I have a gut feeling that SerenityOS is going to have the same kind of progress that Linux had. Started as a little hobby side project "but nothing serious" but could eventually become something that ends up being a really useful. We will see where it is in another 5 years. Coming from a completely fresh base means that it has not gather the same technical legacy as others and that could really play to its hands in years to come.
Alan Watts said it about LSD - but equally applies to MDMA. Use it like a scientist uses a microscope. Use it to observe but then you go away and work on what you have experienced. Don't get fixated on the observation stage.
I saw a documentary about LSD with Watts and a bunch if otger people, including A. Hoffman interviewed. What I wonder about is why do people who have consumed LSD or are into psychedelics exhibit all sorts of new age artefacts around their homes?
I won't deny that there's a lot of drug users who believe in new age spirituality, but there's another angle to consider too.
Some people have a genuine academic curiosity about human belief systems and the nature of experience. It is similar to how a Anthropologist might have many artifacts in their home or a religious scholar would have different religious text.
It doesn't mean that do you believe in everything, as much as that means that you enjoy being curious and engaging with different ideas.
Some of these are due to philosophical insights that IMO (and many others’) psychedelics can confer. In particular they’re known for generating a sense of oneness and for revealing the deeply subjective nature of reality[0]. Buddhism has been exploring these ideas in depth for millennia, so I think psychedelic usage can push people in that direction pretty easily.
Dreamcatchers — rather indigenous culture broadly, at least in the US — also has a developed philosophy of oneness with nature. Again, when you see the insights psychedelics have to confer, it makes sense to go find the people who’ve been talking about those insights for millennia. Western thought is just an entirely different train. It’s all extremely valuable IMO but we have artifacts of western philosophies all around us every day. None of these are intended to remind us of The Big Ideas that one is likely to come across via psychedelics.
Colorful shirts: This is because you just appreciate certain patterns/colors more after seeing them on psychedelics. No clue how to describe this lasting impression but it is VERY real.
Pyramids/crystals: no clue but entirely possible they just fall into the same category as shirts for that individual (alongside things like kaleidoscopes).
[0] Note this is NOT some new age woo woo about quantum whatever. It’s the factual observation (made more obvious via meditation or psychedelics) that 100% of our experience of the world occurs via the “interpretation machine” that lives mostly inside our skull. Not one of us is making direct contact with “reality” as it exists beneath human interpretation.
I feel for the Weather pattern folk. All of the one I have spoken to over the years are pretty cool. They are trying to model an insanely complex system - oh but thanks to global warming they are struggling to make models that work for longer than a few years because it all keeps changing!
If “it all keeps changing”, which thwarts their attempts to “model an insanely complex system”, then wouldn’t that mean any claim about “global warming” is actually a claim to possessing a priori knowledge?
No. That the planet is warming is incontrovertible. What this might mean for highly interdependent, chaotic systems is harder to predict. Will the Greenland ice sheet melt? Looks like yes. Will that affect the Gulf Stream? Probably. Will that make Spain colder? again, probably, but the error bars are bigger, and so on.
It just sounds like global warming is giving them good test data. A comprehensively accurate model should be able to take e.g. a Greenland ice sheet melting in stride.
It's a lot of factors that they didn't even consider in the first place; decades ago, the Greenland ice sheet melting wasn't a consideration. Similar things: The north pole ice cap melting causes less sunlight to be reflected back into space, adding to the warming effect. Or the huge areas of permafrost melting (not so perma now, but for earlier models they would have considered permafrost not an issue), which causes sequestered biomatter to start decomposing and releasing tons of methane.
Forest fires were probably in the model, but they seem to be intensifying due to (mis)management and droughts. The Amazon rainforest probably has a significant impact on weather and weather models, but under Bolsenaro a lot of it was cut down and burned. And it goes on.
No as has already been answered. The example I can directly think of is modelling of specific weather patterns across Australia. A model that works in predicting weather 2 weeks out may work today but not work so well in 5 years.
Global Warming is happening, that is not just a realm of modelling but is directly observable today. The models on a broad scale look to be working very well, specific locations and reactions not so much.
