Here's a hint--if bacteria really doubled continuously until they ran out of resources, we would all be swimming in green goo.
They DON'T do that. They grow exponentially in a new environment, until they reach a certain population density, or until they experience environmental stress. They quorum sense, and form a biofilm (analogous to a human city--http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biofilm). Resource use falls dramatically. The half of the remaining resources becomes enough to maintain the population for YEARS so long as they don't dry out.
IAACWOM. I am a chemist who oversees microbiologists.
You don't get it. Growth trends indicate a PEAK at 9 billion before we return to around the current population, and level off there.
Also, your aquifer problem is easily solved with advances in desalinization technologies. There are many times as much salty or brackish water in those aquifers as there is fresh water. Hell,, you could pump it into a large, continuous flow solar desalinization facility with no moving parts (ie sun heats up the water, much of it evaporates and gathers in another culvert, while the now saltier water is allowed to drain into another empty aquifer).
Size of the US government in 1960 as a % of GDP: 27%
Size of the US government in 2010 as a % of GDP: 40%
Also, understand that practically every government job creates at least one compliance job in the private sector. Thank God government employees are so overpaid. If they were consuming 40% of GDP for governance and were paid the same wages as the private sector, that would mean that 80% of our GDP was governance, or dealing with governance. As it is, it is WAY too much, and those few that remain are the ones who produce the things that everyone else buys. Again, thank God the Chinese are stupid enough to take our worthless paper in return for real goods, or we'd be screwed.
That is totally false. We have socialism right now, not capitalism. Socialism has destroyed the jobs that those people could be doing, and is feeding them, allowing them to not work. Further, it imposes minimum wage requirements, meaning that jobs that need to be done go undone because they don't produce enough productivity to support someone at minimum wage.
The truth is that socialism only supports those people until it has no more "other people's money" to steal, then it lets them die. Capitalism hands them a shovel and tells them to get to work.
They are exploited by their OWN governments. Unless we have troops in their nation forcing them to give up their money and resources, then any "exploitation by 1st world governments" is second hand at most, and is carried out with the explicit consent of the local government.
All these people need is for their governments to recognize that their people ARE PEOPLE, and stop murdering and stealing from them, and stop them from murdering and stealing from each other. Once that is done, then their economy can begin to grow in a real, sustainable manner. People will recognize that they can get ahead by hard work and savings, rather than bullying those weaker than themselves. Once you see that fundamental change in the people, education will take off, and Africa will pull herself out of her death spiral.
Sadly, this is NOT something we can do for them. They must do it themselves. Understand that any and all charitable aid only supports the current corrupt governments. Starvation will cause the people to rise up against their oppressors, as it has TWICE now in Egypt. Free food delays this as long as it is available, and those who don't get the free food simply die, without the critical mass needed to start an uprising.
How did I get this soul crushing debt when I used the money I had saved?
If my business had failed, I would have gone and done something else. Hell, I could have driven a truck for 4 years and saved up $80,000 (by not having a home of my own, or any bills outside of a cell phone). That would be enough to do any number of things. Hell, a few more years of that, and you could retire.
Then why is it that 99.9% of people don't go to school after entering the workforce, unless it is in the pursuit of a higher paying job?
You can get all the learning you want at your local library for FREE, or now online with Khan Academy. Don't feed people a line of bullshit about college not being a matter of economics.
Left for what? There are no jobs that require college degrees. We've got PhDs flipping burgers and pushing mops, FFS.
The point of the "don't go to college" meme is that by not going to college, you avoid the soul crushing debt that most students now graduate with. I've been out of school for almost six years, and I STILL don't make enough to pay all my loans, even though I have what most would consider to be a "good" job, in my field, ie I manage a multimillion dollar materials research lab.
If I had it to do all over again, I would have taken my college fund that was only enough for about a year of school and started a business. College is now a suckers game, and has been for a decade.
lolwat? How is cutting back on what amounts to the only currently practical non-CO2 emitting power generation technology orthogonal to carbon emissions?
I love how you can't see the IRONY of on the one hand cringing about global warming, and on the other hand having entire nations reactively pledge to get rid of the only real alternative. If you can't see it, then perhaps you should be the one shoveling potato chips into your loud mouth, hmmm?
Yes, Climatology is a "science" at the level of an internet message board argument. Basically, a back and forth of "Yuh-huh"s and "Nuh-uh"s. No independent review of any statements from any side. Everyone uses the same data from the same devices in the same places and puts them into the same computer programs that are NOT open source, and are in fact black boxes.
