Space based mirrors for asteroid mining. Bounce a sh*tton of light from the sun around and just melt asteroids. Love that in the Troy Rising series.
Lots of problems getting there irl (need a better way to get out of the gravity well, and light speed lag for command and control would be a real issue) but the idea is just too fun.
That sounds like a great way to accidentally muzzle sweep a thousand international satellites with a billion-kWh laser beam. Not saying it’s entirely a bad idea, but having invisible unshielded beams of stupendous energy bouncing all over the solar system sounds like a recipe for a couple accidental meltings. I could just see someone making an adjustment to the next mining target without informing China and whoops, that secret manned satellite you sent up a couple months ago is now slag.
Depends how it’s focused. It wouldn’t be a straight coherent beam, because that would actually break thermodynamics if you could produce it from sunlight.
One way to look at it is loss of information. If you point a (brightness-tolerant) telescope at a lasar beam, you can’t see much. Pretty much every beam is the same. If you point it at the sun there’s all kinds of interesting features. Another way is to consider that light is a gas made of photons, and you’re essentially talking about making every particle spontaneously align, which in a heat engine would obviously be ridiculous. All of these are entropy-negative processes, and a passive mirror or lens is passive and can only do reversible operations.
Another fun fact that comes out of this is that a magnifying glass can never make a spot hotter than the sun. Here’s an XKCD what-if that goes into it - and might honestly be where I learned this first.
I suppose lemons could be more combustible. Lemon-based biofuel. To my regret, this is not even the worst startup idea I’ve heard in the last 3 months.
When life gives you lemons, power a city with them. Marketing practically writes itself, at least.
Perhaps the main use for technology is increasing the amount of inequality society can tolerate without collapse. I can’t fix inequality – that just seems to be what the humans want.
However by investing in surveillance technology, computer vision, and AI I could perhaps help our society to bear unbounded amounts of inequality indefinitely, without collapse. Social collapse is a less-than-zero-sum game, whereas an unequal society is still generally more-than-zero-sum. So I posit that the latter is objectively better.
Especially if you plan to survive long enough to get off this stinking rock – you’re going to need to concentrate resources, because the public sector only seems to be able to succeed at space travel under a very specific set of hard-to-replicate circumstances. Whereas greed, inflated egos, and concentrated power are easy to replicate.
Perhaps the main use for technology is increasing the amount of inequality society can tolerate without collapse. I can’t fix inequality – that just seems to be what the humans want.
However by investing in surveillance technology, computer vision, and AI I could perhaps help our society to bear unbounded amounts of inequality indefinitely, without collapse. Social collapse is a less-than-zero-sum game, whereas an unequal society is still generally more-than-zero-sum. So I posit that the latter is objectively better.
... Are you suggesting that we increase inequality to make the world better? Like we need an overlord, be it robot or human, and the rest of the population needs to be placated, worked to the bone, and easily replaced?
I gotta assume I am just vastly misunderstanding something in this argument, but I cannot for the life of me figure out what it is. Is it just sarcastic?
I think the optimal outcome is that technology develops to permit our society to support increasing amounts of inequality. The increasing inequality will happen anyway, we’ll just be able to bear it, or not. I’m won’t suggest it’s a good outcome, just the optimal one.
Well yes, but a) the immune system gobbles up bad cells, but becomes less efficient as it ages b) point mutations accumulate with age => increases the risk of cells going haywire.
I was hard on the r/longevity train until their figurehead (Aubury) was busted for being a sex pest and half the subreddit defended them. Aging is a disease which must be treated as such, but I have zero faith in a community that is so willing to overlook their mascot being a creep, especially not when so much research is being done by other individuals who aren’t carrying that baggage.
Ive been thinking for years that if we could put the (absolutely enormous) privacy concerns aside think of the environmental benefit of every major city in the world having an “AI” controlling the traffic lights and variable speed limits. Using numberplate recognition cameras and gps on every vehicle to optimise flow, reduce bottlenecks and minimise time spent in traffic.
That won’t work because you’re approaching the problem from the wrong angle; you’re trying to “fix” traffic by encouraging more traffic. If you want to improve car traffic the only possible solution is to make other forms of transport more appealing. It doesn’t really matter which form of transport you focus on, it could be trains, busses, bikes, walkability, etc; just as long as you ensure it’s as or more efficient than a car for the majority of journeys.
The only way to fix traffic is for there to be less traffic.
Well you arent wrong but its not like its a “pick one” situation. With the unbiased data from the AI you could optimise all forms of transport. If you can see that theres clearly a lot of people driving from point A to point B you can examine the why and implement better solutions.
Society wastes a great deal of time looking for the perfect solution while some good ones sit right under our nose. If the AI solution has a city of 1 million drivers saving 5 minutes each way on an average commute of an hour. Thats the equivalent of 166k cars not driving that day and everyone saves 10 minutes.
