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from the are-those-imperial-or-metric-units? dept.
We humans like to think ourselves pretty advanced – and with no other technology-bearing beings to compare ourselves to, our back-patting doesn’t have to take context into account. After all, we harnessed fire, invented stone tools and the wheel, developed agriculture and writing, built cities, and learned to use metals.
Then, a mere few moments ago from the perspective of cosmic time, we advanced even more rapidly, developing telescopes and steam power; discovering gravity and electromagnetism and the forces that hold the nuclei of atoms together.
Meanwhile, the age of electricity was transforming human civilization. You could light up a building at night, speak with somebody in another city, or ride in a vehicle that needed no horse to pull it, and humans were very proud of themselves for achieving all of this. In fact, by the year 1899, purportedly, these developments prompted U.S. patent office commissioner Charles H. Duell to remark, “Everything that can be invented has been invented.”
We really have come a long way from the cave, but how far can we still go? Is there a limit to our technological progress? Put another way, if Duell was dead wrong in the year 1899, might his words be prophetic for the year 2099, or 2199? And what does that mean for humanity’s distant future?
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2014/09/02/how-advanced-earthlings-cosmic-yardstick/
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Sunday September 07 2014, @01:13PM
In the highly cited scientific paper: Toward A Metabolic Theory Of Ecology by James H. Brown, James F. Gillooly, Andrew P. Allen, Van M. Savage and Geoffrey B. West ( http://www.esajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1890/03-9000 [esajournals.org] ) and related work, discussed in the New Scientist magazine ( http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18224455.600-one-rate-to-rule-them-all.html [newscientist.com] [subscription required]) and on Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metabolic_theory_of_ecology [wikipedia.org] ), the observed effect of organisms consuming energy in a power law relative to size is extended to the observed effect of industrialized countries drastically reducing the average number of children. A mechanism is posited in which the lifestyle of an organism is determined by total energy consumption including external energy consumption whereas the ability to breed remains constrained to internal energy consumption. Therefore, at a certain level of energy affluence, a population does not sustain itself. Continued to its logical conclusion, a species with abundant energy would make itself extinct even when it remains peaceful.
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(Score: 2) by khallow on Sunday September 07 2014, @08:34PM
So do you have any argument or evidence to back your earlier assertions?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by cafebabe on Sunday September 07 2014, @10:02PM
The only assertion that I haven't already covered was about optical computing. For this, I recommend finding an early 2708 EPROM or suchlike and looking at it under a cheap microscope. It is a small joy to see the gates and wiring for yourself. At one time, this was the only scale of integration. But if we want to do optical computing, we will have to return to a similar scale. This is because the wavelength of photons is much larger than the wavelength of electrons and therefore the scale of integration is limited. It is possible to use photons with short wavelengths. For example, X-rays. However, this is likely to destroy the optical circuits relatively quickly. So, I presume that optical computers would be driven by a ultra-violet laser diode, at best. Even this presents safety problems, so the laser diodes from BluRay players may be re-purposed for this task.
Admittedly, with optical computing, it would be possible to implement something like a 6502 or a Z80 running at 200GHz and then simulate a more contemporary processor. Assuming there is a good impedance match between the ALU and flags of the physical and logical processor, it should be possible to run the common instructions at 5% speed or better. If the optical computer was connected to electronic DRAM, the mismatch in speed would allow the optical processor to implement caching algorithms and hyperthreaded scheduling which cannot be implemented in silicon.
Optical computing would benefit greatly from 3D etching but I don't see this advancing very fast on the basis that it is difficult to etch DRAM with the minimum number of layers even when there is redundancy in the design. Therefore, in the short term, 3D chips (electronic and optical) are likely to be miniturized card buses (with at least a dozen different standards) where each layer is etched and tested separately. So, the shortest path between layers is likely to be via the edge of the stack.
I don't object to possibility of asteroid mining, giant space telescopes, nanobots, high-temperature superconductivity, quantum computing, neuron-level brain scanning, artificial vision or huge quantities of lithium being refined. Nanobots may take 200 years to arrive and may require a ridiculous amount of energy. Mining the Moon is more practical than mining asteroids or going to Mars. However, we're doomed if they don't all occur. Lithium refinement inside the biosphere is likely to be part of a huge environmental disaster.
I leave the remainder undecided.
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(Score: 2) by khallow on Monday September 08 2014, @06:42AM
I'll ask again, do you have any evidence to support your assertions that having access to plentiful energy results in bad things happening (like extinction of humans). A nonsensical model (which doesn't actually support your assertion even) coming from amateur statistics (which doesn't actually support the model even) isn't evidence even if they managed to get the thing published.
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Monday September 08 2014, @10:12AM
Countries which have high energy consumption, such as the UK and US, don't have sustainable populations. However, this is hidden due to immigration.
If everyone's standard of living increases (due to abundant energy) then this immigration ceases and all countries would have declining populations. The remaining people would have more resources each and the process would accelerate, as described by the Metabolic Theory Of Ecology.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by khallow on Monday September 08 2014, @04:57PM
Correlation doesn't imply causation. An obvious rebuttal here is that these countries also have far greater participation in the labor force from women. That has nothing to do with energy consumption, but it in turn creates a substantial tradeoff between having children and having more economic resources such as wealth.
No, a genuine metabolic theory of ecology would note that since humans have more energy at their disposal while supposedly the "internal" energy cost of bearing young hasn't changed, then they should have more young not less.
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Wednesday September 10 2014, @12:16AM
My first reaction to the Metabolic Theory Of Ecology was similar to yours. However, if you plot [paulchefurka.com] birth rate [wikipedia.org] against energy consumption [wikipedia.org] you'll find that high birth rate and high energy consumption are mutually exclusive. Furthermore, the most energy-intensive countries generally have less than two children per breeding pair [wikipedia.org].
Like you, I would have presumed that more energy means more stability and more resources to have more children. But that doesn't match the data. Indeed, it is suspected that some families stop having children after they have male and female children. Also, fertile couples tend to replace lost children. Whereas, people in energy poverty tend to breed prolifically to counter high infant mortality and other dire circumstances.
I think this raises interesting questions about quality of life, labor participation, work patterns, migration, contraception, medical care and very probably other matters.
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(Score: 2) by khallow on Wednesday September 10 2014, @02:04AM
ours. However, if you plot birth rate against energy consumption you'll find that high birth rate and high energy consumption are mutually exclusive.
And I already came up with a better explanation, opportunity costs resulting from women in the work force reduces human fertility. This is an example of the amateur statistics I referred to earlier. You can come up with all sorts of correlations, but correlation isn't causation.
Like you, I would have presumed that more energy means more stability and more resources to have more children.
And you would be right in your presumption. What is missing here is that the real cost of raising children in terms of things more important than energy went up a lot. This includes opportunity costs and use of resources. Further, while the biological cost of giving birth to a child may not have changed much, the actual energy cost of having and raising children vastly increased perhaps even more than the availability of energy. Where's the inclusion of the energy cost of two decades of schooling and education? The actual facts of human rearing indicate that the premises of this model don't apply here.
This goes back to my original assertion "A nonsensical model (which doesn't actually support your assertion even) coming from amateur statistics (which doesn't actually support the model even) isn't evidence".