I just float around, moan, pass through walls, rattle some chains. I draw the line at saying "Boo" though. To kitschy and besides there's an obscure programming language named "Boo." I wouldn't want to be caught dead programming in it (Rimshot).
That if it were to start erupting. There is not one damned thing we could do about it. Nothing. Well placed nukes might change the pattern of eruption slightly, but that's about all. With a very few exceptions, we'd be king-hell fucked as a species.
I design and configure GUI automated testing systems. The particulars change. The principles don't. I've started to design server and virtual machine environments to control the systems more precisely and easily. Think virtual machines are going away? Doubtful. I'm sure the particulars of these too will change, but the principles won't.
That said, I've been coding QA software in some VB-Form language since 1994. My pay during that time has only increased. This is the first year that I've had to do anything in a C-form language.
The unfortunate fact of the matter is that a lot of new technologies are horse puckey. C++ was an actual improvement over C. The.net platform, for all its many faults, has actually increased my productivity, but much of the rest, Windows Presentation Foundation, Python, Ocaml, Ruby, Silverlight, et. al are nifty, but nobody *needs* them. Frankly, if the world standardized on Java tomorrow, and we just used extensions thereof for different platforms and purposes, we could all concentrate on getting useful work done and quit dicking around with learning the latest obscure and allegedly more elegant syntax. The best language and syntax isn't the most logically consistent one, it's the one you know. In productivity terms, human factors trump formal systems elegance every time.
Oh, let's see. The sulphur could acidify huge swaths of ocean, killing off entire ecologies. Oops! My mistake. This could happen on the ocean AND land, and probably the clouds too, which support their own microbial populations whose effects on other ecological systems is as yet unknown.
The acidification could also seep into limestone caves worldwide, increasing decay and creating new sinkholes in certain areas (and destroy cave life), not to mention the deterioration of plain old commercial cement across the planet, but you weren't expecting that bridge to last forever, were you?
And the fact that this appears NONREVERSIBLE if something goes wrong appears to be icing on the cake.
Biofuels will supplement, but never replace oil for the military. Frankly, I doubt there's enough of it to be significant. Maybe if the military used ALL the biofuel produced in the continental USA, it could continue to operate... in the continental USA.
That all being said, I don't have any figures on how much fuel the USA's military uses per day. The entire USA uses about 7 to 8 million barrels of oil a day, depending on what sort of day we're having. Anyone know how much of that is the military's share?
Oh, they can add two and two just fine. They just can't be bothered to read history. Just two generations back, we had working conditions in the USA that would have made any Chinese sweatshop owner proud. 16 hour days. Child labor. People literally chained to their workbenches. It can slip back to that in a single generation if we let it. In the USA, the way out was unionization and standing up to the unelected, unaccountable political power of concentrated wealth.
This was not simple. Union members died when the bullets of the factory goons started flying - when your grandfather was alive, most likely.
In the early 1900s, Americans stood up. The wealthy were forced to back down. The communist revolution scared them then. The Arab spring and OccupyWallStreet movement are scaring them now. Communism may have failed, but class warfare is alive and well.
We have telescopic data galore. It never occurs to look for something that might be an artifact. I doubt we've identified all the intelligences on Earth yet, much less extraterrestrials? If a species of club moss was intelligent, how, (other than with a zipf analysis of its chemical exchanges), would we know? Ditto for large bacteria colonies, squid or mushrooms.
What would a human physical presence add unless we happened to meet up with a recognizable, tool using, creature, and why would we not use a semi-autonomous avatar/robot to interact with it anyway?
I'd refer everyone to a web site for consumption rates, but the ballpark answer is that the world uses 28-30 billion barrels of oil per year, and the USA uses between 7-8 billion barrels per year. We have about 1.4 trillion barrels of technically recoverable conventional oil left. Perhaps about 50% of that is economically recoverable today. Perhaps a bit more as prices rise, if prices don't rise enough to break the world's supply chains or cause nationalistic hoarding - two very distinct possibilities.
The most optimistic assumptions regarding conventional oil that's both energetically and economically profitable is about 40 years max. Realistically, expect about half that. After that, we're um, scraping the bottom of the barrel. Oil doesn't disappear (It never will). We just won't be using it as much. Too expensive energetically and economically.
Bottom line? All the "Drill ANWR and we're saved " idiots would have us destroy the Alaska ecosystem for about 2 years extension of our oil supply. Every moronic Reuters news story that so breathlessly reports that over 1 billion barrels of oil have been found ignores the fact that 1 billion barrels is less than 2 months supply just for the USA, much less the planet.
There are plenty of alternatives and solutions, just none that involve having 7 billion people or more living on Earth in the year 2100 using as much energy as an American uses today.
Slashdot Mirror
It did but almost nobody could read the code to figure it out.
So, I guess the Whitespace language (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_%28programming_language%29) isn't for you then, eh?
C'mon. You're messin' with me aren't you?
I just float around, moan, pass through walls, rattle some chains. I draw the line at saying "Boo" though. To kitschy and besides there's an obscure programming language named "Boo." I wouldn't want to be caught dead programming in it (Rimshot).
There's another intermittent virus called "Windows updates." It slows your computer and then forces it to reboot.
No wait, that was something different.
No wait, that was something different.
Actually, if we could use if for enough geothermal to power South America, that would be cool! Well, cooler, anyway.