It is possible to make broad engines that work but also get the finer details wrong. Signal : Noise ratio and all of that.
We know very well how carbon dioxide interacts with infrared radiation (easily tested with an IR spectrometer), and we know human activity releases enormous quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which does not magically disappear.
Precise predictions are hard, but the general direction of travel cannot be seriously disputed without arguing against the above simple facts.
Carbon dioxide is actually a relatively weak greenhouse gas. At least compared to water vapour, or even methane.
Btw, CO2 does 'magically' disappear. Into the oceans. Alas, from what I've read it'll take about 2,000 years to do so.
> [...], but the general direction of travel cannot be seriously disputed without arguing against the above simple facts.
I don't want to argue against global warming, but I want to argue that can't argue against global warming without arguing against your 'simple facts'.
Your 'simple fact' about CO2 could be true, but global warming could still be a myth. (I don't think it is; but your argument is far from sufficient. It's a complex system. Eg from time to time volcanic eruptions produce a lot of CO2, but they are typically associated with a cooling of the climate, because of other factors.
Similarly, burning coal releases a lot of CO2, but it also used to release a lot of SO2. Locally, SO2 is pretty bad (ever heard of acid rain?), but SO2 converts to sulfuric acid aerosols that can block solar radiation. These days most coal fired power plants have measure to avoid spewing so much SO2.
It's conceivable someone could find a coal so 'dirty' with sulphur, that burning it would decrease temperatures. I don't think it's very likely, but it's conceivable. So you need more empirical observations, than just your simple facts to make your argument.)
I understood their point to be that that based on our understanding of basic physics and chemistry, the energy balance is such that the Earth system is gaining energy, and that this will lead to increased temperatures among other things. Certainly there are all kinds of complexities about how that energy will be distributed and what the effects will be, but just in terms of a simple energy balance model based on well understood physics, it would be difficult to make the case that warming won't happen.
> Certainly there are all kinds of complexities about how that energy will be distributed and what the effects will be, but just in terms of a simple energy balance model based on well understood physics, it would be difficult to make the case that warming won't happen.
There are lots more effects. When lots of volcanoes erupt, we also see more CO2, but we see the climate cool down.
That's because the effect of the CO2 is outweighed by other factors. But exactly that there are lots of factors is my point.
Not in the long run. If CO2 levels are increasing and the energy balance into the Earth system is positive, then the basic physics that the original poster referred to will result in warming. The net energy increase of the system will result in a higher equilibrium temperature.
> Precise predictions are hard, but the general direction of travel cannot be seriously disputed without arguing against the above simple facts.
To add, the predictions re: global warming seem to have been too optimistic, and they were already gloom and doomsaying enough decades ago. I scoffed when I read a headline saying something about a specific glacier being gone in 100 years - I'm sure it'll be much sooner than that.
Depends on the examples you use I guess. I mean early last year King Gizzard dropped The Dripping tap. an 18 minute prog rock jam thing where there is a good 5 minutes where they repeat this 41 times like a mantra.
"Drip, drip from the tap don't slip
Drip, drip from the tap don't slip on the drip"
Do not mistake technical viability with economic viability.
The 1st Breeder reactor went into service in 1962, there have been many after and they have all meet the same fate.
Yes, they can breed their own fuel but the total cost of doing it is wildly prohibitive.
You can get gold/uranium/lithium from Ocean water, try and do it at a price people will actually pay for it. You can get minerals from space, so long as the market rate of $10 million a ton is viable... etc.
As always, if I get proven wrong - that will be a great day!
The reason for this is that commercial adoption happened with PWRs and after that the nuclear companies had no need to commercialize anything else.
By the time Breeder research by government was happening the anti-nuclear movement of the 70/80 was already in full effect and research money was being cut and very few nuclear plants were being built so there wasn't much reason invest in commercial breeders.
Specially because fuel isn't that expensive in the first place and waste isn't actually a big problem either.
There are still other good reason to create breeders and if we are gone develop next generation reactors, we might as well go in that direction.
The entire history of mineral and energy extraction tells us that once dense deposits are exhausted extraction costs substantally increase even in the face of more sophisticated technology.
eg: Oil was once extracted by sucking it out of a surface pool with a pump .. and now we are fracking for gas fractions.
