Right, but wouldn't it be nice if it could replace fossil fuels ideally over the next 50 years? If you try to use todays silicon production volume for solar cells you end up with millions of years until replacement. With wind it looks better but still an order of magnitude off from the 50 years.
Somehow I hope we can deal with the decline coming from peak oil at some time, in a bearable manner.
"Cold rational analysis shows that you could put a family of four on Mars for a few billion dollars. Sustaining them would be more difficult, but probably not cost more than a hundred billion. So long as it was a private venture and not run by NASA, anyway."
And then you figure out that you couldn't sustain them any longer. They have less sunlight, less concentrated resources (little water, little volcanism, smaller planet), so far no energy source that could solve that niggling little issue.
I would never put people in such peril without a breathable atmosphere, flowing water, balmy temperatures, and edible biosphere.
"The Greenland Norse (climate change, environmental damage, loss of trading partners, irrational reluctance to eat fish, hostile neighbors and most unwillingness to adapt in the face of social collapse) Easter Island (a society that collapsed entirely due to environmental damage) The Polynesians of Pitcairn Island (environmental damage and loss of trading partners) The Anasazi of southwestern North America (environmental damage and climate change) The Maya of Central America (environmental damage, climate change, and hostile neighbours) "
"Only a fanatic could believe that humans won't develop the technology to live in space, because all of our past history shows that we will if we're allowed to do so."
More sustainable empires have failed.
Also, our past history shows our past history.
It is already pretty clear now that resource depletion will cause a dip in development, even if we ever make ITER work (Fusion is projected to be commercially available around 2040-2050).
"... we will exhaust our planet's resources long before we're actually able to permanently survive somewhere else." Precisely.
An interesting aspect is though that if we solve this resource exhaustion problem here on earth, i.e. find a better nearly inexhaustible and dense energy source, we would be able to extract resources on other planets. The do the math blog mentions that we have to stop growing then, otherwise we would heat up the planet too much.
Here is a quote: "This discussion of geochemical availability and extractive metallurgy implies that extraction of minor elements in space is questionable unless specific natural concentrations are discovered or energy becomes very inexpensive."
This is so silly, why did no one tell me about this, people know about this issue since the seventies.
So yes with the information from many disciplines we could have decided in the 1930s to not grow to 7 billion people and stay at 2 billion but who would have wanted this.
Given that Mexico has acquired a narco culture that tries to give drugs a positive image, the US still has one more step to go it seems. Also notice that this isn't a new thing in Mexico.
Some are arguing that the 2008 Oil price peak caused the housing bubble to burst, your example seems to be one of malinvestment.
From what I have heard population growth seems to be another ingredient for growth, the western world could stagnate because of this alone. But on the whole I would think energy input is the key ingredient.
Depends on what you have to lose, if you have a smart phone to lose you make somebody else lose his smart phone. If you have your live to lose you make somebody else lose his life. At least if I limit my choices to what you seem to offer.
Slide 16 is interesting apart from explaining that money is a highly inaccurate means to model energy flows, they call money's flow wage message, and purchase message.
"Complexity increase supposedly requires more energy input into systems
This is completely and provably untrue."
I would debate that mainframes are less complex than smart phones. Also did you count the people involved in the creation/maintenance of either technology? They need energy too.
Also it is not completely and provably untrue, you can for instance go ahead and find some papers on the topic of measuring energy flows in biological systems. Here let me give you a hint:
"I am totally optimistic that we can solve the world's resource problems,"
Wrong, you can never build a long lasting civilization based on a finite resource. Especially if you are hell-bent on growth, and it doesn't matter how smart your people are if they can't keep their population in size. Rather to the opposite, the smarter they are the more complex a society they can build and the more complex problems they can solve. Complexity increase supposedly requires more energy input into systems, so your society of smart people will last not as long with a finite resource, as a village full of rednecks.
Notice that resources come with a price tag attached, the price is the energy you need to invest to extract it. You will start out with whatever feeble amount of energy you have until you run out of concentrated enough resources to keep you going. By then you have to find other energy sources, or extract the ones you have faster, to at least keep going with the lifestyle you have. Notice that even recycling needs energy and energy is finally converted into a form you don't have access to. Finally you will have a world with high entropy and finely spread out resources which also represent some kind of high entropy. I didn't mention the waste issue yet, but your problems are bigger than you think.
We have been playing this game with some rather annoying interruptions (the dark ages), but there is no viable energy alternative in sight (fusion isn't there yet, and there is an interruption coming up) to keep us going as long as the roman empire and keep our lifestyle. (Sometimes I think that the lead in the water and wine kept the Roman Empire going longer;)
I have not given up hope, but there is a rather annoying interruption of business as usual coming up, that will definitely not be resolved in time.