I know when I am being sold pork flavored snake oil.
Christ. Look up "centripetal force" and get back to me. As I have now said to you TWICE, the RIBBON is moving up, with the "climber" ATTACHED. Like a flea on a lasso. The ribbon extends of to a counterweight past geostationary orbit. The counterweight is what pulls the ribbon up. The counterweight can either roll up the material and disassemble it, or it can feed it out with cargo attached and launch probes.
This is REALLY EASY. I honestly don't understand how you could possibly fail to understand such a simple concept. According to your logic, solar panels are magic, because they are fueled by the sun. A space elevator (designed like a REAL elevator), gets its energy from the spin of the Earth. This is high school level physics. If you still don't understand how it will work, go get a cat and swing it around by its tail as hard as you can, then let go. If it falls into your face, then you are correct, and I have posited magic. If it flies off away from you at a tangent, then I am correct. Ask yourself, where did the energy to fling the cat that far come from (your spin). Next ask yourself how the energy was transferred to the cat (through your arm and hand, analogous to the elevator and counterweight). Then, finally, ask yourself how much energy the cat expended in this little exchange? (None--this would work just fine on a dead cat).
My God you are stupid. No, this is not like saying Columbus could had a boat if he had a molecule of lignin. It's like saying he had a boat if he had a boat, the raw materials for lignin, and a method of mass production (which has been developed for graphene in the last few months) that he could have a ship ready fairly soon, and that they should probably start thinking about an expedition.
Who the fuck are you to tell me what is for me and what isn't? You are a good example of the decadence of Western culture. You don't NEED to drill holes in asteroids. You just strip mine them. There isn't any environment to damage. Hell, nuke it and drop the leftover bits into a reactor to separate out what you want. Christ, if you had been around in Spanish court you would have made the same dumbshit arguments about further exploration after Columbus' first voyage. "They're just a bunch of savages over there, there's no point in going", and Spain would never have become a superpower, and would have been passed up by the countries that weren't so damned cowardly.
Yeah, Earth does have "ways". Idiots like you have set yourselves into seats of power to tell us what we can or can't do in every way imaginable. You have made us weak and stupid. You would condemn all of humanity to live the rest of their now assuredly short existence in her cradle.
Funny, you can't even spell "guarantee", but you are trying to tell me how stupid I am. Go cry to mommy. Let the adults do the thinking. If people like you had ruled humanity, we would all still be living in Africa, a single tiny tribe on the verge of extinction. No fire. No tools. What has gone in the past is good enough for the future. You would have "guaranteed" that the world ended on the other side of the mountains. You would have "guaranteed" me that men couldn't build canoes much less great ships. You would have SCOFFED at the notion that man could fly through the sky.
So I'll tell you what. You can take your "guarantee", which is backed by nothing but the empty words of a foolish coward who would bet against humanity, and shove it up your ass.
Hurrr, U R childish cause U want to live differntly frum me!
Maybe we are tired of having our tax money used to bail out bankers and failed nations every Tuesday, or being molested by the Fatherland Security Service at every opportunity. Maybe we want to explore, and set foot where no man has walked before? Maybe we are tired of little shits like you telling us what we can or can't do.
You don't know anything about mining, clearly. You want to shut off an abundant and cheap source in favor of mining the urine of hospital patients? Because that is where a lot of silver goes, when used in medical applications. Or perhaps you can mine their livers after their death?
Yes, silver is running out. As are many other resources that are greatly needed in small quantities. Resources that are available in great bulk in the asteroids, or on Mars, or on the Moon, or any other literally untapped goldmine out there.
You aren't using your noodle. Use of a climber is a dumber idea than having a thousand miles of iron floating in the ocean prior to launching an orbital loop. Rather, you fix the "climber" to the ribbon, and you let the ribbon out, like a lasso.
This isn't magic, but it might as well be, when you have a strong enough material to make a cable suitable for this design (which graphene is), such that there is no taper. The counterweight station would roll up/disassemble the ribbon as it came up, or would feed it through to allow for interplanetary launches.
"Moons get in the way" lol, what the FUCK are you talking about? This is literally the dumbest thing I have ever heard. For one, Martian stationary orbit is 17000 kilometers. So that puts Deimos WAAAAYYYYY out of range. Phobos is within range, but if we can move the avoid space debris, I think we can avoid hitting a fucking moon.
