I think that number is a measure of how smart/determined humans are to improve their standard of living. As energy becomes more plentiful, more becomes possible with the same level of effort/skill. The trend has been for energy to become more and more plentiful because of human ingenuity. Alternative energy sources are the only way to mitigate the finiteness of the resources we have used thusfar.
CO2 output = K * Fossil Fuel consumption at least approximately, K being nearish to 1.
Fossil Fuels are limited, especially cheap ones. There may be an energy price at which much economic activity ceases to be worth doing, a price above which much economic activity is priced out of the energy market. When this happens the economy shrinks as energy produced falls, but the price for energy doesn't get higher. This means expensive energy including possibly renewable energy is not developed at all.
But wait, you say, there are some uses for energy which are so vital that energy will be demanded for those uses at almost any price - gas for cars for instance. Yes, this is true, but if the quantity demanded times the price is insufficient to fund the infrastructure necessary to produce it, then it won't be produced. People won't be able to pay 'any price' for gasoline if they lost their job because the plant where they worked became uneconomic because of energy prices. The search for alternatives will be forced.
A bunch of people lose their rural jobs get evicted from their houses, move to city apartments to find work, and no longer demand nearly as much gasoline. Greater efficiency, and lower standards of living, and stagnant gas prices, and declining gas produced because of increased costs to produce in the face of declining reserves. With each spike in energy prices due to decreased extraction rate, segments of the economy priced out of existence lower consumption to meet the rate at which the resource is being produced, however because of declining volumes demanded at the new higher prices it may not make sense to develop further supply given the absence of the scale needed.
Energy produced declines fairly rapidly as does the economy as the price creeps ever upward shrinking consumption ( the economy ). Because the economy has shrunk, energy demanded has severely shrunk. Some expensive energy is still demanded by the wealthy, but the rest are forced to do without. The wealthy are few, so the scale of energy production is kept small. The opposite of economies of scale is what will result. Large scale demands a not just a large price, but also a large quantity to be demanded, price can be low if quantity is high, or quantity can be low if price is high and still justify large scale, but as each tends to zero, the other tends to infinity for a given scale. At smaller and smaller scales the economies of scale built up over recent times disappear.
The smallest scales are old time agrarian subsistence or even hunter gatherer society. Maybe alternative energy can be developed a scale that will support higher levels of civilization, or maybe not. I don't know.
Starvation is a geopolitical problem, not a resource problem.
Is there much wasted opportunity to grow food for and distribute food to those who need it because of geopolitical issues? Absolutely. There's lots of waste and opportunities for greater efficiency. However if there were more resources, then the waste wouldn't be such an issue. What will be fixed, the geopolitical issues, or will the need for food simply be eliminated by the demise of the hungry? Resources aren't going to appear from nowhere, that's almost certain.
Even in the last 30 years there has been a recognition that
high standards of living reduce fertility.
People want what they want, and are wired to want it. In the past this wiring has been an evolutionary advantage. However under a high standard of living regime it is easy to get what one wants without having children. Of course children are still desired, but most choose to have zero one or two. Sex, and a satisfying lifestyle can be had without unwanted procreation thanks to birth control.
Of course as environments change what was once adaptive may become maladaptive. People with a high standard of living are living in such a radically altered environment, and that environment is likely to be very unfit for the species until and unless the species adapts.
One similar example of a creature whose innate wiring has become maladaptive in a newly changed environment is the Julodimorpha bakewelli beetle. It's a kind of Australian Jewel Beetle whose males prefer sex with discarded brown glass beer bottles to sex with female beetles.
The beetles will adapt or be wiped out by the glass beer bottles. People must adapt to a high standard of living or be wiped out by it.
Alien #1: We're getting a weird signal from that yellow star.
Alien #2: I thought I told you not to bother with yellow stars and only listen to the orange ones - yellow stars won't have INTELLIGENT life.
Alien #1: But this signal it's definately not natural, look at it.
Alien #2: Smeg!, not astronomical phenomena known could make this signal it appears so, so random.
Alien #1: Let's try to decipher it.
