Say we place a flashlight in vacuum, and it emits a beam in one direction. The light bulb is actually emmiting light in all directions simultaniously, but the light is only escaping in the forward arc. The rest is reflected, or absorbed, by the backing in the flashlight, pushing it backwards via the same effect as the light impacting a solar sail pushed forwards. If no reaction effects apply to the light bulb filament, then the net thrust is opposite the amount of thrust provided by the beam were it applied to a light sail. If reaction effects apply to the filament, then it's still thrusting away from the beam opening, since the light is only leaving via that arc. So the laws of reaction still apply, regardless.
A laser is subject to the same effect, since lasers have mirrored backing (the light beam is parralel, but projects equally in both directions unless reflected).
>This design isn't a solar-sail. Rather it is a rocket that looks like a solar sail.
>Just like any other rocket, the thrust comes from the thermal expansion of gasses pressing against the sail-shaped surface. The major >difference in this design is that the energy to heat the gasses comes not from chemical, nuclear or solar power onboard the craft but from on >off-board source on the ground. It is functionally identical to the Laser Launch concept.
Hehe, I was wondering when someone would bring this up. You're absolutly right about it being more like a rocket than a sail, but I would guess that this design could be used for both purposes. Solar sails launched via laser is an old idea in science fiction, and I think that using the gas coating/reaction approach used here would be compatible.
I wonder how much thrust, if any, this patricular "sail" gets from light pressure though... It's got a big honking microwave beam aimed at it, it must be either opaque or reflective to microwaves for the gas to boil, so at least _some_ thrust must be coming from light pressure.
Actually, light pressure would propel the lauching emmiter backwards, this is the principal governing light sails in general and photon drives as well. This light sail differs in that, as you rightly pointed out, it gains thrust from the surface CO boiling away. But a regular lightsail uses the pressure generated from reflecting light to accelerate, no gas emmisions required.
The laws of reaction still apply to the emiiter, but at these levels it should be negligable (most of the thrust on the other end is coming from the boiling gas). I don't know what kind of station-keeping thrusters would be needed for the emmiter if it were built in orbit, I assume it wouldn't be too difficult compared to the difficulty of building the emmiter in the first place.
TFA seems slowed by slashdoting at the moment (and I'm on dialup), but I would guess that putting the kind of emmiter in orbit that could provide that kind of output would be prohibitively expensive. We have a power grid here on earth already, why not use it to send the microwaves up and simply live with the reduced efficiency? I imagine that the cost of the extra energy would balance out the savings from not launching the microwave emmiter into orbit.
On the other hand, if we could build a solar array + microwave emmiter in orbit, we could use it to beam the power back to a recieving station on the earth's surface. We could build the orbital solar/microwave stations first, and then use one to send off a solar sail craft.
Depends, can you get it new? If not then, yeah, the OP's point stands.
Halo 2 in this context is a really bad example - it was released recently and thus is still available as a new game. You either missed the point or made a strawman argument - the emulator he's talking about is for a really old game that is long since out of production.
>One final question: Are you Derek Smart?
:-)
He can't possibly be. He hasn't used the word "fuck" or attacked any vending machines yet.
Maybe John Romero and Sid Meier's illegitemate love child though...
Many people would tell you to draw the line where your actions begin to affect others. "My right to swing my fist ends where your face begins" is typical of this form of libertarianism. So porn is OK, flashing a bus full of nuns is not :-) Actually, a better serious example would be how sex between consenting adults is no business of the state, whereas the moment consent is violated or in question the law has the duty to intervene. Thus anti-sodomy laws are not considered ok from a personal freedoms standpoint, but laws prohibiting rape, pedophilia and sexual assault are fine.
>Even if we use your defination of terrorism, wouldn't the fact that the plane was a civilian plane make crashing it terrorism? Civilian hostages were taken.
That's actually a really good point. You could argue that they were using human shields, which takes the hijackers into the clearcut territory of terrorism.
However, the point several people in this thread have made, and that the gp was making, is that the US government has distorted the definition of terrorism. What is a terrorist now? It's someone who does or plans some violent act that the gov't under this administration doesn't like. So Iraqi insurgent forces are "terrorists", which is as much newspeak as calling them "freedom fighters", only in the other direction. It's a PR thing; call 'em terrorists and people will associate them with 9/11, or al-Queda or whatever. Although I would say that some of the Iraqi insurgents have crossed the line, the people who beheaded aid workers are terrorists in my books...
Those are things like costume slipups and continuity errors. In the context of a game those are not "bugs"; they're rarely even noticed.
:-)
If, in a game, someone's clothing changed between two levels with no plausible explanation that didn't violate continuity, would it count as a bug? That's the sort of thing you linked to in IMDB, and it doesn't fit the definiton of a software bug. "Bug" in the context of software means something that prevents the program from executing properly, like a crash bug, or a rendering anomaly.