Of course you spend energy somewhere. The question is where you get it. I answered that in my post--we use Earth's angular momentum. Funny how you cast stones for not knowing about orbital mechanics, but you yourself know nothing about orbital mechanics AND have an elementary school level of reading comprehension.
What part of "200 times stronger than structural steel" didn't you understand? What part of "maneuver around larger space debris" don't you understand? And where did you get the idea that the ribbon will be thin? We're not talking a bit of cellophane here--more like an inch thick plate--maybe thicker.
Congrats, you win the award for whiniest post of the year.
Launch loops are stupid, and can't be maintained (you want to have a thousand mile long piece of IRON running over the OCEAN?). There is no practical way to deploy them. Space elevators, on the other hand, can be deployed from geostationary orbit, and take up very little space on the ground, meaning you can have THOUSANDS of them. You can have one, MAYBE two launch loops, that would in reality be highly unreliable because the climate leads directly to the destruction of the mechanism.
There are space elevator designs that require only one moving part after deployment, and that is on the ground. The ribbon can be "let up", and even better, the ribbon itself is nearly a superconductor, so you can move power up and down it easily. This makes it a very flexible technology.
Uhhh, except this technology is the only one we were lacking, and we have it now.
In space, there are resources. Lots of them. There are places where you can stick a 4000 square mile array of solar panels that will be lit for all but a few minutes each year. There are infinite amounts of metals, and fissile materials. There is SPACE to establish a new home for those sick of the Earth and her decadent ways.
But thanks for deciding what is best for everyone, and what is even possible. We really appreciate it.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, yeah, but you are. Stupid as shit too.
Here's a hint--if bacteria really doubled continuously until they ran out of resources, we would all be swimming in green goo.
They DON'T do that. They grow exponentially in a new environment, until they reach a certain population density, or until they experience environmental stress. They quorum sense, and form a biofilm (analogous to a human city--http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biofilm). Resource use falls dramatically. The half of the remaining resources becomes enough to maintain the population for YEARS so long as they don't dry out.
IAACWOM. I am a chemist who oversees microbiologists.
You act as if the super power creates the people, rather than the other way around.
You don't get it. Growth trends indicate a PEAK at 9 billion before we return to around the current population, and level off there.
Also, your aquifer problem is easily solved with advances in desalinization technologies. There are many times as much salty or brackish water in those aquifers as there is fresh water. Hell,, you could pump it into a large, continuous flow solar desalinization facility with no moving parts (ie sun heats up the water, much of it evaporates and gathers in another culvert, while the now saltier water is allowed to drain into another empty aquifer).
Size of the US government in 1960 as a % of GDP: 27%
Size of the US government in 2010 as a % of GDP: 40%
Also, understand that practically every government job creates at least one compliance job in the private sector. Thank God government employees are so overpaid. If they were consuming 40% of GDP for governance and were paid the same wages as the private sector, that would mean that 80% of our GDP was governance, or dealing with governance. As it is, it is WAY too much, and those few that remain are the ones who produce the things that everyone else buys. Again, thank God the Chinese are stupid enough to take our worthless paper in return for real goods, or we'd be screwed.
That is totally false. We have socialism right now, not capitalism. Socialism has destroyed the jobs that those people could be doing, and is feeding them, allowing them to not work. Further, it imposes minimum wage requirements, meaning that jobs that need to be done go undone because they don't produce enough productivity to support someone at minimum wage.
The truth is that socialism only supports those people until it has no more "other people's money" to steal, then it lets them die. Capitalism hands them a shovel and tells them to get to work.
India imports more than 2/3rds of their energy from abroad, just like the US. China only produces significant amounts of coal and natural gas.
However, you might note that the energy companies producing oil abroad for import to the US are, in fact, US companies.
Wrong.
They are exploited by their OWN governments. Unless we have troops in their nation forcing them to give up their money and resources, then any "exploitation by 1st world governments" is second hand at most, and is carried out with the explicit consent of the local government.
All these people need is for their governments to recognize that their people ARE PEOPLE, and stop murdering and stealing from them, and stop them from murdering and stealing from each other. Once that is done, then their economy can begin to grow in a real, sustainable manner. People will recognize that they can get ahead by hard work and savings, rather than bullying those weaker than themselves. Once you see that fundamental change in the people, education will take off, and Africa will pull herself out of her death spiral.
