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2117 revisited

Where are we going to be, a century from now?

Let's go back and chew on this old bone again--from a different angle.

Let me first eliminate from discussion a bunch of possible outcomes I'm not interested in examining. Total human extinction could happen in a variety of ways, ranging from wars over access to scarce resources (idiotic, but it's something humans have prior form for), to plagues, to the collapse of agricultural viability on a global scale due to climate change, sudden catastrophic collapse of unrecognized critical infrastrcture (e.g. the single factory in Bangladesh that makes the cheap quantum computer chips everyone uses to get around the central planning problem is taken out by a Cat-6 Typhoon: this causes a cascading loss of efficiency in global supply chains, leading to ...) to an asteroid mining operation gone horribly wrong. But scenarios in which everyone is dead are not currently interesting to me, as a fiction writer.

Let's also ignore transport technology, Mars colonization, climate change, the shift to non-carbon energy sources and distribution, how the hell the west will survive the shift to robotic labour (I'm assuming that by 2117 we'll have robots that can make a good stab at changing the bed linen, which is just about the acme of low-paid but algorithmically intractable jobs right now). I mean, if we're currently hearing billionaires discussing the merits of a universal basic income system, I think that tells us where the SS Titans of Capitalism is trying to steer to avoid the iceberg ...

What new fun things can I project that are both plausible, likely, and didn't feature in my earlier prognostication set a century out?

Everyone's currently focussed on anthropogenic climate change and the in-progress mass extinction. Despite the odd attempt at resurrecting extinct charismatic megafauna, the folks focussing on de-extinction of mammoths aren't talking about raising the ghosts of mammoth lice and mammoth tapeworms; only bits of the gone-away biosphere are up for revival, like preserving the frontage of a 19th century building embedded in a modern glass-and-steel office cube. Similarly, there's another extinction event going on quietly in the background: languages are vanishing, and to the extent that we can only reason about things we have words for, this may be a subtle but far-reaching loss. In fact, language is just one aspect of human culture, and what's going on in the background is a mass extinction event of variant human cultures,and their replacement by a handful of global mega-cultures. From here in the west it's easy to point the finger at Arab/Sunni islam as a rival (perceived as hostile) culture; but there's a state-supported marketing push behind it, and it's not the only one: fish don't notice the water they swim in, and our own culture is also aggressively expansionist. (Note: justifying the western free market/capitalist hegemonic system on the grounds that it brings prosperity is all very well, but it only brings prosperity to the survivors: and since 2007 it has increasing brought prosperity to an ever-smaller elite at the very apex while conditions stagnate or decline for everyone else.)

So here's a projection: by 2117, there's going to be a marked decline in the diversity of ideological and social systems in which we live, brought about by faster communications and the forced spread of the most aggressive societies. The apex societies will be mixed at ground level--there will be plenty of places where followers of religion A rub shoulders with members of economic system B--but they're still hegemonic ideologies, and there will be friction where they rub up against each other. There's also going to be a decline in the number of languages spoken: the main world languages will be down to English, Mandarin, Spanish, and some dialect of Arabic (Arabic is highly fragmented), plus surviving secondary languages with large bodies of adherents (over a hundred million each: for example German, Russian, Japanese).

We're also going to see the widespread deployment of deep learning driven machine translation and, most importantly, near-real-time interpretation. There'll be less reason for a native speaker of an apex language to learn other tongues simply because such a language gives direct access to over a billion other people and translation between apex languages will be at least as accurate as translation between English and Donald Trump speeches at this time.

And the apex languages will have changed considerably.

This goes beyond picking up new vocabulary (imagine a time traveller from 1917 trying to follow a discussion about viewing youtube videos of cruise missile strikes on ISIS positions in Syria on iPhones: the grammatical structure is accessible but a lot of the noun parts cannot be clarified without a dizzying deep dive into unimagined-in-1917 new technologies). Let's consider English--which I expect will still be around as a trade language, at least, simply because it's already so widespread. We're already seeing a shift towards simplified spelling (as practied in the US dialect) and towards abandonment of some punctuation forms; the semi-colon may be on the way out, as is the plural apostrophe, just as a number of characters used in old English (the thorn or "y"-like character, for example) vanished. More controversially English: is going to acquire a new writing system. Not all languages use a single alphabet; consider Japanese, with its eclectic mixture of syllabaries (hiragana and katakana), logographic ideograms (kanji), and romanji (roman alphabet, mostly used for loan words), not to mention arabic numerals. English currently has about three main writing systems (if we exclude shorthand notations, now a dying form, and Braile): we have roman block lettering in upper and lower case, we have arabic numerals, and we have cursive handwritten forms (also now slowly dying out). But a fourth English form is rapidly emerging in the shape of emoji, which I think are best viewed as a secondary ideographic written form optimised for visually dense text on display devices. Emoji are pared down and lack a bunch of the characteristics we associate with English grammar such as tenses and punctuation and verb conjugation ... but that's not what they're for. I suspect that over the next century (assuming we don't lose our technological infrastructure) current mechanisms for writing will be supplanted by newer ones--e.g. the replacement of discrete mechanical keys on keyboards with multitouch keyboards and then with gestural/swipe interfaces, where each dictionary word is replaced by a directional ideogram swiped across a QWERTY keymap, until eventually the ideogram replaces the alphabetic word or is auto-replaced by a corresponding emoji.

So: gradual obsolescence of some grammatical forms, appearance of entire new writing systems, unforseen changes due to the vagaries of machine translation, assimilation of loan words from other cultures, and the 2117 equivalent of "don't drone me, bro" (new shorthand to describe stuff that has become the new normal).

What am I overlooking?

985 Comments

1:

If you're positing Mandarin as one of the major languages, you should probably also posit Hindi/Urdu?

2:

Early breaking of "Lent" to ask if you know the plot behind the TV show, "Fortitude." I know you probably have not watched it, but it gets a lot of discussion in some SF circles; so you might know the premise.

SPOILER

What if we accidentally de-extincted a parasite, but not the mammoth.

3:

Emojis as a (limited) universal language? I long pre-date the emoji generation, but as I understand it they're not just a phenomenon in English. Perhaps we'll have people with no common spoken language communicate by sending emojis to each others AR devices.

Now that I think about it, I believe Greg Bear had this in "Eon", with characters 'picting' at each other.

4:

Speaking in emoji has already been proposed by Greg Bear in Eon, where the society wears a device which holographically projects pictograms. And the Swype keyboard already proposes substituting an emoji of words that match the descriptions. You're stuck in near-future.

But no warp drives, and I'm guessing you're through with uploading brains, so... what about med-tech? If we don't upload ourselves (perhaps religion finds it deplorable), will we build cyborg bodies around brains propped up with chemicals to slow their decay? Will mostly-meat people be lower class citizens?

5:

Total surveillance of everyone?

Also will any interfaces between people and machines be purely under the user control?

6:

I can see two things. One is a bit complicated, so I need to compose a response.

The other I mentioned in "We get mail (contd.)" #627. The social changes caused by the above will be immense, and the only precedent from history that I can see is an extremely nasty slave state, with a miniscule 'aristocracy'. And one of the characteristics of that sort of state is that progress (ANY progress) more or less comes to a halt. That carries on either until the rot of time leads to a bloody revolution that creates a (temporarily) even worse society, or it is hit by an outside context problem in which case it simply crashes and burns.

While I can see alternatives, they all lie in directions almost directly away from the one we are heading in.

7:

You answered the question I had: Would fast and accurate automated translation make learning another language unecessary? Now picturing students and teachers with earpieces doing translation for them. Yeah, yeah, business people too.

Then had a thought about insular groups, like Hassidim, who use another language among themselves. But not a fully formed thought, or queston at the moment.

And it's Romaji (and Braille, though that's an excusable typo). /pedantry. Apologies.

8:

No way. Yes, they could form a language - reversing thousands of years of progress in one fell swoop - but no way are they cross-cultural. Look at the utter bafflement faced by people from even the same culture faced with the hieroglyphs that are used to operate domestic and other machinery (electronic or not) if they have not seen them before. Look at how long it took to decode Egyption hieroglyphs, Linear B and others, even with suitable alternative text.

9:

I think we could see the opposite of what it sounds like you're predicting. With computer-mediated communication we could see an increasing balkanization of language into multiple dialects. Seamless computer translation of written and spoken word could mean that you don't need to speak the proper version of your own language -- for example, you could be listening to a person with a thick African American dialect speaking and have it translated into your local Mumbai English dialect without giving it a second thought. You could also the the collapse of functional literacy -- maybe you only read ideograph, but luckily your "computer" automatically translates everything into emoji for you.

Along with this we could have a fragmentation of culture. It is becoming increasingly easy to filter out content you don't like and avoid people who are different than you online. The next step would be to have automatic modification and censorship of communications and content you are exposed to. You could make it so that you and your children are literally unable to be exposed to racist comments, or things that contradict your religion, etc. Rather than being government driven like some dystopian settings predict, this would be entirely self-imposed and market driven.

10:

Well, the transference of Chinese script to Japan shows that you kinda/sorta could have a written language that was intelligible to people who did not necessarily speak the same spoken languages. In practice that did not stay the case, the transferred characters rapidly mutate to accommodate the needs of the second language. But in theory all languages could be written in one (massively simplified) script.

11:

Feels like there's almost a second category of language that emoji would fall into. A parallel language that is technology-driven and hyper-evolutionary. Emoji's will include animated emojis soon, as well as .gifs and then 3D objects you can manipulate or VR environments, or shared neural patterns that have gained consensus as having 'meaning' with certain subgroups... etc.

I just can't see emoji or anything like it get enough traction to be formalized before it mutates into something vastly different.

12:

IF (and it's a big if) we follow Charlie's thoughts on development of global languages I would expect English to push out Urdu and probably Hindi. 40% of Indians speak Hindi as a first language; if you are a non Hindi-speaker is Hindi or English a better choice for a second language in a global world? Meanwhile although most Pakistanis speak Urdu, only about 10% have it as a first language.

India is big enough that it could sustain itself as a Hindi speaking nation even under the pressures that Charlie notes above, but English is already widely used there and it seems unlikely it would become less popular. So I would expect there to still be wide Hindi-speaking areas in India but that it would be losing ground outside it's current heartlands.

13:

Getting to there from here is going to be dodgy. Is that in the permitted discussion-list?

I agree with Elderly Cynic in that a "slave" society is entirely possible, but I don't think it will happen without enormous repression & bloodshed. Look at the internal reactions even Putin is now getting as he continues to overstep. Goat-fucker Erdogan may ( I hope) lose his vote, f'rinstance. A half-baked WW III, initiated by Trumphelm ( see previous thread ) would royally screw things. Agree that society & all societies will be very different. Just look at 1917 or 1817 for evidence. I think that's the question Charlie is asking ( Is it? ) But you cannot also rule out vast societal changes wrought by technology - again see 1817 / 1917 / 2017.

14:

If you're positing Mandarin as one of the major languages, you should probably also posit Hindi/Urdu?

A very large number of people who speak Hindi/Urdu also speak English, albeit a slightly weird version thereof, where you 'do the needful and revert'.

It would be fairly easy to see English replacing Hindi as a culturally neutral Common Language.

15:

Regarding the mass extinction of languages, I think the real question determining if they are going to survive is how many speakers and what kind of opportunities (for work and education) are available for native speakers. This implies that survivability is closely tied with how rich the native speakers are. The strength of their national identity also plays a significant role.

If the majority of native speakers are able to get an education and work in their native tongue, I doubt the language will die out anytime soon, because most natives can live out their lives without really needing another language.

In European terms, I think a language like Icelandic (~300.000 speakers) is very likely to still be around in a century and be the dominant language spoken in Iceland.

16:

Where did you get the idea that I wasn't expecting enormous repression and bloodshed from? 'They' have already started making the legal changes to enable those.

17:

It could go the other way: learning languages is now a lot easier than it used to be, and if we actually have more leisure time, language could become a hobby. My fluency in German is much better than it was ten years ago, and the reason is that I have access to better tools for practicing, and to as much German-language media as I can consume.

I suspect more people are learning Danish than were ten years ago, and that's a fairly obscure language: the reason to learn it is to enjoy TV shows acted in Danish, and to enjoy the ability to understand what the actors are saying in that delightfully strange-sounding language. So it could well be that languages that don't have much media available will be the ones that fade.

Of course, this assumes that we don't wind up in some sort of slave dystopia, but honestly, I wish we'd spend more effort imaging ways to get to non-dystopian futures. There have been times in human history when things have gotten massively better, rather than massively worse. Why can't 2117 be one of those times?

18:

Not to be obvious, but fields with names beginning with bio- are advancing rapidly, show no signs of slowing, and clearly have a long way to go. In 2117 CRISPR-Cas9 will have had more than a century to do its stuff, and other powerful techniques will very likely have appeared. (I suspect that the new deep-learning AI is going to impact genetic analysis sooner rather than later.)

And since words beginning with med- are closely linked with the bio- ones, there will be that.

19:

each dictionary word is replaced by a directional ideogram swiped across a QWERTY keymap, until eventually the ideogram replaces the alphabetic word or is auto-replaced by a corresponding emoji

While I think that your thoughts go into the generally right direction, I think you are vastly overestimating the rate of change. 2117 is only hundred years from now. QWERTY dates back to 1868 and is still the dominant input method.

20:

I'm guessing you're through with uploading brains

I'm not convinced uploading brains is impossible, but I'm pretty sure it's not easy, either ... and doing so while retaining personality/memories may be very difficult unless we grow the brains from scratch around some sort of interface hardware (from the embryonic neural tube onwards). Oh, and think about the implications of antibiotic resistance for implanted brain interfaces!

21:

If we see the development of automated video editing software sufficient to alter lip movements then combined with voice translation we may see a flood of media from non-anglophone countries worldwide.

Currently TV, film and new media like twitch/YouTube are very regional outside of English language (with notable Japanese exceptions). If it becomes quick and easy to adapt media on the fly for other languages in a way that doesn't compromise on quality then many smaller cultures could have an influence on the increasingly global megaculture.

22:

Total surveillance of everyone isn't 2117; it's 2027, or maybe even 2017 depending on how much surveillance you want.

23:

Think about metadata -- each emoji has an underlying concept. You could have culture specific emoji that mean the same thing just displayed differently. Displays would just show the ones appropriate to the viewer.

Though there's nothing really preventing pan-cultural emoji. Chinese characters can be used by multiple languages, for example.

24:

I think it may well be possible to "record" brains long before we can do anything with them. Emulation will probably come next, with a lot of debate over whether or not they are real conscious minds, and how accurate the emulation is. Downloading them into new living brains and starting them up again seems like a much more distant problem. (Though I suppose if you could completely record the physical state of a brain and had bioprinters capable of that level of detail you could print a copy....)

25:

It's possible we could see the abandonment of both visual and aural interfaces in favor of gnostic ones. Direct links to whatever sort of computing devices then have 100 years, with your thoughts translated into action, and knowledge appearing fully formed in your brain rather than being communicated to you indirectly.

For example, rather than reading or hearing about life in 2017 you would just know whatever you needed to know about living 2017. Or a step further, wake up with simulated memories of someone who lived in 2017. Or a bit more simple -- you need to know how to get to the airport while on vacation, instead of looking it up and following directions you just suddenly know how to get there.

26:

What might prove difficult about personality uploads is how we present different aspects of ourselves depending on relationships and circumstance, all variations on a theme, but each one a problem to solve. Early adopters are liable to be boring.

27:

If the EU is still in business in 2117 wil they still be translating everything into their core languages? French is still pretty widely spoken in some of its former colonies and you can assume that the Acadamie will still be banging on about words from foreign languages being used.

28:

If two cultures have equivalent concepts, they are the same culture.

29:

You need to make a gesture towards how climate change got solved to make this scenario work.

I'm not specifying HOW that gets solved, but since it involves a profound shift in infrastructure, the consequences are going to ripple out.

For example, electric cars don't appear to have the range or volume of gas cars (barring some miraculous battery that's as energy dense as gas), and this in turn means that most US and other cities built since 1900 are going to have to be radically restructured to accommodate either electric cars or their substitutes (bikes, trains, whatever). As a result, there will be a lot of young infrastructure around, particularly in the US, Australia, China, and India.

No one's going to solve the one meter of sea level rise, because that's pretty much already locked in, even if we get fusion power tomorrow. At a minimum, there are going to be Bangladeshis, southern Chinese, (and Floridians) everywhere, or rather their second and third generation descendants.

So that's a lot of people moved around. Various languages (Benghali, Cantonese) are going to be spoken by dwindling pools of expats, car culture will be tweaked to dead (note the changes from the loss of 19th Century horse culture), so that's a not of new words and phrases to evolve. What will replace "you're driving me nuts?."

Politically, I suspect that the wave of ultra-wealth concentration will break and reverse. Yes, this is utopian, but the fundamental problem we've got right now is that we're spending too much time and effort listening to Gates, the Koch Boys, Musk, and so on. These days, you've got to please a rich person to get anything done, and at least some wealthy people think, without hard data to back them up, that they can individually solve problems better than can, say, ten thousand college graduates tackling the same problems from different angles (crowdsourcing, marketplace of ideas, ad nauseum). I think that we get collectively stupider when wealth is collected, because the prejudices and half-baked ideas of the wealthy get far too much weight, and drown out the ideas of other people who actually know what's going on. What Gates did with teaching is a great example of this.

So, if we're wand-waving away climate change, because, say, solar, wind, and fusion made the fossil fuel industries dry up and blow away by 2030, I'd add also that the only way this could have happened is if the megacorps and billionaires got broken up in some sort of global jubilee, freeing up people to roll out the solutions that these brontosaurs had been squelching by their sheer presence.

Would that work?

30:

"Total surveillance of everyone?"

I'm going to say that is a given, but I would phrase it differently: "Spaceship-like living conditions"

For there to be a relevant 2117 in the first place, a number of human behaviours and technologies will have to be controlled or at least monitored very tightly by relevant agencies.

My prediction is that by 2117 it will be an established fact and fundamental attitude amongst the survivors, that we are all together in the only space-worthy vehicle we will ever have.

The process is already well started and ironically the IT-libertarians on HackerNews with their "encrypt everything" dogma seem to be the last subculture to get the point.

For instance, in all the privacy-brouhaha about governments collecting travellers data and monitoring peoples geographical position via mobile phones, nobody seem to pay much attention to WHO's need to be able to find out who might have exported the latest virus from outbreak A to metropolis B (A non-killer case for surveillance if there ever was one.)

And that would be the easy case: CRISPR and undoubtedly similar future advances are where the real fun starts.

Just like you are not allowed to practice fireworks or big game hunting on a spaceship and just like you are currently not allowed to practice nuclear fission on this spaceship, CRISPR and its ilk will have to be reined in.

But trying to limit the damage potential of CRISPR by force would make the current nuclear non-proliferation regime look like a Barbie Plastic Picket Fence.

We can argue how feasible that is, but the only alternative would be to make it a global taboo, to the point where your mother will actually, literally kill you, and be thanked rather than punished for it, if she finds petri dishes in your sock-drawer.

We have not even managed that with canibalism, much less getting your sister or daughter pregnant.

31:

This is my other point. First, a diversion, though it's relevant. We shall NOT be seeing a 'singularity' - that's mathematical nonsense, because no mere super-exponential increase will lead to one. None of the following describes a point in time at which everything changes.

Let's skip the defects in the P/NP/etc. model, and note practical AI programs are WAY beyond our ability to analyse, and almost certain to remain so for the next millennium, let alone century. Indeed, Goedel's work and some other branches of mathematics give us grounds to believe that they will be for all time. While I could defend this, and point out some defects in the claims to the contrary, I won't.

The result is that AI programs will have emergent behaviours that are beyond our ability to analyse. This is seriously compounded by the modern approach of replacing programming from the ground up, and the full understanding of programs, but composing existing, 'tested-by-use' programs. Already, it is common for the world experts on some important components to be unable to explain some of the emergent effects, or even give directions about how to chase them down. And you ain't seen nothin' yet, folks!

The days of actually fixing (or even locating) non-trivial bugs are long gone, and have been largely replaced by making changes or adding layers so that the bug does not appear in the cases that 'matter'. Also note the increasing use of fixing problems by changing specifications and even contracts - yes, some do (effectively) say "thou shalt not cause our software to misbehave". Several decades ago, I said that computing was ceasing to be a mathematical/engineering discipline and rapidly becoming something closer to animal or plant breeding. A rather eminent computer scientist regretfully agreed that I had a point!

At present, when the existing automation starts misbehaving too badly, there are humans higher up the decision tree who can (in theory) order other humans to get in and do something. Let's ignore the fact that an increasing amount of such work is outsourced to the lowest bidder, who employ the cheapest programmers that they can find. But even that's changing. One of the major interests in AI is for metaprograms that take a requirement and build a program to solve it, out of existing, 'tested-by-use' programs. And there is increasing interest in automating the debugging, (commercial) decision and planning processes, too ....

Sooner or later, if we head down this path, we are going end up having a critical AI system start misbehaving in a serious or incomprehensible way, be unable either to replace or 'fix' it, and have to rely on another AI system to decide what is the 'best' way out of that hole. At that point, may the Eschaton help us.

32:

Will a given language be shaped by its ability to translate?

The translation process will certainly be completely automated, at least for the 'printed' word. I would assume that our contacts or glasses will throw up a HUD with sub-titles, if we don't have a more direct-to-brain interface.

If you know your day-to-day words are going to be translated across the big 6 languages, presumably you structure your text to avoid ambiguous nuances. Over time, does this cause a decline in the use of subtle phrases? Perhaps for everyday speech, we end up with a fairly simple public-language punctuated with emojis to convey limited nuance. Twitter may be a great predictor of this, if they attempt to implement a language translator.

Another side of this is industry specific lingo, which will never die. Public-speak may rule social conversation, but there will be industry specific translator packs for technical chatter forums.

33:

Ok, we're postulating survival.

Capitalism is gone. People will kill you for saying you want to make a profit, and if the recording -- of course there is a recording -- is clear that, yeah, you said that, it will be legal. (Profit as a success metric is still around, but it's not called that; it might be called social efficiency or something. What it's called is probably the single biggest short hint about specific outcomes available.)

Biotech is inescapable; it's replaced pesticides at a minimum. But it's also cheap and lightweight and the plagues were really, really bad. Population is way down; two billion or so. Cities are "a concentration of robot activity"; humans can't form cities. Travel is rare and horribly expensive because there's a four-month quarantine process. Wet sex with other humans is rare; xenogamy of the form of passionately romantic interactions over the comms systems followed by exchange of digitized genomes is doing good things for human diversity. So is biotech; there are an awful lot of hair and eye colours there didn't used to be.

Robots are mining the cities away prior to their inundation. There's a lot of areas re-wilding because you can't go there; various clever people used insects and soil organisms as "animal reservoirs" for their (self-modifying) plagues. Biologists are having a field day but using drones.

Central control is weak; the robots don't actually care what humans want in many cases. Small human settlements can keep themselves fed, and trade, and communicate -- there's a lot of really good art out there; the ability for an individual to produce art has never been greater -- as long as one bunch of robots will talk to them. Most have several; robots specialize. There's a big fussy social issue about how much robot ecosystem the planet can take. Humans haven't got anything the robots want; human-robot economic interaction is because the robots are in a much better position to move stuff around.

"Computer viruses", broadly constructed, are maybe a problem among robots. Humans don't do that, in part because they can't, effectively, and in part because it makes the robots angry.

34:

Another interesting question is the question of autonomous robotic soldiers.

The option of having a 100% loyal soldier that always follows orders, always acts within the scope of whatever law it is programmed to follow, never acts in anger, never has any remorse and can be turned off when the fighting is done is quite alluring to autocrat and democrat alike.

For the autocrat, using soldiers against a civil uprising is quite dangerous as soldiers may refuse to fight or even join the uprising. With modern communication technology it is also harder than before to control the flow of information to the soldiers. And there is always the danger of a group of officers conspiring to make a coup. However, it also means that whoever controls the robots will also be in power. This is potentially a single point of failure that a human army not would have. On top of the internal dissent (e.g. from an disgruntled sys-admin) there is also the problem of outsiders hacking the control servers.

The democrat can use the robot soldiers to argue that the bombs are indeed humanitarian as the robots could be programmed to never break the Geneva convention and always take care not to damage civilians. Lowering the need to deploy human soldiers and, hence, fewer bodybags and eye witnesses, this could be leveraged to reduce the discomfort of the public to war. The arms industry may also like this notion: If humanitarian safeguards could be put in place, it could make it easier to sell arms to repressive regimes (who could then remove the safeguards).

I would not be surprised if this turns into very real discussions among the higher echelons of our societies well before 2117. My bet would be that most sane leaders would probably keep human soldiers in charge of semi-autonomous robots, but some could end up trying the fully autonomous robots. And would probably fail spectacularly.

Further considerations on this question could be e.g. the emergent behaviours mentioned by Elderly Cynic, programming errors, how strong the humanitarian safeguards are and how easily they can be bypassed (see Asimov's Laws of Robotics), how good the robots actually are at various types of warfare (e.g. bombing from above vs city warfare), disruption of communication with their command server (also applies to semi-autonomous robots).

35:

I think your vision is incomplete in some ways, Charlie. I believe most surfaces will be white, although the sole attire will be colored unisex jumpsuits. People will no longer have names; instead they will be identified by short serial numbers. English will be universally spoken, except that no one will understand the word "love". Occasionally, the population will speak in unison, offering fealty to "Father", who will turn out to be a giant pulsing brain in a jar. Children will be well-behaved and polite, to an unsettling extent.

At least that's what my research suggests.

36:
Seamless computer translation of written and spoken word could mean that you don't need to speak the proper version of your own language -- for example, you could be listening to a person with a thick African American dialect speaking and have it translated into your local Mumbai English dialect without giving it a second thought.

Machine translation depends on published corpuses to "learn" the languages, so minority languages and "non-official" accents will suffer from pre-existing neglect and lack of network effect. The well-known joke about having to impersonate an American accent at any voice recognition device applies...

37:

For example, electric cars don't appear to have the range or volume of gas cars (barring some miraculous battery that's as energy dense as gas

Not actually true in the time frame we're talking about. Tesla are upgrading their original Roadsters (only 500 were made) to a 350 mile battery pack, which for a two-seater sports car is probably about what you'd get from gas. Meanwhile, the higher end Model S is good for 250 miles. And this is using current generation LiION cells; the new lithium-based non-explodey battery that's due to hit the market in the next couple of years (invented by the team led by the guy who got a Nobel prize for inventing our current lithium-ion battery technology, so I'm calling this one a plausible story) is supposed to have up to double the capacity (and charges much faster).

If we're looking at 400-500 miles range and a 1-hour recharge time (after a 6-8 hour drive) then electric cars are pretty reasonably on the same level as gas-burners.

I suspect that the wave of ultra-wealth concentration will break and reverse.

Very likely, IMO — and on a time frame of single-digit years to low-single-digit decades at that. We're at the far end of a reaction against the Great Depression and then reconstruction from WW2 and welfare states; assuming it's a century-long cycle things should begin to re-equillibrate in the next couple of decades. (Too late to help us old farts, but in time to help the next generation before they hit retirement age.)

The one turd in the punchbowl that would block this would be early availability of life prolongation meds; as long as we've got Rupert Murdoch, the Koch Twins, etcetera, we're going to see pushback.

(I'm going to put Musk in a separate bracket from the above. He seems to be playing a very long game, oriented around an SF author's near future concerns — clean energy, climate change, space ...)

38:

Total surveillance is not 2017, it's 1617 with added confession to the local Stasi enforcer every week or else. Even that "right to privacy" in the wishlist of the First Great Treasonous Slaveholder's Revolt of 1776 only applied to their peers, fellow slaveholders and property owners and not to slaves, women and the Irish. The DELUSION of non-surveillance has taken a knock more recently, I must admit.

39:
Think about metadata -- each emoji has an underlying concept. You could have culture specific emoji that mean the same thing just displayed differently.

We already the beginnings of that.

40:

The option of having a 100% loyal soldier that always follows orders, always acts within the scope of whatever law it is programmed to follow, [snip]

I think the at least human-level AI you would need for a robot to act always within the scope of any law would mean quite a lot of other changes, too.

I'm trying to say that laws are very difficult to follow completely, especially in situations which need rapid decisions and which are not clear cut, for example war.

Autonomous robots fighting? Yes. Autonomous robots making decisions which follow the law in combat? Not likely, until that human-level AI.

41:

And I accidentally drop a word in a conversation about the future of language. Excellent. :-/

42:

One big question for 2117: will the internet still exist?

I think we could make a case that it does not. While it's great to do, well, this--communicating freely with people from all over the world, the down-sides are pretty vicious. For one thing, I can be hacked by people from all over the world, and for another, internet companies often seem to focus on maximizing the addictiveness of their technology, not its utility. A lot of countries are cracking down, too, and it's getting ever easier to implement authoritarianism by controlling some local backbone network.

So whether it's China's great rainbow firewall (be happy, not angry! Angry is bad!) or the US launching a War On The Internet that mirrors the War on Drugs, I could see the whole thing falling apart into at best a taxonomy of splinternets in another couple of decades, with the Internet of Things being the first casualty.

However, this does not mean that computer technology won't keep Moore's and Koomey's laws (and other scaling issues) from building ever better technology for another few decades. The end result might be something that would be more recognizable to a 1980s SF writer than to a 2010s one.

Actually, that's another background question: aside from the internet, what's the handwave for when computer technology hits to Moore's Wall, Koomey Wall, and so forth. If it doesn't, by 2117, we'll probably have post singulatarian brains in the picture, and reactionaries will be vandalizing Kurzweil's grave.

43:

With gene editing, brain mapping, brain computer interfaces, etc I'm hoping for my talking dog ala Clifford Simak. But I'd settle for a talking duck ala Sheldon. Along the same lines, does practical telepathy become a technological reality instead of a psionic ability?

44:

the new lithium-based non-explodey battery that's due to hit the market in the next couple of years (invented by the team led by the guy who got a Nobel prize for inventing our current lithium-ion battery technology, so I'm calling this one a plausible story) is supposed to have up to double the capacity (and charges much faster).

Oh dear, another press-release "biggest breakthrough since breakfast" battery story and you fell for it? Charlie, Charlie, Charlie...

The team who put out the vague-details-no-commercial-version press release about this very early supposedly-promising lab demo is led by a 90-year-old figurehead, a distinguished and celebrated scientist who is still 90 years old and still a figurehead. Clarke's Law about elderly and distinguished scientists stands, I believe. As for the press release itself I could dig through the Slashdot archives and pull out multiple similar "biggest breakthrough since breakfast" battery stories issued over a span of a decade and more. The result, after all the breathless hype and anticipation? The Screamliner, the Galaxy Note 7 debacle etc., online shops selling fireproof bags for enthusiasts to transport LiIon battery packs while the battery capacity hasn't improved that much in terms of weight and volume -- the Watt Hours per Kilogram (Wh/kg) figure that rules and limits mobile applications of batteries.

There have been new battery techs that have actually made it to market but their upsides come with downsides -- SCiB from Toshiba has an eye-watering (and connector-melting) recharge rate of 10C i.e. a 2Ah cell can charge to full capacity in 6 minutes at 20A and it can do more than once but it's heavy, not a match in the Wh/kg competition with regular Li-ion and LiPoly technologies. It's also genuinely in the "if you ask the price you can't afford it" section of the catalogue. It's a real thing though, not just a series of PowerPoint slides like nearly all of the other BBSB stories.

45:

...car culture will be tweaked to dead (note the changes from the loss of 19th Century horse culture), so that's a not of new words and phrases to evolve. What will replace "you're driving me nuts?."

I could drive a coach and four through that argument. I won't look a gift horse in the mouth since I've got the whip hand.

Incidently "Driving me nuts" is the punchline to the joke "Why is there steering wheel on your trousers?"

46:

The option of having a 100% loyal soldier that always follows orders...

...is a frequent trope in US fiction, and is (to put it politely), something only desired by those who don't understand the problem. I think I may have mentioned this in a recent thread...

Militaries deal with wicked problems. There is no "correct" answer to many of the issues; and they frequently demand creativity and inventiveness (much of the leadership training is about problem solving, the use of intuition vs. analysis, etc). Most of the issues are people problems, requiring social skills. Most of the time, militaries aren't fighting - and when they do deploy, they increasingly face the "three-block war" (peace support, a few hundred meters from peace enforcement, a few hundred meters from full-on kill-people-and-break-things). I can honestly say that I have never heard an Army Officer declare that he/she'd rather have robots than real soldiers. The closest I've heard is a veiled insult that "they train to man the equipment; we train to equip the man".

47:

I do find it amazing that on the one hand, we have the "watch out for the surveillance state" meme; and on the other hand, the "we'll have universal translators for all!" meme...

...and no-one has put the two together and pointed out that if you've made sure that everything you say goes through a machine or a server farm that (by definition) can be subverted, then "they" won't just know where you are, but everything you ever say...

I can see an increasing use of a subset of English (the Economist had an interesting article a while back about the emergence of "Globish") as a common trade tongue, especially among the security-minded. With the advantage of keeping the translation hardware between your ears.

49:

what's the handwave for when computer technology hits to Moore's Wall, Koomey Wall, and so forth

We're already on the off-ramp from Moore's Law as of a couple of years ago; the doubling of capacity per dollar every two years is now ancient history. (Koomey's Law still has some way to run but is also slowing.)

50:

Of these, looking a gift horse in the mouth is the only thing I think the Youngs would srsly consider using. Like OMG. Still, things like "pedal to the metal," "give it some gas" or "shade tree mechanic" might make little sense a century from now.

As for other slang, probably the biggest wave of new slang terms will likely come from Bengali (cf: the Bangladeshi diaspora). I could be wrong, but I can't think of another country that has so many people that are so vulnerable to climate change, and has so little land to relocate them onto.

Since the Bangladeshis are mostly not Salafist---oh yeah, that's the other thing: Islam's going to change quite a lot over the next 100 years. The biggest reason the Salafists have the megaphone at the moment is that the House of Saud has butt loads of petrodollars. If they dry up and go away, they'll be just another sunshine exporter, hustling to inject solar watts into some grid or other. There are many other Sunnis (including the Bangladeshis) who may stage their own Sunni revival when OPEC goes away. That should be interesting.

51:

As a physicist, your claim that we can only reason about things we have words for strikes me as weird. I'm used to reasoning about nameless concepts all the time. If after doing some work I'm convinced that the concept is in fact interesting, I invent a word for it and publish it in a scientific paper =)

52:

"If we're looking at 400-500 miles range and a 1-hour recharge time (after a 6-8 hour drive) then electric cars are pretty reasonably on the same level as gas-burners."

And a fifth of the price. Prices drop rapidly only when they are high because the only problem is the lack of mass production, and I don't think that is the case here. A Nissan Leaf is more similar to what ordinary people would buy, costs nearly double what my car costs, is much smaller (both for people and luggage) and has a quarter of the range.

53:

Right. The doubling of speed every 2 years stopped about 2003, and was replaced by the doubling of the number of cores - but, unfortunately, that's not where the limits are for most uses.

54:

Haven't read the comments yet, so please excuse if already mentioned ...

Some small yet remarkably successful Western countries have been transitioning from prime capitalism to mixed capitalism-socialism. The US meanwhile is still mostly capitalism but seems to be transitioning to a more mixed religio-capitalism (you will succeed/make more $ if you follow these exact words of ‘God’.) This is exactly the same thing that’s been happening in the MidEast/Saudi influenced nations only the flavor is different. Wahhabism is a fundamentalist sect – same as the most popular gung-ho Christian-flavor sects in the US. So at a very (…erm..) fundamental level, this is a war between brothers. The rationalists and socialists – probably because they are rational and pro-social - are the common targets/victims of both. That’s probably most folk reading your books/blog. (Okay Saudi Arabia has seriously ratcheted up its spending on tertiary education and scientific research in the past 15 years, i.e., ads for profs/post-docs in almost every Nature issue. But seriously – from the ads I recall seeing, their research is tech-focused and engineering oriented and not basic – therefore safe-from/not-a-threat-to-religious or current social structures. )

Re: ‘Decline in religions and languages …’ No and yes. Religions are notorious for spinning off sects … and there’s no minimum size requirement. Just look at the number of registered religions in the US – thousands! – and the majority are plain ol’ X-fundy strains. Think there’s a relationship between number of sects and population, e.g. more versions of Catholicism in India than in any other country. Languages – I’d credit formal schooling with at least as much influence here as near-universal access to tech communications. Consider: education is deemed by pretty well every org as a public good because it’s a very visible measurable public good. More importantly, public education usually correlates with likely future success/prosperity. So, I’d look more closely at how various countries’ public education programs are designed: availability of subjects/courses, textbooks and in-class videos/demos, exams, special-ed and ‘X’-as-a-second-language course availability, etc. Lastly, the language that you most need to learn is the language you work in. So, this means software languages too … and I’ve no idea how this might change ‘cuz that’s not my area.

Emoji’s – IMO, emoji’s are necessary because text has replaced both face-to-face (expressions) and voice (tone, pauses, etc.) communications. Most importantly emoji’s add relevance because a lot of/most interpersonal communication depends on context, that is, emotion conveys which particular meaning is intended. Emoji are this era’s ‘short-hand’ … what we need to convey most quickly and accurately are our feelings ... which says a lot of what we value. (Don’t recall which video but Daniel Dennett has covered emotional context and statement meaning at some point.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Dennett

A question for the linguists … just how many ideas are completely unique to the different languages? One way of keeping at least part of a language alive is to include some of its unique vocabulary … something that English is especially good at.

55:

You didn't mention the addition of machine oriented languages spoken by humans and by machines. English is so difficult to use without ambiguity it might be easier to use a different language when it's paramount there is precision of representation the first time and without feedback.

Further, if you posit general AI (as I would), you'll have the cultures of machines and how they interact with humans.

I know you're focusing mostly on the changes to human culture, but these will reverberate back and forth between machines and humans, changing both in the process.

56:

I'm going to go (slightly) more optimistic and suggest that a combination of biotech, renewable energy and ecological engineering has led to the universal basic calorie being provided as a human right. Biotech will give the human body the ability to synthesise those awkward proteins, vitamins etc that we currently have to eat. A widespread drive towards technology to extract CO2 (and other undesirables like NOx) from the air will initially produce enormous plants sited near cheap energy sources, but ultimately will be miniaturised to something that can be installed in buildings like small wind turbines are today. Food synthesis / cultivation will advance to allow the feedstocks extracted from the air (plus additional supplements for rare minerals) to be made into human-metabolisable food using energy produced from solar / wind sources.

On the negative side, easy access to biotech tinkering equipment has lead to bioengineered plagues deployed by useful idiots aligned to a number of different causes, from radical religion through to anti-globalisation activists trying to shut down transcontinental megacorps. In response, people rarely travel from their state-provided sealed communities, interacting with other communities and working via full immersion A/VR (via direct-brain interface).

The elite (now a small group, almost a separate species with little-to-no social mobility) roam more freely around the globe, protected by state of the art biotech immune systems from local microbes. Emphasis on decision making in person and the courage of the top management in allowing themselves to be exposed to the world helps to keep the lid on a popular revolt, combined with a level of total surveillance worse than could have been imagined before the brain interface was the universal method of working and communicating. A person's conscious and unconscious biases can be measured, then targeted reality programs subtly change the way information is presented to sculpt more complacent personalities.

Well, that was less optimistic than planned...

57:

(barring some miraculous battery that's as energy dense as gas)

The problem is that gas, in this context, doesn't actually have an energy density of its own. It needs help, and lots of it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline#Energy_content

Energy is obtained from the combustion of gasoline by the conversion of a hydrocarbon to carbon dioxide and water. The combustion of octane follows this reaction:

<i>2 C8H18 + 25 O2 → 16 CO2 + 18 H2O</i>

If you add up the octane and oxygen weights, it's 228 of octane plus 800 of externally obtained oxygen, or 1 part gas to 3.5 parts oxygen. That's a pretty big advantage for combustion engines.

Of course, there are metal-air battery concepts around, and maybe one of them will work out and close the gap a bit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal%E2%80%93air_electrochemical_cell

58:

Capitalism is gone. People will kill you for saying you want to make a profit, and if the recording -- of course there is a recording -- is clear that, yeah, you said that, it will be legal.

Disagree. I think it's more likely that some aspects of capitalism will be highly illegal; in particular, making a profit without regard to physical or energy externalities will be close to crimes-against-humanity territory. But it's possible to have a profit-driven capitalist economy that doesn't generate physical externalities if the market in question is virtual: for example, in-game MMO economies are inherently inflationary but don't interact with our "real" economy in terms of corn futures or water. (Electrons, maybe ...) Your point about arts and crafts is a good one and it's possible to support a growth-driven arts sector more or less indefinitely (unless we're talking about physical pyramid-building as opposed to imaginary pyramid-building in cyberspace). Some virtual economies will be illegal, though: Bitcoin, for example, is deflationary and sucks up more and more electricity as you try to mine new coins—this is a pretty obvious environmental no-no.

Biotech is inescapable; it's replaced pesticides at a minimum. But it's also cheap and lightweight and the plagues were really, really bad. Population is way down; two billion or so. Cities are "a concentration of robot activity"; humans can't form cities.

Unsure, tending to disagree. If biotech is inescapable then we may be looking at ubiquitous real-time genome sequencing of the ambient biosphere—a sequencer in every square meter of sidewalk, looking for anomalous fingerprints and running them against a simulated human extended proteome to see if for example it looks likely to trigger a cytokine storm or stealthily infiltrate T helper cells. (This simulation won't happen in the paving stone, but in server farms on the same scale as the ones Facebook currently uses for ambient face recognition in photographs, i.e. tens of millions of cores running highly parallelized algorithms on big data.)

We may also see "cities" as we know them — sprawling, with suburbs — replaced by much denser roofed-over arcologies and groundscrapers for weather/environment protection and, coincidentally, realtime tracking of inhabitants along with aforementioned biosphere threat monitoring. New diseases won't have time to get a toe-hold and spread; they'll either be instantly fatal (thus making sure they're not terribly contagious) or contagious but with lethality deferred long enough under such highly surveilled conditions that tracking down the carriers and forcibly treating them is practical.

Now, inter-city travel might well be slow and punctuated by quarantine sessions at the city gates ... but non-existent? Not so much.

Long haul travel: I suspect sleeper trains may make a big come-back. Subsonic airliners are still practical, as long as the kerosene they're burning is synthetic, but probably not in as wide use as they are today.

Apropos rewilding: I note that the enthusiasm for vertical farming and hydroponics and so on of a couple of years ago has died down a little. It all depends where your energy comes from. We now have high-efficiency daylight spectrum LEDs that can be used for farming indoors. Currently it's mostly of use to folks who want to grow C. sativa, but I can see nuclear/tidal/wind power used to top up solar and power windowless indoor high density farms to supply those cities. Folks who live near the sea are probably going to get used to a variety of products derived in some way from jellyfish, though. (Not as a direct-to-human input, but as feedstock for other food products.)

Robots mining cities: yes. An entire robot ecosystem: yes. Arguably, an entire prosthetic biosphere, powered by nukes, organized to keep a few surviving endangered "wild" pre-anthropocene ecosystems from final collapse. Human access to such wilderness reserves would be a rare privilege and require use of isolation suits and sterile procedures to prevent cross-infection.

59:

Also note Kevin Drum's prediction that terrorism will decline by 50% in the middle east by 2040 ... for a simple reason: most of the middle east only banned lead as an additive in gasoline in the early 21st century (and terrorism thrives on a ready supply of angry, cognitively-damaged young men who grew up inhaling lead in the car exhaust fumes where they live). Same reason as the decline in violent crime in the USA, UK, and other developed nations.

So there's that to hope for.

60:

I tried to tackle the future of religion in Hot Earth Dreams.

The takeaways that are relevant here:

--"Religion" as a meme is basically a Christian idea and apparently about 1,000 years old in its current form. The Chinese language(s) reportedly didn't have a word for that meme until the late 19th Century, and then they borrowed it from Japanese. This is worth seriously considering, because the Chinese have been dealing with Christian missionaries for most of 2000 years, and there was even a Chinese Archbishop leading the Church of the East (out of Baghdad) back somewhere around 600 AD. It's not like they hadn't seen Christianity or Islam, it's just that they didn't bother with the category we now see as so important. The bottom line here is that there are multiple ways of dealing with various forms of organized spirituality. Right now the "religion" meme is paramount, and it probably will be in 2117, but radical shifts are possible.

--What constitutes a "sect" or a "religion" or even "spirituality" is highly subjective. One of the biggest arguments in Religious Studies is what they're studying, and whether something (martial arts, or Jedi, or yoga) is something they should study.

--The easily available data for how many Christian religions/sects/branches/forms there are in the world is probably bogus (one data set claims over 200 forms of Roman Catholicism...) and similar studies of Islam and Buddhism weren't readily available a couple of years ago and may not exist now (see point about religion as a meme: there's no reason to think these split the same way Christianity does, so lumping them into the same subcategories may be beyond stupid).

--The bottom line, though is clear: no matter how you lump or split them, religions tend to follow something like a long-tailed distribution curve. There are a few big, heterogeneous blocks, either in all religions or within each religion (Christianity is a big block of all religions, Roman Catholicism is a big block of Christianity, but it's highly heterogeneous, etc.). There also is a very long tail of smaller religions/sects/cults/whatever, tailing out to a crowd of holy people who attract few if any followers and whose teachings don't survive their lifetimes.

--Religions spring up effectively at random. There's that huge long tail of holy people who don't amount to anything, but occasionally one of them is blessed by the black swan and recruits a lot of followers. A few of these are blessed by further black swans and found "Great Religions" that last centuries to thousands of years.

--There is no regular lifespan for big religious movements. Some flame out quickly, some last longer, and none (going back to the Babylonian religions, which disappeared around 1000-1200 AD in the Iraqi marshes) has verifiably lasted more than 3000 years or so (Australian aboriginal myths don't count, as there's no documentary evidence showing continuity of belief for >1,000 years, let alone >3,000 years). There's no steady trend or path for any movement, either: it's safer to say that each one is a special snowflake whose future is unpredictable. Christianity is the classic example, mentioned because tis the season: if Paul hadn't come along, Jesus would have been just another executed Jewish messiah (of many in that time), and his semi-effective teachings about non-violent political revolution would probably have died with his disciples or perhaps their disciples.

61:

English-for-non-native-speakers is already the dominant language in the EU's institutions, so when you're talking Globish, that does already exist. A different English-for-non-natives is a big deal in India. Both are pretty easy for a native-speaker to understand, though fairly hard to speak (native-speakers have too much vocabulary and too many idioms). What I don't know is whether they are mutually comprehensible, or if they are effectively disjoint subsets of English. If they're disjoint, then English will hold the line much better than if they are mutually comprehensible. If you can get to semi-fluency in Globish and be fine in any non-English-speaking country, then English itself could fragment entirely.

India is about the same percentage natively Hindi as China is natively Mandarin, but non-Hindi-speaking Indians tend to learn English, whereas non-Mandarin-speaking Chinese tend to learn Mandarin. I think the lack of second-language Hindi-speakers will prevent Hindi expanding, where there are lots of second-language Mandarin speakers from the rest of China - so the infrastructure for teaching Mandarin already exists, and Mandarin speakers are familiar with conversing with semi-fluent learners.

I expect that automated translation will continue to be much better at translating between a small number of major languages than at coping with a large number of minor ones. I wonder if the other killer (translating between languages that have few mutual speakers, therefore getting few corrections to learn from) will continue to screw up translation between Indo-European languages and East Asian languages.

62:

Not really relevant to the content, but there's a typo in the link to the Saturn's Children Wikipedia page, resulting in a broken link and a hanging parenthesis.

63:

If your theory about cultures aggressively expanding due to language extinction is correct, then I expect we'll see the beginnings of a new age of city states. Not necessarily full independence and primacy for cities and the nation-states all gone. I mean more like a gradual weakening of central authority, in favor of cities having more and more leeway to act independently on the world stage.

How could this happen?

Cities are the drivers of economic development these days. The features that allow this to be true (network effects; resource efficiency; culture and talent incubation, etc) will not likely disappear during the time frame you specify. The best and the brightest will be sucked into the cities, and the long-running brain drain of rural areas will only accelerate, driving further wedges between urban and rural citizens.

At the same time, aggressively spread cultures running on just a handful of languages with better-than-modern telecommunications technology will begin to have the effect of allowing urban dwellers to know and begin to identify with other urban dwellers as a trans-national caste. (Not quite a class, since the whole spectrum of wealth will be found in cities, and not quite an ethnic group either--but there will be a sense of shared identification.) They will become concerned about each other's domestic developments, and commiserate about their respective "red state" problems.

Brexit was a good example of this already happening.

Push this process further, and cities will begin to wonder why they should go to war on behalf of their countrysides and vice versa. I don't expect a clean break from centralized nation state governance to city-state rule overnight, but we could be see some local bids for independence by the end of the century. #NewYorkxit

Alternatively, serious devolution of powers to city governments may become commonplace.

You might see send his newly-established City Commissioner of State to a major gathering of international leaders and have it be seen as a long time coming.

Already we are seeing American cities openly defy the Federal Government on issues of immigration. The 10th Amendment means the Feds cannot directly order local governments to do anything; usually they just bribe for compliance but that doesn't work on issues of identity. Cities in the US will increasingly have an identity that is distinct from the US as a whole.

I think this will be true elsewhere, since urban/rural friction is as old as cities themselves, thus the generalizations.

Sorry for the meandering ramble; tired after work.

64:

Who said anything about terrorism? Heck, there are anti-Muslim Buddhist extremists in Myanmar, and suicide bombs were used quite successfully by Marxists in Sri Lanka. If there are smart, angry young men, there will be terrorists. What might stop them is if the data get out that non-violence tends to be about twice as effective, but even then, I doubt it.

No, the Salafist "no pictures, no singing, no dancing, wear the veil" has been flooding Islam for the last century, just as (petro-dollar driven?) corporate evangelical Churchianity seems to be flooding the US. As these recede, other traditions will flower again: if the House of Saud can no longer push its agenda, then we'll likely see a flowering of Muslim arts that are nothing like what we consider them today: pictures of the Prophet and so forth. These used to be normal in many parts of the Muslim world before oil came along.

65:

Re: Emoji's

Early stages of research but does show how/why 'emojis' (not specifically referenced) may prime how text is interpreted.

Neurophysiological correlates of comprehending emotional meaning in context

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3143819/

Not in the article, but a personal opinion ... and something to keep in mind: Most humans mimic each other during conversation/interaction. Such mimicking provides the mimicker a way of internalizing (feeling) and interpreting the other's internal state, therefore, more correctly discerning the intended meaning of whatever else in whatever modality is also being communicated.

66:

Absolutely is the problem.

Fossil carbon investment is in the trillions. Battery investment is in the low billions. Nobody has put the money into true mass production yet and the learn-by-doing hasn't happened.

There are a bunch of promising battery chemistries; there's flow batteries (which are important for solar storage if not a mobile tech themselves for anything smaller than trains); there's the possibility of doing something weird with meta-materials and getting more of an electron tank than a battery as such. None of this has been appropriately funded. (Rather like you can get funding for hydrogen cars but not for anything that might work.)

That's starting to crack; the PRC seems to be (appropriately!) deadly, deadly serious about their smog problem. At least one of nickel-cobalt, lithium-sulfur, and the solid-electrolyte lithium or sodium chemistries seems likely to be a good successor technology to lithium-ion. And the good thing about electric cars is that you can swap the battery pack, whether the one in the car you have or at the design-and-manufacturing stage, without having to do anything much to the rest of the system.

I would also question the current cost; upfront cost is higher, lifetime operating cost is lower. And ultimately, cost scales with parts count, which is an inherent advantage for electric.

67:

your theory about cultures aggressively expanding due to language extinction

Nope, I'm not attributing a causal link running in that direction. If anything it's the opposite way round; aggressively expansionist cultures kill off minority languages.

The city hypothesis you then go into seems to be echoing Richard Florida's work ...

68:

Goodenough may be emeritus but he sure doesn't sound emeritus, is taking last-author, and the lead author is a young Portuguese woman engineering professor named Maria Helena Braga. They're also being very open about not being certain they have the cathode yet. This does not strike me as obviously risible stuff; the IEEE article in particular has the team talking about material specifics.

I wouldn't casually dismiss this one any more than I'd casually dismiss the Harvard team that's working on organic electrolyte flow batteries.

69:

I'd also like to note that over the past few years Nojay was convinced that (a) SpaceX would go bust before making orbit, (b) yeah, but the Falcon 9 was an untried design and they'd go bust trying to get sales, (c) okay, but they for-sure wouldn't be able to successfully recover a first stage, (d) well maybe but it was a stunt and they'll never risk a commercial cargo on a second-hand booster, and probably now (e) they'll never retrieve an upper stage (per Musk, they're going to try and nail it by the end of next year).

IOW, Nojay is an engineering pessimist. He's often right, but sometimes he's very wrong.

70:

Emoji don't seem to be developing in the direction of ideograms; rather, they're turning into a sort of substitute for gesture and expression, essential elements of spoken communication missing from written language. (Gretchen McCulloch has a nice discussion of this: http://the-toast.net/2016/06/29/a-linguist-explains-emoji-and-what-language-death-actually-looks-like/ .) If this continues, they may become obligatory as a sort of vastly expanded punctuation system, and we'll finally be able to stop worrying about the intended tone of our emails being completely misinterpreted.

As for the ongoing extinction of cultures and languages, one word: urbanization. Young people can't find a decent job around home, so they move to big cities where the neighbours don't understand their language, and think speaking it makes you a hick. That works to the advantage of both "Western culture" and "Arab/Sunni Islam", but the homogeneizing effect of the massive spike in urbanization that we're living through would be much the same if neither existed.

71:

Re: "Religion" as a meme is basically a Christian idea ...'

Nope ... there are records of ancient civilizations that had religious wars. These were wars between states as well as civil wars when the head honcho decided to change religions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_war

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akhenaten

Do agree with that in China, Korea, and Japan 'the way one lived one's life' had a more philosophical than religious tone. Then again, personal opinion is that both concepts were interchangeable back then and depended largely on how much the population (or head honchos) needed something relatable such as a mythic personality (religion) or were comfortable with an abstraction (philosophy).

72:

Isn't the term for 2017 surveillance "sparrow-fart"? Or wouldn't it be that good yet?

Quantum Computers seem to be starting to appear, but so far they require liquid Helium temperatures. It seems quite possible, though, that liquid Nitrogen could eventually be made to work ... probably before 2117. This makes many kinds of surveillance much more do-able.

It's worth noting that currently many AI object recognition programs don't work the same way human object recognition does, even if they have better accuracy in a normal scene. This is shown by the construction of patterns that humans see as noise and the AI confidently recognizes as the target object. This might not be addressed, as it doesn't affect normal operation. But one may wonder what the AI might notice that people are just blind to. This could have effects in 2117.

Additionally an AI could be designed to have a higher limit than "the magic number 7 plus or minus 2". The effects of this are hard to project, but it might well think thoughts that are intrinsically unintelligible to people. (I usually synopsize this as "having a deeper stack" even though that isn't quite right.) Note: This isn't quite the same as being more intelligent, it's more like having a wider mind. I think. It's definitely not the same as thinking faster (which it might also do).

And, of course, the real problem with any AI is its motivations. They won't be human. Presumably they will be designed with "standard engineering safeguards", but in a new area those often don't work in the expected way. So I consider the recognition of noise by an AI object recognizer as an analog of what should be expected.

Social problems appear intractable. We've already got a huge amount of "bread and circuses", and that will need to increase dramatically. Virtual reality shows promise here. That can allow the aggressive feeling to be bled off safely, but is it sufficient? (And how will haptic feedback develop? Will odor feedback become important, or will people generally ignore smells? Etc.)

Since a really good virtual reality requires allowing free motion, there's going to be the need for rooms where people are suspended in the air in visualization suits that allow them to run, walk, etc. This will be expensive, so I expect the reappearance of "video arcades". How will they be regulated? Will they replace gyms? Movie theaters? Business conferences?

How much traffic can the E-M spectrum support? Will local transmissions need to be over light (including infra-red and UV)? Will spread spectrum replace radio frequency transmission? (Probably not, but...CSMACD)

I am, of course, presuming that there won't be a direct brain link. If there is it will have a lot greater effect in many different directions, but which are impossible to quantify as its not certain to what extent direct communication would be even intelligible. Similar patterns are used for sensory representations in different brains, but they are far from being identical. The same may be true of muscle twitch representations, which even includes speech.

73:

[capitalism gone?]

Some of the systemic mechanisms of capitalism will still likely be with us, but it's currently effectively the state religion of the global hegemon. Getting rid of it as a mechanism of control (you can only gang up on problems -- express your basic humanity, in other words -- in narrowly capitalist ways) is going to take a really drastic cultural shift, on the order of "baptism and a clean shirt or death". So while the mechanisms may be there, I don't think the language will be. (Rather like the Christianization of Easter!)

[biotech] General real-time sampling, etc. isn't plausible on information density grounds; can't build enough server farms and the potential search space is functionally infinite. You can't just check for "codes for protein", you have to check for "codes for protein parts A through Q, seven protein folders, and a four-step assembly process"; then what about a five step assembly process? three? Effective pre-detection isn't going to work in general. Which leaves both infection control (you only change gloves hourly? I won't have anyone so rash dating my child!) and quarantine barriers. (Expect sad stories of good damaged by the cargo container autoclave having an overpressure event on the live steam.)

[travel] The technology is going to be there to move people around, but I don't think the safety factor will be. Or the willingness; another pneumonic rabies outbreak has nigh-infinite cost. I expect there's a subset of robots who take a cut out of human trade by moving stuff around for disparate groups of humans. How the robots get paid out of this -- what humans have robots want they can't get more cheaply elsewhere -- is unclear; "cat pictures" is, alas, highly unlikely. I'd put that as the single biggest risk to people in a scenario like this; we don't necessarily have anything the robots want. "majestic herds of bison" here we come.

Don't think we've got any pre-anthropocene ecosystems. I expect humans have big fights (between locals and interested distant persons) about ecosystem maintenance, and how the great Pennsylvanian tiger introduction of 2023 was or was not a mistake.

74:

And how will haptic feedback develop? Will odor feedback become important, or will people generally ignore smells? Etc.

Supernormal stimulus virtual sex. If we've got ongoing VR gaming we're going to get this, and I think it's going to solve far more problems than it causes.

75:

The running costs are nothing like enough lower to offset the capital costs, unfortunately. A Nissan Leaf costs about 12p/mile in fuel if driven hard, and a Skoda Fabia about 17p/mile; I can't estimate the other running costs. That's 5 grand over 100,000 miles difference, but the capital cost difference is 10 grand. And the latter car is bigger (and much bigger in cargo capacity).

Yes, in theory, electric is simpler and so should be cheaper (including for maintenance), but that is still a long way off. If the problems haven't been solved by 2117, we will have worse ones to worry about, but I am not expecting electric cars to replace petrol before about 2030.

76:

Quantum computers? When I last looked, they passed the duck test for being pure snake oil.

77:

If even meaningless jobs disappear as they seem to be doing then perhaps the global population will have crashed by then, maybe not with a roar but with a whimper. Boredom is a powerful force and if Those In Charge see no reason for the existence of a mass of non-worker bees then violence isn't strictly necessary. Comfortable boredom and birth control will do the job humanely, if they so choose, and why not? What the hell else is there for most people to do?

78:

Different issue, I think. If we're in the Middle Eastern City State age, Akhenaten was less a visionary monotheist and more a Kim Il Sung-like authoritarian who was trying to take power away from other temples.

There are two dirty little secrets here: one is that religious tithes were often the precursor to taxes, as in the Roman Empire (tithes to the Imperial Genius that kept the Empire together counted as taxes, and Christians got in trouble for not paying said "tax" because it implied they were enemies of state unity), China (look at the sacrifices the Emperor had to make to maintain the link between Heaven and the Middle Kingdom, and tell me he was secular), and in Egypt, where the pharoahs ("Of the Great House") were spiritual as well as secular authorities. Battles between who got to control which warehouse the crops flowed into (and by extension, who got to divvy them out and for what) were framed in competitions among the gods who owned those warehouses.

The other is that, when one city-state conquered another, it was taken as evidence that the losers' gods were worthless, and they were generally pitched out as their people were sold into slavery. Judaism was unique, at least in the Middle East, in managing to keep Yahweh going after they were conquered and absorbed. That actually marked the shift from religion being a magical part of the state panoply to religion being something else that marked worshipers as a people, not as a state.

But actually, the biggest problem is that we work in a Judeo-Christian framework, so we back-project modern concepts of religion onto the past, and then assume that we understand what was going on the same way the people of the past did. I'm not so sure that's entirely or even relatively true. Two counterexamples of that are the Roman ritual of evocatio, a ceremony by which Roman priests transferred to Rome the head deity of a city they were beseiging. This makes perfect sense under the genius loci theory, but as religion, not so much. Imperial Chinese ritual is another example, wherein the emperor, much as the Roman emperor, was expected to perform rituals to keep the empire together, and a lot of this was framed as the Son of Heaven sacrificing to his ancestors (eg Heaven). It didn't particulary matter whether an emperor also practiced Buddhism or Taoism, any more than it mattered that his subjects did, because the ancestor sacrifices were what was important.

79:

7 Samurai or Stalker (Tarkovski) is a great movie, but really slow compared to todays mainstream cinema and so hard to watch if you are used to modern cinema. So I think many old classics are simply not watched that much anymore. How many people actually have seen and enjoyed Kurosawas Hidden Fortress, vs. how many have heard that it was somewhat inspirational to Star Wars?*

I think video games and novels also change over time and the older stuff is hard to digest unless you work at it (because you are a nerd, or teach cultural studies).

I think there will be always change in the tastes popular media are made for, and these tastes will change, and quite possible that change will rather accelerate - like 'fast fashion', but for books (textually represented entertainment).**

This would mean that you in 2117 will have a (maybe) really sophisticated taste, but that you will have a hard time to emjoy novels or games from as short back as 2107.

  • This thought is inspired by two things: A friend who looked at me in disbeleiv when I talked about how awesome the Hidden fortress is ("You watch Movies from '65?"), and another friend who bragged about how much he liked Tarkovskis Stalker because of the very slow pace.

** When writing this, I wondered wether there will be some final style movie/book/? that each media will asymptotically move towards. But no: Fashion with it's constant variation and repetition is a far likelier candidate for such multi-dimensional, chaotic things without fixed attractors as visual style in movie or textual narration.

80:

If fossil fuels are unusuable, then long-haul freight will revert from ships to rail. China has been spending a lot of money on their "Iron Silk Road" project, and that's a very long-term plan for maintaining a connection to Europe when ships stop being able to use diesel engines.

If someone builds the infrastructure for rail between the two Americas and a decent freight net in South America, then I expect goods not to cross the Atlantic and Pacific except where necessary.

Islands will become expensive to live on, because goods have to go by sea, and there's no easy (ie cheap) way to power a ship. Sure, you could use sail, but that's slow and unreliable. And either lots of manpower, or powered sails - and where do you get the electricity from? Presumably, you can use a wind-turbine since you don't need to adjust your sails when it's calm. I could see those in the calmer seas - supplying the Mediterranean islands and the Caribbean ones, but they'll still be expensive compared to rail.

Now, some islands will be fine: there's a Channel Tunnel. Someone will build an Irish Sea Tunnel. There will be a bridge over the Straits of Messina. Japan and Sumatra-Java will get fixed links. So will Sri Lanka.

But shifting volumes of goods over water is going to get a lot more expensive. Some islands will just get subsidised (Scottish ones, Nantucket, Hawaii, Corsica, Sardinia etc). Others will just not be there (Maldives), but the costs are going to really hurt somewhere like Malta or Cyprus or Iceland, never mind the much poorer islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans.

81:

"I'm trying to say that laws are very difficult to follow completely, especially in situations which need rapid decisions and which are not clear cut, for example war."

Not just very difficult, but probably impossible, unless the whole lot is rewritten from the ground up in a manner that incorporates at least formal proof of consistency and maximal parsimony.

For humans, scrupulously following every detail of every rule and regulation is a useful form of industrial action: the management can hardly criticise people for following the rules, but the result of scrupulously following the rules is to bring the whole operation to a grinding halt. Some of this is due to lack of parsimony - too many rules have application to any given situation and complying with them all takes up the majority of the effort. And some of it is due to inconsistency - one rule mandates one course of action, another rule mandates a mutually exclusive course. Sometimes, even, in a blatantly stupid way that can be totally internal to one small-ish rule set, as with railway enabling acts that simultaneously prescribe and proscribe the use of locomotives. And of course the larger the corpus of rules and precedents becomes, the more such contradictions will accumulate in it.

I strongly suspect the success of the legal system positively depends on being so bloated and baroque that it is simply impossible for humans to comply with it. But a computer would not suffer from the human limitations of not being able to remember or correlate more than a tiny bit of it. So either it would spend the whole time deadlocked, or it would have to be programmed to break the law, which is one of those trolley-problem things that could run and run.

82:

I'd be looking at a Chevy Bolt or the E-Smart long before I looked at the Leaf. The Leaf is pretty much worst-in-class as I understand the matter.

83:

Capitalism will probably be around in 2117. What it actually involves may or may not have anything to do with current capitalist theory (the same has happened with Communism, Christianity, Buddhism...) but something called capitalism will probably be around.

If you believe Graeber's Debt, capitalism was basically founded on things like expansive conquest followed by redistribution of wealth to the conquerors, trades in people, arms, drugs (including alcohol), and money. All of these are still around, but human trafficking and some aspects of the drugs, arms, and money trades are currently illegal. Making them illegal didn't make them go away, it just changed the market structure (as with drug cartels, migrant farm workers, prostitution, and the like).

Now, if you don't believe Graeber's Debt, you'll point out that trade in all these things long pre-dates anything called capitalism, and we can argue endlessly which practices are uniquely capitalist and whether they'll be around in a coherent bundle in a century or so. My personal bet is, unless the term Capitalism gets such a bad rap that it's banned like the swastika, it'll be around in a century, although 22nd Century captialism may look little like what we practice today. I also predict all the old, scary trades in people, drugs, and weapons will continue, whether they're illegal or not.

84:

Re: '... and note practical AI programs are WAY beyond our ability to analyse, and almost certain to remain so for the next millennium, let alone century.'

On a Dennett kick recently ... in some video he mentioned that until/unless there's a consequence for your AI/robot, there's damn well little stopping it from evolving in whatever direction it wants, i.e., all are paths of least resistance. There's an idea that having to think one's way around consequences can be a prod for developing consciousness or at least 'will'. If this is so, then hardwiring/hard-programming an AI/program so that it must make decisions and then having a panel of humans review those decisions (esp. the why's/objectives and consequences) and altering the programming accordingly seems reasonable in developing trustworthy AI.

Has anyone bothered to program in a must-stop-here as part of a robot's/program's function?

85:

Ships are easy; air+water ammonia synthesis with solar or wind (sailing ships designed to do this with ocean wind would be my bet), then cargo ships driven by alkaline fuel cells using the ammonia. Pretty much all of it is demonstrated tech; ammonia handling is known tech. Big electric motors for ship propellers is an increasingly standard tech.

Container cargo volumes per ship might drop as the weather gets worse and "route around the storm" gets less practical, so that will run prices up, but I'm very unsure there's going to be a loss of ocean traffic.

(oh, and fixed links require "same crustal plate"; this is why there isn't a rail bridge to Vancouver Island, where the good deep water harbour is.)

86:
  • Machine learning algorithms are likely capable to decode dolphin, whale, crow, fox, etc languages. If this is successful, then citizens would no longer be human-only in all countries. Of course, this would vary.

  • Total Fertility Rate can't be predicted yet. Industrialization lowered TFR. Perhaps UBI would raise it again?

  • Portuguese may or may not become an apex language? I am not familiar with the status of Portuguese in the former Portuguese Africa, but Brazil right now is about a third of Latin America's population, and within Latin-American trade will probably increase.

  • Genetic engineering seems to be the black box in this. I don't know enough about the field to extrapolate.

  • 87:

    "Has anyone bothered to program in a must-stop-here as part of a robot's/program's function?"

    Probably, but it's subject to the same failure modes as you described.

    88:

    You can't be sure that Moore's law is dead yet. Or, in fact, that it will hit the wall short of computronium. It may, but more likely it's just a current slow-down that will pick up again as soon as there's sufficient reason.

