[FRIAM] The God Equation

[Steve Smith]

Marcus wrote:
>
> Humans might be capable of deciding how to allocate energy.  Or we
> might just infest the solar system and beyond, paving over
> everything.    With a HPC/complexity mindset, I tend to prefer big and
> direct approaches, myself.   I would be happy to drive around 1000hp
> electric hummer.   More motive to get fusion working!
>
I too have always been mildly attracted to Big Iron (why I came to LANL
to work on the Proton Storage Ring and then on the (Super)Computing
Division that became HPC), but in the bottom line I have always chosen
my motorcycles (for example) to be ones I could stand back up if they
fell over. 

Regarding a 1000hp Hummer:   My 4000lb Volt already seems excessive (to
me) for most purposes, but I am in the market for hub-drive motor or two
I can swap in under wheels of my 1949 Ford Dump Truck (more big iron)
and run with the (salvaged out) battery from my Volt (16KWh of Lithium
mined from Columbia after Musk stated "we can coup anyone we want"). 
Maybe graphene or nanopartical solid-state batteries or hydrogen
fuel-cell technology will overtake Lithium Chemistry fast enough to make
a 1000hp GWh Hummer less egregious than my Volt or the Gen1 Insight I
tooled around in before that one.  

Re: Fusion energy plant proliferation:   There is one HUGE fusion
reactor in the sky flooding us with a wide spectrum of radiation (albeit
shielded nicely with an endogenous magnetic field and an atmosphere
suffused with water vapor) which is fairly easy to harness for *heat*
and even the ever-fungible stored electric charge...  

A half-dozen (salvaged) PV panels are enough to fill up my Volt's puny
battery in a day of good sunshine...   your Hummer is not going to get
the same range (30-40 miles) from the same KWh input (by half?).   In
the 1970s, a mega-giga-hyper solar project in the AZ desert placed
thousands of mirrors in concentric circles with heliostatic controls to
focus on a central heating tower (steam generator?)...  *free energy!*
everyone screamed hysterically... but it had to shut down in just a few
years (as I remember it) because heat isn't the quantity needed to
generate power, but rather heat-flow, so they were dumping scads of
low-grade heat into the nearby Colorado River (why they chose the
location I believe, for the cooling) to facilitate the
power-generation...   eventually they were shown to be destroying
(disrupting badly?) the existing ecosystem in the river and even Baja CA
with all this "low grade" and "waste" heat.    Thermal fusion power
plants are not going to do any more-better on this count I don't expect.  

Maybe direct electric-generation through fusion processes might get
around that problem.  More tech is always the most obvious answer to the
failings/exacerbations of the last round of tech.  Maybe Iron-Man class
of miniaturization? 

                    Deliberately misquoting Pogo - "I have met the enemy
and they is the Red Queen"

>  
>
> *From:* Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> *On Behalf Of *Steve Smith
> *Sent:* Monday, April 5, 2021 12:31 PM
> *To:* friam at redfish.com
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] The God Equation
>
>  
>
> Marcus  wrote:
>
>     That was Glen.   (My explanation is just that we have limited
>     short term memory and can’t tolerate any other representation than
>     terribly compressed forms.   So it is hard to gain confidence in
>     simulations because we can’t get them entirely in our heads, nor
>     prove them correct, nor reason very effectively about how
>     mutations will change their behavior.   The natural world has no
>     such hesitation.)
>
> <not-snark> I wonder if perhaps that "the natural world" *does* have
> such hesitation in the sense you cop to here...  and suggest that when
> this happens it is exactly what we call "life".   We fat-brained
> humans with elaborate language are just the (known) apex of this
> process that bootstraps itself up some kind of tower-of-babel style
> complexity (to increase our ability to hold more and more and more
> qualitatively and quantitatively "in our heads").   Clay tablets unto
> nanodots (and beyond)  and proto-abacii unto quantum computers (and
> beyond) represent our progress toward extending our phenotypes
> represent our attempts to expand (transcend?) the reasons for our
> hesitation.  
>
> Is "life itself" and "consciousness" by extension, somehow the urge
> (an inevitable self-organizing trend itself?) toward a particular type
> of self-organization?
>
> </not snark>
>
> - Steve
>
>  
>
>
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