Random thought

[unixronin]

"It's not so much that I hate my life, as that I find the Universe's current implementation of it deeply unsatisfactory.¹"

[1]  See also:  "It's 2008.  We're supposed to be launching manned missions to the outer solar system by now.  And where the !(*%&($% is my flying car?²"

[2]  No, the Möller Volantor doesn't qualify.  How many decades of development and he still can't fly it off a safety tether?  And I don't want to know what its fuel consumption is.  I already have a pretty good idea what its noise level must be — eight Wankel engines driving ducted fans?

Comments

[fatcook.livejournal.com]

I want my flying car too!
We are at TL 8 and we don't have virtual environments, efficient hydroponics, hyperspace technology, broadcast/fusion power for everyday use or nano-tech!
What happened to the future?

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Half the reason we don't have fusion power yet is because when it comes to getting funding, fusion power research has been pretty much treated as the red-headed stepchild. There are actually pretty good hydroponic systems here and there (they're just too expensive for widespread use), and we're working on virtual environments, but as for hyperspace technology, well ... the underlying physics just isn't there yet. There's too much we don't know, and too much of what we think we do know fails to support the viewpoint that it's even possible.

And as for poor slandered nanotech ... well, there are actual nanotech developments going on (IBM's Millipede storage technology, for example, or any of several development projects working on nanoscale self-assembly). But in large part it's been taken over as a sales-gimmick buzzword by the bloody marketers who couldn't give a flying crap whether what they're selling actually has anything to do with nanotech or not (viz. "nanotech" jeans, where "nanotech" has been abducted, beaten and raped to mean "the fabric fibers are chemically treated to repel stains"), and who probably couldn't even give a meaningful definition of 'nanotechnology' if you asked them flat-out. Between that and people who are utterly convinced that the prefix "nano" means "going to destroy the world by accident any day now", nanotech is having a pretty hard time of it.

[koyote.livejournal.com]

thing is, while fusion would be nice, we don't NEED it. what we need is a global grid with truly dispersed wind and nuclear. Solar in spots, especially residential grid feeders. And efficiency. we need to do 5 times as much, 10 times as well, with the power we use now.

Hydroponics is almost moot- we simply don't need it here on the mothership, and we need it in space only once we GET in space for real. Organic systemic farming systems have come a long way since Niven and Pournelle's little bigoted "squatting in the dirt picking bugs off plants" dig in Lucifer's Hammer. There's a LOT of biological science involved, but the yields can be extremely impressive. It's not terribly visible in some circles because people think in terms of large acre monoculture.


Nano as a prefix, does to some people mean "danger! corporate raiders at work making money off your health." But honestly, the track record of big business deploying technology isn't all that great when it comes to caring about people.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

There's one killer "win" to fusion over fission: You can't use byproducts from a fusion power plant to make nuclear weapons.

[koyote.livejournal.com]

sure. But seriously. we HAVE the tech to solve all of our energy crises currently. It's not like you have to add that much nuclear energy. that's the glorious thing about wind and a *global* grid. Nuclear becomes a minor buffer at that point - especially with terawatts of rooftop solar.

of course, that whole 'global' thing brings up the silly topic of growing up and acting like a race/species instead of a bunch of squabbling children fighting over the color of a hat or size of a tonka truck.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Uh ... have you checked the math on that? On a global scale, there really isn't all that much solar and wind power available. Most of what there is, is in inaccessible or hostile places like the Sahara and the Gobi Desert, or Antarctica. The Antarctic is a great place for wind power ... if you can keep the equipment from freezing solid or icing up, and if you can get the power off the continent.

In any case, a global grid is a massive engineering problem. Honestly, I don't think it's one we're capable of yet. We have enough trouble just with national supergrids. Expand the US supergrid to global scale and every technical problem grows by at least an order of magnitude. And I don't want to think about the resistive losses, or the size of induced-current surges in a grid that big. I honestly think we'll have beamed-power solar satellites before we have a global power grid.

[koyote.livejournal.com]

hrm. interesting. Fuller had pretty strong math backing up the global grid and decentralised wind (you may be thinking in terms of large power plants rather than distributed systems) back in the 70s.

Grids are funny creatures- you don't really ship power from siberia to NYC, even if that appears to be the net effect.

For solar power specifically, just look at peak power. if every resident of LA had a 50 watt panel running at 50% output on a peak day (say, a heat wave) you'd have 250 megawatts of peak power into the grid. More on a hot cunny day, that 50% output is a bit excessively conservative.

Wind is similar, you don't build megafarms but rather put vertical axis wind generation systems on power poles, more or less.

Obviously, the Sahara or Altamont will be more efficient in some terms, but they ARE inaccessible, they are centralised where power *consumption* is decentralised. So they really aren't more efficient.

There's a lot of power out there, it mostly requires a shift in thinking to harvest it.

[smandal.livejournal.com]

Ideas are second to egos. If and when that is reversed, we will take a quantum leap forward as a species; until then, we're just apes with better tools.

[koyote.livejournal.com]

it *could* be flown off a tether...

And while it isn't quite as noisy as you'd think, it does make a tricked out GTO sound like a bicycle.

a lot of the problem is in size. We've been trained to think bigger bigger bigger, when if we were aiming for something like an old 70s honda 350 utility bike we'd BE there in flying cars.

I'll sya it as I often do- at least half (I would say something close to all) of our lack of fulfilled dreams boils down to an enforced false scarcity. As much from the greens as from the corporate/political power mongers. No one gets off free here. It's a case of monumental and deliberate fuckup.