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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">Marcus wrote:<br>
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<p class="MsoNormal">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!</p>
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<p>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. <br>
</p>
<p>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. <br>
</p>
<p>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... <br>
</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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? <br>
</p>
<p> Deliberately misquoting Pogo - "I have met
the enemy and they is the Red Queen"<br>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><b>From:</b> Friam
<a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:friam-bounces@redfish.com"><friam-bounces@redfish.com></a> <b>On Behalf Of
</b>Steve Smith<br>
<b>Sent:</b> Monday, April 5, 2021 12:31 PM<br>
<b>To:</b> <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:friam@redfish.com">friam@redfish.com</a><br>
<b>Subject:</b> Re: [FRIAM] The God Equation<o:p></o:p></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p>Marcus wrote:<o:p></o:p></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">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.)<o:p></o:p></p>
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<p><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.
<o:p></o:p></p>
<p>Is "life itself" and "consciousness" by extension, somehow
the urge (an inevitable self-organizing trend itself?) toward
a particular type of self-organization?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p></not snark><o:p></o:p></p>
<p>- Steve<o:p></o:p></p>
<p><o:p> </o:p></p>
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