Alien #2: Oh lets!
They try and try, but there is just no rhyme nor reason to the signal. Also it is never repeated, so it is assumed to be locally generated noise. It's called the 'Smegma Signal' and is a popular subject among those aliens who are known to wear tinfoil trousers to protect their brains from 'psychic waves'. The other aliens assume they probably sat down to hard when they were a larvae and tore a nerve bundle or three.
I am for regularly scheduled above ground nuclear testing. All the films are old and grainy. I want HDTV thermonuclear devestation. If possible, I want to camp nearby ( but not too nearby ) and watch it. And before you say: well X amount of people are going to die because of radioactive pollution, remember that those X people would have died from the pollution the observers would have caused doing whatever else they were going to do on vacation. People get run over by cars heading to amusement parks. The rides break. Shit happens - deal with it.
It just means that should the need present itself to annihilate a patch of land, that we send 3 ICBMS to do the work of one. That way one of them ought to work. We wouldn't want any kind of retaliation if for instance a nuclear missile were discovered in an 'evil' country. We want to make sure it's obliterated.
Why do we want ignorant hordes goaded into spending our money on useless humans-in-space endeavors?
Better to spend the money on useful space science than to piss it away on humans-in-space.
Anyway, the humans-in-space race was about learning to build decent ICBMs. I don't think anyone seriously doubted China had the capability to produce decent ICBMs, but having put humans in space proves they do indeed have that capability. Yay for China. I hope ( for China's sake ) that they don't feel that they must put people on the moon to belabor the point. If they want national pride, spend the money discovering something interesting and cool, and NEW. Then it will go down in history FOREVER that the Chinese discovered it. Now there's a monument that will never fall down. And the best part is the whole world gets the benefit of the knowledge.
Well, nobody but the parents chose in GATTACA. I think it was probably evil.
Sexual selection is primitive eugenics. However tastes in mates have been subject to the evolutionary reality check over time. Bad taste in mates was and is penalized. There is no reason why people or peacocks should prefer one thing over another other than that those who prefer the 'wrong' thing are penalized. Biases towards correct preferences are preserved in genes. And what's bad taste today might be good taste tomorrow.
We probably aren't smart enough to predict future gene fashion trends well enough to profit our own genes. We might see that there is demand for long attention span or tallness currently and so sexually select those traits for our children ( and scifi in-vitro sexual selection of sperm/eggs is still sexual selection - you are in effect only breeding with those aspects of your partner that you find desirable )
However there is no guarantee that trait X will continue to be in demand into the future. Imagine if people had bred themselves to be able to be great office workers by breeding in the ability to do arithmetic in their heads at the expense of some other mental characteristic, and then the calculator/computer were invented? These people's skill would be obsolete. Maybe a left hand shaped like a mallet would be really useful, but when someone invents a mallet, the mallet shaped hand becomes less useful than the more versitile version with fingers.
Maybe the mental calculator device doesn't require sacrificing any trait, but weighs 5 grams in brain material requiring a slightly larger skull. How many 5 gram extra devices do you want your body carrying, encoded into your very genes?
Nowadays people might select for something that is completely doomed to die in the environment of only a few hundred years from now. With the pace at which people alter their environment it seems almost certain. I imagine that companies like this will find the human equivalent of Cornish Chickens and convince them to cross themselves with the human equivalent of White Rock chickens to make ridiculous human equivalents of Broiler chickens with very 'desirable' traits, perfectly suited to their intended factory farm lifestyle ( a great niche in high demand *currently* ). But when economic forces close the factory the ridiculous Broiler chicken offspring so choice for their short lived intended niche won't be able to cope with the new realities they face. No longer wild chickens, they are doomed.
Although if there are no wild spaces for wild chickens, maybe the wild type chicken is likewise doomed.
Will the genetic fashion mavens who's genes flock to new man-made niches drive the old standard model human to extinction, or will those niches disappear before the versitile old model person fades completely away, and will that model be better able to take advantage of the latest niche? Or will it be some of both?
