The Singularity is coming

[Davoid]

New book out by futurist/AI pioneer Ray Kurzweil. Haven't gotten my hands on it yet, but my curiosity is certainly piqued by this article, "The Law of Accelerating Returns", which appeared over 4 years ago, and is no doubt expanded upon in the book:

http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0 ... rintable=1

a quote:

"Most long range forecasts of technical feasibility in future time periods dramatically underestimate the power of future technology because they are based on what I call the "intuitive linear" view of technological progress rather than the "historical exponential view." To express this another way, it is not the case that we will experience a hundred years of progress in the twenty-first century; rather we will witness on the order of twenty thousand years of progress (at today's rate of progress, that is)."

Not necessarily a new idea, but well explained in the article. Lots of food for thought. Please share, after eating.

[geekster]

Interesting and while I agree with the basic premise of technological growth not being the intuitive linear, I also think he makes a couple of basic assumptions that might not prove out.

While the rate of technological growth certainly might have been exponential at certain times, there is no promise that it will remain so. It could very well flatten out or even collapse in the face of some global catastrophe.

Overall it is very interesting to read but I would caution about driving forward while staring into the rear view mirror. Past performance is not certain indication of future performance.

[geekster]

I would give an example of such a thing in the past and they almost always have to do with climate change, by the way ...

During the period of the Roman Empire which was also a period of warming climate, there was tremendous growth in technology, particularly in the areas of civil engineering associated with urban living and building. Sewers, baths, water transport, building construction, road construction, etc. all made great advances. Then the climate turned colder. Starving tribes from the north sacked Rome time and time again as they migrated south to better conditions. During the Dark Ages there was a period of famine, plagues, little technological advancement. Then the climate began to warm again and we had the renaissance. Another burst of technological advancement, exploration, and discovery. Then we had another cold period and another period of wars, famine, static technological growth. Then in the 1800's we started a warming trend again and again another spurt of technological advancement. In fact, it might be seen as a second renaissance.

Now suppose we have another cold spell and food production falls after failed harvests and famine results in more strife. What if H5N1 or some other flu kills a large percentage of the population and causes economic chaos? What if both events happen at the same time as the plagues and famines did at times in history and we fall into another period of dark ages that is even wose because this time the people are so far detached from the land and so reliant on a huge infrastructure that they can not survive without it. Do they then turn against technology and blame the technology for their being dependent on it?

And the thing is that it WILL happen. It has happened in the past, more than once, and will happen in the future, more than once. There will be pandemics, plagues, famines, crop failures of a scale that we can not even contemplate just as the people living at the time were unable to deal with the death and economic havoc in their times.

The problem with most projections is that they rely on a static environment in which to occur. History has shown that the basic environment is anything but static and even small things like common bacterial infections becoming resistant to antibiotics might change the entire planet and set back technology tremendously.

[AntiM]

Does anyone remember the documentary series Connections? How one technological advance spawned another and then another and how each set the stage for changes in the world?

The "Little Ice Age" of the 1600s gave us glass window panes and the Black Death factored into the invention of the printing press, that's struck me. Fascinating stuff.

[stuart]

not all technologies keep that rapid pace. If, for example, transportation had kept pace with computing we would be able to fly to the moon and back for 10 bucks. Also, we are now seeing the breaking of moore's law. So, first premise? False.

[geekster]

Also, the rate at which some technolgies develop could be influenced by politics. For example, we could be practically fossil fuel free for energy in this country if nuclear power technology were developed at the same rate that computer technology has. Instead it has been hamstrung by politics. Transportation is much the same with US auto and rubber manufacturers having great lobbying power in the congress up until the 1970's.

[can't sit still]

I finally read that essay. It's a great projection. Projections are great when they're tidy. Of necessity, he had to leave out global catastrophes etc.
It's still pretty hard to take in,,,even in a pure world. He doesn't make much mention of human factors like religion, irrationality, self-destructiveness, and human rejection of science, etc
I'm sure that there are other factors both big and small that WILL affect his projections.
As far as his projections on SETI, I really have the feeling that he's being too analytical and not quite intuitive enough. I believe that there is some big factor that he and we are not aware of. Historicly, millions of planets have come and gone before Terra coalesced out of the ether.

I guess that I have to buy the book or be considered the family dolt.

I'd already given some thought on the matter of future possibilities. I wrote an essay on said subject a couple of years ago. I considered a more conservative timeline. I haven't plaigarized anyone.

Future Possibilities

Johnathon was resting next to a small fire when the ETI signal came in. He didn't need the fire of course, he didn't even need the small dwelling behind him. He just built them for a small sense of familiarity. The ETI signal was radio of course, but it had been relayed at uber-speed by one of the uncountable relays drifting around the universe. That was one of the nice things about self-replicating machines, there were lots of them.