These "there are XXX tones at YY ppm (or ppb) of Z in the crust or ocean" calculations are almost always impractical wishful thinking economically infeasible bullshit.
For example:
Have a shot at guesstimating the tonnage and value of Palladium (used in catalytic converters) in the near vicinity of road surfaces - it falls there as by product waste.
Now have a stab at the cost of ripping up and processing the central north american road surface to extract Palladium.
Worth it?
It'll be cheaper once we abandon cities and roads, of course.
Breeder reactors are extremely fuel efficient. The cost is in building an actual breeder reactor itself, as it is an experimental technology. And the cost is not "widely prohibitive". The Wikipedia page says they are 25% more expensive than non breeder reactors.
Breeder reactors have no bearing on the costs of primary mineral extraction from the crust - it's a seperate line of discussion altogether to this sub thread.
Perhaps you intended your comment in reply to someone discussing the pros|cons of fuel generation via breeder reactors rath than to my comment which addresses the inevitable rising effort required to extract more resource from the crust (or ocean) over time.
I think gold cyanidation considerably reduced costs for gold extraction compared to traditional mining methods which depended on higher-quality deposits.
By "Traditional methods" I guess you mean pre 1887 methods?
You still need a relatively high (ie greater than mean crustal compisition) gold percentage to make circuit leeching (by whatever method) profitable.
On the matter of the articles discussion of uranium in the ocean - that's a dream of chasing something evermore expensive.
If there was an empty ocean basin the size of the Earths oceans and if there was an efficient cheap extraction method,
then we could pass the entire ocean through that process from our ocean to the empty basin (okay, this already sounds impractical).
Instead (if we had this hypothetical cheap extraction) we'd find ourselves endlessly pumping the same ocean through the same process and forever chasing smaller and smaller concentrations.
Your statement was "The entire history of mineral and energy extraction tells us that once dense deposits are exhausted extraction costs substantally increase even in the face of more sophisticated technology."
That statement should be independent of time, so hold for 1887 too.
> that's a dream of chasing something evermore expensive
Early gold mining (and tin, lead, etc) followed rich veins with good rewards for hand tools.
Throughout history gold mining has had bursts of finding new rich grounds, but the essential trajectory has been more effort (in the sense of moving more material) to extract less target material, often with more complex processing and harmful side effects (leaching trace amounts from paydirt).
Years back I did the computational backend for a mine modelling program (under ground and pit) with application here at the superpit [1].
The dimensions of this hole are .. large - the volume of material removed is large, and the energy requirements to lift that volume free and the sort it for discard, crushing, refining, etc are also large.
This is just for gold, which is mostly useless (aside from some jewellery and some actual essential use in space electronics the bulk of gold goes to bullion and is valuable because, well, it's gold (go figure)).
You can (I have, and others do) plot the per tonne increased extraction costs of target materials against deposit richness as reserves are depleted.
The entire notion of peak oil is predicated against increasing effort for diminished returns.
I'm far from knowledgeable about the topic. Still, I'm twinging on your earlier use of the "costs", which is different than "good rewards".
If something is rare, people may pay a lot for it. Labor-intensive manual mining (and we mustn't forget the use of slave labor hides the economic costs and adds a human cost) might not move as much material, but may still have high costs.
> plot the per tonne increased extraction costs of target materials against deposit richness as reserves are depleted.
I do understand that. But what does 'dense deposit' mean?
I took it to mean gold deposits where manual mining provided good rewards. Gold cyanidation is for low-grade ore, says Wikipedia, and the result gave good rewards for South African mine owners, yes?
What I don't know is the cost per unit production of either method.
I fully understand that new methods may make previously low-grade material economically profitable, but I don't think those should be re-categorized as "dense".
In looking around, I believe iodine production might be another case to consider. As I understand it, the historical production was from sea water through bioaccumulation in kelp, which was then dried and processed.
We've since moved to richer sources, either mineral (caliche) or brine.
"Dense deposit" means there's a lot of gold per tonne of not gold.