Well I personally don't believe in justice. Nobody 'deserves' anything good or bad in a cosmic/karmic sense. But what goes on in courts is what is commonly referred to as 'justice'.
It's a glitch in the
system, one that we strive to eliminate.
When you've eliminated it let me know. Till then we have to live with a glitchy system. And the imperfect system we have demands the blood of innocents to function. Most agree that this is more palatable than anarchy mafia wars.
This is unfair, but necessary for the proper function of the wheels of justice. It's also unfair when an innocent person is convicted and sentenced to jail, but that is also necessary for the proper functioning of the wheels of justice. Justice demands that it's wheels are regularly lubricated with innocent blood. If you don't want bad-guys running rampant, then you have to throw some virgins into the mangler. It's the price of justice.
If the dumb are rich and the smart are poor, why aren't the
smart acting dumb to get rich? Are they too dumb to do
that? And if they are dumb, then how come they're not rich?
I have a headache now, thanks to you.
Investing time/energy/money dumbly nets less than you put in ON AVERAGE, however, to get fantastically more than the effort you put in, which is really the only way to become very much more wealthy than the average person who works 40 hours a week, requires doing something dumb, or insanely smart. You aren't insanely smart, though you may think you are. This is one way some apparently smart people trick themselves into doing insanely dumb things on occasion, that is by tricking themselves into thinking they are insanely smart. When they win, their smartitude is confirmed, and they are apparently smart so it is chocked up to that by outside observers if any, but most times when they lose they are ridiculed as egotistical dumbasses, and reminded how pride cometh before the fall.
Supposing there were a way to invest smartly that would earn you fantastically more than the effort you put in. EVERYONE would be doing it. Then it would cease to be so smart and could not continue to be so profitable. There is some economics law to this effect but the name escapes me.
However there will always be some who become fantastically successful actors/rock stars/CEOs/etc. To fool yourself into thinking you have a chance in hell at succeeding at getting so very much more than you put in for any appreciable time, you must have quite an ego, and to maintain this ego you either have to either be comic-relief-for-American-Idol-stupid or actually fairly good at what you are doing. But the required luck component for fantastic success in your chosen field means that even if you succeed, many others as able or even more able than you will have failed. You were just in the right place at the right time.
Of course anyone can buy a mega millions ticket now and then and imagine that there might be multiple universes and that although there may be billions of universes with versions of you that just threw away a dollar, that there is one lucky ass version of you in some universe rolling in the dough. And all the yous that bought the ticket didn't miss the dollar all that much anyway. But I certainly wouldn't bet the farm on the lottery or other such get rich quick schemes.
I don't think Idiocracy comforts anyone. It's a joke anyway since shit like putting Brawndo on the fields would tear it down long before it got to that point. I think the point was that modern conditions work to the detriment of those most to blame for modernity. If it could go on forever, it would destroy those human traits we most value, but never fear, Malthusian Catastrophe is on it's way, and Idiocracy is just a phantasm.
Although there is some question as to whether Malthusian Catastrophe is good for humanity. It could be that humans were doomed from the invention of acriculture.
Buzz Lightyear steps off his lander to be the first human being on Mars.
Six hours later, he is a puddle of goo. Two hours after that, all his crewmates are puddles of goo as well.
Hmm. That's not going to work since you can appear scary without actually being careless. If cops could ticket for appearing scary I'd have no license. I don't cell and drive and don't text at all, but I have been repeatedly pulled over for suspected DUI when completely sober ( I don't drink and drive either ). Under 'Appearing to be a bad driver' laws I'd still get a ticket.
And I've been driving for years and NEVER been in an accident that was my fault and the only accident I WAS in was over a decade ago while I was parked.
If you have determined a path from here to there that is safe and legal and you remain within that path, you shouldn't also need to do it 'with style'. Getting from point A to point B without breaking the law or getting in a smashup should be good enough.
Slashdot Mirror
I want someone with the sense not to have reached lvl 80 for my strategist.