The signal probably traveled for only a few centuries before it was picked up and relayed. He hoped that this proved to be an interesting species, Things seemed to be so predictable. He had become a caretaker because he wanted to investigate things that hadn't been investigated before. His "job" was to ride herd on a number of emerging species and subtly guide them towards a harmonius future. The universe had infinite variety but, form follows function and so many species were quite similar.

Their problems were often similar too. They usually involved population or war or energy. Still, the job was interesting. Terrans had invented radio 80,000 years ago and had slowly made their way forward. Other species in varying stages of evolution had provided clues to the early stages of evolution on Terra. It was generally agreed that the early history of Terrans had been a series of "revolutions" Terrans of today , with all of their microscopic implants, were [or could be] in constant communication with everyone in the universe. But that didn't mean that they were always in agreement.
Communication and transportation were all at uber-speed but that didn't mean that all Terrans were of one mind. It was generally agreed that the revolutions had a distinct order. The earliest revolutions were the smallest and they gradually increased in importance. The use of animals was a small change. This was followed by the introduction of agriculture, the building of nations, the use of machines.
All of these "revolutions" had been well documenmted in other species. They had a large effect, but the later revolutions had even more effect. The introduction of computers, pre-implantation, nanomeds and nanomachines and macromachines, the synchronization of computers and the human brain.
. The diaspora from Terra, atomic transmutation. Take for example the dwelling behind him. Throw a gram of macros on the ground, they received their instructions from the macros implanted in his body [that were linked to his brain ] and in a few hours they replicated themselves and built this dwelling. The ground was material and anything above absolute zero was energy. For the macros it was that easy.

This planet didn't even have the atmosphere that he needed. The macros maintained a forcefield and converted the gases available to the gases that he needed. Computers had shrunk until they were all but invisible. When they became smart enough, they were linked to the human brain. There was little resistance to implanting them.
With this improvement they could be used to manage the nanomeds. It was hard to tell where the body left off and the nanomeds took up. If you cut yourself,. the white blood cells rushed in arm in arm with nanomeds to repair the cut. The nanos , of course did the larger reconstruction jobs much, much faster. This was also true of pre-implantation. It was hard to tell what genes had been tinkered with way back when.

Terrans are inveterate tinkerers. Every parent wants the best for his offspring. When it became possible to eliminate geneticaly caused problems, there was no hesitation. When the option was offered to improve a little here and a little there- who could resist? Untold ages of little changes had resulted in Terrans who were physically beautiful , mentally stable and stuningly intelligent.

The human brain, when coupled with the whole universe of computers and fellow brains was a powerful thing. Fortunately Terrans still had different ideas of what beauty was, so they didn't look like clones.

Johnathon's "job" involved monitoring other species. He usually didn't travel physically to the species under study-it wasn't necessary. He usually just projected himself. When he physically traveled, he had to be more cautious. Atmosphere, gravity etc. had to be controlled. Often, he couldn't pass as a local, no matter what the nanos did to his appearance.

Often as not, if other species saw him, they thought he was an angel. Pre-implantation had resulted in indescribably beautiful physical appearance. He didn't like to appear as an angel to other beings. This invariably caused them great personal problems. This of course depended on what species he was dealing with. An aquatic species didn't think much of his appearance.
The larger community of Terrans had speculated endlessly about the beings who had come and gone before Terra was formed. This was one of the areas of investigation that yielded very few answers. There were some that believed that beings from some 10 billion years ago had merged their energy fields with the energy of stars. Some Terrans had tried to communicate with stars, but there was no reply.
At times, it seemed that every detail, no matter how small, had been discovered and documented centuries ago. In general, every question that one could dream up had an answer and it was easy to find.

Guiding other species with subtle pressures was an "old" science. But the truth was, there were still plenty of questions to be answered. Why were Terrans [apparently] the only caretaker species in the universe. Other species had come and gone to extinction-why? Had the earlier species migrated to another plane of existence? Were these other species "caretakers" for Terrans. Did these species have "caretakers" of whom they were unaware? Were there species that opperated on a completely different timeplane? Yes , there were still plenty of answers to be found. But, at the moment, he needed to investigate this new species. He hoped that they were interesting in a nice way.
Dan




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[d6]

Thank you for starting this thread !,
all I have to add is that, in "reality",

I am nothing more than a gentle robot sent here to help you with your groceries.

seeing some humans at decom......

d6, calmative-bot

[Davoid]

So I agree with Kurzweil's basic premise of exponential progress, and I also think that he's not looking enough at the bigger picture. Yeah, he skips most chaotic/catastrophic influences in favor of a pure vision, but he's an admitted optimist. He'd also probably say that his exponential curve has remained steady throughout history if you stand back from it far enough, dark ages and renaissances included. Of course the progress of man could be derailed at any time by our own shortsightedness or Mother Nature or both. And the stakes are, indeed, much higher these days. But if we truly are at the elbow of the curve, then we stand to experience that paradigm shift that he speaks of, and will have to throw a lot of old ideas out the window. It's difficult to imagine the world's leaders and citizens experiencing grand-scale enlightenment through this process, but I'm trying.