    I think the current problem is that programmers have been slow to adapt to multiple concurrent processors, so the demand is slack. But "smart phones" don't seem to have had that same problem, nor have the really high-end machines.

    Also, Moore's law was never stated in terms of price, but rather in terms of transistors/area. And it's always been followed in a rather jagged manner, as technologies changed.

    All that said, I do think we're approaching a limit until there's a major technology change. I just wouldn't write it off without a three or four more years of evidence.

    89:

    "... perhaps the global population will have crashed by then ..."

    Or exploded :-(

    90:

    Re: 'But actually, the biggest problem is that we work in a Judeo-Christian framework, so we back-project modern concepts of religion onto the past, and then assume that we understand what was going on the same way the people of the past did.'

    See your point and agree esp. with the above. So, guess we need folks from other religious-cultural backgrounds to add their perspectives on this?

    91:

    Oh, and I'd be looking at costs other than fuel, too; maintenance where you don't need oil changes, air filters, transmission fluid, or experience anything like as much brake wear, is a lower cost. (E-Smarts get advertised here as cheaper to run than the gas Smart as a commuter car. Since Canada has some moderately effective truth in advertising laws, the scenario chosen has to hold up and be at least vaguely plausible.)

    92:

    When it comes to electrification and flight, I'd like to remind everyone a few things

  • A Boeing 747 is not a regional jet (talk of electrifying flight is often derailed by the impossibility of making an all-electric 747). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_jet

  • Propellers are a substitute to jet engines

  • 93:

    That's my prediction, that we'll have sustainable energy by 2100: either we'll be running on wind, solar, and fusion, or the few survivors will be burning wood in fires midst the ruins. But either way it will be sustainable, and right now, we're fighting about who suffers and how much.

    However, there are some interesting additions to that.

    Assuming human populations don't drop by 95-99% over the next century (which will put you into Hot Earth Dreams territory, and I assume OGH doesn't need to go there again), they're predicted to peak around 2050.

    That's when things get interesting.

    The problem is that so many US cities (and for all I know, cities, governments, and corporations around the world) are basically built like pyramid schemes, predicating their continued existence on continued growth. At some point, growth in population will stop, so that will no longer grow markets. Obviously we can play games with increasing the economy by spending unreal money on unreal things, but the bigger problem is all those bonds that cities and corporations took out, that are predicated on continued growth to make it possible to repay them. When we stop growing, a lot of big financial entities are going to go into default, whether it's due to defaulted road bonds, pension payments, or whatever.* That will make things very interesting indeed, and this might do as much to disrupt capitalism as changes in ideology do.

    If 2117 is a world with the same or fewer people and resources, it's going to take a very different kind of economics to make it work, and it won't be possible to sweep the fact that there are losers under the rug (as progressives are wont to do). Indeed, cannibalizing the glories of the past will be one obvious way to make payments in a shrinking economy, as will abandoning stuff a la Detroit.

    Hmmm. Oddly, this puts me in mind of the Barsoom of A Princess of Mars, which was written about 110 years ago, before they great war. Talk about all that is old being new again...

    *Currently, I'm a citizen member of a county committee that's trying to figure out growth and conservation issues out to 2050. They really don't want to hear that things may be really different by then. Actually, they can't hear it, because the structure of their planning won't allow them to consider such notions seriously.

    94:

    Given the diversity in Spanish within Latin America and between Latin America and Iberia, and the similarity between Spanish and Portuguese, I'm not entirely convinced that the Spanish/Portuguese distinction will be the most relevant one in 2117.

    Portuguese is at least as close to Spanish as, say, Catalan. And there doesn't seem to be a single trans-Atlantic language community in either Spanish or Portuguese to anything like the same degree as there is in English.

    Wouldn't surprise me to find that the dominant form ends up being the Spanish spoken by Hispanics in the US - it tends to be a consensus Spanish, understandable to Mexicans and Cubans and Spaniards (etc), and it has Univision and Telemundo behind it.

    95:

    Going back to the original question:

    What are you overlooking? Food.

    Remember "A chicken in every pot?" That sounded wonderful, because chicken was expensive. Now it's dirt cheap, and beef is increasingly expensive.

    Continue this on a century, and you find, well, Bengali food. Now I don't know anything about this cuisine, but it looks like mostly vegetables, with some shrimp, fish (fish heads are popular) and some mutton (they're muslim, and yes, this is playing off the idea of a massive Bangladeshi diaspora again).

    What proteinaceous foods will be cheap in a non-crashed 22st century? Probably fungi, bugs, cephalopods, chickens, maybe goats. Cattle probably will be much more minor than they are now (don't talk to me about Savory's regenerative grazing, I have more respect for genuine snake oil than I have for that), and most fish stocks will be crashed by 2050, and I still haven't heard of a good way to eat jellyfish as a main course. As for other ungulates...hard to say. We may be eating more camel and less horse. Pigs may or may not be plentiful, depending on whether they get incorporated into recycling waste food or not.

    But anyway, cricket malaikari for 2117, anyone? Might be tasty.

    What other food trends do people predict?

    96:

    I'm sure there will be electric puddle-jumpers for crossing water, and in regions where there isn't the population density to build fast land-transport infrastructure, or where the geography makes that impractical.

    And there will be electric bizjets for the very rich assuming there are such things as the very rich.

    But I'd bet on fast electric railways being the main means of transporting people longer distances. With 1990s technology, you could do LA-NY in 18 hours that way, rather than six in the air. The Japanese are building a faster Shinkansen right now; that could do LA-NY in 12. This is a field where billions of dollars are being invested in R&D for the next generation technologies. By 2117, land transport might actually be faster than flying on the principal routes. Whether we can do better over water, well that's another question, isn't it?

    97:

    Surely a key issue will be the demographics. World population projections for then vary between 8 & 16 billion people (Wikipedia). That will make a huge difference to the kind of planet we live on. Unfortunately there are many strands of religion that discourage female education and the use of contraception, so the population growth will be even more uneven, setting up huge migratory pressures.

    Locally in the UK we have the problem of an aging population, with more people requiring increasing amounts of care as they age. How is this going to be handled? Will we continue to raise taxes to pay for more and more health interventions & care so they live (and vote) even longer? Or will old age care become the privilege of the wealthy? Could we count on a technical quick-fix, e.g. robo-carers?

    However these questions are resolved, it will decide the background to any other projections on what life will be like in 2117.

    98:

    Re: 'Biotech will give the human body the ability to synthesise those awkward proteins, vitamins etc that we currently have to eat.'

    Recentish headline about one country's healthcare costs identified specialty meds/treatments as the biggest and fastest growing line item. Which means that this sector might fizzle out and die because current producers are just too greedy to be sustained by the health insurers, gov'ts and patients*. IP/patent laws would probably have to be changed/rolled back for this to happen though.

    • Current per-annum pricing for many MABs is in the $250,000-$500,000 USD range. These are not 'cures', they're treatments that must be taken for the rest of one's life.

    http://news.nationalpost.com/health/worlds-most-expensive-drug-prescription-that-costs-up-to-700000-per-year-too-expensive-canada-says

    99:

    As I understand the matter, just exactly how leatherback sea turtles subsist on jellyfish is an open question. Making the energetics work out is not obvious.

    I figure by 2117 people will be eating carniculture; no idea what will be popular, but I suspect it won't taste quite like the original.

    I also suspect we won't have any dairy; the point to dairy is four times the protein per animal lifetime compared to just eating the animal. If carniculture gets cheap enough, and the weather gets bad enough, and the lactase-retention genes get diffuse enough/lose enough political influence, dairy won't survive even as a luxury. (Wool also gets interesting. I would really like the Merino Mafia to stop it with the impossibility of getting winter socks with no wool in them, but global catastrophe seems excessive.)

    Chicken is currently cheap due to a dependence on a short-cycle terminal hybrid (can't survive to adulthood!) and grain feed. I don't think that will persist. (Someone taking the already quite good understanding of chicken genetics and generalizing a bit to produce fifty kilo chickens less vulnerable to coyotes seems totally plausible.)

    100:

    50-kilo chickens sounds like K W Jeter territory, IIRC. I forget which book it was.

    101:

    Re: 'What other food trends do people predict?'

    What you said but sped up on steroids ...

    The time from seed to ripe/mature can probably be manipulated/CRISPR'd. If this happens, then you need a smaller food growing area which could translate into grow-chambers the size of today's two-door-all-bells-and-whistles-included fridge in every home*. And, if you can pull off a grow-as-you-need-when you-need-food supply, you won't need a big fridge. The energy from wasteful refrigeration would be more efficiently used to quik-gro your next meal. Plus, if most of your diet was plant, then a largely fresh raw food diet means even less energy expended on cooking it. And the largest energy savings (10-15%) would be not having to move, store and then throw out tons of food. The companion appliance to the quik-gro would be the quik-com(-poster).

    And, no - this notion is not any more daft than the idea of bringing in a well (running water), moving-rocks/paddles-plus-stream (washing machine) or outhouse (toilet) into one's home.

    • Garages would be ideal for conversion to this as motor vehicles disappear for various reasons.
    102:

    As for the Wunder battery thing, remember that batteries store energy. Doubling the capacity of the battery within the same mass and volume envelope means doubling the amount of energy stored. Lithium-chemistry batteries have a very low internal resistance which means all of that energy can be released quite quickly, in a matter of a few seconds in a dead short situation within a cell or if they are damaged by overcharging (the usual reason for Li-tech batteries to light off). The Toshiba SCiB batteries I mentioned earlier get round this by using tantalum-lithium electrochemistry at a severe cost, typically having half the capacity of regular Li-cells of the same mass and volume. They're not suitable for cars (A Tesla with SCiB batteries would have a range of about 150km between charges and cost about $300,000) but there are people experimenting with them in buses and other forms of transport where the very short charge times are a deciding factor.

    103:

    Pretty much all airliners are propellor-driven today -- high-bypass turbofan engines provide well over half of their thrust from the big fan at the front of the engine, driven by the turbine stage via shafts and gearboxes. A new Pratt and Whitney engine, the PW1000G has a 12.5-to-1 bypass ratio resulting in claims of a much-decreased fuel burn.

    104:

    A brief correction to your idea. I think that NY to LA would still require aircraft.

    I doubt the US will have one high speed network. Most likely, the high speed rail networks will align with our electric grid, except that the middle is going to be empty

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_U.S._power_transmission_grid

    If you look at US population densities, you divide it into 3 large regions: East-of-the-Mississippi River (EOMR), West Coast, and Texas. Perhaps the EOMR and Texas grids will be combined into one? I don't think the geography is practical to join the West Coast Grid to either. Denver is situated on a mile-high plateau in the Rocky Mountains.

    105:

    Really fast rail, whether steel-wheel or maglev requires virtually straight-line track layouts with no climbs and dips -- at 500km/hr plus any sort of a deviation from a straight line will result in significant G-forces on the passengers and running gear. That means it's not possible to divert the line around problem geography or litigious landowners and it's why the proposed Japanese Tokyo-Nagoya maglev line runs in tunnels for most of its length. The alternative is to run at lower speeds in places which obviates the advantages of getting up to speed and staying there over long distances, and sometimes that can go wrong if the driver isn't alert (see the recent fatal Spanish high-speed rail accident on an 80km/hr curve). Aircraft don't have to deal with geography getting in the way of straight-line flight unless something bad happens.

    106:

    Transcontinental railroad anybody? The US already has a bunch of them. http://www.mapsofworld.com/usa/usa-maps/usa-rail-map.jpg

    Basically, you can make any train electric if you load in battery cars behind the engines...

    108:

    I've seen those tiny plants, and yes, I'd love a pea-sized tomato myself (they've grown them for NASA for decades). Actually I wouldn't because they're a nuisance to grow.

    Problems? Quite a few actually. Getting rid of the waste heat is a perennial problem with large grow chambers. One plant physiologist I knew (they're the profs with all the grow chambers) joked about installing a commercial sauna on the downstream side of his eight chambers, because he was dumping so much waste hot water that there had to be a way to make money off it.

    More seriously, growth chambers (and greenhouses) get into outbreak problems like you wouldn't believe. It's just the perfect environment to grow stuff, and that's got both good and bad aspects.

    While I think that industrial production will improve, and it won't just be basil grown in warehouses in left-leaning cities, I'll point out that the reason peasants do dirt agriculture is that it's cheap. Running it artificially tends to be expensive, which is why they grow basil that way and not wheat.

    Ditto vat meat. You can feed a cow on straw. You can feed a culture of cow cells on growth media (and don't forget that a lot of this comes from seaweed), plus whatever you're using as scaffolding to give the meat texture, so that it's not just stem cell slurry. That's a $500 burger, not a $0.50 burger. Oh, and cell cultures have all the contamination problems of plants in growth chambers and then some.

    So no, if we're talking micromeat, instead of cell cultures we've got to go with small animals, including crickets and other bugs, cuy (guinea pigs), rabbits, rats, tilapia, goldfish and carp (every kids' favorite pets, in other words). Sir PTerry may have been ahead of his time (as usual), with the menu from Gimlet's Delicatessen in Men at Arms:"Soss, egg, beans and rat 12p Soss, rat and fried slice l0p Cream-cheese rat 9p Rat and beans 8p Rat and ketchup 7p Rat 4p." And yes, the ketchup may well cost more than the rat.

    109:

    Going back to the original question, if we have a stable or shrinking human population, we may we see the disappearance of schools, especially age-graded schools, and combination elder/child facilities springing up. Older people seem to do better when there are kids around, and kids can help their nanas and uncles as needed. Additionally, if education gets gamified (the horror!) age-graded schooling may disappear in favor of mixed age schooling (which is supposedly better anyway) along with tutoring from qualified adults, some of whom may in fact be the elders at a center.

    110:

    I agree this is technically possible to build a transcontinental high speed train. However, I'm skeptical of the economics.

    Currently, freight trains don't need to increase their speeds while passenger ones are financial losers for Amtrak. I do think that the economics of train travel will be better in the future. However, I think the following journey makes more economic sense than a transcontinental high speed line from NY to SF

  • High speed train down to Dallas -> Electric aircraft to LA or Las Vegas -> high speed train to SF

  • High speed train to St. Louis -> Electric flight to Denver -> Wait 1 hour in Denver to swap batteries -> Fly to SF

  • High speed train to Minneapolis -> Electric flight to Cheyenne, Wyoming -> Wait 1 hour in Cheyenne to swap batteries -> Fly to SF.

  • It wouldn't be as cheap as today's travel, but it would probably take fewer than 12 hours for a 1-way trip which Richard had suggested.

    111:

    I take it you haven't recently looked at the terrain in California? The San Andreas and various other geologic structures have kicked up a lot of inconvenient mountains (specifically the transverse range north of LA), but the bottom line is that there's no easy way to do high speed rail into and out of places like LA, just as it's not easy to do high speed through the Rockies (how does Switzerland handle that issue?). As recently as WWII, though, passenger rail was the norm, and somehow it did just fine without having to be a high speed race.

    This is all predicated on the notion that, in a century, we'll need high speed transportation for all. That's the part that needs to be justified, actually. If the population's older and economies are generally shrinking, why the rush?

    112:

    The lack of any attempt to hide the spoiler or put space between it and the warning was appreciated. Thanks. If I ever get the opportunity I will be sure to return the favour.

    On the topic of emoji/dead semicolons I vaguely remember an aside in some old SF novel about a best selling book of poetry that consisted entirely of punctuation. ;/

    113:

    Fair enough on the California geography. I also am not clear on how the Appalachian mountains would function as a barrier?

    FYI, Switzerland doesn't have high speed rail save for the Gotthard Base Tunnel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Base_Tunnel

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_Europe

    114:

    Waste heat gets converted into other (usable) power. No prob!

    The point is to do closed-system circular(?) energy flows instead of the single-use, single-energy type, single-purpose stuff we've been sold on. Nature is a Rube Goldberg machine.

    The disease bit depends on many factors. Probably a lot more human traffic (sporting different groups of germs, spores, etc.), variety of plantings and just plain shifting about of foodstuffs in a uni research lab than in my fridge. Some time back I mentioned an urban movement about growing food in apartments because it's not that difficult or expensive. Add 100 years of bio-engineering and it should be possible to grow more types of plant foodstuffs. And, if the flora quick-gro home units catch on, then a 'meat protein' grasshopper farm unit would probably be as easy to develop and market.

    http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125504307

    Something else to consider ... the Baby Boomer generation is the largest/tallest in human history. Why exactly do humans have to be so large/tall? It's my belief (i.e., haven't seen any stats) that there are as many short/skinny as tall/overweight geniuses. And since the jobs of the future are unlikely to require human brute strength, why waste food on developing large muscles. Okay, you may say that large well developed muscle is beautiful and a sign of good health. Really - so if I do yoga, I'm less healthy and less 'beautiful' than my neighbor the sumo wrestler? Anyway, beauty is cultural and if there is a global food shortage, being large/tall will likely become culturally taboo. Not sure about the exact caloric requirement/trade off per pound of muscle (and bone), but chances are that smaller humans would not need 2,000 - 2,500 calories per day.

    115:

    A hopelessly utopian take on range anxiety:

    If everyones job has been automated away and society is structured in a way that allows unemployed people to afford travel then it doesn't really matter if the cars range is a bit crap because you don't have to be there and back by the end of the weekend anyway.

    Maybe people will be allowed to enjoy travelling again.

    116:

    Yes and no. It's instructive to go up highway 49 in the California Foothills (Calaveras County/Gold Rush/Jumping Frog Saloon place). There are a lot of tiny little dilapidated towns in there, and many of them have shuttered, antique gas stations.

    I drove through there last year, and I amused myself by how many of those little dying and dead gas stations could reinvent themselves to become battery recharging stations if electric cars became the norm and ranges dropped. When a car can travel 300-400 miles on a tank, gas stations conglomerate from when they serviced Model Ts (range 100 miles). So yes, a lot of geography will change as we go electric. Electricity will enable people to spread out a bit. This might be good for little main streets and bad for regional superstores.

    A bigger problem for the US are some of the national parks, notably Death Valley (100 miles just to get to the center of the park) and Yellowstone (even bigger). These parks flourished in the automobile age, but they're going to have to either put in huge power lines or even bigger power plants (especially if solar) to power the cars of visitors. Or they're going to have to put huge infrastructure in the small towns around them.

    And it goes on from there. For example, I can't reach my mom's house in an electric car with a range shorter than a Tesla or a Bolt. So if I'm going to drive an E-Car to visit her, I'll have to plan on staying the night and probably repaying her for all the electricity I loaded off her meter. Yes, this is cheaper than paying a multinational to gas my car, but it changes how I can visit. I'd deduce from this that going all electric will tend to cluster families a bit more. Certainly kids can go live in different cities, but "being close enough to take care of an aging parent" will probably mean living in the same city, not the same state. Yes, we could go for multi-generational housing, but that's just starting to be built where I live in San Diego, so we're also talking necessarily about the need to raze and rebuild a lot of housing stock in order to make it more sustainable. It's not just switching houses over to solar and ditching the gas pipes, it's accommodating people moving around to deal with the changed parameters of their lives.

    117:

    I think it's important to understand what

    [...] since 2007 it has increasing brought prosperity to an ever-smaller elite at the very apex while conditions stagnate or decline for everyone else [...]

    actually means. In particular it is informative to plot the GDP per head of China since 2000 (even more informative to plot it since 1980). There might be a slight decrease in the upward trend around 2007, but it's not really noticeable (certainly it's not noticable compared with plotting the same figures for the UK where there's just a huge hole in the graph). And GDP per head in China went up by about a factor of 8 between 2000 and 2014 (in rather naive uncorrected dollar terms, but whatever the correction which needs to be applied it's still a spectacular increase).

    Now, of course, it is possible that a very tiny number of people in China are getting very (very!) rich while everyone else is not doing so, but I don't think that's actually the case: I think people in China are a lot better off than they were. A lot better off. And more than one human in seven is Chinese.

    Well, these figures would be more convincing if they were produced by a proper statistician rather than someone with a copy of Mathematica and The Truth, but let's assume they're reasonaby close to correct.

    So what the above claim really means is that a rather small number of people in the richest countries in the world have and are continuing to have a relatively hard time, while a very minute number of people in these same countries are getting stupidly rich.

    In the meantime over a billion people in China have experienced a GDP per head increase from less than $200 in 1980 (less than $1,000 in 2000) to more than $7,500 in 2014. These are people who were living in real poverty (when was the last famine in China? when was the last famine in the UK?) and no longer are.

    At the same time there has been a huge decrease in inequality between China and the UK, say: in 1980 Chinese GDP/head was about 1/50th of that in the UK, in 2000 it was about 1/28th, in 2014 it was about 1/6th.

    Again, this would be more convincing if it came from someone who had spent the time to do the statistics properly.

    But the small number of people ('everyone else') in very rich countries who are not doing too well are really, really cross about it, and they don't care at all about the Chinese or any other formerly-really-poor people, so they're gleefully fucking everything up for everyone, but mostly for themselves.

    Sorry, this is kind of tangential to your point about language, which is obviously correct.

    118:

    The people in the very rich countries who aren't doing relatively well have a couple of robust complaints.

    One is that there not doing very well was policy, not inevitability; the folks in the rich countries who were very very rich and wanted to get richer sacrificed the general prosperity to make themselves obscenely rich.

    Two is that they're in a very precarious economic position in a more meta/general sort of sense because those very, very rich people have been blithering incompetent in "copies into the generational future" sense.

    (China's last famine was in the 60s sometime, and Mao-inflicted. See "Four Pests Campaign".)

    I entirely agree that what you're seeing isn't a competent response; it's mostly a white supremacist response, which precludes competence. (So does ignorance.) The substance of the complaint, though, there's something to that. (Rather like people in the UK have grounds to complain about the UKIP, Brexit, and the sheer howling incompetence of it all.)

    119:

    I can't believe no one has made this joke yet: "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra." "Shaka, when the walls fell."

    120:

    End of a lonnnng day. Apologies in advance for any infelicities.

    A note about Hindi: Most of my Indian friends (particularly those in southern India) pointed out that English is the lingua franca [sic] in India because everyone who isn't a native Hindi speaker hates the language and the other 21 "official" languages that are not their native tongue much more than they hate English. The enemy of my enemy's language is my friend, apparently.

    I think you missed the very real possibility of a post-scarcity world developing not because of breakthrough maker technology, but rather because of a massive collapse of the global agricultural ecosystem. Developed countries will likely survive with greatly reduced populations because we have money to burn and greenhouse technology. For the rest of the world, the phrase "simple gigadeath proportions" comes to mind. It'll be a spectacularly ugly next century. But come out on the other side, and... post-scarcity because the population will be radically adjusted to conform with the carrying capacity.

    In terms of the loss of languages and subtleties of thought, be careful about relying too heavily on strong Sapir-Whorf. It's certainly true that all humans seem capable of grasping the concepts of noun, verb etc.; in that sense, Sapir-Whorf is unequivocally valid. But there are many nominally untranslatable words such as "frisson" that lack a single-word English equivalent yet can be easily explained with the use of many words. In short, most people can learn concepts described in any other language, though some education may be required (e.g., you need to learn mathematics to really grasp physics). Nuance won't always be lost if the language is lost; if one human mind could grasp the concept, so could any other human mind, though it might take a lot of hard work. Think of this in computing terms: there are many things that would be exceedingly difficult or cumbersome to implement in BASIC that would be easy to implement in a modern object-oriented language. The two languages are hugely different, and because they see the world from very different perspectives, they strongly shape how their "speakers" think, yet you can still create the same semantic structure in both languages.

    121:

    The semicolon will not disappear, it will be needed to terminate statements in the "C" language. C is the programming equivalent of Latin, and it may become archaic, but it will not be dead.

    122:

    Well, if you want a non-joke, try translating into Korean. Properly. The problem is that traditional Korean verbs are inflected by politeness, which is a relative (and Confucian)term: you are more polite to elders than you are to your children, and the most polite versions are used for executives, customers, and (at one time) the king.

    English gets around this by having dual vocabulary: fuck, screw, and have intercourse, are all appropriate for some situations and wildly inappropriate for others.

    The problem for the would-be Korean algorithmic translator is figuring out what the relative statuses of the people communicating are so that it can put the proper verb suffix on. Failure to do so would be a major faux pas. Similarly, translating out of Korean, the computer could use high-class English, but if the subject doesn't understand it (perhaps he works for the current US administration or something), it doesn't work well as a translation.

    123:

    The decline in US crime is also caused by legal abortion. Fewer unwanted children means fewer psychopathically neglected children.

    124:

    I suspect we will see a fragmentation of the ultra-rich caused by the rich geeks who seem to favour composition over inheritance. Viz, rather than Murdoch Jr inheriting the media empire, we see Gates Jr being just one of a bunch of people who look to be inheriting the Gates fortune. I suspect that will look more like zaibatsu or the long-lived European companies than the royal family model. But the combination of technophilia and long-term thinking might throw up some new oddities.

    Perhaps more "company states" like Qatar and Oman but focussed directly on money rather than oil. Rather than negotiate labyrinthine sociopolitical obstacles to new ideas (like the hyperloop) buy in at a high level and get permanent influence if not outright control. There's lots of poor island nations with semi-feudal governments. Look at Tuvalu and the .tv domain, for example. I suspect Gates could become one of the "hereditary" chiefs of Samoa quite cheaply if he wanted to... probably not much more than Theil paid to become a New Zealand citizen.

    Given a century with decent telecommunications we could easily see guilds return - rather than join a union that'[s subject to the vagaries of local politics, skilled workers buy into an international guild that offers mobility and the type of supports that used to be offered by employers (healthcare in the US, for example). Telemedicine and individualised gene editing of microflora would allow much healthcare to be delivered anywhere, anytime by any reasonable-sized financial entity. As a worker, much better that than the increasingly literal interpretation of "burn and churn" by employers.

    125:

    when was the last famine in China?

    1958-1962, depending on where you lived. Combination of natural disasters and ideology-based centralized decision-making.

    126:

    I think "work" of some sort will persist, either in the current slave state model of a mass of peasants fighting for low paid, low value work but more so (as in US, India, Russia); or via basic income and "hobbies" done for reward (etsy style). The spaceship model seems likely to me, and I can see a community service obligation being made explicit and likely detached from the basic income as a philosophical move to discourage people thinking of those who can't work as parasites (the opposite of current political modes).

    I wonder whether we will see a crossover between automated transport and gym membership. Rather than the bicycle, people will get the private part of their workday while exercising and travelling, then meet in person for the other part of the day. Pedalling a "roborickshaw" would likely be safer than a bicycle as well as freeing up people's attention to do more important things, whether that be social media or work. I personally don't like that, but it seems to be the way most people prefer to travel now.

    As we get more automation and lighter vehicles I think the whole "electric vehicles can't work" will become a trope of the "silly things people believed in 2000" type. Even if only the easiest 80% of journeys switch to electric power that's a huge win, and once even 50% of the traffic in congested cities is small electric cars the on-road environment will be so different that the current rules will be no more relevant than "steam gives way to sail" (which may become more relevant on the water than it is now).

    127:

    To answer the second part.

    I don't really think that the slow speed was really appreciated back then. It was something that people put up with.

    A brief aside: I wonder how many people today would take advantage of supersonic air travel? Is the lack of passenger supersonic travel due to a genuine lack of demand, or the fact that the leadership of Boeing, Airbus, Embraer, Bombardier, etc. are too paranoid of a repeat of the Concord?

    The biggest question w.r.t. an electric regional jet is: what will be the price per ticket relative to the median wage? I am assuming that it would be equivalent to what air travel was in the 1960s, but I don't have any evidence to back up that claim. In other words, I'm pulling this number out of thin air.

    A big question for USians and Canadians who know what they're talking about: around when did air travel overtake the transcontinental railroad in terms of popularity? And how expensive was an airline ticket relative to the median wage of the time?

    128:

    50 kg chickens? If you can find a way to block embryonic pygostyle formation and reverse engineer them some teeth, this sounds like a way to bring back non-avian dinosaurs, which is an inherently good idea I am wholly in favour of.

    Farming them might be a bit difficult, though. A 50 kg chicken wouldn't just be invulnerable to coyotes or wild dogs, it would be above them in the food chain.

    Extend Improvements in VR to their logical conclusion. By 2117 most people, liberated of the burden of labour or any participation in society, have turned entirely solipsistic and retreated into comfortable virtual worlds. Rates of interpersonal violence, depression, and reproduction plummet.

    129:

    I can answer that air travel overtook train travel at some time after WWII. During the war, air travel was reserved for officers. Unless there was a special exception, enlisted rode the rails.

    Still, I think you missed part of the issue: speed is great when everyone is (or can) do it. It's the shared suffering model. If everyone is stuck on passenger rail, then that's what everyone's stuck on, and it's not a problem. It's when some passengers fly and some go slow rail that there's a serious problem, especially if the difference is by region (just as prosperity can be defined as earning more than your brother/sister-in-law). Putting high speed rail is too expensive for much of the US, but depending on how the future works out (for instance, electric airplanes are impractical, but blowing more carbon into the air is lethal), sending people by slow rail may be seen as the best of a bad lot, and culture will reorganize around that. After the requisite whining, people will probably, simply, get on with their lives, all the while complaining that if only there were a zeppelin, that could be electric AND go faster...

    130:

    I'm glad to see you writing about the global mass extinction of languages, as that's something that concerns me. I've seen the (probably conservative) estimate that by the end of the century, 80% of the world's languages will have died out. On one hand I can't see it as legitimate to tell someone who only speaks a New Guinean tribal tongue with a total of 150 other speakers that they can't learn Tok Pisin, or encourage their kids to speak it; that seems like denying them the choice to interact with a larger economy and cultural pool—and at a certain point that looks like putting them in a zoo to make people from other cultures feel good. But on the other hand, there are all kinds of linguistic features that exist only in a handful of languages—things like click consonants (Khoi-San languages and one mother-in-law language in Australia) or word orders other than SOV and SVO (one of the other four apparently exists only in a few indigenous languages in South America). And it's really hard to revive a language; it was managed with Hebrew, but the success of efforts with Gaelic seems mixed. There are more people who speak Esperanto, or Klingon, or probably Sindarin than some of those fading languages. . . . And, well, as someone fascinated by language as such I find it sad.

    131:

    We're already seeing the rise of renewable energy sources and fossil fuels losing dominance. If anything, they are going to get cheaper and more efficient. I expect the storage problem to be solved. Look back at 1917. The internal combustion engine was on the rise, the road network was being built out, electricity was taking over in homes and, more importantly, in industry. In 2017, I expect large diesel engines to be used in shipping and power generation. They are exceedingly efficient. Fossil fuels will be used in all sorts of niche applications.

    Meanwhile, major coastal cities with have their dikes to deal with rising sea levels. High speed rail will bring about a revival of non-coastal cities. The recently completely NYC water tunnel suggest that tunneling even on a continental scale is practical if one can keep the project funded for a decade or two. I think the post-WWII suburban experiment has played out. It was an attempt to preserve and revive small towns life as remembered from the late 19th century, but it was at best a stopgap, at worst a failure. I think we've learned a lot about making cities more livable, and this can be applied to both coastal and interior cities.

    We're only talking about 100 years, but we'll see a lot of changes in the "natural" world with altered climate and genetically engineered organisms. I expect new breeds of mosquito that are less likely to carry disease. Population is predicted to stabilize in 50 years and fall after that. Combine that with higher density agriculture and we might even see more nature reserves and less populated areas usable for recreation and preservation. Just don't expect to see a lot of barrier reef life for a while.

    As for languages, I expect more of the less spoken ones to vanish, but why would I expect Icelandic or Dutch to go away? I'm guessing there will be more bilingualism as even more people find understanding the local hegemonic language useful. You might speak Laotian at home and work, but go to school in China or India or England.

    Maybe I'm a cockeyed optimist. I think we'll need a lot of political reform and a lot of will and resource, but humans can do pretty amazing things. I remember the 1950s and 1960s with dire predictions of famine. Then came the green revolution, a piece at a time. It required plant breeding, agricultural reform, education, fertilizer use and so on. We have localized food shortages, but not widespread famines.

    Now the plant breeders have to do another green revolution again to deal with further population increase and global warming. I read the articles about them in Science and sometimes tear up a bit, "fucking heroes". There was some lunatic trying to come up with a storage stable avocado seed for Africa, along with the usual round of C4 rice visionaries. That and all the more mainstream sorts. There are also the nano-material people wrapping cathode particles in carbon buckyball bags for higher density battery storage. We are living in the golden age of materials science. In 2017, there wil be a bunch of big breakthroughs in material science and they'll be calling it the silver age.

    This is a science fiction writer's blog, so a lot of us here have some idea of what the human mind can create and how we can change our world given a need and resources. Let's do it.

    P.S. You may have noticed I don't mention computers or quantum anything. Those are means to an end. We don't talk about the calculus enabled moon landing or atomic theory enabled fertilizers.

    132:

    I actually have been wondering whether, in another 50 years, Indian English will be the standard form of English globally. Between Bollywood and the recruitment of people in Indian to provide phone support, not to mention the sheer number of people in India who might be using English a few decades from now. . . .

    133:

    There isn't any supersonic air travel because "The research data the XB-70 gathered helped kill the American version of the Concorde by showing how destructive and expensive sustained supersonic flight was."

    Having a big -- and thus passenger-km-economic -- supersonic airliner is not very different from deciding to make air travel very expensive. If it's very expensive fewer people do it, and if fewer people do it, you can't build as many planes and oh, look, economic death spiral.

    Ek = ½MV² and the fuel costs go way up, too. That squared term on velocity runs you from ~0.8 (for ~.9 Mach) to 9 (for Mach 3) and so you're looking at worse than an order of magnitude more fuel.

    134:

    Both of those have been demonstrated in embryo. (http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150512-bird-grows-face-of-dinosaur) There isn't any real barrier to doing it except the ethics committee and the vestiges of good sense.

    Chickens (and turkeys, and galliform birds generally) are farmed intensively because they are efficient at converting feed into bird. A fifty kilo chicken would be fairly efficient at converting rats into food, and if you were more worried about rats in the granary you might well prefer to eat chicken, even large chicken, than cats. (Not that you would need a fifty kilo dino-chicken to keep the rats down; ten kilos would likely as not be plenty.)

    135:

    A fifty kilo chicken would be fairly efficient at converting rats into food, and if you were more worried about rats in the granary you might well prefer

    Or possibly larger pests than rats? Might make farming tricky, but people farm Cape Buffalo and crocodiles, as well as less fearsome things like emu and bison. The idea of having self-defending meat animals might appeal to a certain sort of farmer.

    136:

    I've seen a ten-pound chicken kill a rat (it got in her coop. She got pissed off. End of rat). A fifty kilo chicken, especially a fifty kilo rooster, might be just a bit dangerous, and rather big for going after just rats. After all, cassowaries aren't much bigger than that, and they're rather dangerous. Imagine this confrontation with a much larger bird involved.

    137:

    I can't say that I fully understand what you an Ioan are debating. There seems to be a little confusion, though, so let me chime in.

    (1) Portuguese is much closer to Spanish than Catalan. Or anything, really. Portuguese speakers can understand spoken Spanish (spoken directly to them) and a Spanish speaker can puzzle out written Portuguese with the occasional glance at a dictionary. I learned the language in six weeks and 1993 and then promptly forgot all of it.

    (2) There is a trans-Atlantic Spanish community at least as much as there's an English-speaking one, but maybe I'm missing the meaning of "community"? Sort of lost at that.

    (3) There isn't a standard Spanish in the USA. Accents on U.S. networks are all over the map. (Literally!) But they're all mutually intelligible. There is a middle-class "neutral " Spanish in the Americas, more-or-less upper-class Andean but without some markers from those countries. But everywhere is more-or-less intelligible, although a thick Chilean accent loses me and there's something about Argentine Spanish (written as much as spoken) that I sometimes have trouble parsing.

    And Mexicans curse a lot. If you hear profanity in Mexico, don't assume that it's okay in similar situations elsewhere!

    Anyway, this is more than you need to know. The upshot is that Portuguese and Spanish are unlikely to switch their relative positions unless there emerges some huge differential in economic or demographic growth between Brazil and Spanish America over the next century. Think Norwegian and Swedish; it's too easy to understand both. And as far as machine translation goes, it'd be almost trivial to automate between the two; where you'd have trouble is with the sorts of subtle differences in connotation or meaning that right now bedevil Canadians talking to Britons in a putative common tongue.

    138:

    I normally joke that "chickens are too stupid to understand that they are not big scary dinosaurs any more". They act as though they are, but normally it's funny because they're small. If they weren't it could easily be terrifying. They hunt and kill mice, for example, and often peck things that they're curious about. Again, only amusing if they're much smaller than you are.

    I've also been within touching distance of baby cassowaries(only about 1.5m tall), with their dad a few metres away. It was a little nerve-wracking because we went from "oh look over there, little cassowaries" then they saw us and ran over to have a look. We really didn't want dad to get defensive, but keeping three curious chicks from running behind us was hard work - we got out of there quite quickly. I was also concerned that they might venture an exploratory peck... which might remove a finger or a chunk of flesh. Somewhere I have photos :)

    139:

    There's a YouTube video somewhere of a backyard chicken muscling in on and stealing a live mouse from a cat. The chicken moves so fast the cat's left stunned. And the mouse ... Well, at least it was quick. Chickens are a little bit frightening. As are cassowaries, exhibit A in the case against people who think that feathered dinosaurs aren't scary enough to be cool. Looking at you, Jurassic World makers. :(

    140:

    2117 diets will have a bias towards crops and foods that can be grown densely in sheltered greenhouses with efficient use of water, although that won't be the entire composition of their diet by any means (and it's possible food might be able to be made essentially out of basic components - a protein, a carbohydrate, flavoring ingredients - to whatever you like). Lots of vegetables, tomatoes, potatoes, etc. A very good world if you enjoy french fries/chips and ketchup!

    141:

    Hmmm. I can even see a campaign to stop certain ethnic groups from eating scorpions, because we need them to control all the domesticated crickets that are getting out of people's raising boxes and eating the household garden... After all, scorpions are predators, and ideally we should only eat herbivores.

    142:

    Water's not going to be a problem in most places around the world after global warming has had its wicked way with ocean surface temperatures. Lack of fresh water/rainfall in overpopulated deserts like California is a "today" problem, not a "tomorrow" problem. Mudslides and flooding after the annual west coast monsoon drops two metres of rain on the mountains in two months, that's a "tomorrow" problem.

    143:

    Mudslides and flooding after the annual west coast monsoon drops two metres of rain on the mountains in two months, that's a "tomorrow" problem.

    Maybe in the USA, but in Australia it's happening now. We're in an intermediate stage for both the pacific oscillation (El Nino/La Nina) and the Indian Ocean Dipole, so you'd expect moderate weather and a reasonable amount of rain. Instead we've had some weather events and quite a lot of rain: http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/current/annual/aus/

    Not looking forward to next time the two oceans give us wet weather at the same time, "record setting" seems likely to be a very gentle way to describe it. It we get a storm or two in those years I wouldn't be surprised to see a cyclone make it over the hump from the Pacific into the Coral Sea. Then a few weeks or months later flooding right through the Murray-Darling basin, because despite the distance a lot of Queensland drains to South Australia.

    144:

    [Short-circuiting intervening comments] Climate change reversal, outside Truphelm's USSA is already underway & even in some prats of the states - very recent news report on (effectively) "free" electricity in California, thanks to solar power.

    I note that the naysayers are now shouting that: "sea-level rise hasn't happened, these islands are still there" - whilst carefully ignoring what's happening in the sothern tip of Florida.

    145:

    No Profit has been around since before money was invented. Not going to go away, unless you re-create Stalin, or let Kim Jong-Un take the planet over. It might - probably will be highly regulated, so profit is legal, ripping-off is not, but that's a n other story

    146:

    The Ballad of lost C'Mell (!)

    147:

    Yes If any one body or group can stop Brexit in it's tracks ( As opposed to say a "Referendum on the terms" before the time-limit is up ) then it's The Corporation. I could easily see a repeat of a Labour mayor & the conservative City ganging up on the little Englanders. "Repeat" ? Yes, the Corp hated the dissolution of the old GLC, whom they could work with very well.

    [ Charles I, Richard Cromwell & James II & VII were all thrown out, because they were bad for business .. ]

    148:

    Thank you.

    Anyone else going to predict a switch-over to the "Ammonia Cycle" for powering, well, almost anything that moves?

    149:

    Unfortunately there are many strands of religion that discourage female education and the use of contraception,... Well, there's a simple answer to that problem. Denis Diderot: "Hang all the priests!"

    150:

    Exactly WHY does anyone need to travel between New York and Los Angeles frequently and in under a day? It's taken as a given, but there isn't actually any critical requirement for it.

    151:

    As I understand it, Catalan is essentially the old southern French language, that was superseded in most of France by the northern one, much like southern English superseded northern.

    152:

    Are we talking about the same (VW Golf/Ford Focus sized) Nissan Leaf and the same (VW Polo derived) Skoda Fabia?

    The same Nissan Leaf which comfortably carries a couple of 6' tall adults in the rear seat and which can take a 100 Watt guitar amplifier and speaker cabinet, a large pedalboard, a guitar, my share of the lighting rig, and all required appurtenances in the boot without folding the rear seat?

    The same Nissan Leaf which can happily cover 180 miles each way from my home in Essex to my Mum's place in West Yorkshire with a single extra 20 minute charging stop on top of the one we've always made doing the same trip in an IC powered car?

    The same Nissan Leaf which costs less to lease and operate month-to-month than a fully paid-up, wholly owned SAAB 93 TiD did?

    Of course, I could be wrong about all of the above but what the heck would I know, I've just been driving the damned thing for 18 months and 22,000 miles...

    153:

    Interesting I'm looking at possible power-unit replacement for my magic old Land_Rover ( Diesel, made in 1996 & I live inside the putative ULEZ for 2020/21 .... NOT going to change car - too useful, but a power-change might be do-able.

    [ They are talking about a "Diesel scrappage scheme" but I wonder about an engine scrappage, instead ??? ]

    154:

    I have no idea, but I can assure you that a Skoda Fabia is a lot larger than a VW Polo (I have owned both), about the size of the old Golf (which I also owned), and the Nissan Leaf I inspected was a LOT smaller. There may be more than one of the latter, of course - it as in New Zealand. I agree that there's no problem in densely populated areas - now consider touring north-west Scotland. Off-season. On a Sunday.

    155:

    A Fabia costs ~GB£150 per 10_000 miles in engine servicing (Skoda dealer, fixed price tariffs). But over 100k miles that still leaves you £3500 better off than the Leaf driver.

    Context - My neighbour had a Leaf, and apologised to me for leaving its back end overhanging my house every other day as being the only way she could charge it. Also, it would need a recharge to get from Oban to Glasgow (about 100 miles, 2 to 2.5 hours depending on driver) where some Fabias (engine dependent) would manage Oban to London (about 500 miles) without re-fueling the car.

    156:

    Seriously!!?

    You do know that Concorde super-cruised at Mach 2 on dry power? Which means similar fuel burn to the Avro Vulcan (No surprise there since Concorde used an afterburning version of the Vulcan's Olympus engine). Without saying more than I understand, they derived something like 90% of thrust from the intake ducts at that speed.

    157:

    The same Nissan Leaf which can happily cover 180 miles each way from my home in Essex to my Mum's place in West Yorkshire with a single extra 20 minute charging stop on top of the one we've always made doing the same trip in an IC powered car?

    I'm reading this as "making 2 recharging stops rather than one comfort stop".

    158:

    There does seem to be this "X works for Y, therefore X is better everywhere - no, X is worse in Z, so it's no use anywhere" going on.

    For rural uses, the Leaf is probably currently inappropriate. But for my wife, it would be great: her daily mileage is less than a charge, and she normally has no need to go further. For many other people the occasional longer trip can be done using a hire vehicle.

    (Oban to London non-stop? Eep! Not me, not these days. though I did do Frankfurt to Cambridge in one stint, on one tank, back when. That's ~525 miles)

    159:

    Yes. And mine costs 115 quid a year road fund tax, but I don't know how expensive Nissan Leaf servicing is, nor the statistics of battery lifetime. I forgot to mention that I always buy the 'estate' versions of any car when available, and am comparing the largest capacity version of each.

    160:

    Absolutely. If the unholy conspiracy between the government and insurers didn't make 1-5 week hiring so difficult and expensive, I would be happy with an estate version of a runabout. I am expecting electric cars to dominate in the UK's major cities fairly soon - just as soon as the prices drop a bit and more charging stations come online - but not in the country as a whole.

    161:

    My understanding is that Concorde's main fuel burn was getting to supersonic speed, not at cruise speed. Make a Concorde drop to subsonic speeds and suddenly its range shrank. This is totally counter-intuitive for anyone aware of how air resistance works in the subsonic region.

    I am however dubious as to whether you could get the same engine efficiency as the current generation of high bypass engines manage. There's been a lot of development in civil engine tech in the subsonic region since the 60s, and a new supersonic airliner might need decades of catch up. And you can't just throw more fuel at the problem - in flight refuelling, as one solution, just ain't going to fly.

    162:

    "One big question for 2117: will the internet still exist?"

    Looking at the current state of gun control in the US and the utility of the internet for almost everyone, I very much doubt that the internet as such will not be there in 2117. It is likely going to be different from the one we know today. Everything is pointing to lawmakers wanting to reign in the open wild-west nature of the internet. On the other hand, it was designed to be a very easy infrastructure to hook into, and it would be very difficult and expensive to change it fundamentally - ip6 is still struggling to be adopted.

    The current trend seems to be to connect everything to the internet so it can be controlled locally by your voice-activated device or remotely by your handheld computing device. Whether the problems with the security of these devices (not to mention the privacy implications) are going to reverse the trend or just be ignored is too early to say, though my money would be on "functionality before security".

    163:

    I didn't mean that I'd contemplate 500 miles non-stop, just that with the HC engine you're not a slave to the vehicle range.

    164:

    "Has anyone bothered to program in a must-stop-here as part of a robot's/program's function?" Many programs and devices for medical use has a number of safeguards to protect the patient. I'm not sure if anything like that has been incorporated in any AI code, though, even though self-driving cars would be a likely candidate.

    I suspect it is not an easy problem to solve. The developers for the video game Oblivion experimented with an AI for their NPCs and had a lot of problems keeping them from killing important NPCs. They ended up making all important NPCs immortal.

    165:

    No arguments; All I was saying was that for 1960s tech (which is comparable between the XB-70 and Concorde) Concorde's fuel burn at M2 did not scale as a square function like the OP argues. Concorde's actual main burn was taxiing and accelerating in the trans-sonic region.

    166:

    Is this the explanation for the source of Edgar's scalp injuries?

    167:

    How much traffic can the E-M spectrum support?

    The figure I saw was: on the order of 2tbps, through air (with wavelength dimension multiplexing and compression) at short range (on the order of 10 metres). Longer range reduces bandwidth drastically. However, the logical answer is to use cabling (fiber optic) which has roughly the same bandwidth per cable. In other words, a trunked network with densely-spaced wireless access points. This lets you have 2tbps locally to any individual, and provide the same level of service across a wide area (subject to the cost of installing infrastructure).

    I will note that the sensory bandwidth of a human brain is a lot less than 2tbps. In fact, I've got no idea what you'd do with 2tbps of bandwidth into every 100m^2 area of a city; we're talking about the same sort of provision that you might find inside a supercomputer today.

    168:

    Some of the systemic mechanisms of capitalism will still likely be with us, but it's currently effectively the state religion of the global hegemon.

    Agreed, and it's going to go down hard. What I'm worried about is the vacuum it's going to leave behind; what's going to fill it? (I note that the adherents of radical salafi islam see it not merely as a religion in the Christian-understood sense but as a legal code and a way of life; repugnant to us, but nevertheless there's a reason minority ethnic kids with disturbed backgrounds in western countries gravitate to it—it offers an alternate structure and a way of life that isn't alienating to them.) It's possible — even likely — that something even worse than Da'esh's version of Islam will show up. (Think singularitarianism in religious rapture-of-the-nerds mode with mandatory mind uploading for all who are present as physical "useless mouths" or "resisters to the truth" — "don't worry, we'll resurrect them later once we've built heaven for them" — and, ahem, lossy scanning and storage.)

    Effective pre-detection isn't going to work in general.

    I'm thinking more along the lines of recognizing anything in a library of known toxins, and also being able to identify anything that isn't in a "whitelist" of known and permitted genomes and track its progress and contacts, so that if it later turns out to be a pathogen everyone who has been exposed can be isolated immediately (no more protracted searches for patient zero). It's a big ask, but if we posit the sort of plagues we've been discussing, then I think biodefense on a scale equivalent to peak cold war nuclear arsenal spending (as in: trillions of dollars-equivalent) is not out of the question.

    169:

    Damn, that was a rabbit-hole and a half! Where's the last hour gone!

    Thanks for the link, absolutely fascinating.

    170:

    The technology is going to be there to move people around, but I don't think the safety factor will be.

    Short-haul travel: I'm finding it hard to imagine human societies in which going about on foot, or bicycle, or segway or pogo-stick—over distances of up to an hour's travel, i.e. 5-25km—is impossible. Even if it's only over closed routes, like Toronto's underground PATH tunnels in winter. But if the routes are constrained, then compartmentalizing and monitoring them for biohazards should be practical.

    Long-distance mass public transport as we know it today — open train carriages, long-haul coaches, airliners where everybody breathes the same airstream and mingle in huge terminals — is obviously a no-no, I agree. But I think long-distance travel is still going to happen. It'll be different, though.

    I'm thinking in terms of sleeper trains with individual cabins, or long-distance self-driving cars — compartments that can, with very little modification, be made into comfortable negative pressure bio-isolation cells so that they serve as quarantine on wheels. If much of what people do is virtual then you can continue to work (and eat and sleep) in your comfy moving cell while fulfilling whatever quarantine or test requirements your destination wants. (If you don't test out as clean, you simply aren't allowed out of your car.) Airliners ... you could run them on the same basis: first class intercontinental flyers are pretty much isolated and travel in a bubble as it is. But it won't be mass flying as we know it today, and it'll be expensive and a bit weird. (Think in terms of 100 people on something the size of an A380 super-jumbo, in separate rooms: the only time they'd meet each other would be in event of an emergency evacuation down the slides, which implies an already-existing threat of death or injury to trump routine bioisolation.)

    171:

    Apropos language extinction - I think it depends heavily on the political context.

    I grew up in Friesland, in the Netherlands, where the local language (Frisian) had long been ignored by the national government. In the 1950s, this changed, and Frisian became a legally recognized minority language; since then, its use has increased, and when I was at primary school, we were taught in both Dutch and Frisian. In practice, most people are bilingual, speaking Frisian in informal situations, and Dutch in more formalized settings. Today, I see many people who are tri-lingual - Frisian with their friends, and Dutch or English at work.

    I see the same thing at work in Europe - many people use English for their international work settings, and their native languages at home, or with local colleagues.

    I think that is likely to be a pretty ubiquitous situation in Europe in 2117, assuming the political situation doesn't change dramatically. Rather than languages disappearing, I think the developed West will continue to see multi-lingualism, especially in the economically active population.

    172:

    That's 5 grand over 100,000 miles difference, but the capital cost difference is 10 grand.

    So as a matter of public policy we should tax the fuck out of the dinosaur-burners until they go extinct. (Anyway, the cost of EV batteries is falling rapidly as demand increases and in turn causes production capacity to ramp up.) Seriously, this "free market" shit is choking us to death. See also Graydon's other point about capitalism. Putting a financial "value" on everything blinds us to stuff that we don't assign value to, like the future habitability of our planet or not dying of emphysema at 70 due to inhalation of PM10 particulates.

    173:

    if Those In Charge see no reason for the existence of a mass of non-worker bees then violence isn't strictly necessary. Comfortable boredom and birth control will do the job humanely, if they so choose, and why not?

    Your "why not" is that those in charge are ordinary stupid people like the rest of us (except they lucked into a potload of leverage or money), and they generally don't see why they should spend money subsidizing "useless mouths". So they try starvation tactics instead of welfare every fucking time, with results that are Not Pretty (because when you systematically try to starve 90% of the population to death, you eventually get riots and civil war).

    174:

    Can we all stop for a moment, and please remember we are still (modulo CRISPR, selective breeding programs, mass ennui-sparked die-offs and similar other such unlikelihoods) dealing largely with the standard Mk 1.0 Plains Ape anatomy, physiology and psychology we were looking at back in 1817, 1717, and even 2017BCE here? Unless there's an absolutely startling breakthrough or twelve in biotechnology which allows things like, for example:

    • Blood or serum tests to determine the most appropriate psychiatric medication and dose thereof for a particular person (along the same lines as those used to determine things like appropriate doses of insulin or thyroid hormones for persons with deficiencies);
    • Personalised genetic screening at birth to highlight personal modalities regarding things like learning style; potential for various physical or psychological disorders; potential problems with vision, hearing, and so on;
    • Easy, instant and accurate diagnosis of mental illness, as well as easy, simple and largely successful treatment of same;

      • well, unless we can fix a lot of the problems with the Mark 1.0 plains ape, we're still going to be looking at a lot of the same damn problems we have now, because the majority of our problems are caused by people being people at people. Plus, of course, there's all the other things we don't know about right now, but will find out about at some point over the next century or so (consider the interesting history of ADD/ADHD as a condition - when I entered primary school, it didn't exist; by the time I was leaving high school, it was being over-diagnosed in the USA).

    I do think we're looking at an interesting period for psychology and psychiatry (both of which are currently in the "hit it with this and see what that does" stage of experimentation with regards to formulating treatments), as they start to accumulate more and more data both from the practitioners and from the patients about what does and doesn't work, and for how long it does so, or why it does or doesn't work.

    Prior to the Age of the Internet, the majority of psychological information came from the practitioners, because the patients "weren't qualified" to give an opinion. Never mind questions about who was doing what to whose brains here, if you were a psych patient, you couldn't possibly be an expert on anything, much less the contents of your own head. These days, however, there's an instant availability of support groups for just about every psych diagnosis known to humanity, all offering "well, this worked for me" or "don't try that, it's horrible", or even just "yeah, what you're experiencing is extremely typical for your diagnosis. Here are some other landmarks on the journey to be looking out for". It's worth noting one of the larger and more accessible databases about psych medication out there ("Crazy Meds") was started and is kept up by someone who essentially began it with a group of friends by writing down their own experiences with the medications in question.

    175:

    If any one body or group can stop Brexit in it's tracks ( As opposed to say a "Referendum on the terms" before the time-limit is up ) then it's The Corporation.

    Nope.

    We bankers worked extremely hard to get the leadership, and the leading figures, of the Conservative Party to listen and to moderate the extremist 'Hard Brexit': nobody home.

    Not just a refusal, or an expression of reluctance with excuses and an explanation about what can and cannot be attempted with the media and the electorate we've got: no engagement, brush-offs and evasion, no real interest in responding to serious men with lots and lots of money.

    Let that last remark sink in.

    Nobody home.

    In one sense, there is much to celebrate in this: it turns out that bankers do not own the government. But somehow, I don't think that you'll be reassured by this at all.

    176:

    Fine by me :-) If it wasn't for the obstacles placed in the way of getting a recumbent trike and 25 Kg of luggage up to (say) Fort William by the modern railway system, I would go by train. I might, anyway, assuming I do that :-) I would quite happily give up driving entirely, given viable alternatives.

    And, yes, I fully agree with you about the "free market". One of my objections to old Labour is that it was monetarist even before the Conservatives became so - i.e. money and its management were both the problem and its solution. Thomas More was right, but it is also true that money is good when it is a medium of exchange but not when it becomes the primary measure of value. I.e. I believe that it is long past time that we abandoned money as the key to our economy. My economist friends believe that I am a trifle radical ....

    177:

    Eventually, yes, unless there is an outside context problem, but societies of the form I described in #6 are loathesomely stable. I am predicting that TPTB are NOT going to drop the "starvation" approach, but are going to increasingly use the military, arm the police, and create a militia, to keep the lower classes under control. Thatcher took several steps in that respect, Blair took others, and May isn't going to be reluctant.

    178:

    I think Mr. Wells wrote a story about that one. "Food of the Gods"

    179:

    --What constitutes a "sect" or a "religion" or even "spirituality" is highly subjective. One of the biggest arguments in Religious Studies is what they're studying, and whether something (martial arts, or Jedi, or yoga) is something they should study.

    I've seen many people online (mostly Americans) attempt to redefine religion so that it only includes traditions that include worshipping gods, thereby excluding two of the world's main recognised religions (Buddhism and Confucianism) just for starters and redefining them as "life philosophies". On the other hand the theologian Paul Tillich invented the term quasi-religion which is applied to movements like Marxism and Nazism which are religions with the most superstitious parts removed.

    180:

    I am predicting that TPTB are NOT going to drop the "starvation" approach, but are going to increasingly use the military, arm the police, and create a militia, to keep the lower classes under control.

    If that were true, then, we should expect to see an expanding Army, and increased Reserve / militia, a Police whose numbers are increasing / moving away from Peelian principles.

    Except that none of these things are happening. The Regular Army is smaller than it has ever been in the modern era, and shrinking; the Reserves are tiny, and their regrowth has been hamstrung by incompetence (on the part of the Regular Army); the Police aren't exactly in a growth phase; and I haven't seen any moves toward a militia (I would argue that trying to replace expensive Constables with cheap PCSOs isn't evidence of this).

    So I'm curious as to what evidence you're offering to support your hypothesis?

    181:

    This would mean that you in 2117 will have a (maybe) really sophisticated taste, but that you will have a hard time to emjoy novels or games from as short back as 2107.

    I think that's a category error, based on linear extrapolation of trends.

    The real underlying problem that nobody talks about much is that the innovation window in any new art form is about 70 years. To use a generational metaphor, first you get the pioneers who discover the new frontier; then you get the settlers who claim territory to expand into and tame: then you get the children of the original farmers producing more of the same. After three generations most fields are tapped-out and the pace of innovation drops to a snail's crawl while the restless and imaginative look elsewhere. You may get entire new art forms forking off from old and moribund ones, or hybridizing (consider the relationship between rock-and-roll and country and jazz forms), especially as new technology comes along: but the original form is kind of static.

    Added problem: sometimes we mistake a medium for an art form. I submit that there are multiple art forms embedded within "written long-form fiction", and they don't necessarily conform to the bookstore genre boundaries. Ditto "classical music" (do you mean baroque? Or Beethoven? Or Shostakovich?)

    But a linear extrapolation of a trend running from 1970-2017 through into 2117 just isn't plausible, in my view.

    182:

    There also is a very long tail of smaller religions/sects/cults/whatever, tailing out to a crowd of holy people who attract few if any followers and whose teachings don't survive their lifetimes.

    --Religions spring up effectively at random. There's that huge long tail of holy people who don't amount to anything, but occasionally one of them is blessed by the black swan and recruits a lot of followers.

    I think there are around ten thousand active religions in the world with a few hundred dying off or starting each year. A religion typically becomes inactive when the last group of believers dies out or converts to another religion (genocide, colonialism). Some inactive religions have been reinterpreted and revived but the neo-Druids and modern Norse pagans don't have the same beliefs as the originals. New religions that have achieved some degree of success or infamy recently include falung gong and Raëlianism which were founded in 1992 and 1974. Falun gong membership quickly exceeded that of the Mormons (founded 1820s, 15 million members) with several tens of millions of followers. The Raëlians are still under a hundred thousand.

    183:

    mechanisms for writing will be supplanted by newer ones--e.g. the replacement of discrete mechanical keys on keyboards with multitouch keyboards and then with gestural/swipe interfaces, where each dictionary word is replaced by a directional ideogram swiped across a QWERTY keymap, until eventually the ideogram replaces the alphabetic word or is auto-replaced by a corresponding emoji

    While I agree every language will be simplified, I think you are forgetting that modern mechanism of writing by 'touching buttons on keyboards or symbols on screens' may go away itself. As it is often said: 'Sloth is the engine of progress'. All the modern day technology is vectored to become more oriented towards more laziness and less attention-span. And typing things be it text or emoji not only requires spending energy to wiggle your fingers but requires remembering what you want to say and how to say it. Not saying about grammar/spelling - even today everyone has spellcheck and autocorrect. So it is very likely that in 2117 typing for most people will be a redundant skill - like knowing how to operate in Windows/macOS by command line in 2017. Typing things by entering letters will go away in favor of speech-to-text and/or some type of predictive input that will detect what you want to say based on context. Just imagine a world where the contextual algorithm predicts your messages/expressions/inputs based on your where you are, what you do and how do you feel in that moment. Will the words you utter still be yours?

    184:

    If fossil fuels are unusuable, then long-haul freight will revert from ships to rail. China has been spending a lot of money on their "Iron Silk Road" project, and that's a very long-term plan for maintaining a connection to Europe when ships stop being able to use diesel engines.

    My expectation is that we'll see most containers go on much, much bigger ships (tonnage up to 1Mt from the current 0.25-0.33Mt range) powered by nautical nuclear reactors. Probably big-ass civilianized PWRs that don't run on weapons-grade fuel (like contemporary military subs and CVNs) because if you're a million-ton freight ship you can afford to carry a spare ten thousand tons of shielding around the reactor. Alternatively, if Lockheed's alleged skunk-works fusion reactor works, that'd be about the right size to save freight shipping.

    Nuclear is expensive but if you amortize it over the equivalent of 3-5 of today's biggest container ships and design the reactor to be modular/suitable for transfer to a new hull, a design life of 50-75 years isn't out of the question ...

    (Look for sails in there, too.)

    185:

    Provided the alternative of engine / Power-Unit change is available. There is quite literally NO AVAILABLE ALTERNATIVE to a "proper" old-fashioned L-R. Since they stopped production last year, secondhand prices have been rising. But - a new-or-alternative cleaner power unit changes the game entirely. I've been making enquiries, needless to say, but so far de Nada

    186:

    Then I suggest that you look a bit deeper, and read the title of this thread. The government is not going to employ enforcers until it has to, and 2117 is still some way off. The law now allows the government to give private militia (think: G4S, etc.) many police powers, and there have been quite a lot of other changes to enable the government to do what I say without needing the consent of Parliament. The fact that the numbers are not increasing is because they have not needed to be. Yet. I am not expecting much visible change until our economy goes down the tubes, followed by the near-elimination of the welfare state.

    187:

    I do not disagree with your analysis one little bit. But, the Corp can, if they are really determined change things, without reference to the politicians ... but they have to be really desperate before they would make any open move. I expect an awful lot of arm-twisting being done behind the arras in the circs ...

    188:

    Very true, but the number of people who need one is quite small. The number of people who need a Chelsea tractor is even smaller, of course.

    189:

    A Boeing 747 is not a regional jet

    It can be, on the right route ;) Back in 2005, I flew from Sydney to Melbourne on a 747 that was being used as a regional jet (i.e. this was start and end of journey, not "first leg of an ongoing flight").

    Anyway, we've talked about hybrid cars - and no-one has mentioned NASA's new Hybrid Aircraft, the XV-24A ;)

    http://www.aurora.aero/lightningstrike/

    190:

    Thinking of some non-infectious disease public health trends:

    Rates of obesity and its sequelae will continue to increase, worldwide. 60% of adult humans (closer to 80% on the Indian subcontinent) will be diabetic. Where municipal water supplies still exist, statins and metformin will be added like fluoride is today.

    At the same time, heart disease will become so survivable (through advances in early thrombolysis via intravascular robotics) that 95% of people with cardiovascular disease will die in their 100s of dementia in mostly roboticised nursing homes. (There will be great advances in using VR to delay the progression of dementia. Great-great-grandpa thinks he's in the 2050s again? Well with immersion VR now he can be!)

    Nobody smokes. Lung cancer is mainly a disease of overenthusiastic 3D printer users.

    191:

    Cynic that I am, I think Exterminism is the future.

    https://www.jacobinmag.com/2011/12/four-futures/

    Fun fact, that section cites the Old High One here

    Anyway, the issue isn't going to be so much resource scarcity, as it will be the loss of power that comes with everyone having enough. Thats the thing that will kill any UBI plan, the politics of it not the economics. With a UBI you will have some folks doing something that others don't like/respect/approve of and they will move to take it away as a result, because they are still hung up on the idea that they should be able to control what others do by refusing to provide resources if the person does what they don't like.

    The rich don't want to give up their wealth, but even more they don't want to give up their power.

    And they will absolutely kill us all before they budge one iota.

    192:

    Total Fertility Rate can't be predicted yet. Industrialization lowered TFR. Perhaps UBI would raise it again?

    Disagree strongly. First, industrialization didn't lower TFR — TFR in UK remained very high until the 20th century. What lowered TFR was (a) decoupling the need to have adult children from poverty in old age, (b) vaccination against most childhood diseases (meant more children survived to adulthood, so smaller families were viable), and (c) education — particularly female education. (TFR drops in general one generation after women become literate as family planning information spreads. Also, education keeps kids out of the work force so they become an investment rather than a labour source for their parents to exploit.)

    Evidence from Japan, China, and other countries where TFR has dropped suggests that women converge on a family size "normal" among their peers. If everyone has 6 babies, having a seventh isn't particularly extraordinary. But if one child families are the norm, even a second child looks profligate, and a third is outrageous.) Also, about 20-25% of women are pretty much uninterested in having children (to the point of being actively hostile). That's okay, another 20-25% love babies to bits and exceed the societal norm; but the point is, once TFR falls, it's very hard to raise it significantly—it'd be a multigenerational project or require special support for "super-breeders".

    193:

    powered by nautical nuclear reactors. Probably big-ass civilianized PWRs that don't run on weapons-grade fuel (like contemporary military subs and CVNs)

    Contemporary French and Chinese submarine reactors already use LEU, and I gather that LEU has been considered for the US' next-generation SSBN. Interestingly, that SSBN is being designed to use a life-of-boat (50 years, IIRC) reactor that will never need refueling.

    194:

    Remember the old line "the future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed"?

    Well my guess is that it will stay like that. That at least is one lesson I drew from Thomas Hylland Eriksen's excellent book from last year, "Overheating", which I have reviewed here:

    https://upperguineacoast.wordpress.com/2017/04/12/acceleration-the-key-feature-of-twenty-first-century-globalization-a-review-of-overheating-an-anthropology-of-accelerated-change-by-thomas-hylland-eriksen-pluto-press-2016-david-okane/

    TL:DR - the global processes we're talking about here take place across different scales, and they can also experience reversals and deceleration as well as ever-accelerating forward progress.

    This makes extrapolating from present trends into future social and cultural results much more difficult than you might think at first glance.

    (NB, Charlie, I hope it's not against the rules of the house to post links to one's own work here)

    195:

    Whoops, I forgot Portuguese! (It's a tiny minority in Europe and I've never visited South America so it's just off my radar.) Yeah, it'll probably be one of the survivors.

    My entirely subjective yardstick for assessing a language's viability is "can a practitioner of some art form in this language survive on their earnings without translation into other tongues?" For example, can an SF writer earn a living in language X without translated editions? In the case of English (or Japanese, or Chinese) the answer is obviously "yes". In the case of German it's a whole lot more marginal — there are about 2-5 full-time SF authors in the German-speaking world, and maybe 2-4 times that many fantasy authors: for everyone else it's a side-hustle because the money simply isn't there in a language with only about 100M native speakers (many of whom are fluent in English). So I tend to think of "100M potential customers for an SF author" as my viability marker. In other art forms the threshold may be much lower (think in terms of Israeli film directors or TV stars, for example), and in societies where the cost of living is lower it may be possible to get by. But we're still probably talking on the order of 10^7 native speakers/reader and up to pass this test. (You will note that Bjork sings almost entirely in English, despite being Icelandic ...)

    196:

    Going back to the original question:

    Intergenerational issues. Is it a fair assumption that current generational patterns will still be extant and that if so they might impact language use? As per the Greg Bear Eon references way upstream, people will walk around surrounded by clouds of picts. However, even if the oldsters use implants and AR to parse and (and even speak) the 2117 equivalents of the kids’ emojis, kids will continue to hack whatever they can to create parent-free cliques, accessible only to those with sufficient intellectual / physical dexterity. Possible analogy: the development by young deaf people of forms of signing that are more sophisticated and grammatically nuanced than those taught to them by oldsters. All of these things suggest to me that communications will remain fragmented, even if the base spoken languages converge.

    Also, truthiness, assessment of. Consider source-code editors that colour tokens according to whether they are identifiers, reserved words, delimiters, comments, etc. What sort of real-time annotations will be possible for visual and written languages? ‘Citation needed’? ‘True (according to the stated conventions of my stated filter-bubble allegiance)’? ‘Brought to you by the Tessier-Kardashians’?

