Aren’t all the people getting in trouble for downloading music and movies from file sharing sites it bittorrent getting charged (or threat there of) with theft?
Anyone that is genuinely interested in doing this should move north.
I moved to the Yukon in 2011, I know dozens of yukoners and Alaskans living off grid. Decades without buying meat or vegetables, building their own log cabins, etc.
One lady I met in her 50s had just worked as a cook in a mining camp for 8 weeks, and she was disappointed - that was the most she had ever worked in a year.
Unless there is some sort of magic we have missed I would venture to guess that to become species capable of interstellar travel you need certain scale of industry. And scale of that industry is most likely colossal.
Just energy inputs to get to orbit are somewhat significant. Any sort of mega-structures to bypass chemical rockets are certainly colossal. Just technology you would expect has rather large foot print even if space was only singular thing being done.
> Just energy inputs to get to orbit are somewhat significant.
You only think that because you had the misfortune to be born down a deep gravity well. While that's the only kind of life we have evidence for, doesn't mean that's the only kind of life which can occur.
Sentients who evolved inside or on the surface of an asteroid would maybe think that getting to orbit is just a careless hop away.
That being said I agree with the general idea that any alien entity who visits us has likely went through industrialisation and related destruction.
Gravity is a pretty major benefit for the development of complex life, because low gravity cannot form an atmosphere, and without an atmosphere, radiation would cause massive problems for early lifeforms. As bad as radiation is for existing life on Earth's surface today, I imagine it would be far worse for complex macromolecules to form when getting bombarded with radiation constantly. Temperature is also a problem without an atmosphere- you would tend to have extreme temperature cycles. Not insurmountable, but definitely more difficult to make it work. Given the sheer unlikelihood of life developing in the first place even in fairly good conditions like on Earth, I feel like it's a lot less likely on an even harsher environment like an asteroid.
The unforseen consequences of progress? Nobody thought cars would be bad for the environment when they were inventing them. Heck, 5 years ago nobody was thinking seriously about AI having the potential to exterminate us.
> What sci-fi of the 1950s was showing world of environmental collapse - not nuclear war, not overpopulation.
Maybe not the 1950s, but in the 1960s it became a well established trope. J G Ballard and Frank Herbert in particular lean heavily on themes of environmental destruction
> Heck, 5 years ago nobody was thinking seriously about AI having the potential to exterminate us.
That's just not true. Nick Bostrom published "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies" 12 years ago. The book is clear evidence that people were very much seriously thinking about the potential dangers of AI.
It has been pretty clear for a while that we have the potential to exterminate ourselves. That we might use AI to do it now is an implementation detail.
What? Have you not seen the Terminator series (starting in 1984) or some derivative of it (Terminator Zero - 2024)?
The really sad and shocking thing about AI's threat to humanity, is it feels like the obvious warning in the movie(s) was ignored, while certain people are using the movie plot as a guideline for how to carry out human extinction.
Possibly, but how do you think you could build a spacefaring civilization without doing what we did?
I don’t really understand people who look at the world as it is, and think there’s a high possibility it could have evolved in a different way than it did. Like, we have an existence proof for one path through the tree of possibilities. For the others, we have only speculation.
Solar plus battery and some wind now beats everything else by such a wide margin it boggles my mind we’re even still talking about, or contemplating anything else.
By the time you finish reading this, solar panels got cheaper
Only in some regions that’s enough. A lot of regions have winters where solar output is greatly diminished and wind can stop for days. Batteries are too expensive to store electricity for days to weeks. On top of that you have higher demand if you have electrified space heating.
PV making sense and PV+batteries being enough are two different things though. I have 10 kW on my roof as well here in Germany, in winter there’s not enough sun for heating with a heat pump though.
I think this is a reasonable question -- not a simple deflection. To get more sustainable builds (that people/voters can accept), I think we need a compromise for new major data centers (~250MW+). If you want to build a new major data center, it needs to paired with power production that is near zero carbon. Example: Solar + battery + wind + nat-gas peaker (rarely used). If not possible to build the required solar farm near the data center, then electrical grid interconnect upgrades need to be "fairly" shared (how is debatable).
Physical footprint fits in limited available space, well understood turnkey commercial off the shelf solution, and lack of grid scale flexibility/redundancy to best exploit available capacity at different times of day/year.
Indeed. And the problem with grid connections is that the grid can't carry arbitrary streams of energy. So you can't just connect a bunch of remote panels to the grid and YOLO it on the scale of the large datacenters.
This problem does not go away, though. It's still an issue for renewable generation, especially for northern areas.
Because behind-the-meter generation bypasses many municipal permitting processes and now also skips NEPA review. As diesel keeps climbing it'll get more expensive to truck fuel in and you'll start to see operators begging for the grid connections they scoffed at before.
Is there actually evidence of them scoffing at grid connections, or merely being realistic that the grid connection takes a lot of time to establish, so the jet turbines are the "right now" solution while they wait for the grid connection permitting bureaucracy to take its time.