One thing I read about future theory that has stuck in my mind is the time ceiling that exists in making accurate predictions. Something like 20 years is all you can extrapolate before something completely unexpected pops into the picture and changes everything. I think Kurzweil fails on this count. I read that "20 year" thing years ago; by Kurzweil's logic that interval has no doubt shortened since. How short would it be now? 15 years? 10? I applaud the bravery of his predictions, and am excited by them, but I'd guess that, even factoring in many of the basic advancements he describes, we'll end up in going in directions neither he nor anyone has any idea about.

The growing pains in these scenarios will be tremendous. The ethical and political battles to come are going to be nasty and I can only hope the religious fundamentalists (and other shallow thinkers) don't triumph. At the same time I'm very curious what we'll learn in the spiritual realm, and if that realm can finally be truly reconciled with the (techno)logical one.

As far as different paces for different technologies, and economic issues, if you read the article thoroughly I'll think you'll see these addressed. Transportation advances took us from first flight to man on the moon in what, less than 60 years? Maybe things have stalled since,or maybe it's just harder to see the forest for the trees. We've barely begun to apply the advances in computer technology to all other technologies.

An indulgence: One scenario that dances through my own head is along the lines of Kurzweil's "experience beaming". If we will have nanobot-augmented brains, complete with wireless transfer capabilities, then won't we effectively have a form of mental telepathy? And if that's the case, what's to stop us from linking ourselves into a (participants only!) worldmind? Hmm, and if my mind is boggled by that thought, what kind of thought would it take to boggle a worldmind?

[geekster]

I agree with the 20 year thing. In the 1950's and 1960's it was projected that we would all have flying cars by now. Where is my flying car?

[geekster]

Another thing from the 1950's and 1960's that was popular was "the home of the future". That hasn't happened either. A lot of technological development has to do with culture. Some things are adopted more easily than others and once something is adopted, it can advance further. A technology that is available and is not widely adopted isn't usually developed any further. Look at the B-70 bomber (a design from 1955), the SST, the X-15. It is quite possible to have FedEx delivering transoceanic cargo at Mach 3. The B-70 was quite expensive but there is also an argument that says that if we had continued down that path of development, the technology would have advanced and costs come down. It is quite possible we could have much cheaper and much quieter supersonic transport today than we actually have if we had invested in the development of it. The key is that there was no economic benefit EARLY ON to cause there to be any investment in follow on development.

Computers is an entirely different story. A home computer costs about the same no as one did in 1985. In 1985 you would get 64K of RAM (expanable to 128K) color graphics at lower than VGA resolution, a joystick, a keyboard, a floppy disk, and maybe a 10 Meg hard disk or more likely a special tape cassette. But the utility of it caused demand to go up for spreadsheet, simple data entry, and word processing/printing use. There was an immediate economic benefit to a business owning one because it improved productivity. Units sold, money was reinvested in improvement, and the technology advanced.

So there is a difference between the potential of a technology to advance and the actual advancement of it. It is quite possible that computer technology will reach a plateau where futher advancement returns benefits that are not deemed to be "worth it" and so they don't sell. Once that happens, further advancement is curtailed. Money is shifted to the next "big thing".

The article describes to me the potential of technology but I don't see it as an accurate portrayal of a road map to the future. It is possible that automotive technology could advance as quickly as computer technology. Or rail transport technology, or aviation technology, but there must be a basis for it in economic benefit or better, perceived economic benefit before any money is invested in that development or continued follow on development. The lesson of the Edsel is still fresh. Better isn't always better. Advanced doesn't always sell. You can lose your ass "improving" something if people like something just the way it is.

[Davoid]

Money is indeed shifted to the "next big thing"; repeated paradigm shifts are part of the premise of the article. Kurzweil describes why Moore's law is irrelevant in the larger scheme of things, that it's but the fifth such paradigm in a succession during the last century. As I said, that crazy amount of aviation progress happened during less than 60 years, and that was decades ago. Have subsequent advances been slower, less meaningful, or just under the radar? If transportation advances have slowed, does this mean that another paradigm for transportation will arise, as needed? If someone succeeded in inventing, say, teleportation (assuming they weren't disappeared by the gov't.), what would that mean for trucks and planes and the companies who use them? No choice but to embrace the new technology, as we embraced computers.