    197:

    You can't be sure that Moore's law is dead yet. Or, in fact, that it will hit the wall short of computronium. It may, but more likely it's just a current slow-down that will pick up again as soon as there's sufficient reason.

    How do you engineer ever-smaller transistors where the average width of a conductive circuit is now down to only 2-3 atoms?

    With 7nm processes on the horizon (and atoms on the order of 1-3nm across) we're pretty close to a hard stop for Moore's Law. The obvious solution is to go 3D and stack circuits vertically, but then you get into heat dissipation issues; stacking is already happening, but that, too, is limited.

    198:

    What proteinaceous foods will be cheap in a non-crashed 22st century?

    My money is on vat-grown meat. (Or, as Rudy Rucker put it in one of his novels, "the motel kitchen had four tanks to keep the tourists fed; they had a choice of Beef, Chicken, Lamb, or Wendy.") If you can culture animal tissues efficiently in bulk you can lose the roughly 90% of the inputs that get wasted on inedible bits (bones, brains, hair and claws) and on moving the sheep around the hillside. You also step away from animal welfare concerns, and have higher grade quality control and reduce the land area required for production drastically.

    If you can use dried, powdered jellyfish as an input and get 3D printed ersatz rump steak (made with real bovine tissue culture) out of the other end, then there's no need to give up steak.

    The evidence suggests that vat-grown meat is plausible, but commercializing it is going to take a lot of effort.

    199:

    Aha! You have just awakened one of my hobby-horses. Actually, stacking is much less limited than it is made out to be - the human brain is 3-D, after all. What is needed is to abandon the serial Von Neumann designs of today, both in hardware and software (e.g. programming languages), and introduce massive parallelism. I don't mean a few thousand processors - I mean millions, of really simple ones - and asynchronous and implicitly parallel languages. They would have to be clocked right down to keep the power under control, and some of the layers would have to be mostly heat pipes, but it's doable.

    The usual objection is that we don't know how to make use of such things. And my response is: so what? Make some experimental devices available for 1,000 quid/dollars/euros on standard cards (not making any profit), though they would be only a few thousand processors, and let the mad hackers loose on them. Yes, I remember the ICL DAP, and I am talking about a vastly bigger and more modern version of something like that. In 3-D.

    200:

    and let the mad hackers loose on them

    Okay, it only involves 1000s of cores rather than millions, but this is essentially what has happened with NVidia GPUs being re-purposed as deep-learning engines, and now explicitly sold as such

    201:

    I see the next generation of performance increases coming, not necessarily all from parallelism (which is hard) but from using task-specific rather than general-purpose computing (somewhat easier). The easy gains came from "do the same stuff, the same way, on a faster CPU". Then, Intel and AMD dragged all the techniques that I learned on my mid-80s supercomputing modules, into "plain old CISC" CPUs, such that they became mainstream. Now, C++ has native language support for parallelism (not that many people are using it).

    We're already seeing C-to-gates RTL compilers that achieve better results than hand-coded Verilog/VHDL, to the extent that IP developers have started to use C to describe their circuitry, by choice. We're now seeing FPGAs being built into cloud computing resources (Amazon Web Services).

    So where there are compute-intensive tasks that are badly-conditioned for solving in a linear or repetitive fashion on a general-purpose computer (signal processing, image processing) you can expect to see the increase in effective power come from the use of programmable logic, not just programs running on Von Neumann machines. How do you think they're doing the machine vision stuff on high-end cars?

    I can see some fascinating mix-and-match of hardware and software down the line; who knows, maybe the much-promised asynchronous digital designs will get to play...

    202:

    2 of the largest and most obvious being:- 1) The "Scotrail Express"; This is a DMU, and not suitable for a 3 to 4 hour journey like Glasgow to Am Gearasden! It can, just about, accommodate 2 conventional single seat bicycles. 2) Modern "intercity" stock no longer includes a guard/luggage/brake car in a rake of coaches.

    203:

    Without wanting to get into a definition debate around the point at which culture shades into sub-culture, two groups can have a shared understanding of concepts yet very different ethnographicly defining ways of living, ideology, kinship structures, taboos etc.

    Mutual incomprehension isn't a necessary or defining feature of cross-cultural communication.

    Eg., A secular New Yorker of Jewish descent and a Southern Baptist theocrat both understand the concepts of "Church" and "State". But they disagree about how those concepts should relate to one another, in culturally defining ways.

    204:

    Northern hemisphere atmospheric circulation sure looks like it's switching to north-south rather than east-west. One of the possible consequences is an explanation for the Oligocene "centre of NorAm is a desert" outcome; warm air from the Gulf up to the arctic, and it's dry most of the trip. AKA, desertification in Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, Illinois....

    That's a non-trivial problem.

    205:
    You will note that Bjork sings almost entirely in English, despite being Icelandic ...

    cough Sigur Rós cough. :-) Your point stands, of course.

    206:

    Ed got run over by a ... what is the word for the brief awkward stage between "pullet" and "chicken"? .. of the Creek breed, which means it weighed about 30 kg. (Creek chickens are built like Malay chickens, which means at ~35 kg, the roosters get to 40 kg, they're darn near six feet tall.) It quite literally stepped on Ed's head. (Well, attempted to use Ed's head as a traction enhancement. It's round, it's grippable...)

    I can assure you that even regular old barnyard chickens can result in bleeding scalp wounds when they step on your head in a state of haste; not bad enough to require stitches, but the scutes have some sharpish traction enhancements and the claws dig.

    So, anyway, no; Creek chickens have beaks, not delicate toothy jaws. What they call a chicken-hawk, on the other hand, is basically Dakotaraptor.

    207:

    I doubt the US will have one high speed network. Most likely, the high speed rail networks will align with our electric grid, except that the middle is going to be empty

    Hyperloop, anyone?

    Yes, it's much-hyped and embryonic. But if it works it'll be as fast as an SST while having energy draw closer to a regular high speed train. Construction cost ... not low, but if there's enough business in coast-to-coast transit it could take a giant bite out of the airline industry's revenue model.

    208:
    If we see the development of automated video editing software sufficient to alter lip movements [...]

    Already here.

    209:

    That's horribly inefficient. For example, here's a partial list of all the stuff industry gets from a typical cow carcass. You wanna give up surgical sutures? Leather? Gelatin?

    There's a second, bigger problem: cells in a vat of growth medium taste (at best) like broth, because they don't form the structure of a bone or organ. If you want to eat a muscle, you have to grow a muscle, which means, like growing a heart for transplant, you have to grow those muscle cells on a scaffolding. That's a bit more complicated (and expensive) than just growing cells in a simple growth medium and slicing off a bit of it periodically.

    There are two VERY NECESSARY byproduct of assuming that cheap, vat grown meat will be a thing: one is that cheap, vat grown human organs will be a thing, for all that means for human medicine (assuming antibiotics still work...). The other is that you're going to have to find substitutes for the hundred-odd industrial products, from fertilizer to leather to medicines, that a typical slaughtered cow produces, that won't be produced in your vat.

    So yes, vat meat would be a tremendously disruptive technology, and probably a very inefficient one to boot. Well, to Welly, since where's the leather for the boot?

    210:
    [...] I expect we'll see the beginnings of a new age of city states. Not necessarily full independence and primacy for cities and the nation-states all gone. I mean more like a gradual weakening of central authority, in favor of cities having more and more leeway to act independently on the world stage.

    This is a process which is currently ongoing. As you suggest, one particular area of interest is climate change - one of the most contentious divisions between "urbanites" and "ruralites", IMO.

    211:

    We already have vat-grown meat; your point about muscle structure means that it's served as the world's most expensive hamburger. Cheap vat-grown cuts of meats imply your first byproduct, but we eat a lot of processed meat anyway. Your second byproduct? Many-if-not-most of those have replacements already - vegans and Hindus exist.

    212:

    If you can vat-grow muscle, you can vat-grow skin. ("your skin is your largest organ!" The medical types want to grow skin pretty intensely.)

    If I was trying to bootstrap this, and I was in the early-Tesla position of knowing it was possible but it was hard to pay for, I'd be starting with, oh, I don't know, clouded leopards. I'd put money into conservation as PR, I'd have the actual genetic donors -- the live clouded leopards -- all over the marketing, and I'd be selling Very Expensive king-sized clouded leopard bed throws/rugs. Hygienic, seamless, and guaranteed unique in pattern!

    Once that works, well, rhino boot leather is very fine, if you can get it. If you can grow it by the many hundreds of square metres, well. Futz with some ostrich genes and some crocodile and make Tyrannosaur Brand biker boots. Making mink cheap. Do the whole thing while being a conservationist cause, protecting habit, and making the point over and over the protecting biodiversity is key to the commercially necessary (and coincidentally lucrative) genetic diversity underlying your business. (By extension, everyone else's business. Feathers were very fashionable once; if you can make the vat-grown ones visibly and obviously not removed from wild birds, they could be again.)

    213:

    The one cow product I have heard serious angsting about replacing? Fetal calf serum, without which much biotech grinds to a halt, and replacement of which seems ...non-straightforward.

    214:

    IMO, civilian nuclear reactors are a fiction. The regulations, decommissioning, and incident insurance puts nuclear power out of reach of any non-state operation short of the kind of megacorp you get in cyberpunk fiction (and those are large enough to be viewed as non-geographic states anyway). Existing "civilian" reactors are subsidised to an absurd amount by governments, mostly in the form of guaranteed electricity prices and implicit incident insurance, and are only "private" as a shady way to keep them off the government's books, like PFI/PPP schemes.

    I don't mean to imply I don't like nuclear power - I love it! - I just don't think it's practical at anything short of nation-scale. Nuclear transport shipping is certainly technically possible but would require governments to be operating the vessels IMO, which is a few levels of state intervention beyond the current norm. I guess it fits with the authoritarian state, though!

    215:

    Does this mean anthropodermic bibliopegy could make a comeback? Why, autodermic biblopegy could even be a thing.

    216:

    Putting high speed rail is too expensive for much of the US, but depending on how the future works out (for instance, electric airplanes are impractical, but blowing more carbon into the air is lethal)

    Category error, like assuming "if horse transport continues to grow at present rates, by 1970 London will be 30 feet deep in manure".

    Jet engines burning kerosene will continue to be practical for the foreseeable future. The source of the kerosene, however, will have to change. IIRC Virgin America already demonstrated an unmodified wide-body flying a significant distance on algae-sourced biodiesel: why switch to a less energy-dense new propulsion mechanism that requires all-new infrastructure, when it's probably cheaper to simply swap in a new input source? (Air travel consumes less than 3% of global petrochemical fuels at present.)

    As long as the source of the carbon they're burning is the carbon currently in the atmosphere, jet travel can be carbon-neutral. That's all you really need.

    (Also, I submit that if we see a human population crash the support for re-tooling our entire civil aviation industry and building new aircraft won't be there. It'll be much easier to simply patch one dependency and keep flying already-existing planes.)

    217:

    Sort of, but not at all in the technology. I left out some of the details, though. NVIDIA GPUs are strongly SIMD, as was the DAP, and that is too restrictive, as well have having some scaling problems - if I were doing it, the cores would be asynchronous. More importantly, those GPUs are power hogs, and about the limit of what can be put in a standard slot - to scale up at all seriously, that simply HAS to be resolved.

    218:

    Rhino hide? Um, they made shields out of that, not boots.

    I was thinking about that culturing skin, but as SFReader pointed out, the real problem is that fetal calf serum is the stuff that's most widely used to grow eukaryotic (not animal, eukaryotic) cells in culture. Until you can grow fetal bovine serum in a culture that doesn't start with fetal bovine serum, basically all of this vat grown stuff if a non-starter. The phrase "[t]he rich variety of proteins in fetal bovine serum maintains cultured cells in a medium in which they can survive, grow, and divide" (from Wikipedia) should really make people think about this.

    As SFReader noted, extracting it is not free of suffering for the animals, and the product can easily be contaminated with viruses. There IS an incentive to make an effective axenic substitute, but it should be obvious that it isn't easy.

    The bottom line here is that nature has provided these wonderful bionanotech systems that take plentiful, low grade nutrient sources (straw, for example) that we can't use, and slowly turns them into forms we can use. They'll even helpfully adapt to our Darwinian engineering to upgrade their performance. They actually aren't the problem. The problem is that people get greedy to have more of them, resulting in stress on the production system, then techies come along and think that reverse engineering the system, so that some of its components can be operated in sterile isolation, will be radically more efficient somehow, and wonder why the rest of us start laughing at them.

    If it weren't so rude, I'd suggest that things like induced liberal guilt over being a consumer (as opposed to an autotroph), and chauvinism that animals are innately more valuable than, say, old growth trees (or any plant) are the problems vat meat is actually designed to solve. Trying to make it cheaper than raising and slaughtering animals is almost certainly grossly impractical. In several senses.

    Besides, you want some hotel maids tending the cell cultures that are feeding you dinner? Really? Would you trust yourself to maintain one of those cultures, especially if you regularly cut bits out of it? Without good sterile procedure or even a sterilized hood to work in?

    219:

    brains

    My late MiL made the best frituras de sesos (de cerdo)...

    220:

    You are actually supporting my point! An emoji is not a reliable form of communicating unless the concept it describes is identical in both languages and, even more for emojis than single words, that includes the connotations it has.

    221:

    [The apostasy of capitalism] What I'm worried about is the vacuum it's going to leave behind; what's going to fill it?

    People have to cooperate in groups. HOW people co-operate in groups is a function of what they believe is legitimate, which in turn is a function of how they see other people behaving (mostly).

    Right now, cooperation in groups is effectively banned; you have to be an individual or you can participate in a very limited number of ways in a corporation and corporations are very narrowly defined and very focused on "shareholder value". (That is, the model is (some descendant of) the New Model Army, a Presbyterian church, a temple-focus church, or a latifundia, and it has to produce an extractive profit. And the latifundia are winning in terms of ecological dominance.)

    My take on this is basically "what if condos weren't a scam?" You could have a really full-service credit union; housing, food, child care, retirement supports and elder care as well as financial services. It gets those basic things on an efficient scale and you can -- or at least I can -- easily imagine laws that facilitate switching such organizations (whether you move for a job or marriage or whatever) so your equity follows you around and badly run ones erode and good ones grow (and get forced to split, because upward size limits.)

    It's close enough to the old capitalist orthodoxy that people could cope, emotionally; it's big enough to take advantage of specialization. It goes right on using market mechanisms which mostly work fine for a group of roughly equivalent participants who know what they are doing. It provides opportunities for social engineering. (As any cultural orthodoxy must; it has to get copies of itself into the future.) It solves a lot of problems individuals don't necessarily want to solve for themselves. There's a community. (the primary housing customer becomes a long-term thinker with actual capital...)

    222:

    OP: So here's a projection: by 2117, there's going to be a marked decline in the diversity of ideological and social systems in which we live, brought about by faster communications and the forced spread of the most aggressive societies.

    Disagree. Yes, there'll be a continuation of 500 years of (post)colonial destruction and deracination of indigenous societies, but:

    In the absence of vigorous repression, the internet makes it not just possible but almost unavoidable for people to find niche or radical ideas,and to form communities or constituencies around those ideas, reinforced by confirmation bias, echo chamber effects, and in-group out-group dynamics.

    A white, gay 17 year old Doctor Who fan in Texas probably has more in common with a gay 17 year old Turkish Doctor Who fan in Germany, than with his 17 yo neighbour. In 1980 those people never would have met or communicated. Now, they're a sub-culture.

    So you get a balkanization on micro-niche cultural/ideological/social lines, mediated by the internet rather than geography.

    That can be healthy or toxic, sanity preservation for small town gays or Pepe the frog for MRAs.

    At the same time, there's a move to supranational organizations, despite the hiccup of Brexit. Carbon markets will have to be regulated by a transnational body with teeth, despite the fact that it gets the black-helicopter crowd frothing at the mouth about one world government, but it isn't much of a step from the unnaccountable bodies which arbitrate trade disputes. Like the EU it can be done democratically and competently or . . . not.

    (Side note: Climate policy may be the ideological fault line which divides the world into blocs later this century)

    223:

    Or, thanks to texting, acronyms become the new grammar and vocab.

    224:

    In one sense, there is much to celebrate in this: it turns out that bankers do not own the government. But somehow, I don't think that you'll be reassured by this at all.

    England: a nation of lions led by lemmings. (In the Disney Jungle Book and faked-up documentary senses of the species stereotypes.)

    Am I right?

    225:

    That's been around for decades and doesn't fly, though the reasons are going to change. It gives only a small factor improvement (typically 1.5 to 5), and it was simpler and cheaper just to spend more money and/or wait for the generic technology to catch up, as you said. That doesn't mean that it hasn't been used at all, but that it hasn't become more than an extreme niche. Let's assume that the days of serial performance are over, why won't it fly now? Well, because small factors like that typically aren't very useful - you can usually achieve them in other ways, such as rewriting the bloatware or small-scale parallelism.

    Yes, special-purpose CPUs will become a bit more widespread, but they aren't the next great thing. If you want to implement (say) real-time language translation, you need a lot more than they will give you. If you want to run (say) real-time machine vision in glasses, you need a similar reduction in wattage.

    226:

    So I'm curious as to what evidence you're offering to support your hypothesis?

    I think he's right, though. What you're missing is that we don't need a pair of uniformed boots on every street corner to monitor signs of criminal activity when we've got CCTV and track everyone's cellphone. A lot of the former functions of a high-manpower military or police force have been automated, and this trend is ongoing. We're well on the way to being a total surveillance panopticon society. For example, the Five Eyes are pretty much guaranteed able to rootkit any wifi router on the market; new high-bandwidth wifi systems are moving towards using beam-shaping via multiple antennae, and the wavelengths wifi relies on are able to penetrate many materials and can be used to locate humans on the other sides of walls — MIT's signal kinetics people are publishing research on this subject, and you can bet the Five Eyes are on this particular ball.

    Upshot: they don't need to hire bodies to watch us when our own comms technology tells them where we're standing or sitting to the nearest centimetre and we're all carrying wireless repeater bugs with cameras and microphones the whole time! Everything else is an implementation detail, plus enough warm bodies to run the snatch squad (or, more likely, just an algorithm to suspend your bank and e-cash payments until you end up starving on the street and thank them for taking you in and giving you a meal and a roof over your head).

    227:

    First, Musk says that the optimal distance for a Hyperloop is 900 miles (1,400 km). The distance between NYC and LA is 3,944 km. http://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-hyperloop-plan-2013-8

    I think you guys are misunderstanding what I'm saying. I'm not saying that a transcontinental electric hyperloop or Shinkansen can't be built. What I'm arguing is that the region West of the Mississippi River and East of the Sierra Nevada mountains is too empty to justify the economics of a hyperloop over an electric regional jet. The parts that aren't empty are found in VERY isolated terrain (Salt Lake City, Denver, Albuquerque). Texas and Arizona are (very tenuous) exceptions to this.

    228:

    I have seen a pair of 19th century British Empire rhino hide infantry boots. They were accompanied by a rapturous testimonial. (I suspect that if you can get top grain off it's an important increase in the utility of the stuff; good steel knives time.)

    The default vegetarian position -- farm everywhere that can be farmed for human food -- is what's driving the current mass extinction. I want the farming footprint to go down by half. Which means an increase in efficiency, which means more return per footprint.[1] Which means starting to treat cities as part of the footprint and part of the loop rather than the current horrible open system.

    (As an aside; straw is not something cattle will eat. Straw gets used as bedding because it doesn't have food value. Hay has food value and optimizing that food value is wiping out ground-nesting meadow birds. (The mowing date moved up before the fledging date to optimize the protein content of the hay.) Fetal calf serum, if it's just a haze of proteins, can be sequenced and replicated in principle. It's going to take government-scale investment but that's not inherently a bar to doing it.)

    Many people -- I am one of them -- die if put on a vegetarian diet. (In my case, slowly and horribly. "you should be a vegetarian" = "I want you to be tortured to death! for years!" I am not free of emotional bias on this point.)

    If you want good meat, you need to maintain an ecosystem that supports a whole lot more diversity and has a much higher apex. It's not cheap meat. I don't see carniculture as a tool for consumer price reduction, I see it as a footprint reduction mechanism. (I would expect on the scale of the local abattoir, not the local timmy's, with their very different scales of local.)

    If you want people to survive the next couple centuries, a food pyramid built pretty strictly on wheat, rice, and maize isn't going to do it. Reliable large crops aren't going to be a feature of the future. That's another reason to look at footprint reduction.

    [1] this is not the same thing as an area reduction; mixed intensive agriculture that's extracting less per area is an ecological win and probably a reliability win in terms of how consistently it can feed people.

    229:

    We're starting to grapple with this problem in California, because the Board of Forestry thinks that burning hundred year-old trees is carbon neutral, because the carbon in the trees isn't coming out of the ground. If we called carbon "money," the problem would be obvious, because you're spending now, repaying over the course of the next hundred years (for a tree to regrow) and declaring that there is no change in your bank account because you didn't mine gold to put it in your account.

    Yes, algae isn't wood, but it faces a similar problem. The biggest problem with climate change isn't the average increase in temperature, it's the strong increase in extremes, loss of the jet stream (which makes air transport more useful), the increased size of storms, the decrease in predictable weather, and so on. The only good solution to this is to get the carbon out of the air.

    Now, everyone and their dog wants to carve out an exception for why their emissions are okay, but someone else's are not. For example, in San Diego, transportation (primarily car and truck exhaust) causes 55% of GHG emissions, while construction causes less than 5%. Therefore, it can be and is argued that continued growth is okay, because it's not a major contributor to climate change (ignoring the reasons why people are driving to and from all those new buildings).

    Since I've been working with this for a little bit, I'd gently suggest that, if you're positing that global civilization still exists in 2117, about the only way to get there is to stop burning all carbon-containing fuels, period, whatever the source. Civilized transports in 2117 will all use some form of electricity storage or hydrogen. We're at a point where if you carve any major sector and say that their emissions are okay, politically I don't think you're going to be able to prevent all other sectors from pointing out that they deserve an exemption too, because of their critical role in maintaining civilization.

    Now, if you want to really dive into the weed, the other problem with growing huge amounts of algae for biofuels is that they take huge amounts of nutrients other than carbon. I believe there's a calculation out there from about five years ago that said that replacing gas with biofuels was infeasible, because there wasn't enough fixed nitrogen or phosphorus available to feed the algae, even if we could scale up their tanks to make enough. Leibig's Law of the Minimum is the relevant rule: what limits the growth of any organism isn't what nutrient is most available, it's the nutrient that is in shortest supply. Having a huge amount of carbon in the air is worthless, if you don't have all the other nutrients that plants need to grow and capture that carbon. In the future, the limiting nutrient is likely to be phosphorus, and if we don't have good supplies of it, biofuels are going to be a non-starter, along with continued industrial agriculture

    That's why I'm saying that ultimately, Americans may simply be forced to slow down and take the train or the boat, rather than flying as we do now. If the tradeoff isn't the inconvenience of lost time, it's dying horribly after burying your children in the ruins of your civilization, people may eventually agree that a few extra days on a train away from the office is (just barely) a doable sacrifice.

    230:

    Google TPU chips for running trained neural networks (the training is done on GPUs but the trained weights can be run on much simpler specialised TPU chips).

    231:

    Actually, I was arguing that Portuguese would be an apex language, not that it would survive

  • It has currently 250 million speakers found on 3 continents South America: Brazil, any neighbors who wish to trade with Brazil Africa: Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe and Equatorial Guinea

    • These countries are facing a population growth Europe: Portugal
  • It can becomes a language of trade It depends on commerce within Latin America progresses. Mexican companies are already looking at Brazil as a supplier of corn should the country need to retaliate against the US for trade restrictions. Plus, I predict deepening trade between Brazil and Africa in the future, especially Portuguese speaking Africa

  • 232:

    Have been wondering whether anyone has started a 'language vault' similar to the international seed vault in order to record and store languages against loss and/or future study. Something like YouTube would be ideal because of its audio and video capabilities to save/explain both the written and spoken. Usage, grammar, lit/poetry/jokes/quips/witticisms/adages, music (lyrics and tunes) should be included. No idea how long per language would be needed so probably a good project for grad students/academics as well as hordes of lay persons/hobbyists/seniors with a strong interest in any of these areas. Most importantly: computing power/data storage as well as human ability and time are available, so this is technically feasible.

    G7 countries along with the UN and a wealthy corporate language-loving patron or two would be enough to provide the impetus and possibly the funds for this 'Universal Rosetta Stone Project'.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault

    233:

    The problem with limiting, controlling, or even understanding AI is that quite a lot of it uses neural networks which are black boxes. You train a network and the result is a matrix of weights which is completely opaque. You can take this matrix and run it on a software (or hardware like the Google TPU) neural network processor and it will recognise faces or play GO or whatever but the matrix of numbers produced by the training doesn't come with an explanation.

    234:

    That's only true for civilian versions. The military has continued its research into supersonic engines, so the engine probably needs less catching up than you think?

    235:

    Right now, cooperation in groups is effectively banned NO Not even wrong? Maybe.

    What about "Unincorprated Associations"? ( HINT: I'm treasurer for two of these - the Morris-side I dance in & my local Allotment Association. )

    Or you speaking from a USSA viewpoint? The voluntary sector, based on co-operation & the so-called "Mutuals" are really big in the UK.

    236:

    Angola & Mozambique are switching, slowly, to English

    237:

    Re: 'Leibig's Law of the Minimum is the relevant rule: what limits the growth of any organism isn't what nutrient is most available, it's the nutrient that is in shortest supply.'

    Suggest you keep repeating this because too few people are aware of it.

    Something to consider about future travel - fewer kids per family this generation therefore fewer relatives to visit for family reunions, etc. According to 2015 US Travel stats, almost one-third of pleasure travel was to visit family and two-thirds for vacation. In-town spas, sports and theme parks are becoming more common, so this could absorb some vacation travel plus provide local jobs.

    http://travel.trade.gov/outreachpages/download_data_table/2015-US-Leisure-VFR.pdf

    Even so,I'm guessing that vast majority of travel is for the daily commute. Nip that by changing zoning in favor of multi-usage buildings and multi-generational friendly communities* and lots of money/energy saved. Also, more orgs are using desks/spaces rather than offices for many of their staff who mostly work from home. This reduces travel (energy consumption) plus the excessive street lanes, parking spaces, and office building spaces that could be used for other purposes, i.e., housing and in-city parks/green spaces.

    • 'Generation-friendly communities' (from kiddies to seniors) are already being marketed as a major feature/benefit by smaller cities.
    238:

    Actually, it applies even here to an increasing extent. Over the past quarter century, an increasing number of restrictions and penalisations have been placed on such organisations. The small-scale and peripheral ones are ignored as unimportant, but look at what happened to the Plant Breeding Institute etc. and many of the mutual etc. housing societies. Also, some (many?) of the penalisation laws apply to every member of such a thing, but not even to all directors or executives of standard for-profit corporations.

    Dammit, Sir!, what you are proposing is pure communism! You should be horsewhipped for mentioning it where ladies might hear!

    239:

    For a more business-y way of talking about limiting factors, you could reference the author of 'The Goal':

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliyahu_M._Goldratt

    240:

    Ironically, the Long Now Foundation is running a Rosetta Project as you describe.

    From my limited experience, I don't think linguists should be involved in this project, and there's a couple of stories behind that.

    Many years ago, I lamented online that so many aboriginal (and Indian) languages had been lost. As a budding land manager at the time, I wished I had the technical knowledge that the aboriginal inhabitants of that land had had, because they'd done a better job of managing that land for 10,000-odd years than my employers had for forty. Unfortunately, epidemic disease and forced missionization had destroyed that knowledge centuries ago.

    A linguist scolded me for even expressing this desire. She (?) told me that linguists generally only collected "everyday" terms, like terms for familial relationships. She regarded the kind of technical knowledge that I wanted to be part of a cultural patrimony/copyright, and thought that I was wrong to want it. Now, I agree that western science has a horrible record of exploiting native discoveries (see the jerks that tried to patent yoga, bismati rice, and so on), but what do you do about people like me who just want to take care of a piece of land properly, so that it can be passed on in good shape to the next caretakers? Being judgemental about not recording technical knowledge can deny people the opportunity to do good with it, as well as the opportunity to profit from it.

    The bigger issue is that linguists often have no clue about technical subjects and mistranslate them horribly. Even the Spanish gardeners use is specialized, and if you're trying to translate a gardening book into Spanish by employing a bilingual non-gardener, problems can crop up. I was actually part of a project like that. Its goal was to create a bilingual gardening book that landowners could use to communicate with their workers even if they had limited shared language. Unfortunately, one translator didn't understand the difference between mulch and manure, so all the text references to mulch in the English text were translated as manure in the Spanish text. At least we caught that one...

    241:

    I raise you the Sugarcubes' first album, much of which was sung in Icelandic, by Bjork. But there were enough English tracks to give us "Deus", which became a mega-hit, and their subsequent albums (until Bjork went solo) were all anglophone because (duh) that's where the platinum sales were.

    242:

    Speaking of which, where has book 4 gotten to?

    243:

    I did not know that. Thanks for the info.

    244:

    Interesting and related article in Nature:

    Track how technology is transforming work

    Without data on how artificial intelligence is affecting jobs, policymakers will fly blind into the next industrial revolution, warn Tom Mitchell and Erik Brynjolfsson.

    http://www.nature.com/news/track-how-technology-is-transforming-work-1.21837

    245:

    I have the impression, from Pinker, I believe, that this used to be the standard thing linguistics graduate students got sent to do, using lower tech, of course: notebooks, IPA to record the exact speech sounds, maybe tape recorders. Then the Chomskyan revolution came along, and you had young radicals saying that you could deduce the inherent structure of all languages by thinking really hard about the grammar of English; if I recall correctly, Pinker described traditional linguistics presentations on descriptions of little known language X, and Chomskyans asking, "But what does this have to do with linguistics?"

    These days, I think the primary people who do the old language description thing are Christian missionary organizations that take seriously the text about the Gospel being preached in all languages (even if that means writing about "the baby seal of God" in one of the Inuit languages, if that story is accurate). That likely produces a selective choice of what vocabulary to record.

    But language preservation gets much less attention than species preservation. Of course there are only around 5k languages and a thousand times as many species to preserve, or more. But I don't know if the effort should be proportionate.

    246:

    Why don't we talk about hyperloop failure modes, too?

    Aside from the trivia of running it across the San Andreas fault at least twice (into and out of LA or SF), there's the problem that the vehicles are supposed to run at something like 500 mph about five miles apart. Assuming one has a breakdown, the ones behind it have to stop, and I'll leave it to you to do the math. I got something like people hanging from their harnesses at >>1 gee as they go from 500 mph to zero over five miles, but I'm probably wrong on that. At any rate, the stopped vehicles are now sitting in a vacuum tube, piling up until (I guess?) their combined weight makes the tube sag, crack, let the air in (boom goes your vacuum across the entire five hundred mile length of tube), and spill the vehicles to the ground. Then they can be rescued, but the tube won't work at all until it is repaired, resealed, and evacuated again.

    You want to ride this thing? I'm not sure I do. It beats spending a week riding 50,000 miles up a beanstalk to orbit when the beanstalk itself is vibrating like the bass string from hell, but not by all that much.

    247:

    Not quite - 500 MPH at 1 g is 1.6 miles, and you could stop in 5 miles at 0.32 g. I agree with your points, though. At a perfectly feasible railway speed (200 MPH), it's under 13 hours from New York to Los Angeles, and the overall time is only about double that of flying.

    248:

    the primary people who do the old language description thing are Christian missionary organizations that take seriously the text about the Gospel being preached in all languages (even if that means writing about "the baby seal of God" in one of the Inuit languages, if that story is accurate). That likely produces a selective choice of what vocabulary to record.

    ... And the preservation of these languages then falls to the US National Security Agency, who apparently have the biggest archive of Bible translations on the planet and curate them carefully. (Alas "Bible" and "National Security Agency" are useless search terms on the internet because god-botherers and paranoiacs, but there's chapter and verse in one or more of James Bamford's books about the NSA.) The point being that the NSA is as much about linguistics as cryptanalysis, and Bibles are a kind of Rosetta Stone — as far back as the late 80s they were known to have upwards of a thousand bible translations on hand.

    249:

    Not quite... I suspect I wasn't clear enough by what I meant as "specialist processor". These are ten-year-old slides, but they capture the problem neatly

    http://www.mpsoc-forum.org/previous/2006/slides/bolsens.pdf

    As you correctly say, the "design a specialist processor to carry out a task" of thirty/twenty/ten years ago was indeed limited - although as a worked example, wayyyyy back when, we saw a 2x to 6x gain in usable processing power over our equivalent competitor in the USA who used general-purpose computers (comparing the Blue Vixen signal processor with that of APG-65 / APG-72). It makes sense when you need the performance, cost no object; as you say, the advantages on the other side come with being able to rely on Moore's Law and waiting a couple of years...

    However, I'm not talking about hard-silicon implementations of specialist circuitry. When you compare (say) a Network Processor with an FPGA implementation; you now get much better performance for the same socket cost, or much lower costs for the same performance, if using an FPGA. That's why if you crack open any 4G base station, or exchange line card, you can play "spot the FPGA in the critical path".

    I'm also talking about a working, good QoR, C-to-gates compiler putting their output onto programmable logic. This is something that's only really reached feasibility (as in "they're now out there, working") in the last year or two - even a decade ago, I saw a "C-to-gates compiler" project crash and burn, because it was awkward to use and didn't give great results. Microsoft is already using FPGAs in all their new search engine server farms:

    https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-catapult/

    But even that is only a half-step in the right direction; we now see this kind of thing:

    https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/f1/

    and can expect to see programmable logic at personal, not just server-farm level. Tools that turn up with DLLs for the CPU, and bitstreams for loading into the FPGA. Tools that support the designer in offloading compute-intensive stuff onto specialised hardware by tagging it, not by having to lovingly hand-craft it using the experience of years of specialism; reconfigurable processors that change their circuitry on the fly, not after a complete reload and reboot...

    http://reconfigurablecomputing4themasses.net/

    250:

    Seconded. Looking forward to the next one :)

    251:

    I got clever. Clever is bad.

    Book 4, Under One Banner, is written but because it is chronologically nested in the events of Book 5, A Mist of Grit and Splinters, I need to get #5 finished before I can be sure of various chronological details in #4. ("When <character/> looks out that direction, is the road there yet?" stuff.) So I have to finish #5 before I can let #4 out into the wild, and one of the things I know for certain about #5 is that I shouldn't try to write in the viewpoint of someone whose character is intended to be a conflation of Dread Achilles and US Grant. (Those bits are done. All the other bits, not so done. Tentacular timeline, emphatically not done. This one seems to be like a mosaic.)

    Book 6, tentatively The Hempen Jig, is from the viewpoint of people who are not from the Commonweal. It starts before and ends after Book 5, but there's less chronological meshing to worry about. So I do not now foresee that it will be a problem.

    The clever -- that word again! -- plan was to publish the Doorstop this year, more properly The Human Dress. That's still the plan; what I neglected to consider was that it's 330,000 words long and involves, urm, a more extravagant register than the Commonweal books do. So it might be worse than the "double the word count to get the effective word count for scheduling purposes" rule about my writing. It takes a long time to copy-edit and the copy-editor has a life, so it's been going slower than I had hoped. Still plan to release it sometime this year. Very much NOT a Commonweal novel; that reaction to The Lord of the Rings every (anglophone of a certain age) fantasy author has in them.

    252:

    Mozambique joined the Commonwealth in 1995, the first (but not the last) country with no colonial ties to Britain to do so. Its neighbouring countries are predominantly in the English speaking sphere.

    253:

    Seriously? 'Then the Chomskyan revolution came along, and you had young radicals saying that you could deduce the inherent structure of all languages by thinking really hard about the grammar of English; if I recall correctly, ...'

    Sounds like the equivalent of the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin with a megadose of Chauvinism. Not a linguist but can easily think of stuff that English doesn't have but other European languages do, i.e., cases, gender.

    254:

    Figured I'd done it wrong. Thanks.

    Anyway, the idea of going through the Rockies (or the San Gabriels, or the Sierras) at 200 mph without a seat belt sounds like a fun ride. Still, you can drive from NY to LA in about five days by yourself, so 3-4 days in a normal passenger train without the stress of driving isn't that horrible, especially if you have wi-fi to get other work done.

    255:

    I hve owned two Fabias. They are a lot smaller than Golfs. Fabia boot 330L, Golf boot 380L, Leaf boot 390L.

    256:

    An example that strikes me is that the first move in a Chomskyan analysis (at least the "transformational grammar" version he came up with in the fifties) was to split a sentence into Noun Phrase and Verb Phrase, or in traditional terms Subject and Predicate. That works fine in English. But what about Spanish? If I say ¡Te amo! the verb phrase/predicate is "te am-" and the noun phrase/subject is -o. In fact it's worse than that, because the -o means not just first person singular but also present indicative, so it also has to count as part of the verb phrase. The NP/VP split is really unnatural in a simple pro-drop language like Spanish. . . .

    257:

    what I neglected to consider was that it's 330,000 words long

    Good grief; that's about the length of the entire EMPIRE GAMES trilogy, which is a multi-year project. (Overlapping with a couple of Laundry novels and GHOST ENGINE, currently at 145,000 words.)

    Which is to say, I should be more patient ...!

    258:

    I have so much to say about this and so little time.

    1.) When we lose Florida, the U.S. will get religion about climate change in a major way. The world will be "all electric" twenty years after, with guaranteed bombing of your coal mine or any oil well with an output used for something other than lubrication. (The prophecies of this new religion will have something to do with "Florida Man will go home and leave us in peace.") We may go with fusion or pebble bed reactors instead of solar and wind, but coal and oil are dead right now, we're just waiting for the house of cards to fall. Trump will give them an extra 5-10 years of life, but hydrocarbons are dead men walking. Divest now and don't try to short them. (No human can know the time.) In the U.S. this will probably kill the Republican Party.

    2.) Car manufacturers will standardize on a particular battery size and an infrastructure which will allow batteries to be changed in charging stations by semi-skilled labor (in other words, the same people who currently pump your gas and check your oil) in less than five minutes. The smarter oil companies will take part in this shift - your "Shell Gas Station" will become a "Shell Battery Station", the rest of the oil companies will die rapidly. There may be multiple battery sizes available; you can't run a semi-truck (lorry for the Brits) with a car battery, but "change it in less than five minutes" will hold true.

    3.) When we stop using oil we're going to clobber the Saudis, (and possibly the Iranians) and we'll round up the Wahabi clerics and shoot them. The only thing saving the Saudis from having this happen today (by which I mean 4/13/2017) is oil. When we stop using carbon the "nuke Mecca" crowd will gain political power with a speed that surpasses c by orders of magnitude.

    4.) Yes, many languages will die.

    5.) There will be a general decline in prejudice in the WEIRD countries. The real "Howard Foundation" of our future may well be a non-profit which pays people to marry outside their race, having taken their cue from the fact that everyone realized they had a Gay relative and... things changed quickly. I see the current increase in fascism as a minor minor problem in historical terms. The issue of "U.S. intelligence community vs. Trump" is going to involve large reveals about who is financing certain kinds of social change. The temporary positive change in the fortunes of the prejudiced is bringing them out in the open. Over time, this will be a good thing (as more Nazis get "punched" in various forms.)

    6.) Climate change guarantees a very ugly period starting around 2040. By 2117 this ugly period will be mostly over, with a significant reduction in population and a much greater understanding of the dangers of badly managed capitalism (or a badly managed ecology.) Capitalism will still exist in 2117, but it will be a spayed and neutered capitalism designed to feed into better health and life for citizens. By 2217 these restrictions on capitalism will dissolve as people forget their history. 2077 and 2217 will be pretty dystopian, but 2117 will be socialistic (in a good way.)

    I have a couple more thoughts but no more time to record them. I will hopefully post more later.

    259:

    No wonder Chomsky dislikes Piraha so much. Actually, writers can have a bit of fun writing non-Chomskyan languages (for instance, without recursion) as one way to (at least fictitiously) make them less amenable to machine decipherment.

    260:

    This is where YouTube is really handy: you get the real live person talking about their real life in their own vocabulary and then combine this with everyone else who shares that language describing their day-to-days to give you an authentic (non-editorialized/-sanitized) trove of what that language/culture is.

    Your 'linguist' sounds like a grammar obsessive and probably should not be allowed/would prefer to not be near real-live talking, walking, eating, defecating, sleeping, working, laughing, etc. humans.

    261:

    0.6 Ash :)

    I wrote the Doorstop between 1997 and 2003, with a different brain. Dealing with the edits has been strange.

    262:

    I know the problem - but, more importantly, I know the elephants (plural) in the room those references are ignoring. I was a supercomputing expert before I retired, incidentally. As an aside: slide 21 in the first one - Oh! Dear! That's nearly as bad as the 1950s Brand X comparisons. The Itanic was a disaster in silicon - almost anything did better.

    The main problem is that CPU power hasn't been the bottleneck for most applications for well over three decades! The limit is almost always data access, often caused by bloatware, and FPGAs don't really help there. Oh, yes, they can provide a limited improvement in some cases, but the key problem (as with using them for specialist calculations) is that the improvement doesn't scale. And, because of that, it doesn't enable anything that can be done without it, even if it may make it a factor of (let's be over-generous) up to ten times cheaper or less power hungry.

    To expand what is done to things that aren't feasible at present, you need hundreds or thousands of times more oomph per watt, not under ten; I gave a couple of real-life examples. And, while there ARE a few things for which FPGAs are more than ten times faster or efficient, there aren't many, and it's normally a lot less than ten. Actually, the same is true for GPUs (as general compute engines), which is why they have not taken off the way that some people predicted. Even in the supercomputing area, the proportion of people who convert their codes, only to find they are no faster, is large.

    Your point about easy programming is good, but the issue there is whether you can take an existing C++ program (which you can assume to be ghastly) and speed it up. That's also the reason that GPUs haven't spread out of their niche. You need an application that is dominated by a small, comprehensible kernel, and then change the code of the kernel to be efficient on the specialist processor. That's also why they don't rewrite their code in more suitable languages, or even clean it up. Doing that automatically is a research topic, but isn't likely to be delivered before full automatic translation is (it's a closely related problem).

    I agree that FPGAs aren't going to disappear soon, and are probably going to be more common, but they aren't any more of a game changer than GPUs have been. Not really relevant on a century timescale, I am afraid.

    263:

    I said the OLD Golf - VW increased the size of the Golf.

    264:

    Which brings up the subject of hybrid languages. Several years back when I was living in San Antonio, Texas, riding the bus back home after work one afternoon I overheard a conversation between two Hispanic men. The conversation started out in Spanish and then the word “babysitter” in English, then back to Spanish and ending with a phone number in English. This way of speaking known as Spanglish is common in regions of the US Southwest, including California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, and Texas. These states were actually part of greater Mexico before being annexed by the US. Spanglish is also spoken in Florida and NYC by Cuban and Puerto Rican populations.

    I can see a form of Spanglish (perhaps more English with Spanish slang) taking hold in these regions in 2117. Donald’s wall and immigration policies in this century will be moot a hundred years from now.

    The letter “y” is the Spanish word for “and” may well be used as a substitute like the “&” in written form. The Spanish “y” pronounced like the English letter “e” when spoken may also substitute “and” in conversations. The query “eh?” substituted by “y?”…

    In short, Spanglish will be used in communication and marketing to these regional populations in 2117.

    265:

    You know, I'm seriously looking at getting a Bolt. The battery pack for that sucker weighs 436 kg, and I don't think you're getting it out of the car without disassembling the car. Indeed, it's a major part of the car's cost. That's just to go 238 miles at a sane speed.

    I'd suggest it's simpler to rethink service station purpose and architecture. Instead of swapping out gynormous battery packs, perhaps it makes more sense to make it a true service station: a place to stop for a few hours, eat, sleep, whatever, while your car recharges, sort of like a truck stop. I don't know if we'll get to 300-400 miles per day for electric vehicles in general, but if we go towards electric vehicles for all purposes, this will have the effect of regenerating any number of little towns that used to make their money on gas stations back when gas cars didn't go that far either. And if they're not putting their watts in cars, they can sell them to the grid, so it's a win either way.

    266:

    You can go further than that: Spanglish, Chinglish, Konglish... It's pretty obvious that, over the next 500-1,000 years or so (absent an extinction event), there's going to be a whole family of Lish/Glish languages developing, where the basic vocabulary, syntax, and structure derive from English, but local terms are welded in (like Chingus for friends in Konglish). This exactly parallels the development of Romance languages from Latin, and will happen for much the same reason.

    267:

    Electric vehicles with pumpable fuels are pretty straightforward; long-range vehicles like long-haul trucks and trains will probably use them. (I continue to expect anhydrous ammonia, but that's not the only possibility. Aluminium is a good choice if someone can figure out the sludge problem.)

    We have battery electric cars now because we've got the batteries; the point is not that the batteries are good, it's that they're good enough and the basis for mass production on a sufficient scale almost existed. (Less almost than Musk was counting on, I think.) (Which I am sure you know! but it seems to get lost from this kind of discussion.)

    268:

    Some of the Tesla superchargers are that -- they're referred to as "destination chargers."

    The one I used to use a lot was at Harris Ranch; this is a 90-120 minute drive from home, and the restaurant has superchargers.

    But since November, I'm significantly cutting down activities that give money to the fascist's supporters.

    269:

    Sorry - I realise that I was being very confusing, because I was forgetting which comparisons I made when.

    We could get four 6' people in the old Golf and can in my current Fabia without severe discomfort; we could not in my Polo. I agree that the boot on my old Golf estate was a lot larger.

    To stop this debate, let's assume that I made a mistake about the Nissan Leaf's capacities; my points about its distance limits and price stand, especially for people who replace their car before it dies. But, to repeat, the former is not a problem for many people, and the latter is within the range that could be overcome by taxation (yes, I am siding with OGH). However, both the Fabia and Leaf count as small cars, and those do not dominate even in the UK - electric is not yet in a position to take over for larger ones, even with considerable taxation support. By 2030, perhaps.

    270:

    Yes :-) But a reasonable compromise would be the trip in a long day (or long overnight), with 200 MPH across the plains and much less in the tricky parts. What we need to do is get away from the 'minimise time at all costs' mindset.

    Disclaimer: I first started long distance (intercontinental) travel when the default mode was steamship :-)

    271:

    English vs. Every other language

    What kind of English are we talking about here? How will it evolve and change?

    Will it be as different as today's English is from that of Shakespeare or Chaucer, or even "A Clockwork Orange"?

    Will it be regional with mutually incomprehensible dialects even here in the US?

    How about multinational hybrids like Spanglish, Engnese or Engdustani?

    I can see English conquering the globe only at it moment of victory to split and break up into dozens of English derived languages the same way Latin became Romanian, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and French.

    272:

    Re: 'This implies that survivability is closely tied with how rich the native speakers are.'

    Disagree - Latin which was spoken/written only by the 'learned and elite' was replaced by the local (peasant-class) dialects thanks to widespread affordable tech, i.e., Gutenberg's press.

    273:

    "Capitalism is gone. People will kill you for saying you want to make a profit, and if the recording -- of course there is a recording -- is clear that, yeah, you said that, it will be legal."

    "Well, there's a simple answer to that problem. Denis Diderot: "Hang all the priests!"

    The world will be "all electric" twenty years after, with guaranteed bombing of your coal mine or any oil well with an output used for something other than lubrication.

    ...

    Sigh.

    I wonder why there is so much bloodthirstiness in this thread?

    274:

    Vat-grown meat seems unlikely to me. More likely is fake meat made from plant inputs and flavoring ingredients that near-perfectly replicates the taste and texture of meat. We're close to that already with fake boneless chicken breasts.

    Agreed on the biofuels for air travel. What would really be revolutionary, though, would be if we could get full electric battery planes capable of carrying 100-200 passengers. Electricity is a lot cheaper than fossil fuel, to the point where if we had such planes it might be cheaper to do more short trips with stops/transfers versus the long distance flights that are best when you're running the planes on fuel.

    275:

    Rural vs. Urban - Cities Triumphant, especially here in America.

    As they say down South, nothing kicks harder than a dying mule. The 2016 election was that kick.

    Economically and technologically, Red Rural America will soon have no reason to exist. And its a world wide trend with more people for the first time living in cities than in the countryside.

    Got coal?
    Nobody cares because fracking gas is cheaper and solar energy is now cheaper in most areas (the Chinese just cancelled 103 coal burning plants in favor of expanding their already impressive renewable energy industry - so overseas markets won't save the coal industry).

    Got oil? Nobody cares because we will be driving EVs (Tesla now has greater market valuation than the Ford Motor Company).

    Got cattle and livestock? Nobody cares because we will grow meat from stem cells (its already on the market and the price of a lab grown hamburger patty fell from $300,000 to $3 in a single year)

    Got farms? Nobody cares because we are turning old warehouses into vertical farms in the hearts of major cities worldwide from Newark, to Singapore to London to Tokyo - growing crops 24/7/365 more cheaply without the transportation costs needed to haul fruits and vegetables cross country.

    Got farm labor? Nobody cares because any remaining outdoor farming will be done with robots and drones.

    Got small town manufacturing? Nobody cares because we have robots, automation and algorithms that replace repetitive human labor on the factory floor and 3D printers that can perform customize batch production from anywhere.

    Got a fishing boat? Nobody cares because we will be harvesting multi-modal oceanic farms for kelp, fish and shellfish - and the fishing industry can finally advance from the hunter/gatherer stage.

    A new technology - fracking - killed coal. These newer technologies will kill what is left of Red Rural America's economy, leaving Blue Urban cities as the only source of economic growth and prosperity.

    Look for large mega cities surrounded by vast empty spaces filled with old industrial and agricultural ghost towns populated by a few back to nature off the grid hippies and that family from "Deliverance".

    276:

    We certainly agree on getting past time minimization, and I agree with you that it's probably possible to do high speed rail across the Great Plains, unless there are blizzards, tornados, or cyclones to deal with (CF climate change. The Great Plains have some of the most unstable weather known on the globe).

    As for the rest of it, a lot of people need to remember that the US has a lot of inconvenient topography. Here in Southern California I'm used to it, and I've been here long enough to have learned that all of the good routes have century-old rail lines on them already. If they can't accommodate high speed rail, there's not another way for the line to go, other than burrowing through some young and seismically active mountains. Sucks, but there you have it. At least no one here is talking about ramming a high speed rail tunnel through Mt. Rainer...

    277:

    Educated vs. Uneducated

    Trump's election wasn't so much a victory as a last stand. His voters pine for the days when a high school education was all you needed to get into the middle class.

    Those days are gone.

    When trucks get automated the last good paying blue collar job will be gone.

    Those humans still working on the factory floor will need to know how to program computer languages and perform college level statistical analysis for quality control.

    https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/01/making-it-in-america/308844/

    278:

    Heteromeles noted: "Now, if you want to really dive into the weed, the other problem with growing huge amounts of algae for biofuels is that they take huge amounts of nutrients other than carbon. I believe there's a calculation out there from about five years ago that said that replacing gas with biofuels was infeasible, because there wasn't enough fixed nitrogen or phosphorus available to feed the algae, even if we could scale up their tanks to make enough."

    Excellent point, and thanks for mentioning Leibig's Law of the Minimum. Two quibbles:

    First, nitrogen fixation is relatively easy, since there are a great many soil microbes that will do the job for (essentially) free. Shouldn't be too hard to scale them up to industrial levels of production, though as you probably know, bioreactor technology isn't trivial. It can take quite a bit of R&D to get a bioreactor working effectively and keep it stable in the long term. Fortunately, it seems that it's not too hard to reboot the reactors by starting with a fresh infusion of appropriate bugs.

    Second, I just edited a paper by a Chinese colleague about global phosphorus budgets. Seems we're more likely to run out of phosphorus in the near future than most other plant nutrients. That's a non-trivial problem, since its primary source is phosphate ores (a nonrenewable resource), though I suspect that we'll be able to harvest the element from most eutrophicated bodies of water for many decades before we run out. Since phosphorus doesn't become part of the biofuels, I can foresee some kind of really tight recycling system to recover the phosphorus during extraction of the biofuel. Again, R&D will be required, but it doesn't seem like an unsolvable problem.

    279:

    Probably want to read the US Constitution again, if you think that a big nation full of no-hope rural people isn't an enormous political problem. That's a mistake the Democrats keep making, to everyone's collective sorrow.

    280:

    Old Vs. Young

    Practical gerontocracy with life extension techniques and reduced birth rates (sorry Millenials, we Boomers aren't going anywhere for a very long time).

    World population peaking at 10b more or less and (depending on your assumptions) either slowly declines or drops like a rock. By 2050 there will be 30 million fewer Japanese and 50 million fewer Russians. Don't worry about Putin, his Russia is already a Potemkin village.

    Declining population alone is enough to cripple capitalism, which depends on an assumed ever increasing pool of laborers and consumers for real growth.

    Capitalism itself cannot survive the demographic transition to lower birth rates, graying populations and declining populations

    No-growth capitalism is an oxymoron.

    Economic growth is not possible with falling populations.

    Fake economic growth mostly from mergers into bigger and bigger conglomerates followed by bubbles that burst taking investment money with them, only to see another bubble form.

    281:

    Russia vs. Demographics

    Aside from being a corrupt, oligarchic, mafiya state whose only source of income is ever cheaper oil, Russia is demographically doomed. By 2050 there will be 50 million fewer Russians:

    http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/russian-demographics-perfect-storm

    The shrinking population is the result of deaths outnumbering births for nearly two decades without sufficient immigration to compensate for the deficit. The increasing number of deaths reflects the persistence of comparatively high mortality. The decreasing number of births is due to the prevailing low fertility, which plummeted to 1.2 births per woman in the late 1990s and now hovers at 1.7 births per woman. That rate is still about 20 percent below 2.1 births per woman, the level necessary to ensure population replacement. High rates of smoking, alcohol consumption, drug use, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, obesity, heart disease, violence, suicide and environmental pollution contribute to Russians’ poor health. Russia’s current male life expectancy at birth of 64 years is 15 years lower than male life expectancies in Germany, Italy and Sweden.

    Notwithstanding a recent fertility uptick, low fertility persists due to inadequate reproductive health services, lack of modern and low-cost contraceptives, widespread and unsafe abortions, infertility, fewer women of childbearing age, changing attitudes toward marriage and voluntary childlessness. In addition, Russia’s abortion rate, estimated at two abortions for every birth, has traditionally been the highest in the world.

    Russia’s aging population has placed strains on the economy that will impact numerous sectors including agriculture, manufacturing, the armed forces and retirement schemes. In the next decade, Russia's labor force is expected to shrink by more than 12 million, or around 15 percent. The contraction of Russia’s labor force is exacerbated by low retirement ages: 60 for men and 55 for women. In certain situations, for example, hazardous occupations or unemployment, retirement ages are lower. Nevertheless, Russia’s older population does not fare well. According to a 2014 global survey of the social and economic well-being of older people, Russia ranked 65 among 96 countries.

    Which will lead to political collapse:

    http://www.businessinsider.com/startfor-predictions-for-the-next-decade-2015-3#russia-will-collapse--1

    "There will not be an uprising against Moscow, but Moscow's withering ability to support and control the Russian Federation will leave a vacuum," Stratfor warns. "What will exist in this vacuum will be the individual fragments of the Russian Federation."

    Sanctions, declining oil prices, a plunging ruble, rising military expenses, and increasing internal discord will weaken the hold of Russia's central government over the world's largest country. Russia won't officially split into multiple countries, but Moscow's power may loosen to the point that Russia will effectively become a string of semi-autonomous regions that might not even get along with one another.

    "We expect Moscow's authority to weaken substantially, leading to the formal and informal fragmentation of Russia" the report states, adding that "It is unlikely that the Russian Federation will survive in its current form."

    282:

    China vs. Demographics

    But China is also doomed.

    Remember back in the 1980s when everyone was predicting the Japan would take over the world? Didn't happen. Why? for the same reason China is not going to take over the world: demographics.

    Hard to imagine, but China is running out of people and workers. Like Japan before it, China has very poor fertility rates. Its so bad that the interior provinces are asking for a 2 baby MINIMUM policy:

    http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/02/china-provincial-population-deputy-head.html

    The decades-old one-child policy has skewed China’s population older, as well as resulted in far more boys than girls, due to some couples seeking to make sure their only child would be male. The aging problem is weighing on China’s pension system, while the gender imbalance has made it hard for some men to find wives. As a result, Mei said in his proposal to the provincial political advisory body earlier this year, the mere relaxation of the one-child policy isn’t enough, and two-child policy should be enforced.

    But it's already too late. Easing its one baby policy won't alter China's demographic collapse:

    http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/easing-one-child-policy-may-be-too-late

    As a result of rapid declines in birth and death rates over the past four decades, China’s life expectancy at birth has increased by more than 10 years to 75 years. With steep declines in fertility and increasing longevity, China’s population has aged rapidly over the past 40 years, with the median age nearly doubling from 19 to 35 years. The adoption of the one-child policy also accelerated the decline in the proportion of China’s children, falling precipitously from 40 percent in 1970 to 18 percent today. In contrast, the working-age population aged 15 to 64 years jumped from 56 to 73 percent, higher than the 62 percent average for more developed countries. The extraordinary age-structure transformation allowed China to benefit from the demographic dividend, a short-term productive advantage due to a large labor force relative to small numbers of dependent young and old. Throughout the past four decades, China’s potential support ratio, or working-age persons per retiree, was high, early on 14 working-age persons per retiree, and now eight, versus three per retiree in Germany, Italy and Japan and five per retiree in Australia, Canada and the United States. Also, before the one-child policy, China’s sex ratio at birth averaged around 107 boys for every 100 girls. Ten years after the policy’s adoption, the ratio reached 115 boys for 100 girls and may exceed 125 in some provinces, reflecting the strong preference for sons, especially in rural farming areas. China’s unusually high sex ratio at birth indicates extensive use of sex-selective abortion. The number of young males unable to find brides is estimated at more than 25 million.

    The critical factor determining China’s future population is the level of fertility. If China’s current fertility of about 1.6 births per woman were to remain constant, its population would peak at 1.44 billion in a dozen years and then begin declining, reaching a population of 1.33 billion by mid-century and 868 million by the century’s end

    In addition, constant fertility would reduce the proportions of children and the working-age population and nearly triple the proportion of elderly to 25 percent. As a result, China’s current potential support ratio of 8.3 working-age persons per retiree would fall to 2.5 persons per retiree by mid-century. China’s fertility could also decline further, perhaps approaching low levels of Germany, Hong Kong, Italy and Japan. Further reduction in Chinese fertility to 1.3 births per woman – the low variant - would accelerate population decline, shrinking labor force and aging, with China’s population peaking at 1.40 billion by this decade’s end, then declining to 600 million by 2100. In 50 years, one-third of the population would be elderly and the potential support ratio would fall to an unprecedented 1.6 working-age persons per retiree.

    283:

    Descriptions of zeppelin travel do sound attractive. :)

    One thing about hyperloop is you can see it as a way to keep making use of the (tremendously improved) pipeline tech that isn't going to be useful for oil.

    And of course it's meant to compete with air travel, so it has to be really fast.

    I can't help but be reminded that the average speed for freight rail is low; somewhere around 40 kph considered over the journey, and that one of the big issues is in-city delivery. These don't necessarily connect anymore; a lot of things are going off long-haul trucks straight on to shelves because if you build a big box store you can build a big loading dock round the back. Of course, this is not what you want if you're trying to push towards dense urban living.

    Anybody can fit a 2 metre pipe down a lane of road; there are places where you could fit a 2x2 grid of those in a slightly enlarged centre lane no problem instead of the jersey barriers. Run a 4 rail X rail electric system down the inside of that and deliver ~1.7m cargo cubes (up to whatever length your turning radius decision can handle) down them. It doesn't have to be fast; evacuated is nice, constant pressure would be nice, but all you really need is ~50 kph and a good switching system. Build the city a material circulation system.

    284:

    What we need to do is get away from the 'minimise time at all costs' mindset.

    A good start would be to adopt EU norms for annual vacation from work; 6 weeks/30 days paid leave, plus maybe another 10-20 days for health/spa leave (the German pattern) and no set allocation of sick leave, just time off as vouched for by an accredited medic.

    (For me, one of the most annoying things about US SF conventions is the way everybody begins to leave on Sunday morning in order to catch their flights home, because they can't take an extra day off the following Monday. It really drives home the difference between 10 days paid leave a year and 20 days paid leave — the UK norm, which is pathetically short by EU standards.)

    285:

    I wonder why there is so much bloodthirstiness in this thread?

    Because it's overrun by Brits and Americans (citizens of a former aggressive imperial hegemonic power and citizens of the current one). Next?

    286:

    Working age population isn't especially relevant if your economy has shifted to robot labour.

    China is ... in a really tough spot, let's say, but that's mostly because of food and economy = coastal issues, not demographics.

    287:

    Those humans still working on the factory floor will need to know how to program computer languages and perform college level statistical analysis for quality control.

    In the Year of Grace 2117, I don't think the few (if any) humans on the factory floor will need to do any of that. If they see anything wrong or have suggestions, they'll just point it out, describe it to the machines in the human language du jour and the machines will take it from there. If there are any humans still doing programming and statistical analysis, they'll be way up the line from the factory floor.

    288:

    Disagree strongly with your prediction that the rural areas will empty

    http://www.agbioforum.org/v18n3/v18n3a02-artz.htm

    Look at Figure 2. Current US rural population is about 125% of what it was in 1900. This is despite the massive automation the region experienced in the 1920s, 30s, and the depopulation that occurred as a result of WWII (young men and women joining the army or working in factories). There is even an increase in population in the 1980s.

    My theory is that the increase in the 1980s - 1990s corresponds to a. Increases in tourism b. the WWII generation retiring

    It would be interesting to see another analysis of the population of micropolitan areas (US small towns) over the years.

    In short, rural areas aren't going anywhere. Unless the Electoral College is abolished and the Senate is reformed, they will continue to play an outsize role in US politics.

    289:

    I put in spaces. If I had known how this would be formatted, I would have put in asterisks or another place holder. I attempted to apologize and explain the problem, but the site would not take a second comment from me that quickly. When the comment did not draw any interest, I decided a follow up would just be uselessly cluttering up Charlie's site.

    So in case anyone else cares. I apologize for not formatting correctly and if the moderators are in the mood, they can delete said comment with my blessing.

    290:

    Current US rural population is about 125% of what it was in 1900.

    American population in 1900 = 76 million. American population now = 324 million. A 425% increase.

    Rural America is not keeping pace and is falling behind. The median urban adult is six years younger than his or her rural counterpart: 45 years old compared with 51. Immigration will keep urban areas younger as depopulation makes rural areas older.

    Its a trend that has been going on for over a quarter century:

    http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/06/slow-death-in-the-great-plains/376882/

    OVER the past two decades a strange phenomenon has become clear in much of the center of the United States: people have almost stopped having children. Several factors may explain this. Much of the Baby Boom generation has finished having children, and its successors, known unimaginatively as Generation X, have delayed having children and chosen to have much smaller families. These facts, which apply to the country as a whole, acquire ominous dimensions when considered alongside the "rural flight" away from the Midwest which began in the 1930s and continues today. The problem is far from just local: the area suffering from this reverse baby boom comprises 279 counties in six states, totaling nearly 470,000 square miles. Included are Wyoming and Montana, most of North and South Dakota, three fourths of Nebraska, and more than half of Kansas. In the past ten years 16 percent of the lower forty-eight states has seen barely one percent of the nation's births.

    The region is already underpopulated. As a whole, the 279 counties average only six people per square mile, according to the 1990 census. Even this average would be lower were it not for a few comparatively populous places, such as Hall County, Nebraska, which is served by an interstate highway and is thus a center of trade; in 1990 it had ninety-one people per square mile. In that census half the counties had fewer than four people per square mile and nineteen counties had fewer than one. In contrast, New Jersey has nearly 1,100, and three New England states taken together average more than 750. This area can ill afford the economic and social consequences of a lost generation of unborn children. When it comes time to pass the torch to the next generation, too few hands will be waiting.

    With fewer children, schools will be closed and consolidated. As the population drops, the Postal Service will close post offices. Government at all levels will reduce staff. Elks Clubs and American Legion posts will close, as will movie theaters and barber shops. Churches with dwindling memberships will be unable to support a pastor. In many towns the clinic or hospital will close, owing to a lack of patients and an inability to retain doctors. The effects of reduced economic input will ripple through the local economy -- particularly in rural areas, where people depend on one another. As the cutbacks continue, the value of real estate will plummet. Adding to the problem, in fifteen years Baby Boomers will begin to retire. Many will move to Omaha, Wichita, Denver, or even Texas. WOOFs (well-off older folks) will seek easier climes, and houses in many small towns will go begging. A similar fate awaits commercial property.

    The colleges throughout the region will also suffer from declining birth rates. College and university enrollments will be high over the short term, because of the comparatively large number of children born during the "echo" years. In recent decades college towns have been insulated from the ebb and flow of the economy. By 2010, however, enrollments will decline substantially.

    Without doubt the decline in births will gradually drain the life out of the region. Children are the key to holding society together. Any village, town, county, culture, or other social unit is just one generation from extinction. Without more children, the aging social fabric will fray and finally fall apart.

    291:

    Also, before the one-child policy, China’s sex ratio at birth averaged around 107 boys for every 100 girls. Ten years after the policy’s adoption, the ratio reached 115 boys for 100 girls and may exceed 125 in some provinces

    Trying to remember where I read this (recently — i.e. in 2017) but apparently this is the official figure; unofficially, what happened is that a lot of second children were born but were not reported by their parents and are now undocumented teens/adults. Many of these are girls; sex-specific infanticide is apparently less widespread than previously believed, but underreporting of female births is widespread (by parents hoping for a boy to carry on the family name).

    (Note that the "X murder their girl babies" story plays to a xenophobic audience's prejudices; in reality most people have a really strong preference for not killing their children—any of them—so while I'm sure some infanticide happened, I suspect that a whole lot of underreporting of births also happened and was tacitly ignored by the neighbours because they were doing exactly the same thing.)

    This is still a huge administrative headache but it's a bit less damaging in the long term than a 5:4 sex ratio; in particular, it could in principle be fixed retroactively by a general amnesty process.

    292:

    Actually, the Imperial power wasn't expansive, and the expansive power wasn't the Imperium, but what the hell? - they were in bed with one another.

    293:

    America vs. Demographics - A Nation of Mutts

    "We're Americans, with a capital 'A', huh? You know what that means? Do ya? That means that our forefathers were kicked out of every decent country in the world. We are the wretched refuse. We're the underdog. We're mutts! Here's proof: his nose is cold! But there's no animal that's more faithful, that's more loyal, more loveable than the mutt. Who saw "Old Yeller?" Who cried when Old Yeller got shot at the end?" - Bill Murray in "Stripes"

    Trump and his more racist followers not withstanding America remains open to immigrants. As such remain the only industrial nation with relatively high birth rates, and growing population that isn't getting old as fast as the others. We have to remain immigrant friendly, we can't fund social security and other sacred programs without an influx of new Amwericans.

    But something interesting is happening, something predicted by the late Ben Wattenberg in his book "The First Universal Nation".

    The fastest growing racial/ethnic census category is "Mixed".

    https://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/race/cb12-182.html

    "The 2010 Census showed that people who reported multiple races grew by a larger percentage than those reporting a single race. According to the 2010 Census brief The Two or More Races Population: 2010, the population reporting multiple races (9.0 million) grew by 32.0 percent from 2000 to 2010, compared with those who reported a single race, which grew by 9.2 percent. Overall, the total U.S. population increased by 9.7 percent since 2000, however, many multiple-race groups increased by 50 percent or more. The first time in U.S. history that people were presented with the option to self-identify with more than one race came on the 2000 Census questionnaire. Therefore, the examination of data from the 2000 and 2010 censuses provides the first comparisons on multiple-race combinations in the United States. An effective way to compare the multiple-race data is to examine changes in specific combinations, such as white and black, white and Asian, or black and Asian. “These comparisons show substantial growth in the multiple-race population, providing detailed insights to how this population has grown and diversified over the past decade,” said Nicholas Jones, chief of the U.S. Census Bureau's Racial Statistics Branch."

