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Oh, 2022

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Re: Oh, 2022

#181

Post by vikingerik »

Syonyk wrote: post #107
stickfigure wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space." (RIP Douglas Adams)

Space is hugely, vastly, mind-bogglingly big. Useful low orbital shells around the Earth are an awful lot smaller. They're still big, like the sky is big, but airplanes do manage to, at least somewhat regularly, collide with each other "in the middle of nowhere" (most midairs are around airports, since there are a lot of airplanes heading in and out of them). Aircraft debris, however, falls out of the sky in short or…

And the birthday problem applies; the probability of a collision goes up quadratically. If you have N objects, you've got N^2/2 pairs that could collide.

Re: Oh, 2022

#182

Post by ncmncm »

walrus01 wrote: post #65
j0057 wrote: post #61

> low-lying coastal nations like Bangladesh And lots of other places. About 1 billion people live along coastlines at 20 meters or less above sea level, and 200 million at 5 meters or less. I live in a wealthy country but well within the 5 meters range and am already having to think about whether it wouldn't be more prudent to sell my house today, now that it's still worth something, and emigrate to somewhere with a…

the immediate personal need to not live in a flooded zone is one thing to consider another thing to think about is the global geopolitical/civil war/economic possible disruptions and consequences of something like potentially half to 3/4 of bangladesh's population becoming international refugees. imagine what happened with syrians around 2012-2015 and people trying to get into europe multiplied by a factor of 50. and…

Not just inundated places.

Much of the tropics will become literally uninhabitable: being outside, in the shade, not moving, you die of heat stroke. Not every day, but in several days of the year, which is entirely enough. Before that, of course, the crops fail.

The effect of massive refugee influx has been seen to drive a rise of fascism in democratic nations.

Re: Oh, 2022

#183

Post by shagie »

doctoboggan wrote: post #89
cstross wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote Accelerando from 1998-2004. That's a third of a lifetime ago. It's normal to slow down as you grow older!

I recently read glass house and just started accelerando, great work!

If I may suggest dabbling in the BLIT short stories that the Langford fractal mentioned in the fifth decade of the century of wonders.

  https://ansible.uk/writing/t3_002.html
  http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/blit.htm
  https://www.nature.com/articles/44964
  https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/different-kinds-of-darkness/
And following up from Glasshouse with Implied Spaces by Walter Jon Williams where the exploration of what could have been without the Vile Offspring and computers were harnessed without a singularity... but "tools" such as Curious Yellow are a part of the nightmare scenarios in the possibilities of war.

Re: Oh, 2022

#184

Post by rob_c »

barry-cotter wrote: post #133
ErikAugust wrote: post #76

“If the SARS family of coronaviruses had emerged just a decade earlier it's quite likely we'd be on the brink of civilizational, if not species-level, extinction by now—SARS1 has 20% mortality among patients, MERS (aka SARS2) is up around 35-40% fatal, SARS-NCoV19, aka SARS3, is down around the 1-4% fatality level. If SARS1 had gone pandemic we might plausibly have lost a billion people within two years.” That’s a sc…

Sweden exists. They never locked down. The Hong Kong flu of the 1950s[1] happened. It was a really bad flu season. Many, many old, very young and sick people died. Civilization was never in danger from COVID. Civilization survived smallpox. The Inca civilization came very close to surviving getting the entire old world disease package and being invaded by people with horses, iron weapons and gunpowder all in the spac…

You make strong arguments, but unfortunately covid didn't happen in a political vacuum and western responses became tied up in anti-trump and anti-brexit rhetoric both sides of the pond.

But I do wish people a) understood stats and b) listened to reason not rhetoric.

Re: Oh, 2022

#185

Post by ncmncm »

rektide wrote: post #168
tptacek wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More people should block on Twitter. Blocking is far preferable, in an environment like Twitter, to pointless hostile misunderstanding. It's a bad look to dunk on someone for blocking you; just let them block and get on with your life. Pay it forward when someone pokes you on Twitter with a question you can tell is going to pull you into a time-wasting cortisol spike.