Again, we've only just started to see computer technology's applications. It obviously headed for serious integration into all aspects of our lives, and will continue to impact all other technologies. And if something comes along that's better, then it will be succeeded. And life continues in inevitable(?) progress.

[can't sit still]

One thing that Kurzweil mentionioned only briefly is that man might resent being made superfluous.
AI factories building AI robots that take over agriculture, manufacturing,
etc X 15 What's a man going to do? Jobs would consist of mostly make-work if AI can do it better. No jobs, no purchasing power. The existing capital structure might actively resist such a change.
I can see a paradigm shift coming. What about a psycological shift. Are the robots going to cover the continent with golf courses, skeet ranges and ski slopes so that we can keep entertained? Inactivity could be species death.

The human body is a relatively fragile thing. "Blade Runner" has robots doing dangerous jobs, why not all jobs?

In "A Boy and His Dog",Don Johnson was utilised strictly for reproduction. He wasn't very happy about it.
Do we master fusion power, mine the asteroids for materials and then find our species relegated solely to the job of procreation because AI can do everything else better?
Dan

[ZaphodBurner]

I agree with the 20 year thing. In the 1950's and 1960's it was projected that we would all have flying cars by now. Where is my flying car?

In a museum at Boeing Field. It has been invented and flown, decades ago, but then a couple of realities set in:

First, people have a difficult enough time figuring out stop signs, turn signals and crosswalks. Are we ready to give them all airplanes?

Second, how do you keep them in check? Privacy, safety...what's to keep a bunch of college kids from racing their airplanes 200 feet over your house at night or circling over your swimming pool ogling your daughter until the auger into the side of somebody's house? As for policing it, off the street, the DMV has no authority. Generally speaking, below 500 feet, the FAA would have no authority. And, how do you pull over a reckless or intoxicated driver in an airplane?

These issues could have been figured out, but they weren't.
-c

[AntiM]

I agree with the 20 year thing. In the 1950's and 1960's it was projected that we would all have flying cars by now. Where is my flying car?

I understand there is one in the Neiman-Marcus Christmas catalog this year. Really.

Hey, we have Dick Tracy TV/radio wristwatches now, they've simply morphed in design to resemble classic Star Trek communicators.

[Davoid]

Do we master fusion power, mine the asteroids for materials and then find our species relegated solely to the job of procreation because AI can do everything else better?

I don't know if it's a better future than that, but it seems we'll be more integrated with AI than seperate from it, or both at the same time. And then the messy business of consciousness and soul enters the picture, to go with the messy capital structure stuff.

[geekster]

It obviously headed for serious integration into all aspects of our lives

It really already has and has been for a couple of centuries but most people don't recognize it. What we are seeing is really a change of mechanics and application of existing principles than the development of fundamentally new ideas.

Much machinery built before, say, the 1970's could really be thought of as an analog computer or mechanical logic. Cams and gears and pumps and pulleys have been used to keep mechanical systems in sync for a very long time. Take for example the ignition system of a car. It still works in basically the same way. On the compression stroke, an arc across the sparkplug causes an explosion which forces the piston down and rotates the crankshaft. In old systems an analog "computer" was used to determine when to fire the plug by having a thing called the "distributor" run mechanically off the cam shaft. As the shaft rotates, it causes a "rotor" to make contact with a post that is connected to each spark plug. It rotates and makes contact with the post just as it is time for that plug to fire (valves are closed and it is reaching the top of the compression stroke). Since spark advance is a function of RPM and manifold vacuum, mechanical systems were used to manage that as well. A centrifugal advance using weights and a vacuum advance using ... well, vacuum, adjusted the timing slightly according to current operating conditions.

Cars work exactly the same way now except a "cam sensor" is used to tell a computer where the cam is in it's rotation, and the computer "fires" a transistor connected to something much like a TV flyback transformer to cause an arc across the sparkplug. Timing is still adjusted according to engine RPM (from a crank angle sensor) and vacuum (from a vacuum or "Manifold Absolute Pressure or MAP sensor) which provide inputs to the computer so it can vary the timing as operating conditions require. So what has really happened is that the mechanical/analog "computing" has been replaced with digital computing. Making an adjustment in timing doesn't mean the mechanical adjustment of a distributor's position or adjustment of contact points for wear anymore, it means making a tweak to a variable in a computer program. Still it provides exactly the same function, getting the sparkplug to fire at the optimum moment in time.