    From Ben Wattenberg:

    "But while separatism may be trendy among foundation-supported "grass roots" advocacy groups, it is losing its war where it counts, between the sheets. The 1990 Census revealed that exogamy was booming. Just 13% of first generation Hispanics intermarry. The figure for second generation was 34%, and 54% for third generation. The corresponding rates for Asian Americans were 14%, 34% and 54%. About half of Jews intermarry. The black rates are much lower, but climbing rapidly. The final 2000 Census results will reveal this pattern more fully.

    How to regard all this? With interest. Americans have had a tangled view of racial and ethnic skeins. Only a few decades ago the elimination of legal segregation was denounced by racists as a precursor to "mongrelization." But, when they're called "mutts,"Americans think mongrels are cute. When we hear that someone is "mean as a junkyard dog," we're not condemning dogs, junkyards or even meanness, only indicating that those half-breeds are plenty tough, maybe like Tiger and Derek.

    From "The Melting Pot" to "Abie's Irish Rose," to "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," Americans have had a, uh, mixed attitude toward melting pottism. And we still do. Some Anglos fear that America will become "a third world nation." In a world where Indian techies are worth their weight in semi-conductors, not to worry. We're becoming the first universal nation.

    The typical American of the year 2117 will be 1/8 Icelandic, 1/8 Irish, 1/8 Italian, 1/8 Israeli, 1/8 Iranian, 1/8 Indian, 1/8 Ibo, and 1/8 Iroquois.

    And that's just the "I"s.

    294:

    "When an distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right"? That Clarke's Law?

    295:

    Ok, so, slightly before 300, but a serious response. We'll even do you a Utopian bent for a change of pace:

    What am I overlooking?

    1 Culture Shock, esp. surrounding the extinction of the last mega-fauna (elephants, tigers, whales, lions etc: say sorry to your kids, wild populations will no longer exist). Regarding meat eating: now largely considered a remnant of a time when serial killers got their own TV shows (Dexter, Hannibal) and viewed in the same light. Plus, with the loss of the Amazon Rainforest, everyone is very aware of what cheap burgers and palm oil actually cost.

    It's 2067, the UK is vegan, but older generations are suffering the guilt of their carnivorous past. Simon Amstell asks us to forgive them for the horrors of what they swallowed.

    Simon Amstell: Carnage BBC, 19th March 2017 (note: the satire is an acquired taste, not really my favorite comedic style, but just to show it's on the radar).

    Likewise, clone vat meat, while a staple of SF since 2000AD, is really impractical (think: tonnes / frameworks to grow on / support networks, largely medium + feedstock the global supply chain requires (455 million tonnes by 2050: World Agriculture: Towards 2015/30 FAO). Also ~ Muscle cells doesn't just infinitely divide and not require electrical stimulation: if you spot anyone talking about vat meat who isn't considering the inputs required to keep that muscle, well, alive and functional - they're a TedX talk, not an industry disruptor:

    Imbalanced biphasic electrical stimulation: muscle tissue damage. NCBI, Annuals of Biomedical Engineering, 1990. WARNING: yes, they used cat muscle tissue. We don't think the cat survived.

    2 The Weakness of Hegemonic Systems: when the Game is not just fixed, but stratified and kept stagnant, something breaks. Brexit, Trump, Putin, even the Eurocrats lead by ex-GS / BIS banker class. All have shown (quite comprehensively) that "no one is home".

    What replaces them? We're seeing a whole lot of "no-one is home" (largely because why bother playing sociopathic games with Things-that-Cheat-even-when-they-lose?) and balloon deflation. Someone will pick up the ideological equivalent to Prometheus' Fire. And it won't be the Far Right, either.

    At the moment we're globally watching the last generation who fought WWII die off and their children (Boomers) collective shit the bed.

    3 First Hive-Mind launches, goes totally Jim Jones and biotech becomes popular. Silicon is fast, silicon is cheap, silicon is fucking ridiculously dangerous in the wrong hands. Which is almost the entire of Silicon Valley. 2117, computers will be firmly back in the box of "TOOLS" rather than "TEEHEE DISRUPT ALL THE THINGS" with some very large padlocks on the doors.

    We're at this stage at the moment [cough Public Source This is a Lie Things are Much Worse cough]:

    Google Disabled Burger King’s Ad Hijacking Google Home, but BK Got Around That Too AdWeek, 13th April, 2017.

    Meta-hacking across media? Clever, but hardly novel. When someone starts weaponizing aural channels for realz, there's going to be a huge market for 'hard-wired defenses'. i.e. Womb onwards. Oh, and if you're switched on, you'll have heard about hacking Dallas early warning klaxons. Nope, more interesting than that:

    Pirate radio: Signal spoof set off Dallas emergency sirens, not hacking ArsTechnica, 12th April, 2017

    4 Mental Schema as Cultural Signifier. This has always been a thing since Oxford / Cambridge (UK) or Ivy League (USA) or the Sorbonne (France) etc etc. The grunts who run the computers (and even, ick, interface with them) will be a lower class than those who can afford to be 'pure', and there will be (all very sensitively done, of course) very specific slots for the neuro-atypical. Mentats, but autistic so they're not a security threat. That kind of thing.

    Expect a lot of tinkering on the side as well. Pure =/= CisWhiteEuropean, but more than that. Empathy ramp ups (mimicking MDMA), celephopod gene hacks to prevent DNA damage (via automatic RNA sequencing), Neanderthal [redacted] that gives [redacted], the full nine yards - "pure" is going to mean "biological enhanced diversity maximals".

    It's already here if you are watching closely.

    [Links redacted]

    5 This 'purity' will also be linked to environment: total horror at the levels of pollution once endured. Although it is largely the case now that Global Wealth = lack of pollution (at least visible), this will be a major change. The very idea H.S.S lived with lead in the air, PCBs / endocrine disruptors (as well as both illegal and medically prescribed drugs in the water supply) will be horrifying. On the levels of looking at the Somme horrifying.

    Anyhow, all of these are boring and predictable.

    1 Full Furry kink chimeras: someone's going to do it, and 100% it'll be the furry community. By 2117 the ones not hunted down will be a separate subspecies. 2 Crone Island becomes Reality. Given Western male sperm decline, well. Are men still around in 2117? Did they all die out in that 'unexpected' plague of 2079? Just who was Doctor Anaya Virtanen, and why is her name erased from history? 3 Aliens / Higher Plane Entities turn up. It goes how you would expect: Zoorp Oglaf, NSFW, cartoon nudity / swearing.
    296:

    I seriously considered replacing my mk2 Fabia with a VW Golf GTE plug in hybrid but the fairly poor fuel economy on a long journey and the high purchase price put me off. However I could do most of my journeys on electricity only. Another problem is that the battery size reduces the boot volume considerably.

    297:

    I'm open to suggestions concerning a cure to what ails Red Rural America.

    But I can see a future republican winning the presidency in the electoral college while losing the popular vote by as much as 10 million.

    298:

    Demographics aren't the worst of China's problems. In their rush to industrialize they have turned China into a toxic cesspool.

    As for China's degraded and poisoned environment see "Our Real China Problem"

    http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/11/our-real-china-problem/376989/

    Within seconds we saw a broad stream of bubbling water cascading out the back of the plant and down the hillside. The astringent odor of chlorine attacked our nostrils, and once we reached the stream's edge, the smell was so powerful that we immediately backed away. Below us, where the discharge emptied into the Jialin, a frothy white plume was spreading across the slow-moving river.

    Fifty yards farther on we encountered a second stream, this one a mere foot wide but clogged with pineapple-sized clumps of dried orange foam. Beyond was a third creek. Its stench identified it as household sewage (workers in China's state-owned factories generally live on site or nearby), but its most extraordinary feature was its color -- as black as used motor oil. Not ten yards away a grizzled peasant in a dark-blue Mao jacket and trousers (an outfit still worn in China by the poor) bent over a tiny vegetable patch to pick some greens for his midday meal.

    All this was dwarfed by what lay ahead. The vapor was what we saw first -- wispy white, it hung low in the air, like tear gas. Stepping closer, we heard the sound of gushing water. Not until we were merely footsteps away, however, could we see the source of the commotion: a vast, roaring torrent of white, easily thirty yards wide, splashing down the hillside like a waterfall of boiling milk.

    Again the scent of chlorine was unmistakable, but this waterfall was much whiter than the first. Decades of unhindered discharge had left the rocks coated with a creamlike residue, creating a perversely beautiful white-on-white effect. Above us the waterfall had bent trees sideways; below, it split into five channels before pouring into the unfortunate Jialin. All this and yet the factory, as one worker had informed us, was operating at about 25 percent of capacity.

    At least five of the cities with the worst air pollution in the world are in China. Sixty to 90 percent of the rainfall in Guangdong, the southern province that is the center of China's economic boom, is acid rain. Since nearly all the gasoline in China is leaded (Beijing switched to unleaded gas in June), and 80 percent of the coal isn't "washed" before being burned, people's lungs and nervous systems are bombarded by an extraordinary volume and variety of deadly poisons. One of every four deaths in China is caused by lung disease, brought about by the air pollution and the increasingly fashionable habit of cigarette smoking. Suburban sprawl and soil erosion gobbled up more than 86 million acres of farmland from 1950 to 1990 -- as much as all the farmland in Germany, France, and the United Kingdom. Farmland losses have continued in the 1990s, raising questions about China's ability to feed itself in years to come, especially as rising incomes lead to more meat-intensive diets.

    299:

    The evidence suggests that vat-grown meat is plausible, but commercializing it is going to take a lot of effort.

    If McDonald's can sell the McRib it can sell vat grown meat.

    300:

    By 2117 we reach the end of science.

    This is based on the assumption that we are about to reach the "end of science" and the limits of scientific inquiry due to inherent physical limitations or practicality (string theory would need an atom smasher the size of the solar system to test). The main proponent of this theory is John Horgan.

    His book, "The End of Science" hasn't sold me completely on his argument, it does make intuitive sense. If a graph of our scientific progress can truly be described as an S-curve, the rapid growth in human knowledge we have seen since the time of Galileo would be considered the steep vertical portion. Prior to Galileo, human knowledge increased only incrementally with a few dark ages thrown in (the first flat portion of the s-curve). After our current age of rapid knowledge growth, another era of incremental knowledge growth (the second flat portion of the s-curve) will occur.

    In an interview with Edge, Horgan makes it clear that he is referring to pure scientific research, not applied science or engineering. These can continue long after science butts about against the limits of inquiry, so there is no need to close the patent office just yet:

    I believe that this map of reality that scientists have constructed, and this narrative of creation, from the big bang through the present, is essentially true. It will thus be as viable 100 or even 1,000 years from now as it is today. I also believe that, given how far science has already come, and given the limits constraining further research, science will be hard-pressed to make any truly profound additions to the knowledge it has already generated. Further research may yield no more great revelations or revolutions but only incremental returns.

    In other words, evolution, relativity, quantum mechanics, etc. can only be discovered once. Though some scientists strain against the limits of inquiry, indulging in what Horgan refers to as "ironic science":

    The vast majority of scientists are content to fill in details of the great paradigms laid down by their predecessors or to apply that knowledge for practical purposes. They try to show how a new high-temperature superconductor can be understood in quantum terms, or how a mutation in a particular stretch of DNA triggers breast cancer. These are certainly worthy goals.

    But some scientists are much too ambitious and creative to settle for filling in details or developing practical applications. They want to transcend the received wisdom, to precipitate revolutions in knowledge analogous to those triggered by Darwin's theory of evolution or by quantum mechanics.

    For the most part these over-reachers have only one option: to pursue science in a speculative, non-empirical mode that I call ironic science. Ironic science resembles literature or philosophy or theology in that it offers points of view, opinions, which are, at best, "interesting," which provoke further comment. But it does not converge on the truth.

    In other words, once science reaches the practical and physical limits of inquiry, all scientists can do is speculate about non-testable, non-falsifiable hypotheses — much like medieval theologians arguing over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

    All the big questions have been answered. We are leaving the golden age of science which was akin tot he age of exploration (from Columbus to Perry) when the planet was mapped. All that isleft to us is some surveying to fill in the gaps.

    301:

    I think we're all open to a "Cure for What Ails Red America." In general, I figure if I can toss it off the answer in a few sentences, the problem wouldn't exist, so anything I say towards that end is best treated as BS until proven otherwise.

    That said, there are multiple issues here:

    One (per Cadillac Desert) is that we're nearing the end of a lot of government sponsored, groundwater and dam-based stupidity. The idea, starting with the Mormons and going still trickling on even today, was to dam and irrigate everything, and make the western desert into a paradise. We've tried, we've managed to green an area about the size of Vermont across the western US, and it's taken billions of dollars, thousands of dams, and exhausted just about every major aquifer. Simultaneously, Washington imposed limits on what could be grown east of the Mississippi, to make western crops competitive with eastern ones. The groundwater's running out, the fields are getting salted up, but the heavily subsidized farmers are too big a political force in the western US to let them dry up and blow away. Simultaneously, their allies in the eastern farmlands are being punished to subsidize the western farms, and both are taking money from cities. There's a nasty solution to this (cut off water subsidies), but that would result in armed revolt on the ISIL model. Still, it's not sustainable, and when there's more farming in the east and fewer people in the west, some of the problems will be solved the hard way, and certainly by 2117. By the way, this bodes badly for terraforming Mars. Just saying.

    A second issue is simply culture and religion. A lot of people who don't like to deal with The Laws also tend to prefer messianic religion. You can see this in Southeast Asia as easily as in Appalachia. A lot of unscrupulous types have figured this out, and use the trappings of messianic religion to form a power base.

    They also do things like read Bob Altemeyer's The Authoritarians and use it as a cookbook for assembling an authoritarian power base. That's kind of a third thing, but this is where the vicious attacks on public liberal education and science come from. The way liberal education works is not so much that professors reprogram students (that's the red herring of the culture wars). Rather, it's that rubbing shoulders with a lot of different people (LGBTQ, other races, creeds, beliefs, etc.) helps undo some of the narrow-mindedness and xenophobia that underlies authoritarian personalities. And that's just from exposure to other students and faculty. Professors may or may not play a role. This is why there's such a push to have far-right schools that teach an applied curriculum that tries to keep students from questioning, because the authoritarian types understand the power of a liberal education more than the liberals do.

    A fourth issue is economics. So many towns have tried to run their economies on a single big business, whether it's a factory, a plantation (in days of old), or a prison. When these close, people suffer. A few towns (like Arcata, CA), figure out this trap and try to diversify their way out of it. Rather more just suffer, wilt, and die, as towns have been doing for the last 10,000-odd years.

    A fifth issue is opioid drugs, which are epidemic in Red America. Some state that this leads to mistrust of science, because people have their lives destroyed by drugs prescribed by their doctors that the doctors swore were safe. This leads them to distrust all science, maybe.

    A sixth issue is the deep racism that pervades the US. On the one hand, we state that "All men are created equal," but on the other, our country was built, quite successfully, on the backs of black and Indian slaves, and on the genocide and replacement of Indian populations. There's a nasty moral contradiction there, and it's been papered over (semi-successfully) by the doctrine of white male supremacy. You can see it in action now in the current administration and Congress, where the Republicans don't have a coherent policy, they just want to destroy everything Obama did. Because he was black. From a policy point of view this is stupid, but from the view of racist politics, it makes too much sense. Governing successfully while black is a capital crime to some people, and so is governing while female. Hillary Clinton isn't a terribly charismatic candidate or a sufficiently good strategic campaigner, but she did remarkably well, considering that she was systematically and thoroughly smeared for going on 20 years before she ever ran.

    So you've got at least six problems: a profoundly stupid hydraulic policy, messianic religion and authoritarian politics, and racist and sexist ideologies yanking people around against their best interests, short-sighted boom-bust economics, and an opioid epidemic. Solve all those, and the heartland will be whole and healthy. But, of course, they'll object if you use any of their tax money to do so.

    302:
  • Smaller growth doesn't equal emptying out. I never made the claim that rural area growth has kept pace with the rest of the nation. You made the claim that rural areas are emptying out. That would require an absolute population decline, not a relative one.

  • Rural areas are diverse places. Right now, some rural areas are growing their populations due to tourism (Andirondacks, parts of Appalachia) or shale oil (parts of North Dakota and Texas). Others are declining. So far, this has evened out. However, the price is that rural areas are older than average. However, how much of that age differential is due to people retiring to rural areas?

  • I think that rural tourism is still relatively untapped. River cruises are far more popular on the Rhine or Danube Rivers than on the Mississippi, Colorado, or St. Lawrence Rivers. These cruises exist, there's just little demand for them compared to their counterparts. No reason that can't change.

  • 303:

    Predicting the end of science is like predicting practical fusion power in thirty years time. The end of science has been proclaimed for over a century. There's always more to know.

    304:

    I'm not sure China is more polluted than the US was at this point in its industrialization. Look at how many superfund sites we have now

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Superfund_sites

    Probably if we used EU standards, the number would be much higher?

    305:

    Daniel Duffy noted: "Demographics aren't the worst of China's problems. In their rush to industrialize they have turned China into a toxic cesspool."

    I'm also unconvinced that demographics are a major problem for China. On the contrary, they have a desperate need to decrease the population so they can live within the carrying capacity of their severely degraded environment. You can cheat Malthus, but he's going to rear up and bite your ass eventually. There are two huge and looming problems that are every bit as bad as the environmental pollution, which is not trivial even by U.S. "EPA superfund site" standards.

    First, there's unsustainable land use (under Mao, in the interest of economic development at all costs; today, in the interest of food security at all costs). Enormous areas of China's land (larger than many European countries) have been severely degraded through inappropriate agriculture and livestock grazing to the point that desertification has become a major challenge. Inappropriate crop choice and highly inefficient fertilizer use accompanying these practices contribute strongly to pollution problems.

    Second, they're also overexploiting their groundwater and surface water resources in ways that make the U.S. overexploitation of groundwater and imminent collapse of most aquifers look like a non-problem. (It's not. It's going to have ginormous negative consequences for the U.S., even if they invade Canada to seize our water.)

    306:

    One (per Cadillac Desert) is that we're nearing the end of a lot of government sponsored, groundwater and dam-based stupidity.

    I highly recommend "The Water Knife" by Paolo Bacigalupi

    307:

    The big wrench here w.r.t. Russian demographics is immigration.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependent_territories_by_immigrant_population

    Russia is poor compared to the West, but not to parts of the world. It also has about 11.6 million immigrants. Plus, Putin can implement policies such as Christians only to cater to Russian racism if so chooses.

    308:

    Economic growth is not possible with falling populations Really? Not sure I Believe you ... May I suggest the words: "The Culture" ?

    309:

    I suggest that you remember that I quoted D Diderot, just prior to the French revolution. And, therefore, your strictures are, um, err ... inaccurate.

    310:

    No. No. No. NO. NO, GODDAMMIT!

    I hate the way Donohue and Levitt popularized their work with the heat of a burning sun. They were wrong, they know they were wrong ... but once the idea was out there it became unkillable.

    Short version: over at the Fed, two guys named Christopher (Foote and Goetz) decided to check their work. They found out that Donohue and Levitt had left out some important control variables in what appears to have been a coding error. (I write Stata code all the time; I'm sympathetic.) Put the controls back in, and poof, no more significance.

    This is as wrong as an empirical economic study can be wrong.

    To be clear, I have no beef with the original work. It's an honest error. I will certainly make such myself. What I have beef with is how Levitt (Donohue not so much) built an iconoclastic brand based on that article about abortion and crime ... which you now see cited as fact by a commentator on a well-read blog.

    I don't blame you, either, HC Meyer! The retraction was not as publicized as the article. But please please don't ever state that connection as fact ever again.

    311:

    At the moment we're globally watching the last generation who fought WWII die off and their children (Boomers) collective shit the bed. BOLLOCKS As a boomer, born 1946 I comprehensively reject that statement. We wanted a better world & some bastards stole it & we are still angry about it ....

    312:

    All the big questions have been answered. Which is why QM & Relativity are incompatible, & the question(s) is/are still unanswered. Err , methinks you are mistaken

    313:

    By 2117 we reach the end of science.

    You're a naked ape, running wetware that's full of errors (before we get into the damage that your environment hands out like free heroin samples) who currently doesn't even have good models for how consciousness occurs. (No, fMRI =/= good models).

    You, the majority, can barely scrape past first stage Higher Order Thinking let alone expanded consciousness and so on. Your sense of empathy is more easily triggered by puppies and cats than other human suffering and you're unable to see Pattern Networks intrinsically (spider-webs vrs linear models - your brain has been lashed unto a straight mast by slavers looking to ward of the dangers of the Sirens).

    I'm thinking you're a falling into the old 'In G_D's Image' trap there.

    So, no: wrong. Very very badly wrong.

    ~

    Oh, #6

    Sensory inputs will have been upgraded. Most H.S.S are running at sub-optimum levels even given the bad baseline (mostly sight / smell due to environment). EM sensing, tetrachromia, sense of smell equivalent to at least a hamster, if not dog etc.

    Your environment determines such things: Minds wanting to keep their edge have clean environments.

    Same thing for the internet: determining what is a 'clean environment' is going to be a full on battle though, and 2,000 year old manuals aren't going to help.

    ~

    For Mr Arnold: rhythmic wave-length attunement akin to telepathy, swapping of memories / emotional experiences, causal pattern creating that changes reality. But those, well. We'd get in trouble if we proved them, wouldn't me? (oh, and p.s. - seeing in the dark: points to full moon. Your cities give out light pollution like rampant males in heat, 'seeing in the dark' is just a different thing. But it's really annoying when it's taken away).

    314:

    Got Heroin ? Where are they dying from it ? Everywhere, but dying from it in rural areas is new.

    315:

    No.

    As a native Spanglish speaker myself, I can tell you that is not how it works. You're confusing code-mixing for hybridization. And you're assuming the two gentlemen were native-born.

    There is no sign of English grammar morphing, nor of Spanish surviving much beyond the second generation. You do have the emergence of a regional accent in South Florida (and, weirdly enough, in parts of the Northeast) which appears to have been influenced by Spanish but is now spoken by people with no knowledge of Spanish and no ancestral connection to the language.

    The Miami accent is a far cry from what you're proposing. Ditto the possibility that "y" will enter American English. That isn't hybridization, kapeesh?

    In all seriousness, while hybridization may happen, it would be a massive reversal of current language trends. I don't see which technological or social developments would cause those trends to reverse over the next century.

    316:

    (Head desk)

    See above, please. The link actually discusses southern California in depth. It ain't happening and shows no sign of happening.

    317:

    Ok, Greg, since it's a full moon, let's dance that dance.

    Note: all these questions are personal, but feel free to reply with reference to your collective age bracket if you don't want to give personal data:

    1 Do you have a pension? 1a Is it just State guaranteed or also via private company or public service? 2 Do you own shares / stocks in any companies? 2a If so, do you personally manage them, or are they part / parcel of a larger wealth fund (be it via a Private investment agent, or via membership of a larger public body, or Union, who does so)? 3 Do you have private savings in a bank account where said savings saw (historically) over %4 return for a minimum of 10 years, or a long-term mortgage (20+ years) in a house that has increased in value over the past 20+ years that was never 'under water'? 3a If so, please explain why since 2008 saving rates have been at 1%, the impact on mortgages and house rise inflation over the last 40 years.

    If you are somehow living in the London area with none of the above applying, well: you're a Saint (as well as a very sweet man).

    Pro-tip: it's impossible to fulfill any of those, and you can't.

    Guess which parts of #1-3 current generation will enjoy?

    Yep.

    Fucking None of them.

    318:

    Trying to remember where I read this (recently — i.e. in 2017) but apparently this is the official figure; unofficially, what happened is that a lot of second children were born but were not reported by their parents and are now undocumented teens/adults. Many of these are girls; sex-specific infanticide is apparently less widespread than previously believed, but underreporting of female births is widespread (by parents hoping for a boy to carry on the family name).

    Yes, correct. That's even without knowing about the different stages / relaxations / enforcement districts. i.e. "One family = one child" was never the actual policy across the entire country: there were plenty of provinces where that was never the case, and relaxation examples are always there (guess - 1975 one instance, 1990 another, would have to drag out case files). It was never ever purely about Party Elites either (although, of course, if you made a billion in China, and didn't run into a murder scandal, that third child isn't going to be an issue with the right amount of donations to "Orphanages"): it was about all those "empty" (now filling) cities.

    There's a strong Christian network (USA / Falun Gong) that has been pumping out propaganda about the evil Communist baby-killers for 30+ years now. We did the work back in (2010?) and spotted that it didn't really play out. i.e. Enforcement is never a real thing (well, politically motivated, but...) esp. if the local beauro is open to bribes. It does, however, work into a patriarchal narrative where said 'undocumented' women are happy to marry 'lower than their expectations' in return for a marriage certificate and thus legal rights.

    Never let it be said that the Minds of Men aren't always on the make. And fairly sure China saw that one coming. They did, after all, plan empty cities 20-30 years in advance...

    319:

    (And, really apologies for spam, but):

    Capitalism and denying women's rights to property ownership / sole bank accounts etc work in exactly the same fashion. But, you know, "Communist" so hard to put that one in the books without a lot of issues.

    It's all the same Game, just with different trappings: assuring low-status males (wait... Communist wut?) that there's a lower state category who is forced to pair up with them because otherwise the RULES are against them. It's not like this wasn't deliberate, either. Told people this before 2010 as well.

    TL;DR

    No, not a baby-killing psychopathic regime, a regime copying what Western Capitalism did, to attempt to avoid the "MRA virgin killer rabble males getting radicalized leading into ISIL" stuff.

    Sigh.

    320:

    Mr PrivateIron: Not only are you far too 'Human' to entertain the required levels of cynicism to manage Human Populations, but you missed the biggest joke on the planet at this point in time.

    What if we accidentally de-extincted a parasite, but not the mammoth

    No, someone removed the parasites and look what happened.

    Thatsthejoke.jpg

    Oh, you ain't ever gonna enjoy life until you understand that one.

    (If you need this unpacking, well: that moment when H.Clinton played with balloons while stating "we'll go high", with B. Sanders looking defeated in the background and Wikileaks banner unfurled)

    I think a previous version of me stated something like: "Cunts, spell broken".

    ~

    Dreamworld, Neo, broken spells. (MOAB's in the Desert: not quite the Dune translation they should be looking for).

    321:

    "So, anyway, no; Creek chickens have beaks, not delicate toothy jaws. "

    This will affect flora in ways that you'd find interesting.

    Here in New Zealand the flora evolved to try to avoid being eaten by birds, whereas your flora evolved to try to avoid being browsed by mammals.

    Hence few thistles or thorns in the NZ bush. Spikes are not efficient at stopping Moas, or 30-point chickens, because beaked animals don't care the way a soft-mouthed mammal does.

    More complex dense bushes made up of small leaves (moehlenbeckia, etc). A mammal will take a big mouthful and suck the leaves off - bird's mouths don't work that way.

    More visual mimicry and high nutritional leaves trying to be less obvious with dark/drab colours. Because birds are sight-dominant and have a crap sense of smell.

    Ferns are also harder for birds to browse, compared to mammals.

    David Attenborough used to describe herbivorous mammals as "plant predators". Apt.

    322:

    MOAB's in the Desert: not quite the Dune translation they should be looking for Was wondering about that MOAB today. Seemed a bit confused politically. Lots of material from you today, interesting, and read. Tx for the link to that PhD thesis on "Oscillatory Dynamics..."; if that's the best there is (-3 years), then ... it's indeed a pretty wide open field. New search keywords though; oscillatory dynamics gamma, are finding plenty of work like Common oscillatory mechanisms across multiple memory systems (05 January 2017) to make sense of. (Was inspired to purchase a cheap EEG rig.) Long weekend of pdf consumption ahead.

    323:

    Here's a 2017 prediction:

    A solution to the problem of heterogenous transport for people, as we did in the 20th century for freight.

    Because right now for most people increasing airplane's speed by 50% (which is a lot!) just wouldn't get you there anything like 50% faster.

    In 1917 transport of freight was super-slow. Largely because of loading/unloading - on to a truck at the factory, from truck into a warehouse, from warehouse onto a railway car, from railway car to port, from port to ship, from ship to port, to railway car, to truck. Typically goods spent as much or more time getting loaded onto and off ships than in transit, and the labour costs involved were horrific.

    Containerization solved that for freight.

    But we have the same problem now for transporting people. Getting from your house to an airport and waiting for the plane will typically take you as long or longer than the flight. Connecting flight sometimes don't. Check-in time is often ridiculously long.

    Some better way of connecting all these things up is badly needed by 2017. Imagine an automated system where you buy a ticket to get you from your house to your destination, and where it handles the routing by the most efficient means. At its simplest, imagine the autonomous car picks you up from your door, handles your checkin and checks your ID, drives to the airport and drops you at your gate (and your checked luggage to the airport luggage system) - moving you to an earlier or later flight if necessary.

    This isn't really about technology - just as containerization wasn't really about technology. It's about integration, leveraging technology.

    (And as an aside: just how long will people keep insisting that auto-pilots for planes need a "real pilot" watching them, and keep dragging the feet on self-driving trains, once we have self-driving cars?)

    324:

    "All the big questions have been answered"

    That's what people said in 1907. Newtonian mechanics had been perfected, Maxwell had explained electro-magnetism, equations for thermodynamics were well-established.

    The periodic table had been developed, chemistry was now fairly well understood.

    Oh, there were some fiddly little details about just what 'atoms' were like, and some debate about the composition of and distance of distant stars. But really, those were just fiddly things far distant from the important frontiers of science.

    325:

    "What am I overlooking?"

    Um, an explanation for why someone wearing technology in 2117 needs to know how to read?

    326:

    Some odd growth patterns where you get lattice stuff up to about the limit of moa reach and then straight stems, too.

    (I am particularly fond of the suggestion that tall straight conifers where the lower branches fall off as the tree gains height, leaving a relatively small crown of leaves, may be a locked-in anti-sauropod/other dinosaurian high browser adaptation. Not strictly required, these last sixty million years, but the memory of long, long necks is graven in the possible survivors.)

    Creek flora is a bit patchy; there's a bunch of climate zones and soil types, and there are ungulate populations, some wild, as well as galliform ones. (and maybe some xenarthrans; it's tempting.) And the various notions of irresponsible sorcerers; no shortage of thorns, and probably no shortage of analogs to those horrible Australian glass-fiber-bark-needle trees.

    327:

    Apropos language extinction - I think it depends heavily on the political context.

    Somewhat related: what will happen to the sign languages? Cochlear implants are getting better all the time, so a big pool of people who would have been part of the Deaf culture(s) are going to be only hard of hearing. At least in places where the public healthcare will provide those for people who can't hear, the Deaf culture and the local sign language can well be in peril.

    In poor places (those that do have a local Deaf culture and sign language) deaf children just don't get cochlear implants as a rule will not have as much trouble. In rich places which decide to rely on charity (The US of A, I'm looking at you) or places where the main inflow of deaf children is not the children of hearing parents you still might have a strong Deaf culture.

    The cochlear implants obviously don't work for everybody, while many of the people for whom they don't work can still learn sign languages. I can argue that it's going to be very lonely for the people whose local sign language has died, but who would need it (and the Deaf culture around them) for them to express themselves properly.

    Just as an example of languages few people realize exist, too.

    328:

    Because it's overrun by Brits and Americans (citizens of a former aggressive imperial hegemonic power and citizens of the current one). Next?

    Yeah, no. I'm pretty sure 99% of the commenters here are anti-imperialists.

    It's more of a typical sci-fi nerd maximalism. "If things don't follow my solution exactly - and I have the best and onliest solution - then everything might as well crash and burn".

    Followed by several masturbatory pages describing exactly how things will crash and burn...

    329:

    This appears to be a disguised personal attack from the re-morphed SEAGULL.

    Let's play anyway:

    1 YES 1a 2 of them - one from an ex-employer 2 Do ISA's count? Otherwise, NO. 2a NO 3 None of your fucking business. 3a Irrelevant tosh.

    There is something also - called inheritance - my father bought the house in 1948 Now, why don't you go & enjoy sex & travel?

    330:

    A search for creek chickens did not show any large birdies - was I looking in the wrong place?

    331:

    Statistical analysis is work computers can likely do better than humans NOW.

    The humans still working on the factory floor aren't there to tell whether we're exceeding the .03% maximum deflaggelation rate on the orifice scaffolds often enough to trigger the penalty clause in our contract; they're working the factory floor to check to make sure that the orifice scaffolds actually exist and that none of the expert systems are optimizing yield ratios by recalibrating their sensors to ignore lichen-3 infestation again. And they do a hefty sideline in stuff like unjamming the moebius conveyor and fixing squeaky wheels.

    Now on to Speculation:

    Lifeform compilers will be common. Not like washing machines where there's one in every house - more like public libraries. And they will have the expected flaws, including 'you don't need to be LITERATE to make airborne Ebola. All you need to do is be dumb enough to make the recipe for chocolate mushrooms you found on a fileserver between California's Funniest Medical Emergencies vids and a 9000-hour-long loop of a green frog distending its anus until you can see another green frog inside ad infinitum.

    Most polities will have lifeform compilers, because those that successfully outlawed 'em generally got wiped out by some stupid plague put together by the ass end of a culture that made 'em widely available - while WITH a compiler you can run off a satellite virus to turn airborne Ebola into a decorative rash, and temporary glands that secrete the antifungals needed to cure your lichen-3 before it reaches the Obedient Phase.

    Overall, bioterror will not be seen as a major risk by the people of 2117. Either they live in a perpetual quarantine that reads Newsflesh to fantasize about casual gregarious contact, or more likely it is a Solved Problem. Doing a full gene readout on every microorganism in every square meter to check for plagues is impractical - you need a god tier AI to do it, for one thing, and for another if you're going to spend the energy to liquify and scan every candidate infectious vector a tourist is carrying at the airport turnstile, you might as well just turn the energy dial up and convert 'em to plasma.

    But you don't NEED a full gene readout of every microorganism - once you control the chordate bud process, you can construct homunculi of genuine, infectable human tissues, place them at every intersection, and just sample them every morning to scan for new pathogens. This does require new systems to ensure the homunculi are properly fed, since human organs don't really run well off a solar panel. Hence the occasional sociology papers with a title like 'Changes in the correlation between perceived sexual desirability and public trophallaxis between 2060 and 2090: A Longitudinal Study.'

    Secondary defense against plagues will come from obsessive logging on use of lifeform compilers - quite possibly extending to 'you must have worn a surveillance collar for a week before being allowed to touch this machine, and the logs are freely available to everyone' - and policies requiring multiple people sign off on a 'Run' command. This won't stop someone from cooking up a batch of fentanyl poppies that look and taste like lettuce, but it will give warning when someone who attends the Involuntary Human Extinction Society's events three times a week uses the compiler.

    This also implies highly engineered ecosystems, and fucktons of feral tech out there. Charismatic megafauna back with a vengeance in some rural areas, because while a homunculus will catch smallpox-C Just Fine, it will not notice an 'allosaur' (scare quotes because it's NOT an allosaur or even a large birb - the genome is mostly frog, with snake for the scale patterns and hornet proteins for the in-scale cooling system) unless it's hungry.

    The personal ecosystem will also be restructured. The obvious workaround for homunculi is smarter diseases - ones that won't infect something that's got seven eyes and sixteen flavors of mucous membrane just flapping in the breeze. You can't fit much processing power into a mimivirus or a spirochaete, though. So people trying to get NASTY will rely on programmed macrofauna. Jumping spiders are smart enough to recognize humans as a Thing They Can Make Intimidation Displays At (though not smart enough to recognize Also Humans Are A Thousand Times Taller.). When it comes time to stop all flies from landing on you for your own protection, you develop a new appreciation for the symbiotic mites you picked up at the sex club the other week - sure, they aren't quite the shade of blue you wanted, but they do a surprisingly good job of detecting flyders and switching your skin to hyperallergenic mode before the sting.

    And as Ms. Moore points out @296 Aliens. If our technosphere survives until 2117, while CONTACT is wildly unlikely (unless we learn that 'actually, Pluto and Eris are kind of too warm for comfort, sensible people live in the Oort clouds of, well, everywhere, now FUCK OFF your probes are too damn hot), a century's enough to notice anyone building yottastructures in our neck of the galaxy. If we know the travel time from Tabby's Star, what's happening there, how long enclosure took, and how many centuries ago the Starswarmer ships launched for Sol that may have a bit of an impact on our memespace.

    @326: Reading is faster than listening for a large number of users, and can be parallelized to scan for interesting bits faster. Channer/tumblr users still type and read lucidly despite also picting like mad. (Generally. Though I'm not entirely convinced that channer nazis are all human - the posting quality on the politics board seemed significantly better when notmoot changed the URL a couple weeks back, though it's also possible that the nazis just went away because they couldn't handle the horse porn that came with the url change)

    332:

    That's completely irrelevant. Greg Tingey is largely right - many (perhaps even most) of us did - I have been despondent about and vocal against the stealing for 50 years. While many of those that did the stealing were also baby boomers, they probably weren't even the majority - there were as many of previous generations and even some of later ones. Look into it a bit more deeply.

    333:

    There will be intelligence increase, at least at the low end.

    This is a hard world for people who aren't especially bright, and it seems to me that technology for getting people from what is currently considered dull to what is currently considered average or somewhat above average should be a lot easier than the fascinating idea of getting smart people to be smarter than anyone who has ever lived.

    I'm not saying there will be tech to solve all low-end intellectual problems, but there should be tech for the most common problems.

    In the same spirit, there are people who live into their nineties in good health, and it seems to be genetic. It should be easier to make this generally available than to completely stop or reverse ageing.

    334:

    That's not a great analogy, but I know what you mean. It was stated in the 19th century, but didn't really resurface until the late 20th. It's obviously bollocks, but we are in the same situation that we were in a century and a quarter ago. The mentally fossilised (and I mean eminent scientists here) believe that we can resolve all the known discrepancies just by adding more of the modern equivalent of epicycles, and then close the book. Unless civilisation collapses, we will sooner or later get someone who breaks the mould, in the way that relativity and quantum mechanics did.

    335:

    I think the effect on memory is going to be profound. We have already partly outsourced "knowledge" to the cloud. By 2117 the process will be complete. Stopping entire populations knowing something, even in principle, will simply be a case of making it unavailable on their AR devices.

    Also, I suspect that the end of Moore's law will mean that the tens of billions of pounds currently spent hyper-optimising hardware may be somewhat redistributed to optimising software stacks, but there'll also be a continuing proliferation of ASICs on low-end consumer hardware, sidestepping the issue to a certain degree.

    336:

    You aren't thinking it through. There doubtless are some people like that, but I think of such things as an engineering problem (i.e. I think like Churchill - seriously). The first two, and most critical, steps in resolving a hard problem are (a) to face up to the severity of the problem and (b) accept that carrying on as before, even with modifications, will only make it worse. The problems ARE soluble but, so far, our politicians and the public haven't got beyond (a) and almost nobody has got beyond (b).

    337:

    I think there will remain a Network Standard English, "For Engineers" if nothing else. American usage seems to be winning, at least in Europe, watched a bunch of YouTube videos about English in Germany recently.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tW5Cg3Zb0M4

    Dialect speakers (Nigerian, Ebonics, etc) will be taught "Proper" Pronunciation, get clues from Media and use it as appropriate.

    338:

    USA Transcontinental High Speed Rail?

    IIUC, US Transcontinental (passenger) Rail used to frequently involve a change in Chicago; All the Major Eastern railroads went to Chicago.

    Chicago is STILL the major mid continental freight car (Container) interchange point, with major (Probably inadequate) investments under way to stop the system breaking down under all the containers full of stuff flowing through.

    The Republican controlled congress is unwilling/unable to even consider the infrastructure investments in this key part of the American Infrastructure, because you know, socialism. And the Presidents draft budget proposal zeroed out the current subsidy for Passenger Rail (Amtrak); It will be interesting to see how the Red State rural legislators handle that one.

    There are a couple of MAJOR projects that absolutely need to be done in New York City, if they don't get the Federal Dollars planned for, all commuter and Freight Rail in the Northeast will be awkward.

    The American Railways never turned much of a profit on Passenger service, too seasonal, one reason they were all so eager to turn it over to Amtrak. Freight was always where the money was. But back then, as a corporate citizen, you would not have been much of a Railroad if you did not have Passenger Service.

    339:

    Greg,

    You should be looking for Creek chickens in Graydon Saunders' most excellent Commonweal books.

    Start with "The March North", though the chickens don't appear until one runs down Ed in "A Succession of Bad Days".

    340:

    "Was wondering about that MOAB today. Seemed a bit confused politically."

    The military have wanted to play with their toy for some time, and now there is a president distracted enough to have let them do so. I doubt that there is much more than that - or that it will have been particularly effective. Inter alia, it is intended to demoralise the enemy by its power, and if there is one thing that Afghans do not do, it is demoralise when faced with more firepower.

    341:

    I think that you WILL find that there is a connection - but it's a very minor factor. There is a strong link between rejected (and even neglected) children and criminality, and (I believe) a weak one between unwanted / excessive children and rejection and neglect. The issue is so foul, statistically, that a really convincing investigation is almost inconceivable. So, while the claim that it is a major factor is bogus (and I agree that it is), that's not the same as saying that there is no connection at all.

    342:

    Plus the fact that apart for the limitless horizons types the End of Science is far less impactful than the end of Engineering.

    There are very few of who can predict the impacts of the next Moore's Law analogue.

    343:

    actually, in 1917 any respectable factory had it's own railroad siding. Loading dock straight into box car, car load lots to distributor/wholesaler. Who had their own Rail access.

    344:

    Oh, it's easy enough to predict the impact - what people will do then is the great unknown :-) But, niggling apart, I agree completely. My prediction record in the IT area is fairly good, and I don't have a clue about even which possibilities are likely. I know what could be done about it, but don't see a hope in hell of it actually being done.

    345:

    Yes, major problem. Be aware, much of the "Rural" population was dependent on the economic activity generated by the local manufacturing plant of some sort, so many of which have closed. There are not enough Walmart and Amazon distribution centers (Which tend to pay minimum wage) to make it up.

    My sister amuses herself by pricing housing in Decatur, Illinois. Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), the last major economic enterprise is moving their corporate HQ to Chicago. You can buy a decent house for less that $50K. Multi unit buildings still have investment potential, because of the structure of American Social Housing policies. There are old people, the disabled and homeless veterans.

    Meanwhile, Decatur Arkansas, same County I live in, say a twenty (?) minute drive from Walmart HQ, is one of those Dead Towns Walmart closed it's small grocery experiment ("Walmart Express") out of a year and a half ago. 80% of the Children in the Decatur schools are eligible for the Free/Reduced Price Lunch program (Very Poor by American standards). In Bentonville it is 40% (?)maybe less.

    346:

    Chicago as the hub has a lot to do with there being some big rivers in the way. Bridged now, but not when the initial transcontinental railroads were going in.

    If you haven't -- to combine a response to 346 here -- read Jane Jacobs, "Cities and the Wealth of Nations", it is worth a read. Jacobs took a historian's approach to economics and how cities work.

    347:

    "With 7nm processes on the horizon (and atoms on the order of 1-3nm across)"

    I think you mean 1-3 angstroms (1A = 0.1nm) for atom size/bond length.

    Still not many atoms across a 7nm wide wire, but it gives IC fabs another ~3-4 generations before that becomes the limiting factor. As opposed to cost, cost, synthesizing, emplacing, and successfully etching masks with a dimensional tolerance of one nanometre or less, current leakage...

    But yes, I definitely agree that there will be a very un-pretty collision between Moore's law and the laws of physics/chemistry/

    348:

    Some better way of connecting all these things up is badly needed by 2017. Imagine an automated system where you buy a ticket to get you from your house to your destination

    Yes, this is a REAL BIG win; it's also one that is do-able but challenging because it requires ripping up the entire ticketing playbook and reinventing it. The airline booking systems descended from SABRE (a 1950s design) evolved time-sharing terminal front-ends and then we got web sites that do demand/bid pricing and back onto these mainframe systems ... but under the hood it's still the same-old same-old, which in turn was designed to implement on punched-card vintage machines the pre-computer techniques the airline industry copied from shipping lines, probably going all the way back to the age of sail.

    Modern budget airlines that only do point-to-point flights (no connections; you collect your checked bags, if any, then re-check-in for your next flight, if you need to fly multiple sectors) generally invented their own booking systems in the 1990s and 2000s and are a whole lot more efficient ... only not joined-up.

    A true point-to-point ticket system would indeed work the way you describe, including the Uber or taxi to the airport and from the destination 'port to your hotel or final stop; it'd probably also rearrange itself in transit in event of missed connections, so the only change you'd notice would be an extra hour or two in a transit lounge before your phone directed you to go to the onward connection gate (hopefully via a stop at a charging point if your phone is running low en route).

    Also: security clearance should happen in the taxi — checked bags go in the boot (and get inspected at the airport), the self-driving cab's passenger wifi does a quick scan for obvious weapons using beam-shaping radar (see that MIT research link I posted earlier), and you only get stopped and examined by a human TSA or airport security person if you're carrying something suspicious. And the stop should occur before you even reach the terminal building. The terminal itself should be sterile, inside a virtual security cordon and impossible to approach without having been pre-checked, thus making the entire airport a much less tempting target for malefactors. And also making the airport experience itself much less unpleasant — no shuffling shoeless in queues beneath the gaze of bored knuckle-draggers with a license to commit mayhem on the traveling public.

    349:

    Um, an explanation for why someone wearing technology in 2117 needs to know how to read?

    Speed of information assimilation.

    Unabridged audiobooks typically run for two to three times the playing time that it takes to actually read the thing; proficient readers assimilate 300-400 words per minute (speed readers can push it up to 500-1000 wpm) but human speech is a whole lot slower; during public readings I typically declaim at about 120 wpm.

    Video is sometimes much, much worse: yes, "one picture tells a thousand words", but to take all those words in you need to study the image. There's a reason most monthly comics run to a core of 20-24 pages in a 32 page issue, and the amount of dialog/text involved is relatively limited. Video and film use time as well as images to convey tone and pacing; but in terms of text a 2 hour motion picture script is under 30,000 words, running to about 200 words/minute max

    350:

    Yes: we're discussing the biology and world building of the Creek territories in Graydon's ongoing fantasy series.

    351:

    Yup. I travelled from Cambridge to Montgenevre a few times by train, allowing ample time between trains (2 changes, neither trivial), which takes about 13 hours. Flying would have taken 11 hours, at best. Door to door times, of course.

    352:

    "3.) [...]When we stop using carbon the "nuke Mecca" crowd will gain political power with a speed that surpasses c by orders of magnitude. [...] 5.) There will be a general decline in prejudice in the WEIRD countries."

    Your posited general decline seems to contain a specific spike.

    353:

    When planning trips these days I always calculate travel time in terms of door-to-door. (Starting with: 30m for taxi to EDI airport, 2 hour margin for check-in with checked bags in case of problems, then flight and transit time at next airport, and so on.)

    354:

    Smaller growth doesn't equal emptying out.

    It's not just slower relative growth. Rural America's population is declining in absolute terms:

    https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/06/the-graying-of-rural-america/485159/

    "Over the past two decades, as cities have become job centers that attract diverse young people, rural America has become older, whiter, and less populated. Between 2010 and 2014, rural areas lost an average of 33,000 people a year. Today, just 19 percent of Americans live in areas the Census department classifies as rural, down from 44 percent in 1930. But roughly one-quarter of seniors live in rural communities, and 21 of the 25 oldest counties in the United States are rural."

    https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/rural-economy-population/population-migration.aspx

    "The total population in nonmetro counties stood at 46.2 million in July 2015—14 percent of U.S. residents spread across 72 percent of the Nation's land area. Annual population losses averaged 33,000 per year between 2010 and 2014, but dropped to about 4,000 in 2015."

    What is being left across vast stretches of rural America are towns with boarded up main streets and closed schools = shells of their former selves populated by the aged, the uneducated and the unemployable.

    Prediction: In another generation all of Red Rural America will come to resemble Appalachia in economics, demographics and social pathologies.

    355:

    And doesn't it make a difference? I find it slightly incredible that, even for long-haul flights (e.g. UK to NZ!), the time taken at both ends, stopovers etc. is comparable with the flying time. But enduring is believing ....

    356:

    Not really. The interaction between statistics and quantum mechanics is already causing quite serious problems. Like all approaches to singularities (and this one IS a true singularity), the problems increase super-exponentially as you get closer. Exactly when they will hit the feasibility / RAS / economic limit, I don't know, but it will be before the fundamental limit, not at it.

    357:

    A couple of interesting factors emerge.

    Every additional sector (flight) on a trip adds the flight time plus 1h30m to 6h to the journey. Also, wearing a fitness tracker, it turns out that each airport terminal traversed at departure or arrival adds an average of 1.5km of walking (roughly a mile), even with travellators. (Small airports don't have moving walkways, so you walk the same distance; big airports ... only provide moving walkways because they're big. You still walk a whole lot.)

    Part of the latency in sectors is down to me never allowing less than 70 minutes for a transfer, even at a hub I know extremely well; chances of a missed connection are just too high if your first flight misses its slot and ends up waiting half an hour for a gate to free up, or going for a guided tour of the Polderbaan at Schiphol (one of my two preferred hubs: I swear the Polderbaan taxiway is about the same length as the A1(M) from Edinburgh to London). Realistically, allow two and a half hours for a transfer: most ATC delays or minor (non-cancellation-causing) technical problems get fixed within a couple of hours. But it all adds up.

    A side-effect: direct flights to a major hub aren't too bad. With hand luggage only I can get from my home to the center of Paris or Amsterdam in about the same time it takes me to get to the center of London. When the seasonal direct flights are operating, it would only take me another 5 hours to get to Manhattan. But anything that requires three flights—say, Austin, Texas (I'd end up flying EDI-hub, hub-Atlanta, Atlanta-Austin, or something like that) is gruelling: adds about 12 hours to the flight duration.

    358:

    Haven't read the last 100 or so comments yet ...

    Air travel may decline and not just because of more expensive fuel. Saw a blurb that air turbulence is increasing and will continue to increase in-step with global warming. No idea how many planes with all their passengers and crew lost, or number of homes with their occupants destroyed by falling aircraft and debris before insurers, gov’ts (who often underwrite/assist in disaster relief) and consumers decide they just don’t want to take that risk.

    Depending on how bad the airplane disasters, could be that even after global warming is abated, airplanes as we know them may never come back. No idea whether Zeppelins would be any safer.

    359:

    Naah, turbulence isn't going to be a huge problem on this scale. Yes, more diversions and cancelled flights (airports being closed by storms); yes, more clear air turbulence at cruising altitude means the seatbelt signs will stay lit a lot longer. But airliners have weather radar for a reason, and usually route around bad stuff successfully (the exceptions are famous precisely because they're exceptions). Most of the weather is low down anyway, and long-haul jet airliners typically cruise between 33,000 and 40,000 feet up — above the worst of it.

    The main lesson from reading Aviation Herald too much is: ALWAYS keep your seat belt fastened, even when the lights are off. Doesn't need to be tight when in cruise flight, but if you hit a bump in the air and the plane drops a couple of hundred feet it might save you from bouncing your skull off the overhead luggage bins; only unfasten your seatbelt if you're actually going to leave your seat, and do so for as little time as possible.

    (In event of worsening climate/weather, airships would be a lot worse. They can't cruise above the worst weather and they're not fast enough to detour around it.)

    360:

    “But anything that requires three flights—say, Austin, Texas (I'd end up flying EDI-hub, hub-Atlanta, Atlanta-Austin, or something like that) is gruelling: adds about 12 hours to the flight duration.”

    Precisely why I select flights with one transfer (or none), anything that involves multiple transfers adds to the possibility of flight delays and cancellations. I loathe hanging out it airports for more than 3 hours. That’s why I don’t necessarily look for the cheapest flights, affordable yes, but with the least time spent.

    I fly Delta when flying home to Flint, Michigan, since they are one of three airlines that do. It’s usually AUS-ATL-FNT or AUS-MSP-FNT with one transfer. I love flying Southwest out to San Diego, it’s a straight shot with no transfers … a 3 hour flight from Austin, Texas.

    361:

    Precisely why I select flights with one transfer (or none)

    You live close to a major hub, don't you? Flint, MI is close enough to DTW, and DTW is a big-ass hub.

    EDI, in contrast, is well-connected within the UK and to a variety of European hubs — LGW, LHR, CDG, AMS — and even to Emirates' hub in Dubai, but has very few trans-Atlantic connections (daily services to JFK and LGA on Delta and United respectively, and the Delta service only operates six months a year). Nor can I use other local airports; GLA and Newcastle are both > 2 hours away from where I live by ground transport (GLA is only forty miles away but to get there I have to go through two city centres that were designed before automobiles were a thing); the nearest real hub, MAN, is a mere 250 miles away. So pretty much everywhere I want to go requires a minimum of two sectors.

    I submit that this is a lot closer to how most people—excluding residents of megacities with populations over 5 million—experience air travel than your version (living on the doorstep of one of Delta's three main hubs).

    362:

    Well, if you're talking about redwoods overtopping dinosaurs, it kinda makes sense, in that no sauropod could reach 100 meters up a tree, and I don't think even the biggest sauropod could topple one.

    That said...

    Trees compete with each other for light, which is why, in certain fairly rare environments, you get trees competing to grow 100 meters tall. This is even true for trees (such as douglas-firs and eucalypts) that really evolved in the Cenozoic, well after the dinosaurs went extinct. They still shoot for the 100 meter mark as well.

    As for thorns not deterring birds, oddly enough, some of the plants in Hawai'i evolved spines apparently to deter the indigenous (and extinct) giant geese. Go figure.

    Finally, no one pays attention to what came out of sauropod cloacas. The Jurassic wasn't just a time of giant grazers, it had to have been a time when there was a whole dung ecosystem that's not really necessary now. Indeed, some have suggested that some of the weirder dinosaurs were evolved to scavenge in dung heaps for whatever, and this may have also been where termites got their start. Sadly though, this unique aspect of Jurassic ecology (worldwide feed lot?) never gets shown in the artistic reconstructions of the era.

    363:
    2.) Car manufacturers will standardize on a particular battery size and an infrastructure which will allow batteries to be changed in charging stations by semi-skilled labor (in other words, the same people who currently pump your gas and check your oil) in less than five minutes.

    Swapping out the battery, which constitutes a substantial fraction of both the mass and the cost, seems impractical. At the same time, the benefits seem limited, particularly with self-driving.

    The majority of trucks don't care about time, in the same way that you don't get high-speed freight trains and cargo ships on the sea use "slow steaming" to save fuel. The main reason to hurry is the cost of the driver, which is eliminated with self-driving trucks.

    For time-sensitive cargo, trucks already have existing standards for swapping the cargo in and out, all the way up to the intermodal container twistlock. The additional benefit of also detaching the battery is probably not worth the extra complexity.

    For self-driving passenger cars which are hired by the trip, it's not needed at all; you'll in any case let it go and get a new one after lunch, no point paying waiting charges.

    All that's left is the passenger with a lot of luggage or special needs, and privately-owned cars. That doesn't seem worth putting in all the engineering and infrastructure, especially if the delays are on the order of a leisurely lunch...

    364:

    Re: 'Most of the weather is low down anyway, ...'

    Precisely ... and because you have to take-off and then land, this means? Now, multiply this by the number of times you have to change planes per trip.

    Not sure how comprehensive this report is but provides some interesting stats. See page 21 of this PDF for accidents during phases of flight for years 2006-2015 combined.

    http://www.boeing.com/resources/boeingdotcom/company/about_bca/pdf/statsum.pdf

    Note: Malaysia 370 not included because it's still 'missing'.

    365:

    Make that Page 20 ...

    366:

    Can you please point me in the direction of those papers on Jurassic dung ecosystems? It sounds genuinely interesting.

    367:

    Did you even read the second sentence of my comment before you hit "submit" on your reply?

    368:

    For those of us who don't live near major hubs delays can be even longer. I could fly from Norwich to Amsterdam and take a connection from there. The problem is that it's almost always much more expensive than driving to Stansted, Gatwick or Heathrow. So we often book a night at an Airport Hotel. The Hotels usually include car parking and cost about the same as a car park alone. It also gets rid or the worry that the M11 or M25 will be at a standstill. Travelling by train is much more relaxing but getting to Heathrow from Norwich involves too many changes of train/tube carrying luggage. High speed rail is much more relaxing and efficient. We were once held up by a motorway closure and arrived at the Ebbsfleet Eurostar terminal ten minutes before the train was due to depart. We got through security and onto the platform in eight minutes. This could never be done on an aircraft.

    369:

    Was wondering how quickly air traffic control could clear the skies safely and found this excellent Time story re: 9/11.

    The Day the FAA Stopped the World

    http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,174912,00.html

    370:

    Yes I did read it ... being diverted to another airport is not always an option.

    371:

    Getting back to the original question: what else got overlooked?

    Ooh, ooh: what replaces consumerism?

    One obvious candidate is religion, as practiced by various fundamentalist authoritarian types. Thing is, there's already non-violent pushback on all of it (non-violence being more effective than violence in this regard, because it makes would-be martyrs look too violent). On the bigger side, some fairly important religions, like a the pro-commercial chunk of evangelical Churchianity, Salafist Islam, even Tibetan Buddhism and for-all-I-know Scientology, look set to undergo massive upheavals in the 21st Century. Hard to say if they come out of it stronger or weaker.

    So no, I don't think current religions will replace current consumerism. Ascetic religion might. It certainly happened in the Late Roman Empire, partly in reaction to Rome's conspicuous consumption and corruption, partly as a lemonade-making exercise, but monasticism, pillar-sitting and the like became increasingly popular as the empire declined. So if current conditions gradually worsen, the appeal of religions that praise endurance of suffering may increase.

    Still, I can't help wondering if something else out of left field will be the Next Big Thing. My candidate so far is gamification: instead of being defined by what you consume, treat life as a game. Now, you can play to win, but for anyone who's read Carse's Finite and Infinite Games, the only reason to play the infinite game of life isn't to win, because the only way to win a game is to be ahead when it ends, and (hopefully)the game of life will continue after your death. Instead, the reason to play the infinite game of life is to keep the game going, and if you fancy yourself to be a good person, it is to keep The Game going with as many players as possible.

    If you think about it, politics truly works on an infinite game model. The point of politicking is to solve problems and to keep the system running, and the only way to be a "winner" in such a game is to crash the system when you're on top (which some in the current US Administration seem to think is worthwhile).

    So if 2117 isn't about global consumer society, is it about global gamesterism? I don't know, but the idea leads to a bunch of issues: Would gamification even work if gaming was theoretically extended to all aspects of life? Of course it can't be: things like love, raising families, tending elders, and mucking out large animal barns don't easily lend themselves to gameplaying. Worse, people always confuse finite games with infinite games, and there will be inevitable and vast tension between leveling up and keeping the bigger game of planetary life going. Still, making a game out of keeping the planet and civilizations going and inviting everybody to play makes at least as much sense as trying to stop ideological wars by urging everyone to become hedonistic consumers.

    Or is there something else around which 2117 life will be organized?

    372:

    I would add a seventh problem, which is that Red-State people are subjected to horrifying amounts of ugly propaganda from both their churches and the right-wing media.

    When I look back at the point where American starting going to crap, I focus on Reagan overturning the fairness doctrine.

    373:

    Can I suggest that you have a look at Brian Uptons book "The aesthetic of play" which has some intriguing ideas on play space and its relationship to life.

    374:

    On the topic of transport, this nice graphic popped up on my twitter feed today, showing isochrones of travel from Berlin:

    https://alternativetransport.wordpress.com/2016/12/20/isochrone-map-of-berlin-1819-1906-and-2015/

    Naturally, the introduction of trains made a massive difference in achievable distance.

    Sfreader #371- if turbulence was that much of a problem, airplane travel wouldn't have grown so much in the first place. Go read some historical books. Your concerns are bunk.

    375:

    I've been thinking about that one for a long time. Once we have self-driving cars we'll route them like they were packets, with a much-less-expensive option to ride with multiple strangers. You'll have the option to rate your fellow passengers (this will probably be the beginning of a national/international "reputation market") and choose the average rating of the passengers you're willing to ride with. If your reputation is too low, and you choose too high, your ride will be more expensive.

    Among other things, this will completely kill any kind of road congestion.

    376:

    And because we're Humanity 1.0. (I like to think that my own comment wasn't bloodthirsty so much as describing the bloodthirstiness of others, but I could be wrong :) )

    377:

    Probably the solution is to look for someone who runs up a deadly virus and also the appropriate antibodies on the same machine. (More sophisticated versions of this are possible for both attack and defense.)

    378:

    Um, packet routing hasn't killed internet delays, so I'm not sure why packetizing human car trips will automatically cause traffic jams to go away. After all, these can also be caused by too many people on too narrow a road with no way to widen the road. That's the major problem in places like LA.

    379:

    I think the bigger concern for turbulence is climate change-based. After all, the jet stream got its name for its utility for jets, but what happens when it starts going away?

    As I understand it (not being a meteorologist), the Jet stream and its Antarctic counterpart are driven by having a very cold region at the pole and a much warmer region in the temperate zone. The energy from the temperature gradient dissipates by blowing up a huge gyre of wind between these two regions: the Jet Stream.

    The problem is, as the gradient dissipates, there's less of a gradient to feed the Jet Stream, so it starts showing all the problems with slowing streams: slower velocity, increased meander, and ultimately, dissipation.

    That's the turbulence I'm more worried about, going forward. Just for air travel, it could seriously complicate routes and route times. And of course there's all the chaotic weather, from bigger, slower moving storms, to polar vortexes when the slowing jet stream loops far enough south to let Arctic air into temperate regions, to Arctic heat waves when the Jet Stream wanders far enough north to let temperate air to the poles.

    380:

    Yes I did read it ... being diverted to another airport is not always an option.

    Actually, airliners are not supposed to depart unless they've got a margin of spare fuel for holding and then flying on to (and landing at) one or more planned alternate airports; if an airliner doesn't have enough fuel on arrival to divert, or spends so long holding that it can't divert, then that's pretty much the definition of an emergency, and triggers all sorts of paperwork (starting with an enquiry by the responsible aviation authority—FAA in the USA, CAA in the UK, etc—with consequences that can cost the airline its operator's license). Here's a classic example of why airliners usually carry extra fuel around (i.e. an incident where one didn't, and 80 people died).

    381:

    Increased stacking is what I expect to happen EVEN IF Moore's law has hit the wall, because that shortens the paths, and thus speeds things up. But because of stacking I also expect it hasn't hit the wall. There may, however, be some sort of split, similar to that between dynamic RAM and static RAM, where the denser computation has the computation in sleep mode most of the time. This seems inherently true of the designs that mix storage with the CPUs. The alternatives so far all seem pretty expensive (Silver heat pipes, liquid Nitrogen cooling, etc.) and so would only be used in things like supercomputers. OTOH, going back a bit liquid water cooling was only used in mainframes, but these days you can buy it for a desktop. So maybe the cooling designs will improve.

    That said, there seem to be early reports of bits being stored in single atoms...but I expect the equipment to stabilize or read them is sufficient to negate any current value. In a century, who knows.

    A century can bring a LOT of changes. And halving the dimensions of a circuit means that you can get 8 times as many in the same volume. There is a hard limit to Moore's law, but we're still a distance away, even without heavily increased stacking. But I have a suspicion that noise*uncertainty will put a limit to it before the hard limit...and that it will be circumvented by some kind of increased stacking. Which will also have limits that are circumvented by altered designs. But more slowly. We haven't yet even adapted the the need for multi-processing. Mixing the computation with the memory will be a further alteration, and not necessarily an easier one.

    382:

    I'm very much a Liberal, and while I'm generally anti-violence and anti-prejudice, I'm also sick of Islamic terror. I dislike Islamic terror just a little less than I dislike the way Western governments use Islamic terror as an excuse for passing ugly laws and engaging in gruesome behavior.

    I think the mechanism by which Islamic terror spreads is pretty well-known; that is, the Saudis (possibly some faction amid the Saudis) use the money generated by their immense oil fields to send Wahabi missionaries to countries which historically practice a much mellower brand of Islam. In Christian terms, it's as if the Westboro Baptist Church was the official church of some rich, powerful country and that rich, powerful country regularly sent Westboro Baptist missionaries off to poor countries filled with Methodists, Quakers, and Presbyterians. The rich country only gets away with this because they are rich (and powerful.)

    In terms of violence and other forms of ugly behavior, the results of the Saudis' missionary urges are very predictable.

    We only put up with this crap because we need Saudi oil. When Saudi oil goes away, so will the Saudis. And their missionaries.

    383:

    Doubt very much that the SABRE descendants are less efficient than a budget airlines. They were built efficient from the ground up back when they had to deliver sub 3s responses across networks measured in a few 10's of Baud. Hence being written in assembler and running on some of IBM's biggest baddest mainframes. They've been reegineered in c++/Linux since of course but contrast that with say Ryan Air who rumour has it paid a couple of summer students to build their core in Java. There'll be 30 years of cruft but I'd still bet on Sabre and friends.

    The GDS' have also been multimodal since day one covering nearly all forms public transport and they have had the Interoperability built it. All that's missing is a bit of reroute logic over the top and Bobs yer uncle.

    Of course it not the systems that are the main problems it's the business models of the dinosaurs using it. I'm surprised no one swamped in cheap VC cash hasn't done an Uber-Budget Airline mashup app yet....

    384:

    the jet stream got its name for its utility for jets, but what happens when it starts going away?

    In terms of air travel, not a lot.

    Whenever I fly to the USA (prior to Trump that'd be 2-4 times a year; now, a whole lot less), the outbound trip takes an hour longer than the homebound trip? Why? Well, because I'm flying from Northern Europe out across the Atlantic and back. There's always turbulence passing over the Western Approaches and then hitting the Atlantic, or coming off the Atlantic and crossing over Ireland, because flying west means flying straight into the teeth a jet stream that varies between 60 and 150mph; coming back in the opposite direction, the airliner is surfing the same jet stream in the opposite direction. So: outbound ground speed is 400-500 mph, homebound ground speed is 550-700mph. (Note: ground speed is not the same as air speed!)

    Now, suppose that jet stream goes away completely. What happens? Well, instead of the westbound flight taking 7h30m and the eastbound flight taking 6h15m, both flights take 6h45m.

    385:

    I was thinking more in terms of full cars vs. cars with only one person in them, plus better routing.

    I have a sort of rough expertise in this, as I make my living by driving around Southern California installing and repairing stuff. There are lots of ways to beat freeway speeds. Look into the Waze app if you don't believe me, or ask a driver with several years of experience in beating the local freeway mess.

    386:

    Charlie specified human industrial/post-industrial cultural survival in 2117.

    That is not where we're presently going whatsoever. If it were to be, the path change required to accomplish that has to be large, abrupt, and soon. So no quiet fade-away models; something on the order of the initial rise of Islam. No tactful gentle reasoning; one of the major problems is a US culture of never, ever acknowledging defeat in anything, which means you either accept that the innumerate slavers are in charge, or you destroy them. They're not going to stop on their own.

    One abrupt soon thing is very likely to be the market consequences of the carbon bubble popping. Combine that with a US attempt to revert to a hard currency and maybe the cohesive response will be the forcible replacement of capitalism.

    387:

    Personally, speaking only as an American who was raised Christian, I'm much more sick of Christian terrorism than I am of Muslim terrorism.

    The problem with terrorism, at least the US flavor, is that it is, by law enforcement definition, performed by (brown) people who aren't Christian. Christian terrorism is almost always handled under other laws and memes, whether it's hate crimes, or "lone wolves" shooting up abortion clinics, or whatever. Many of our terrorists are mentally ill. Their terrorists are dehumanized monsters.

    And yes, Islamic terrorism is a serious problem. I just happen to be a lot more sympathetic to the non-terrorists when I recategorize our violent extremists as terrorists too.

    388:

    it's the business models of the dinosaurs using it

    Also the regulatory framework that evolved to police them, remember.

    F'rxample, flexible rebookable ticketing would be wonderful, but it ain't going to happen between the UK and USA (or the USA and elsewhere) while the current ESTA and APN collection mechanism ties passengers to specific flights and arrival times — and the ESTA stuff is simply an electronic implementation of the old I94w visa waiver form which in turn was fixed in stone by Act of Congress (hence it still asking if you've been convicted of a "crime of moral turpitude" or if you were "a member of the Nazi Party").

    Yes, the system can cope with ESTA-granted visitors returning periodically, and the APN requirement (advance passenger notification) is flexible enough that if your flight is cancelled or you get bumped they don't keel-haul you for arriving on the wrong airliner; but it's treated as an exception, not the norm.