Oh heck, sure. Let me get my calendar up.
That if it were to start erupting. There is not one damned thing we could do about it. Nothing. Well placed nukes might change the pattern of eruption slightly, but that's about all. With a very few exceptions, we'd be king-hell fucked as a species.
I design and configure GUI automated testing systems. The particulars change. The principles don't. I've started to design server and virtual machine environments to control the systems more precisely and easily. Think virtual machines are going away? Doubtful. I'm sure the particulars of these too will change, but the principles won't.
Probably. I picked Java as an example since it's portable and object-oriented, unlike straight C.
That said, I've been coding QA software in some VB-Form language since 1994. My pay during that time has only increased. This is the first year that I've had to do anything in a C-form language.
The unfortunate fact of the matter is that a lot of new technologies are horse puckey. C++ was an actual improvement over C. The .net platform, for all its many faults, has actually increased my productivity, but much of the rest, Windows Presentation Foundation, Python, Ocaml, Ruby, Silverlight, et. al are nifty, but nobody *needs* them. Frankly, if the world standardized on Java tomorrow, and we just used extensions thereof for different platforms and purposes, we could all concentrate on getting useful work done and quit dicking around with learning the latest obscure and allegedly more elegant syntax. The best language and syntax isn't the most logically consistent one, it's the one you know. In productivity terms, human factors trump formal systems elegance every time.
Oh, let's see. The sulphur could acidify huge swaths of ocean, killing off entire ecologies. Oops! My mistake. This could happen on the ocean AND land, and probably the clouds too, which support their own microbial populations whose effects on other ecological systems is as yet unknown.
The acidification could also seep into limestone caves worldwide, increasing decay and creating new sinkholes in certain areas (and destroy cave life), not to mention the deterioration of plain old commercial cement across the planet, but you weren't expecting that bridge to last forever, were you?
And the fact that this appears NONREVERSIBLE if something goes wrong appears to be icing on the cake.
Ummmm. No. I suggest you review the quantities of oil and energy involved in the book referenced here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_mile_of_oil
Biofuels will supplement, but never replace oil for the military. Frankly, I doubt there's enough of it to be significant. Maybe if the military used ALL the biofuel produced in the continental USA, it could continue to operate... in the continental USA.
That all being said, I don't have any figures on how much fuel the USA's military uses per day. The entire USA uses about 7 to 8 million barrels of oil a day, depending on what sort of day we're having. Anyone know how much of that is the military's share?
They're always trying to put their spin on everything. Well, they succeeded.
That's so depressing. :(
Oh, they can add two and two just fine. They just can't be bothered to read history. Just two generations back, we had working conditions in the USA that would have made any Chinese sweatshop owner proud. 16 hour days. Child labor. People literally chained to their workbenches. It can slip back to that in a single generation if we let it. In the USA, the way out was unionization and standing up to the unelected, unaccountable political power of concentrated wealth.
This was not simple. Union members died when the bullets of the factory goons started flying - when your grandfather was alive, most likely.
In the early 1900s, Americans stood up. The wealthy were forced to back down. The communist revolution scared them then. The Arab spring and OccupyWallStreet movement are scaring them now. Communism may have failed, but class warfare is alive and well.
Pretty soon, they'll be monitoring our online blog posts. Now excuse me, there's someone knocking at my door *really* loud.
We have telescopic data galore. It never occurs to look for something that might be an artifact. I doubt we've identified all the intelligences on Earth yet, much less extraterrestrials? If a species of club moss was intelligent, how, (other than with a zipf analysis of its chemical exchanges), would we know? Ditto for large bacteria colonies, squid or mushrooms.
What would a human physical presence add unless we happened to meet up with a recognizable, tool using, creature, and why would we not use a semi-autonomous avatar/robot to interact with it anyway?
OK, guys here's the deal.
First review the numbers around oil (i.e. how much we've got and what that means energetically). For that, look here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_mile_of_oil
Then look here to see how much we have access to in the USA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_reserves_in_the_United_States.
I'd refer everyone to a web site for consumption rates, but the ballpark answer is that the world uses 28-30 billion barrels of oil per year, and the USA uses between 7-8 billion barrels per year. We have about 1.4 trillion barrels of technically recoverable conventional oil left. Perhaps about 50% of that is economically recoverable today. Perhaps a bit more as prices rise, if prices don't rise enough to break the world's supply chains or cause nationalistic hoarding - two very distinct possibilities.
The most optimistic assumptions regarding conventional oil that's both energetically and economically profitable is about 40 years max. Realistically, expect about half that. After that, we're um, scraping the bottom of the barrel. Oil doesn't disappear (It never will). We just won't be using it as much. Too expensive energetically and economically.
Bottom line? All the "Drill ANWR and we're saved " idiots would have us destroy the Alaska ecosystem for about 2 years extension of our oil supply. Every moronic Reuters news story that so breathlessly reports that over 1 billion barrels of oil have been found ignores the fact that 1 billion barrels is less than 2 months supply just for the USA, much less the planet.
There are plenty of alternatives and solutions, just none that involve having 7 billion people or more living on Earth in the year 2100 using as much energy as an American uses today.
At least, that's the word on the street.
Sadly, given my current age and shape, the odds are high.
I guess that makes me a viable power source.