Mechanical systems were under great advancement too, before computers came along. Hydraulic lifters were introduced so that valve clearance did not need to be periodically adjusted to compensate for lifter, pushrod, valve stem, and rocker arm wear. The lifter changed it's length to make up for the difference.

These days we don't even need any of those parts. There is no reason to have a camshaft, pushrods, lifters, or rocker arms at all. It is perfectly within our technical means to push the valves with a solenoid that is also controlled by the computer. But even in doing this we STILL haven't changed what goes on inside that cylinder inside that car. All we have done is changed the means by which it is controlled. The same principles that were controlling that process in 1955 are still controlling it today.

So in just about every area except fuel delivery and mixture control, the computer has had very little impact on what goes on inside an engine. What the computer HAS done is greatly reduce the moving parts count, reduced the number of points of failure, lengthened the duration between routine maintenance events.

So yeah, while computers will get more and more into things, it is often the case that they are simply replacing mechanical "logic" with digital logic and not changing the function of the device itself. When I look at it in that way, it isn't such a revolution, really. It's just new parts doing the same old job.

[d6]

i thought "hover-bikes" were supposed to be first.........
the N-M catalog 3.5 million "car" requires a pilots license,
it sort of reminds me of the Homer designed vehicle on the simpons.


d6, Munzbots' robot-boy at Reno and SF decoms.

www.robotronia.com

[can't sit still]

Geekster, many of the current Diesel F.I. systems use a high pressure oil pump to pressurise the fuel injector. It's controlled by a microprocessor that varies the timing, duration and stroke of the injector. That's why they're getting such great mileage and power out of the new diesels. The current Ford diesels use this system. Solenoid activation never worked out because of the very high injection pressure needed.

Navistar corp., the parent of International Harvester, spent the time and money to get rid of camshafts in their new trucks. High pressure oil is chambered to a lifter. The opening and closing points as well as lift and duration are all variable and controlled by a computer. It was tricky to get the control valves up to the necessary levels of durability, but they evidently succeded.
They've made injection and valve control infinitely variable. An 80,000 lb truck can get 8 mpg,,,about the same as a mid 80s bronco.
Dan

[geekster]

Cool, another example of what I was talking about. In the past there were fuel injection systems for diesels that were much like gasoline systems in that volkswagon, for example, had a "fuel distributor" after the fuel pump where timing was managed mechanically.

But the idea is the same, the electronics are being used to control the system taking the place of mechanical aparatus that did the same thing but what happens inside the cylinder is unchanged. Fuel/air is the one area where computers have made a big difference and I think I kindof alluded to that in my earlier posting. You can "sniff" the exhaust and adjust the fuel mixture to give a closer to perfect ratio. That is the one function that mechanical systems could not do. Electronics has allowed a closed loop fuel system where in the past it ran open loop.

But still, mechanical systems advance even in the face of electronics. I will give an example in use in both gasoline and diesel engines ... EGR or Exhaust Gas Recirculation. Many people have a mistaken idea for the purpose of this. They believe it "reburns" exhaust gas to extract unburned furel or something. That isn't the idea. It is designed as a fuel mixture management option.

Fuel mixture is the ratio of fuel and oxygen in the cylinder. If you need to make the mixture richer, there are two ways to do it, you can increase fuel, or you can decrease oxygen. One way to richen the mixture if you are experiancing detonation (as reported by the "knock sensor) is to open the EGR valve and allow some exhaust gas to flow into the intake manifold. This gas is depleted of oxygen. Most of the oxygen has been burned. This allows you to make the fuel mixture richer without adding more fuel. You have kept the same amount of fuel but reduced the amount of oxygen without reducing the volume of air you are pulling in to the cylinder. So you are able to richen the mixture without adding more fuel, which increases fuel economy. In other words, EGR is an oxygen management system. The wider the EGR valve is open, the richer the mixture with a given amount of fuel. It is a mechanical system that allowed the managemet of the oxygen side if the equation without touching the fuel side of the equation. And the first such systems were purely mechanical.

I would venture to say that you can create a mechanical system that allows you to do whatever an electronic system can do with only one exception and that is easily "sniffing" the exhaust gas for oxygen content, or more accurately, unburned fuel content. I have not seen a mechanical substitute for the exhaust gas oxygen sensor.

[can't sit still]

My computer is being a total BASTARD this morning. Twice I've gone for a link and twice I've lost the whole post.

