Kurzweil's rebuttal to Paul Allen

It's worth noting, however, that we'll never completely run out of energy, so long as Sol keeps burning. Can we sustain anything remotely resembling civilization based only on solar energy and its indirect organic by-products? Well, that's obviously debatable.

> Even if the energy problem is technically solvable, it seems to me that our political systems may be set up to do the absolute worst possible thing

Never doubt the self-interest of the powerful. Some may be short-sighted enough to eat their seed and burn resources in resource wars, but I think we're more likely to devolve into feudalism, where the masses eke out their existence serving the needs of those who control the remaining resources. On the other hand, if any kind of information infrastructure remains when the oil runs out, we also have the possibility of new emergent, de-centralized social structures constructed out of necessity. (Imagine, for instance, a mesh network of hand-crank-powered cell phones which virally alert clusters of villages to band together to defend against marauders.)

Either way, I can't help but feel that our lifetimes are the perfect fulfillment of the old Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times."

These areas are inherently dirty and dangerous. It's always easy to do Monday morning quarterbacking, but little recognition of the fact that infrequent domestic oil spills may be preferable to endless foreign oil wars.

Resource extraction in general is demonized by the EPA just as much as the pharmaceutical industry is by the FDA. It is hard to regulate an industry which is respected by the public, because they will get some benefit of the doubt. But if they can be turned into polluters and poisoners, it is easy to justify ever greater state power over the sector.

Computers and the internet are in the exact opposite space: highly respected and almost entirely unregulated. So it's hard for many here to see what the fedguv means (they make App Store approval look like a walk in the park).

But once you're on the insides of those sectors, you start to realize that what is holding back oil in the West (and nuclear power, and drugs, and all non CS sectors) are human factors, not physical ones. That is simultaneous harder and easier to deal with than a genuine scarcity of energy.

Remember that our brains only need a couple thousand kcals per day.

No. That single cell is a working machine of which the DNA is just one component. The proteins which transcribe the DNA, they are in there too, but they are not the DNA. The whole point is that everything else that's in a cell, and there's a lot of "stuff" besides the DNA, has a major effect on what happens.

For embryos specifically both the egg and the sperm contribute "stuff" in addition to DNA.

The metaphor of code and compiler is a bit clunky but decent. If you think the animal as the compiled application and of DNA as its source code, it should be obvious there are millions of lines of code in the OS and compiler, which were required for the compilation of the application.

Is "Hello World" in C just the one .c file, or do we have to count the standard libraries? How about the hardware designs of the PC running it? If you look at just the .c file, it's a few lines, if you look at everything that's actually required to run it, that's a bit more complicated.

The data says that Jevon's paradox is wrong. See the energy usage chart here: http://www.singularity2050.com/2011/07/the-end-of-petrotyran...

Since about 1982, the annual world oil consumption has held at roughly 32 billion barrels despite efficiency improvements in petrol energy usage.

Our technological efficiency improvements are doing more with the same amount of energy and not more with more energy, as Jevon's paradox predicts.

Think about this simplified example. Our cars get better mpg today. Which means that we have energy left over to use to sink those 2 mile long pipes into the ocean. Because of the efficiency improvements, we have just done more with the same amount of energy.