321–330 of 356 posts
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There's GridCoin, as well, which utilizes BOINC for work units.
Golem (www.golem.network) is building a general-purpose distributed computation platform where people who need compute power pay using cryptocurrency. And developers can build software to run on it (and get paid when it's used).
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Hahah, I can relate so much with the 'poorerer' part, I'll raise you another one: my first '686' was a Cyrix 6x86 because those were the cheapest you could get. Eventually got my hands on a Pentium II and had to scavenge parts to replace my setup. Good times. Nowadays I just buy a laptop with everything soldered on it and complain a lot if I have to reboot it every month.
In the late 90s I had a 486sx33 with one of those Cyrix 586 upgrade chips for the math co-processor slot. It was so hot it had a fan on it! Crazy! I also maxed out the RAM to 32mb and upgrade the SRAM in my Trident video card so I could do 256 color in Windows 95. I also had a 40mb Erwin Tape Drive for backing up my 100mb HDD. It wasn't fast but it was faster than reinstalling Tie Fighter from Floppies.
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I would think of compute resources "going to waste" in three separate groups: - The baseline electricity the computer is using. This will get used and produce no S@H work either way (in an era where our computers didn't go to sleep) - The added electricity to do S@H work. This certainly was not idle, but also was a relatively small amount relative to an entire household's use. - The hardware itself. I would say that…
I may be wrong but back in 90s an idle processor used up just as much electricity as an actively computing one.
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Wait, isn't the force "that would tear it apart" the same as the gravity you wanted to generate?
An O’Neil Cylinder is a few miles wide. Stainless steel can handle the rotation required to create earth like gravity. If we can practically produce graphemes instead you can go up to several thousand miles in diameter (McKendree Cylinders). 1 AU in diameter is something else entirely.
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That's a fascinating comment, thank you. I personally suspect the engineering challenges might pale next to the challenges of political organization. Quite simply, the continued human expertise and organization necessary to manage and sustain such a system is far, far beyond anything we have today. We can't even manage to globally reduce CO2, and the recent government responses to coronavirus have led a lot to be des…
"Quite simply, the continued human expertise and organization necessary to manage and sustain such a system is far, far beyond anything we have today." You don't need "a system" for doing this. You only need one. 9,999 of 10,000 habitats could be staring into their naval, but the one building more will still be building more. So, I think you ought to flip the intuition around; it's not a question of keeping everyone…
It's not about habitats coexisting with each other or not, it's about them imploding internally because people develop factions, compete for resources internally, threaten brinkmanship with critical systems, and eventually someone goes too far -- like people do all the time in countries all around the globe today.
Except a company can go bankrupt and a political regime can be replaced without all their employees or citizens dying in the process, because none of them are responsible for maintaining earth's life support.
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I was a new web developer in that era and the bad taste in my mouth left by that era's Internet Exploiter is still strong. LOL. ugh.
Younger developers truly don’t understand the pain and suffering IE inflicted
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We think it's different for us because the reversal in population growth is correlated with education and development levels. These are factors which aren't present in animal populations. If we lived in a world where every culture had achieved a certain level of education and development (and most all of them do want to get there), it's likely they would all have flat or declining populations. They might have to heav…
This seems to currently be a thing. It's a little premature to say it's going to apply to all cultures across all time. In fact I'd take the opposite side of that bet. The thing is if there's any culture for which that's not true, like Mormons, Orthodox Jews, some groups of Muslims, whatever. In a few generations they replace the cultures that don't have a lot of children like our own. Then expansion continues. I cou…
Anyway I agree that we can't say for certain whether population will grow or shrink. In fact in the context of this discussion I think that's the most important point. Many discussions about alien civilizations tend to assume that they'll evolve into huge multiplanetary populations with large energy/EM/whatever footprints. When in reality our most developed cultures are slowly declining in population. If an underground cache of brains in pleasure boxes is the end stage for most civs we will probably never know.