There is also a chance that with your breeding program the likes of you will one day be in the underclass.
I made some comment about the topic in the past. Nice, DARPA listened, or to be more modest, had a similar idea.
Darn sad I can't find it now. Thinking about it, it really isn't that hard to come up with the idea, somebody like Oberth or Ziolkovsky probably already thought about it.
This sort of thing could really put a space station and its inhabitants to easy to understand use, fix and repair stuff in orbit. Keep most of the kinetic energy, get unobstructed sunshine, and catch some space junk - campy. Running a solar sailing race on the side as a hobby could be entertaining.
I remember that there existed a TV show about junkyard people in the past. Maybe one could come up with a space comedy around it. Some cross between Alien and Space Cowboys maybe.
Here is one more thing, 1600 square miles is roughly a million acres. Maybe you need that much to cover some US electrical energy needs.
I also don't know how much more silicon can be produced per year and for how long, I would expect some exponential growth in silicon production could help. The problem is that Fluorine is also needed and I suspect that not all is recycled. Fluorite is a much more limited resource than silicon, there could be a nasty surprise in it.
When you see people in the street being able to organize, chant slogans, use wireless communications devices, stay calm, listen, and maybe do a little bit. When you see a disheveled mob in the street screaming for food you supposedly should have acted at least 10 days ago.
You would think they know this without expensive studies.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, povre lui! Just because the languages are different it doesn't mean the rules always are.
Right, but wouldn't it be nice if it could replace fossil fuels ideally over the next 50 years? If you try to use todays silicon production volume for solar cells you end up with millions of years until replacement. With wind it looks better but still an order of magnitude off from the 50 years.
Somehow I hope we can deal with the decline coming from peak oil at some time, in a bearable manner.
"depleting all our resources within 100 years"
This guy seems to be more in the League.
www.tno.nl/downloads/Metal_minerals_scarcity.pdf
"Cold rational analysis shows that you could put a family of four on Mars for a few billion dollars. Sustaining them would be more difficult, but probably not cost more than a hundred billion. So long as it was a private venture and not run by NASA, anyway."
And then you figure out that you couldn't sustain them any longer. They have less sunlight, less concentrated resources (little water, little volcanism, smaller planet), so far no energy source that could solve that niggling little issue.
I would never put people in such peril without a breathable atmosphere, flowing water, balmy temperatures, and edible biosphere.
In here is a list actually:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse:_How_Societies_Choose_to_Fail_or_Succeed
"The Greenland Norse (climate change, environmental damage, loss of trading partners, irrational reluctance to eat fish, hostile neighbors and most unwillingness to adapt in the face of social collapse)
Easter Island (a society that collapsed entirely due to environmental damage)
The Polynesians of Pitcairn Island (environmental damage and loss of trading partners)
The Anasazi of southwestern North America (environmental damage and climate change)
The Maya of Central America (environmental damage, climate change, and hostile neighbours)
"
"Only a fanatic could believe that humans won't develop the technology to live in space, because all of our past history shows that we will if we're allowed to do so."
More sustainable empires have failed.
Also, our past history shows our past history.
It is already pretty clear now that resource depletion will cause a dip in development, even if we ever make ITER work (Fusion is projected to be commercially available around 2040-2050).
You can do the math yourself.
That may actually have a chance of succeeding, apart from that conflict thing.
"... we will exhaust our planet's resources long before we're actually able to permanently survive somewhere else."
Precisely.
An interesting aspect is though that if we solve this resource exhaustion problem here on earth, i.e. find a better nearly inexhaustible and dense energy source, we would be able to extract resources on other planets. The do the math blog mentions that we have to stop growing then, otherwise we would heat up the planet too much.
Here is a link about resource concentrations:
http://www.nss.org/settlement/nasa/spaceresvol3/pmofld1a.htm
Here is a quote:
"This discussion of geochemical availability and extractive metallurgy implies that extraction of minor elements in space is questionable unless specific natural concentrations are discovered or energy becomes very inexpensive."
This is so silly, why did no one tell me about this, people know about this issue since the seventies.
(or whatever the fuck they yell)
D{u|i|e}rka D{u|i|e}rka!
I'm 36 and joking :).
Funny enough the fact that there has to be a green house effect was discovered in the 19th century by our all time favourite Fourier and also later more accurately by Arrhenius.
Here are a few links:
http://www.globalwarmingart.com/images/1/18/Arrhenius.pdf
http://geologist-1011.mobi/
So yes with the information from many disciplines we could have decided in the 1930s to not grow to 7 billion people and stay at 2 billion but who would have wanted this.
>not sharing everything will be deemed suspicious.
Bah, I'm highly conservative about my computer use, like all older people.
Given that Mexico has acquired a narco culture that tries to give drugs a positive image, the US still has one more step to go it seems.