Geekster, are we going to hijack this thread to talk mechanics? What? yeah,,,OK. Everyone seems to be in agreement. We're going to hijack this thread to talk about mechanics.
As you stated, the O2 sensor tells the EGR to open. The resultant lowered O2 ratio slows down the speed of propagatioin in the combustion charge and eliminates the knock. It' hard to imagine a mechanical O2 sensor. Maybe a campfire.

The 18th, 19th, and 20th century have seem some marvelous mechanical creations;
The mechanical representations of all our solar system's bodies and movements done with clockworks.
The Space Shuttle
The water clock in the Europa Center, Berlin is absolutely mesmerizing.

We've reached a point where mechanical control is too ponderous, cumbersome and unreliable.
We're now in the process of changing everything over to electronic control.
Man is a slow reacting, mechanical contraption. I think that's part of the reason that transportation has lagged behind other areas. As long as you have a carbon unit in control, things are slow and unreliable. Also the fact that transportation consumes a LOT of energy.
[This morning, my computer has given me serious reasons to doubt the reliability of electronic units too]

FAST transportation generally proves the rules of diminishing returns. Things should speed up when speed is no longer tied to energy consumption. You walk in to a "phone booth", dial a number ,, and appear at another "phone booth" in another locale. Yes, yes,,,Dr Who

The other area that seems to have artificial restraints is power generation. There are people who are working on it but they don't receive much support.
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/ ... ndex3.html

That URL cost me a LOT of work. I've bookmarked another, far more comprehensive, but it's "page not found" My computer must be decompressing.

Most power generation still relies heavily on conversion. We need to get away from conversion to get good efficiency.

All we really need is a super efficient thermo-couple. For the few that don't know, thermocouples convert heat directly to electricity. I forget the name of the effect. You can bet your ass that I'm not going to do a quick search. My computer would love to show me a blank innocent face one more time.
Imagine a bazillion thermocouples all over the earth, all tied to wireless transmission of power.
You turn on the thermocouple in your tent to instantly cool it down and I use that power to run my welder.
A major power installation would be a bundle of thermocouples buried deep enough to draw on the core heat of the earth.
I don't know the calorie content of the earth but, I'm not worried about cooling.
Your computer controlled air-car would use electrical-gravitational repulsion to lift and for propulsion???
I'd love to post the URL, but I'm not the trusting type.

Ok Geekster, your turn. Tear it down or build on it. We have to talk about something other than CT,,,but I do love the T part.
Dan

Here's the link. It's fascinating. The indication is that the whole thing is far advanced as a "black OP" I seem to be speculating about things that are "fait acompli"
http://jnaudin.free.fr/html/advprop.htm

[cowboyangel]

dudes..check out James Kunster's "The Long Emergency" ...
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/de ... s&n=507846


no alternative energy, nukes included, will avert the catastrophe that is looming when oil extraction becomes economically unfeasible in our lifetimes...

[cowboyangel]

oh btw, Kunstler is a modern day prophet of sorts....the guy's brilliant, purely.

[can't sit still]

Well, it's the angelic cowboy disguised as a former pres.
The whole oil crisis thing has been around for a while.
http://www.oilcrisis.com/
They keep moving forward the crash date. I've seen studies that claim that you don't even need to know how much oil we have. You can infer the total by studying current production trends. Yeah,,right

To a great degree, our petrochemical supply total is dependent on how much we're willing to pay for it.
It's true that our oil supply has limitations that we shouldn't ignore. We should be conserving oil as a base material and burning more gas.
Our gas reserves are enormous. I'll try to find some numbers later.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/international/petroleu.html


The whole world has enormous reserves of gas,,except the US. Russia and Iran are the 2 highest. Maybe we should provoke something with Iran.
They're tinkering around with stressing the supply to get higher prices, but there isn't any kind of shortage.
Canada, Mexico, Saudi and Prudhoe have zillions of cubic feet.

Friends tell me that because Prudhoe oil has sand in it ,it's abrading the ALEYESKA pipeline. They hope to replace the existing pipe with a new one and use the old pipe for gas. It wouldn't be too expensive to connect to the Canadian pipe that's already here. That might relieve some of the pressure on oil.
We really need to work on super-conductors. I'm not current on what's happening with metallic hydrogen, but it was promising at one time.
I'm at the low-tech end. I heat the log house with firewood.
Dan

[geekster]

Fast transportation is, in my opinion, easier than many think. The major hurdle to high-speed transport is wind resistance. Wind resistance increases as the square of speed. In other words, double the speed from 30MPH to 60MPH and you have 4x as much wind resistance. Double it again to 120MPH and you have 16x the resistance that you had at 30MPH. This effectively mean that you need 4x the power to simply maintain speed at 60 as you need at 30 and 16x the power to maintain a steady 120MPH on a level surface with no other winds.

