Nuke

zardoz was a warning. if you want to live forever you have to give up something. the movie spelled it out in a rather vulgar way, it was the '70s after all. but you cant have immortality without creating a population crisis, so its either for the few or you have to stop reproducing, perhaps as a condition of having the procedure done. whatever method is used, it probibly wont protect you in case of rapid unplanned disassembly of the biological sort, unless its a mind upload. but even that will come with an energy cost, and thanks to entropy, a source of potential conflict resulting in violence or some kind of emp attack on the datacenter (this would actually make a good sci-if scenario where a lot of digital minds are scrambled in such an attack, but some survive and are still conscious, and whatever container structure they are stored in break down so you end up with what is essentially a mad hive mind intelligence hellbent on destruction). i like to think of life as an iterative process. new people are new perspectives and death cleanses the way. but without that you all become "old man yelling at cloud" even though you look no older than 20. the thinking becomes so inflexible and life loses its meaning. you just exist to spite the universe, god, or what have you. kosh was right, we are not ready for immortality.

is that what it takes to have an actual job in 2025? no wonder there are so many homeless people.

if you can get one. there are plenty of horror stories about people who brought generators to sell in disaster areas only to have them confiscated by authorities for profiteering. then they sit in an evidence locker when people will pay 3x the going rate to charge their phone. whatever supply will not be sufficient. same goes with wood stoves. companies sell them, but the demand inst universal, so the available stock cant cover everyone.

its funny, because i dont use a phone people see me as a tech luddite. even though i grew up at a time when practically nobody had computer knowledge. we pretty much prototyped all the phone features on computers when brick phones were a thing. texting, file sharing, video conferencing. except all on an appliance that was for all intents and purposes tied to a wall. so you left it home when you went out and it didn't interfere as much with ones social development. there was a clear division between tech time and any other time. now its all mushed together and they cant even socialize without a device in the middle. anyway senior care is such a mess, thats why i take care of my mom, because they would just take her money and shove her into a small room. she is also kind of hard to deal with so they will probibly file her away in a facility that can handle mental disorders, and they would shove her into an even smaller room and give her nothing. how is that different than prison? i dont have anyone to take care of me when im that age, and the soilent green solution to this problem sounds a lot more viable. except instead of flowers i want war footage and instead of light classical i want death metal. in before someone mentions logans run. zardoz may also be relevant as we get closer to breaking the mortality problem.

honestly im not sure what it was about, the tangent into dystopian fiction then that fiction becoming reality was kind of disorienting.

i will never get tired of seeing dirty rockets.

you are better off buying old hardware and playing ksp1. just look at the current boondoggle wrt 12vhpwr connectors and the lack of load balancing circuitry on the 50xx series gpus.

point is there are locations that would be considered uninhabitable without the infrastructure. for example they converted us all from a centralized fuel oil furnace to heat pumps for the efficiency, but if the electricity fails for any long period of time there is no backup. the pipes will freeze and the apartment owners will be hit with massive repair bills. now our power has backups, the diesel generator for example, were also tied into wrangell for reduncancy. without that infrastructure we would be 100% dependant on fossil fuel. we could always chop wood i suppose, but not everyone has wood stoves and an urban population would consume wood like crazy. if the electricity just disappeared tomorrow and never came back, people would die.

then i would have to go outside.

regulation is always a buzzkill. how else is a misanthrope shut-in to make a living?

you do realize what happens when an alaskan home goes unheated for even a couple of days in winter? pipes burst, water gets everywhere, it freezes, and then you got a big mess and expensive plumbing repairs to deal with. you need to at least keep the heat tapes powered and you might only maintain 50 degrees in the home when its unoccupied. good thing we are on hydro. arctic solutions get more inventive (the term poopsicle comes to mind, since traditional septic systems dont work). i dont think the city of phoenix would be there without air conditioning either. before ac the city may have been a wild west town, after ac its a sprawling metropolis. meanwhile the homeless population frequently contracts heat stroke. the notion that you could live without in these locations all come from a place that hovers around 80f degrees year round. whatever methods indigenous populations use to cope with harsh climates do not scale well to urban size.

i had kind of hoped crypto would stay. but we cant have peasants making money with little or no effort, can we? current gen gpus just ended up power hogging to sell performance, but the real objective was to make hashing cost more than electricity. we need an algorithm that resists hoarding of infrastructure by single entities. otherwise the biggest holders of hash power just end up becoming the new banks. it should also function with ubiquitous hardware so you dont manufacture e-waste that's only good at hashing for a couple years before it too no longer pays for itself. only then can you truely democratize banking.