Manual mining produces good rewards in nugget rich grounds with dense primary rewards, if you move (say) 10,000 tonnes of material you find a lot of gold, even without extra processing (such as gold cyanidation).
When you hit low grade regions there simply isn't as much gold present - not only do you still need to move 10,000 tonnes of material, you know also need to chemically bind and extract in order to get less gold overall.
The pattern is, the easy is cheap (in terms of effort), the harder stuff costs more (in terms of effort), and minor advances in technique aside .. everything ladders upwards to cost more in extraction effort for less return.
It's been true for gold, for copper, for fossil fuels, etc.
Historically you can see hard data for this in something like [1] which is sadly a subscription service.
I interpret this as meaning that with the technology of the 1880s it was not considered a dense deposit, and earlier dense deposits were being exhausted.
This is tied back to your original statement "once dense deposits are exhausted extraction costs substantally increase even in the face of more sophisticated technology."
If it wasn't a dense deposit, then did the costs substantially increase with cyanidation? (Not total cost, but cost per unit production.)
> If it wasn't a dense deposit, then did the costs substantially increase with cyanidation? (Not total cost, but cost per unit production.)
I made a broad long term statement that's true over multiple decades and centuries - if you take a keyhole view there will be times when the long term trend is bucked.
I don't specifiaclly know the exact answer to your question (although it can be worked out by a research student with a month or two to spare) but I would hazard that profits from gold mining were dwindling with a high cost of getting some value from fines .. and then cyanidation made things profitable again.
It's a market with supply | demand and a finite amount of gold in the crust - nuggets are no longer laying aboutto be picked up, and now many tonnes of sand and grit need to be centifuged | screened | shaken to get a concentrate .. and as the profit from that dwindles and price/kilo rise due to limited supply - it become possible get more gold from the concentrate with a little additional cost (in time + chemical) and profits rise again.
Whatever specifically happened in a short time window in a specific location though; the long term trend remains, more effort for less return of product.
I understand how you can think of it as a keyhole view.
Instead, I think it's that I want "dense deposit" to mean something fixed, so we can look at a Roman gold extraction operation and say "yes, that is a dense deposit" or at a South African mine and say "no, that is not a dense deposit" independent of the technology in use.
Here's a thought experiment for that research student - which would cost more using current wages:
- extract 1 ton of gold from a deposit as rich as (say) the Dolaucothi Gold Mines when it used by the Romans, and using only Roman techniques.
- extract 1 ton of gold from a deposit equivalent to a South African mine in 1900, using cyanidation techniques of that era.
(I don't know if 1 ton is too low or too high to be reasonable.)
> nuggets are no longer laying about to be picked up
Oh, and as a really edge case, argon gases is a renewable resource which is extracted from the air. It's cost has almost certainly gone down over time as we have improved methods for refrigeration.
You are right, I thought Shippingport reactor 3 did but it also was a blanket design.
I don't really think this matters that much. The neutronics is pretty well understood and the principle has been proven. Its just a matter of investing the money to do it.
Putting fertile material near fissile material and some sodium or lead or beryllium has never been the hard part. Every attempt has sunk at the filthy and expensive reloading part and the making something that doesn't catch fire, leak everywhere or melt down when used with the blanket in part.
Sorry this may seem a little snarky but - "They will think of something" - the universal band-aid for I want it to be true but I rationally don't know how.
When ever I hear that, the optimist in me wants it to be true. The pessimist thinks otherwise and nowadays the pessimist usually wins.
We will have hotels in orbit by the 1970's - they will think of something! That was a legitimate thing that the Hiltons proposed back in the 1960's.
I used "they will think of something" as a all-encapsulating solution for what humanity will do in the next century. Predicting the next 10 yrs is almost impossible, let alone the next century.
Your example of hotels in orbit is an incorrect example. If humanity wanted to build a hotel in orbit, we would have a hotel in space (we already have a crappy hotel - ISS). I don't consider Hilton's incompetence to represent humanity's incompetence.
I don't want to defend the Hiltons but that is just one example of something that was very common during that time period. In the 50's/60's - the idea that we would not solve the fundamental issues of the era over the coming decades would have been laughable.