Also notice that this isn't a new thing in Mexico.
http://www.nowpublic.com/world/sinaloa-cradle-mexicos-narcotrafficking-industry-jesus-malverde-sinaloan-bandit-their-patron-saint
Some are arguing that the 2008 Oil price peak caused the housing bubble to burst, your example seems to be one of malinvestment.
From what I have heard population growth seems to be another ingredient for growth, the western world could stagnate because of this alone. But on the whole I would think energy input is the key ingredient.
Depends on what you have to lose, if you have a smart phone to lose you make somebody else lose his smart phone. If you have your live to lose you make somebody else lose his life. At least if I limit my choices to what you seem to offer.
Hmm, I like the following:
http://faculty.washington.edu/gmobus/Energy/NetEnergy/NetEnergyAndTheEconomy.pdf
Slide 16 is interesting apart from explaining that money is a highly inaccurate means to model energy flows, they call money's flow wage message, and purchase message.
"Complexity increase supposedly requires more energy input into systems
This is completely and provably untrue."
I would debate that mainframes are less complex than smart phones.
Also did you count the people involved in the creation/maintenance of either technology? They need energy too.
Also it is not completely and provably untrue, you can for instance go ahead and find some papers on the topic of measuring energy flows in biological systems. Here let me give you a hint:
www.tufts.edu/as/wright_center/eric/reprints/EnergyRateDensity_I_FINAL_2011.pdf
This should start to prove your statement false, which is easily done given the totality of it.
The rest doesn't even fall apart, only the side issue regarding smart people would have become more shaky.
Also I don't have to prove anything, I don't have any good news, and there is little we can do about it.
"I am totally optimistic that we can solve the world's resource problems,"
Wrong, you can never build a long lasting civilization based on a finite resource. Especially if you are hell-bent on growth, and it doesn't matter how smart your people are if they can't keep their population in size. Rather to the opposite, the smarter they are the more complex a society they can build and the more complex problems they can solve. Complexity increase supposedly requires more energy input into systems, so your society of smart people will last not as long with a finite resource, as a village full of rednecks.
Notice that resources come with a price tag attached, the price is the energy you need to invest to extract it. You will start out with whatever feeble amount of energy you have until you run out of concentrated enough resources to keep you going. By then you have to find other energy sources, or extract the ones you have faster, to at least keep going with the lifestyle you have. Notice that even recycling needs energy and energy is finally converted into a form you don't have access to. Finally you will have a world with high entropy and finely spread out resources which also represent some kind of high entropy. I didn't mention the waste issue yet, but your problems are bigger than you think.
We have been playing this game with some rather annoying interruptions (the dark ages), but there is no viable energy alternative in sight (fusion isn't there yet, and there is an interruption coming up) to keep us going as long as the roman empire and keep our lifestyle. ;)
(Sometimes I think that the lead in the water and wine kept the Roman Empire going longer
I have not given up hope, but there is a rather annoying interruption of business as usual coming up, that will definitely not be resolved in time.
There is also a chance that with your breeding program the likes of you will one day be in the underclass.
Indeed, keep the dark side clean, even Jotunheimen has standards.
Before making grand sweeping statements, how do you know you know about everything they have done, I found the HBGary thing highly amusing by the way.
Regards,
Loki
I made some comment about the topic in the past. Nice, DARPA listened, or to be more modest, had a similar idea.
Darn sad I can't find it now. Thinking about it, it really isn't that hard to come up with the idea, somebody like Oberth or Ziolkovsky probably already thought about it.
This sort of thing could really put a space station and its inhabitants to easy to understand use, fix and repair stuff in orbit. Keep most of the kinetic energy, get unobstructed sunshine, and catch some space junk - campy. Running a solar sailing race on the side as a hobby could be entertaining.
I remember that there existed a TV show about junkyard people in the past. Maybe one could come up with a space comedy around it. Some cross between Alien and Space Cowboys maybe.
What makes you think that thieves take lightly to be victims of theft?
Great, I should finally get rid of my mercury fillings, muhahaha!
I don't know why I accepted them, martyr syndrome maybe, business as usual?
Here is one more thing, 1600 square miles is roughly a million acres. Maybe you need that much to cover some US electrical energy needs.
I also don't know how much more silicon can be produced per year and for how long, I would expect some exponential growth in silicon production could help. The problem is that Fluorine is also needed and I suspect that not all is recycled. Fluorite is a much more limited resource than silicon, there could be a nasty surprise in it.
When you see people in the street being able to organize, chant slogans, use wireless communications devices, stay calm, listen, and maybe do a little bit. When you see a disheveled mob in the street screaming for food you supposedly should have acted at least 10 days ago.
You would think they know this without expensive studies.