It would be possible to build a train in an evacuated tube. Or it is possible to actually move the train by having the body act as a seal in the tube and you evacuate air in front and pump it in behind the train making it a pneumatic piston. In this case wind resistance isn't an issue because you are using it to propell the vehicle. Put two tubes side by side and you can simply evacuate from one tube and pump into the other. One tube has a train going in one direction and the other tube a train in the other direction. Replace the air with water and you can make it even more efficient. In this case you wont even need a "track" as the tube itself is the track. You have turbine pumps at each end that move the water between tubes.

As for a thermocouple, yeah, that could produce a lot of power from waste heat. But there are already ways of using waste heat. One of the places where there is a lot of waste heat is in the catalytic converter of a standard vehicle. It does need to maintain a certain temperature in order to work but is constantly needing to shed heat generated by the cracking process. How about a small turbine using a working fluid to convert the heat to electrical power? How about having a ceramic engine that operates at a much higher temperature and also having a turbine generator to generate power from the block heat?

What about an auxlillary steam power device that operates in parallel with the engine to provide additional crank power? Water would be heated first by the engine block, then the catalytic converter and converted to steam. The hot steam is flashed into a cylinder. The steam instantly condenses creating a significant vaccum in the cylinder that pulls the piston forward and you have just generated mechanical power. There are plenty of ways to recover waste heat that aren't being used because the additional energy recovered doesn't yet make economic sense. You would be spending a dollar to recover a dime. The bottom line is that efficiency is measured in dollars and cents. If it costs $10 to extract 100 units of energy, then it costs you $0.10 per unit. If you extract another 10 units at the cost of $2 more, your net economic efficiency has gone down. Now if fuel costs go up and it costs $20 to extract that 100 units, it then becomes feasable to spend that $2 to get the additional 10 units. At $21 dollars to extract the first 100 units, spending $2 to get 10 units then results in savings. At THAT point is where you will see energy recovery systems begin to advance. Once it makes economic sense to spend the money, bazillions of individual people will be working on it and there will be breakthrough after breakthrough. Until that time, the only people that will be working on it are governments, pure research instututions that have money to burn for pure research, and a few individuals that have the knowledge and money to do their own research as a hobby, just for the sake of the research.

Computer advancement is happening because so far there is economic pressure for it to happen. Once that changes, so will the speed of development. It won't mean that it doesn't have the POTENTIAL to develop further, it just means that it isn't economically efficient. The market really is an invisible hand that guides the development of everything. You might not like what the market says but it is basically correct. As long as it is cheaper to burn oil, we are going to burn oil. But there is always the potential of that hurdle in another technology being lept where while it is more expensive right now, some breakthrough happens that makes it cheaper than oil without oil having to get more expensive and that is what the research people are doing.

The only place this has actually happened so far is with nuclear power but certain political groups have added external costs (litigation, etc) that make it too expensive. So people not only want an alternative that is cheaper, they want an alternative that is cheaper that is aligned with their politics and they are prepared to spend money to make things that are not aligned with their politics more expensive. In my opinion, all the money that is spent on anti-nuclear activity should be added to the cost of fossil fuel use since that is what they are, in effect doing. By opposing nuclear power, they are subsidising fossil fuel use by making it less expensive. They might as well just be giving their money to Exxon when they donate to an anti-muclear power cause because that is the net economic impact. And they are also preventing the development of safer nuclear power too. But actually, they haven't because other countries have been subsidizing the development of our nuclear industry by allowing our companies to build out plants in their countries.

Have a serious look at this power plant, it is much safer, requires many fewer workers, has a huge amount less of "moving" parts, pumps, valves, controls, etc. and it has passive safety systems that do not require external power to operate. Read both pages in their entirety, please.

http://www.ap1000.westinghousenuclear.com/
http://www.ap1000.westinghousenuclear.com/A2.asp

In my opinion plants like the AP1000 reactor are exactly what we need to replace coal power plants.

NOTE: As the AP1000 is based on the AP600, the AP600 info has more detailed information on exactly how these safety systems work:

http://www.ap600.westinghousenuclear.com/C1.asp
http://www.ap600.westinghousenuclear.com/C2.asp
http://www.ap600.westinghousenuclear.com/C3.asp

[cowboyangel]

I'm for trains...will read your post when I get more time Geeky. meanwhile 'can't' ..better look twice at world gas reserves...I think you're way off....the point of the peak oil people is a valid one... at he current rate, oil and gas reserves will be more costly to recover than they are worth....the resulting crisis, will I believe happen in our lifetime.....no one seems to give a shit for conservation or Manhattan style alternative energy development (Kunstler seems to be a fan of Nuke energy Geeky). so hold onto your hats..we are doomed except for a few who manage to get the subsistance equation right.