Its a shit rubbish reality that the only moderation option is infinite, is forever. Sever ties. End it. Write someone off as garbage. Your comment is way way too cancel culture for me. It hurts a lot having one bad exchange & having the door slammed in your face. Especially if it's some topic you feel strongly about, that you were trying to engage in. You may be right that it's a better tact than engaging. It's a shi…

Treat it as a hint that Twitter is a cesspit you are better off out of.

Re: Oh, 2022

#186

Post by jaybrendansmith »

walrus01 wrote: post #65
j0057 wrote: post #61

> low-lying coastal nations like Bangladesh And lots of other places. About 1 billion people live along coastlines at 20 meters or less above sea level, and 200 million at 5 meters or less. I live in a wealthy country but well within the 5 meters range and am already having to think about whether it wouldn't be more prudent to sell my house today, now that it's still worth something, and emigrate to somewhere with a…

the immediate personal need to not live in a flooded zone is one thing to consider another thing to think about is the global geopolitical/civil war/economic possible disruptions and consequences of something like potentially half to 3/4 of bangladesh's population becoming international refugees. imagine what happened with syrians around 2012-2015 and people trying to get into europe multiplied by a factor of 50. and…

Global Warming is absolutely a slow motion comet strike. We don't believe the science, because we don't WANT to believe it. Those of us that DO believe it feel like robots, speaking to the rest of mankind in ones and zeros. And it's still 10-20 years away, we all think. We will just move north (or south). We will just move inland or uphill. We can science our way out of this shit. Not true. None of that is true. When food prices start to skyrocket, and refugees swarm in from lowland countries and every direction including our own country, where will we go? This should absolutely be seen as a slow motion meteor strike, a world-buster event that happens right in front of our eyes before we can truly react. But we must take action. The danger of methane release, particularly methane hydrates, is beyond scary. That, and the raising of sea levels by 2-7 meters, and other unknowns such as the halting of the gulf stream, species die-off, ocean acidification, coral reefs and god knows what else. As a society, we must intelligently react to these dangers as we've done in the past with threats like the ozone layer. We must plan as if a comet was going to hit the planet, starting now.

Re: Oh, 2022

#187

Post by krapp »

rektide wrote: post #168
tptacek wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More people should block on Twitter. Blocking is far preferable, in an environment like Twitter, to pointless hostile misunderstanding. It's a bad look to dunk on someone for blocking you; just let them block and get on with your life. Pay it forward when someone pokes you on Twitter with a question you can tell is going to pull you into a time-wasting cortisol spike.

Its a shit rubbish reality that the only moderation option is infinite, is forever. Sever ties. End it. Write someone off as garbage. Your comment is way way too cancel culture for me. It hurts a lot having one bad exchange & having the door slammed in your face. Especially if it's some topic you feel strongly about, that you were trying to engage in. You may be right that it's a better tact than engaging. It's a shi…

>It's a shit system though, deeply dehumanizing ways of treating each other.

The system was already deeply dehumanizing. "Block early, block often" is simply the inevitable and, frankly, only reasonable reaction to years of dealing with psychopaths, assholes and trolls on the internet.

I only wish Hacker News came with its own killfile. Mine would be hundred of entries long by now.

Re: Oh, 2022

#188

Post by tuatoru »

elihu wrote: post #123

> "Looking further afield: it seems likely that the end of internal combustion engines will be in sight. Some countries are already scheduling a ban on IC engines to come in after 2030—electric cars are now a maturing technology with clear advantages in every respect except recharge time. Once those IC cars are no longer manufactured, we can expect a very rapid ramp-down of extraction and distribution industries for…

> half of global shipping.

There was a post here just yesterday, of a piece by Bill McKibben on this very topic. 40%. Seems about right to me.[1]

> > At this point the proposed bans are on the sale of new vehicles that run on fossil fuels [...] leading to a complete phase-out ...

> ... making the policy sound more extreme than it is

And the reduction in fossil fuels, too. Gasoline is somewhere between 30% and 40% of total oil consumption (if I am interpreting pages on the IEA's website correctly). There will be a ramp down, perhaps, but not a complete phase-out.

The ramp-down could happen slowly, then all at once, though.

On the one hand, ICE vehicles will be around for many decades after the bans come into force. On the other, most vehicle miles travelled are travelled by newer vehicles (say up to ten or twelve years old). I think there could be a tipping point after a while, in which the price of gasoline suddenly rises sharply because it's uneconomic to refine the small quantities demanded.