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make and the metrics you’re using don’t really make sense. If one million people are driving with an average commute of 1 hour (personally I find it insane that that’s considered “normal” in some places, it should be an upper bound) and switch to a train which saves only 5 minutes each way they’d still save that same 10 minutes. Depending on what you mean by your “cars not driving” metric, that’s anywhere between 1 million cars (no more cars driving) and 255k cars (carbon emissions of 1m electric car commuters vs 1m national rail commuters, using this data).
That’s not even accounting for the induced demand previously mentioned, making driving more appealing only creates more drivers which makes driving worse.
And all of that is still only considering the traffic itself and not the effect of the infrastructure. Take a satellite shot of any random North American city and chances are a significant portion of it is just places to park a car. It’s a bit less common to see a city center dedicate half of its land to bike, bus, or train parking; that land is better used for people or business instead.
If you take 1 million cars with an average useage time of 1 hour a day and reduce that by 10 minutes thats roughly the same as taking 1 in 6 cars off the road from an emisions standpoint.
Make it 500,000 cars and reduce it by only 5 minutes its roughly the same as 41,000 cars worth of emissions that werent pumped out of exhaust pipes.
No it doesnt solve everything. Yes a well designed public transport system would be a much bigger environmental benefit. But its something that could be done with current tech and without massive infrastructure overhauls with a real tangible benefit for the environment and society.
The numbers do matter because the numbers are literally your entire argument. You’re arguing building for cars is more effective, you cannot make arguments about effectiveness without numbers. Alternative transport methods can be done with current tech since alternative transport methods literally existed before cars. There are plenty of examples of places that aren’t car-centric, and most major car-centric cities weren’t originally built around cars. I honestly have no idea how you could have thought that’s a remotely reasonable argument? It’s utter nonsense.
Even if your massive infrastructure overhaul argument was valid^1^, we’re literally talking about a hypothetical scenario where you can pump absurd amounts of money into a project.
Not so much technology, but I’d fund the Howard Society for real. For those unfamiliar, it’s a program to identify people who are genetically predisposed to natural long life and pay them to have kids with each other; it’s a core plot point in a bunch of Heinlein novels.
I find a lot of people don’t understand what eugenics even is. Hell, as Richard Dawkins proved, if you worded it properly you could even get people to rally behind it, which is a huge problem because eugenics is fascist pseudoscience.
To wit, coincidences are more noticeable than non-coincidences, and once you’ve noticed one it’ll be much easier to notice others you might have missed.
I myself once spent about a week seeing Curta hand-held mechanical calculators everywhere. Books, magazines, blog posts, youtube… I wasn’t complaining, of course, the Curta is an amazing piece of engineering, but still, it was a bit weird.
I see this very much as another Pandora’s box situation for humanity. Once it’s open, both good and bad things can come of it.
The bad being, brain hacking, brain ransome, and perhaps a few other things. You mention a “nondestructive brain machine,” but I can’t comprehend how anyone will be able to make an implant that could be engineered not to be destructible and still have uber computing power in such a small form. But who knows what advancements are in store this century?
The good, as you mentioned would be, enabling the disabled in many ways never fully realized before. Both personal and professional productivity across the board, in theory, would greatly be improved.
Way “non destructive” was my hand waving risks some tbh. What I mean is safe implants either though regenerative technology to overcome damages, precision so small no meaningful damage was done, or non invasive. I also consider reparability and upgradability/downgradabilty import.
May be poulsen treatment or immortality cruciform from Hyperion. Not sure if immortality is such a good idea though. Throughout history horrible dictatorships tend to end after the death of the despots. Imagine if these horrible people are immortal…
The terror usually doesn’t end when the dictator dies today he just gets replaced by the next in line, but even, having the entire human race go old and suffer until death to alleviate the dictator problem is maybe not the best way to do it?
that’s a no on the cruciform for me, dawg. Yeesh. I’ll take everything else from there though, Poulsen, hawking drive, farcasters (maybe without the yoke of the AI techno core though), etc.
I’ve been thinking along the same lines lately. A fully open source hardware and software architecture and implementation, to replace the closed “old world”.
I’ll add mine here then. Cat Girl genetic engineering. It helps no one but the amount of non destructive upheavel from it be easy available would be entertaining.
Yeah. But on the other hand, isn’t civics sort of a technology too? Policies were invented, no?
I guess you could say the UBI has already been invented, but I think practical implementation is important too. Same as if I’d said we should do fusion power or something.
People make this sound way harder to achieve than it actually is. There’s even people who are poly for free. I don’t know how many do group sex but it’s not none, and theoretically you could be one of them.
Is that where it’s from? I knew it was a meme, but I just thought I’d bring up that it’s a weird one, given it’s in the responses to every question like this.
Add comment