I think that number is a measure of how smart/determined humans are to improve their standard of living. As energy becomes more plentiful, more becomes possible with the same level of effort/skill. The trend has been for energy to become more and more plentiful because of human ingenuity. Alternative energy sources are the only way to mitigate the finiteness of the resources we have used thusfar.
CO2 output = K * Fossil Fuel consumption at least approximately, K being nearish to 1.
Fossil Fuels are limited, especially cheap ones. There may be an energy price at which much economic activity ceases to be worth doing, a price above which much economic activity is priced out of the energy market. When this happens the economy shrinks as energy produced falls, but the price for energy doesn't get higher. This means expensive energy including possibly renewable energy is not developed at all.
But wait, you say, there are some uses for energy which are so vital that energy will be demanded for those uses at almost any price - gas for cars for instance. Yes, this is true, but if the quantity demanded times the price is insufficient to fund the infrastructure necessary to produce it, then it won't be produced. People won't be able to pay 'any price' for gasoline if they lost their job because the plant where they worked became uneconomic because of energy prices. The search for alternatives will be forced.
A bunch of people lose their rural jobs get evicted from their houses, move to city apartments to find work, and no longer demand nearly as much gasoline. Greater efficiency, and lower standards of living, and stagnant gas prices, and declining gas produced because of increased costs to produce in the face of declining reserves. With each spike in energy prices due to decreased extraction rate, segments of the economy priced out of existence lower consumption to meet the rate at which the resource is being produced, however because of declining volumes demanded at the new higher prices it may not make sense to develop further supply given the absence of the scale needed.
Energy produced declines fairly rapidly as does the economy as the price creeps ever upward shrinking consumption ( the economy ). Because the economy has shrunk, energy demanded has severely shrunk. Some expensive energy is still demanded by the wealthy, but the rest are forced to do without. The wealthy are few, so the scale of energy production is kept small. The opposite of economies of scale is what will result. Large scale demands a not just a large price, but also a large quantity to be demanded, price can be low if quantity is high, or quantity can be low if price is high and still justify large scale, but as each tends to zero, the other tends to infinity for a given scale. At smaller and smaller scales the economies of scale built up over recent times disappear.
The smallest scales are old time agrarian subsistence or even hunter gatherer society. Maybe alternative energy can be developed a scale that will support higher levels of civilization, or maybe not. I don't know.
Google Gail the Actuary for more.
Is there much wasted opportunity to grow food for and distribute food to those who need it because of geopolitical issues? Absolutely. There's lots of waste and opportunities for greater efficiency. However if there were more resources, then the waste wouldn't be such an issue. What will be fixed, the geopolitical issues, or will the need for food simply be eliminated by the demise of the hungry? Resources aren't going to appear from nowhere, that's almost certain.
People want what they want, and are wired to want it. In the past this wiring has been an evolutionary advantage. However under a high standard of living regime it is easy to get what one wants without having children. Of course children are still desired, but most choose to have zero one or two. Sex, and a satisfying lifestyle can be had without unwanted procreation thanks to birth control.
Of course as environments change what was once adaptive may become maladaptive. People with a high standard of living are living in such a radically altered environment, and that environment is likely to be very unfit for the species until and unless the species adapts.
One similar example of a creature whose innate wiring has become maladaptive in a newly changed environment is the Julodimorpha bakewelli beetle. It's a kind of Australian Jewel Beetle whose males prefer sex with discarded brown glass beer bottles to sex with female beetles.
The beetles will adapt or be wiped out by the glass beer bottles. People must adapt to a high standard of living or be wiped out by it.
Alien #1: We're getting a weird signal from that yellow star.
Alien #2: I thought I told you not to bother with yellow stars and only listen to the orange ones - yellow stars won't have INTELLIGENT life.
Alien #1: But this signal it's definately not natural, look at it.
Alien #2: Smeg!, not astronomical phenomena known could make this signal it appears so, so random.
Alien #1: Let's try to decipher it.
Alien #2: Oh lets!