All the other components, not so much. There are lots of uses for which there are no good substitutes: industrial chemical feedstocks, ships, roadmaking, off-road construction and agriculture, trains, backup generators, military vehicles, and many more.

Diesel, kerosene (jet fuel), naptha, bitumen, etc., will be with use for a long time to come. Let's hope someone comes up with a cheap way of synthesizing them from atmospheric CO2.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29850631

Re: Oh, 2022

#189

Post by djokkataja »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #9

These predictions are like puzzle pieces that don't fit together. If 50% of the population are COVID invalids, who's going to be doing the (building) work for a new economic boom? You can't seriously say "I'm going to make predictions - but let's just ignore the most important health event for over a century." So - mRNA vaccinations. If you can vaccinate against AIDS, flu, cancer (being investigated...), and the rest…

> If there's a permanent Moon base - so what? Does anything really change? How? (What - in practical and economic terms, as opposed to symbolically - did the ISS change?) Can you even have a self-sustaining Moon base without relying on Earth. (Hint: not for a long time.)

In practical terms, permanent Moon bases could make it easier to get to the rest of the solar system:

> Perhaps a more immediate use for this water, though, is to make rocket fuel. Water molecules are made of hydrogen and oxygen, both of which are super useful for rocket propellants. The molecules can be split apart by running an electric current through the water (electrolysis), yielding hydrogen and oxygen, which can then be stored as liquids, ready to fuel a rocket.

> If only there were places for rockets to refuel somewhere along the way … like, perhaps, a service station orbiting the Moon. This could allow rockets to leave Earth with just enough fuel to make it to the Moon, where they could then re-fuel before moving on to the next destination. Alternatively, fuel from the Moon could be transported to a fuel depot in low Earth orbit, allowing rockets to dock for re-fuelling closer to home. Either way, it means a more efficient use of fuel and energy that could potentially allow spacecraft to travel a lot deeper into space and lower the costs of space exploration activities.

https://www.science.org.au/curious/space-time/mining-moon

I agree that it's not likely to be very significant if we're only looking 10 years ahead, but on a longer timescale, I think it will be almost absurdist to look at the little steps we took to get off planet as unimportant. Sort of like saying that Europe has been largely unaffected by Christopher Columbus getting in a boat and going for a joyride across the Atlantic, though I suppose there could be a case made for that.

> But behind this the real issues are psychological. The planet without toxic media and mad billionaires is a much nicer place than the planet with them. Many of the biggest trad-media offenders will be dead by 2030. Will they be replaced? Will there be a Metaverse Abstinence movement? Can one be engineered?

This is one way in which I see a Moon base as an important symbol even over the shorter term. Something that could prompt realizations along the lines of: "We're not stuck here on this planet, we can go elsewhere and live in other ways... so maybe we can live in other ways here on Earth, too. Our reality can be what we choose to make of it together, not an 'inevitably' shitty situation where one of us is stomping on the other's head forever."

Re: Oh, 2022

#190

Post by csomar »

barry-cotter wrote: post #133
ErikAugust wrote: post #76

“If the SARS family of coronaviruses had emerged just a decade earlier it's quite likely we'd be on the brink of civilizational, if not species-level, extinction by now—SARS1 has 20% mortality among patients, MERS (aka SARS2) is up around 35-40% fatal, SARS-NCoV19, aka SARS3, is down around the 1-4% fatality level. If SARS1 had gone pandemic we might plausibly have lost a billion people within two years.” That’s a sc…

Sweden exists. They never locked down. The Hong Kong flu of the 1950s[1] happened. It was a really bad flu season. Many, many old, very young and sick people died. Civilization was never in danger from COVID. Civilization survived smallpox. The Inca civilization came very close to surviving getting the entire old world disease package and being invaded by people with horses, iron weapons and gunpowder all in the spac…

So you are saying a pandemic could potentially collapse a civilization, but the flu was not serious enough to do that? The Inca should be a cautionary tale. The human race is unlikely to go away unless we have a dinosaurs-like extinction event. However, civilizations are much more delicate.
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