    An online application for "clearance to visit the USA (tourism/business) with flexible arrival scheduling" would be great, but it runs up against US primary legislation and CPB and TSA existing practices and baked-in IT systems.

    389:

    Let's see, other things to think about:

    What will be considered classical music in 2117? The Beastie Boys?. Will academy-trained classical musicians still be rapping in a century? If so, what will they be playing in the street. If urban soundscapes are any indication, the electrified 22st Century may well be a lot quieter than the 21st Century, and it will have a different set of background sounds and rhythms to inspire people.

    Dance and other arts have the same issue. Will there be a street vs. elite division, and if so, what's on the street?

    390:

    I was thinking more in terms of full cars vs. cars with only one person in them, plus better routing.

    Objections to ride-sharing in self-driving vehicles (playing devil's advocate here):

    • I have a compromised immune system. What guarantee do I have that my co-traveller doesn't have a mild throat infection that will give me pneumonia and hospitalize me?

    • What guarantee do I have that my co-traveller isn't drunk-to-throwing-up or planning to spend the trip shooting up heroin? Or just being annoyingly conversational (at me, or at $FRIEND on their phone)?

    • Assume I am female, young, and conventionally attractive: what guarantee do I have that my co-traveller isn't going to take a couple of hours alone in a car with me as an opportunity for harassment, or even violent sexual assault? (NB: this is the commonest reported problem, but: applies to any other vulnerable demographic.)

    The objection that "you can always pay more to travel alone" is, of course, inherently discriminatory against people who are already marginalized/disadvantaged.

    391:

    Religion evolves in Darwinian fashion. Instead of dying out as many atheists predicted, religion is experiencing its own Cambrian Explosion. The next century will see the greatest diversification and expansion of religion in history.

    https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/02/oh-gods/302412/

    Religion didn't begin to wither away during the twentieth century, as some academic experts had prophesied. Far from it. And the new century will probably see religion explode—in both intensity and variety. New religions are springing up everywhere. Old ones are mutating with Darwinian restlessness. And the big "problem religion" of the twenty-first century may not be the one you think

    ew religions are born all the time. Old ones transform themselves dramatically. Schism, evolution, death, and rebirth are the norm. And this doesn't apply only to religious groups that one often hears referred to as cults. Today hundreds of widely divergent forms of Christianity are practiced around the world. Islam is usually talked about in monolithic terms (or, at most, in terms of the Shia-Sunni divide), but one almost never hears about the 50 million or so members of the Naqshabandiya order of Sufi Islam, which is strong in Central Asia and India, or about the more than 20 million members of various schismatic Muslim groups around the world. Think, too, about the strange rise and fall of the Taliban. Buddhism, far from being an all-encompassing glow radiating benignly out of the East, is a vast family of religions made up of more than 200 distinct bodies, many of which don't see eye-to-eye at all. Major strands of Hinduism were profoundly reshaped in the nineteenth century, revealing strong Western and Christian influences.

    The fact is that religion mutates with Darwinian restlessness. Take a long enough view, and all talk of "established" or "traditional" faith becomes oxymoronic: there's no reason to think that the religious movements of today are any less subject to change than were the religious movements of hundreds or even thousands of years ago. History bears this out.

    Secularization of a sort certainly has occurred in the modern world—but religion seems to keep adapting to new social ecosystems, in a process one might refer to as "supernatural selection." It shows no sign of extinction, and "theodiversity" is, if anything, on the rise. How can this be? Three decades ago the British sociologist Colin Campbell suggested an answer. A way to explore the apparently paradoxical relationship between secularization and religion, Campbell felt, might be to examine closely what happens on the religious fringe, where new movements are born. "Ironically enough," he wrote, "it could be that the very processes of secularization which have been responsible for the 'cutting back' of the established form of religion have actually allowed 'hardier varieties' to flourish."

    The essence of the idea is this: People act rationally in choosing their religion. If they are believers, they make a constant cost-benefit analysis, consciously or unconsciously, about what form of religion to practice. Religious beliefs and practices make up the product that is on sale in the market, and current and potential followers are the consumers. In a free-market religious economy there is a healthy abundance of choice (religious pluralism), which leads naturally to vigorous competition and efficient supply (new and old religious movements). The more competition there is, the higher the level of consumption. This would explain the often remarked paradox that the United States is one of the most religious countries in the world but also one of the strongest enforcers of a separation between Church and State.

    One of the most remarkable changes already taking place because of new religious movements is the under-reported shift in the center of gravity in the Christian world. There has been a dramatic move from North to South. Christianity is most vital now in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, where independent churches, Pentecostalism, and even major Catholic Charismatic movements are expanding rapidly. The story of Christianity in twentieth-century Africa is particularly noteworthy. There were fewer than 10 million Christians in Africa in 1900; by 2000 there were more than 360 million. And something very interesting is happening: ancient Christian practices such as exorcism, spirit healing, and speaking in tongues—all of which are documented in the Book of Acts—are back in force. In classic NRM fashion, some of these Christianity-based movements involve new prophet figures, new sacred texts, new pilgrimage sites, and new forms of worship.

    "We need to take the new Christianity very seriously," Philip Jenkins told me. "It is not just Christianity plus drums. If we're not careful, fifty years from now we may find a largely secular North defining itself against a largely Christian South. This will have its implications." Such as? I asked. Jenkins paused, and then made a prediction. "I think," he said, "that the big 'problem cult' of the twenty-first century will be Christianity."

    392:

    I'm also very sick of Christian terrorism, or maybe I should say Right-Wing terror in general. My thinking in this case is that the Saudis have made a great short-term decision if they want to have soft power. But it's a really poor long-term decision because of the huge number of both people and nations they have pissed off.

    BTW, I personally would not handle the problem by "nuking Mecca" or shooting Wahabi missionaries, but I suspect things will go more that direction than the peaceful alternatives.

    Just so you know how I think, my 9/11 fantasy was that we should confiscate all Saudi assets in the U.S. and use them to finance a tax holiday for a couple years, with the remainder of the money being used to pay down the national debt. Imagine the morale effect on Al Quaeda when the end result of their attack is a tax holiday for the victims. Aside from putting a much-needed restraint on Saudi impulses towards financing terror, it would also have been an enormous defeat for bin Laden. I would have done other things to end Islamic terror as well, of course.

    I'm rather annoyed at this thread; its the best thread we've had for a couple months and I'm crazy busy right now, so I'm not able to give it my best. In fact, I'm out the door late just to give you this overly-quick reply!

    393:

    Great posts!

    China has a young retirement age (60 for men, 50-55 for women) which could easily be changed for budgetary/economic/labor-requirement reasons. Also, traditional medicine was never abandoned in China so is still in use, widely available and works fairly well and probably much less expensive than the drugs/medical treatments in the West. (Therefore age-related health cost estimates may be overstated.)

    394:

    There are a bunch of big problems with this idea: religions are not species or even populations, they're clusters of ideas and identifiers. They also don't "evolve" even as bacteria do, primarily because people talk to teach other and swap ideas. For example, the founders of modern druidry and Wicca were friends, and that (along with the fact that many people are practitioners of both) is probably why they continue to look so similar to this day, 70 years down the line. I agree there is change, but it's not Darwinian and it isn't rational. I don't even have to go with all the death cults to point out the various forms of religious behavior that reduce the reproductive fitness of their practitioners, whether we're talking about them passing on their genes or their memes.

    The second problem is the idea that "we're special now." BS. EVERY era has a lot of spiritual people in it, and most of them found groups that don't last very long. This was as true of Roman times, or the Ottoman Empire (look at the diversity of Sufis) or the Chinese empire (look at the diversity of folk cults: they'd even canonized the heroes of The Water Margin) as it is now. And that doesn't even begin to delve the vast majority of religious practices that were destroyed by the forcible proselytizing of both Christianity and Islam. A tremendous amount of spiritual diversity has disappeared in the last 2,000 years, along with linguistic diversity. Indeed, most religious/spiritual diversity is outside the big faiths, not within it, and we're losing that diversity to continued missionary work as fast as we're losing languages.

    The bottom line is that we're not special. We just like to think we are.

    395:

    Re: 'Go read some historical books. Your concerns are bunk.'

    Not sure history books would have answers to all current problems.

    Had also been thinking that increased humidity (known effect of global warming) could have serious consequences apart from a bumpier flight.

    http://www.acta.mechanica.pb.edu.pl/volume/vol8no2/02_2014_005_BALICKI_GLOWACKI_SZCZECINSKI_CHACHURSKI_SZCZECINSKI.pdf

    Excerpt:

    'Water sucked into the compressor duct is gradually evaporating. Normally water in liquid form is rejected due to the centrifugal force by the rotor blades on the surface of compressor duct and then flows towards the combustion chamber. This water can get into the bleed valves. If all of the water does not evaporate in the compressor or will not be removed by bleed valves can enter the combustor and may lead to the engine shutdown. Large amount of water vapor worsen preparation and combustion of the air – fuel mixture and moreover, water can rapidly (quasidetonation) vaporize becoming anaerobic filler of the air stream in the combustion chamber causing flame out.'

    Plus, ...

    'High humidity can also cause icing of the engine, which can occur in temperatures between +10 °C ... +15 °C and corresponding relative humidity. Icing formations depend on engine design, as well as inlets position on the airframe and their structure.'

    There's a graph on pg3 that shows lift and humidity .. need lots more lift (fuel) in high humidity situations.

    And yes, airplane manufacturers and airlines will probably address this at some point.

    396:

    'actually, Pluto and Eris are kind of too warm for comfort, sensible people live in the Oort clouds of, well, everywhere, now FUCK OFF your probes are too damn hot... Ah, Niven's "Outsiders"?

    397:

    Increasing turbulence and humidity are known problems that could be dealt with, if necessary, by minor reengineering. Yes, they could get so bad that current aircraft could not fly at all safely but, by then, we would have really catastrophic problems on the ground.

    398:

    ( And Icehawk) Thank you. NOW it makes sense ( sort-of, anyway! )

    399:

    Heteromeles noted: "There are a bunch of big problems with this idea: religions are not species or even populations, they're clusters of ideas and identifiers. They also don't "evolve" even as bacteria do, primarily because people talk to teach other and swap ideas."

    Not so fast: without overextending this into the whole "religion as disease" metaphor, which I find toxic, there are more than enough parallels to consider an evolutionary model for religion. (Substitute "memes", sensu lato, for "genes" if you wish.)

    First, there are large bodies of conserved genes (the holy scripture). These change slowly or not at all, except for periodic mutations (i.e., schisms and reformations, spawning of new subreligions).

    Second, religions promiscuously exchange ideas the way bacteria exchange genes. Some of these exchanges are even "viral", pardon the pun. They can be replaced, outcompeted, or even defeated by other viruses (memes).

    Third, religions are not monolithic; they exhibit considerable "genetic" variation, witness the dozens of flavors of Christianity. Those that no longer have what it takes to survive in a changing environment die out or are culled so that only "fitter" ones survive.

    Fourth, like other microorganisms, religions may live largely independently or they may require hosts. Once inside a habitat, they may completely dominate that habitat (see "state religions"), or they may coexist with many other organisms (see the U.S. multicultural example). For those that require a specific host, they may be largely passive (commensal), parasitic, or even mutualistic. As examples of the latter, they may even reshape the host's whole metabolism (see "microbiome"), witness how conservative religion has crept back into modern U.S. politics.

    Needless to say, I am not proposing this as a physically deterministic/mechanistic model for how the social world really works. And it's easy to extend the metaphor to reductio ad absurdum, as with any overextended metaphor. Just pointing out that as metaphors go, this one works quite well.

    400:

    And, even living in London, with easy access by train to 3 airports, it may be faster by train, once you note the security-farce & checking-in-time fuckarounds. Certainly faster for here to Paris or Brussel by train, probably Amsterdam or Antwerp. Köln is slower - FUCK the Brit guvmint's security-paranoia re "Eurostar" & other trains, as without it, I would not ever need to fly for my normal travelling - excepting Dublin, which I expect to re-visit for the first time in over 50 years, quite soon.

    401:

    Really? "The Night-Blooming Saurian" James Tiptree Jnr

    402:

    That problem will disappear in 2019 Norwich Thorpe - Liverpool St - Crossral-1 ( Liz-line) to Theifrow. Job done

    403:

    “You live close to a major hub, don't you? Flint, MI is close enough to DTW, and DTW is a big-ass hub.”

    Sure, DTW is an hour drive (~65 miles) from Flint, MI. I used to fly into DTW and my family would drive down to pick me up, a two hour round trip for them. Back then DTW was a Northwest hub and cost an extra $150 – $200 for a 17 minute hop to Flint (half the time flights canceled due to low booking). After the Delta/Northwest merger there were better flight alternatives. Also, current connecting flights to Flint are no longer made through DTW. From Austin, TX I have a choice between Minneapolis/St. Paul or Atlanta for connecting flights to Flint, MI. It takes between 5 to 7 hours depending on the layover.

    Granted there is a huge difference between regional/continental flights and transatlantic or transpacific flights. We’re talking major time warp and traveling multiple time zones. Last time I flew to Europe was in 2001 (before 9/11), flying American from Austin, Texas to Frankfurt, Germany (with a transfer in Houston) for $445 round trip. Those were the days, today it costs me more to fly to Flint, MI.

    404:

    because flying west means flying straight into the teeth a jet stream that varies between 60 and 150mph; coming back in the opposite direction, the airliner is surfing the same jet stream in the opposite direction.

    Past #300, so,

    Back around, I guess, 1990, I was taking a 757 on a direct flight from KSEA to KIAD and the pilot could not stop enthusing about how the jet stream was super-strong and in just right place and we were really ripping along. IIRC, we went gate-to-gate in about four hours.

    405:

    "What guarantee do I have that my co-traveller isn't drunk-to-throwing-up or planning to spend the trip shooting up heroin?"

    This is what everyone ignores about the autonomous taxi idea: the autonomous taxis will be full of piss, shit, puke, and used needles/condoms.

    406:

    Maybe. Maybe not. Religious revival is a phenomenon of most religions & both the bronze-age goatherders' & the dark-ages camelherders' varieties are undergoing those, right now. But, it almost certainly won't last.

    Remember, education is the deadly enemy of any "revealed" religion, same as education is the enemy of women's slavery ( And, obviously the two are connected ).

    407:

    Not necessarily; but the alternative is that they're as full of CCTV cameras and urea-sniffers as elevator cars in Singapore ("Singapore is a FINE country — $50 for littering, $100 for chewing gum, $200 for not dressing smartly in public ...")

    Also, reputation markets can be gamed, even in the highly constrained paddling-pool of a ride-share app. (Afraid of a bad rep or trying to recover from one? Offer $5 cash for a good review from your fellow traveler.)

    408:

    religions are not species or even populations, they're clusters of ideas and identifiers.

    Memetics, not genetics.

    See Dawkins.

    409:

    Remember, education is the deadly enemy of any "revealed" religion, same as education is the enemy of women's slavery ( And, obviously the two are connected ).

    I note the enthusiasm for school voucher programs in the US among people and parties of a certain religioideological orientation. Cf. Betsy DeVos.

    410:

    Pfui.

    There are large bodies of holy scripture, but most groups only use a small amount of it. Who practices everything in Leviticus, for example? Worse, many evangelicals don't open the Bible at all. They're baptized, welcomed into the church, assured that as long as they stay they're going to Heaven, and given a Bible that they are "encouraged" to read later (most don't. That's why the Bible makes such a great holy object.

    This isn't new. The Council of Nicea, which basically decided what books are in the Christian Bible, was called by Constantine I. To put it snarkily, he'd declared himself Christian after having a dream, found out Christians argued a lot about what that meant, and ordered a council assembled to figure out what the official doctrine was so he could subscribe to it. In other words, Christianity won before it had its memes together. Put that in an organismal shell and explain how that could possibly have happened.

    Buddhism has similar issues. So do Islam and Taoism, to name two that it's easy to find out about (with Islam, the Sufis are the ones who get The Laws upset, but the Sunni/Shia split is fundamentally doctrinal as well).

    Anyway, back in the 1990s and 2000s when paganism was popular, there was some really neat scholarly work looking at its early evolution from Gardner forward, trying to confirm or debunk a lot of the stories going around. It turns out that ideas were flowing everywhere, because there was basically a smallish group of hobbyists talking with each other. If you try to trace a "family tree of ideas" (and it's been done), it's a knotted mess, with stuff flowing everywhere. It's more like the way science fiction writers create stories than the way bacteria exchange genes.

    And that doesn't get to the biggest problem of all: life. Religion doesn't happen in isolation. For example, if a non-humanistic society doesn't believe in giving people time off work because unions fought and won that "right," you can get much the same effect by having the Church give people time off through saint's feast days and other required church attendance. Same effect, different institutions, but if you only look at the religious side, there appears to be a profound difference between these two. Or another: most evangelicals just want to go to heaven when they die, and that's all the baptism and churching is about. Their knowledge of what's in The Bible is highly selective (they've been told--they've not read it critically* if at all), and they're mostly concerned about fitting into their society and having a good end to life that they don't have to worry about. That's very different than what Jesus wanted them to do, but there you have it. Same thing happens in Buddhism, Islam, etc.

    Now the reason I'm dancing on your head on this one is that I've already been down this road. It's worthless: you might as well pitch ideas about religious memes evolving as organisms or genes and read more about the diversity of spiritual and religious practice. The comparison between religious memes and life is a hell of a lot less useful than you currently think.

    411:

    As an older European, these discussions about religion and the future of religion feel quite strange. Especially when they assume that religion is inevitable. Increasingly in Europe we're not atheist, but a-religionist. We're simply no longer interested. Religion is something that old people do and fewer and fewer of them. We can't ignore a few thousand years of history because churches, cathedrals and such like are all around us. But it's just cultural baggage and not something people like us do. And this is not just the Christian religion that's fading away, it's all religions. It's tempting to take this further and suggest that Europe is ahead of the curve in working towards an end point of the age of enlightenment. So by 2117 religion in Europe and hopefully everywhere, will have died out as a process and will just be a cultural artefact in museums.

    412:

    No time now to catch up on comments, but i want you to look at this video if you have 40 min. to spare and an interest in history or architecture:

    https://vimeo.com/211269857

    Guy bascially starts with the Berlin Wall torn down and then hops via St. Louis demolished housing projects in '72, Piketty,Fukuyama and Dubai back to Berlin to claim that the 20th century never happened.

    süecial note to the wierd thing that Dubai is in terms of real estate development, and the love affair of (weste4rn) architexcts with authoritarian pseudo democracys (This love affair beeing repeated in some forward-thinking nerd circles).

    don't agree with the basic outlook but many good points are there and of interest to readers here, methinks.

    413:

    Precisely Constrained, channelled "education" "Give us a child until he is seven" ( And don't educate the girls, of course... )

    414:

    Ooh, ooh: what replaces consumerism? Why wouldn't consumerism continue to be an arms race? Arms races are notoriously hard to predict, and I rewrote a scenario 3 times before giving up, but the common theme was a fight between maintaining a population that can largely be manipulated (at various scales, including individual targeting) into wanting Stuff, and attempts to grow subpopulations resistant [1] to such manipulation. There is almost certainly a reasonable treatment of this somewhere, but didn't spot one in a quick halfhearted search. Current the attackers dominate at least in the West, but I see no compelling reason that this dominance would continue long or even mid term. Consumerism would still exist, but in a weaker form. [1] resistance would be conferred in various ways, including making people want other things more than Stuff, substantial improvements in self-awareness, and the like. Anyway, the halfhearted search found this self-help-style piece: How to Avoid Being Enslaved by Consumerism which suggests a general personal strategy of mental improvement (approve of the sentiment, but ... how to scale?), and various suggested replacements, including: Facebook :-), ephemeralism, sharing economy, pragmatism, caring values, nonindulgence, love, financial prudence, compassion, the power of shared connections, conscious minimalism, an emphasis on quality of life and the use of intermediate or appropriate technologies, community and home economics, permaculture.

    415:

    The objection that "you can always pay more to travel alone" is, of course, inherently discriminatory against people who are already marginalized/disadvantaged.

    Can't the same argument be applied to any public transportation system? A plane, a train, a bus? You are always at some level of risk when you are in the same room with other people.

    416:

    We're simply no longer interested. Religion is something that old people do and fewer and fewer of them. We can't ignore a few thousand years of history because churches, cathedrals and such like are all around us

    A century ago in the UK, I suspect the Church was the primary focus of aspirational social life. "What Church do you attend?" disappeared before I hit adulthood over thirty years ago - but still appears (from my seat, at least) to be a necessary feature of "respectable" US social existence.

    If you look around Edinburgh, there are plenty of repurposed churches. One near OGH turned into a large gym for a while, I sat some University exams in another, two in Leith are now indoor climbing facilities, one in Morningside is a pizzeria, one in Sciennes has been a lighting shop and dance school for over twenty years, one at Tollcross has been empty for decades and is only now being renovated - but not as a church. At "Holy Corner" there are four churches facing each other over a crossroads; at least one is now mostly attended as a community centre, with Judo classes etc. It took over a decade to build the Mosque in Edinburgh's South Side, but they've discovered a roaring trade in food sales during the Festival, while throwing open their doors to show and explain what was inside; "knowledge dispels fear" in action...)

    The Ministers have changed too. Perhaps it's because I was mostly exposed to military chaplains from the Church of Scotland, but they performed non-denominational services and focussed mostly on social and welfare sides of their ministry - practical help, pragmatically delivered. Of the reservists, one worked as a life coach, another as a teacher, another went on to deliver local social care programmes for a PMC in the Middle East. None of your televangelical, preachy, or happy-clappy types there, just good people getting on with doing good works; I found supporting them was easy (being an atheist, yet taking a lead role a military Remembrance Service because it was part of the job).

    I do rather hope that pragmatism wins out, and "BELIEF" fades gently. I've seen it work here (and hey, Y'all, aren't we in the UK meant to be the class-conscious, socially rigid, up-tight ones?), and rather hope that the USA trends in that direction, rather than in isolationist frustration and fracture.

    I've met too many downright sensible Americans to think otherwise, and wonder whether the swivel-eyed shouty types appear much more prevalent than they actually are, just because they're louder and far more attention-seeking... even those of today's young US Mormons that I've met were pragmatists, not blinkered devotees (we've got a church close by, some of their young men on a mission come door to door very occasionally).

    417:

    There's one I think about sometimes, and I'm not sure whether to consider it a variation on the machine translation thing or not.

    Consider microexpressions, where fleeting thoughts or emotions are extremely briefly exposed via ephemeral involuntary twitches. People can be trained to read them, but the results are far from perfect, and there are "protections" like botox, and I'm not clear on the extent to which there's cultural variation going on here.

    So. Instead of looking directly at the fleeting expressions with human eyes made of meat, throw a cheap thermal imaging camera at it, small enough not to be noticeable. If you can pick up on changes to blood flow to different muscle groups, feed that into the machine. Couple that with deep learning and the systems for machine translation. You could end up with machines being able to read involuntary emotional cues and states more accurately and less fallibly than a human can.

    Imagine if whenever you're talking with someone, not only do you see various metadata like their name and how you know them floating around them, and not only do you get pretty good machine translation of whatever they're saying (and perhaps even subvocalizing), you get a "thought balloon" with emoji in it translating their likely emotional state. Every joke is accompanied by a smiley, all the time, whether the speaker intends it or not. Nobody (with access to the tool) doubts when they're starting to piss someone off. Nobody (with access to the tool) doubts when somebody is afraid or angry. If the speaker is a locally-present human being, at least (or even a remote one if you trust the hardware/software that has its eye on them).

    At its best, I would think this would be a tremendous help to anyone who has trouble with social cues. But it could also be a pretty powerful tool for control.

    418:

    Another thing I wonder about is what social & "family" groups will look like in 2117.

    For example…

    a) I know a fair number of "successful" people in their 20s-40s who are living in shared accommodation. The major driver for that is the high cost of living in expensive urban cities (NYC, London, Silicon Valley, etc.) But there also seems to be a strong element of social support that feels similar to the multi-generational family homes I grew up in/around. Some of them could afford to live by themselves - or with a partner - but choose not to.

    b) The kinds of small/medium/large communities I associate myself with aren't location based. Forty years ago my next door neighbour was basically family — even though we weren't related. Now I barely know my neighbours names. Whereas some of my most intimate friends live in different countries, and I've only met them in meatspace a dozen or so times. My family & tribal relationships tend to be distributed, not co-located.

    So… on one side new kinds of co-located relationships and groups are building that aren't built along traditional family lines. On the other side tribes & friendships that are no longer restricted by physical location. Throw in things like company subsidised housing, and folks like airbnb blurring the lines between rental and hotel accommodation, and peoples possessions moving from physical to virtual "stuff"…

    What does "home" look/feel like? Capsule hotel at one end, commune at the other?

    419:

    Jeez, I have a rough week, and we're well over 200 posts....

  • "Stick batteries in a loco"? Perhaps you missed that all diesels are, in fact, diesel-electric, with the diesel engine generating electricity for the electric motors running the wheels. Or you could electrify the lines... as the US "eastern corridor" is, thanks to the Pennsy and the NYC, about 90 years ago.

  • For months after 9/11, the pilots union in the US was saying that for distances under 300-400 mi, flying didn't make sense, the train would be better. Esp. since they come right downtown, and aren't up to an hour's drive from downtown (depending on traffic).

  • I see languages getting fewer in public use, but come on, Charlie - I refer you to the Quebecois....

  • I work at what may be the premier (and largest) medical and bioscientific research facility in the world, an agency of the US gov't (I do not speak for my company, nor for the US federal gov't), and all the worry about genengineered plagues... I'd also expect genengineered vaccines (think flu shots every year; time to update your biological antivirus), to take care of most of them. And others... well, I suspect too many Patient Zero will be the idiot trying to engineer them; think script kiddies who can't be bothered to read the documentation). Oh, and t-cells that don't run out.

  • GPUs... yeah, they really want a lot of power. The NVidia Tesla cards have to have separate cables to the PSU, becuase the motherboard doesn't give it enough power. Now, stick two of them in a rack-mounted server... of which we have two systems like that. And if you don't think they've started making compilers and the o/s aware of all the cores, um, sorry, been going on for years. (Yes, I'm a sr. sysadmin for folks running on these systems, and the clusters, and the small supercomputer....)

  • And it's been a rough week. See y'all Monday....

    mark

    420:

    [ CRAP DELETED BY MODERATOR — who considered leaving the climate change denialist tract in situ until he got to the deadly phrase, "this was a drive-by" — that's a nope, then. ]

    421:

    You definitely have some good points. I'd argue that we can also develop technology and/or customs for handling most of your objections:

    First, put cameras in the cars. They beam video and audio back to a centralized system. It requires a warrant to view the records of each ride. This doesn't require a Singapore-like level of surveillance, just the ability to respond to a human's complaint in an intelligent fashion, or figure out who spilled beer on the leather upholstery and didn't pay the clean-up fee.

    Second, if you're really horny, why harass anyone for sex? When that person complains the next car you ride in will ron-de-vous with a police car, or simply lock the doors and drive you to the police station. Wouldn't it be much more sensible to request a car-partner who wants casual sex, then make sure you clean the seat and dispose of your condoms properly? Car-whoring, anyone?

    Third, since we're talking about 2117 here, we could also develop an AI for watching what happens in cars. If someone throws up, the AI dings them for the cost of clean-up. If someone attacks someone else, the AI calls the police. If people have consensual sex in the car, the AI doesn't do anything unless the people fail to clean up after themselves or one of them is under-age and the other is above-age. Etc. Non-sex cars will also be available for a greater or lesser fee, depending on the market.

    Fourth, we can develop human customs and politenesses for dealing with the problems which can develop in cars. Everyone can carry their own rag and a small bottle of rubbing alcohol. People can develop customs for informing others what kind of ride they want; perhaps a system of badges or jewelry. Since we don't have to worry about human drivers making errors, cars can be equipped with small tables, electrical adapters, and other items intended to allow people to plug in headphones.

    Fifth, we can even give everyone their own pod in a car. Imagine a modern SUV designed to seat four. There are four doors, each leading to a small, separate space that is walled off from the other spaces. Each space has it's own ventilation system and climate control, and two people can cooperate to roll down a window between them if they desire to do so. Or it would be possible to special order a car designed to accommodate a group if that's your preference. "Go To Meeting" anyone?

    Sixth, we now have a new job available for people without an education; car attendants who deadhead in unoccupied cars and clean when nobody is using the vehicle. You could probably even trade car-cleaning for travel if you were poor.

    (There's probably a story here with a poor-but-brave hero(ine) who travels around by trading car-cleaning, massages, good reputation reports and sex for transportation.)

    And last, you wouldn't merely subscribe to a car, you'd subscribe to a company with a reputation for providing particular types of experiences, each aimed at a particular demographic. White Collar Rides. Safe Kiddie Transport. The Sexmobiles are hot and horny for you!

    People like me who carry a hundred pounds of tools, multiple boxes full or new or dead gear, plus a thousand feet of cable and a ladder or two will have a harder time of it, but if we can use routing protocols for cars, perhaps we can do it for ladders and boxes of cable too!

    422:

    Well, I can agree with that sentiment, but I'm not so sure about its reality. It's hard to see out of one's bubble, but things like Brexit and the Trump election should give us the notion that not only do a LOT of people not agree with us, our pollsters are either frauds or incompetent, since we didn't see any of this coming through our allegedly scientific opinion sampling processes. It looks to me like there are a number of people in the world who disagree with us quite strongly, but I'm not at all sure what they actually believe.

    There are other two things that are worth considering here: one is that there are a number of ways to organize people to do things, and religion in the Christian sense is one of them. States are another, corporations are a third, and these aren't mutually exclusive. Right now, we see a lot of state and corporate intrusion into what used to be the realm of religion, in things like health and helping people through the various stages of life and death. If these institutions fall apart, organized religion may suddenly get called on to pick up the slack.

    The second is that true religious diversity is quite a bit larger than what we conventionally think of as religion, and most of that diversity has been expressed by tribes that are losing their culture. For example, the Navajo don't believe in an afterlife, and the yogis are not alone in believing that things like body postures and movements can lead to a better life and afterlife (the Aztecs seemed to believe similarly, as do the Chinese Taoists). There are also groups of sacred runners, particularly among the American Indians. Are they similar to modern joggers? Hard to tell. You can have a lot of fun considering whether things like yoga and jediism constitute religions. You'll probably say they don't, but other cultures practice similar things and they do get called religions when we look at them in a foreign context. Where's the boundary? Does it have to be foreign before it can be weird?

    The point of the diversity of religion is that we may say that religion (e.g. going to church on Sunday, reading the Bible, tithing, and having this as an important part of your social life) appears to be on the decline in WEIRD societies. Conversely, things that might be called religion, such as yoga, spiritual martial arts (like tai chi, aikido, or jediism), meditation, and running, are all on the rise. Are these our new religions and we're just not recognizing them as such? Hard call on that. They do fulfill a lot of the things that belonging to a church used to do for us. Is that the definition of what a religion is?

    But as to the future, I think it's way too soon to say religion is going away. The question is, what will it be?

    423:

    "all diesels are, in fact, diesel-electric"

    Weeerrrlllll..... They don't have to be.

    The Western Region of British Rail had experimented with a couple of gas-turbine-electric locomotives while steam still ruled, and concluded that trying to keep the electrical equipment working was a huge pain in the arse (indeed one of those locomotives burnt out a traction motor quite early on and spent the rest of its time running on the three remaining ones). So they based their dieselisation programme on diesel-hydraulic technology, derived from the successful German V200 design which coupled hydraulic transmissions to lightweight, "high-speed" (1500rpm) diesel engines (as opposed to the massively heavy slow-revving engines more commonly used).

    Basically, they had the right idea. The locomotives were fundamentally good designs; while they had similar problems to diesel-electrics with failures in engines and in ancillary and control systems, the hydraulic transmissions gave very little trouble, whereas the diesel-electrics suffered from the dreaded "Flashovers" in their generators and traction motors, and other power-electrical type faults. The hydraulic system also gave better traction than electrical transmission did, and its greater resistance to wheelslip was an advantage for working heavy freights like the bulk stone trains which originated on the Western Region.

    The reasons we don't have those locomotives now while contemporary diesel-electrics are still running are numerous and very complicated, but the common thread is that considerations of the relative merits of the two types of transmission had very little influence. It was nearly all politics, and particularly stupid politics at that.

    But hydraulic transmissions we do still use, and in large numbers. Nearly all diesel passenger workings these days use not locomotive-hauled stock, but DMUs, even for long distance stuff (which is epically shit drone drone drone but that's not relevant right here). Depending on precisely how you define a DMU, either most or all of them have hydraulic transmissions, and they work very well.

    Battery locomotives - yes, we have them too; they haul maintenance trains on the London Underground when the traction current is off. And there has been some interest (I'm not sure how far it's got) in diesel/battery hybrids for shunting purposes.

    424:

    I am guessing they are still only on e-book. I might have to finally give in if people start publishing interesting stuff exclusively without the aid of dead trees.

    425:

    Except that, in the USA ( & in both parts of Ireland) the knuckle-dragging loudmouthed section of the believers are the ones actively working in politics & are determined to impose their primitive vision on everyone. Which is why Ireland still shits on women & the USA is doing the exact same thing - please correct me if this is not correct?

    426:

    Change: The Flynn Effect, 2.0

    For a long time, it has been noted that iq tests need adjusting because the average person gets better at them over time. This is mostly chalked up to things like iodine in salt, better nutrition, less abusive child rearing models and other changes to society that result in many fewer cases of subtle brain damage.

    There is also an ongoing effort to make education better - mostly this has not paid off because the one thing we do know would get much better results - that is, individual tutoring - is simply too darn expensive to be practicable on a mass scale.

    Except, with weak AI - Not even discussing strong AI here, just well designed machine learning systems and user interfaces of the kind we already have for other purposes, automating individual tution is possible. Heck, you can likely beat all but the very best human tutors - all it really takes is a system that tracks progress and optimizes the use of spaced repetition and the presentation of novel information to the individual child - Not trivial, but not "Requires Strong AI" hard either.

    It can also be engineered to step really hard on your engagement and reward "circuits" - heck, even without deliberate effort in that direction, a teacher that never bores you will hook a heck of a lot of kids really hard.

    Then there is the medical side of things - with a proper understanding of neurology and development - which seems like a very likely consequence of the biotech revolution within the next century - it is going to be possible to nudge a kids brain onto one of the known "Very high function" pathways of development. If nothing else works, there´s always mass genetic engineering for it.

    The combination of those two things gives you an entire society of what we would consider genius polymaths.

    And the (high) nash equilibrium of these technologies existing is that they get used. By everyone. (the low equilibrium is that the same technologies get used as a tool of control.. but that weakens the hell out of the nation that does it)

    So. What does society look like if everyone is very, very clever? If genius has become a basic human right?

    427:

    WHAT were you smoking when you wrote that?

    428:

    "What Church do you attend?" disappeared before I hit adulthood over thirty years ago - but still appears (from my seat, at least) to be a necessary feature of "respectable" US social existence.

    Er, after some 50 + years of conscious existence in the US, I have never, ever been asked that question in any situation and would regard it as a sign that I should back slowly away or regester a formal protest if I ever did. Of course, I wouldn't claim all that much respectably in my existence, so maybe that's it.

    Have any other of our USian members encountered the question?

    429:

    WHAT were you smoking when you wrote that? Something from the 1950s, clearly. But I have no clue what. Just read a much more sophisticated denial piece, Climate models for the layman, Judith Curry Feb 2017. Worth a look, just be wary. (e.g. drill down on the refs, make sure they say what she implies they say in the text.)

    430:

    Then there is the medical side of things - with a proper understanding of neurology and development - which seems like a very likely consequence of the biotech revolution within the next century - it is going to be possible to nudge a kids brain onto one of the known "Very high function" pathways of development. If nothing else works, there´s always mass genetic engineering for it.

    I would agree -- the advance of biological sciences and related ones over the next 100 years certainly looks to hold the potential for really revolutionary changes in what humans, or at least some humans, are. Maybe it won't work out, maybe it will go off the rails in some way, maybe it will be abandoned for some reason. But maybe current trends will continue.

    431:

    My apologies if I've got it completely wrong; I had been under the impression that in much of the USA that some form of public declaration or observation of faith was still felt necessary when standing as a candidate in an election...

    432:

    Still only ebook.

    Paper involves increased expense and some sort of distribution system and the volume just isn't there for me to consider that on my own. (So far as I can tell, audio book would be a much better choice of additional format in terms of number of people reached. But also something involving increased expense.)

    The Google Play versions are DRM-free, so you do get something you can archive.

    433:

    Moral assortment -- there are good people and bad people -- is much more of a problem than religion. (Almost all religious adherents are doing something that models as a social club. Rather like a hijab is functionally a hat, and a civil authority in conditions of freedom of religion will so regard it. It really doesn't matter why they're doing it.)

    It really doesn't matter what the basis of the assortment is; it's seductively easy, and it's got the same ghastly failure case of confusing "good" and "useful" irrespective of the mechanism of assortment. (Useful is inherently situational; consider carrying an uninflated eight person life raft on public transit at rush hour.)

    So religion, as a thing, is nigh-irrelevant; the notion that everyone should be compelled to behave correctly and then everything will be nice is the problem. Doesn't matter what the rationalization for "correctly" is.

    (In a system involving people, you can have success, or you can have control, never both. Maybe the single most important scientific result of the 20th century.)

    434:

    Have any other of our USian members encountered the question?

    Anecdotally I've had friends tell me that this sort of question is asked in the bible belt and to some degree in greater Trumpland.

    One is typically required to swear a religious oath to hold public office or become a lawyer in those places as well (before someone points it out: yes, indeed, that does directly violate the US Constitution).

    You wouldn't expect it in a large coastal city, and indeed many churches around here sport large rainbow flags and the like.

    435:
    Er, after some 50 + years of conscious existence in the US, I have never, ever been asked that question in any situation and would regard it as a sign that I should back slowly away or regester a formal protest if I ever did. Of course, I wouldn't claim all that much respectably in my existence, so maybe that's it.

    As a UK person who spent about six months doing the whole cross-country road trip thang in the early 90s I certainly heard that question asked of me several times. Mostly (but not exclusively) in the southern states. Mostly (but not exclusively) in smaller / more rural towns.

    (I should also add that the fact that I responded with "none — I'm an atheist" produced nothing but friendly, if occasionally somewhat confused, responses. The "worst" that ever happened was being called "brave" for saying it.)

    436:

    Yes, commonly, and in New York City, greater Boston, and the District of Columbia. But never phrased that way and never with any sense that it was more than honest curiosity.

    That exact phrasing, though, sounds kinda weird.

    I can easily see how a Briton might find questions weird that an American won't even notice they've been asked if they go to a synagogue, or gave anything up for lent, or will be taking the kids to church, or whatever of the ten million innocuous ways Americans ask each other about religion. It ain't like you're asking about /money/, or anything.

    By the way, what's with this "USian" schtick by the commentators here?

    437:

    Man, it's hard to edit comments written on an iPhone. That really doesn't sound like a native English speaker, does it? Apologies.

    438:

    By the way, what's with this "USian" schtick by the commentators here? I started using it (USAian but close) since the America is potentially a bit confusing, there being North, Central and South America. Also, USA citizens recently collectively did something stupid/bad/embarrassing (my POV) last November that we need to take full blame for. So (personally) it's a bit of self-mockery, like using given-middle-surname or equivalent when addressing a misbehaving child. (Don't know what (sub)cultures share that practice.)

    Re the actual question, I never get asked about Church (northern USA), but was recently told that it is a ubiquitous early question in Texas (San Antonio/Austin region).

    What looks to me to be an interesting piece on MAD or not in South Asia (M. Krepon at armscontrolwonk): The Counterforce Compulsion in South Asia. Would be interested to hear an informed counter-opinion particularly from South Asia. Quote: Pakistan and India have fulfilled the requirements of counter value targeting, and are moving down the path of counterforce targeting requirements. Warhead totals can grow significantly because MIRVing technology is available and because as counterforce capabilities increase, neither side can afford to be caught with missiles in garrisons. The obvious countermove is to have some missiles out of garrison, even in peacetime. Many more missiles will be flushed in a crisis. These are some of the operational ramifications of adopting worst-case assessments of Menon’s writing, which Rawalpindi is prone to do.New Delhi is likely to lag behind unless there is an extraordinary shift in India’s strategic culture. Nuclear dangers will grow alongside counterforce capabilities, because launchers will be maintained at increased readiness levels to deal with reciprocal fears of surprise attack. Sound familiar?

    439:

    *Currently, I'm a citizen member of a county committee that's trying to figure out growth and conservation issues out to 2050. They really don't want to hear that things may be really different by then. Actually, they can't hear it, because the structure of their planning won't allow them to consider such notions seriously.

    Can you elaborate on this a bit? Particularly, just how much did you try to tell them?

    440:

    The Harper's article mentions finding areas in the Sahara that were once green. This was explored just a decade ago. Basically showing proof that 10 thousand and 6 thousand years ago, the Arctic Ice cleared.

    Lost Tribes of the Green Sahara

    Um, no.

    The Sahara Desert has a 22k median shift (i.e. roughly +44k in total in and out) year exchange from plains to desert due to axial tilt of the Earth shifting and the (then pristine, no longer) mid-African rainforests (Congo etc) providing so much atmospheric water that it can happen.

    Earth tilts: rain shifts north, 20k years gets you plains (although, there's strong evidence that the longer this goes on, the more radical and less benign the shift / wobble is).

    Hate to tell you this:

    1 Yes, that's the origin of the Garden of Eden myth (there are literally places in the Sahara desert with more flint nappings, notched bones and so forth / Km2 than even the 'cradles' of civilisation). 2 No, it won't happen again (due to many factors)

    Want links?

    ZZzzz.

    "Space Cadets". No: we do myth, weird and beard sniffing, but it's all actually based on reality.

    Yours: not so much.

    441:

    If you want a dubious and Murdoch sponsored link to a recent article on it, then so be it:

    With more rain, the region gets more greenery and rivers and lakes. All this has been known for decades. But between 8,000 and 4,500 years ago, something strange happened: The transition from humid to dry happened far more rapidly in some areas than could be explained by the orbital precession alone, resulting in the Sahara Desert as we know it today. “Scientists usually call it ‘poor parameterization’ of the data,” Wright said by email. “Which is to say that we have no idea what we’re missing here—but something’s wrong...”

    Wright thinks this is exactly what happened. “By overgrazing the grasses, they were reducing the amount of atmospheric moisture—plants give off moisture, which produces clouds—and enhancing albedo,” Wright said. He suggests this may have triggered the end of the humid period more abruptly than can be explained by the orbital changes. These nomadic humans also may have used fire as a land management tool, which would have exacerbated the speed at which the desert took hold.

    What Really Turned the Sahara Desert From a Green Oasis Into a Wasteland? Smithsonian Magazine, March 24th, 2017

    Zzzz.

    Yes, H.S.S certainly sped things up. WTB actual ecologists being involved rather than Archaeologists grasping at straws. You know, science and shit.

    442:

    I would also like to know about this, particularly since we both live in So Cal (if I understand you correctly.)

    Also, I'd be happy to show up at a meeting and cheer on the right position if that will help. Generally I need 10-14 days warning to clear my schedule.

    443:

    One is typically required to swear a religious oath to hold public office... Just noticed this; at the US national level at least it is not true; affirmation is acceptable and has roots in accommodations for Quakers, originally in English law. Background from Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Britain (additional explanation) Friends believe that their word should be accepted at any time among all persons and thus [uphold] the right to stand simply on their own word rather than swearing on the Bible or before God,...

    Interesting (did not know this), from another section of the same doc, In Scotland there is a long tradition of affirmation, so there has not been the same need for a distinctive Quaker witness as in England and Wales. The information and advice given in 20.51 is equally valid in Scotland. The Oaths Act 1978 applies in Scotland as well as in England and Wales.

    444:

    Specifically, you're going to have to link the domestication of the goat, then sheep into this little pattern. (Dogs were at least 10k+ years earlier).

    Most notably, you're going to have to explain how/why the Zagros Mountains are in Iraq / Iran / Turkey which was the origin of the domesticated goat species and how they skipped over to the Sahara before, you know, civilisation had risen there.

    Oh, and, of course: the Sahara doesn't have fossils / bones from either goats or sheep, it's all native wild stuff.

    It's literally a stupid theory put forth by liars and fools.

    445:

    Since we're over 300, has anyone heard the story about Iain M. Banks and the Korean car-company executive? It seems that the executive was so inspired by the Culture novels that he gave Banks a very special car. It was an experimental prototype Hyundai that ran on a fuel cell.

    Mr. Banks was so impressed with this gift that he gave the car a special name - The Hydrogen Sonata.

    446:

    There is a passage in one of the Gospels where the disciples are asking Jesus "what shall we swear by, shall we swear by God, or what?" and he replies "Na, just don't do it at all, let your word stand". Which (Quakers excepted) rather makes a nonsense of the whole thing. I get the impression that, in so far as anyone notices that bit at all, they insist on interpreting it as meaning "don't say "fuck"", which is pretty obviously not what it actually does mean.

    447:

    Another thing I wonder about is what social & "family" groups will look like in 2117.

    Yeah, "family" as a concept in kind of flexible. I can see at least in some circles more options to the "traditional" monogamous hetero marriage, and I think it's a pretty good thing. I personally am more comfortable knowing that I at least somewhat chose the personal life arrangements I have. I also see a lot of unhappiness or at least uncomfort in people who apparently got married to a person of the opposite gender and had children only because it was expected of them or they thought it was the proper thing to do. I hope more options will become available and acceptable in the next hundred years.

    The equal marriage law we just got here in Finland is a good thing, but it's only one step in a long process. I think we also need more government support or acceptance for families or family groups who don't do the "man, woman, and a number of their children" thing. Nowadays, it's apparently impossible for a child to have two homes in some parts of the bureaucracy here, but divorces have been around for a long time and how to handle a larger group of adults caring for a number of children is not that easy for buraucracies.

    I think we might get some kind of marriages which can have a variable number of people. I and my wife lived in a commune with an another married couple, and we did have children there - and occasionally it was getting a bit difficult to tell which people were my "family" in which context. Officially it was clear, though marriage helps. (Some friends used to live in a commune with multiple couples, and some officials wanted proof of who wasin a romantic relationship with who as the papers they were sent apparently weren't enough. One of them invited the officials to see who sleeps with whom, but then they backed up and accepted what the people told them.) Unofficially, when there's an invitation to something for "you and your family" who should I bring with me? Usually we went with the broader interpretation as that was how we felt it was, other's opinion be damned.

    I hope we will get more accepting and can teach our children (and adults!) that the "get married to a nice woman/man and have children" is not the only option.

    448:

    I think we might get some kind of marriages which can have a variable number of people. ... Unofficially, when there's an invitation to something for "you and your family" who should I bring with me?

    The anarchist commune I lived in used to ask, because consent was important to them, more important than trying to preserve social norms that have largely gone away. Viz, the time when asking for clarification of an invitation was considered horribly rude. These days "bring your family"... "do you mean my spouse, my spouse and children, my spouse, children, my brother who's staying with us this week and his boyfriend, or what?" is normal. even for serially monogamous heterosexuals with children. You don't have to live in a multi-adult polyamourus anarchist commune to need to ask those questions (but IMO it's more fun if you do :)

    But our SMHwC neighbours also have two grandparents, two of their kids (one with spouse) and three grandkids, all living in one house. very normal and boring, right up until the "nuclear family" was popularised. Plus we live in an area where polyamourus households are more likely to be traditional religous ones than modern ones, maybe.

    I wonder whether consent will take off as a basis for marriage and other major relationships. I certainly hope so. Aotearoa banning physical abuse of children is a positive sign of that, as is the popularity of same-sex marriage.

    449:

    I know a fair number of "successful" people in their 20s-40s who are living in shared accommodation.

    I live that way. No having kids means it's very hard to find a house with a backyard that's not ridiculously oversized (our house is small compared to most new Australian houses, but currently we have five adults in it, and it's been modified to have four bedrooms plus a shedroom in the back yard). Also, money. It's much cheaper to live this way, as well as more environmentally friendly. There are a whole lot of reasons, and I've been living in share houses for 25-odd years now. It may not be more common, but it's definitely more visible now.

    450:

    I recall a long-ish thread on Crooked timber about multi-member marriages that was quite interesting. At one stage I made up an example of a hideously complex but completely legal family arrangement (based on situations "enjoyed" by friends of mine), that the law is required to cope with now (and in fact some aspects have been created by the law). Those saying "multiple marriage is too hard for the legal system" have a pretty high bar to clear when explaining exactly how that's true.

    For example: Sam and Bob live together with their child in a house owned jointly by Pat and Sam, sharing it with Pat and Sam's child who enjoys joint custody so is only there 3 or 4 nights a week. Since Bob is getting maintenance money from Chris to raise their joint child who also lives in the house, Bob pays rent to Pat and Sam. Sam is a stay-at-home parent, so has an income-sharing arrangement with Bob who works full time, but also with Pat since Pat and their new partner both also work full time. Bob and Chris still jointly own the house Chris lives in. Some of this is laid out in a series of legal agreements set down by various courts at different times, and will change further with the situation. Other parts of the arrangement are informal, and not all of it is declared to the tax authorities.

    If this was a poly relationship where the two houses were next door, how would the legal situation change if Bob, Sam and Chris wanted to marry?

    451:

    THAT's easy. Even today, the coasts and the south of the Sahara are capable of supporting sheep and goats, if there were no humans and their livestock, and migrations can happen in quite short favourable periods: dozens of miles a year. However, that article describes almost certainly what happened, though whether it was overgrazing, deforestation or both remains unclear. Also, it WILL happen again, but it won't do so in the forseeable future and our species is unlikely to see it, whether or not humans survive until after it does.

    452:

    Matthew 5:33-36.

    453:

    Nile, that is rather worrying about the bankers and such being completely shut out of the decision making process. So has that been made public anywhere? Are the media that much in the tank for brexit and the toxic billionaires who funded it?

    454:

    Can't the same argument be applied to any public transportation system? A plane, a train, a bus? You are always at some level of risk when you are in the same room with other people.

    Not to the same extent, insofar as the presence of third parties usually has an inhibitory effect on peoples' willingness to act out. Larger public spaces (buses, trains) are easier to police and easier to get away from the bad guy and make it easier to call for help.

    455:

    What are you missing ?

    Firstly cars aren't cars anymore and you don't own them. They are fully autonomous grid of cars. work in an uber-like fashion and are rented as needed

    This plays extremely well with electric cars, as range anxiety becomes a non issue and charging happens in the background after you release the car

    It will seriously change the physical layout of a car, I imagine them morphing to something like collections of sleeper pods

    Not needing to own a car drastically decreases the number of cars in existence and has positive effects on city design and congestion

    Secondly language: by 2117 there is likely some kind of high speed interface between you and your computer. Musk is kicking that company off even as we speak. If this interface is faster then speech it might kill or transform language in some pretty fundamental ways

    Also the last green Sahara period was only 5k years ago and I can't think of any reason other then human climate change why it wouldn't reoccur on schedule

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_African_climate_cycles

    456:

    WHAT decision making process? I have seen no evidence that there is one, which isn't proof that there isn't; we damn Trump for making up policy on the fly, but that is exactly what May has done so far. Indeed, the only coherent plan that has become public is one to ensure that she can continue to do so without keeping Parliament in the loop. We knew that she was a toxic control freak when she was Home Secretary, after all.

    The answer to your last question is "Yes", and it's been well documented for over a decade.

    457:

    The second is that true religious diversity is quite a bit larger than what we conventionally think of as religion, and most of that diversity has been expressed by tribes that are losing their culture. For example, the Navajo don't believe in an afterlife,

    This is one of the reasons I hate the term "Judeo-Christian"; Judaism is incompatible with Christianity at multiple levels, many of them invisible to Christians. For example, traditional Jewish belief does not posit an afterlife; yes, God judges you after you die, but there's no nonsense about eternal life in Some Other Place, let alone a Hell where sinners are condemned to eternal torment — that's bonkers revisionism, and heretical at that.

    The fact that folks from a predominantly Christian tradition seem to think belief in an afterlife is one of the main characteristics of a monotheistic biblical faith is itself something of a WTF revelation to me.

    458:

    POinting to recognition of a problem is not the same as it massively impacting the future.

    As for green places and the garden of Eden, one for those of us interested in dodgy history stuff is that some such researchers have zeroed in on the area in Anatolia and IIRC Armenia and the south eastern end of Turkey as being the original source of the idea, 10k years ago when the climate was better and humans hadn't yet destroyed the local ecosystem.

    459:

    There is a hell of a difference between lightly populated areas and densely populated ones. Autonomous grids work well only in the latter, but the numbers don't add up. Currently, even a medium car is 7 m^2 - let's say that they shrink to 3. Take London: a million people on the move simultaneously (very plausible) is getting on for one percent of the TOTAL land area, and that's not including ANY space around the car. Conversely, in the West Country, the chance of two people using sufficiently similar routes within a hour (except between main cities and on the trunk routes) is often quite low. Yes, such a scheme could work, but it would have to be 'car on request' in some areas and interface with mass transport systems in the densely populated areas.

    460:

    Not to the same extent, insofar as the presence of third parties usually has an inhibitory effect on peoples' willingness to act out. Larger public spaces (buses, trains) are easier to police and easier to get away from the bad guy and make it easier to call for help.

    Well, then I suppose you could divide the automatic taxi into 4 separate compartments, similarly to how the driver is sometimes separated from the passengers in regular taxis.

    And the problem of littering and vandalizing the taxi is easily solved by putting a camera inside and fining passengers for any damage. You don't even have to record the passenger themselves, just check the taxi before and after the journey.

    Yes, it will discriminate against people who don't have credit cards and/or IDs. The solution is to make them easier to get.

    461:

    Yes agree in many lower populated areas most rides will be single payer rides

    The economics of autonomous cars are still strong

    Today almost all car rides are also single payer ones with the downside of having the car idle and not doing anything during most of its day. Plus sometimes having to pay for parking it

    The downside of that is commutes run in peaks however the economic factors that triggers will have an additional benefit of forcing more flexible work schedules

    Cars in demand also mean that charging electric cars becomes a non issue

    Another upside is imagine by 2117 car accidents will be a thing of the past or at least much more rare then today which will should depress insurance costs and possibly lead to cheaper cars with less safety features

    I still imagine that other forms of public transport will also survive especially in very urban areas, they still have economies of scale. However car ownership is really going to change

    462:

    Well, then I suppose you could divide the automatic taxi into 4 separate compartments, similarly to how the driver is sometimes separated from the passengers in regular taxis.

    I will note that taxis with physical barriers between driver and passenger areas can (depending on design) feel extremely claustrophobia-inducing.

    This isn't a problem I've encountered with British "black" cab designs — including ones based on the Mercedes M8 mini-van, as well as the modernized-traditional TX4 and its relatives. They're designed with a separate two-seat front compartment, then a large open rear area with rear-facing fold-down jump seats against the front wall (for extra passengers) and a normal bench seat at the back for the usual 1-2 passengers — bags go on the floor between the passengers, and the sense of space is more like a stretch limo than a car, even though a TX4 is only about the same size as a Range Rover.

    However, some conversions just take a regular car or SUV and put a big-ass shield between the passengers and the driver, breaking up a single cabin, and these tend to be very in-your-face and actually quite unpleasant. These vehicles don't have open floor space and retain a boot (trunk) for baggage; I think this is a design error in human factors terms as it denies the passengers the use of extra space to spread out in when they're not carting suitcases around.

    But my point is, a four-compartment cab is either going to have to be big, or it's going to be unpleasantly claustrophobic. Consider mandatory airliner seat pitch limits. US charter airliners get away with 28" seat pitch (distance between seats in line) but that's really unpleasant; 32" is generally considered to be more survivable in short-haul, and if we're looking to use self-driving taxis over any distance at all I'd expect seat pitch even for luggage-free passenger compartments to be more like 1 metre (39"). If passengers are sitting in separate pods then you can't save leg-room by having facing seats (where people can interleave their legs in the middle), so you're looking for a 2 metre long passenger compartment if you want to have 4 passengers on board, or 3+ metres for 6 passengers; something like a VW Caravelle minivan can accommodate this, but then you need to add room for a luggage compartment as well — "open" black cab conversions of the Caravelle chassis can take five passengers reasonably comfortably (facing seats, luggage in the middle) but I'm guessing separate passengers in pods will need separate luggage bins, so ...

    Individual pods mean bigger taxis. Significantly bigger ones. And claustrophobia triggers. It's probably cheaper and easier to have slightly more somewhat smaller open-plan taxis.

    Littering/vandalizing: most UK taxis already have in-cab IR cameras for recording evidence of passenger misbehavior.

    463:

    Barring extremes of taxation or social disapproval I'm unconvinced car ownership will change much as I think most forecasts ignore just how much of owning a car is psychological in nature. Even now car ownership is one of the most financially stupid things you can do but that doesn't stop most of us owning one and I just dont see that changing.

    464:

    Individual pods mean bigger taxis. Significantly bigger ones. And claustrophobia triggers. It's probably cheaper and easier to have slightly more somewhat smaller open-plan taxis.

    But aren't we postulating that some people might find open-plan taxis dangerous, because of possible harassment?

    Anyway, there is no reason why there can't be multiple types of autonomous taxis, both open-plan and individual pods.

    465:

    The simplest problem with autonomous vehicles used many times across a day is that the previous user could have left it in a state, whether just crumbs on the seat and floor or bad smells or worse. This is somewhat amenable to technological solutions, such as cameras or far enough in the future, nanotech that just eats up the problem, but whilst more pressure can be applied than just now with people simply littering the roads (And do you want cameras on the windows too so they can't just throw their rubbish out the car), until there is either some sort of effective solution, such as denying car usage services to people, or an amazing increase in social pressure, it would retard adoption of self driving cars.

    gordycoale - your use of the word 'most' is doing more work than it can support, regarding car ownership. If we can switch living conditions back to not needing a car as much in our daily lives, that would change, but at the moment a car is essential for full productive involvement in society unless you happen to live in the denser parts of the cities.

    466:

    "Those saying "multiple marriage is too hard for the legal system" have a pretty high bar to clear when explaining exactly how that's true."

    Not particularly. It depends on how common situations like your example are. The legal system might have an interest in minimizing the number of situations which require complex legal documents and court administration. An anti-poly legalization advocate might say poly will greatly expand such examples; so we need to leave such arrangements private or non-existent. If on the other hand the courts are simply refusing to service a large segment of the population, then that becomes a matter of democratic deficit. It all depends on the numbers. However, without recognized statistical categories, how do you get the numbers to make the decision in the first place? And how do you know to what extent society will move to take advantage of new opportunities presented by legal forms of poly? It also brings up a point on privacy versus state intervention. How many more opportunities to do you want to give the state to have a say in how you structure your private life? Alternatively, the state is invariably going to favor some forms of poly over others, and might outright outlaw some. What if your preferred relationship is on the wrong side of the line?

    467:

    far enough in the future, nanotech that just eats up the problem,

    That far enough in the future, the nanotech would just eat up people in their homes and reconstruct them at their destination. Or just eat them up. Read Glasshouse for more info. :-)

    468:

    You also need to remember that if you remove the steering apparatus, and the engine under the hood you clear up a lot of interior space

    You could also force the pods to be horizontal and stack them two high, sort of like honeycomb hotels

    I imagine a lot of crazy designs and experimentation is coming and it's possible to provide a fair amount of variation to customers

    As far as the previous occupant leaving the cab in a mess, you can always allow the current passenger to rate the previous occupant and start applying corrective action as trends become apparent . Current passenger could also just refuse the pickup and request another

    With regards to car economics in the US at least there are not a lot of good options in areas where car ownership is mandatory . Leasing is generally not great either

    469:

    I'm surprised that the concept of "Play" hasn't had more play in this thread tbh. Play is, after all what most animals more complex than a nudibranch do with their time when they're not taking care of food, shelter, sleep and sex, so if we look forward to a largely automated future where 90% of the population are surviving on UBI at a high enough rate to prevent them taking torches and pitchforks to the 1% who own everything and the 9% who do the work that cannot be automated, then we can expect play to be pretty central to the culture: games both physical and mental (including virtual gaming under mental) will be played and watched and followed by almost everybody as a key part of their self-definition. And never fear that it might be hard to monetise this: look at FIFA or the IOC; look at Sony; look at Joe Coral and Paddy Power. They're not hurting. A lot of UBI will find its way back to such people.

    In a post-labour economy, I wouldn't rule out membership and participation in sports clubs, gaming societies, even quiz teams becoming the defining sources of identity, maybe even more than ethnicity and locality. A dreary prospect perhaps, but no more so than the work most people do today.

    470:

    Might I suggest cleaning up our act be less from avoiding climate catastrophe and more for something prosaic, like the way one is (Hopefully) disinclined to commit flatulence in an enclosed space. The reason being, lest some large entity enact some half-ass climate plan and on not seeing results Right Fucking Now! announces "This doesn't work.", and delays progress for decades more.

    471:

    As with Uber, access to a self-driving taxi is going to be via the net, and payment will perforce be electronic. Handling the mess problem shouldn't be too difficult: you either include a deposit with your payment (refunded within half an hour once a keyboard ape confirms from the onboard camera that the cab is tidy), or you keep a credit account on file and get fined if the next customer files a complaint (and it's upheld). Seriously, this is trivial to do today, vastly easier than engineering a stage 5 self-driving vehicle.

    472:

    It has been done.

    "A Wrinkle in Time", Madeleine L'Engle, 1963 I believe.

    You have reinvented/rediscovered Camazotz.

    473:

    With regards to car economics in the US at least there are not a lot of good options in areas where car ownership is mandatory . Leasing is generally not great either

    Remember, we're looking a century ahead.

    Here in the UK, the average dwelling is 75 years old — we tend to build for permanence. I'm not sure what the corresponding figure is for the US, but I suspect it's a lot less. Firstly the construction materials are not terribly durable — I gather there are places where houses are eaten by termites unless they're regularly maintained! (this is not a problem when your construction material is stone) — and there's been significant population growth over the past half century. So I expect to see a lot of turnover of older decaying properties and construction of new-build suburbs.

    But if we push forward, we're going to see: direct effects of climate change, effects of an aging population base (old folks don't live the same way as young folks), effects of changing energy costs and infrastructure maintenance (look at the way chunks of Detroit are rewilding or being turned into farms), and so on. Just as today's American suburbia wasn't really practical in 1917, before modern roads and reliable automobiles, it's also unlikely to be practical if we end up with violent weather, an average age of 60, and expensive travel (if only because road maintenance costs will go up due to bad weather events). Rather, I'd expect to see more condominium living for older people — bigger apartments, maintained gardens for the residents (indoor gym and swimming pool included), a recharge slot/garage so that there's always a self-driving taxi available at a second's notice rather than waiting five minutes, maybe stuff like an on-demand store (order via Amazon-equivalent on your phone then take the elevator down to the basement to pick up your package when it comes in, deliveries four times a day) and visiting service workers (is a condo with 50-100 apartments enough for a full-time hairdresser or beauty salon? It's certainly enough to support some cleaners for those who are willing to pay extra), maybe other stuff (a maker space with 3D printers instead of your Amazon micro-depot; a hobby/craft workshop for folks who want to paint or indulge in carpentry with hand tools; communal kitchens for social use; and so on).

    I'm speculating here, but such collective living, the village-scale equivalent of an arcology, might be much more defensible against bad weather events than the current pattern of widely-spaced individual houses: and it might well be more appealing to healthy seniors (you hit 70 or 80 years old and you're clearly aging past middle age and have health issues but you're still basically functional and engaged with the world).

    NB: this is an optimistic outlook. (Don't need pessimism right now, with the Trumpenführer seemingly trying to start a nuclear war with North Korea to shore up his brand identity).

    474:

    games both physical and mental (including virtual gaming under mental)

    If you've ever seen someone gaming with a high-end VR headset, you should be aware that there's a lot of physical interaction going on; you're not pushing buttons on a joypad, you're kicking and punching the shit out of your imaginary enemies. It may not be resistance exercise, but it's as energetic as dance or non-contact bits of martial arts.

    The next generation of rockstar gamers (yes, computer games are a spectator sport) are likely to be extremely spry, and most certainly not your stereotypical obese neckbeard.

    And, hrm ... now that I think about it, the current wellspring of alt-right support comes from angry virgin stay-at-home MRA gamer dudes (average gameplay time per week: 35 hours — about the same as 1970s TV couch potatoes). If they've got universal basic income and they're in physically good shape then what's left is to work on their attitude/social skills. Gives me some hope that the whole GamerGate/MRA/Red Pill thing may eventually be fixable.

    475:

    Actually, I can't talk about this too much, because the whole program is still in process, and while it's not secret, the end result is what's important, not the hashing we're doing now.

    That said, here are some general issues that everyone in conservation might want to think about:

    --Trying to protect rare plant communities is a laudable goal, but a hard one to accomplish over 50 years of a changing climate, let alone the 100 or more years trees need to really mature. Setting aside the land where the currently grow probably isn't enough. --How do plants migrate in the face of climate change? Have you preserved those mechanisms in your conservation plan?
    --What do you do about seriously problematic introduced pests (in our county, Kuroshio shot hole borer is one, gold-spotted oak borer is another). The lessons of things like Dutch elm disease and Chestnut blight seem to have been forgotten. --And yes, who owns which parcel of land matters quite a lot. And it's not a good habit to write land management plans that ignore this fact, especially when your plan hinges on buying up critical parcels of land. Since I've now seen at least three plans that had this problem, I think it's a general failing around here, not just a comment on this particular program.

    The interesting part is where the younger employees are nodding their heads when these comments are made, while their superiors are sitting stone faced at the table...

    476:

    Heteromeles: no offence taken. Metaphors aren't objectively correct entitities, and tastes in metaphor vary. Works for me, but not for you. I'm OK with that.

    Jumping topics: In terms of future family structures, I'd have to say I don't foresee any major changes from the current status quo unless something disruptive happens to change the dominant social conditions in which families exist. Heterosexual two-person marriages are likely to remain the dominant and default form purely because they're easy (i.e., you only have to maintain a relationship with one person, plus possibly kids) and socially sanctioned everywhere, thereby providing numerous examples to react against or emulate. I speculate that the reason this marriage structure has been so ubiquitous throughout history is because (i) it's the default and (ii) it's relatively easy. There are many other possible reasons, but those two are sufficient for me. Note that I make no value judgment about whether this state is a good thing. It works fine for me; I recognize and accept that it doesn't work well for everyone.

    There will undoubtedly continue to be many kinds of non-default marriages, whether licit or otherwise. I hope that, as in my brother's case, stable GLBT marriages continue to be accepted on a broad social scale despite a few vociferous protesters, but I can see many ways that could fail (e.g., a continuing slide towards reactionary religious dogma intruding on politicla systems). Still, I live in hope that society will make room for diversity (live and let live). That hope is undermined by the large number of people who seem deeply unhappy whenever anyone else is happy and feel a need to change that situation.

    Polyamories can definitely be functional and even superior solutions for some, but they're much more work; you have to maintain and balance 2 or more adult relationships, which takes both more work and more maturity than most people are willing to muster. That makes them both less common and more likely to fail; the latter is exacerbated by a dearth of successful examples for people to emulate. Thus, I don't see them as becoming the default in the absence of a significant social change that makes them more survivable than other forms. I base this purely on a limited amount of anecdata. Of the three polyamories I know personally, I consider 1 to be healthy and functional and admirable in as many ways as conventional two-person marriage, 1 to be functional but of questionable health and not admirable in a few ways, and 1 to be at least somewhat dysfunctional and raising several red flags for me. Please don't extrapolate those statistics to the general population; that is not my intent in providing them. I suspect you could come up with a similar breakdown for conventional marriages.

    477:

    Gives me some hope that the whole GamerGate/MRA/Red Pill thing may eventually be fixable.

    Then again, on second thoughts, we might just be using better technology to grow a crop of physically fit misogynist neo-Nazis this time around. Hrmph.

    478:

    Anyway, there is no reason why there can't be multiple types of autonomous taxis, both open-plan and individual pods.

    As I noted in my post at 422, you'll get the kind of car you need for your trip. If your ultimate destination is the airport, you'll get a car with room for luggage. If your ultimate destination is an office, you'll get a car with room for your laptop and maybe a briefcase. There will also be different car companies for different demographics and social needs.

    All the problems I've seen anyone bring up are solvable in 2117 given even a modest pace of technical development between now and then. There will be cameras and an AI on board, with records of your trip erased after 30 days unless there's a complaint from one of your fellow riders, or the AI indicates that you made a mess and didn't clean it up (or pay the cleaning fee if that's indicated.)