The equivalent in a movie would be a random BSOD in the middle of a fight scene, or a character's body clipping into a wall and getting stuck. Obviously this is a rare occurence
The monsters? Or the quality acting? :-)
That is a false comparison. Movies are an established form of entertainment, and have a fairly well laid out production arc. Hardware considerations are a non issue, and neither are alpha and beta testing (and yes, I know about test screenings, and they just don't compare for difficulty). When was the last time you saw a "bugged" movie? Design in a movie is what's done before production; you don't write the script after you've started filming. Conversly, game design is what take up much of the production time, meaning that the number of variables you need to take into account is greater.
Finally, I would rather _not_ see the game industry become the next hollywood. Games are already too formulaic for my taste, and speeding up production in order to give a predictable product faster, *cough* EA *cough*, does not sound like an improvement.
So we'll start using uranium and biodiesel, and in the long term maybe hydrogen, fusion or non-uranium fissile fuel.
So what was your point exactly?
There will always be a fuel source running out, there will always be a looming humanitarian crisis. There will be war, in five years or fifty or five hundred. There are always national powers rising and others failing; nationialism replaces religion, replaces tribalism, replaces greed. Human history dictates this. Barring $event (where $event refers to some never-before-seen shift like tranhumanism, interstellar spaceflight or extintion) these emergencies are always going to be the facts of our world.
Does this mean we should abandon everthing not related to solving the myriad dangers we now face? In fact, who's to say that pure scientific research won't somehow connect to solving seemingly unrelated problems? Medical technology has come out of unrelated space reseach in the past. Should we drop everything and focus on oil? What about nuclear proliferation, or the AIDS epidemic? What about impending global ecological disasters? Your problem is not the be all and end all, nor is it unsolvable without panicking. Space research, and other pure science endeavors, benefit us as a species, even if they never yield anything. And the peak oil problem is an economic and technological one, not a scientific one; modern tech and the global will to use it can get us out of this crisis.
Untrue. The basic premise of the greenhouse effect is sound; cabon dioxide/monoxide, water vapour and gaseous hydrocarbons trap heat in the same IR range that the earth radiates away its excess heat in. None of this is in debate, or yet to be proven. Without a greenhouse effect, and assuming a nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere, we'd be freezing our asses off. At least one theory wrt the ice age suggests that global cooling can occur if greenhouse gass levels fall.
What is in question is not the theory of greenhouse gasses, or global warming itself, but rather the degree of warming and the degree that can be attributed to human activity. Saying that it's as scientific as astrology is just FUD.
Assuming that human release of greenhouse gasses is causing an increase in temperature, or will cause such an increase in the future, requires two assumtions. First, we must be able to release enough CO2 to cause an appreaciable rise in temperature. Second, our contribution must be enough, in and of itself, to cause a rise in temperature; if the warming can be attributed to methane or solar output, then the greenhouse effect caused by us is secondary. In other words, it's not that global warming can or can't happen, it's whether or not we need to worry about it, given our present technology.
The article states that 75% of peer-reviewed scientists, who are far more informed about these phenomina than you, believe that both of the assumtions are valid, and that we need to worry. Disagree all you want, but dismissing the matter out-of-hand based on a layman's understanding of the earth's climate, is arrogant and foolish.
By saying we "should" die, you are passing a moral judgement, whether you mean to or not. Yes, we are all going to die. Yeah, nothing lasts forever. But the fact that this is the normal natural order automatically makes it good?
I would tend to argue that it is the sort of emphasis on the immediate that you refer to WRT your daughter that also makes us short sighted. If living longer made us more concerned about the future, since we'll be living with the consequences of our actions, wouldn't that be a good thing for the rest of the human race? As it stands the only reason we have for not completely squandering the resources of the present is the idea that our descendants will have to live in the world we leave them. If we ourselves knew that we would live with those same consequences, would we be so wasteful? Would we leave so little?
There are selfish reasons for wanting to live forever, but there are also more pragmatic reasons. I don't think I'm better than the rest of humanity (although, highschool made me wonder about the state of us apes...), but I also think that the worst elements in the human race are the ones who see nothing but a short mortal life without any sense of responsibility for the future. Such a viewpoint is only possible when you don't have a long term outlook, which immortality would tend to force. The selfish who only want to live forever would be faced with the prospect of facing the world they help create. This would be a good thing. It would also be far easier than trying to alter the facts of greedy human nature that have persisted for all of history.
There is room in the future for me, there is room for your daughter and there is room for a 1977 beater. Said future will benefit from an immortal outlook, which technology might someday give us. I would be in favour of "curing" aging, even if I didn't live to see it.
So you think we'll be able to solve telomere aging on a genetic level, organ failure, neurological aging, long term development of cancer...
And we won't be able to extend our reproductive lifespan?