Sadly, this is NOT something we can do for them. They must do it themselves. Understand that any and all charitable aid only supports the current corrupt governments. Starvation will cause the people to rise up against their oppressors, as it has TWICE now in Egypt. Free food delays this as long as it is available, and those who don't get the free food simply die, without the critical mass needed to start an uprising.
I know Physics PhDs from state universities that are making only $30,000/year in a testing laboratory.
And the competition for THOSE crappy jobs was FIERCE!
How did I get this soul crushing debt when I used the money I had saved?
If my business had failed, I would have gone and done something else. Hell, I could have driven a truck for 4 years and saved up $80,000 (by not having a home of my own, or any bills outside of a cell phone). That would be enough to do any number of things. Hell, a few more years of that, and you could retire.
Yeah, you have to earn it back by the end of your lifetime, which with interest and penalties means you pay a half a million dollars or more.
And with the current jobs situation, that rate of appreciation will only get worse.
Then why is it that 99.9% of people don't go to school after entering the workforce, unless it is in the pursuit of a higher paying job?
You can get all the learning you want at your local library for FREE, or now online with Khan Academy. Don't feed people a line of bullshit about college not being a matter of economics.
Left for what? There are no jobs that require college degrees. We've got PhDs flipping burgers and pushing mops, FFS.
The point of the "don't go to college" meme is that by not going to college, you avoid the soul crushing debt that most students now graduate with. I've been out of school for almost six years, and I STILL don't make enough to pay all my loans, even though I have what most would consider to be a "good" job, in my field, ie I manage a multimillion dollar materials research lab.
If I had it to do all over again, I would have taken my college fund that was only enough for about a year of school and started a business. College is now a suckers game, and has been for a decade.
If you shop around, you can find them quite a bit cheaper than that.
For example, look at sunelec.com
lolwat? How is cutting back on what amounts to the only currently practical non-CO2 emitting power generation technology orthogonal to carbon emissions?
I love how you can't see the IRONY of on the one hand cringing about global warming, and on the other hand having entire nations reactively pledge to get rid of the only real alternative. If you can't see it, then perhaps you should be the one shoveling potato chips into your loud mouth, hmmm?
Yes, Climatology is a "science" at the level of an internet message board argument. Basically, a back and forth of "Yuh-huh"s and "Nuh-uh"s. No independent review of any statements from any side. Everyone uses the same data from the same devices in the same places and puts them into the same computer programs that are NOT open source, and are in fact black boxes.
I know when I am being sold pork flavored snake oil.
lol, you think "Climatology" is a science on par with physics, chemistry, or biology.
It's more of a science like the Church of Scientology's audits are "science". If you disagree then they yell and scream and call you nasty names, etc.
And the logical response?
Stop using nuclear energy.
lol, Western Civilization is over. Wake me up after the next set of Dark Ages.
Christ. Look up "centripetal force" and get back to me. As I have now said to you TWICE, the RIBBON is moving up, with the "climber" ATTACHED. Like a flea on a lasso. The ribbon extends of to a counterweight past geostationary orbit. The counterweight is what pulls the ribbon up. The counterweight can either roll up the material and disassemble it, or it can feed it out with cargo attached and launch probes.
This is REALLY EASY. I honestly don't understand how you could possibly fail to understand such a simple concept. According to your logic, solar panels are magic, because they are fueled by the sun. A space elevator (designed like a REAL elevator), gets its energy from the spin of the Earth. This is high school level physics. If you still don't understand how it will work, go get a cat and swing it around by its tail as hard as you can, then let go. If it falls into your face, then you are correct, and I have posited magic. If it flies off away from you at a tangent, then I am correct. Ask yourself, where did the energy to fling the cat that far come from (your spin). Next ask yourself how the energy was transferred to the cat (through your arm and hand, analogous to the elevator and counterweight). Then, finally, ask yourself how much energy the cat expended in this little exchange? (None--this would work just fine on a dead cat).
Again, you didn't use your noodle.
My God you are stupid. No, this is not like saying Columbus could had a boat if he had a molecule of lignin. It's like saying he had a boat if he had a boat, the raw materials for lignin, and a method of mass production (which has been developed for graphene in the last few months) that he could have a ship ready fairly soon, and that they should probably start thinking about an expedition.
