Earlier quoted context omitted.
They won't get after you because of one paper. Please, do it for the betterment of mankind :).
It's not worth it. The terrorists won.
Or we could talk about nuclear fusion.
Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion
131–140 of 194 posts
Re: Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fortunately, if we had a lot more cheap energy we could probably get to space pretty easily too. So a lot of the growth wouldn't be happening on this planet.
Covered by the linked article to an extent and Asimov IIRC. Exponential growth requires FTL travel within a period shorter than recorded history even with free energy + space travel.
Right, I wasn't suggesting it could continue indefinitely, just that the limit is well beyond this planet. Solar system at least, maybe nearby stars.
Re: Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
YC companies aren't funded by taxpayer dollars
I don't understand what argument you are making here.
The point was the research is being performed by a government funded lab not private money.
If the public is paying for the research should they not have access to the published papers resulting from it without paying $32 to a private company for a PDF download?
Re: Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
By terrorists you mean those illusionary guys that the politicians use as the boogie man, to beat down the rationality of ordinary people by provoking fear, so they are legally allowed to do virtually anything without nobody to stop them?
I want to downvote this. I really do. And I think when I feel justified in doing so that things will have improved.
It would be cool if there were a globally inclusive political movement that continuously stood for election in multiple countries simultaneously.
It could then be called the Terraists and possibly solve the whole issue through discordant namespace collision.
Re: Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
You go tell Feynman the Manhattan project wasn't about science.
Good way of putting it so that people can understand. Feynman was a scientist, not an engineer, so that's a clue that the Manhattan project involved science, not just engineering. The same is true of fusion research. That's why it's "research", not merely "development". In particular, the physics of plasma instabilities has always been quite imperfectly understood, and that has been one of the key problems with contr…
The Manhattan project was a boy band or had a significant boy band component. It clearly involved a number of amateur male musicians[1][2].
Science is about understanding, engineering is about building something.
If the Manhattan project had resulted in no new understanding, but had created a nuclear bomb it would have been a success. The science was incidental to the success of the project.
Engineering is built on science so there will often be scientists involved in Engineering projects, however the assumption with an Engineering project is that the science is already understood (or at least significantly understood) and so the main effort is in the design and construction.
The problem with Science projects is that they are hard to sell to the public. Thats because its hard for someone who isn't a domain expert to put a value on its significance. This is why a lot of Science projects are dressed up as Engineering projects[1] to sell them to the public.
Its pretty clear that the above fusion research is a Science project, i.e about understanding.
If this facility is being used to produce new bombs then that is an engineering project but if it is just being used to gain understanding about existing bombs then its science.
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein#Love_of_music
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative
Re: Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not enough. Learning what doesn't work is sort of useful, but only if it ever leads to something that DOES work. There's an infinite supply of dead ends out there. You need a higher bar than 'learned something' if that something is a negative.
> You need a higher bar than 'learned something' if that something is a negative. Not really. The point of big scientific research is that at the moment a project is being conceived, no one has any idea where it will go and whether it will bring anything useful. Yet in time, it always brings breakthroughs. I'll put it bluntly: we need more trust . The right way to do science is to keep throwing money at it, no questi…
No. Feynman actually criticised scientists who weren't prepared to explain and justify their work to the public. He says this in one of the bbc videos, can't remember which, as part of a critique of the social sciences.
Re: Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or even better failed military projects, such as the $25+ billion spent on a spy satellite project before it was killed in 2002. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Reconnaissance_Office...
The F-35 is not exactly a resounding success: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-02-22/flawed-f-35-fighter...
No, at this point we should have built more F-22s for air-to-air. Strange how the "cheap" program is now the expensive one.
Re: Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but in the article they also say this isn't possible with their current techniques. Anyone have a figure that represents how far off they are?
they also say this isn't possible with their current techniques. That's fine by me, it was not very long ago that we were unable to get more out of the fuel than we put into the fuel. That's step one to fusion ignition, and was done for the very first time last fall, so as far as I'm concerned they are still fleshing out step one.
Doesn't every H-bomb have substantial positive fuel yield?
Re: Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
> we could probably solve some really fundamental world problems (i.e. energy, climate change) in the near future I have a feeling that if we had fusion plants providing limitless cheap power, we'd get back on an 8% yearly growth track for energy consumption, like with oil consumption before 1970. Then within a century or so, we'd be producing an amount of power equivalent to 20% of what the earth receives from the s…
An old article on exactly that which I found interesting http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-e... To sum it up "Free energy" buys us about 300-400 years of growth before thermodynamics kicks our ass.
Free energy buys us a century or more of energy growth. Nobody has any idea what anyone would use that much per capita energy for -- how much A/C, food and transportation are you capable of consuming?
Re: Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
This isn't protesting the law with civil disobedience, it is breaking the law because the direct expected value of breaking the law (people having access to this specific paper) is greater then the expected cost of breaking the law (~0).
Are you a psychopath? In what world does personal expected value versus expected cost of breaking the law ever become a good way to make moral decisions? If you have the chance to get a promotion by killing your boss but have near zero chance of being caught due to some circumstance, would you kill your boss? What the fuck.
In this case it is clear he is talking about utilitarian expected value rather than personal expected value. He receives no personal benefit by uploading the paper, but reading it provides value to others at ~0 cost to anyone.