They try and try, but there is just no rhyme nor reason to the signal. Also it is never repeated, so it is assumed to be locally generated noise. It's called the 'Smegma Signal' and is a popular subject among those aliens who are known to wear tinfoil trousers to protect their brains from 'psychic waves'. The other aliens assume they probably sat down to hard when they were a larvae and tore a nerve bundle or three.
I dunno, three seemed like a nice number. Ramans always do things in threes.
I am for regularly scheduled above ground nuclear testing. All the films are old and grainy. I want HDTV thermonuclear devestation. If possible, I want to camp nearby ( but not too nearby ) and watch it. And before you say: well X amount of people are going to die because of radioactive pollution, remember that those X people would have died from the pollution the observers would have caused doing whatever else they were going to do on vacation. People get run over by cars heading to amusement parks. The rides break. Shit happens - deal with it.
It just means that should the need present itself to annihilate a patch of land, that we send 3 ICBMS to do the work of one. That way one of them ought to work. We wouldn't want any kind of retaliation if for instance a nuclear missile were discovered in an 'evil' country. We want to make sure it's obliterated.
Why do we want ignorant hordes goaded into spending our money on useless humans-in-space endeavors?
Better to spend the money on useful space science than to piss it away on humans-in-space.
Anyway, the humans-in-space race was about learning to build decent ICBMs. I don't think anyone seriously doubted China had the capability to produce decent ICBMs, but having put humans in space proves they do indeed have that capability. Yay for China. I hope ( for China's sake ) that they don't feel that they must put people on the moon to belabor the point. If they want national pride, spend the money discovering something interesting and cool, and NEW. Then it will go down in history FOREVER that the Chinese discovered it. Now there's a monument that will never fall down. And the best part is the whole world gets the benefit of the knowledge.
I'm imagining Dr Evil's pinky going to the corner of his mouth... How about one gajillion jillion dollars?
With this many cores, don't they cease being cores, and become more of a smudge?
The phrase 'Garbage Scow' brings to mind the Star Raiders rank 'Garbage Scow Captain'. I've never heard the phrase 'Garbage Scow' anywhere else.
Well, nobody but the parents chose in GATTACA. I think it was probably evil.
Sexual selection is primitive eugenics. However tastes in mates have been subject to the evolutionary reality check over time. Bad taste in mates was and is penalized. There is no reason why people or peacocks should prefer one thing over another other than that those who prefer the 'wrong' thing are penalized. Biases towards correct preferences are preserved in genes. And what's bad taste today might be good taste tomorrow.
We probably aren't smart enough to predict future gene fashion trends well enough to profit our own genes. We might see that there is demand for long attention span or tallness currently and so sexually select those traits for our children ( and scifi in-vitro sexual selection of sperm/eggs is still sexual selection - you are in effect only breeding with those aspects of your partner that you find desirable )
However there is no guarantee that trait X will continue to be in demand into the future. Imagine if people had bred themselves to be able to be great office workers by breeding in the ability to do arithmetic in their heads at the expense of some other mental characteristic, and then the calculator/computer were invented? These people's skill would be obsolete. Maybe a left hand shaped like a mallet would be really useful, but when someone invents a mallet, the mallet shaped hand becomes less useful than the more versitile version with fingers.
Maybe the mental calculator device doesn't require sacrificing any trait, but weighs 5 grams in brain material requiring a slightly larger skull. How many 5 gram extra devices do you want your body carrying, encoded into your very genes?
Nowadays people might select for something that is completely doomed to die in the environment of only a few hundred years from now. With the pace at which people alter their environment it seems almost certain. I imagine that companies like this will find the human equivalent of Cornish Chickens and convince them to cross themselves with the human equivalent of White Rock chickens to make ridiculous human equivalents of Broiler chickens with very 'desirable' traits, perfectly suited to their intended factory farm lifestyle ( a great niche in high demand *currently* ). But when economic forces close the factory the ridiculous Broiler chicken offspring so choice for their short lived intended niche won't be able to cope with the new realities they face. No longer wild chickens, they are doomed.
Although if there are no wild spaces for wild chickens, maybe the wild type chicken is likewise doomed.