    479:

    But if their social interaction capabilities are as bad, then it won't make much of a difference, although they might manage to murder a few more people. The important thing is to alter the rest of society and remove the powerful people who like to use them as cannon fodder. By which time of course the gaming community en masse will likely have changed and the gamergate folk will be a tiny minority.

    480:

    As I noted in 422, there will probably be opportunities to trade car-cleaning for a ride. (This is probably a reasonable system to allow poor people to have access to transportation.)

    481:

    I think both Iain Banks and Piers Anthony have had a crack at this kind of society. There may be others too, but I'm not done with my coffee.

    482:

    Except that in 2017 it won't require a keyboard ape.

    483:

    ... we might just be using better technology to grow a crop of physically fit misogynist neo-Nazis this time around.

    I'm afraid that was my immediate reaction. Fingers crossed heir gaming/sports identity will come to outweigh their political one.

    484:

    Banks did, for sure, and very nasty he made it. I can't comment on Anthony, because I haven't read any of his work for half a century.

    485:

    I'm not a huge fan of Banks, and felt like he'd badly missed something in the "Player of Games," which is that cultural transference goes both ways, and culture based attacks have unexpected consequences.

    Once "The Player" (I forget his name) got good enough at the enemy culture to win their games, he would also no longer be completely of "The Culture," with whom he had a reasonable grudge. And "The Player" was a pretty good strategist... with the ultimate effect that they weren't going to "save" the enemy culture, merely turn it into the kind of enemy - with a brilliant strategist running their side of the conflict - which requires a visit from "Don't Say We Didn't Warn You" and "Mission of Gravitas."

    486:

    Remember, education is the deadly enemy of any "revealed" religion

    That's the traditional story, but that's not precisely what history shows. Revealed religions seem to flourish when there are a bunch of people who have no hope for ? in this world. In Rome Christianity flourished first among the slaves. Later among the soldiers. (I believe that an enlistment was for 20 years, but that could be wrong, a quick google returned a source that said 25 years.) Education is relevant here, it appears, mainly as a marker. The educated generally are those with hope for achieving some goal.

    487:

    Depending on the age group, living in communal settings is desirable...but there are also huge costs, and it's an age related thing. Once you are getting ready to start a family it loses most of it's appeal. And economic appeal is quite uncertain unless circumstances force you, because inter-personal frictions can cause things to dissolve unexpectedly.

    Been there, done that. It was the right move for the time, but wasn't anything to hold onto.

    488:

    I am not optimistic, but let's consider what would happen if the disasters we are facing in the short term were followed by outbreaks of sanity (in the UK case, possibly starting with a very British military coup, supported by the King). I am not expecting this, and certainly won't live to see it, but I won't live to see 2100, either.

    In the UK, the personal transport problems are soluble, by ensuring that the actual priority on most roads is pedestrians, cyclists and cars etc. - and not just by paying lip service to it. And I do mean on the roads. With some reorganisation of workplace and living locations, almost all commuting would be on foot, by bicycle, the electric equivalents (including invalid vehicles), or public transport. There would be significant rail expansion, and an integration of the train and bus services. Few of the problems in doing this are technical.

    Goods transport would be changed similarly, but the most important change would be the abolition of superstores, and the restriction of most goods transport on the roads to 'trunk' roads. Things not reasonable to buy locally in relatively small shops would be delivered to a local store with both local and trunk access - NOT people's houses - yes, there would be mechanisms to do local delivery (usually Fred on his trike).

    The legal systems would be changed to be quick, cheap and available to all; barristers would cease to be, and the main job of solicitors would be to give advice. False news and false advertising would become actionable, without needing to prove actual loss, and no person or organisation would be allowed to dominate. Again, mostly easy.

    Computers would be vastly more powerful, and based on completely different principles to those of today; I mentioned something of how earlier. Programming would be mind-blowing even to a parallel programming expert of today. They would also be much more usable, reliable and longer-lasting, which isn't even difficult, starting from a clean slate - i.e. it's been done - look up capability machines, high-RAS machines etc.

    Automation would not be used as much as described in this thread, because it would be used only when its use was actually desirable for the society as a whole.

    This is all very socialist, but NOT in the modern (e.g. Marx and beyond) senses, but in its original sense. Obviously, monetarism would get the boot and, frankly, 'democracy' in its current form would, too.

    489:

    Well, UStatian isn't generally understood, and American includes Canada, Mexico, and points south. So USian seems reasonable to me, a Californian. (My coinage was UStatian...but that was only used humorously.)

    490:

    I can see a complete alteration even elimination in family structures. Probably not world universal however.

    To control population and manage the economy we: Sterilize everyone All reproduction is done ex utero All fetuses are preselected to eliminate defective genes and select for certain talents. Education is industrialized and centralized for efficiency. No need for families. You are decanted directly into the education system. Population size is matched to resources, employment, etc. During recessions excess labor is put on ice until needed. No war, put the soldiers in storage. No entitlements needed but government pays for storage. (I wonder what percent of the population is out cold at any given time) The cost of relocation to a new job vs storage is relevant. Direct brain re-education is available to retrain those permanently obsolete in their original jobs. Forget immortality, bad for business and the bottom line. Political and economic leadership is ordered up on demand. "Men of Gold/Doges" are designed, educated, and managed like any other workers. Ultimately they become the decision makers.

    The final commodification of Labor. A free market with minimal social structures. You can dress it up with whatever political facade you like. Direct democracy? Corporate state? Probably not all parts of the world submit at once. I wonder what crisis wold be sufficient to trigger this scenario. Global warming? Nuclear winter? The long delayed Malthusian climax? Plague? The Really Big Depression? Permanent Republican dominance of the US?

    This looks like a mix and match of a lot of the scifi I read as a teenager all stirred up together. It just no longer seems so distant. I was never that into the post-apocalyptic dystopias.

    I was sort of hoping for a nice post-scarcity libertarian paradise myself, but things happen.

    491:

    * What guarantee do I have that my co-traveller isn't drunk-to-throwing-up or planning to spend the trip shooting up heroin?

    Internal camera (actually, several internal cameras) plus face-recognition software.

    492:

    the alternative is that they're as full of CCTV cameras and urea-sniffers as elevator cars in Singapore

    It's not "the alternative" -- it's a given. A taxi company would have to be insane to not install CCTV in autonomous cars.

    493:

    But the decision of how to relate to the cameras is cultural. Singapore has chosen to relate to the cameras in a singularly ugly way. Its entirely possible to have a camera in your car that looks for real problems rather than fining you $100 merely because you were chewing gum, even though you may have disposed of the gum appropriately.

    494:

    "All reproduction is done ex utero" In 2117? NO chance! We aren't even close to having a clue of how to start.

    495:

    Depending on the age group, living in communal settings is desirable...but there are also huge costs, and it's an age related thing. Once you are getting ready to start a family it loses most of it's appeal. And economic appeal is quite uncertain unless circumstances force you, because inter-personal frictions can cause things to dissolve unexpectedly. Been there, done that. It was the right move for the time, but wasn't anything to hold onto.

    Depending, yes. As for having children, we had one in the commune which was absolutelý brilliant: even with three small children, having four adults around was a very nice thing. It could have been better with a larger apartment (big ones around here are either very expensive or far away). It could be nice now, but I would want a larger apartment or even a house. (A hundred square meters apartment with three bedrooms is quite small for seven people, with modern standards.)

    496:

    Well, UStatian isn't generally understood, and American includes Canada, Mexico, and points south. So USian seems reasonable to me, a Californian

    Yes, folks south of the Rio Grande/Bravo can get a bit annoyed about USAians using "American" and tend to use "norteamericano." I don't know what Canadians of various ethnicities and self-designations think about that.

    497:

    "All reproduction is done ex utero" In 2117? NO chance! We aren't even close to having a clue of how to start.

    Er, we are talking about a hundred years in the future, right? Leaving aside the "all", is talking about ex utero reproduction then less of a stretch than talking about heart transplants would have been in 1917? Maybe it will happen, maybe not, but "NO chance!" seems to be going out on a limb.

    498:

    It might seem so, but it isn't. Someone posted about placental development, which contained links that indicated how little we know of even the basics of the process; checking up confirmed that. It's at least as little understood as the immune system, and much more so than aging or cancer.

    As an indication, the survival rate of 24-week foetuses has gone up by leaps and bounds over the past few decades, but that has been accompanied by a corresponding increase in developmental problems - and nobody has a clue of how those could be reduced. It's a serious ethical problem with late miscarriages and corresponding emergency abortions/deliveries - just because the foetus is 'viable', is it right to keep it alive if it is almost certain to be seriously handicapped?

    499:

    True, but so what? If an American taxi company decided to fine people for chewing gum (chewing, not littering), there would be a public outrage and it would lose customers. Likewise if the company levered an excessive fine on littering. But nobody would be particularly upset with a $100 fine on throwing up in a taxi.

    Perhaps some other societies feel differently and/or have different scales of outrage. Their taxi companies will adjust accordingly.

    500:

    I was sort of hoping for a nice post-scarcity libertarian paradise myself, but things happen.

    Wow. Someone who thinks "libertarian" and "paradise" belong in the same sentence! Quite the utopian view, that — positively Leninist, in fact.

    As for your vision of a plausible future, it sounds hellish; a work-obsessed fascist tyranny populated by neutered, socially-atomized wage slaves subject to downsizing ("put on ice" or just simply terminated) in event of a recession or demand/supply mismatch.

    Seriously, I don't think that's plausible. Even authoritarian ideologues like a little human creature comfort in their lives.

    501:

    I didn't hear it when I was last south of the border, but it's one of the two things my mother (elderly British/Canadian) remarked about when she returned from a conference in the US: the prevalence of religion (specifically lots of churches and the assumption that you went to one of them) and the size of the portions at restaurants.

    502:

    Guess I'm clueless about Sheol then.

    503:

    No component of any doctrine I learned about when I was growing up Jewish.

    504:

    My Hebrew is limited to being able to write the character aleph, and my references all the Christian ones, but I can't remember having seen it and can't find it in Cruden. I never did discover where it came from.

    505:

    A hundred years of biotech is a long time. I am really uncomfortable saying anything is not going to be both doable and routine in that timeframe unless it blatantly violates physical laws. And a placenta that isn`t inside a human woman, but still functions (as least) as well as the original one does not do that. If this is done on mass scale, it might not look quite like you would expect, however.

    As in, how does one do this cheaply? Well, that`s obvious - you grow your kids in the wombs of highly modified mares.

    506:

    In my part of Canada, "America" means USA. It bothers some people, but it's common usage south of the border, and as they have 10 times our population (and even more media power) there's no point in fighting it.

    Eg. "Made in America" and "Buy American" refer to the USA, not the continent.

    507:

    Um, that doesn't make a huge amount of sense. I'm thinking of the very religious, allegedly ethical, slaveowners of the antebellum US. At least some slaveowners (Thomas Jefferson, for instance) admitted to varying degrees that slavery was a moral problem, but the allegedly practical problem of keeping the economy going without slaves was such that churches in slave-owning states seem (from my superficial reading) to have spent more time justifying slavery than preaching that all men were created equal.

    And so it goes. Determining what is right is a complex problem, and it's always influenced by religion. If you don't believe that, ask the women or people who identify as a gender minority in this crowd whether religion is irrelevant in determining what constitutes moral behavior. I'd argue to the contrary that knowledge of religions is actually vital to understanding morality--not adherence, but understanding, and the only way you get any understanding is by interacting with practitioners. For example, apparently I'm very ignorant about what Sheol is in Judaism. I thought it was an afterlife for faithful Jews, but apparently I'm mistaken.

    508:

    Hmmm. I'd take the Soviet counterexample: everyone lived in block apartments, but a lot of people had country homes with dacha gardens, and that's where they got a lot of their food. When the USSR collapsed, it's thought that the dacha gardens and informal food trade were what kept Russia from experiencing a famine.

    The arguments for packing people like sardines is that (in the US) their resource use goes down, because they don't have to drive everywhere. Survivability goes down too because everyone depends on complex supply chains that are easier to break, but when you're trying to get resource use under control, that's of lesser concern.

    Still, the Russian example isn't quite as stupid as it sounds. One could envision shrinking towns trying to make new, compact homes in dense urban communities, while allowing people to keep their land in the suburbs where the homes are being ripped down to make for garden space. Given the way Americans currently think, this is simultaneously too practical and too utopian to get buy-in, but who knows? Certainly places like Detroit and New Orleans (and rural California) have realized that keeping up a huge infrastructure on a decaying block just for one or two residents is far too expensive for a shrinking municipality to afford, and it might be useful to allow families to keep owning their land (as a store of value) while living off of it. This pattern is socially acceptable, if weird. Heck, retired people who have razed their homes could even rent their land to farmers or gardeners, and get a bit of income off of it. That's socially acceptable in rural America right now, and a major way farmers retire.

    509:

    A hundred years is less than 1.5 times my life so far, this is one area of biology that has not progressed all that far in that time, and we have some idea of why (i.e. it is FAR more abstruse than we thought it was). I agree that we can't exclude using mares as surrogates, though my understanding is that sows are more plausible, and I wouldn't call either 'ex utero'!

    Talking about this to my wife reminds me to say that, if bevans1 actually meant fertilisation and not reproduction, then it is very plausible. That could be done tomorrow, in principle.

    510:

    As in, how does one do this cheaply? Well, that`s obvious - you grow your kids in the wombs of highly modified mares.

    I think Frederik Pohl had it as cows, but yes, that might be a possibility. Use what nature has developed and tweak it as much as necessary.

    Pumpkin and cabbage wombs seem more of a stretch.

    511:

    "A hundred years of biotech is a long time."

    Yes, but stuff that we currently have absolutely no clue how we'd start to do also takes a very, very long time.

    " is talking about ex utero reproduction then less of a stretch than talking about heart transplants would have been in 1917? "

    Yes. Hearts are simple bits of muscle. By 1917 we had the essential theory: antibodies and antigens, blood typing, host resistance, and Carrel's 1912 Nobel prize - after which Carrel began speculative work on artificial hearts. The first human heart transplant was 1967.

    I'm reluctant to say anything has "NO CHANCE" of happening in science in 100 years. But the only obvious thing I can easily think of that seems harder than ex utero human reproduction is brain transplants or head transplants - and I'd rate both as extraordinarily unlikely in 2117. Like brain function, pregnancy seems to make use of all sorts of weird chemical stuff happening elsewhere in the body, in ways we don't understand - and we've no idea which of those chemical effects are important.

    512:

    Let's point out the dumb fact that gets in the way: You remember the reports that mothers have cells from the babies they carried running around in their bloodstream? Well it turns out that physicians have known for even longer that babies (and presumably everyone) has maternal cells in their bloodstreams (the term for this is microchimerism, in case you want to look it up). Oh, and twins end up sharing cells too. Apparently, placentas are leakier than we thought they were.

    So while I know it's possible for animals to carry embryos of other species to term because it's been done in a few cases. However, as with cloning, it turns out to be trickier and more species-specific than we'd like.

    The bottom line here is that producing humans in mechanical wombs is probably a lot more complicated than we thought, and using animals to gestate humans is the same kind of "efficiency" as vat meat: while it's touted as increasing efficiency, it's really about people trying to find technological workarounds for the innate squickiness of life, in this case, the connection between sex and pregnancy in a society that romanticizes sex.

    513:

    "A hundred years of biotech is a long time."

    Yes, but stuff that we currently have absolutely no clue how we'd start to do also takes a very, very long time.

    " is talking about ex utero reproduction then less of a stretch than talking about heart transplants would have been in 1917? "

    Yes. Hearts are simple bits of muscle. By 1917 we had the essential theory: antibodies and antigens, blood typing, host resistance, and Carrel's 1912 Nobel prize - after which Carrel began speculative work on artificial hearts. The first human heart transplant was 1967.

    I'm reluctant to say anything has "NO CHANCE" of happening in science in 100 years. But the only obvious thing I can easily think of that seems harder than ex utero human reproduction is brain transplants or head transplants - and I'd rate both as extraordinarily unlikely in 2117. Like brain function, pregnancy seems to make use of all sorts of weird chemical stuff happening elsewhere in the body, in ways we don't understand - and we've no idea which of those chemical effects are important.

    514:

    I'm going to be boring. Ironic, given my love of escapist and idealist fiction. Personally, I think Ken Macleod nailed it in one way; Peter Hamilton in another... I think it's going to be superficially and boringly similar, but with some minor changes that would make those of 2117 shake their heads and pity our attitudes. More like "Halting State" than Culture Novel or Hunger Games, but with tweaks around recycling and personal finance.

    So, assuming that neither the Korean peninsula nor the Baltic turns into a war zone:

    Families are going to stay much the same - two parents, two-ish kids plus or minus, according to health, income, and ideology. More tolerant of mixed-race, same-gender, polyamory, but mostly dual-income, two kids, the middle classes will still be buying personal vehicles with a Volvo badge on the front, and young men will be trying to accessorize what personal transport they can afford (body-kit, hi-fi, and LED underlights from Halfords onto a Renault Clio today; more wing mirrors on your Vespa back in the fifties; by 2050 "I've rewound the motors on my pod!").

    Churches/Synagogues/Mosques/Ashrams/Temples are still going to be around, but less of them and with a purpose that has changed; more pragmatic, more accepting (but with a swivel-eyed fringe out there).

    Politicians are going to be just as corruptible, media-obsessed, power-hungry types they've always been - just watched more closely, and (as a result) more careful about how they operate.

    Countries might dick about and play power games to suit the domestic agendas of their politicians - Russia will play for fracture or chaos, because that levels the playing field; China will play for stability, because that suits the economy; USA will play for capitalism, because that suits the billionaires. They'll all still exist, more or less.

    The ease with which we communicate will just be taken for granted; the telecomms infrastructure will just keep on growing. So what if we can't all carry a 2nm supercomputer in our phone, the personal-computing-or-client/server model should swing to and fro, at least a couple of times over the next century; and you'll have a server farm on the end of (in our terms) an insanely-high-bandwidth connection.

    Education is going to be fascinating. My mother was saying that at the start of her career (early 1960s) she never quite got to the fifty-pupil primary class - 47 was her personal record. She finished her career in special education, with a class of six kids, a nurse, and an assistant. If we move more to the "what are we going to do with all of these tertiary-educated types, and fewer jobs", then I'd like to see more individualised teaching and training. That "seven plus or minus two" thing might equally apply to a classroom; maybe we'll see another expansion in school staff numbers?

    ;) Forty years of reading sci-fi, and I'm hoping that we'll sort out our schools ;)

    515:

    "As for having children, we had one in the commune which was absolutelý brilliant:"

    We had trouble because a single-parent could never making it to evening meetings about running our community-run childcare:

    Me: "Scheduling things is really hard when you're single-parent".

    Reply by a lesbian friend, in a couple who raised kids with together the father of their children: "Yeah. We even don't get how you two-parent households cope."

    516:

    I don't think Bevans was entirely serious - look at the line about "...all the scifi I read as a teenager."

    As to the "Libertarian Paradise" I wouldn't mind a world where sexual decisions are left entirely to the (adult) individuals involved, and we've gotten rid of the drug warriors. (Other parts of the Libertarian agenda... Not so much.)

    517:

    Depending, yes. As for having children, we had one in the commune which was absolutelý brilliant

    I think this is one of those times where hearing from those actually doing it is less important to many people than their knowledge that it can't be done.

    I doubt that we will see a legal effort to simplify family law by reverting to legal monogamy (how's that working out for the people's church?), but we will see an expanding view of what constitutes family. Even today, the average legal marriage lasts less than ten years while people are adults for 50 or more. Also, less than half of couples are married. In my social circles marriage does seem to be associated with child-rearing more than just coupledom, and I know a small number of couples-with-kids who are living in share houses partly to make kid-raising easier. Sadly I only know of one jointly owned share house where a group of renters decided to buy together.

    What's interesting me right now is watching youtube "off grid living" types as their video diaries progress from rugged individualism to the realisation that without community they can't survive. I'm also missing out on an autumn solstice gathering at a rural intentional community this weekend, so they're in my thoughts too. They, however, started as a community and intend to continue that way after their founding circle age out. I expect some vigorous discussion when the aging out happens, because I suspect at least one would rather die at home of a "preventable" or "curable" problem than in hospital when the problem eventually wins.

    On that note: I think/fervently hope that suicide becomes more acceptable as a way to deal with incurable illness. that is not really explicit in much SF, but I've just re-read Octavia Butler's Earthseed books and the "god is change, make the change you want to see" idea meshes with my ideas about consent as the rule. In those terms, allowing people to chose when to give up living makes perfect sense.

    518:

    Let me try to phrase this a little differently -- I am starting from a position that trying to determine what is right is a mistake. So is trying to determine what is "moral" at any scale larger than the personal. (I'm really not sure that's useful at a personal scale, either, but am aware my experience is not universal.) If you try to extend morals generally you get at least one of a requirement to be horribly coercive or a collapse due to insufficient information going on. (Look at how much work "ineffable" has to do in Christian doctrines to get around the insufficient information!)

    "Right", like "good", is an abstraction, and you inescapably abstract the circumstances. (Can I take all the Taoist proverbs about the situationality of good things as read?) So once you start defining right, you slurp up the implicit context into the definition, and it will cause you trouble thereafter because context changes. (Especially with generational iteration!) If you define specific material outcomes, well, at least you know what you are talking about, rather than struggling with too many layers of abstraction to resolve anything other than feelings of comfort or discomfort. (Observe the western rise of "gays are human" as "trained discomfort less than discomfort at hurting a live personal acquaintance"; observe also where the "bad to hurt" discomfort lines may be observed to exist and to not exist.)

    If you then try to use a moral system as a social control system -- which you ought not to be doing at all, because you can't get it and trying makes everything worse for everybody in material terms because the (generally large!) resources used up in the attempt are consumed vainly -- you get, well. You get Jefferson, who was at best a monstrously entitled rapist; the habit of viewing him as "righteous" has historically tended to obscure that. I think Jefferson's justifications for slavery were a lot closer to "but I will be uncomfortable" than "but the economy will collapse"; "but the economy will collapse" was obvious nonsense. (The people who were very rich would be much less rich, but that's not the same thing at all. Preachers are in the business of keeping the system running. They have factions about what precisely the system is, but they also have cash flow issues.) But the purpose of a system is what it does. If it's a human system, it will justify itself to itself, whether from the pulpit or otherwise.

    You've still got the problem of having to win fights with the slavers and you still have the problem of how you set bounds on conduct, but you don't need to do it -- and, from the operations research results, CANNOT do it -- by setting up a control system. (Not in the dictates context sense; there's a technical sense in which any system has to have controls, but that's not what I mean here; I mean "some individual has a supported belief they can give this thing orders and it will do what they say" by control.)

    519:

    This gets back to the comment I made to Charlie, about the need to go completely off burning fuels if you want to get to a 2117 global civilization. Fossil fuels are more efficient for all sorts of things, but if you carve out exceptions because "it's just a few percent of emissions we can keep it" for any of them, pretty soon you're burning too many fossil fuels, severe climate change kicks in, and civilization crashes before 2117.

    In general, I think "shared sacrifice of all fossil fuels" is the meme that might get us to 2117. The idea that there are no exceptions, everyone sacrifices, from the people who lose the value of their mineral interests to cities that have to redesign around electric transportation, to companies that rely on international shipping, to people like me who grease their lips with vaseline. If you don't make any exceptions, it's morally easier, and it will also probably spur innovation in a way that only penalizing certain industries will not. I also realize that this will be hard to pull off in international terms (looking at India), but at the same time, I'd rather encourage them to leapfrog us into an electric future than drag everyone down by trying to copy our industrial revolution. Unfair as it is, India's going to suffer from climate change more and faster than we are.

    This isn't to say I disagree with you about the relative efficiencies of diesel or hydraulics as functional units. It's what they do as part of the global supply chains that makes them so dangerous.

    Now, for moving electric freight trains across the US, Canada, or Asia, yes, we can put 50,000 volt lines right next to the tracks for the trains to run off, at least until too many get caught up in tornadoes and accidentally incinerate a town or three (or too many kids fry by climbing on them, or dropping their kites off them, or whatever. Thousands of miles of high voltage lines within a few meters of the ground is kind of dangerous. That's why I'd just suggest loading up freight cars with batteries, putting them right behind the locomotives, and running the train that way. You can swap out the battery cars quickly, recharge them literally offline, and it appears to be much safer than trying to run it as if it's a subway. It also takes less infrastructure to build, which is a good thing, and it might revitalize some small towns because they'll be recharging and servicing battery cars that get dropped off as the trains roll through.

    520:

    There's absolutely no reason to suppose we can't do trains with ammonia-air or aluminium-air; I'd go ammonia-air. There's three known ammonia synthesis routes from air and water, it's a well-known storage-and-pumping tech, alkaline fuel cells are a problem solely in picking between multiple effective possibilities, and much as we had steam traction engines and steam ships and then diesel traction engines and diesel ships, we could have alkaline fuel cell traction engines and ships.

    I mean, yeah, batteries can probably be made to work, too, but for some things you really want a pumpable fuel.

    (The prospect of trying to run a set of high voltage lines for a pantograph through northern Ontario fills me soul with horror. Parts of the Rockies would be impressively challenging, too.)

    521:

    Chill out. GOD* is not needed, I do not offend easily, so invective is wasted. Since reading your post, I have reviewed the arguments and counter arguments, and still believe in the correlation. So do many responsible parties, who have no axe to grind about code, social science, or right to life. Read the end of the freakanomics link:

    http://freakonomics.com/2005/05/15/abortion-and-crime-who-should-you-believe/

    The most interesting info I learned from this review was in a Wikipedia article. It stated that legalizing abortion does not increase the abortion rate. At least in Wales.

    522:

    Having grown up Orthodox I can assure you that (i) many Jews do believe in an afterlife; and (ii) there is significant support in Jewish texts and traditions for this belief.

    523:

    I would agree with your second thoughts than your first

  • I don't know how it is in Europe. Outside of the large cities in the US, obesity isn't as big a deal breaker as people think. It's still a handicap in the dating game, but not the defining one. Not enough of a reason to create the problems you mentioned. The problems there are 80 percent psychological.

  • They can always opt out of the physically demanding games. This is why I don't believe the claims that VR will get most gamers fit. Physically challenging games will mostly attract gamers who enjoy physical activities.

  • 524:

    "...to people like me who grease their lips with vaseline."

    Not that; it's not a fuel use. If we're going to have machinery at all, we'll be needing lubricants, and also feedstock for the chemical processes that produce pretty well all the non-metallic components. So we'll still be needing to dig stuff up. Getting it from biological sources may be another possibility, but either way, niche uses like yours will still be able to tap a tiny percentage of lubricant production.

    "Thousands of miles of high voltage lines within a few meters of the ground is kind of dangerous."

    We do it all over the place on this side. 25kV rather than 50kV, but on the other hand US trains are remarkably tall (you can double-stack containers, we can't) so our wires are a lot closer to the ground. Untoward consequences do not result. There are occasional instances of yobboes throwing bicycles or shopping carts onto the wires, but by the time the thing hits the wire it's several metres from their hands. It causes some disruption while the offending item is removed, but then so it does when yobboes throw junk onto non-electrified lines also.

    The main difficulty (apart from all the posts and knitting being really fucking ugly) is high winds, or a train somehow getting its pantograph entangled in the wire, pulling the whole lot down. This ruins several miles of the installation in an instant, and tends to affect not just one track but all of them, so you get a multiple-track main line completely out of action and chaos ensues.

    It is this sort of thing, rather than danger, that clobbered long-distance electrification in the US: the hassle of maintaining not only the catenary, but also the feeder lines and power stations, out across hundreds of miles of nowhere, in rather more severe weather conditions. It was worth it compared to steam traction, but when diesels became practical they took much of it down again, and now US electrification is mainly used for those areas which are reasonably similar to conditions over here - intensive passenger services in denselyUS populated areas and I believe some short-haul freight.

    I am unconvinced about long-distance battery traction because of the enormous amounts of energy involved. UK diesels run up to about 2.5MW, but from what I understand of US freight, with more powerful locomotives working in multiple sometimes in more than one place in the train, you could easily end up needing 10-20MW, sustained for several hours up an extended gradient (which you want to get to the top of before you stop for fresh batteries). You lose the weight of the diesel engine, but you more than make it up in batteries. (Rail operators do care about reducing dead weight, though it might not look like it and US ones probably care less than others (part of the reason for the WR's choice of hydraulics was that the German design used a stressed skin body which saved about 40 tons over the half a bridge universally used as a chassis in other designs).) Also, you're back to the problem of having to provide big-ass electrical supplies in the middle of nowhere again (or else having lots of trains just hauling batteries for other trains and caning your network capacity).

    The Russians came up with the idea of a nuclear-powered locomotive for their long-distance heavy haulage, but it didn't work out. The reactor response time was far too long for railway use. And it ran on special twelve-foot-gauge track, and broke it. But that was with dinosaur reactor technology. I'm wondering about something like a compact gas-cooled reactor using ceramic fuel elements, feeding a gas turbine...

    525:

    There's the small problem that some NOx can be greenhouse gases, and the other problem that you've got to change the way ammonia's distributed. And it's less efficient than gas. That said, it could work too. Right now, though, everybody's looking at batteries, so that's why I'm thinking about them.

    526:

    Well, there's a lot of electricity in the middle of nowhere, if you look at the distribution of wind and solar. That's why I think that electrifying trains isn't quite that stupid. One of the big problems with renewables in general is getting the energy out of Nebraska and Dakota winds and running it to a big city like LA, and powering the trains is one way to move energy around.

    As for energy density, the Bolt puts 60KwH in a 436 kg battery, so...100 MwH comes out as something like 13.76 metric tonnes for a Bolt-like battery. That's not horrible, it's less than half the maximum axle weight of 40 tonnes for a freight car. Unless (as usual) I screwed up the calculations, a freight car full of batteries would run a decent train.

    527:

    NOx is bad, but there's repeated results with different fuel cell types that you can run the thing rich and get effectively no NOx.

    Right now, ammonia is distributed in tank cars and by pipeline. Don't think you'd have to change that; you'd (hopefully) be starting by having it pumped ashore from ocean wind sources but I don't think it would take much infrastructure change. (More tanker cars; we still use a lot of the stuff as fertilizer feed stocks and chemically.)

    It's not clear that ammonia through a fuel cell is less efficient -- that is, less energy per unit fuel system mass -- than diesel through a diesel engine. Certainly not at train scales. And, really, with not-killing-us-all pricing in effect, the diesel is Right Out anyway.

    The Bolt battery is about 7.2 kg/kWh; a MWh would be 7200 kg. 100 of those is 720,000 kg, seven hundred and twenty tonnes. Doable, but certainly not one car.

    528:

    Hmm.

    You clearly haven't considered all the arguments, given the use of the word "correlation" and your citation of a blog post by the authors from 2005.

    We're in global-warming denialism here, which I find interesting. I can wrap my head around why someone would want to believe that COULD 2 emissions don't change the climate. But why would somebody want to believe that abortion lowers crime? Thoughts?

    529:

    "COULD 2" = CO2. Bloody smartphone.

    BTW, I do empirical social science for a living. I know, recourse to authority ain't worth squat, but you can at least assume I know the literature.

    530:

    0.436*100k/60 = 726 and two thirds...

    I'm not saying it couldn't be done, I'm just saying I'm not convinced by it. I think they'd try more convenient alternatives first and only go to batteries if they couldn't make the alternatives work.

    Aside: the "Daedalus" column in the back of New Scientist once proposed the idea of powering a train by mowing grass grown between the rails. I worked it out and it turns out that (ignoring the problem that you can't do it because using the track as a garden buggers up the ballast) it does just about work, as long as you don't burn the grass (or whatever plant you end up using) in a conventional steam engine, but instead dry it (using waste exhaust heat), powder it, and use it in a diesel. You could run about one passenger train of two or three carriages each way per hour, which is as good as many rural British lines get - as long as you could depend on ideal growing conditions...

    531:

    Re extreme premature births:

    Depends on who is doing the "Deciding"; The American Pro-life people seem disinterested in WHO is going to pay for the neo-natal intensive care ($250K per DAY is the number I have heard) and even less interested in their post-discharge fate

    I keep asking where to find Medicaid spend breakdowns (Many of the severely disabled end up in "Nursing Homes" under Medicaid, and seniors are the other big user of that program), to a deafening shrugging of shoulders.

    532:

    It's morally wrong or it should be to use fossil fuels simply for energy. Whether that's transport, electricity production or whatever. But we're going to need it for feedstock in manufacturing for quite some time. So instead we'll poison ourselves with plastic and nitrogen runoff. And there's that horrible catch-22 of the LtoG modelling again. If the resource constraints don't get you the pollution will. And technological fixes make the peak bigger but the subsequent crash steeper. They never really said what the pollution was so interpretations are shifting with time and now include CO2. "Pollution" doesn't go away though.

    On which, pollution (n.) mid-14c., "discharge of semen other than during sex," later, "desecration, defilement" (late 14c.), from Late Latin pollutionem (nominative pollutio) "defilement," noun of action from past participle stem of Latin polluere "to soil, defile, contaminate," ... So it's a man thing then. ;) If the resource constraints don't get you the Wankers will!

    515 There's an easy answer to what will 2117 look like and that's to compare back with 1917. An empire or two contracted while another empire or two expanded. We don't get to use the whale fall again to power a couple of world wars and the first half of the 20th century's technological progress and population expansion. Socially we're just not that different. Just saying it will be the same with small differences is boring though. Where's the collapse leading to near term extinction? Or the socialist revolution that leads to (Waitrose) fully automated luxury communism with UBI for all? Where are the deepmind successor just machines of loving grace to make big decisions, programmed by fellows with compassion and vision?

    Oh, wait. Wankers.

    533:

    Actually, such collective living already exists (sort of) for well off US "Seniors". My mother lived in one ($4300/Month) for the last two years of her life, and I sat through a catered lunch sales pitch for another (New one) here in NW Arkansas last week. I am in the class that will sit through a (subtle) sales pitch for a decent free lunch.

    Absent the vegetable gardens and nice flower garden too.

    The one my Mother lived in was socially very isolating, revolving around established couples. It was designed around the concept of the healthy and wealthy, tired of yard work and household maintenance. Theory seemed to be people who could spend a week a month traveling (Kid's vacations, whatever); What they had was an increasingly frail group of elderly, there were home health aides running around the building seven days a week.

    Providing that level of services for the hoi polloi? SOCIALISM, by definition evil. Needless to say, they all were enthusiastic about voting for Trump (the ones in Texas).

    534:

    The prospect of trying to run a set of high voltage lines for a pantograph through northern Ontario fills me soul with horror. Parts of the Rockies would be impressively challenging, too... Well, the Swiss & the Austrians have been managing for quite some time, now! ( Gotthard pass line electrified in 1922, f'rinstance using locos like This )

    535:

    I'd expect to see more condominium living for older people — bigger apartments, maintained gardens... maybe stuff like an on-demand store ... visiting service workers... a hobby/craft workshop for folks who want to paint or indulge in carpentry with hand tools; communal kitchens for social use; and so on).

    Cohousing for seniors, in other words. Or wikipedia. Done commecially it's harder, but if you worked in that direction from the existing senior village stuff it might be do-able. The conventional approach may work better - have the young workers on site as residents with little equity, slowly buying said equity off older residents as they earn and save. Could solve a revolving set of social problems fairly neatly, at the expense of radically revising people's "preference" for age-segregated housing (generally done via wealth stratification, but the US at least has a spreading plague of explicit age restrictions in housing... to go with the race and religious ones)

    Right now one friend's elderly mother lives in a giant luxury apartment block and that already has a lot of those services on site. There is a hairdresser+makeup/nail shop that does house calls, they have a medical centre down in the retail zone that likewise does "in house calls" and at least one luxury car dealer will do pickup and service calls (she only has one car, so I'm not sure how widespread that option is). The apartment is largely older people simple because prices start around the $AU1M mark, and the monthly service fee is over $AU600.

    536:

    Just had an advert from $BigRiver for "Delirium Brief, 13th July release" !!

    537:

    No component of any doctrine I learned about when I was growing up Jewish.

    If you go to Israel and observe people who consider themselves Jewish, but who aren't actively religious (the ones who have no idea what the word "doctrine" even means) you will find they use the concepts of Heaven and Hell a lot, to refer to places where good and bad people go after death. "Burn in hell" is a very common curse, for example.

    I assume this is due to Christianity leaking into the Jewish culture. Which makes it, yep, a Judeo-Christian construct. :-)

    538:

    I disagree with the prediction that the world will somehow get down to a dozen or so languages and that languages need 100 million speakers or so in order to be sustainable over the long term. There is a "death of languages" going on, and it is likely most of the world's languages will die out, but this is simply because there are a lot of very small languages, spoken by tiny communities whose entire cultures are under threat by economic development. Languages die when the communities they are spoken in die. While the often cited figure is that 90% of the world's languages are likely to die out in the next 100 years, that still leaves something like 700 languages. The overall number of languages which will disappear sounds large but the number of people affected is nonetheless small.

    Languages spoken by millions, or even hundreds of thousands, are not under threat over a hundread year time frame, except those that are actively suppressed. Even those can take a long time to stamp out, unless the language's users decide to let that happen.

    The economics of science fiction publishing suggests that science fiction fans who are native speakers of small languages will either have to pay throught the nose for translations or read in English (that's been my experience living in Finland; there is an active publishing industry in Finnish. I have no clue as to how it survives, but books seem to get published; not much science fiction though) . So there is a tension, but it has been and will continue to be resolved by some people learning English well enough to get by, to do the things they want to do. This may be seem like sacrilege on this particular blog (trigger warning!) but to many people science fiction is not as important to their identity as the language and culture they were raised in.

    I am an academic, and I see the same presures in academia - publishing in English is necessary to communicate with a larger audience, but doing that does mean Finnish as an academic language is under threat - but only in specialized academic contexts and a lot still goes on in Finnish. Some academics publishing and reading in English however, is not going to change the fact that in the general population in Finland people basically speak Finnish (except Swedish Finns, of course), 99.9% of the time and teach it to their children, and basically no one is switching to English for their daily lives. Some people need English for work (or study, or to read science fiction), but the overwhelming presence of Finnish in their daily lives, and it's position as a foundation stone of Finnish identity means Finnish is not going away any time soon.

    Keep in mind that some people born today will still be alive in 2117, and will still presumably speak the language they were taught when they were born. If we look 500 or 1000 years down the line, that's another matter, but in that case, every existing language in its present form is under threat. In the next 100 years, even relatively small languages will still be around as long as the communities which sustain them are stable. There are good reasons to think some smaller (medium sized, really) languages might shrink somewhat - both in terms of overall population of active users (because of international mobility and marriages), and in term of the life contexts they are used in (because of the increasing importance of transnational contacts), but 100 years is too short a time frame to see them disappear.

    539:

    So here's a thought - social mores driven by the bankers, who decide to make more out of their cosy deal with the lawyers and house selling agents... ;)

    Around here in the U.K., a mortgage term is typically 25 years; and unsurprisingly, prices roughly follow a "one person's earnings, early-mid career, gets you a small flat; two people, mid to late career, gets you a house with spare bedrooms for the kids". Exclude London, vary for "good/bad parts of town" as applicable. If you look at Germany, you see less emphasis on house ownership, but more big houses (cellar and workable attic) shared by multiple generations of a family.

    If formalised relationships (aka marriage) tend to either succeed or fail by the decade marker, why should the bankers lose money to the lawyers, just because there's a churn in living arrangements as a result? What if the banks made it much easier to trade shares in the roof under which you live, more... co-operative? Would access to critical finance allow a change in how we formalise our social behaviour?

    Would we see a protectionist fight in Parliament (where all the lawyers go) between "banking" and "jobs for estate agents"? I note that in Edinburgh, the solicitors (lawyers) have already turned on and eaten the estate agents - they got organised, and the gorilla (more Godzilla) in the local housing market is the Edinburgh Solicitors Property Centre...

    PS I really don't envy, and have a lot of respect for, single parents - it's hard enough with two of you trying to do it, let alone when there's more than one child.

    540:

    Yes. Hearts are simple bits of muscle. By 1917 we had the essential theory: antibodies and antigens, blood typing, host resistance, and Carrel's 1912 Nobel prize - after which Carrel began speculative work on artificial hearts. The first human heart transplant was 1967.

    Yes, sort-of. Blood types were known about early, but it took until the late 1940s for tissue antigen typing to become a thing.

    But the biggest reason for the 50 year gap before transplant surgery began is down to ethics; (a) who is going to volunteer for experimental surgery on a life-critical organ (failure will kill you), and (b) where do you get the donor organ (donor must be (a) human and (b) freshly killed)?

    There's an additional (c) immunosuppression; we didn't begin to get good-enough immunosuppressants until first generation chemotherapy agents showed up, which in turn hinged on epidemiological research following the sinking of the SS John Harvey at Bari in 1943. (The same research might have happened in the 1920s instead of the 1950s among survivors of the big gas attacks on the western front in WW1, if anyone had been studying the soldiers' subsequent medical history, but I'm inclined to believe that the development of tabulators and, later, computers and their use in statistical analysis was a contributory factor that just wasn't there in the 1920s.)

    As it is, kidney transplantation between humans began experimentally in 1933 and once cortisone became available in the 1950s it began to be successful from 1954. Because you can just about survive a single kidney crapping out, and you can survive donating one. If we were born with two mirrored hearts ...

    541:

    Countries might dick about and play power games to suit the domestic agendas of their politicians - Russia will play for fracture or chaos, because that levels the playing field; China will play for stability, because that suits the economy; USA will play for capitalism, because that suits the billionaires. They'll all still exist, more or less.

    Disagree, conditionally. Let me re-frame:

    Former superpowers in catastrophic decline will play for fracture or chaos because that levels the playing field; superpowers experiencing their post-climax Indian summer will play for stability because that suits the economy; superpowers with planetary-reserve-currency-status and big banking sectors play for capitalism, because that suits the [by-then] trillionaires.

    Which nations match these roles will change drastically over the next century. (My money would be on Russia being depopulated and out of the game; the USA or rUK being in the FSiCD role; one or more of China, India, the rEU, and some-other-ascendant-entity occupying the other roles.

    Not sure there's ever going to be another planetary military hegemon on the scale of the USA — having that sort of force concentration damages the productive non-military economy (see also: the USSR) leading to an actual loss of traction in soft power terms and an accelerated economic decline. In a century of climate instability, having a huge military machine and being able to rapidly adapt may well be incompatible, and if nobody else has a huge military, why do you need one anyway?

    (Note wrt. the preceding paragraph: I am prone to fits of irrational optimism.)

    542:

    ;) Forty years of reading sci-fi, and I'm hoping that we'll sort out our schools ;)

    Do we need schools? What are schools for, anyway?

    Certainly the 19th century Matthew Arnold model of Public schools for the nobs (to train MPs, Lords, and colonial administrators: take boys from age 4-8, isolate and emotionally castrate, then make them dependent on status achieved through participation in power structures and tell them they're the elite), and the later 19th century model of training camps churning out tame industrial workers for the proles (perform rote tasks, obey incomprehensible orders, change tasks at the ring of a bell), don't seem to have much applicability to today's world, never mind the post-mass-employment future.

    Schools seem to be institutions designed around forced socialization of pre-adults, socialization to fit specific societal goals based on historical requirements (so always a generation or three behind the times). Yes, socializing kids is a very good thing, and I can see something occupying that role for a long time to come — and I don't think social media will be a substitute for actual physically-present forced mingling with strangers, because that's essential training for adult life (how to deal with strangers without escalating to physical violence by default).

    But I suspect everything else beyond that is up for grabs.

    543:

    Even today, the average legal marriage lasts less than ten years while people are adults for 50 or more. Also, less than half of couples are married.

    Ahem: in Victorian England the average legal marriage only lasted 12 years — about the same as marriages in the UK today. And a divorce required an Act of Parliament! (Typically by private member's bill.)

    Men married late (when they had the means to support a family); women died in childbirth: people tended to succumb in their 40s through 60s to illnesses that are survivable today.

    Marriage was for the affluent/successful/respectable and members of conformist churches; folks who couldn't afford the official paperwork still formed common law relationships. And today we see that folks who aren't members of religions that place a heavy weight of marriage tend not to bother with the paperwork. Oh, and except among the True Believers, pre-marital sex means there's less risk of ending up in a loveless marriage today (but marriages last longer and affection often has a half-life, so it evens out in the long term). And female education and availability of safe, reliable contraception and abortion[*] make that a lot easier, and this in some ways feeds into the huge crash in prostitution as an occupation/social phenomenon in the past century. (Although there's some — it's rarely documented so hard to tell — evidence that Victorian unmarried folks got up to everything short of penis-in-vagina-and-ejaculation intercourse, sex was a risky activity for women, so economics comes into play ...)

    At an individual level? Huge changes. At a statistical level? Not so much. It's like a swan, gliding serenely across a lake, giving no sign of all the thrashing around going on beneath the surface. And this is why I'm very wary of assertions that in 2117 society will look much the same as it does today (sorry, Martin).

    [*] In the UK; bits of the USA may differ.

    544:

    Yes. Bloody hypocrites. And only a religiously bigoted ignoramus believes that two zygotes magically become a human at some particular moment - indeed, it takes a week or so for the sperm and egg to become even an implanted embryo!

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ensoulment

    The ethical, social and practical issues are thoroughly difficult. I answered Noel Maurer about the link with crime (#529) back in #342.

    545:

    Schools seem to be institutions designed around forced socialization of pre-adults, socialization to fit specific societal goals based on historical requirements (so always a generation or three behind the times). Yes, socializing kids is a very good thing, and I can see something occupying that role for a long time to come — and I don't think social media will be a substitute for actual physically-present forced mingling with strangers, because that's essential training for adult life (how to deal with strangers without escalating to physical violence by default).

    Ever noticed how stupid the bolded part is?

    If you want to train children for adult life, you should have them interact with adults as much as possible. Let them see how socialized adults behave, and emulate that.

    Instead, you isolate children with a large group of other children, and with only limited adult supervision and exposure, and let them reenact "Lord of the Flies" at leisure. And only when they had several years of experience in building primitive tribes, you let them into the adult society.

    And then some people wonder why "every new generation is a fresh invasion of savages".

    546:

    I disagree with you about schools - not about the description, because I always say that my public school was halfway between Tom Brown's Schooldays and Stalky & Co. But there was a phase (say, late 1960s to 1990s) when most of the teachers, educationalists and schools moved away from that. The row over schools for the past 30 years has been largely over the restoration of that model - yes, I agree that it's insane, and bad for the country, but that's not how TPTB see it and I regretfully agree that they ARE appropriate for the country that TPTB want :-(

    547:

    Why would Russia become depopulated? Disintegrate and regress in all sorts of ways, yes, but depopulate?

    548:

    Thousands of miles of high voltage lines within a few meters of the ground is kind of dangerous.

    We have this in the EU. It works just fine. Yes, we have occasional auto-immolation incidents; you have the same in the USA with idiots who think it's fun to fly kites near high tension grid lines. But in general the way to deal with it is grade separation, which is a well-understood engineering issue, and also fixes the truck-stalled-on-level-crossing problem — you might have noticed the slight lack of collisions between 200mph TGV trains and trucks?

    The only reason you don't already have this in the USA is because your railway network dates to the 1860s and hasn't been properly modernized since the 1930s, and is privately owned with no real legal accountability for public safety.

    549:

    There's absolutely no reason to suppose we can't do trains with ammonia-air or aluminium-air; I'd go ammonia-air.

    Yes there is: ammonia is more hazardous than diesel in event of a crash or derailment. I submit that while you can run trains on ammonia/air, a necessary precondition is grade-separated running with no level crossings, fences or walls alongside all tracks, and pure electric traction for passenger services or services running through densely populated areas (do I need to mention Lac-Mégantic?).

    By the time you've done all this — at least to the American railway network — full electrification may well be cheaper. (I suspect that ammonia/air is the right way to go for remote/depopulated areas, such as the long freight haul from Mongolia through Asia until those big-ass Chinese freight trains hit the urbanized/densely inhabited middle east. Or freight lines through Northern Ontario. But not for use where people actually live, and you'd better ensure your train engineers have emergency protective and breathing gear in the cab and it's well maintained.)

    550:

    The Russians came up with the idea of a nuclear-powered locomotive for their long-distance heavy haulage, but it didn't work out. The reactor response time was far too long for railway use. And it ran on special twelve-foot-gauge track, and broke it. But that was with dinosaur reactor technology. I'm wondering about something like a compact gas-cooled reactor using ceramic fuel elements, feeding a gas turbine...

    Unlikely; the failure modes in event of a derailment/collision are too unpleasant.

    Anyway, the French have had sleek atomic-powered 200mph express passenger trains for years: the trick is to leave the reactor inside a giant concrete monolith a long way away from the tracks, and use overhead electrification. (See previous objections to electrifying the midwest. I'm beginning to think the options are (a) Graydon's ammonia shtick, or (b) accept that railfreight in America is going to get more expensive.)

    551:

    Even so, something like methanol is likely to be better. Carbon-containing fuels aren't the bogeymen some people make them out to be (in many ways, nitrogen-containing ones are worse) - our problem is the way that we are pumping fossil and biospehere carbon into the atmosphere. Or, indeed, a thoroughly modern gas turbine / steam engine combination burning wood chippings :-)

    552:

    why would somebody want to believe that abortion lowers crime? Thoughts?

    Compulsory "family planning"[*] has been misused as a tool of class warfare by ruling groups, imposed on undesirables, "other" ethnicities, and lower castes, many times over the 20th century — for example the US government's role in sterilizing women of color. It has the advantage (for racists) of being far less visible than a lynching, while achieving one of the same objectives — fewer people of color. (It's less useful as a tool of terror, but by the same token it's less easy for well-intentioned white folks to muster an objection to it ...) However, this doesn't play well with a strongly anti-abortion religious culture and has fallen into abeyance in recent decades.

    If one is a racist looking for an excuse to revive this tool of class warfare, propaganda of the form "crime is committed by people who should have been aborted but weren't" would be a good starting point before moving on to "let's provide free abortions for the poor", before leading to "let's provide compulsory abortions for the poor, or maybe let's just sterilize them".

    [*] I'm all in favour of contraception, abortion, and sterilization being free and available on request. (Unwanted children are not a good thing for any society. Or their parents.) Making any of these things compulsory is another matter.

    553:

    Projection for 2117... Let's speculate recklessly. On technological front, which will have significant impact on societal structure:

    • Fusion Power: I do think at least some sort of fusion power will be available. If we're unfortunate, it will be in form of gigantic plants costing few billion per unit and we'll have lots of batteries and room-temperature superconductors (or at least close enough for government work ones requiring some refrigeration). If we're lucky, we'll have some sort of polywell in home basements.
    • Manufacturing: 3D printing is mature technology, capable of producing ...well, 95+% of anything you can manufacture. With bit luck this figure will be 99.9% (ie. antimatter, exotic island elements, etc. are excluded) and manufacturing is based on molecular assemblers which also neatly recycle waste. Powered by fusion.
    • Medicine: If we're lucky, medicine will be more or less mature field. Most diseases can be treated by proper diagnosis and firmware update on nanosymbionts, or simple injection of properly programmed nanobots. On cases of gross trauma, if you make it to ER alive, you will recover 100% physically although brain damage and recovery from such may result in amnesia, personality shifts etc. and you'll have to learn things again. Uploading will be possible, though it may require destructive read and be a risky one-way trip. (Though many will think that it beats other forms of death, if true rejuvenation is not yet possible.) Genetic screening is common and most of the inheritable genetic diseases have been eradicated. The Wealthy will be eugeneering their offspring, legally or not.
    • Robotics: Common, publicly available and used nearly universally. Every home will have several robots to do much of the stuff that in 1907 was considered "servant's work". Depending on the level of AI (and level of civil rights accorded!), rich or well-off might hire one or two actual human servant as "butler" to coordinate and supervise unintelligent and uncreative AIs. For less well-off living in condos, some of this job might become part of janitor's job. The Job of human soldier might be to become a NCO for a squad of AI-driven robots.
    • Space technology: Conservatively and assuming no radical breakthrough (eg. warp drive or reactionless drive), we'll be puttering around solar system. Probably with some sort of ion drive or fusion rocket. Beanstalk has been constructed and this has opened the wider solar system. Several asteroids have been captured and are being mined out for metals.(Bye bye any gold standard!) Journey times inside solar system are measured in weeks and months, but lightspeed communications are available.
    Right. Now, piling speculation on speculation, let's think about social developments. We'll be recovering from a rather sh*tty century, but being an optimist, we'll be recovering.
    • EU has collapsed and european nations have ...cordial relations with each other. Business is business and trade is going on, but national governments will be paranoid about "supranational influence" and will crack down hard on internationalism. Especially international socialism. "Mutti Merkel" will have replaced That Austrian Corporal as political bogeyman. "Refugee" will be an epithet associated with terrorism. Most of refugees, actual or not, will have been labeled "economic fortune-seekers" or equivalent and returned rather roughly. If they're lucky. If they (and we) are not lucky... Well, there has been a rash of civil wars and awfully lot of people will have gone up to atmosphere as fine ash. (Mass graves are so 20th Century.)
    • USA will have either disintegrated or returned to the Old Skool constitution with severely limited federal powers and abolition of 17th amendment. USA will not be a hyperpower or superpower. It will possibly stay as great (or regional) power, but it will have gone the way the British Empire did around 1940-1960.
    • Middle-Eastern countries, if we are lucky, have collapsed dramatically. Oil is gone, wealth is gone and there have been few famines that have dramatically reduced local population. If we're unlucky, there are few patches of radioactive glass deserts marring the normal desert.
    • Russia will have risen back to "great power" status and Vladimir Putin will have gone to history next to Peter the Great and Catherine the Great as the ruler who guided Russia back to greatness after the disastrous experiment with Communism. He might even be remembered as "Tsar Vladimir IV, The Great", as some have proposed, though this part is admittedly a lower-probability outcome.
    • There are several new "corporate enclaves", aka. "city states", that are literal company towns ruled by sovereign corporations. They exist at sufferance of their larger neighbours, but the arrangement is mutually beneficial and has replaced the old tax shelter dodges. This arrangement probably extends to a handful of research stations at L4-L5 or luna. Some distant asteroid colonies may have declared independence, but they'll be militarily and politically insignificant. For now...
    • Note: I disagree, to a degree, with our gracious host on practicality and culture of future space settlements. Self-replicating machinery and robotics are pretty much inevitable. AI and mind uploading are probable. All which will make lifesupport issues less pressing. There will be more restricted culture than historically, but those restrictions will be based on hard rationality (spacesuit routines and maintenance, monitoring for mental instability, religious restrictions, etc.) and reasons for each restriction and obligation will be explicitly spelled out to everyone before they even learn to read. It will be relatively simple for a community to eject undesirables (send them elsewhere, back to "slum ball" Earth on one-way drop capsule if necessary), or preferably for the unfit person to find a habitat more to his liking and emigrate. There will be failures and death, but others will learn from them.
    • Earth is getting little renovation, on scale that could be called "recovery by terraforming". Some species are extinct, but others have expanded to take their places. Global warming is getting under control, as is weather, by brute force measures (soletta mirrors or similar).

    As for the rest and further accuracy... We'll see.

    554:

    Why would Russia become depopulated?

    Because it's been happening, consistently, since 1992: Russia's depopulation bomb.

    If it was a decade, I'd be so-so about it. But this is now a quarter-century phenomenon which suggests it's as well-established as Japan's demographic shrinkage.

    555:

    There's absolutely no reason to suppose we can't do trains with ammonia-air or aluminium-air; I'd go ammonia-air.

    Yes there is: ammonia is more hazardous than diesel in event of a crash or derailment. I submit that while you can run trains on ammonia/air, a necessary precondition is grade-separated running with no level crossings, fences or walls alongside all tracks, and pure electric traction for passenger services or services running through densely populated areas (do I need to mention Lac-Mégantic?).

    There's an easy way to detoxify ammonia. Turn it into urea. It's an easy synthesis from ammonia + carbon dioxide (the reaction that put paid to the concept of vitalism in chemistry), can be stored dry as a solid but it's extremely water soluble, and so long as you keep it away from bacteria that convert it back to ammonia it doesn't even smell particularly offensive.

    Also, while you could just burn it to power your vehicles there's a potentially much more efficient route by using it in fuel cells. Heat engines have a practical maximum thermodynamic efficiency of somewhere around 15-20% due to engineering constraints on the maximum operating temperature of the engine; electro-chemical cells can easily exceed 50% efficiency. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ente.201600185/full

    556:

    EU has collapsed and european nations have ...cordial relations with each other. Business is business and trade is going on, but national governments will be paranoid about "supranational influence" and will crack down hard on internationalism. Especially international socialism. "Mutti Merkel" will have replaced That Austrian Corporal as political bogeyman.

    What drugs are you taking? Seriously, I don't see this, short of a neo-nazi takeover (of the kind that Mr Putin appears to be trying to bankroll, with some successes in the USA and UK) ...

    EU structural reform is necessary and will happen, especially if Brexit happens, but you're describing the politics of the early-21st century right wing here, not any plausible vision of the 22nd century. And comparing Angela Merkel to Hitler is frankly disgusting.

    (Your suggestion for the disposition of refugees, in a century of climate change, is basically tantamount to genocide on a gigadeath scale.)

    (Pauses to read rest of eerily familiar political laundry list.)

    Ah, you're one of them. Betcha there's a "painless genetic fix" for homosexuality lurking below the waterline of that list (mandatory, applied prior to conception, forced abortion for noncompliant sexual deviant dissidents, etc).

    557:

    Oh, yes - but it's not an island unto itself. There are dozens of other countries that are becoming uninhabitable, either absolutely or with even close to their current population, and Russia is one of the few countries whose habitable area is increasing due to climate change. The result of severe depopulation would be massive immigration, whether encouraged or not - a 'fortress Russia' with 25% of its population would collapse in short order.

    558:

    Er, what's this about Putin? I find MirrorField's perspective of him highly amusing, and definitely a perspective worthy of the name MirrorField :-) But the limited evidence I have seen is that the extreme right-wingers funding the neo-Nazi movements in Europe come more from the USA than anyone other country. Inter alia, why should he support movements that want to get deeper into bed with the USA and NATO?

    559:

    The sheer "Amount of Stuff you REALLY NEED to KNOW" is huge & probably growing. For all the internet is there & wasn't when I was at school, you still need formal introductions, if nothing else, to lots of fields, so that you can avoid making all the mistakes that generations of predecessors made, before the limited number of "right" answers were found. Remember that even if there are 2-5 or even 7 workable/right answers, there will always be an infinite number of wrong ones. ( Which is why "child-centred learning" & "letting them find the answers for themselves" is such a load of Foetid Dingoes Kidneys. There isn't enough TIME. )

    560:

    ... and the UK did not achieve effective universal food security until the industrialization of agriculture during the Second World War. Unless you were wealthy, a poor season or a bad roll of the economic dice could well mean you went hungry even up to about 1940. Admittedly, on nothing like the scale of the Irish Potato Famine or the hungry 1840's which were the last instances of widespread famine in the British Isles.

    561:

    Yes. Of course in many parts of the USSA, the believers quite deliberately mix, mismatch & muddle those courses up, so as to make sure that proper, voluntary family planning never gets a hold. ( Time for Diderot, again? )

    562:

    To which, may I add ... that sooner or later Tsar Putin is probably going to overdo it & something will turn-around & bite him on the arse, really hard. He knows he's riding an irritable Bear, but even so ....

    563:

    EU structural reform is necessary and will happen, especially if Brexit happens, but you're describing the politics of the early-21st century right wing here, not any plausible vision of the 22nd century. And comparing Angela Merkel to Hitler is frankly disgusting.

    EU structural reform would be nice, if it could happen. However, we have seen EU reaction to Brexit, with all fun threats, demands for 60 billion reparations and so on. I do not believe such structural reform is possible. As for Merkel comparisons... Well, she will be the main bogeyman thought responsible (fairly or unfairly) for the EU collapse and refugee crisis that's going to hit europe like a notional freight train. Neither of which can be avoided, IMHO.

    (Your suggestion for the disposition of refugees, in a century of climate change, is basically tantamount to genocide on a gigadeath scale.)

    Prediction does not equate approval.

    My honest opinion is that islamists cannot control their nature and the terror campaigns of driving cars into crowds, suicide bombings, Rotherhams and cutting off the heads of infidels will continue. They do not understand western mindset, consider current tolerance a sign of weakness and are emboldened to further atrocities. This will inevitably provoke a truly ugly reaction from europe that could be called "Reconquista 2.0". And the more authorities try to conceal and whitewash the terror strikes of the week, the more they brand themselves as "protectors of islamic terrorism" and increase the violence of the inevitable reaction.

    I would love to be wrong and see the immigrants assimilated and europeanized. However, I do not think this will happen. The Grip of islam and native culture is simply too strong.

    Ah, you're one of them. Betcha there's a "painless genetic fix" for homosexuality lurking below the waterline of that list (mandatory, applied prior to conception, forced abortion for noncompliant sexual deviant dissidents, etc).

    Actually, not. Didn't even think of that one, but let's continue speculating: "Painless genetic fix for homosexuality" is a possibility, though I personally suspect it has more to do with mothers' hormonal balance during some critical period of pregnancy, in which case exowomb will be the key. If and when the causes of homosexuality is discovered, I suspect it will be parents themselves who will demand pre-implantation screening and exowombs.

    However, the whole gay thing is IMHO mostly irrelevant. What does give me nightmares is the possibility of state-controlled and mandated genetic engineering, producing an updated version of the Brave New World.

    564:

    Are you familiar with the work of Alexander Dugin?

    565:

    (Although there's some — it's rarely documented so hard to tell — evidence that Victorian unmarried folks got up to everything short of penis-in-vagina-and-ejaculation intercourse, sex was a risky activity for women, so economics comes into play ...)

    In an age when female viriginity was valued, it seems that the period of engagement was one in which determining sexual compatibility was assumed; hence breach of promise suits and engagement gifts, putting a monetary value on the presumed lower marital value of a bride who may no longer be chaste.

    Having said this, the Victorians, especialy the upper and middle classes, got a lot more prudish about this than earlier (and later) English ages who were a bit more practical about an engagement being a trial before settling down.

    566:

    However, we have seen EU reaction to Brexit, with all fun threats, demands for 60 billion reparations and so on.

    No we haven't; May only pulled the trigger a couple of weeks ago, so what we're currently seeing is the establishment of initial negotiating positions before a two year period. In other words, the cards are still being dealt for a very high-stakes game of poker.

    As the UK was one of the main obstacles to "ever closer union" (at the prompting of the USA) it's going to be very interesting to see where the EU goes, once a precedent is set for allowing the more neoliberal/right-wing fringes to split off (I'm also thinking about Orban's Hungary: France might, if Le Pen wins the presidential run-off, but I don't think that's likely).

    Disagree about the Islamist issue. I think it's down to a huge amount of Saudi slush-money going to funding the most extreme fringe movements, and exporting their own remittence men (like one Osama bin Laden, for example). Saudi is basically the Titanic heading for an iceberg right now, in economic terms: they won't be able to keep it up much past 2020. (And there's also the issue of gasoline in the middle east going unleaded, reducing the supply of angry poor-impulse-control young men at source in a decade or so.). Immigrant communities generally begin to assimilate after 1-2 generations; absent inflammatory funding by foreign extremists, it could still happen.

    The narrative about terror strikes that you're regurgitating misses the point that "the terror strike of the week" is usually one mentally disturbed, socially marginalized man, out of a community numbered in double-digit millions (in Europe); it's statistically as significant as the equivalent US phenomenon of the spree shooter of the week (usually one mentally disturbed, socially marginalized man: ethnically white, so "it's not terrorism").

    (NB: my money is on the "gay gene" turning out to be indistinguishable from the gene that codes for human brains finding males attractive. Prune it out and, oh look, females aren't interested in men any more ... which is one of the major reasons why homosexual behaviour is conserved: if anything, it's surprising that it's not much more common. See also.)

    567:

    Having said this, the Victorians, especialy the upper and middle classes, got a lot more prudish about this than earlier (and later) English ages

    The problem with this assertion is that it's very hard to know what was really going on, because people don't generally leave documentary evidence of societally-disapproved-of misbehaviour. Pace Matthew Sweeting, "Inventing the Victorians". (A book which concluded that much of what we think we know about Victorian marital/sexual behaviour is down to highly selective cherry-picking of surviving texts, mostly written by bonkers parsons, which survived precisely because nobody bothered pulling them off the library shelves. Books which are frequently read tend to fall apart. These aspirational pious rants were subsequently mythologized by modern young 1900s tearaways who wanted to believe that they were rebelling against their fuddy-duddy elders, just as in the 1960s/70s: and so a lot of what the Victorians really got up to was swept under the rug.)

    568:

    One fairly obvious prediction: self driving vehicles will become common-place within about 20 years.

    Within the next 100 years, I'd expect almost all vehicles to have autonomous computer control, and human controlled vehicles to be limited to recreational purposes only. Indeed, human controlled vehicles will be forbidden on most roads. The occupations of 'Taxi Driver' or 'Truck Driver' will be as obsolete then as 'Lamp Lighter' or 'Ostler' is today.

    Consequently most road signs, much road lighting and almost all road markings will disappear. Computerized vehicles will just download the maps and traffic regulations they need. Any signage that remains will be restricted to back-roads and local routes for the benefit of cyclists, walkers and horse riders. Effectively the roads (other than the road-users) will look a lot more like 1917 than 2017.

    569:

    No - and a quick look at Wikipedia makes me sure that I don't want to be! But the fact that Russia does nasties even better than Western Europe does isn't the issue - you said that Putin seemed to be bankrolling the neo-nazis, which is a common claim in the anti-Russian propaganda, but for which I have seen little evidence (note: 'little', not 'no'). There is rather more evidence for USA links - this gives two, though I have seen others in the past - plus one for Russia:

    https://theintercept.com/2017/03/03/geert-wilders-freedomcenters/ http://www.dutchnews.nl/features/2010/06/wilders_and_the_us_israel_lobb-2/ http://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/US-lifts-ban-on-funding-neo-Nazi-Ukrainian-militia-441884 http://www.constantinereport.com/congress-kills-amendment-bar-funding-neo-nazi-groups-ukraine/ http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/putin-s-far-right-ambition-think-tank-reveals-how-russian-president-is-wooing-and-funding-populist-9883052.html

    Why are you assuming that Russia's (or even just Putin's) actions are entirely consistent - they may be more consistent than both those of recent USA administrations and its military-industrial machine, but that's not a high bar! You do know that the USA is now allied with a renamed Al-qaeda offshoot in Syria, I assume? Also, while Russia is an autocracy, even those have loose cannons - there just aren't the hours in the day to oversee every detail.

    570:

    Quite. I have a friend who is a professor specialising in a closely related area, and the evidence from incidental records (e.g. employment ones) is that the official records bear a very tenuous connection with reality for the working class. And, when I was a child, I heard a rumour of a great great aunt who disappeared from the family records; that's upper-middle class.

    571:

    What are schools for, anyway?

    Based on personal experience, childcare and babysitting.

    The last time Ontario teachers went full work-to-rule as a job action it was a public relations disaster. The kids were still getting what they were supposedly in school for (education) — in fact, they were getting more than usual because there were no extra-curricular activities puling them from classes.

    So what led the parents to call us Nazis and say we should be sent to death camps? No free childcare for 12 hours. With no staff arriving in the school until 15 minutes before classes, there was no one to keep an eye on the kids dropped off 2 hours before first class*, and no one to watch them for 4 hours after last class.

    Maybe not an issue in a depopulating world with a lot of not-employed-9-to-5 adults. But some of the people on my street who complained most bitterly don't work — the stay-at-home spouse objected to the strike taking away their personal time. Get rid of schools (as a separate place for children), parents are suddenly responsible for their own childcare…

    (Parenthetically, I wonder how much obnoxious teenage behaviour arises because they spend so much time segregated with just their peer group and not enough adults. A few years ago I corresponded with a teacher in Sweden who taught at a small school that was a floor in an office tower. His school didn't have any of the behaviour problems mine did; the kids behaved much like the adults who surrounded them. He said that wasn't the case at the large municipal school, where they behaved like my kids do.)

    *Same parent, obviously rather shaky on history. "You're just Nazis. Hitler would have known what do to with you!"