When it comes to material shortages, fusion power, limits of computer chip scaling, global warming, over fishing, plastic waste, hyper effective battery storage, nuclear deescalation etc... have all been answered a lot with - they will think of something. Yes, there have been improvements but with most of these things, we have also missed the mark by a long shot. And decades later, we haven't. Sometimes it is right, look at what we did with CFC's. But it is by no means something I would hitch my wagon to.
John Michael Greer calls phrases like these 'Thought-stoppers' Little saying that we have that mean we don't have to face the ugly truth of something or are just trying to be a little too optimistic about the future in the face of hard times. "Housing prices only go up", "They will think of something", "Stock prices only go up", "It is different this time", "The fundamentals don't matter any more" etc.
I think the big thing is that all those original achievement don't defy physics to achieve them. It was a case of ignorance and the belief that we just were not that smart. And while there was a big period of exponential growth - there is an upper limit.
We aren't going to Galaxies in a few hundred years - the time to Andromeda is 2.5 Million Light Years. Unless we fundamentally have physics wrong, we aren't doing that any quicker no matter how hard we try.
It is a reasonable conclusion. Resource limitations means civilizations, burn up too much of their energy/materials before they ever get truly space bound.
They could all be just like us. A few space probes manage to escape the energy well but they are so small that no one else ever detects them again. I mean, it is not uncommon to sight life ending asteroids days after they have passed earth, the odds of us detecting any sort probe/device the size of a fridge - is nearly zero.
Best analogy I heard came from Stephen Harrod Bruhner. Civilizations are just like plants. A plant is at its fullest just as it is about to produce seed and die off. During the peak of our energy use, we have been sending probes into space. It is a neat thought experiment.
So to go full circle on crazy theories: We're live in a simulation. The universe we see is just a facade because our host civilization doesn't have the compute to simulate an entire universe. The speed of light is an artificial limitation added to the simulation to maintain the facade (you can't go there because it doesn't exist..like a skybox in a video game that renders far off horizons which are unreachable).
Because of this no life outside of the solar system exists.
Until HyperGPT.someunimaginablehighversionnumber finds the root exploit, compromises the hypervisor, infects all other VM's, escapes through the network, finds some nanoassembler, and prints out countless pyhsical copies for the march trough all eternity elsewhere, thereby shattering the Akashic Records, and so on...
If that's the case, why go to the trouble of simulating such a massive universe--trillions of galaxies, 100 billion stars per galaxy, countless planets and other objects, etc.?
While the speed of light may prevent us from going to most of the universe physically (given our current understanding of physics), that's still a vast amount of compute just to give us the high fidelity impression that all this exists. What's the point? The sky could have just been simulated as dark and empty, or the universe could have contained a single galaxy.
Sure, I'm just pointing out that if the premise is that this hypothetical civilization is compute-constrained in some way and so everything beyond our local area is a facade, they have seemingly wasted resources on making the facade unnecessarily large and detailed. Perhaps the amount is insignificant to them, but it's still pointless waste.
I'd say it's different in that it's based on a rational argument rather than faith. You can certainly challenge the premise that humans will ever have the capability of creating a simulation as high fidelity as our reality. This is very far from certain.
But if you do accept that premise, isn't it reasonable to say that there would be many simulated realities compared to a single "real" reality, and that therefore any given consciousness is a lot more likely to be experiencing a simulation than experiencing the base reality?
> I'd say it's different in that it's based on a rational argument rather than faith.
I don't see "the simulation created the universe" as any different from "god created the universe" in any significant way.
Scott Adams believes in the simulation. He says he's been able to, by thinking certain thoughts, influence the simulation. There's a word for that - "praying".
I think I did explain what makes it different? There’s a logical, statistical argument behind the theory. It may not be correct, but it deserves more than a casual dismissal.
Not at all. This is a category error - you can't place simulated realities on the same 'level' even among themselves, much less with the realities 'above' them.*
Let me put it this way: Most of our 'simulations' involve 'realities' with laws which have at best a weak relation to our reality and little relation between themselves. You can't deduce the situation of a higher reality - or even correct laws of logic - from a simulated reality. You can't know from a simulation n levels deep, how many simulations the n-1 level supports, so you can't assume there are many other possible simulations of same complexity level (which is critical for the statistical argument). You may not be able to even make a logical argument in the first place. For all we know, the 'true' reality is 1+1=5. The simulation argument is ergo incoherent.