[geekster]

As oil and gas prices have gone up quite a bit over the past six months, a lot of reserves that were not worth extracting have become so. Particularly tar sands in Canada and oil shales in the US. If your information comes from anything a year old or more, it is obsolete and doesn't work in today's market. What nobody seems to have factored in was the speed of growth of the Chinese economy.

Oil that is not worth pumping at $40 a barrel offers a handy profit at $60 a barrel. Tar sands that aren't worth processing at $40 are at $60. Every time the price goes up, fields that were not worth producing suddenly become profitable again.

As for gas, there is a lot still being wasted. Iraq, for example, has until recently had no use for the natural gas that it gets from it's oil fields and has been flaring it off as a waste product ever since they started drilling there. It would have cost them more to deal with it than it was worth. Recent installation of gas turbine electrical generators and provided a local demand for it and now some is being captured and used. In many oil fields, though, gas is still burned off as the resources required to capture, remove the CO2, and transport it are still more than it is worth. As the price of gas rises, it will be profitable to capture more of it.

Also there is a huge amount of methane hydrates on the sea bed that have yet to be developed. I am talking enough to supply world fossil fuel demands for centuries. This resource is practically untouched at this time. Japan is leading the development here as it could possibly be a local source of fuel in a country that basically has no oil and must import all fossil fuels.

If predictions were correct, we would never have anything to worry about because we could just listen to the predictions and know exactly what was going to happen. Nobody would ever lose money, everyone would make money and the predictors would always be right. In reality they are rarely ever right, or most often, only partially right.

My prediction? Things will be way different in the future. That's as far as I am willing to go. But I will predict that we will be able to tap more resources as prices rise.

[can't sit still]

Here's a quick look at gas reserves. http://www.factmonster.com/ipka/A0872966.html
The figures here are also price connected. As geekster and I pointed out,,the more you pay, the more is recoverable.

I also posted a more comprehensive site. Did you read it? We[Terra] have enough gas that many people suggested terminate exploration. The US is in the weakest position of the G7, but the world has a full tank[CNG]

Trains are cool, I like trains. Personal transportation is the great bottleneck.
The Russian Federation recently completed electrification of a complete cross-country track.[memory]? I'd like to do that trip.

The complication of an evacuated tube with hermeticly sealed stations doesn't seem to be worth the complexity. Thousands of miles of pressured tube that grows and shrinks with temp would be a nightmare to maintain. I wouldn't want Morton Thiokol to build the seals.

The bullet trains have a small frontal area relative to their volume and weight. I don't know the numbers, but I don't believe that air resistance is a big factor in the ton-mile costs.

The Stirling engine is , I believe, the most efficient converter of heat. They sell a demonstration unit. that will operate in the palm of your hand solely off the HEAT OF YOUR HAND. It may have been superseded in efficiency, but I am not aware of it yet.

One of our biggest enemies is sulphur. If someone comes up with a great way to extract S from hydrocarbons, it will have an enormous impact on price and availability of hydrocarbons.
I'm going from memory [as usual], but I believe that Alaskan oil has too much sulphur. We sell it a little cheaper to other countries so that they won't buy the low-sulphur oil that we want. I'm sure that in the end, we get the same net ammount of sulphur dioxide and hydrogen sulphide in the atmosphere. Acid rain will continue. and Rome will continue to melt.
Dan

[can't sit still]

Hey Geekster, Great post, It is a company site with a dearth of numbers. Westinghouse has come a long way in their design.
The nukes have an evolution of design comparable to the evolution of steam power, faster of course.

Here's a site with all the numbers. http://www.uic.com.au/nip08.htm
Dan

[geekster]

What I like about that particular design is that they have decided to simplify and use natural processes rather than to apply technology even more agressively and make it even more complicated. They decided to REMOVE systems and technology to make the system simpler, have fewer parts, more reliable, less prone to failure. There is no need for redundant systems. If you don't need a pump, then you don't need two pumps, in case the first pump fails.

This is a case where an advance in design resulted in a reduction of the "technology" involved. Why use a pump when nature provides you with one called convection? Why use HVAC when nature provides you with evaporation and condensation? Why use a control system when the system can be made to act naturally as soon as the cooling water reaches a certain temperature without human intervention? If you don't need a human to activate an emergency system, there can be no operator error involved in activating it. There can also be no human error in deactivating it.

Sometimes there is an elegance in simplicity and using natural processes where they make more sense than technology.