Who the fuck are you to tell me what is for me and what isn't? You are a good example of the decadence of Western culture. You don't NEED to drill holes in asteroids. You just strip mine them. There isn't any environment to damage. Hell, nuke it and drop the leftover bits into a reactor to separate out what you want. Christ, if you had been around in Spanish court you would have made the same dumbshit arguments about further exploration after Columbus' first voyage. "They're just a bunch of savages over there, there's no point in going", and Spain would never have become a superpower, and would have been passed up by the countries that weren't so damned cowardly.
Yeah, Earth does have "ways". Idiots like you have set yourselves into seats of power to tell us what we can or can't do in every way imaginable. You have made us weak and stupid. You would condemn all of humanity to live the rest of their now assuredly short existence in her cradle.
Funny, you can't even spell "guarantee", but you are trying to tell me how stupid I am. Go cry to mommy. Let the adults do the thinking. If people like you had ruled humanity, we would all still be living in Africa, a single tiny tribe on the verge of extinction. No fire. No tools. What has gone in the past is good enough for the future. You would have "guaranteed" that the world ended on the other side of the mountains. You would have "guaranteed" me that men couldn't build canoes much less great ships. You would have SCOFFED at the notion that man could fly through the sky.
So I'll tell you what. You can take your "guarantee", which is backed by nothing but the empty words of a foolish coward who would bet against humanity, and shove it up your ass.
I guess you must be the last Royal loyalist.
Hurrr, U R childish cause U want to live differntly frum me!
Maybe we are tired of having our tax money used to bail out bankers and failed nations every Tuesday, or being molested by the Fatherland Security Service at every opportunity. Maybe we want to explore, and set foot where no man has walked before? Maybe we are tired of little shits like you telling us what we can or can't do.
You don't know anything about mining, clearly. You want to shut off an abundant and cheap source in favor of mining the urine of hospital patients? Because that is where a lot of silver goes, when used in medical applications. Or perhaps you can mine their livers after their death?
Yes, silver is running out. As are many other resources that are greatly needed in small quantities. Resources that are available in great bulk in the asteroids, or on Mars, or on the Moon, or any other literally untapped goldmine out there.
You aren't using your noodle. Use of a climber is a dumber idea than having a thousand miles of iron floating in the ocean prior to launching an orbital loop. Rather, you fix the "climber" to the ribbon, and you let the ribbon out, like a lasso.
This isn't magic, but it might as well be, when you have a strong enough material to make a cable suitable for this design (which graphene is), such that there is no taper. The counterweight station would roll up/disassemble the ribbon as it came up, or would feed it through to allow for interplanetary launches.
"Moons get in the way" lol, what the FUCK are you talking about? This is literally the dumbest thing I have ever heard. For one, Martian stationary orbit is 17000 kilometers. So that puts Deimos WAAAAYYYYY out of range. Phobos is within range, but if we can move the avoid space debris, I think we can avoid hitting a fucking moon.
Of course you spend energy somewhere. The question is where you get it. I answered that in my post--we use Earth's angular momentum. Funny how you cast stones for not knowing about orbital mechanics, but you yourself know nothing about orbital mechanics AND have an elementary school level of reading comprehension.
What part of "200 times stronger than structural steel" didn't you understand? What part of "maneuver around larger space debris" don't you understand? And where did you get the idea that the ribbon will be thin? We're not talking a bit of cellophane here--more like an inch thick plate--maybe thicker.
Congrats, you win the award for whiniest post of the year.
Launch loops are stupid, and can't be maintained (you want to have a thousand mile long piece of IRON running over the OCEAN?). There is no practical way to deploy them. Space elevators, on the other hand, can be deployed from geostationary orbit, and take up very little space on the ground, meaning you can have THOUSANDS of them. You can have one, MAYBE two launch loops, that would in reality be highly unreliable because the climate leads directly to the destruction of the mechanism.
There are space elevator designs that require only one moving part after deployment, and that is on the ground. The ribbon can be "let up", and even better, the ribbon itself is nearly a superconductor, so you can move power up and down it easily. This makes it a very flexible technology.
Uhhh, except this technology is the only one we were lacking, and we have it now.
In space, there are resources. Lots of them. There are places where you can stick a 4000 square mile array of solar panels that will be lit for all but a few minutes each year. There are infinite amounts of metals, and fissile materials. There is SPACE to establish a new home for those sick of the Earth and her decadent ways.
But thanks for deciding what is best for everyone, and what is even possible. We really appreciate it.