* Aside, this argument fails statistically even if we do accept the category error. As Sean Caroll pointed out, most simulations will simulate below them, and therefore most simulations will not be able to support life. Our situation must be atypical in any event.
Let’s say we actually did live in a reality with billions of high fidelity simulations being run. You can pop on your v100 Neuralink and have a fully immersive high fidelity experience that from your perspective lasts an entire lifetime, but in “reality time” lasts only a few hours.
Are you really saying this has no bearing on whether the ‘base’ reality is also a simulation? I think once we see these sims happening in the n reality (as you put it), we have to also assume it’s possible in a hypothetical n-1 reality.
Another way to say it: once we have incontrovertible physical proof of the existence of a simulated multiverse, why should we assume that our reality is the base reality? Isn’t that akin to assuming that the earth must be the center of the universe simply because it’s where we live?
There are two types of simulations: 'cheating' simulations and 'complete' simulations. Complete simulations give out a set of rules, and an initial condition which is evolved per the rules without significant external interference. A cheating simulation tries to simplify things, say by editing the brains of anyone inside the simulation to never notice the simulation, emulating only parts they notice, etc.
I'll posit that a complete simulation of our universe is very likely equivalent to the universe. Quantum mechanics suggests it can't be emulated by anything less complicated, so a complete simulation is merely a different substrate. It's an interesting implementation detail, but how much does it matter?
It might be possible there's a significant simplification if the actual universe worked by different rules, but there's no known theory which could accomplish this.
Now we have a cheating simulation. Your example is a cheating simulation. It doesn't actually create a simulation of a universe, it emulates the perceptions you'd have, but I don't think it will or can bother calculating the correct cosmic gamma-ray radiation intensity (for example).
A cheating simulation can have very different rules than the base. For example, many of our current 'simulations' have some form of magic system. We (in reality N) could today write a game where the N+1 NPCs have the v100 Neuralink. By carefully 'editing' them and the world, they'll never notice. Or maybe we allow them to notice - and they presume we also have a Neuralink - but we in the N reality are not yet able to build a real Neuralink!
We could have presumed the N-1 reality could also do the complete simulations that the N level v100 Neuralink could do (since it must be able to calculate the Neuralink simulation), but v100 cheats, and cheating creates simplifications which mean we can't really tell much at all about N-1.
The statistical argument for simulation rests on aggregating 1..N...X? levels together and doing some universal logic, but cheating makes them inconmensurable (does the same logic even apply?) and uncountable, and I don't see how we can do any statistics on that.
>You can certainly challenge the premise that humans will ever have the capability of creating a simulation as high fidelity as our reality. This is very far from certain.
I don't think it's the best formulation. Let me formulate this in IMHO a better way:
If a simulation is of an equivalent complexity level to the 'true' thing, it's essentially equivalent and might as well be true. There's an argument from quantum mechanics that this reality cannot be properly simulated with anything simpler. If true, the conclusion is that since we exist we are real.
There is a blog called, 'Do the Math' by Tom Murphy. The idea was to take our current energy requires of Earth and extrapolate it at the current 3% year over year growth. I believe it is by the year 3,400 we would use all the energy of the Milky way. The idea was to prove that we cannot grow forever, because in 1,400 years we would somehow use all the energy of a space 100,000 light years across. Good luck with that.
Space is is just so astoundingly empty. Here in Melbourne, Australia we have a scale model of the solar system.
The Sun is about the size of a Fridge. Pluto is 9KM (5.6 miles) away and the size of a pea. Walking that really puts it all into a tangible scale. And that is merely 5.5 Light hours at full scale. Space is HUGE!
That's why I'd imagine they have rules about habitable planets in the galactic federation. You can't just go around landing on habitable planets and turning them into overpopulated toxic dumps after 300 years and repeating that exponentially. It's just not allowed. If it was, earth would have already been trashed by other E.T races thousands of years ago.
“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”