Grid connection permits don't take as much time as, for instance, real natural gas turbines, which currently have a three to five year lead time. The jet turbines are the "right now" solution while they wait for those. While it's possible some jet-powered datacenters have some grid tie permits in process, I have so far found none. Permit applications are public record almost anywhere, so it's not tough to check
Humanity actually has millennia of experience with solar energy, we just call it agriculture. Plants literally are natural solar panels. And you know what all this experience tells us? It varies from place to place, like, a lot. In some places it works nice and in some places it just doesn't.
It needs two things: sun and water. Water has been solved and California is doing pretty great, don't you think? Let's take a look at another example: I live in the Netherlands and I like having berries with breakfast. Blueberries, strawberries, raspberries, all kinds of them. And you can buy them all year round in any supermarket, but just for a few months in summer they will have a proud label "made in the Netherlands". Plants had hundreds of millions of years of evolution, millennia of human selection, and still growing berries is not viable here for most of the year. Maybe we will start producing electricity in Morocco and shipping it here one day, just like berries, but producing it domestically using solar will never be effective
Wow, that is wild. Can you imagine the logistics required to pick a berry in South Africa or Peru, then deliver it (by air?) to the Netherlands? Unbelievable. It could make an amazing YouTube video/documentary. To be fair, I'm not here to point the finger at you. I also love to eat berries year-round, including when the are not in season. I am always blown away when I see from where they come!
But the volume of solar panels you'd need and especially the volume of batteries you'd need don't exist, nor is the supply there for anything but a gradual build-out.
I put 7.2kw on my roof in Canada. Tight valley, tons of snow.
You know what I learned about all the projections and estimates?
It’s a complete waste of time .
Panels are so cheap now just slap up as many as will physically fit and get on with it. Everything else is a waste of time.
Over their 25+ year lifespan I’ll profit $25k-$30k.
It’s the no brainer of all time.
As soon as my garage build is done I’ll cover that roof in another 8kw of panels too.
I am just astonished, I haven't been following the cost evolution of solar panels, but, as I have quite some tree canopy for our house, I left the the installation of panels to "later", I ran the calculations today for a city in Germany.
- Took the cost of a complete system from a big provider + 30% for the installation.
- Ran the calculations using the JRC tool[0] recommended in the previous comment.
- Added 75% loss because of the tree canopy.
I am still 2 to 3 times cheaper per kWh than my current provider. I would have no trees etc., I would be about 10 times cheaper!
Doing a quick calculation, PV panels are about €50/m2. Putting regular roof tiles on there costs about €30/m2. In other words: we've reached a point where it almost makes economic sense to put them on there even if you leave them disconnected!
If you aren't putting solar panels on your roof, you're (literally) burning money. Pretty much all of the cost is in getting someone to install them.
I don’t think so under historical English common law. If you lift a finger to help, i think so. If you see everything with no aid whatsoever, I don’t think so
Curiously predates US law, it’s old English common law still operating as a principle
While europeans tend to celebrate engines/cars designed for the rich, Americans tend to celebrate engines/cars designed for everyone. Accounting for inflation, the car those engines came in (the 1969 Buick GS 400) sold for ~$30k in today's dollars. For comparison a similarly powerful 1969 Aston Martin DBS V8 sold for the equivalent of $126k today.
I was into the PUA thing, and I disagree the comment above is that.
The PUA scene was about gamifying or exploiting dating - hacking how you go about it for your own gains (getting laid)
Approaching women in public with good intentions and to feel more comfortable talking to women is not PUA. It’s one of the suggested things to do, but I think intentions matter a lot.
Maybe not how the term is used now, or for the last few years, but there's been several waves of it with very different styles.
After Neil Strauss "The Game" almost destroyed several of the early exploitative PUA companies, many of them survived by refocusing on "softer", more self-improvement focused material. You'd find "old school" PUA companies like Real Social Dynamic[1] suddenly pushing exercise, meditation, and other self-improvement focused programs alongside their old routine-based pickup bullshit.
The comment above fits into that era, I think - on one hand there's language that fit right into some of that eras PUA mindset, on the other hand it's mostly arguing for the "softer" self-improvement stuff.
I agree with you that the intentions matter a lot, though. But I think the comment above would've gone down a lot better if worded differently...
[1] RSD later totally imploded after a campaign targeting one of their trainers - Julien Blanc, who pushed the exploitative angle to dizzying new heights.
RSD was one of the few "big" ones. Most of the others seems to have been single-person enterprises focused around a single coach. They ran a large message board and a had a bunch of coaches before it blew up.
The crazy thing is RSD has resurfaced since I wrote that comment and they don't seem to have learned a thing since their last implosion (I was on their mailing list briefly around 15 years ago, until I realised how creepy a lot of their material was, and clearly I didn't manage to get off it, as I got an e-mail about their relaunch)
I'd recommend picking up Neil Strauss' "The Game" - it gives a first hand account of how Strauss embedded himself in that scene in general and RSD in particular, and it's bizarre. Strauss' actually started his own PUA business after the success of that book.
I'd also recommend "Nine Ball: Confessions of an Angst-Ridden Maniac Who Decided to Get Laid or Die Trying" by Jeff Allen. Jeff Allen was one of the RSD coaches that was described in The Game, so it's very much biased. But if you take it as the slightly self-delusional autobiography it is, it's quite fascinating.
It doesn’t matter if it’s $10B or $59, more is more
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