    **Which didn't stop some parents doing that anyway. Apparently that lead to interesting phone conversations — some caretakers were considering reporting the children to police as abandoned, as they didn't want to be held legally responsible for an unknown number of children.

    572:

    For all the internet is there

    Which is a problem when trying to study, frankly. When the internet is there, so are all their friends via chat and texting, as well as twitter and Facebook. Social media and studying don't mix — and social media is addictive enough it wins most battles…

    Some kids have the strength of character to ignore it. But I've seen more of them panicking because something is happening online that they just have to respond to…

    574:

    Crap. Used wrong way of snarking. What I meant to say was "is teenager. Looks around guiltily..." Also can the mods please delete my previous blank comment? Thank you

    575:

    Missed stuff? Designer babies and other biologicals, well beyond the point of species differentiation. Along these lines, designed in man-machine interfaces. Partial solidification of a biologically based caste system. Or too many leaders issue.

    Around the hundred year mark, I'd expect most mental and gender issues would be present in similar quantities, albeit arising from engineering issues rather than natural variation. Around the two hundred year mark, they'll probably be rather less prevalent in some sense. (Don't expect that the people then would precisely qualify as human.)

    Middle East becomes one large refugee crisis after elimination of salable natural resources. Senescence of EU and US and China leads to rise of SA and Russia. Maybe Canada too.

    One big war, fought as a distraction, probably everyone against the middle East. End to war against nation states after successful deployment of rather cheap biological weapons. Most people survive. Rather extreme changes in city structure and evolution of real surveillance state.

    Serious robot nannies. Odd children. Enders game on steroids. The IQ crisis, where gobs of highly motivated IQ 160+ children react to being raised by IQ 110- parents. Many kids leave home before age 16.

    Possibly, artificial depletion of carbon content to allow additional beamed power from satellites.

    Mosquitoes extinct, cockroaches too (oops).

    576:

    Oh. Strong racism/classism, based on ongoing lag in genetic differentiation owing to technology differences between regions.

    Oh, and first prototypes of practical immortality using built in man machine interface.

    577:

    Schools seem to be institutions designed around forced socialization of pre-adults, socialization to fit specific societal goals based on historical requirements (so always a generation or three behind the times)

    Not sure about that. Granted, I was a mildly unhappy consumer (who acknowledges in retrospect that the school staff was full of intelligent and hardworking types, working towards best total outcome for a spectrum of damaged pupils) and a mildly curious observer of Mum's career (she delighted in proving "educationalists" wrong).

    But since we've become "interested customers" (what with the rugrats) it's been fascinating seeing how schools have changed, and how hard they're working to stay ahead of the curve. Far from being a generation or three behind the times, I have the delight of watching youngest starting senior school/8th Grade and being encouraged into technology (he was a "Digital Leader" in primary 7; aka "unpaid occasional sysadmin for the teacher") and debating (he took part in a "Model UN" that the school hosts - playing the role of Turkey). The school is now fully BYOD, and various Google education tools are in full use.

    What influence I've observed from TPTB is a fairly unsubtle attempt at ideology by the SNP - pushing "the Scottish Wars of Independence" onto the curriculum. Otherwise, it appears to be well-intended, if not always successful, attempts to address the flaws of 19th Century thinking. The school won't stop mentioning that many of todays pupils will be doing jobs that currently don't exist; and they're trying to prepare them as well as they can. Critical thinking, self-reliance, independence, communication skills - not just the "three R's".

    You could offer to talk at a few schools; they'd probably grab the offer, and it might give you a new perspective...

    578:

    The IQ crisis, where gobs of highly motivated IQ 160+ children react to being raised by IQ 110- parents

    Why should that happen? The reaction would surely come from bad parenting, not frustration that their parents aren't as quick on the uptake. And that's independent of relative IQ.

    I was an unusual kid who was reading before starting school; I was the first in the family to get a University degree; but there wasn't any "crisis" along the way. Granted, my mother's Teacher's Certificate, and my father's near-zero educational qualifications come from a poor education system (I certainly wouldn't describe either of them as IQ 110-) but they seemed to cope admirably when confronted with me...

    579:

    I'm going to get piled on for the following:

    There's going to be a global warming related refugee crisis, but I'm not sure it's going to be as big as Charlie pointed out, ASSUMING the equatorial countries become developed.

    Note that those countries will have very inhospitable environments with a lot of degradation (very salty oceans, few native wildlife). But an equatorial country which can afford solar power will have

  • Cheap desalination. Desalination is continuously getting cheaper. According to the article below, desalination in the US costs $2.5-$5 per thousand gallons. That compares to $2 for conventional water (I don't know where they got these numbers). However, desalination is reducing in cost due to technological improvements https://www.pri.org/stories/2015-05-15/desalination-expensive-energy-hog-improvements-are-way

  • The use of renewables to power air conditioners and indoor greenhouses. Going outside would be a death trap, but arctic countries have already pioneered a city layout to minimize time outside when it can be fatal (subzero).

  • Many equatorial countries can retreat their populations further inland. Not everyone is Florida or Bangladesh.

  • 580:

    Speculation, part 2:

    So, let's speculate further on distant world of 2117.

    • Internal Combustion Engine will be limited to museum cars. Real cars will be either electric or fuel cell. If we get real lucky with miniaturizing polywell fusion, we'll see an electric car with literally indefinite range. Cars will have automatic controls with physical override and manual backup. The Amount of automatic driving in comparison to manual driving is debatable.
    • Aircars will be available, but they'll be expensive, equipped with heavy redundancies, AI controls and require serious insurance policies. They will be cheaper than private helicopters today, but still a sign of conspicuous consumption. The Carrying capability will be crap (pilot&passenger plus possibly suitcase) and the whole thing will be built from ultralight nanocomposites.
    • Most people will have a personal AI assistant, the capabilities of which will depend on level of AI development and civil rights allowed to AIs.
    • Most people will probably have neural implant interface. If not, they will have AR glasses and haptic clothes. (ObSciFi: Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End.)
    • Either big displays have gone the way of dodo, or we'll have proper video wallpaper. Depending on vagaries of fashion thanks to the AR glasses.
    • The Descendants of Khan Academy are responsible for majority of education, with public domain ones available for everyone and high end ones behind paywall. The STEM subjects will be more or less identical, but humanities courses will be biased according to parental preference. Or more sinisterly, by government preference. Electronic materials have terminated the textbook scam. Teachers (the expensive part) will supervise and help those students who have difficulties, but course providers will most likely monitor these interactions in order to update their materials. The Classic classroom will have gone the way of the dodo, while facilities for practical stuff (homeroom, electronics lab, chemistry lab, etc.) have slightly expanded. Really high-end and expensive education might involve VR chamber, palette of drugs, MRI, medical monitoring and uncomfortable resemblance to brainwashing.
    • Sexbots will be available, physically indistinguishable from normal humans without cutting the skin or invasive scan. "Companionability" will depend on degree of AI availability, but will minimally perform on level of a drugged-out porn star. Both male and female models are available, but female ones will be in majority for the same reason Playgirl is far less popular than Playboy. Unless they are equipped with emotionally-sensitive sapient AIs (which would open several cans of worms).
    • Traditional telephony, radio and TV have gone the way of the dodo and replaced by internet. The Internet, or more accurately the upper layers (I do believe that it'll still run on IPv6) have been seriously updated. Whether we'll be living government-monitored walled garden or heavily encrypted open source world depends on far too many things to predict. Much of the internet will be wireless, but for maximum reliability and bandwidth you'll still resort to fiber-optic cable.
    581:

    Re: "homosexuality" - except it's in other species. It has been observed a a "minority-but-normal" behaviour in many, many species, including non-mammals. Baby dinosaurs ( i.e. "birds" ) do it as well - as observed by no less a person then the late Sir P. Scott (!)) Which knocks your hypothesis about hormones during development on the head - maybe. OTOH, said observations also kill the christian/muslim idea of it being some horrible "sin" on the head as well, not that a few facts ever stopped believers.

    582:

    And ... if the currently lab-experimental graphene sheets method turns out to be scaleable & industrially-producable, desalination is going to be REALLY cheap.

    583:

    Designer babies and other biologicals, well beyond the point of species differentiation.

    Don't see that happening.

    When the human genome was published the most striking feature of human DNA was how few genes we really had. And of those genes, only 100 were different than those of a lab mouse (whose genome was published at the same time).

    When researchers began unraveling DNA they anticipated tens of thousands of genes to account for the complexity of the human mind and body. They assumed that they could find the gene for mathematical prowess, musical genius, or even high jumping ability. What they found is that the genes are merely the first in a complicated chain of events which create a human.

    Its the proteins created by the genes and the subsequent multiple interactions of these proteins with each other (and the proteins that they make, and the proteins made after that, and so on) which creates a person. The whole process is complicated to the point of invoking chaos theory, in that the processes may be deterministic but untraceable and unpredictable. Each gene is apparently wholly or partially responsible for multiple physical and mental characteristics. Disturbing one gene may result in a daisy chain of unforeseeable results. So even if they found the genes for blond hair and blue eyes, altering them may also result in an idiot savant, albino with webbed toes (e.g.).

    If (as it seems likely) the multiple level gene and protein productions/interactions which make a human being are complex to the point of being classified as "chaotic", then we can no more understand or trace these interactions than we can travel faster than light. There is no "gene" for height, or musical ability, or blue eyes, or male pattern baldness (much to my chagrin). These things are the result of probably nontraceable (chaotic) interactions between proteins made by genes and the other chemical made by proteins, and their interactions, etc.

    584:

    Cheap desalination.

    This.

    With unlimited cheap desalinated water we can remake the planet and make every desert bloom and feed every mouth.

    The key is the development of graphene. For now graphene can do everything but get out of the lab. But once it it can be manufactured in bulk it really will change the world.

    585:

    All of Austria is about the same size as Lake Superior. (83,000 square km vs 82,000 square km.)

    When you come up on to the Shield east of Winnipeg, you drive for two whole days before you come down off it again, and that's if you're turning south for Toronto. If you're going to Ottawa or anywhere in Quebec, you stay up on the rippled, wet, intractable billion-year-old mountain-roots another day.

    It's an area that gets tornadoes, ice storms, and mid-continental thunderstorms, that has effectively no soil or population, and which has lots of places where the existing rail right of way is the extent of the solid ground. (Muskeg. Which really is like that.) It gets cold; there was a recent "why'd you let the contract to a European firm" scandal after a cable-stayed bridge along a major highway shrank enough in winter to rip its roadbed off the bridge piers. People literally go insane from the biting insects. (Many more people wind up inadvertently high because they've been bit so much the anticoagulants in the insect bites are affecting their minds.) There's a 300km stretch of highway 11 along the north shore of Lake Superior where there is no AM radio reception because nobody and nothing is broadcasting.

    The effort to insert the power transmission system would be highly non-trivial.

    586:

    I've actually become guardedly optimistic about global warming.

    Coal has been killed by cheap fracking methane, which produces half the greenhouse gases per kWh as coal. Purists may want 100% renewables but that just isn't practical. And if you could wave a magic wand and cut GHG emission in half would that not be considered a great victory for the environment?

    If fracking killed coal, cheap solar and wind will bury it. EVs will do the same to oil demand. Fear of peak oil demand would explain a lot of current geopoltiics:

    https://thenearlynow.com/trump-putin-and-the-pipelines-to-nowhere-742d745ce8fd

    Long term however, this looks like a problem that will solve itself through clean energy technology. At least to the point where global warming becomes manageable by other means.

    http://planetsave.com/2014/07/02/ocean-fertilization-dangerous-experiment-gone-right/

    587:

    How is ammonia more dangerous? It can't go boom at STP; the vapour goes up. It's much harder to light on fire. Three orders of magnitude between the threshold of detection and threshold of harm. (It reeks and people notice before they're hurt by it.)

    Diesel... probably won't got boom, though if the crash aerosols it it might. (Lac Megantic's boom was the (illegally filled) tanker cars aerosoling.) It puddles on the ground; the vapour is heavier than air; gas or liquid, it burns readily. The vapour is bad for you.

    588:

    All comments noted and appreciated. My first scenario looked to me like the victory of the free market and the demise of the social structures that Polanyi would have said could ameliorate the effects of the worst excesses of the free market on human society.

    Another possible future is the end of labor as a necessary commodity. IF we dodge the bullets of climate change, resource shortfalls, and various forms of self destruction then with nanotech, biotech, 3D printing and automation of agriculture we might get to a post-scarcity economy and a virtually labor free society. With nothing material left to fight over we might achieve a decentralized political state. These could be the realizations of many of the separatist movements we have today. Spontaneous assortative communities might arise based on a variety of social, political and religious ideas. Regional governments might still be needed for mediation of disputes between communities, policing, judicial functions, and control of negative externalities. Probably some financing oversight and currency monitoring would be needed. Certain utilities, transportation networks, and communications would require coordination and maintenance. I wonder how we might finance research and development and large capital projects in this scenario.

    All this still leaves land as a commodity with value to potentially fight over. I remember my Grandfather saying, "Dirt. They don't make more of it. Be sure you get some of your own." Population control, sea-steading, and space habitats could address some of the population pressure, but competition for living space could still provoke bloodshed. The extent to which conflict continues might dictate stronger regional governments that require a larger share of resources. Land and religion in particular might continue as potent sources of disruption. As warfare gets more AI/mechanization the need for labor might dwindle even there.

    This also raises certain social questions. A job is a great thing to make you get up, get dressed, and get out of the house five days a week. It gives a structure to people's lives that many seem to need. I'm not glossing over what it is like to be a miserable, exploited person in a dangerous dead end job, but doing something seems somehow necessary or at least sometimes helpful in making people content with their lives. Will people be happy with mere avocations and possibly too much leisure time? How many artists and politicians do we need? Will we all just be sitting around in our bathrobes drinking beer and watching the internet all day?

    This still seems a more pleasant prospect than people as designed, disposable units of labor in my first scenario.

    589:

    Lack of any interests in common, being unable to follow the child's logic, etc. It is more common than not with such children, and I have known quite a few. It occurs the other way round, too, and then is often tragic.

    590:

    The reason to want ammonia is wanting fuel cells. It's easier to get higher efficiency if you're prying the hydrogens/protons off of nitrogen, rather than carbon.

    And of course we want the fuel cells because they beat the besnackers out of internal combustion for efficiency (and probably economic efficiency due to lower parts count). If you've got a lower energy density fuel, at least the system efficiency can be superior.

    So while there certainly are options for methanol-air fuel cells, they're not comparatively very good ones. And where you get the methanol isn't all that obvious; anything that starts with plant feedstocks is cutting into food production and fundamentally inefficient. Direct synthesis off of 20% efficient solar PV or any kind of wind beats it in unambiguous ways.

    591:

    There's going to be a global warming related refugee crisis, but I'm not sure it's going to be as big as Charlie pointed out, ASSUMING the equatorial countries become developed.

    One word: Bangladesh. About 90% of the population live less than 10m above sea level, and there are around 200M of them. What are the chances of Bangladesh developing before regular storm surges from enhanced-strength tropical cyclones ...?

    But it's not just equatorial and sea-level rise related. Shifting rainfall patterns and persistent black temperature emergencies are probably going to render about half of China and India — not to mention the US deep south — unsurvivable without aircon within 50 years. And large chunks of the North American grain basket are going to become non-viable for agriculture, at least without drastically re-engineered crops, for the same reason. It's not just mammalian enzyme systems that don't take kindly to excessive heat; plants suffer as well.

    Then you've got the collapse of ocean food chains. In many countries, fishing provides most of the protein in the human diet; yes, you could in principle substitute (imported) soya, but it's still problematic. What is the whole Bay of Bengal piracy problem about? Or the civil wars/insurrections in the middle east?

    Desalination is good, if you're within a hundred miles of the (rising) coastline, but is it yet cheap enough for agricultural irrigation as opposed to consumer use?

    592:

    Oh, yes, ammonia CAN go "boom!":

    http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/13/130418-west-texas-fertilizer-explosion-fire-anhydrous-ammonia-science/

    It's less of a fire hazard than many other things proposed, but it's still one.

    The danger of breathing it is if people can't escape fast enough, as in a leak on a motorway - one breath of it, and you can't see and start coughing uncontrollably (which absorbs more). That's not all that different from chlorine.

    It's also corrosive, which adds failure modes that (say) methane or methanol don't have.

    593:

    OK. Good point. But they are only somewhat better than combined cycle engines, which is what I was talking about for railways. And you can use waste plant material (e.g. straw) for methanol production.

    http://www.fftc.agnet.org/library.php?func=view&id=20110725161023

    594:

    That's "unregulated-because-Texas fertilizer plant goes boom; cause unknown". Nigh-certainly not directly the anhydrous ammonia.

    And yes, ammonia can go boom; people have run diesel engines on it. What I said was that it doesn't go boom at STP, and it doesn't; it turns into vapour and rises into the sky.

    It is corrosive, but the handling techniques are very well developed; the stuff is used in massive quantities in agriculture. Connectors, tankage, etc. are all standard catalog items.

    Methane and methanol are less efficient, and run you into "how do you air source the carbon?" and that doesn't have good solutions.

    Anything effective has to air-source any carbon, work well in fuel cells, and have a simple/direct electrically driven synthesis path. (Mass process heat from burning natural gas can't continue.) That turns out to be a really short list of potential pumpable fuels.

    595:

    Ammonia; high vapour pressure at STP, meaning it reaches toxic or lethal levels in ordinary air. I'm assuming the sort of long-haul freight train we're talking about is going to be carrying multiple double-digit tons of the stuff as fuel for hauling 25,000 tons of freight up those long gradients.

    I'm assuming that the most probable location for a derailment or crash, all else being equal, is near points, signals, or stations. These are frequently places where we have townships. And I'm assuming that one of the effects of the bad weather/end of cheap hydrocarbon burning is going to be to reverse suburban flight, increasing population density.

    If you've got grade separation, an increased emphasis on safety relative to contemporary North American rail, and don't use ammonia on commuter/passenger services or inside city limits, fine. But the prospect of spilling multiple tons of anhydrous ammonia inside a dense urban area does not fill me with warm fuzzies.

    596:

    You can use waste plant material but something already was; plowed in, mulch, animal bedding, it's got a role. (Very often a role that's important to the soil carbon cycle; you want to leave the non-food parts of the plant on the soil so you're not extracting the fertility of the soil.) And there just isn't that much of it; 1% photosynthetic efficiency times whatever -- even really good "eats the cellulose" -- process is giving you methanol is way under 1% efficient. Direct ammonia synthesis is dependent on the efficiency of the renewable energy generating the electricity and the specific process chosen but can easily be way over 10%. Even if we're just talking the ships-and-trains portion of the transport energy budget, that difference is important.

    597:

    The sheer "Amount of Stuff you REALLY NEED to KNOW" is huge & probably growing.

    THIS RIGHT HERE!

    If there is to be any kind of realistic optimism for 2117, it is in the widespread adoption of "best practices" about everything starting pretty much immediately, because otherwise we are all going to die (or at least suffer horribly and lose 90-95 percent of our population.)

    "Best Practices" would function as a "religion" or something akin to a religion, with as much social, political, or armed force behind it as necessary. I'm not sure exactly how it would work, but it would involve a radical redefinition of "what matters" vs. "what doesn't matter," careful instruction about how to think clearly and be uninfluenced by propaganda, and a reworking of historical education focused on teaching what worked and what didn't. (Yes, the past is a horrorshow; we will show you how to not repeat the past.)

    598:

    Thing is, long haul freight lugs an immense amount of ammonia around in tanker cars already. (A quick google gets me 3.9 million tons in the US in 2007, for example. And another 1.9 million tons on barges.) It's a very common industrial feedstock and fertilizer/fertilizer precursor. (Note that I live next to a major freight line. I've got reasons to be aware of this!) There's no plausible substitute in the fertilizer role, so as much as railways don't like having to ship TIH material due to liability (as various common-carrier laws require them to do), this is a problem we have to deal with anyway to maintain the food supply.

    So it's not adding a problem; no new infrastructure in the sense of capability, though we'd certainly need some in terms of volume. It's much better to expand a mature technology (which bulk industrial ammonia storage is) than to have to invent a new one.

    I agree with you about grade separation but the cost of underpassing every single rural road is... non-trivial.

    599:

    I have rarely seen straw ploughed in in the UK, and I live in our main grain-growing area. It used to be burned off, and now is piled and ignored (generating carbon dioxide and sometimes methane, eventually) or shipped off for burning in power plants. Some is used for bedding, but there is a massive surplus. The days when straw had a value to farmers are half a century gone, which is why they were so unhappy when burning off was forbidden. From a look at the Web, things are not all that different in the USA.

    And, sorry, but your figure of way under 1% is nonsense. Photosynthesis is more efficient than that, but we can ignore it, as I am talking about material that has already been produced. Also, I am not talking about its use as a universal fuel, but specifically as an alternative to ammonia as a fuel for running trains across (say) the Great Plains or Siberia.

    600:

    Every generation thinks they've invented sex and all the games that can be played. But it's worth noting that in the early 1930s Robert Heinlein found his wife when he "tried out" his best friend's fiance, apparently an arrangement everyone involved was amenable to, with the added interesting fact that Heinlein and his best friend were both graduates of the U.S. Naval Academy!

    This information is from my reading of Heinlein's biography a couple years back, and I can't find my copy to make sure I got all the details right. Perhaps someone can correct me if I have misremembered.

    601:

    And don't let me forget the consensual love-triangle (possibly a threesome?) with L. Ron Hubbard.*

    My point being that uninformed theorizing about the sexual practices of another age is pretty silly.

    • YUCK!
    602:

    That's "unregulated-because-Texas fertilizer plant goes boom; cause unknown". Nigh-certainly not directly the anhydrous ammonia.

    Yes, it apparently was yet another ammonium nitrate explosion:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Fertilizer_Company_explosion

    Note that it happened in West, Texas which neither is nor is in West Texas. Commas matter!

    603:

    Well, yes, it is, but it's not problem-free even in the west:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minot_train_derailment http://www.cornandsoybeandigest.com/crop-chemicals/anhydrous-ammonia-faces-challenges-rail-transport

    And ammonia-powered fuel cells are assuredly NOT a mature technology, whereas (large) combined cycle generators are.

    I am not saying that your idea is insane, because it isn't, but that it introduces more serious problems than it solves. Atmospheric carbon isn't the daemon it is made out to be, not least because it isn't all that potent as a greenhouse gas. What we need to do is reduce it to its recent 'natural' level (say, 1850), and NOT pump it directly into the upper atmosphere (i.e. aircraft should use hydrogen). Ammonia is bad for those, if burning it releases any nitrogen oxides.

    604:

    Yeah. My mistake. The links I found indicated that there was a secondary explosion, but that seems not to have been the case. Note that is the main explosive danger with diesel, too - it will rarely go "boom" on its own, but can form an explosive mixture with air, and a hot enough fire or other explosion can set it off. But let's agree that the risk is not high, certainly compared with things like gasoline and arguably even diesel.

    605:

    If we get a laborpocalypse/robotopia I think humanity's biggest problems in 2117 may be social-psychological. I fear humans have an instinct to want to feel useful and needed (probably an adaptation for working in groups), and a universal leisure society would be plagued by widespread ennui, feelings of purposelessness and meaninglessness and having an essentially pointless and parasitic existence and depression resulting from that. Status-anxiety vs. the people still needed for as-yet-unrobotosized tasks might also be a big problem. I also fear a leisure society would trend toward becoming a sort of eternal high school where cruel zero-sum social gamesmanship serves as a primary source of status and meaning. Even if I'm wrong about this being an inherent problem, I fear a lot of people who live through the transition would have these problems because they've been indoctrinated into the work-culture meme of "if you don't have a job you're an evil parasite and should feel bad."

    I'm actually more worried about this than about mass poverty. The latter at least has a straightforward theoretical solution, and from what I've seen young people today are relatively well-disposed toward socialism so I'm relatively hopeful they'll actually create the institutions needed to deal with that problem once they take over from the generations that grew up fearing the Red Menace (and I think it seems as likely as not that the mass technological unemployment and life-extension trains won't really get rolling until after that's happened). The ennui problem is something we don't even really know how to address, and don't seem to be giving much collective thought to, probably because it seems like such a "First World problem" in today's context, because of the way we discount "soft" problems like that, and because the idea that "stuff + freedom = happiness" is still something like orthodoxy.

    So, assuming a "middle of the road" scenario with an abundant robotopian society but no full-on Singularity stuff...

    I think in 2117 psychology and especially fun theory may be a very big deal. Maybe in 2117 the biggest remaining profession will be a sort of life coach who helps people create and fulfill narratives of personal meaning, purpose, and status in ways that don't step on too many other toes.

    Highly realistic virtual reality (which seems plausible by 2117) will probably be a help there. In 2117 I can see much of the human race spending much of their lives "in the Matrix," in virtual environments that offer more scope for fun, adventure, meaning, and status than the safe, tamed, sanitized "real world." Identity in some massive multiplayer VR game may be as important to many people in 2117 as your job is to many people today.

    Using this as a springboard to a broad generalization: assuming no big disasters or great stagnation, I expect the world of 2117 will be richer than ours, so its people will have fewer poor people problems and more rich people problems.

    606:

    Um, the UK doesn't have the tornados that tornado alley is famous for. Or the wildfires. On the latter, SDG&E is on the hook for most of a billion dollars worth of damage from not rigging their power lines tightly enough. During high winds back in '03, the lines touched, sparks flew, and you saw the resulting fires on the BBC.

    And grade separations get humorous on tiny towns with tinier budgets and reasonably flat land. Heck, I've seen a planning board go ballistic when some idiot suggests a grade separation for a highway. The reason they went ballistic was because no one wanted it, except for the idiot planner who thought that throwing it in at the last minute would somehow solve a dispute that was already mostly solved. Still, the point is that even something as mundane as burying or elevating a railroad isn't cheap, and if the alternative to stringing these oh-so-dangerous lines and building grade crossings everywhere is to add some battery cars to a train that's already a couple of miles long, I'm pretty sure I know which way most municipalities will vote.

    607:

    Ah!

    There's our core disagreement. I find the folks asserting that we need to go to zero net carbon emissions by 2025 to avoid 2 C of anthropogenic warming (note that feedback effects can give us much more than the purely anthropogenic warming; 8 C can't be ruled out) convincing. Which means getting entirely away from combustion tech.

    And, yes, adding carbon to the atmosphere is only about a quarter of the direct heat trapping. It's the main feedback, though; add more carbon, get more water vapour, get more other things.

    We're seeing that the first thing to go is not the coastline or the habitability but food security; it's quite plausible that the whole eastern Med -- Greece, Turkey, and Egypt -- are going to get what's happening to Syria, for example. It's quite likely that a hundred million Americans are going to start migrating away from a central desert. And so on in all directions. I don't think we've got a lot or time or a lot of expectation of a working industrial economy; the folks doing analysis of fossil shorelines in Alaska are getting "3.5 metres by 2100" answers, not 1 metre. All of Greenland can go under Milankovitch cycle forcing, and that's way, way less than what we're doing.

    nullschools.net lets you have a near-real-time view of ocean currents, sea surface temperature anomaly, wind patterns at various altitudes, and so on. You can see the Gulf Stream not making it over to Europe; you can see the "trade winds" circulation pattern collapsing and the replacement running tropical air from 25 N straight up the mid-Atlantic to Svalbard.

    608:

    Ok. Now let's talk about the parts of the equatorial countries that aren't Bangladesh.

  • "Shifting rainfall patterns and persistent black temperature emergencies are probably going to render about half of China and India — not to mention the US deep south — unsurvivable without aircon within 50 years."
  • And the arctic region is not survivable without sources of heat. That hasn't stopped humans from living in Alaska, Siberia, or Scandinavia.

  • "Then you've got the collapse of ocean food chains. In many countries, fishing provides most of the protein in the human diet; yes, you could in principle substitute (imported) soya, but it's still problematic."
  • Fish farming has gone from supplying less than 5% of human consumed fish to 50% in the past few decades. There are still a lot of problems with fish farming. I don't know whether they're solvable or not, but I'm optimistic

  • "Desalination is good, if you're within a hundred miles of the (rising) coastline, but is it yet cheap enough for agricultural irrigation as opposed to consumer use?"
  • Not now. However, I'd argue it's now where renewables were in the late 2000s on its own development curve. Look at Figure 2. I don't know if it will become cheap enough for irrigation. However, solar and wind have so far exceeded expectations people had for them at the beginning of the century.

    http://chinawaterrisk.org/resources/analysis-reviews/desal-in-china-trends-opportunities/

    609:

    Well, yes, I find them convincing, too - but that's not the point! Zero net carbon doesn't mean that every use on its own has to be carbon-neutral - that's monetarist dogma applied to carbon! As I said, in the UK, almost all of the carbon in the straw currently goes into the atmosphere, indirectly - and I would bet that is true in the USA, too. So, if you regard my proposal as not carbon-neutral, you also have to include some way of preventing that in YOUR scheme.

    And a perfectly good objection to my scheme would be that it would need more than the currently available surplus biomass of the right type. I believe that is not so, but I have not looked at the data, and could be wrong.

    One of my favourite quotes: the truth is rarely pure and never simple :-)

    610:

    We do, however, have places which get hit by serious (60+ MPH, sometimes 80+ MPH, occasionally 100+ MPH) gusts many times a year, every year - i.e. every location in the area gets that, not just that there is that, somewhere. And I don't mean just the tops of mountains, either. Gusts of below that don't even get reported on the BBC if they occur in north-west Scotland.

    611:

    To Charlie, re adversarial images mentioned on Twitter, it is reasonable to expect an advertising image/ad image blocker arms race. (Note I haven't played with/don't know this stuff; just been watching the papers go by, and a older NN guy of my acquaintance affirms that it remains a hot topic.)

    Recent summary article: https://blog.openai.com/adversarial-example-research/ (24 Feb 2017) (older but pretty pictures: Exploring the Space of Adversarial Images )

    and very recently a defense example on arxiv then a proposed attack against it. Biologically inspired protection of deep networks from adversarial attacks (27 Mar 2017) then Comment on "Biologically inspired protection of deep networks from adversarial attacks (April 6, 2017) A recent paper [1] suggests that highly saturated deep neural networks (DNNs) might be robust against gradient-based adversarial perturbations. We here show that the observed robustness is likely a side-effect of numerical limitations that arise in the high-saturation limit and which prevent stable computations of the gradient. These limitations can be lifted by a simple and stable estimate of the gradients.

    612:

    You protest too much about electrification difficulties. There must be technical fixes for all the problems you raised. It's the will that's lacking. Since you have diesel electric locomotives already it shoul be fairly trivial to design a hybrid diesel electric which could serve a partly electrified line while the technology for the more difficult sections is developed. Austria may be smaller than Lake Superior but it's only a small part of Europe.

    613:

    Combustion without fine black particulate carbon resulting is very hard to achieve, though. So any combustion tech is a problem even if all the source carbon is air-sourced carbon.

    And, well, we're past comment 600.

    MY scheme would say "stop growing cereal grains".

    Cereal grains are an optimization of labour inputs; if you're starting off with a digging stick and a flint sickle, you must minimize labour inputs. If we're trying to keep agriculture going with an industrial society, huge labour surpluses, and really iffy weather, labour inputs aren't what we should be trying to optimize.

    Generally speaking, the dark colour in "rich dark earth" is carbon; you want continuous top cover for all sorts of mostly-water-related reasons (retention, erosion), and you want carbon from the last growing season's plant matter getting into the dirt for nutrient retention and general soil fertility reasons, not all of them well understood. This is where the trad three and four field rotation schemes come from; grains don't put back, so the other three years need to do that part. Only we've started substituting external inputs for rotation because it ups total yield very substantially.

    Only it won't when the rain gets erratic. So you want something where you're planting a bunch of stuff together; you want something where you're optimizing the growing season down, and you're really interested in minimizing your external inputs because there only external carbon source is one we have to stop using. There's a bunch of options; milpas, no-till with stuff like quinoa and buckwheat, eating a lot more squash grown under a shade crop (which can be a lot of things), and so on. And compost, plow under, or let the roots rot in the earth to try to get the carbon flow going from the atmosphere to the dirt.

    614:

    Or I could be familiar with the difficulties involved in running rail lines or roads through those places.

    Electrification means two things; widening the right of way (so the power lines have a place for their support pylons) and (as Charlie notes) getting rid of the level crossings. (So you have less to worry about in the way of "idiot in dump truck with the bed up intersects power line", etc.)

    Over the Shield, the substrate is right there -- stable interior craton, continental bedrock on the surface. It's really expensive to move the stuff out of the way. And there are thousands of kilometres where you would have to widen the right of way. (There are also places where the right of way is going between two lakes and is just barely wide enough for the rail line, or, well, a bunch.) Plus the drainage is bad; adding an underpass means it will flood and adding an overpass means it will ice in the winter.

    And there's no one there, so no existing access roads or other logistical support structure, and building access roads has all of these problems.

    So, sure, of course there are known technical fixes. They're just implausibly expensive to apply on the necessary scale.

    615:

    If (as it seems likely) the multiple level gene and protein productions/interactions which make a human being are complex to the point of being classified as "chaotic", then we can no more understand or trace these interactions than we can travel faster than light.

    Which is why I think the potential for using the new "deep learning" multilayered neural net AI as a tool in genetic analysis is interesting. As someone noted upstream, the nets train themselves to do tasks, no understanding needed. Quite possibly not of genetic consequence, but I'd bet something will come out of it.

    616:

    Methanol and ethanol burn very cleanly, as may be seen by the colour of the flame (i.e. blue, whereas almost everything else is yellow) - I have no idea why.

    While I agree with you about the improvement of agriculture, there really isn't much alternative to grains in many places. For example, what should we grow in the UK, as a source of calories?

    617:

    Methanol and ethanol are expensive to produce from plant sources, though; someone may come up with a good cellulose cracker, but presently you're starting from sugars. (That is, food.)

    The UK is nigh-all in USDA zones 9 and 10; the flip answer is that you can grow darn near whatever you want.

    Less flip answer; beans, squash, amaranth, quinoa, potatoes, buckwheat, whatever arboriculture suits the soil (the Niagara peninsula, which is a wine growing region, plus peaches and cherries and currants and apples and pears, is in 5b; I'd think you can grow must anything on that list plus tree nuts), beets-turnips-carrots, jerusalem artichokes. Some sort of oilseed, plausibly sunflower. Currants and rhubarb for the vitamin C. Leafy whatever, including the cruciferous vegetables.

    Sorghum makes good beer. Currently grown in the UK as game cover. Something to help out the barley (no one is going to give up beer or whiskey voluntarily). Useful as a late-rising shade crop over the squash.

    Whether with gardening robots or communal greenhouses or whatever; it gets the land area down, the pesticide inputs to zero, and maybe most of the fertilizer inputs to zero, too.

    618:

    On a radio show on NPR (USA non-commercial radio) I heard a sample of synthesized text-to-speech as used by the blind when they want speed-read. If I recall correctly it was about 340 words per minute. I coulldn't follow it, but people who'd been practicing for a couple of years could. Learning to follow it probably takes a smaller total time investment than learning to read that fast.

    619:

    Carbon marketing might seem to work, but I'm suspicious, because it's going to be hard to punish rich scofflaws, and most of the burden still falls on the poor (they have to live near polluting plants, while the rich owners pay a fee to rich investors to keep them running. That's not the most stable system politically).

    In any case, we're talking most of a century down the road from our currently feeble attempts to set up carbon markets. Assuming the miracle happens and we manage to survive 2oC increased average global temperature, I suspect we'll get well past burning much of anything for energy. And note that I think this will take a miracle, so I'd also suggest that assuming politics as usual now won't get us to the 2117 that Charlie started us talking about.

    If we get there, we'll probably also have fewer hyper-rich people, and the markets, if they exist at all, will look as different from the computerized gambling pits we have today as today's markets look from those of, say, 1917. In such a world, something like a modern day carbon market might be more unworkable than disassembling the infrastructure that allows people to extract, ship, or manufacture oil, gas, and coal and forcing the world to make do with the available alternatives.

    620:
    Um, the UK doesn't have the tornados that tornado alley is famous for.

    The UK has a higher density of tornados per square mile than any other country in the world. (And higher than many of the states that make up "Tornado Alley"; IIRC Florida, Kansas, and one or two others have higher densities.)

    However, they're much more likely to dissipate harmlessly (which is also true of many in Florida). And of course even when they do strike populated areas at high strength our rather stronger buildings tend to keep the casualties down.

    621:

    Julian Bond noted that “If the resource constraints don't get you the Wankers will!”

    And the Wankers cause surprising resource constraints, including massive deforestation. Warning: link not for those of a sensitive disposition: https://tinyurl.com/lutaclk

    MirrorField noted “I do think at least some sort of fusion power will be available.”

    Definitely maybe. As the saying goes, fusion is always 30 years away. But then so is Zeno’s paradox: with each new step, we’re halfway closer to the goal, so surely we’ll get there eventually. Not sure whether I’m being sarcastic about this or not. I have this sneaky suspicion that we’re going about fusion like pounding pushpins with a sledgehammer instead of thinking laterally (e.g., using a softer pinboard, replacing the pins with velcro).

    Charlie noted: “Saudi is basically the Titanic heading for an iceberg right now, in economic terms: they won't be able to keep it up much past 2020.”

    More details please? I would’ve thought the trillions of petrodollars the Saudis have been stocking away in various places for the past 50 years are still out there waiting to be used to buy out and control the next big energy source that might compete with oil. But it’s not an issue I even remotely follow, so I plead ignorance on this one. Maybe all those dollars have been stuffed into the g-strings of strippers and in 2117, the strippers will rule the world economically?

    Robert Prior noted: “The last time Ontario teachers went full work-to-rule as a job action it was a public relations disaster.”

    Yes, and this has been true for most actions by government unions. In the case of teachers, the only people you harm by a job action are parents, thereby completely undermining your case. You want to affect the government, and the way you do that is by refusing to produce any government paperwork and doing other things that tick off the politicians but don’t affect the parents in any way. As the necessary exception to the rule, you only process paperwork for the kids where the kids require this, namely in the grade(s) right before college applications where the kids need exam records. Spend your time teaching and nurturing the kids and you win over the parents, who in turn put pressure on the government to cave in and give you what you want. The same approach works at any level of the government: ministerial correspondence is mysteriously lost or (worse) leaked to journalists, someone accidentally downloads ransomware onto a minister’s computer, the Phoenix disaster (http://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/reevely-the-phoenix-debacle-turns-1) suddenly starts affecting the salaries of elected officials too, etc. etc. It’s probably a good thing government unions haven’t figured this out yet.

    Daniel Duffy noted: “When the human genome was published the most striking feature of human DNA was how few genes we really had.”

    Completely wrong. There are ca. 20K human genes, and our closest relative (the chimpanzee) differs from us by ca. 4% of that number, amounting to 800 genes; that doesn't begin to account for allelic and other variations in those genes. Worse yet, those numbers only apply to the ca. 1.5% of the genome that is conventionally considered to be coding DNA. We still don’t have a solid idea of the function of most of the 98.5% of the human genome considered to be junk (noncoding) DNA. Nature doesn’t waste resources on such a huge scale; it costs too much in energy terms. Thus, this noncoding DNA does something essential. We’ll find out just what it does eventually. The rest of your analysis is equally flawed (humans differ from mice in far more than 100 genes, protein interactions are highly complex but not even remotely chaotic in their behavior). In addition: yes, scientists do prefer to look for single-gene explanations because, in part most scientists see simplicity as elegant, but I’d be surprised if even a small percentage of geneticists ever believed in single-gene explanations for complex phenomena. None of the geneticists I work with believe this.

    DD also noted: “Coal has been killed by cheap fracking methane”

    Only for as long as fracking companies aren’t held responsible for the laundry list of expensive environmental and human catastrophes caused by fracking. Only industry flacks currently believe fracking is a good solution. You know this from comments on previous blog entries. Stop flogging that dead horse.

    Graydon noted: “Many more people wind up inadvertently high because they've been bit so much the anticoagulants in the insect bites are affecting their minds.”

    Never found that from mosquitoes (I'm a mosquito magnet, and worked several summers in the field in northern Ontario), but yeah, what you said for blackflies. We used to call it “black fly fever”, and I’m not sure whether it was the anticoagulants or simple giddiness from cumulative blood loss.

    622:

    Lack of any interests in common, being unable to follow the child's logic, etc.

    Oh, agreed. But I've seen plenty of cases where each side makes an effort to take up those common interests; and some where there's mutual effort to try and follow / explain / trust in logic, etc.

    IMO the cases where the failures happen isn't necessarily caused by an IQ differential - those same dissimilarities happen to families right in the middle of the distribution curve.

    I was incredibly lucky in my mother and father; a narrow measure of word association and puzzle-solving was irrelevant to that, they worked damn hard at being good parents. I watched my mother become a capable skier, and my father take up cycling, so we could have interests in common as a family (unfortunately, I failed to take up gardening or cooking - though I managed to learn how to use a sewing machine and to become a competent trainer). My wife and I took up Judo in our late forties, because the boys were enjoying it so much.

    ...when his teacher suggested that firstborn reading Pratchett in Primary 3 was unusual; I replied that I'd been reading Tolkien at that age, seemed perfectly normal to me...

    623:

    what should we grow in the UK, as a source of calories? Well, I've just eaten two of them this evening ( BURP ) Potatoes & Beans. Last-years unfrozen Broad Beans actually & very tasty it all was ... if only because there was Wild Garlic, Allium ursinium, in with it & melted butter on the spuds. ( So there ... ) With the warming climate, growing human-edible Sweetcorn is getting better in the UK ( Provided you can keep the effing grey squirrels from eating the cobs ) but potatoes might be more of a problem - at the moment we're in a near-drought situation here & I'm having to water my new-buried potatoes every alternate day, to get them to sprout & grow. Ditto my pea-rows & the beans, as they get planted.

    624:

    "Jerusalem" artichokes have one drawback, they contribute largely to methane production ( Out of the human-consumers arses! ) NO Rhubarb, either, given the effect on the sewage disposal (!)

    625:

    The bell tolling for coal went almost unremarked last fall. Last November, there decided a proposal for a peaker plant in Long Beach. They decided, purely on cost, to pack the proposed plant full of Tesla batteries and use that to meet peak demand, rather than to build a natural gas plant that would only run during peak demand periods.

    Now I agree that huge numbers of lithium batteries probably aren't the universal solution. I don't know how they work below freezing, for instance, and I honestly don't know if we have enough lithium to replace every peaker plant with a battery backup. Still, if it's cheaper for at least some plants to just put in banks of batteries to suck electricity when it's cheap and let it out after sunset when it's expensive, then we're on our way to solving the duck curve problem without fossil fuels at all. It's not just a matter of fracking paying its real costs (and I happen to agree with you that the real costs are higher, and worse, the companies are trying to externalize all those costs onto the mineral rights owners whose gas they are extracting).

    626:

    The Trans Siberian Railway electrification was finished in the early 2000s.

    627:

    How about leaving the reactor in a nice big concrete building next to a chemical plant that sucks in air and spits out kerosene, which you then use to run your diesel locomotives? Hydrocarbon fuels are really convenient in many ways.

    628:

    Those diesels would be turning air-sourced carbon into black particulate carbon. Don't want that.

    Lighting stuff on fire really isn't the optimal way to go about it.

    629:

    Siberia is mostly taiga; that is, it is mostly flat and has dirt.

    (It's also got Europe at one end and China and Japan at the other, so it's got a better economic case.)

    https://www.google.ca/maps/place/Kapuskasing,+ON/@49.3985119,-91.6860389,12z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x4d3ddfbb95c5a333:0xa8ce0dde1f882e2d!8m2!3d49.380268!4d-82.400129!5m1!1e4

    Kapuskasing has some relatively nice terrain; that's where the railroad and the highway go through. Making the railroad right-of-way wider involves moving an awful lot of miserably tough rock.

    Or http://spaceref.ca/missions-and-programs/international-space-station-1/expedition-30/photo-impact-crater-manicouagan-reservoir-in-quebec-canada-as-seen-from-orbit.html where they had to put in a dam (well, three or five dams) to get the rivers to flow in one particular direction. Only moderately more gnarly terrain than usual.

    630:

    Fish farming has gone from supplying less than 5% of human consumed fish to 50% in the past few decades. There are still a lot of problems with fish farming. I don't know whether they're solvable or not, but I'm optimistic

    No, this is fucking terrible news. I cannot believe I'm going to have to set forth your Reality once more until you get the fucking point. Do a GREP, it included up to date (1-2 years ago) fishing data from Peru / Iceland and the pet food industry amongst others showing fucking megatonne gaps / drops (-25% in the last 20 years). Not fucking tonne gaps, mega-fucking-tonne gaps.

    Oh, and the really cute bit:

    But it turns out that non-carnivorous fish, such as Chinese carp and tilapia, actually do consume quite a bit of fishmeal. In the early 1990's, vegetarian fish farms started adding fishmeal to their feeds to increase their yields. In 2007, tilapia and carp farms together consumed more than 13 million short tons (12 million metric tons) of fishmeal — more than 1.5 times the amount used by shrimp and salmon farms combined.

    Milestone: 50 Percent of Fish Are Now Farmed Livescience, 2009.

    Big fucking hint: those are fucking FRESH WATER SPECIES USING SALT WATER FISHMEAL.

    I give up, I really fucking do. You're fucked and ignorant and cannot even learn.

    455,000,000 tonnes animal flesh consumed by 2050 and none of you have considered just how fucking massive the scale of that little industrial switch would be. It makes building a tiny insignificant wall across a country look like fucking lego for ants.

    p.s.

    Goats making the Sahara desertification quicker? Yes, we have models from Ancient Greece, the high-point of Western Civilization at how that happens and the time-scales, but at which point do you have ANY FUCKING IDEA how long it took and HOW MUCH FUCKING BIGGER THE SAHARA IS....

    Batshit anti-science insanity, both viewpoints.

    No, the fucking Bible is wrong, no they weren't enslaved and fucking nonsense in your heads means none of your Mental Schema will survive in 2117.

    So fucking irritated at this point.

    631:

    P.S.

    It accounts for fucking 50% BECAUSE YOU ATE ALL THE FUCKING REST YOU GIBBERING MORONIC APES.

    632:

    P.S.

    Those megatonne gaps weren't in commercially viable fish (i.e. the stuff that goes Ship - Net - Market - Table), that 25% drop was in the fishmeal supply.

    This is not good news, since that "miracle" 50% farmed fish takes five pounds of wild fish to produce a single pound of farmed salmon (less for carp / tilapia, but guess what? fresh water species consuming salt water biome is fucking suicide 101).

    You've had all these links, a year+ ago, it was carefully sourced and proven. And you're still wurbling around not changing your fucking tiny little BELIEF based Minds.

    ~

    Literally watching your species commit suicide and even given the data, fucking ignore it.

    2117 - No, you don't make it.

    633:

    The gaps are in the ranges of billion of tonnes.

    If you produce ~250,000,000 tonnes of farmed animal flesh (we'll stick to the usual Western chicken, beef, lamb, pork) per year your net input into the system (due to fucking biology) is in an order of *3-10 larger, and that's direct inputs, not the secondary energy requirements of the networks.

    In fish, 5-1 ratios are akin to lamb rather than chicken.

    Go look up the FAO data provided.

    Then understand what a 2-3 billion drop in the fundamentally lowest tier input you have that you've not already exhausted by over-fishing for the last 300 years means.

    Literally. Fucked.

    Cannot even have a discussion with Minds who cannot grasp the fucking scale of these issues.

    p.s.

    Ioan, well done: you get the literal "Don't worry chaps, we'll be home by Christmas" 2017 award.

    634:

    I got inspired by the discussion of autonomous cars and started on a story set around 2077, If anyone is interested I'll post it or send it to your email.

    635:

    100 years from now - I can't imagine much will remain of our current conceptions of productive work. Even in the context of some form of economic collapse, automation will proceed. The toothpaste is hard to put back in the tube, and we may not want to do so.

    Our current idea of 'work' and the value of a person based on the source of their income will need to change. Consider the current differentiation between 'unemployed' and 'retired'. One category is widely despised, while the other is much respected and coveted. To lose one's job at 40 and go on the dole is seen as failure, to retire (from the need to work) at 40 is seen as tremendous success.

    If we see work disappear in non-replaceable amounts I can see it going a couple of directions.

  • Standard dystopian SF story - ultrarich elites and vast masses of unemployed peons living nasty, brutish and short lives. Possible, but unlikely in the context of rapid information sharing etc. This isn't the Dark Ages, and the peons have communication and knowledge. Suppression is a lot harder - see how hard it was for the most powerful military in the world to impose basic order in a place that didn't want them there (Iraq).

  • Guaranteed Income. A long time hobby horse of leftists and libertarians, currently popular with Silicon valley types who see the automation coming. Nice, but our current cultural predispositions make handing out a living wage to all and sundry unlikely barring revolution.

  • Dramatically reduced pension age. Maybe everyone needs to work until (handwave) 30, following which they 'retire' from paid employment and settle into their pensioned life (which provides a basic income + perks relating to savings rate while working). We all keep the option to start businesses or otherwise be creative (write books, Etsy, selling baseball cards etc), but 'pensioned' age people working in the few remaining jobs are frowned upon culturally.

  • Concurrently I can see major increases in life expectancy causing complications - think of Real Estate when old owners might hold onto a place for 200 years rather than 40-50, leaving little option for young people.

    636:

    @Host - the bit you're missing is that (given people are wurbling on about schools, Khan academy nonsense and so forth): It's been long known that an "enriched environment" produces better Humans.

    2117 - no coral reefs. No tigers. No lions. No bears. No elephants. No Amazon Rainforest.

    You're going to have work really fucking hard at higher order cognition living in a global version of the Somme.

    The floors are slippery with blood: The world gyrates too. God is good That while His wind blows out the light For those who hourly die for us – We still can dance, each night.

    The music has grown numb with death – But we will suck their dying breath, The whispered name they breathed to chance, To swell our music, make it loud That we may dance, – may dance.

    We are the dull blind carrion-fly That dance and batten. Though God die Mad from the horror of the light – The light is mad, too, flecked with blood, – We dance, we dance, each night.

    And no, no-one in this thread barring host is even poking at the scale of change that will necessarily be-coming. Fundamental System Change, including global market chains.

    Why?

    Because the USA consumes 1.3 earth resources / annum itself, and the global total is 2.8+.

    You change, or Die.

    How much clearer from the Sahara do you want it? (And no, it wasn't fucking goats - pastoralism at the end cusp point of the median change might have had some small impact around local regions just to the west of Egypt etc, but look to massive levels of slash / burn akin to Australia for the real reason. Murdoch is trying to shoe-horn in a fable about the proto-Jews coming East to the Pharaohs and getting enslaved and it's all a fucking boring lying trite little wanky narrative that needs shooting like the Donkey in pain in the trenches).

    637:

    Look for many countries to no longer exist. Most of Africa, Middle East and Asia have borders drawn by former European colonists without regard to ethnicity or geography. In many cases (such as Iraq and Syria) this was deliberate and based on the time honored tradition of "divide and conquer". Also look for larger western nation to break up (UK, Spain, Italy) or have their central governments weakened (Russian regionalism, American states rights, even China with defacto regional autonomy

    The centralized nation state is an invention of the industrial era, created by Bismark in Germany and Lincoln in America. It's doubtful that.

    Something like the cyber tribes, city state and corporations as government entities as described in "Snowcrash" look likely.

    638:

    Agreed with most of what you have to say. But the U.S. won't change until we lose Florida, and which point we'll repent like 3-pack-a-day smokers who've stopped believing tobacco company propaganda after coming down with lung cancer at 45.

    After that we'll be "world leaders" on the subject and nuke anyone who runs a coal mine. (And yes, the stupid burns very, very painfully.)

    639:

    2117 is 100 years away.

    Your Mind is burbling along with an extremely narrow focus that's about to end and you can't even see it.

    “It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.”

    Look for many countries to no longer exist. Most of Africa, Middle East and Asia ...

    As ever, the hidden dreamscape of an unburdened Earth, with about 500,000 white people in it is the core of your Mind.

    And you wonder why us Abbos drink so much

    640:

    In 2117 "engineering" will involve almost no innovation. Rather it will be all about understanding what already exists, so when you patch one of the patches on the patches on the patches on one of the (multiple, interdependent) Legacy Systems From Hell the problems you create are smaller than the ones you're fixing.

    I can imagine in 2017 a naive student of the previous century being shocked to discover that "Move Fast and Break Things" wasn't the motto of a nihilistic terrorist cult, but that of a large, legal, legitimate business enterprise. Our era's worship of "disruptive innovation" may well look as distasteful to future eras as religious rituals involving cutting the hearts out of captured enemy soldiers look to us.

    641:

    even with perfect, free, reverse-osmosis membranes there is still a thermodynamic cost of 2780 Joules / liter

    http://urila.tripod.com/desalination.htm

    Not huge, but not really cheap either

    642:

    One thing: The next century will have a lot of labor to throw at problems. Oceans of it.

    Seen from a certain perspective "Automation making many jobs obsolete" and "Climate change and other disasters" are a nail and a hammer. So.. there is a very real possibility that a century from now the entirety of the earth is crisscrossed and littered with the many, many insanely large scale and ambitious projects that were undertaken to keep people employed and harden civilization against the whims of climate. Never mind electrifying rail - when you have craftsmen and women by the dozens of millions pressuring you to find them gainful employment, you do not merely electrify the line, you bury and depressurize it so it can run on magnetic levitation at supersonic velocities. And then you cover the stations in art. Does this make economic sense? Who cares, it gave meaning to the lives of the people who did it.

    And this does not merely restrict itself to physical infrastructure. Reading much of the code that the world runs on is kind of distressing, but that too can be solved by throwing a sufficiency of person-centuries at it. Writing a network stack, and an full-suite OS to "Formally Verified" standards would be a mountain of work. But it is not impossible.

    So the future? This future contains a lot of stonework, because, again, from a certain perspective a tunnel project is just a highly elongated quarry. The future contains housing and greenhouses and landscaping that is remarkably storm proof. Landscaping in this context meaning projects to engineer the micro-climate of entire regions via irrigation, forestation and albedo control. And so on.

    643:

    And there we have it, the why to the death of a species and the death cult in a can:

    And then you cover the stations in art. Does this make economic sense? Who cares, it gave meaning to the lives of the people who did it.

    You make your environment and pleasant and beautiful one because it enriches your Mind and Spirit and leads to happier people. You don't do it because it make economic sense. An "Economy" is there to serve Humans, not to be served.

    Well done, you just spelt out correctly why your fucking species goes extinct and your Minds are so fucking insane to network with (trust me, getting real bored of screams of "PSYCHOPATHS" - yes, we know dear, we know they are).

    And yes, the greatest irony is that the world's most beautiful metro stations are found in Russia (largely pre-Revolution, but many also converted: they did one thing right).

    looks at Brutalist Architecture and Concrete and Pepsi Brands and all the 20th Century hooks, grapples and harpoons designed to make Human Minds into slavish little machines

    Yeah, fuck it: nuke them from orbit, it's the only way to be sure.

    644:

    But the U.S. won't change until we lose Florida, and which point we'll repent like 3-pack-a-day smokers who've stopped believing tobacco company propaganda after coming down with lung cancer at 45. Our job as activists is to make this shift happen well before South Florida is convincingly a goner. (And that includes making many more activists and increasing activism levels among activists. (Counting myself as a slacker here relative to urgency.)) Pretty sure that a major political shift can be grown in the next couple of years in the USA re global warming and the catastrophes that it will cause. (Assuming short-term survival of the USA.)

    No tigers. No lions. No bears. Humans are doing horrifying things to megafauna, agreed, but there will still be some species of bears in the wild including brown bears (that will potentially eat humans if hungry, so there's that).

    And there are many species of mid-sized fauna that coexist with humans even in developed areas, e.g. in suburbian parts of my area (USA) some Corvidae (link only because I've never seen that page before) and other birds, deer, raccoons, various species of rodents, skunks, opossums. (A little more rural and a reasonably complete assortment of wild fauna appears and can be observed.) Growing up, much of my wild fauna experience was with even smaller organisms; insects, spiders, crayfish, and things seen only with a hand lens or microscope. (Also plants.) I.e. the awesome complexity of the biological world is available for looking, and hearing, and touching, and smelling. Not enough kids (or adults) get this exposure. (I give a hand lens to anyone who shows an interest.) Imagine observing dodder(warning loud) for the first time, and not knowing what it was.

    645:

    Yeah, no.

    This is 2117, not 2034. Your Mind is too slow.

    Crow says the f word YT: reality: 0.44

    More accurately, it tells a human what it thinks. And you thought Huginn and Muninn were myths?

    Growing up, much of my wild fauna experience was with even smaller organisms; insects, spiders, crayfish, and things seen only with a hand lens or microscope.

    It's all dead Jim, it's all dead.

    You're (no doxxing, guess) ~ 56 (3? was on the cards, but hey). That biological world is as dead as the oceans are in 2041.

    Not sure I can make you understand what path dependency looks like with the inputs you've already submitted into the system. Ludic theory: you're shit at it. Decent Game Players know the outcomes they're aiming for, thus tailor their inputs towards it. Unless, you know, you wanted Gigadeath and Self-immolation.

    TIME. YOU'RE NOT GOOD AT IT.

    AND WORSE, YOU'RE FUCKING RUDE TO THE ONES WHO ARE AND TRY TO KILL THEM. NO, REALLY: DO NOT APPRECIATE IT.

    646:

    Spam!

    TL:DR

    Where are we going to be, a century from now?

    Out of Context problem hits 2035-2064. Then the real one hits 2074-88. Then real fucking nasty destabilizing one hits 2090-2107.

    This thread has shown quite exactly just how unprepared people's Minds are for the actual reality (sorry people, pathway dependency and outcomes are a thing, esp. if you hold up snowballs in the Senate); middle-class quasi-Utopian (they're not Utopias, it's a wish that their World-View continues) dribble about how it's "all kinda the same".

    Fuck that noise. Dead Men Walking.

    ~

    The real issue is (grokk back to the UK gov banning "all drugs that have psychedelic properties" in 2016) how to survive the normies and become / engage / resist / transform.

    looks at Brexit / Trump / BIS Eurozone

    Fuck them, tossers. And worse: tossers who seek to stop anyone else being interesting / different / passionate / loving. CEMCM - it's not a literary device, it's a promise. You want to play, then, oooh, I don't know: what's that version of Justice where one has to submit to the penalties of one's own system? #2017 Wild Hunt is still on, of course.

    p.s.

    "Shadowbrokers" just dumped another mega-load of weaponry into the system. If the "Bankers" are going to be taken seriously, they kinda need to step into the role of Knights etc.

    647:

    Ohh, triptych.

    @Host

    What you're missing is that there's a break point coming up (think French Revolution) and none of your readers even want to imagine it; in fact, they desire to double-down into temporalnormative predictions.

    Now, there's a point we've seen before, eh? nose wiggle

    648:

    Out of Context problem hits 2035-2064. Then the real one hits 2074-88. Then real fucking nasty destabilizing one hits 2090-2107.

    I'm curious about your thinking here and would like to non-hostilely request cites.

    By "out of context" do you mean global warming/flooding/heat-caused environmental stuff, or do you mean something else? If you're thinking 2035 for flooding, I think it may happen earlier: I keep seeing target dates for various events revised earlier and earlier, and I suspect that climate scientists are currently aiming their reports at "sounds reasonable, please don't panic" when they should be telling us to panic!

    IMHO we can expect serious flooding within the next ten years. Worse, there's the feeling, completely outside of climate issues, that Cthulhu is coming soon.

    649:

    a major political shift can be grown in the next couple of years in the USA re global warming

    Well, a major political shift did happen last November in the USA re global warming...

    [fwiw - I voted against Trumpolini - nonetheless, as the election went, he is in office]

    650:

    First critical problem is food security. We have food to eat because there's six inches of dirt and it rains at predictable times.

    Once it stops raining at predictable times, you can lose the dirt (washed away, baked into hardpan, poisoned with fertilizer runoff...) or you can just not have enough rain at the right times or too much at others and there isn't any food. There is no clever technological fix for this when it happens.

    You know how Charlie goes on about how genre publishing is about supply chain contracts? So is food.

    Food gets to us using a big complicated network that runs on credit. It's really not that hard to crash the credit system; a combination of the carbon bubble popping and a bad response (would you take a bet that the Trump admin wouldn't treat "there's a problem with the money" as a reason not to go back to 20 USD/troy ounce of gold the way God and the Founders intended?) Crash the credit system and distribution stops. Harvesting may stop. Then what? (It better happen quick.)

    The scary, scary thing about current inputs is that a)we now have a good reason to believe we've doubled the Milankovitch swing (180-280 ppm; we're at 400 and rising, Mauna Loa has 407 per latest released) AND we know that Milankovitch swings can melt Greenland's ice. So the "oh I'm sure it's not that bad" sensitivity numbers the official projections rest on... are wrong.

    (There's a couple more of these -- ocean circulation and arctic melting feedbacks -- that are likely just as wrong.)

    651:

    If not collapse, weakly post-scarcity. You can't manufacture more time, higher positions in the positional goods game, more dysprosium, more species that went extinct 60 years ago. OTOH, fighting to control human labor, oil, or ore bodies seems nearly as quaint as fighting for a particular papacy. You can often trade design complexity for rare elements of the periodic table and time for a lot of things. And since added design complexity no longer needs to transit through a human brain most of the time, the tradeoff is "free" from a human POV. Extra complexity usually hidden but everywhere (like training someone to use an iPhone vs. an Apple ][, and comparing the respective hardware complexity under an electron microscope.) Wild card: what happens when the Machines of Loving Grace can fab up a cruise missile full of VX bomblets on request as easily as an agricultural survey drone, and we still haven't fixed the root cause of whatever occasionally makes 45 year old men murder-spree their entire families or workplaces?

    There's no way that planetary civilization is going to decarbonize fast enough to stabilize climate with emissions cuts alone. Active carbon dioxide removal measures are going to be required in the later 21st century. So if we're positing a 2117 that's not just skidding toward the big Final Collapse, the good news is that we don't need to invoke hard-and-fast rules like "the last drop of fossil oil is burned in 2050." The difference between top speed decarbonization under the Deep Green Planetary Dictatorship and a lackadaisical effort by Competing Cleantech Capitalists is more degree than kind. If we wanted to stabilize things with purely passive measures the opportunity already passed.

    The end of the age of mass-participation labor is a biggie. Weak post scarcity is... something like hunter-gatherer life, before they encounter Malthusian limits or charismatic jerks wanting to build temples and polities? But you get to gather orbital launchers and semiconductors from their respective strange new trees, along with the fruits that humans could gather from the trees of pre-antiquity.

    652:

    Fully-automated, end of work depends on silicon hardware to run the software. So here's last year's /r/collapse thought. What's the minimum viable civilisation that can support a few chip foundries? Because we won't be able to recycle computer chips for ever.

    653:

    Who let Catina Diamond in? I think they are off their meds again...

    654:

    Regards Global Warming & refugees:

    A million refugees from Syria are a sufficient 'crisis' to emperil the existence of the EU, and to move world politics vastly.

    And still I see people pointing out that global warming will only cause people to flee a few places - which will add up to only a few hundred million refugees, a billion at most by 2117.

    655:

    This isn't the Dark Ages, and the peons have communication and knowledge. Suppression is a lot harder ... SERSLY?

    Russia, Turkey, "Red" US states(?), Hungary, Venezuala, PRC ... etc. See you & raise you on that one.

    The reason it is "not done" in W Europe / Canada etc is the sheer cost in money time & effort to maintain the oppression & the game is perceived as not worth the candle, despite the attractions to those who always gravitate to positions of power. Different methods are used - with much more velvet gloves.

    656:

    At an individual level? Huge changes. At a statistical level? Not so much ... this is why I'm very wary of assertions that in 2117 society will look much the same as it does today

    I think the usual "the future is already here, just unevenly distributed" cliche applies. Even the Pharaohs no doubt had some "nuclear" families, and I'm wondering more about how the majority of the population will arrange their families. Even just looking at Australian statistics, the nuclear family is taking a beating - less than half of households and falling, even though they count non-traditional and traditional households as also being nuclear from what I can tell. The official statistic is "couple with co-resident children" vs "couple without children". I suspect much of that is demographic forcing rather than change in life stage behaviour though - viz, the boomers are aging and their kids are moving out.

    Some of their short-term projections are interesting: In 2011, there were 531,000 'other related persons' living in family households, accounting for only a small proportion of the total population (2.4%). This living arrangement includes arrangements such as elderly parents living with their adult child's family, or adult siblings living together. The number of other related individuals in family households is projected to increase to between 781,000 and 815,000 in 2036, accounting for 2.4 to 2.5% of the population. Then later they say Group household members are projected to remain a relatively minor proportion of the total population, accounting for just under 4% of the population over the projection period.

    657:

    The centralized nation state is an invention of the industrial era, created by Bismark in Germany and Lincoln in America. Not even wrong, I'm afraid Dates back to AT LEAST 1648 ( Frieden von Westfalen ) & longer, much much longer in some cases, notably "England" - centralised from Athelstan onwards, or Kievan Rus, or Ile-de-France gradually expanding to cover what we now call "France". Oh and Austria too ..... And that's from just Europe. Had we forgotten the "Middle Kingdom" ?

    658:

    This is a variation on the "End of Science" meme, & I don't believe this one, either.

    659:

    One thing I often struggle to work out when looking at those stats is where I get put, and where some other weirdos get put. I suspect that we're in the "group household", being unrelated adults without children (but two of us are sisters), and that our neighbours are "couple with children" - their parents and sibling are "other related persons". But that exercise also tells me that it's very easy to just not see sections of the population, especially if they want to hide.

    The poly community in the USA, for example, has many stories of people illegally living together in violation of laws or covenants that prohibit more than two unrelated adults living together or similar ugly nonsense.

    660:

    And yes, the greatest irony is that the world's most beautiful metro stations are found in Russia (largely pre-Revolution, but many also converted: they did one thing right). Bollocks Moscow Metro 1923 initial planning to 1935 first opening.

    661:

    Oh do stop talking this bollocks, please? Look, a lot of fauna are in danger, but screaming "WE'RE ALL DOOMED does not help, especially when you tell us untruths. Here, in NE London, the number of wild fauna is on the increase, OK? And we've had a very good year so far for butterflies - for the first time in a long time, I've seen every single one on my annual check-list. ( And a couple of others, too. )

    662:

    I posted a link. Yes, that was in the laboratory, but the same has been done elsewhere, it has been done on a small scale for well over a century, and there are good reasons to believe that it would be no problem to industrialise. There are LOTS more links that you can find if you want!

    To Heteromeles and Mike Collins: yes. All I was saying is that using methanol or ethanol in combined cycle engines is a better bet for railways with long distances between power feeds than ammonia-using fuel cells.

    663:

    I forgot to add this, as a response to "The UK is nigh-all in USDA zones 9 and 10; the flip answer is that you can grow darn near whatever you want." Bollocks. Insolation. Heat days. All of the statements in the following were checked with authoritative references.

    http://www.u-r-g.co.uk/faqclimate.htm

    And to Greg Tingey as well as you: I grow dried beans, winter squash and more, and the problem is getting the damn things to ripen. All we need is a wet August, and they don't - the sunlight in September is already getting weak, and it's almost hopeless from October onwards. And that is in the south of England.

    The simple fact is that, if we abandon grains as the main source of calories, we have to cut the world population by a factor of five (or some such factor). Yes, a good thing in itself, but it wouldn't be a good thing to do it by deliberate starvation. Some people disagree with the last.

    664:

    And because the tornadoes are almost always very weak - we used to called them willy-willies where and when I was a child. The real issue is that almost all north Atlantic hurricanes blow over Scotland, and many hit England; they are much weaker by then, but a single location can get hit by over a dozen a year.

    665:

    In any event: synthesizing methane via Fischer-Tropsch is more efficient/cheaper/easier than going all the way up the alkane chain to kerosene fractions. And methane burns cleaner, or you can use it in a fuel cell, or lose a little efficiency and reform it as methanol (of non-agricultural origin).

    Another thought: why use diesel locos? I know for a fact (Greg Tingey will have chapter and verse) that British Rail back in the day experimented with gas turbines, and earlier experiments with steam turbine powered trains were a thing. Steam turbine prime movers would have some of the drawbacks of steam locos (needing on watering stations as well as fuel dumps along the track), but with fine-tuning you could probably get a very clean burn of your non-fossil carbon fuels and thermal efficiency close to the carnot limit without the vibration and soot output of a diesel.