Come on, if we could develop cloning technology, or even some form of cellular repair nanotechnology, surely we could find a way to provide more gametes. Actually, some form of cybernetic tech which continously repairs the effect of aging could have birth control built in. Several sci-fi writers have put forward the concept of conscious control of fertility as an engineered solution to overpopulation, and I see no reason it couldn't be incorporated here. Actually, some sort of nano-cybernetic augmentation as a form of immortality, with other benefits included in the package such as bodily self-repair and birth control, would be kinda cool.
Except that the rate of population growth has slowed during the past hundred years. Western countries are now below replacement level fertility, some parts of western europe are even experiencing negative population growth (fewer are born or immigrate than die or emigrate).
The reason seems to be modern medicine and technology, not to mention the wealth needed to pay for them. Once the need to reproduce a dozen times to see some of your children survive is gone, and sex can be had without pregnancy, why would the population grow? Cultural inertia and immigration from other countries and cultures needs to be taken into account, but that isn't an issue WRT immortality.
Assuming we could raise the standard of living of the rest of the world to our level, and assuming that their various cultures adapted as fast as or faster than ours did, then the rate of population growth would stabilize. We would need to fix our industrial waste problems first (bluntly, the planet can't take another two or three industrial revolutions). If we could do it though, why would immortality cause any population problems? People would feel no pressure to have children early, there'd be no biological clock, and after a few centuries our numbers would likely be in decline.
The only problem I see is the stagnantation you describe. But that is a problem for another day. And while I can see there being issues with social stratification, and poorer people and countries being excluded, in the long run things would work themselves out. Poor nations don't remain impoverished forever, and when dealing with immortality, we would start seeing the long term.
The genes you are referring to are called "telomeres", and yes they do govern cellular aging. As for sperm, they don't divide, but rather are produced by division of a class of cell (which remains in the testes). Sperm have only half the requisite genes for replication, eggs in women have the other half (not counting mitochondria).
Aging in this context is probably an evolved response to uncontrolled division of cells. Cancer occurs when cells "forget" to stop replicating. Also, living forever doesn't make sense from an evolutionary perspective; reproduction matters more than lifespan (natural selection only applies to your genes, not you yourself).
>Only half in each sperm. They're all there somewhere, you just have to do some recombining.
:-)
Please tell me you haven't actually attempted this?
Actually, my point about thermodynamics had to do with the viability of alternative energy in terms of local generation of power.
To clarify: distributed solar is a good idea, along the lines of solar shingles and hot water heating. But it will only alleviate the pressure on the grid, and even then it will only work in places where sunlight can be relied upon. Tidal and hydro will work, where tides and rivers allow. Geothermal will work where existing vents are present. Centralized passive power in general is a good idea, where conditions allow.
None of these methods are in question, and none requires complicated technology. But how would you deal with a location that lacked accessible passive power to tap? Or an area that used far more power than it could ever draw from the environment? How would you deal with vehicle power requirements? Transporting that power via, say, a non-nuclear, non-oil, hydrogen economy would be grossly inefficient. Not only are you dealing with transport costs, which apply to fossil fuels too, you're dealing with producing the stuff in the first place. Transmitting the energy over power lines makes little sense if the producer and consumer aren't even on the same continent. We need power plants that can be built to specification anywhere, and such plants invariable burn some sort of fuel.
I don't buy the argument that waste heat from fission or fusion will be a global issue; the amount of heat energy released in the past fifty years by nuclear weapons tests was greater than the amount of heat leaked from power plants. I also don't think that fusion or fission using fuel has any bearing on them being non-renewable. I doubt we could seriously dent the quantities of fissile material available to us before we get fusion operational, and calling fusion non-renewable when it uses _hydrogen_ isotopes is like calling solar energy non-renewable because the sun will eventually burn out.
We both agree that nuclear energy is hazardous and renewables are a good approach to getting humanity off the fossil fuel and nuke teat. But I'm saying that until we can rely on those energy sources, plus fusion power, we'll need to accept either nuclear or coal. And nuclear plants, while nasty in many respects, are the lesser evil, hands down. This isn't a matter of solar, hydro et al not being any good; it's a matter of them being good enough.
Never said those wouldn't work. By "passive" power, I mean power sources that harness energy in the environment and convert it to electricity (ie hydro - running water).
:-)
But I'm Canadian. Can you imagine trying to build solar plants in Nova Scotia? Or costal power in Alberta?
This actually illustrates my point nicely; you're Austrailian, and Austrailia has numerous passive energy sources to tap. We do too (in Ontario and Quebec, most of the power is hyrdo), but they're all very regional (as, undoubtably, are yours). We will need centralized, active (ie fuel using) power, no matter what steps are taken towards conservation. The same applies throuhgout most of the developed world.
Given any possible technology to fill that role, I'd pick fusion. Lacking fusion, and leaving only fossil fuels and nuclear, I'd pick nuclear as the lesser evil. I'm all for alternative energy using passive means of generation. But, I'm a realist about our power requirements and our present ability to meet them. We should put money into alternative energy projects, and fusion power, and more effecient technology like hybrid cars. But until we get there, I'm pro nuclear for pragmatic reasons.