well one is some chemistry legwork and the other is "maybe physics will let us do this thing".

all mine will do is cover the food with cat hair. i mostly only use the convection oven anymore.

only way hydrogen works is when we have reliable solid state hydrogen storage. im not sure where thats at on the trl scale.

were presently afraid they will hit the ground harder and so we dont build them as much as we should. my sister had a house like that when she was still married. had its own well, its own septic tank. the only power it got was through a deisel generator which only ran for a few hours every day. main house power was through a pair of forklift batteries. heat was provided by a wood stove. she did do rain water collection sometimes, but they also had access to spring water, which is what they used for drinking.

who spams the spammer.

air travel is the model you want to emulate. every plane crash is used as an opportunity to make future planes safer. so every reactor malfunction to will point you in the right direction. lessons learned from fukashima, 3 mile island, and chernobyl to name a few are used in more current reactor generations. i dont think were quite out of here be dragons territory anymore, but you wont get there sitting on your hands. if nuclear reactors were aircraft, were still in the interwar period (viable fusion would be about the moon landing, and aneutronic would be mars colony).

storage backed solar is a non starter. what solar does is cover your daytime peak, you still need something to cover your baseload. nuclear doesn't throttle well, solar doesnt throttle at all, you can make up for that with gas, i think phoenix used hoover dam for deep throttle capability (they had nuclear when i lived there too). i see no reason why air cooled nuclear cant be a thing, that's what britain used for its nuclear weapons program. but that was a plutonium generation facility, not a power plant. i didnt know of any air cooled commercial power reactors. thats a thing i thought about post fukashima.

i think fossil fuel companies might pivot to other energy sources, they have the engineering capabilities. they just want to stay in business until that happens.

you need diversity because not every location has the same climate. if you live in a desert where there is sun every day and lots of barren landscapes, then why not use solar? even if you just cover canals and parking lots (things desert cities have in abundance, i used to live in phoenix for a time). here we can do hydro because we got the terrain and the rivers, solar is not worth it, and were not industrialized enough to need nuclear. there are locations where wind is reliable enough to be a 95% solution. they are not everywhere. if we are still keeping power supply as close to demand as possible, then we need to be flexible to local conditions. unless we seriously upgrade the carrying capacity of the grid, this is the best way to do it. keep in mind i am strongly pro nuclear. its a solution that is near 100% green, near 100% reliable, and can be placed practically anywhere there is water. its extremely useful for baseload. this may be a us vs europe thing. europe is more densely populated than the us, and the transmission losses get bad for long power line runs. we got a lot of different climates with different amounts of free energy available.

i figure if we every blow ourselves up in some global thermonuclear war, humans will suffer, survive and for a time it will be a harsh lesson. one that will slowly be forgotten as time goes by. there are many other failure modes though. we had to have two world wars to learn that lesson, and here we are forgetting that and acting like they did before it all started. they stuck around a little longer than the ones learned in subsequent proxy wars. must be proportional to scale. the final lesson we learn will be "schools out, you flunked".

hydro is useful because it comes with built in storage and can be deeply throttled. it also doesn't have the problems with thermal stress. we use mostly hydro power in southeast and south central alaska. it can on small scales cover 100% of your bases. we have the misfortune of living a couple blocks from the diesel backup generator. its used rarely, they shake it down twice a year do maintenance and let it run for a few days, more often than they use it for emergency power.

i think that diverse energy generation options are for the better. putting all the eggs in one basket is a recipe for disaster. solar is good for covering daytime peaks, but all night storage is a non starter. what we call storage is more akin to a smoothing capacitor in a switch power supply. fly wheel on an engine is another analogy. it buys time to adjust the slow throttling plants (in these examples, milliseconds). the amount of time grid storage is good for is minutes to hours. useful as a grid management tool, but little more. nuclear is useful for power that is always required. it is very reliable and very green. its the tortoise to fossil fuel's hare. wind is the cheshire cat (or any cat for that matter), it does what it wants and doesn't make any sense. show me someone who thinks wind and only wind is a good idea, and i will show you the hookah smoking caterpillar who you most certainly dont want managing your energy infrastructure. i guess that makes solar rip van winkle, hydro john henry, and geothermal are the seven dwarves. fusion is the fairy godmother. getting all those fairy tail architypes to play nice is the hard part.

Oppenheimer.