Will the genetic fashion mavens who's genes flock to new man-made niches drive the old standard model human to extinction, or will those niches disappear before the versitile old model person fades completely away, and will that model be better able to take advantage of the latest niche? Or will it be some of both?
Time will tell.
I don't take as an axiom that justice is a good thing. It's just a phenomenon that takes place for good or ill.
Nah.
Well I personally don't believe in justice. Nobody 'deserves' anything good or bad in a cosmic/karmic sense. But what goes on in courts is what is commonly referred to as 'justice'.
When you've eliminated it let me know. Till then we have to live with a glitchy system. And the imperfect system we have demands the blood of innocents to function. Most agree that this is more palatable than anarchy mafia wars.
This is unfair, but necessary for the proper function of the wheels of justice. It's also unfair when an innocent person is convicted and sentenced to jail, but that is also necessary for the proper functioning of the wheels of justice. Justice demands that it's wheels are regularly lubricated with innocent blood. If you don't want bad-guys running rampant, then you have to throw some virgins into the mangler. It's the price of justice.
Investing time/energy/money dumbly nets less than you put in ON AVERAGE, however, to get fantastically more than the effort you put in, which is really the only way to become very much more wealthy than the average person who works 40 hours a week, requires doing something dumb, or insanely smart. You aren't insanely smart, though you may think you are. This is one way some apparently smart people trick themselves into doing insanely dumb things on occasion, that is by tricking themselves into thinking they are insanely smart. When they win, their smartitude is confirmed, and they are apparently smart so it is chocked up to that by outside observers if any, but most times when they lose they are ridiculed as egotistical dumbasses, and reminded how pride cometh before the fall.
Supposing there were a way to invest smartly that would earn you fantastically more than the effort you put in. EVERYONE would be doing it. Then it would cease to be so smart and could not continue to be so profitable. There is some economics law to this effect but the name escapes me.
However there will always be some who become fantastically successful actors/rock stars/CEOs/etc. To fool yourself into thinking you have a chance in hell at succeeding at getting so very much more than you put in for any appreciable time, you must have quite an ego, and to maintain this ego you either have to either be comic-relief-for-American-Idol-stupid or actually fairly good at what you are doing. But the required luck component for fantastic success in your chosen field means that even if you succeed, many others as able or even more able than you will have failed. You were just in the right place at the right time.
Of course anyone can buy a mega millions ticket now and then and imagine that there might be multiple universes and that although there may be billions of universes with versions of you that just threw away a dollar, that there is one lucky ass version of you in some universe rolling in the dough. And all the yous that bought the ticket didn't miss the dollar all that much anyway. But I certainly wouldn't bet the farm on the lottery or other such get rich quick schemes.
I don't think Idiocracy comforts anyone. It's a joke anyway since shit like putting Brawndo on the fields would tear it down long before it got to that point. I think the point was that modern conditions work to the detriment of those most to blame for modernity. If it could go on forever, it would destroy those human traits we most value, but never fear, Malthusian Catastrophe is on it's way, and Idiocracy is just a phantasm. Although there is some question as to whether Malthusian Catastrophe is good for humanity. It could be that humans were doomed from the invention of acriculture.
Buzz Lightyear steps off his lander to be the first human being on Mars. Six hours later, he is a puddle of goo. Two hours after that, all his crewmates are puddles of goo as well.
There will always be more idiocy. What's up next doomwise after 2012?
Heard years ago on the radio: "Women farding in the car causes accidents and should be illegal!"
Hmm. That's not going to work since you can appear scary without actually being careless. If cops could ticket for appearing scary I'd have no license. I don't cell and drive and don't text at all, but I have been repeatedly pulled over for suspected DUI when completely sober ( I don't drink and drive either ). Under 'Appearing to be a bad driver' laws I'd still get a ticket.
And I've been driving for years and NEVER been in an accident that was my fault and the only accident I WAS in was over a decade ago while I was parked.
If you have determined a path from here to there that is safe and legal and you remain within that path, you shouldn't also need to do it 'with style'. Getting from point A to point B without breaking the law or getting in a smashup should be good enough.