    666:

    Are you familiar with the scale of the Displaced Persons problem in Europe, 1945-51? (Exact numbers unknown, but estimated 11-20 million.)

    The problem can be addressed successfully, but doing so requires a political will that is simply not there right now. I'm increasingly partial to CiaD/Jean-Léon Moore's view that an eruption as historically significant (and unprecedented) as the French Revolution is coming due.

    667:

    I agree with her, too, but I am not sure about the timescale for 'due'; TPTB might (just MIGHT) be able to prop up the current approaches for another century. And I am really baffled as to might happen when things do fall apart except, of course, that the first stage is going to be really unpleasant for almost everybody.

    668:

    I'd grant you a century in linear, business-as-usual, time. However, I don't see the century ahead being business-as-usual; I expect a whole bunch of disruptive black swan events.

    Examples ... to take the USA alone, there's a high probability of a major quake hitting (a) the San Andreas fault (LA and San Francisco) and/or (b) the Pacific north-west (Seattle, Portland, Vancouver) in the next two decades. There's a moderate probability of Mount Rainier blowing its top, taking one or more major cities with it. There's a possibility of the New Madrid fault line cutting loose again (it last happened a couple of centuries ago) — that's going to have cascading effects all the way down the Mississippi delta. And of course there's the Yellowstone caldera.

    None of these are climate change related; none of them are human-initiated: yet all of them are unprecedented major national emergencies, and the probability of at least one of them happening within the next century approached unity.

    When we add direct climate events (think Hurricane Katrina; think the midwest grain basket drying up and blowing away: think Florida submerging) then it begins to look more like a disaster a decade.

    By this time next century, a polity the size of the USA could easily be spending as high a proportion of GDP on emergency damage control, climate mitigation, and reconstruction as the USA currently spends on "defense" — and the USA accounts for 60% of global military spending.

    The resource allocation is going to come from somewhere — but where? Because the oligarchs sure as hell aren't going to be happy about paying for it when they can simply buy a (much cheaper) deeper bunker to cower in ...

    669:

    Graydon noted: "The scary, scary thing about current inputs is that a)we now have a good reason to believe we've doubled the Milankovitch swing (180-280 ppm..."

    That is, the CO2 increase since pre-industrial revolution times is about twice the increase during previous geological oscillations? Not really "doubled" (407-280 = 127, versus 280-180 = 100 Milankovitch, thus a ratio of 1.27), but certainly "exceeded" and therefore encroaching on "scary" territory.

    Graydon: "... we're at 400 and rising, Mauna Loa has 407 per latest released)"

    To put this in more dramatic perspective, when I was doing photosynthetic studies in grad school (Toronto, 1987), measured ambient CO2 outside our lab was about 360 ppm; the value of 400 to 407 ppm means we've increased that by ca. 10% in only 30 years. (And that's a conservative estimate; Mauna Kea will have lower CO2 levels than an urban center.) Haven't made time to research the ambient CO2 level at which breathing difficulties begin, but wouldn't be surprised if we're heading rapidly in that direction.

    Graydon: "So the "oh I'm sure it's not that bad" sensitivity numbers the official projections rest on... are wrong."

    Depending which numbers you mean, they may not consider tipping points at which positive feedbacks run away from us. The big and scary one is Arctic, alpine, and boreal methane reserves in the permafrost. The quantities are enormous and the greenhouse effect is far worse than CO2 (28+ times the effect).

    670:

    The most efficient prime movers in the world are giant two-stroke diesel engines for powering ships; they can achieve over 50%. Locomotive-sized ones aren't that good but they are still better than anything else of the size.

    Diesels are also probably the most versatile internal-combustion engine in terms of what fuel they can use - many gases (acetylene is definitely out, though), liquids, and also pulverised solids (as per Rudi's original).

    Gas turbines work in applications like ships and power stations where you can either run them at full pelt or turn them off altogether. Lack of such conditions is the main reason they don't work on railways...

    Two gas turbine locomotives were ordered by the GWR but not delivered until after nationalisation, as an experiment into alternatives to steam traction at a time when diesel was still not obviously the best option. The first one was supposed to have the particular advantage of being able to run on bunker fuel; it also had the efficiency refinement unavailable to piston engines of a heat exchanger to transfer exhaust heat into the input air after compression. The heat exchanger tended to catch fire, and running it on bunker fuel both damaged the turbine blades by ash erosion and distorted the crap out of the combustion chamber due to unstable combustion.

    These problems could have been solved, and the second locomotive was a simpler design that ran on diesel fuel and lacked a heat exchanger. But the principal problem with both of them was that the airflow into the engine, and therefore the compressor power consumption, is more or less independent of power output. The turbines, in both of them, produced about 9000hp at full whack, of which 6000hp went to drive the compressor and 3000hp was left as useful output. But in the "idle" condition, though the output went to zero, the 6000hp consumption of the compressor remained.

    The result was that they were only usefully efficient at full whack; but railway duty tends to consist of long bursts of full power separated by even longer periods of idle. Thermal cycling stresses preclude shutting the turbine down altogether instead of idling. So the overall fuel consumption was shit, and there was nothing you could do about it.

    A third experiment involved a gas turbine power plant bolted on to a steam engine chassis. I think it was an attempt to emulate the simplicity which allowed the Turbomotive to succeed where others had failed. But it was no good either, for the same reason.

    The first incarnation of the APT was powered by eight 350hp Leyland gas turbines, but that was purely for power-to-weight and they just accepted the fuel consumption in an experimental machine.

    Fixed steam turbine plants can be efficient but they are much less constrained than a locomotive and can take measures to greatly improve efficiency which a locomotive cannot. Nearly all steam turbine locomotives were crap. The basic common thread of difficulty was that trying to squeeze all the components of a fixed turbine plant, including and especially the condenser, into the limited and awkwardly-shaped space available on a locomotive meant you ended up with half-arsed versions that didn't work very well; and you had many more bits to go wrong, which they did. They had no advantage in fuel consumption, were a pain to maintain, and were unreliable.

    Almost the only exception was the LMS Turbomotive which managed to be arguably less complex than a conventional steam engine, being more or less a case of unbolting the cylinders and valve gear from a Princess pacific and bolting on a turbine and gearbox in their place. So it basically swapped the burden of the maintenance-heavy valve gear for that of occasional turbine blade failures. It wasn't significantly better on fuel, but it was simpler to maintain, easier to drive, and kinder to the track (no unbalanced masses of con-rods). Had it not been for WW2 and after it the prospect of dieselisation it's quite likely that more would have been built.

    671:

    Successful grains agriculture requires a couple of things; one is the huge logistics operation to harvest and distribute. (Utterly mechanized and socially fragile; three or four intersecting credit networks.) That operation is vulnerable to disruptions in the mechanisms of credit. The other thing is water; grain-surplus regions are significantly high central continental grassland biomes, because those areas get lots and lots of sunlight. (Far from the ocean, little cloud, summer rainy seasons with high and increasing variability.) All of those places dry out if it doesn't rain because the potential evapotranspiration is so high (sunlight, dry air to start with); this is why southern Saskatchewan is a grassland biome, trees dessicate.

    Up the mean temperature and the amount of drying increases. Up the mean temperature and the variability in precipitation increases. The combination means the chance of a good crop year goes down; you're already looking at a situation where two years in five aren't so good for any particular patch of dirt, that's the 20th century norm. There isn't much room at all for increased variation in precipitation before yield gets hammered.

    Remember that the existing feedback is not who gets fed but price, and that the farmers are all plugged into the credit network that runs the harvest. So not only do we have an essentially unforecastable-for-a-particular-year increase in climate variability -- the average for Saskatchewan is very likely to get better, and the agricultural yield is very likely to crash as "what should I plant when?" becomes unanswerable -- there's a problem of capital; what funds the capital reserves required to make agriculture work when the return on investment is negative three years out of five? What can I change to stop having negative returns? (The answer there is very often "grow something with a lower return per area but a shorter growing season and less particularity about rainfall")

    It's all got to work and it's all failing. I don't think going off grains is going to be voluntary.

    (We can take the utility of pumping residential waste heat into greenhouses as read?)

    672:

    I am not so optimistic :-( I have seen TPTB manage to adapt to far too many breakages, often by making any opposition more painful for the sheeple in the short term, and then brainwashing them into believing that the new, worse situation is the best possible (and, as you say, opting out themselves). Standard frog-boiling. Yes, there is a chance that something will shake the sheeple out of their complacency / subservience, but I don't think I will live to see it.

    673:

    My guess, and this is purely a guess, is that genetics turns out to be equivalent to a fairly deterministic computer program written by untrained postdocs over the course of a few hundred years. This guess is consistent with the observations you mention above. Another major project will be the refactoring of the genome...Probably in an abstract sense at first.

    But...bear in mind that, now, we have the technology and the will to modify human fetuses. (As in, already done to a limited extent). It'll start with editing of simple genetic defects and then elimination of predispositions. (Serious stuff, the sort that kills you or has even odds of resulting in schizophrenia.).

    But, within 60+ years, I'll be surprised if the interactions aren't well enough established to do more good than harm. The chaos theory thing matches poorly with observations of familial offspring, so I'm inclined to think it is wishful thinking.

    Dunno about climate change - assuming that real storage solutions pop up, the trend line for solar looks pretty good.

    674:

    The argument against methane is that it's a powerful greenhouse gas and we shouldn't be making more of it out of plants that we could sequester or which could rot without much methane in the cycle.

    The argument against plant sourced fuels is that we're not going to have surplus agricultural land, and "agricultural waste" is opening the local carbon cycle which is (from an agricultural perspective) not what you want. (And also involves a whole bunch of assumptions about availability; some years, you have lots of corn stalks, and some years nothing got above knee high. It's waste, but probably not sufficient in amount to be worth cutting.) A system like that sets you up for "who do we starve to have the fuel to run next year's harvest?" problems.

    I tend to see the problem as "how simple and how local can you get the toolkit?"; big networks disrupt more readily than multiple copies of something simple. We really need the later for resilience.

    675:

    I am not denying that, but a lot of the same is true for most other crops. Be that as it may, the key problem is nutrition (say, calorie) density - there ARE crops that are as dense as grains, but none have been developed as a primary staple outside the tropics. Or, at least, I don't know of any, and have searched the literature. I doubt we shall see an abandonment of grains in the next century, except in places like the USA dust bowls; the predictions I saw is that Russia (Siberia) will take over as the next global supplier.

    Inter alia, moving to less mechanisable crops means a reversal of the last 2-3 centuries of urbanisation in Europe (more recently elsewhere). It's certainly doable, but it would be an immense task and require a combination of political will and technical sanity that I don't see appearing. I am afraid that we shall go through a global catastrophe before a new order emerges.

    "We can take the utility of pumping residential waste heat into greenhouses as read?"

    Only given the reversal of the urbanisation and, even then, it's of less use than is generally claimed. Insolation is more important than temperature for food production.

    676:

    Yes. However, short-haul gas turbine aircraft do NOT suffer very frequent blade failure.

    The plausible references I have seen indicate that steam, gas turbine and combined cycle engines died on the railways because the development was halted. Diesel engines of the time were 'better' but not much better, and had less potential - however, those in charge took the short-term viewpoint. Several very plausible papers indicated that it wouldn't be hard to produce vastly better non-diesel locomotive engines, using modern knowledge, materials and techniques, but it WOULD cost money and the engines wouldn't be of much use for anything else. So what do you think the chances of THAT getting funded are?

    677:

    Well, insolation is the direct energy input. Things like root temperature tend to be on-off switches for processes. (and to maybe control availability of other stuff that happens due to soil processes.)

    That said, residential waste heat into the greenhouse does help and it's something you don't need to find another source of heat for. It also helps with early starts so the plant has time to ripen in the available growing season. (When I was a child, Ottawa was really marginal for tomatoes; people would start them in February under lights so they'd have time to ripen outside in the garden. If the primary problem is "don't ripen in time", I can see a lot of early starts being used.)

    I don't expect deurbanization; I expect lots of urban greenhouses, rooftop plots, and so on. (Plants on the roof is a surprisingly good idea for brutalist architecture.) Lots and lots of closing the loop and making the food cycle as short in transport terms as can be arranged. Cropland I expect to head towards continuous ground cover, arboriculture (the return of the eastern chestnut could be a very good thing indeed!), and more complex sowing patterns focused on trying to guarantee some yield in any given year.

    678:

    It's known not to be - sorry. The more that people discover about genetics, the more that they discover that the simple Mendelian / Darwinian model is only part of the phenomenon. Not merely is the program self-modifying, it is in a partly non-deterministic language, and its meaning depends on the environment in which it is instantiated.

    679:

    I'm increasingly partial to CiaD/Jean-Léon Moore's view that an eruption as historically significant (and unprecedented) as the French Revolution is coming due.

    I agree completely.

    In the U.S. that revolution will kick off the moment it is declared that we have lost Miami to the sea. The U.S. south has a very justified bad reputation for racism and religious fanaticism, but it also contains something like 40 percent of the U.S. coast, including all of Florida. When they "get religion" about climate change they'll probably hang oil company executives from the lamp posts and hopefully do some serious questioning of capitalism. Hopefully someone will have a substitute philosophy ready to go by that time.

    In Europe I suspect that the revolution will involve austerity and the EU's unwillingness to run a debt, plus a huge disagreement about racism and refugees; which way that one will go is a tossup.

    I suspect that the U.S. intelligence agencies are going to hit us with a big data-dump on the subject of Russia and fascism soon, while the EU's intelligence agencies will soon be giving you guys a big data dump about Russia, the U.S., and fascism. I'm both worried about this and also looking forward to it. :-\

    Much more to say on this subject and still in too much a hurry.

    680:

    Not the "sheeple"; the point at which revolution happens is reached when the guard labour — army, police, militia, whoever holds the whip over the sheeple's collective back at the behest of the ruling elite — realizes that if things go on, they're going down with the ship.

    How we define "guard labour" in the age of semi-autonomous drones is an interesting question, of course. Small, professional, capital-intensive-mechanised armies along the lines of the current US or UK model tend to be tightly disciplined and apolitical; it's the sprawling conscript-driven forces that can put goons on the ground that tend towards coups — a small professional officer corps can flood an area with warm bodies. If robots turn out to be a substitute for conscripts, watch out: if robots turn out to be a substitute for artillery shells ... not so much. And, of course, this leaves aside the question of who runs the national infowar assets.

    Hell, the next generation of guard labour (from a revolutionary PoV) might actually turn out to be something arcane in the financial sector infrastructure — something like the Chinese social scoring system crossed with the e-cash system. (Once the public realize that they're trapped in a giant rigged negative-sum game, and the public includes the people who run the networks, the risk of the network itself defecting begins to rise.)

    681:

    AKA "Dawkins was wrong". Genes are not units of selection. There's a developmental space genes constrain but you can't map genes to phenotype.

    Mary Jane West-Eberhard's Developmental Plasticity and Evolution (http://www.oupcanada.com/catalog/9780195122350.html) is really, really chewy. I don't know of an effective popularization.

    682:

    Oh, quite, though (as you imply in your last paragraph), it might be the specialists who actually keep the system running. The trouble is that, over the past half-century, the sheeple mindset has been dominant among even the overseers and specialists. That's why I am not optimistic of an early awakening.

    683:

    I think you're overthinking this.

    (Much like nobody is going to declare Miami lost to the sea and the lawsuits about "misleading property values" will go on as long as the court system lasts. Closest thing you're going to see is the authorization of lethal force to keep non-whites from escaping some weather event.)

    Legitimacy stems from security; if my life is predictable and not substantially worse than I expect, the system of government has legitimacy. Which is the great failure of the French Revolution; they changed who was running the machinery of the state, but they didn't alter that machinery. (Though they did get a lot of stuff done that should have been done; metric, for example.)

    So I think we're either going to see a credit collapse -- system failure on "my life is not predictable; is this still money?" -- or a hunger-driven revolution. The systematic nature of the repression isn't going to matter all that much.

    684:

    3? was on the cards, but hey Would be interested to understand how that happened. No active deception. Anyway, all read, and yes. Agree with most of it except don't understand the details or methods backing the projections.

    Path dependence as a forecasting tool looks really interesting. (Yes, I know you've talked about it previously.) Any suggestions for readings would be appreciated; in the meantime picked (new-ish (2012) open access ref-heavy paper at random) this to get a feel for the techniques involved. Carbon Taxes, Path Dependency and Directed Technical Change: Evidence from the Auto Industry There are other new papers that look more to the point but mostly paywalled.

    685:

    Water pick-up on the move was a big thing here ... look up: "railway Water troughs" Meant you could run London-Newcastle without having to stop ( In summer London-Ediburgh, with a crew-change through a special corridor. )

    686:

    'Guard labor' in a technocracy is whoever programs the machines. My impression is that most compsci folks do not feel that they have any moral responsibility wrt to their programs. Therefore, once the machines are running well enough, these folks will go down with the ship as well.

    Medicine, bio-, neuro, psych, pharma, chemical and nuclear researchers and scientists usually take at least one course that covers their specialty's ethics challenges. Time for compsci/programmers to do the same.

    687:

    I am relatively certain that my son's Computer Science major does have one or two ethics course requirements.

    688:

    Re: 'Legitimacy stems from security; if my life is predictable and not substantially worse than I expect, ...'

    Plus, dead/drowned folk seldom launch lawsuits. So, status quo maintained.

    689:

    Much like nobody is going to declare Miami lost to the sea and the lawsuits about "misleading property values" will go on as long as the court system lasts.

    I've noticed a definite theme in a lot of the comments, that there's going to be a point where the crazy people suddenly wake up and climate change becomes an official emergency.

    It's highly unlikely. There's simply no limit (short of death) to humans' ability to keep believing insanity.

    What you'll see instead is a progression of newer, more insane rationalizations:

  • There's no risk, and you're a liar for suggesting it.
  • Ok the sea level is rising but it's just natural fluctuation.
  • This seems like a problem, but it wasn't caused by us.
  • This problem was caused by YOU. How dare you fail to convince us it was coming sooner!
  • There's no risk. There's sea level has always been this high, and you're a liar for saying otherwise. Burn the heretic!
  • ... and so on.

    690:

    The only compsci ethics course descriptions that I've seen online relate to data integrity, IP protections with no thought about further consequences. This is just like the agro scientists who designed the weed killers back in the '50s felt they were completely ethical because their product did as promised, i.e., very thoroughly killed weeds. As someone who may be exposed to such chemicals, are you comfortable that these agrochemists were and are acting ethically? IMO, this was not sufficiently far-sighted in terms of examining unintended (i.e., not directly marketable) but likely consequences. From what I've read, computer ethics is limited to property/$$$$ (just like '50s style agro firms) whereas the extent of computers in our society is way beyond that.

    http://www.aitp.org/news/98451/

    Excerpt:

    '…the unauthorized use of hardware, the theft of software, disputed rights to products, the use of computers to commit fraud, the phenomenon of hacking and data theft, sabotage in the form of viruses, responsibility for the reliability of output, making false claims for computers, and the degradation of work.” (Forester 4)'

    691:

    What you'll see instead is a progression of newer, more insane rationalizations: Have you seen the increasing appearances of arguments for geoengineering in (American) "Conservative" venues, or the changes in poll responses about climate change? For the later, here are some polls. Not a rosy picture but change is clearly possible. (If one believes multiple independent polls.)
    e.g. 2008-2016 Fewer Americans Doubt Global Warming is Occurring and raw info from polls (about size 1000) here. This one is helpful too, 2016 only but geographic detail: http://climatecommunication.yale.edu/visualizations-data/ycom-us-2016/

    April 2017 poll: https://poll.qu.edu/national/release-detail?ReleaseID=2449 Trends: https://poll.qu.edu/images/polling/us/us04052017_trends_Ubgw27pk.pdf/ In particular the question "TREND: How concerned are you about climate change; very concerned, somewhat concerned, not so concerned, or not concerned at all?" from 2009 through 2017: (Date) Very Smwht NotSo Not DK/NA Apr 05, 2017 45 31 11 12 1 Dec 23, 2009 29 30 17 23 1

    692:

    I'm hoping you're right about urban greening. Also, think that the variety of food crops will also expand.

    For example, at some point I'm going to try to grow chickpeas. Chickpeas are very high in calories and other nutrients as per UN and other gov't health agencies. And, because they can be processed in a blender at home into a variety of preparations and consistencies, it's a suitable food for a large cross-section of the population esp. kiddies-through-seniors who might not eat enough. Also, with improved agro-light technology and increased interest in urban food gardening, this could become a staple year-round home-garden crop.

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5188421/

    'Consumers of chickpeas and/or hummus have been shown to have higher nutrient intakes of dietary fiber, polyunsaturated fatty acids, vitamin A, vitamin E, vitamin C, folate, magnesium, potassium, and iron as compared to non-consumers.'

    693:

    That article is itself unethical! Firstly, ethics and legality are not the same. And, secondly, what the monetarists call software/data/copyright theft is NOT theft. I.e. yes, I agree with you.

    694:

    I have been trying that for decades, and have gone more-or-less bananas with it this year, after being given Around The World In 80 Plants stirred me into action. The usual problems are that the UK is very marginal or that the plants are justifiably neglected, but there are far more that would justify breeding as crops than are used as such in the west. As an aside, when I worked in California, I was seriously unimpressed by the restricted range of fruit available - admittedly, as someone who had lived in a similar climate in the tropics, I was rather more clued-up than the locals.

    695:

    Sample sizes are under 1,000 with lots of weighting. Given that the election polls were larger yet failed to predict correctly, not sure how reliable this info is.

    Also, 'concern' is not adequately defined. People could be concerned that this topic is taking up too much time so that other issues more personally important to them are not being addressed. Ideally, concern about global warming (or any topic) should have 10-15 climate-related more specific statements to further define the concern. Then you run your R2, map the results by total as well as by key subgroups (which would require a larger sample size, e.g., minimum n=250 per subgroup).

    Respondents should also rate communications, lifestyle/beliefs that are most effective/relevant/commonly used/trusted because the objective of this type of exercise is: How do you best move people from quadrant A (non-buyers) to quadrant B (buyers)?

    696:

    I.e. yes, I agree with you.

    FWIW, I don't. Specifically, I don't agree with SFreader's argument that the problem is a lack of University ethics classes among the paid labor class.

    Anecdotally, many software engineers and IT people are very concerned about the ethics involved in what they're doing, and some have taken to various forms of whistleblowing at great personal risk.

    The problem is that it's generally made very clear by management that engineering is paid labor and ethics will not be tolerated. Note the subjects in that class: they're all essentially just attempts to instill management's goals under a framework of morality to make them stronger (and cheaper).

    697:

    Okay - as someone who has worked at the highest level of this profession/industry, what do you feel a compsci/programming ethics course must include?

    698:

    This is a circular argument ... if the uni's, trade bodies/orgs and gov'ts don't establish a code of ethics, then management/buyers can require anything.

    699:

    I'd grant you a century in linear, business-as-usual, time. However, I don't see the century ahead being business-as-usual; I expect a whole bunch of disruptive black swan events Those are all natural black swans. Humans will intentionally generate their own disruptions as well, including perhaps self-generated OOC situations. In particular I'm expecting(&looking forward to any available retrofits, but expecting to be thoroughly outclassed regardless. :-) intelligence increases for various entities including humans (HT Nancy Lebovitz #334). Some will be meat, some technology, some a combination. (Echopraxia, which I need read.) Median intelligence will likely increase substantially (perhaps even over the next 20 years) and the high end will be very high indeed. And that's just linear stuff albeit with non-linear implications; JLM's posts about mental schema changes are very interesting and any such changes (or rounds of them) if major and widely distributed would completely disrupt business-as-usual. There's also the emergence and rapid evolution of information economies; don't have a feeling for how that would play out but clearly value could/would be measured in ways that are alien to (most of) us currently, and less material (better for the remaining biosphere). And weirder intentional disruptions can also be expected.

    700:

    Forecasting revolution is quite dangerous in any event.

    Here are a couple of thoughts that might be of use:

    --Chenowith and Stephan's Why Civil Resistance Works is a sociology work where they accumulated a database of violent and non-violent campaigns (n=323, from 1900-2006). I'm still reading through it, but the big take home message is that nonviolent campaigns were almost twice as likely to succeed in their goals as violent campaigns. Note that we're talking about something like 46% vs. 23%. Also nonviolence isn't good for things like secession (0% of attempts succeeded), but then again, neither is violence (4% succeeded).

    The reason I point that out is that the US is currently in a nonviolent ferment, and if it gets organized (the trillion dollar question), things are going to change mightily. I suspect a big change if this happens will be that the 2nd Amendment becomes irrelevant, because the guys hoarding guns and the industry(ies) they finance will cease to play their current outsized role in national politics.

    The big problem here isn't the will, it's the organization, and I'm quite sure right wing groups like the Koch network know this only too well. Still, movements have succeeded under far worse conditions. Note also that this isn't particularly about the democrats taking over, since few of them so far seem to have a clue about what to do with all the anger in the streets. If someone figures out how to make common cause around deacreasing the role of big money in politics and overturning Citizen's United, I suspect a lot of people from all over the political spectrum might be willing to campaign together, just to get the politics a bit cleaner. Whether or when this will happen, I have no idea.

    --Shall I point out that no violent insurrection in the US has succeeded? Forget guns for the moment.

    --South Florida is a danger zone. So is Louisiana. So is Washington DC if a Cat 5 storm hits it just right. So is St. Louis (New Madrid Fault). And most of the West Coast, due to seismic activity. Basically, we're one big disaster away from having to deal with a multibillion/trillion dollar reconstruction project, and that will change the geopolitics of the world.

    --Then there are the slow disasters of groundwater exhaustion in the Ogallala and the California Central Valley. And various dam and aqueduct issues. And the drying of the West that Graydon referred to. There are multiple levels of problems there: One is that grain from the Ogallala goes around the world to help stabilize food prices. When this goes away, famine becomes a bigger problem, and with it comes political instability. And we're talking in places like Egypt, not just South Sudan. A famished Egypt imperils the Suez Canal, and the transport of food elsewhere. On the US national level, the problem is that a lot of conservative western political districts might start drying up and blowing away, particularly in congress. They've had outsized Congressional influence for most of a century, but I think that comes to an end within the next 20 years, unless wind farming proves as profitable as actual farming. On the local level, we'll see a people moving away from drying farms. If we see them go over to wind and sun farming, the people might stay, but the food and water they consume will come from elsewhere--the Pacific Northwest and east of the Mississippi, most likely (on those electric trains they're charging...). Look for populations shifts into the Pacific Northwest and back into the Rust Belt.

    701:
    FWIW, I don't. Specifically, I don't agree with SFreader's argument that the problem is a lack of University ethics classes among the paid labor class. Anecdotally, many software engineers and IT people are very concerned about the ethics involved in what they're doing, and some have taken to various forms of whistleblowing at great personal risk.

    It might not be the problem, but it's certainly a problem. In that a bunch of folk — both engineer and management — might be very concerned about ethical issues, but often don't have a framework or model to enable them to figure out how to handle those concerns.

    At one level it's actually been quite reassuring to me that a number of my clients have been poking me about ethical issues since the Facebook emotional contagion experiment (and similar) a few years back.

    On another it's quite disconcerting that such basic ideas as informed consent, etc. are completely new to them. Stuff that's basic table stakes if you're in the psychological or anthropological or user research world is just completely unknown to the vast majority of folk I've worked with in the engineering/product domain.

    ¯_(ツ)_/¯

    702:

    I am not disagreeing with the substance of your comments. But professional ethics courses tend to be that way in general. They don't usually teach Profession X Morals classes. American lawyers go through pretty thorough ethical training, testing and CLE, but none of that adds up to "don't give technical advice on transactions that might be politically or morally repugnant to some classes of people." If anything it's the opposite, don't let your personal opinion prevent you from giving your zealous efforts to a representation. Morals might stop you from taking a job, though there are people who would give you grief on even that much, see for example Horace Rumpole's stance as a "taxi for hire."

    703:

    Anyone here know whether Germany has a code of ethics for their IT industry since it's been the lead country for data/online privacy legislation (1970), corporate behavior and employee rights issues? (I don't read/speak German but am aware that US corps have lost cases related to such issues in Germany.)

    704:

    Re: 'But professional ethics courses tend to be that way in general.'

    Nope! Not if you're in medicine, neuro, psych, etc. Whatever is taught as a no-no in your industry/profession's ethics course will get you tossed out of that profession if you're ever caught or even suspected of doing it.

    705:

    A damn qood question! I believe strongly that all professional qualifications should (a) separate ethics from legal courses, pointing out that they are very different and (b) explain that the former is about the effect of what you do, not just about what you do. The ones in medicine are a bit rule-based, but at least consider the issues. But that's a fairly radical stance ....

    706:

    It might not be the problem, but it's certainly a problem. In that a bunch of folk — both engineer and management — might be very concerned about ethical issues, but often don't have a framework or model to enable them to figure out how to handle those concerns.

    Reasons why the "break things and move fast" wing of the IT community is massively ageist:

  • Kids have lower wage expectations than experienced grown-ups

  • Kids have higher debt levels (due to inflation of educational credential prices) — higher motivation, higher anxiety, more obligingly willing to work 80 hour death marches

  • Kids have lower healthcare costs in general (fewer pre-existing conditions) so health insurance is cheaper or optional (doesn't apply in civilized polities with socialized medicine)

  • Kids have less experience of workplace politics so don't know how to organize and push back against bad management

  • ...

    Need I go on?

    707:

    instead of surface ships, think semi-submersible. Huge cargo "balloons", with neutral bouyancy somewhere around 10-20m. That's more than enough to avoid major storm impact, with powered tugs that float or swim depending on surface conditions.

    Low drag skins are already available (albeit in small quantities), and at cargo speeds, cavitation problems just aren't visible (cf low drag).

    708:

    I agree that a bunch of the folk in the valley (and over here) have those problems — and that they're evil, embedded, and systematic problems.

    However that lack of ethical knowledge on the engineering / product / management side seems to be in addition to those sorts of issue. I've been talking to folk who have (from what I can see) honestly been trying very, very hard to "do the right thing". Some of them in the NGO/non-profit sector. But they are still fouling up. Because those communities of practice just don't have that ethical perspective / toolset in their DNA.

    709:

    regarding 'trains' in specific and travel in general.

    I see a transition from trains and railway lines (which are single use infrastructure) to 'road trains' which is multi-use infrastructure.

    From self-driving cars, to convoys of self-driving cars, all the way up to tractor-trailor road trains for cargo and passengers.

    This will be doable within a couple of decades, and will be readily translatable to pretty much the entire world (where roads exist! A larger target than 'where rail exists).

    In the US, that would mean a real alternative to regional air travel (at least): catch a road-train from home to hub. As they improve, and speeds are allowed to increase, they will out-compete any long distance train or plane (when the entire point-to-point time is factored in).

    Planes will still exist for very long haul (transatlantic is difficult otherwise), but their fuel will be entirely (re)generated. (Some flight-grade jet fuel is already made this way)

    And existing railway lines can still be used -- but for cargo rather than people (which is much more energy efficient and use-efficient).

    710:

    We need ethics frameworks in software engineering quite urgently.

    Forget Therac-25 and similar; the potential damage from a catastrophic social network failure mode (turning it into a tool of genocide — I think I blogged about this nearly a decade ago) or a vehicle scheduler (mass fatalities possible) is actually dwarfed by the side-effects of a future Facebook-equivalent warping global politics into a dark pattern (e.g. algorithmically promoting fake news dreamed up as monetization clickbait by opportunists that ends up triggering election of demagogues and subsequent nuclear war).

    This stuff is non-trivial; I suspect if a modern Heinlein was writing the story about the Crazy Years, this time round he'd be talking about "the year we hanged the programmers" in future-historic retrospective.

    711:

    The problem with anything submersible is that it has no reserve buoyancy. Submariners are in consequence overfocused maintenance freaks who will murder you for very broadly defined values of incompetence. (Before your ineptitude kills them.) You can't expect to tow anything submerged from the surface, ocean towing or submerged towing is a very scary exercise, and insurance companies are going to be hammered flat by climate change. The willingness to support a change on that scale is unlikely to exist from that utterly necessary quarter.

    712:

    The reason to have railroads is steel wheels on steel rails; the contact patch is teeny and the cost per tonne is similarly teeny. Get the energy inputs on the books as energy and I expect we'll see much less trucking.

    713:

    Call me a raving ideologue, but I'd say ethical stuff should be inculcated into children and young adults long before they get near an actual job.

    714:

    The usual problems are that the UK is very marginal or that the plants are justifiably neglected

    In Australia we have the interesting problem that the local grains have mostly been deliberately re-wilded and their growing suppressed. Much like the americas, once you kill 90% of the population you pretty much eliminate agriculture.

    Bruce Pascoe is a fascinating guy and seems to have developed the skill of attracting a "we will work if you talk to us" crowd.

    http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-01-09/potential-for-farmers-to-grow-native-plants/8161212

    http://www.gourmettraveller.com.au/recipes/food-news-features/2016/11/bruce-pascoes-crowd-funded-indigenous-agriculture-project/

    There are a few others, but he's the easiest to find.

    715:

    This one I agree with wholeheartedly. One reason is that freight trains (IIRC) are over three times more efficient than are semi-trailers (63,000 payload ton miles/ton fuel vs. 18,500) (This from Deffeyes 2010. I swiped part of that table into Hot Earth Dreams). I didn't save the numbers for pumping fuel via pipeline, but as I recall, this is actually less efficient than sending it via train, which may explain those fuel trains that scare people. Note that the most efficient way to ship stuff is by ship, and big cargo carriers get up to 1,300,000 payload ton miles/ton fuel (which is a way of saying how far you can ship a ton of cargo with a ton of fuel oil). Even river barges do 160,000 payload ton miles/ton fuel, which is why keeping the Mississippi open to barge traffic is so critical.

    This is actually a major place where climate change bites down: on the docks. If sea levels start rising rapidly and somewhat unpredictably (because of ice sheets disintegrating, for example), then we will lose at least some bulk freight, and transport costs will go up dramatically. Rail may be the most efficient form of land transportation, but it's still pretty inefficient compared to ships. If energy costs increase, I'd expect to see less truck traffic and more rail and ship traffic, and if shipping becomes difficult, I'd expect to see a lot of suffering, unless a miracle happens, fusion becomes cheap, and battery-powered trucks pick up the slack.

    716:

    A couple of specific examples: I have been dumped/blacklisted by at least on recruiting company for saying I will not work for extractive industries that use people as an input (gambling, drug pushing, murder). I give them a list rather than explaining why, or just say "ethics". But some really, really hate that.

    I've also been fired for repeatedly objecting to putting illegal rules into a piece of software. The software automated timesheets - hourly employees clock in and out using it, they pay slips are fairly automatically generated from it. So it has a bunch of rules "employee cannot be scheduled for overtime without approval" sort of thing. Or, "overtime pay requires approval" as I was told to code it - employees can work whatever hours "they" like, but pay stops at the overtime threshold. Illegal? Pfft, whatever.

    717:

    One more general issue with ethics is the problem of customers disagreeing with you.

    Take the current wave of IoT hacks. The core problem is that the devices are so cheap, and cheaply built, that there's little to no security and generally no way to provide updates. Superficially this is a problem of unethical engineers working for unethical businesspeople selling insecure devices. But go up a level and look around, you will find that at one time you could buy a secure version of the product from someone. But it cost a little more, very few people bought it, so the market is now full of cheaper devices with no security.

    You might well be able to see this directly. Look at the modems your ISP sells or provides. There might be one that's more expensive and from a more reputable company, and has the feature "automatic firmware updates". I had that option once. But now I'm on Telstra cable and I don't have any real control over my cable modem - the firmware updates might happen or might not (I believe they do), but I have no influence over that.

    718:

    A note re. trains vs. trucks: Yes, trains are vastly more efficient than trucks, but they suffer from a significant problem: unless you're writing a story set in China Mieville's "Railsea" world*, the system of tracks isn't pervasive or omnipresent. You still need trucks for "the final mile" -- which in practice tends to be many miles. We're seeing lots of hybrid systems where rail transport is used to move trucks as close as possible to the final destination given the current rail infrastructure, then the trucks are offloaded and drive that final mile. (Google "intermodal transport" to learn more.)

    • One of his best books, imnsho.

    Charlie, I don't think you responded to my request for details about why you believe the Saudis are doomed in the next 20 years. (Possibly I missed it.) I wasn't being snarky. I really didn't get the logic. Clarification?

    719:

    And specifically in my case: I have a bunch of security cameras and a DVR. But I saved a pile of money by buying Chinese local market versions that have been hacked to run English language firmware. I can even use the manufacturers dynamic DNS. But what I can't do is apply or allow the automatic firmware updates, because at that point the cameras will either revert to Chinese only, or only work if they are on Chinese internal IP addresses.

    So I too am part of the problem. 1/3rd the cost and much less secure... I'm in.

    Admittedly I have taken the simple, brutal precaution of not hooking them up to the internet. They do what I want (including mirroring to an external drive in a less obvious location than the DVR), all I lose is the ability to watch the live feed on my phone from anywhere. Price I'm willing to pay (HikVision make much better gear than the bottom end stuff, but you pay... or, you know, don't)

    720:

    Also Troutwaxer @ 680 SUCCESSFUL revolutions need several factors to be present. Usually a weak "ruler" with a distressingly-independent spouse, perceived as a "loose cannon" + financial &/or military problems & usually poor harvests, + (see financial just previous) a ridiculous tax burden. Now then, where are these conditions likely to be satisfied for a new "revolution"? Apart from Venezuala or S Africa? Which are hardly major players.

    721:

    Charlie, you have just answered the Q I have asked ... given the "guard labour" requirement, I would immediately suggest the USSA, as Trump fronts the ultra-rethuglican's complete rip-off of everyone who is not in the top 5%. WHen it's actually percieved that he isn't draining the swamp, merely farming it for his & his friends' benefit????

    722:

    The problem is that it's generally made very clear by management that engineering is paid labour and ethics will not be tolerated. Note the subjects in that class: they're all essentially just attempts to instil management's goals under a framework of morality to make them stronger (and cheaper). NOT a new problem Study 19th & early 20th C histories of railways, esp in the UK. It was clear that the company Boards regarded their chief Engineers,( Who also oversaw the running of the locomotives & their staffing - usually ) as total servants, bound by Board orders & ethics were not part of it. It tended not to work out like that, often with the chief Engineers supporting "their men" either openly or covertly, against "the bosses", even though said people were regarded as "bosses" themselves ( A salary of £2000 + pa in 1900, was a VERY good wage. )

    This could replay today .....

    723:

    Shall I point out that no violent insurrection in the US has succeeded? REALLY? How about the slaveowners Treasonous Rebellion Mark ONE - in 1776? ( Admittedly with large amounts of foreign aid from royalist France, oops )

    724:

    Which is why the perpetual mantra of: "We can't get the trained staff" in this country is a perpetual & deliberate LIE. It translates as: We can';t get people under 30, or if pushed, 35" - because we can then con them - older people will push back & say "no" - guess how I know this?

    725:

    Certainly there is an ethical component to membership of a professional engineering institution, but that's not a solution (because membership takeup is IME rare amongst software types).

    However, over the past decade I've seen a rollout of "whistleblowing" services across the software industry; but that's medium to large scale workplaces (and for anyone who doubts that these have teeth, ask the CEO of Barclays who just took a £1.3 million hit to his personal income for pushing against whistleblower anonymity).

    And even ethics classes, and a strong culture of ethics (e.g. Hippocratic Oath, or in the U.K. The GMC Good Practice) are no defence - once you look at gagging clauses, naked manipulation of waiting lists by Health Boards (with Doctors complicit in the activities at the top level - it can't all be blamed on "hospital administrator"), or even naked vindictiveness as repeatedly detailed in Private Eye's "M.D." Column. Ethical behaviour by Doctors, Chaplains, and Army Officers failed in the shameful case of Baha Mousa; the Medical Officer was struck off, the Padre was dismissed, and all of the officers involved saw their career come to a sudden stop. Doesn't help the victim, didn't get the murderer(s) jailed.

    Fundamentally, it comes down to individuals, and "are you willing to (potentially) commit career suicide over this action, putting income to risk, and exposing family to hardship". I've faced an ethical issue only once in my career; and am able to sleep well because I took the "right" decision (but was fortunate that my wife's job gave me the luxury of taking the risk). I managed to stand up to, and prevent, a case of constructive dismissal by a petulant little wanker who confused "Daddy owns the Company and made me Head of R&D and 50 engineers, at age 31" with "I have absolute power, can sack people if I don't like them, and don't need to think about Employment Law". Unsurprisingly, he'd learned his management skills at Daddy's knee, and the firm's HR department had a long history of paying people off rather than getting nailed to a tree by the Industrial Tribunal.

    726:

    A couple of specific examples: I have been dumped/blacklisted by at least on recruiting company for saying I will not work [...] gambling, drug pushing, murder [...] I've also been fired for repeatedly objecting to putting illegal rules into a piece of software.

    Thanks for the examples! I admire your courage.

    I have a few examples which aren't really about ethics, but I think are instructive: First, I was once assigned to crack a certain company's music player DRM scheme. Now, I actually have no ethical problem with reverse engineering at all, but given that reading and understanding obfuscated code now exists somewhere between kidnapping and murder on the list of federal crimes (arguably worse than either), I had a problem with going to jail. Luckily I already had a better job lined up...

    Second, I once worked at a company where several senior executives were fired for fraud and embezzlement against the company. They walked away with many millions of dollars each in cash and stock, after which the company paid for their legal defense against the SEC criminal charges. They ended up with the embarrassment of mildly besmirched reputations, but otherwise were completely free to enjoy their vast wealth.

    The point here is twofold: just because you're ordered to do something illegal on pain of being fired doesn't mean you have some sort of legal shield. Management will happily use you as a scapegoat if it benefits them or the organization in the slightest. But the same isn't true at all of the management class -- they can act unethically or illegally with impunity.

    While some kind of ethics training for engineers is undoubtedly something which would be beneficial, it in no way addresses the real problem. There are very real problems in engineering culture, but the worst rot is coming from the Wall Street / profit at any cost thinking at the top.

    727:

    YES

    BUT

    Define ethics, as maybe opposed to morals as definitely opposed to "sin" ( Which only exists in the deranged minds of religious believers) Now then, you are going to go public with this? Expect to be drowned, immediately by the religious fuckwits, determined to input their BSF's "rules" on behaviour, especially sexual behaviour, rather on "Not hurting people" either directly or indirectly.

    THIS is what Socrates was murdered for: "He taught the young to ask too many questions"

    728:

    The scenarios seem to fall into basic types:

    The slowly boiling frog. One hundred years hence we are cooked.

    The sudden apocalyptic catastrophe. Nuclear, plague, asteroid, etc. Sudden death.

    The optimistic. Through population control, scientific advances, and unexpected resilience we muddle through. Lucky, lucky, lucky.

    More likely seems to be a serious event causing us to die back, rather than die off. Perhaps rising seas cause a refugee crisis in Bangladesh and India. The resultant crowding and malnutrition lead to a plague and the world population is knocked back 10-20%. Not an extinction but enough to decrease economic activity, slow global warming, and simply lessen the load on the environment.

    A brief nuclear exchange in India-Pakistan or the Middle East, could kill a few millions, disrupt oil supplies, and cause a nuclear winter that condemns a billion or two to death by starvation and disease, etc.

    From the perspective of a hundred years from now, it might be better to have this kind of thing sooner rather than later. The more recovery time allowed the better off we might be in a hundred years. It would also cut down on the amount of climate change that gets baked into the system. An early setback might pay dividends later.

    Any ideas on how much pruning is required and how soon? The exact nature and location of the event could deal a winning hand to some surprising folks. Wildly different results on language, culture, and religion could be predicted.

    729:

    No matter what we do, the world sea level is going up by > 3 metres by 2100 and the mean temperature will be > 2 C over the baseline.

    So we've probably broken agriculture already. Which means a survivor population in 2100 of a billion is ... optimistic. Not impossible, but it isn't the way to bet. The way to bet is human extinction.

    NOTHING is going to prevent that. The question is much more "how many people can survive?"

    730:

    My crude understanding of these projections is that they incorporate continued emissions even at reduced amounts. They nibble around the edges of the problem. What I'm asking is if we have an immediate drop of economic activity and population of, say fifty percent in the next five years, will that change our destiny? I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed, but might that be a survivable event rather than extinction? One billion people is still about the population of the world in the early Nineteenth century isn't it? It wouldn't take long for that to expand again.

    This is why it seems to me that the earlier the collapse the better. Our long term prospects would be improved.

    731:

    Nope. If alien space bats arrived tomorrow and removed every source of additional fossil carbon, > 3 m of sea level rise, > 2 C of temperature rise by 2100. What we're likely to get is > 5 C.

    Prospects improve if and only if the remnant population is continuing with a reasonably comprehensive post-carbon technical tool kit.

    (We could probably have it, meaning we very likely have the pieces, but it's not assembled; the bootstrap hasn't happened. Were I king, that's something that would be trying to happen with a priority second only to decarbonizing agriculture.)

    732:

    I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed, but might that be a survivable event rather than extinction?

    I was under the impression that the noble thing to do given such a question was to volunteer one's own ethnic group for extermination first.

    Let me start: I was going to posit the efficacy of eliminating all the white people in America towards the future survival of humanity, but 50%? Let's go all in: what if 99.99% of all men died out? Perhaps in 2025 men spontaneously decide to join Fight Club and the results are... disastrous.

    Would reducing the world population by approximately 50% save us from extinction? What affect would this have on the environment?

    733:

    But why would somebody want to believe that abortion lowers crime? Thoughts?

    Abortion obviously does lower crime. If 100&#37 of fetuses are aborted then in about a century there will be no crime at all. If 99&#37 of male fetuses are aborted and a few males (possibly lobotomised to pacify them) are kept around for insemination the crime rate would drop to a fraction since most crime is committed by males.

    734:

    It might take longer to get back to nine billion without men but we do have the technology to do it.

    I would volunteer the destruction of the USA and China if I thought it would save humankind.

    Graydon assures me that will not be enough. Oh well, last call.

    735:

    Any ideas on how much pruning is required and how soon? The exact nature and location of the event could deal a winning hand to some surprising folks. Wildly different results on language, culture, and religion could be predicted.

    You've no idea how many times this one has played out, do you? [Hint: you don't fucking GET or UNDERSTAND Jesus without understanding the Genocide angle, ffs. Theologically you're fucking ignorant apes pissing all over creation with pathetic notions of "original sin". It's a fucking GENOCIDE GAME you twats; running pigs off cliffs to get rid of "demons" was basically a cheat mode move - and they're really pissed off].

    He handed me a piece of paper, it smelled of ink although the weight of card was correct. "Its the best forgery the resistance can make, take it, leave, you have to survive". I shook my head and told him to hand it to another.

    "They're coming! That English bastard broke all our codes and passed them on" he panted, "Here!". It was a small ring, which you used to seal letters of marque. "If they know you're not a Protestant but one of Richelieu's men, you'll survive the destruction of the independent states". I shook my head and told him to hand it to another.

    I saw them long before they knew I knew they were looking for me. Small village postal office, I could spot them from far away. They sidled closer (and whispered "Remember, speak English!") and stood behind me. "You'll be home soon, we promise, just collect the letter and avoid the jathas, you're a citizen now". I shook my head and told him to hand it to another.

    "Look mate, you don't look like a fucking abbo and you've done us a good one for the last two years out here in the outback. We don't give a shit if your old mum got rolled by a bagman. The fellas back home don't see it like we do, and you'll be carted off and denied your property. Yeah, the horse, the clothes, even that timepiece you're so fond of. So fuck off, take this badge, it means you're just a little tanned by a bit long in the outback. Yeah, it means you're in the Army now. And don't you dare fucking mention the testing zone". I shook my head and told him to hand it to another.

    "Try it again: she'll not reject us if it's global". "It's a martyr complex, it thrives on this" "She made herself the worst and ate the evil because - why?!?" "She's poking fun at our games" "She cannot survive this, no human can" "Madness and an ice-pick through the frontal lobe, it worked for getting the Kennedy boys to toe the line" "Mother is dead: the other two killed themselves" "Looks like drug usage, alcohol most likely, trying to... oh shit. She's watching us. Even with that damage."

    Yeah. Genocide Games and 4th Walls. We See You

    ~

    Many more.

    Nine times they brought me back, nine times to participate in the Worst Genocides. You really don't understand what the Game is, do you?

    736:

    Have vague recollection of reference to either Russian or German research prior to ethics regulation (world war stuff) indicating that hormone injections to mother could reliably induce homosexuality in fetuses. Can't find it at moment. Some indications have been seen in animal studies.

    737:

    Yeah, if you were fucking lizards.

    You're not.

    Holy fucking shit you're dumb - I mean, this paper is like the GOLD FUCKING STANDARD for stupid white male heteronormative bias, and guess what?

    We describe six pairs of monozygotic twins, in which at least one member of five pairs were homosexual, and one of the remaining pair was bisexual, from a series of 55 pairs, reared apart from infancy; all the female pairs were discordant for homosexual behaviour. This and other evidence suggest that female homosexuality may be an acquired trait. One male pair was concordant for homosexuality, while the other was not clearly concordant or discordant; this suggests that male homosexuality may be associated with a complex interaction, in which genes play some part.

    Homosexuality in monozygotic twins reared apart. The British Journal of Psychiatry Apr 1986

    I mean, LITERALLY "LESBIANS ARE LIKE CULTURAL AND LIKE THE GAYZ ARE LIKE KINDA GENETIC BUT NOT REALLY BUT FUCK ME DO WE HAVE MASSIVE PENIS SHAPED CHIPS ON OUR SHOULDERS AND LINE DUDE, DO YOU KNOW HOW GENETICS IS AGAINST SHOVING THINGS UP YOUR BUM?!?"

    Yeah, no.

    Muppet.

    738:

    And re ethics in medical research... While hurting people will get you fired, qualitative violations of ethical publication practices are more common than not. Consider the actual proportion of reproducible published work.

    739:

    "We can't get the trained staff" in this country is a perpetual & deliberate LIE.

    Here too. Outside of some narrow specializations we don't have a shortage of skills. What we have is a shortage of skilled people willing to work for peanuts.

    Back before the big fire donut shops in Fort McMurray were importing Temporary Foreign Workers because they 'couldn't find Canadians'. Which was kinda true: they couldn't find Canadians willing to work a minimum wage job in a boomtown where the cost-of-living was astronomical. And a coal mine in BC listed 'speaking Mandarin' as a job requirement on its TFW application (it is rather hard to find Canadian miners who can speak Mandarin…).

    As always, the Invisible Hand only works for businesses — as soon as labour becomes scare government intervention is demanded, and given.

    740:

    [Citation needed]

    Look, there's actually a very interesting (a la Chomsky) line of discussion here (note the prior paper) about how Ethical thought and action is strictly delimited within your OWN FUCKING GROUP TRIBE and how access to that realm is tightly gate-keeped and ruled with an iron fist (but, you know, just not up your bum, despite that pathetic of all male Mental Schema, the myth of the Great Anal Tightness and how the Abrahamic Churches made anal virginity (without, you know, adequate STI knowledge) the fucking Holy Grail).

    I mean, literally: You don't even understand Bum Stuff accurately and make it a whole problematic thing.

    Notes to Apes: Both Male and Female genders (and a whole lot of others in the spectrum outside that little dualism - and remember kids, dualism doesn't exist) get kick-ass orgasms via a (oh, wait, here's the actual fucking point) COMBINATION of "front facing" genitals and erogenous zones via the anal cavity.

    Holy crap: Who knew? You do both to maximize pleasure, not just one or t'other?

    Fucking. Apes. And. Their. Shitty. Little. Dualisms.

    741:

    the Invisible Hand only works for businesses — as soon as labour becomes scare government intervention is demanded, and given.

    This is actually newer than you think - a big part of the post-war boom came from unionised labour. I grew up in a country with compulsory unionism - unless workers were on a salary they were in a union. Also full employment as a matter of policy.

    Right now one of the big "hidden" subsidies is government efforts to prevent unionisation. In Australia it's been very blatant, right up to the Australian Building and Construction Commissioner having the power to imprison people who refuse to incriminate themselves. The taxpayer will not only fund anti-union activities, they actively support making union activity illegal and to hell with the constitution/human rights problems.

    742:

    Remember kids:

    1/5 = Yeah, definitely the MALE GAYZ ARE LIKE GENETIC. 2/5 = But one is kinda not so OMFG THE GAAAAAAAAAAAAAYZ ARE GENETIC

    Note: only Male Gayz are threatening here, so only they are COOOOOMING ON YOUR FACE WITH AIIIIIDS.

    And no.

    Grow the fuck up - that citation is wildly popular / influential, which is why I sourced it.

    ~

    It's a Genocide Game: we're looking for the Minds thinking outside and beyond and not in qualitatively / quantitatively realms of Muppet land that means they enjoy the gigadeath.

    shrug

    743:

    What study actually proved:

    100% lesbians don't trust Patriarchal Society so lie and fuck you Crone Island

    1/5 Gay Men was naive enough to be honest and then got fucked over / blacklisted for the rest of his life

    Of course the study is about White People. I mean, it's only 1986, the UK doesn't have any non-CisWhite-non-Christian population, does it? I mean: literally fuck allllllllllllllllllllllllllll your bullshit.

    ~

    They Wake me up for Genocides: I am not exactly "human". It's more like: "Human Shell, Summoned the Wrong fucking Badger".

    p.s.

    We sober up soon. That's always fun. (There's a reason Jesus got pissed at weddings and used his "special powers" to supply great wines - watching humans have fun / laugh is KINDA THE FUCKING POINT OF YOUR EXISTENCE)

    744:

    We describe six pairs of monozygotic twins [...] five pairs were homosexual [...] from a series of 55 pairs [...] all the female pairs [...] one male pair was concordant for homosexuality, while the other was not clearly concordant or discordant

    Our hard hitting human genetics study will settle longstanding questions about human development by asking 12 people from a group of 110 a question. From this data we were be able to unlock the secrets of humanity!

    745:

    thatsthejoke.jpg

    Now do the actual work of the joke and trace the citations, not just in papers but in media and general cultural impact.

    Trust me, it gets better[1].

    [1] No, it really doesn't.

    746:

    Unfortunately, that's not hard to imagine.

    747:

    Actually, we do have a lot of post-carbon technology. Now if you mean post-carbon high technology, that's a rather bigger hurdle.

    The problem is that with 5oC rise in temperature, you're likely to get something like a >>75% reduction in human populations from present levels. Under such conditions, it's difficult to keep your technical experts. For example, with a 3/4 death rate, the simple, random chance of keeping your internet backbone experts alive is rather low. Or your computer manufacturers. Or your plant breeders. Or whichever. Not that the die-off would be random, I'm just pointing out that our civilization works because a tremendous number of specialists in different things have a framework in which to work. Trash most of the framework, and a lot of technology and supply chains goes with it.

    This incidentally helps answer a question I've received a number of times, which is: what's going to happen over the next 100 years, and what can I do to survive it. Unfortunately, the answer is a) I haven't much of a clue (because there are too many things that are weakly constrained, like technological advances and the willingness of people to keep remaking civilization rather than letting it burn), and b) you personally are not going to survive 100 years. It's a multigenerational stochastic process. How are you going to train your kids to survive, so that they can migrate and pass on your knowledge?

    748:

    the US is currently in a nonviolent ferment

    How true really is this? see: Berkeley, etc. No significant insurrection, but there are certainly clashes.

    749:

    I wouldn't be surprised if an anti-corruption campaigner wins a presidential election sometime soon. We need it desperately.

    As to non-violence vs. violence, I'm not sure I buy your argument, not because you're wrong, exactly, but I question whether you're measuring the right thing or whether you're measuring it sanely... For example, where do we draw the line between violent and non-violent revolutions? How many people have to die before we move a revolution from the "non-violent" to the "violent" category? What does it mean to "win" a revolution? Is non-violence an important thing in itself, or is it merely one measure of how well-organized a revolution is? Is there a difference in the win/loss ratio of revolutions where the violence is defensive vs. offensive?

    In short, you've taken a very complex subject and reduced it to a single variable, and I'm very wary of that kind of thinking. I'd rather see someone look at the commonalities between winning revolutions and the commonalities between losing revolutions.

    For my own revolution, I'd prefer to at least try non-violence for a couple years before engaging in violence; this seems like the ethical way to go.

    Unfortunately, I just don't think that's where our country is right now. If the right decides they've been betrayed by big oil, churches, the Republican Party, etc., I think they're going to get violent. Surely I don't need to explain the difference between expecting a certain behavior and agreeing with it.

    750:

    As to non-violence vs. violence, I'm not sure I buy your argument, not because you're wrong, exactly

    Or perhaps start by defining "revolution"?

    Was the Thatcher government revolutionary or merely a dramatic change from what went before? Is Trump? Ergodan? Putin, for that matter? Was the installation of Pinochet a revolution, or the de-installation of Hussein? I would really like to see examples, because there's (at least to me) a gradient where you start with relative trivia like creating national parks and eventually wind up creating superpowers. Where along that line does it become a revolution?

    We can then discuss whether a cop saying "or I'll arrest you" is violence, the threat of violence or merely an explanation of consequences (viz "or I'll shoot you" is a threat, "or you'll fall to your death" is not). I mean, what if the cop is a literal Nazi, is the consequence still a morally neutral exercise of legitimate state power? Again, where do you draw the line?

    751:

    I discussed my reasons re: Saudis around 383 and 394. Charlie may have a different opinion than I do...

    752:

    I didn't draw the line, a couple of researchers did. Go read the book if you want the details. It's substantially more complicated than a blog posting makes it, and deciding how to categorize each campaign was a substantial issue that they discuss.

    Winning was categorized as attaining the goals that they started out to achieve.

    And revolution is your word. They used campaign.

    753:

    The general problem with armed insurrection in the US is that right now it will fail. We have the biggest army and the biggest prison system in the world. We can already predict where the insurrectionists will go.

    Now, if you want a lesson for how to overcome such a system, there's a pretty darned good model of someone who took on the biggest military in the world with radically inferior forces and kicked them out of his country while maintaining friendly relations with them. His name was Gandhi.

    I'd also point out that, until 1776, the US revolution was non-violent (cf: The Boston Tea Party), and I'm not entirely sure whether it would have gone faster if it had remained non-violent. Someone could make some interesting alt-history where the US had remained resolutely non-violent, refused to support the British, and showed how to make a mockery of imperial violence centuries ago. One wonders how that would have gone, especially if the slaves were watching as their masters succeeded without violence...

    There are some things to realize here. One is to realize that culturally we're programmed and biased towards violence. Another is to realize that when a violent campaign fails, it's said that they screwed up. When a non-violent campaign fails, it's said that non-violent techniques are ineffective, even though they fail less often than does violent campaigns. There's quite a bit of distorted reporting there, and that's why data are so important.

    754:

    Treaty of Waitangi - success or failure? It was largely ignored by the winners for quite some time, the war petered out slowly, but 100 years later it's acknowledged as a very important foundation for the country.

    The Maori Land Wars more or less ended with the signing of the treaty and the campaign was unashamedly violent on both sides (it was a war). At the time, though, I think the Maori were correct to decide that non-violence would lead to extermination since that was the explicit goal of the British. Non-violence was used, but not very successfully, at Parihaka for example. I think we could use Tasmania as a counter-example of ineffective resistance leading to extinction. Context matters a lot.

    That said, I've been part of a campaign where violence was used against us, we didn't reciprocate, and we won. That was the political decision to end native forest logging in the South Island. That has largely stood the test of time - as has the Franklin Dam decision, and the recent Tasmanian Forest Accord is vigorously supported by almost everyone except the Tasmanian Liberal Party.

    755:

    I can never tell what tech qualifies as "high"; I mean "exists as a cohesive whole and can do things like build a greenhouse and ship to the installation site". Some equivalent of the 19th century "coal, iron, copper, and glass" basic toolkit. How well that does solar PV or how well it does VLSI computer chips (that wonder of our age) is secondary to how well it does ships and heat pumps and the requirements of a food supply. And it needs to be as short and as simple as possible, so it can be set up as a bunch of local self-sufficiencies (or nearly) that trade, rather than a single global supply chain because that's not something to plan on keeping. (Good if we can, but that seems like rash optimism in planning.)

    756:

    Not necessarily. My former employer has been advertising for people with a specific set of electronic / CS skills for years; and pays top decile. There is generally a vacancy on site, but not a ready stream of credible potential employees.

    As a result, we had French, Italian, Russian, Hungarian, Cypriot, Spanish, and Slovak engineers at a small site outside Edinburgh. Adverts for "new graduate" positions were intended

    It wasn't age biased (I was five years older than the next oldest in the team, a decade older than my next supervisor); and currently, they're advertising for graduate openings and finding it very hard to get people.

    757:

    Whoops, missed the "reply" tag...

    758:

    Really? That pessimistic?

    If really true & not justifiably alarmist, in order to push people in the correct direction, then not good news.

    759:

    You forgot your medications again

    760:

    The Maori had one specific advantage over many other peoples. They had Land/Property law, so that their negotiations were on a very similar basis to that of the Brits. Other places, esp Tas & the US "OWN" the land? You what? ... Results plain to see ..... Though why, then did the native populations do so much better in Canada than the US remains (to me) an unanswered question

    761:

    "One thing: The next century will have a lot of labor to throw at problems. Oceans of it."

    Unskilled labour, in the USA and UK, at least - unemployed lawyers, financiers, bureaucrats, 'managers' etc. aren't much use except as rather feeble grunt labour. Also, many of the high-tech projects you mention need more in the way of supplies and equipment than they do of labour. Oh, yes, there are possibilities that don't need huge amounts of those - especially in IT and, with land and time available, agricultural research.

    762:

    That actually supports what Greg Tingey said: they want either recent graduates, or people who are prepared to be paid AND TREATED like them.

    Several times over the decades, I searched the advertisements, looking for ones for senior, permanent technical staff. I wasn't surprised that there were none for which I was a strong candidate, but was depressed by the fact that I could find none whatsoever, in any field of IT, anywhere in the UK. Short-term ones, to dig them out of a hole that their negligence had got them into, yes. Senior, permanent managerial staff, in charge of technical staff, yes. Well-paid, nominally permanent, junior staff, yes - but never with a realistic hope of promotion.

    There is a near-impermeable glass ceiling for technical people in the UK; even organisations that used not to have one have installed one. Probably the most damaging is the one that Thatcher allowed the mandarinate to create - even I was a bit surprised when the Hutton whitewash disclosed that there were NO scientists in the senior civil service.

    763:

    Sorry, that was sarcasm. Around here businesses are all for eliminating the evils of government intervention and letting the Free Market determine things, until it might cost them money in which case government intervention is necessary so the free market can produce the right result (profits) :-(

    South of the border they had a Republican president declare that increasing union membership was the sign of a strong capitalist economy. Mind you, he was the same president who warned voters of a military-industrial complex gaining control. Maybe they should have listened to him?

    I'm old enough that I remember when attacking unions became standard as opposed to just right-wing political tactics.

    764:

    "The problem with anything submersible ..."

    That's a solved problem for (most) goods transport. Submariners are paranoid for good reason, but the same doesn't apply to towing goods just below the surface, and I don't know why you think you can't tow submersibles from the surface, though I accept that it gets tricky in storms. You DON'T have the same requirement for most of the vessel to contain air at NTP, and DO have an easy measure of depth, a very small density range to compensate for, and can do it by compressing and expanding a gas chamber.

    765:

    Submariners are paranoid for good reason, but the same doesn't apply to towing goods just below the surface, and I don't know why you think you can't tow submersibles from the surface

    If your submersible cargo barge takes on water for any reason, it's going down. If the tug doesn't cast it loose immediately the tug's going down with it. When towing, there's a non-zero risk of the towed object hitting other objects and springing a leak. Submarines are at lower risk of that because they generally loiter slowly and avoid shipping lanes; a cargo vessel is bound to do neither.

    766:

    Well I hope I'm not derailing or spamming here, but just wanted to point out may wants to call an election on 8 June.

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-39629603

    ljones

    767:

    Well, if it is full of air at surface pressure, or it runs out of power or gas to maintain its density, yes. But, if I recall, it has been done for both oil and fresh water, and quite a few other goods are either close to solid (e.g. bulk plastics) or could be carried in sealed, pressurised containers (e.g. grain).

    Oh, yes, there are risks - but there are for surface vessels, too. What I am saying is that it is NOT infeasible, nor even necessarily any more dangerous than surface transport.

    768:

    What I failed to find out is whether she thinks she can get the turkeys to vote for Christmas, is going to support a vote of no confidence in her own government, or is just going to ignore the law.

    http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2011/14/section/2

    769:

    Essentially her argument is that anyone who doesn't vote for the election is a nasty poopyhead.

    Presumably failing to get the required supermajority could be used as an excuse for a no confidence vote.

    770:

    Yes: I'm processing, and will have an opinion to emit on that subject presently.

    Meanwhile, this extended essay by a former Conservative is looking horribly prescient (especially the bits analyzing Theresa May's vision, and finding it ... lacking).

    771:
    What I failed to find out is whether she thinks she can get the turkeys to vote for Christmas, is going to support a vote of no confidence in her own government, or is just going to ignore the law.

    The turkeys have already said that they're happy and eager for Christmas.

    https://twitter.com/jeremycorbyn/status/854284198772920320

    772:

    The parliamentary constituency boundary changes don't come into effect until 2018, so a bunch of MPs will be highly motivated to call an early election, rather than go competing to get the candidacy in a different seat after their old one is abolished.

    It's possible the SNP will vote for the election and announce a party manifesto commitment to hold a new Independence Referendum. (For whatever that's worth.) They probably won't scoop all the Scottish seats, but they might dislodge the last remaining Scottish Tory MP.

    773:

    Actually, I think that I see. I can't find that a supermajority is needed to amend the Fixed Term Parliaments Act so, if she fails to get the super-majority, she will put forward an emergency bill to change the 2/3 to 1/2, and (if necessary) use the Parliament Act to flatten the Lords. But I am pretty certain that the modern, post-Blair Lords with make a gesture of opposition and then come to heel, like the political appointees they are. I doubt that the Supremes will show any more spine, either.

    774:

    Silver linings…

    • Strong possibility of 100% SNP Scotland
    • It means the election will happen before the proposed 2018 boundary changes.

    Other than that… arse…

    775:

    Retraining also is a problem that can be solved by throwing more labor at it.

    Most of the doom scenarios seem to envision everyone just.. sitting on their asses and dying without trying to solve any of it. Which is absurd. All problems which can be solved by building something will be solved by building that thing. Unemployment cannot coexist with real problems that need solving, except in the presence of epic levels of economic incompetence.

    As for raw materials. Eh, the world will not run out of steel and glass. Tough, as I was hinting, in this scenario, a really absurd amount of things end up being built out of stone. Because you end up with an approximately infinite amount of stone doing tunnel work on these scales.

    776:

    And if physically feeble.. Uhm. I expect the medical profession to get a lot more.. open handed with various interventions to get people into shape. Your piss may be an interesting shade of blue, but you havent felt this good since you were twenty.

    777:

    Yeah. I have, as many here know a first-degree in Physics & an MSc in Engineering. Between getting my mature MSc in 1984/5 until retirement age ( 2011 ) I was prepared to work anywhere within 90 minutes commuting time from home & London is well-connected for transport. Amount of time gainfully employed, using those hard-sought qualifications [ Whilst all the time hearing that "We can't get the trained staff" ] - zero. Not even one minute. And people sometimes wonder why I come across sarcastic & bitter.

    One horse-laugh from this is going to be Brexit ( Assuming it happens ) - said employers are going to have to revise their application barriers aren't they, oh dear, how sad.

    778:

    These days, ex-General Eisenhower would qualify as a dangerous socialist in most of the USSA!

    779:

    NOT a silver lining. Here, we already can see the position where there is no opposition in parliament, because Corbyn is such a total tosser. Even if ( as I do not) think the SNP are wonderful, a guvmint with no opposition is a very very bad idea. I think you might need to reconsider - didn't Old Noll have something to say about that/

    780:

    That actually supports what Greg Tingey said: they want either recent graduates, or people who are prepared to be paid AND TREATED like them.

    Apologies - I left in a discontinuous fragment of text, and wasn't as clear as I should have been (typing on tablet, not keyboard and large screen).

    I was trying to say that while my former employer generally had slots for senior / experienced technical types, these tended to be filled - but from a Europe-wide pool, because insufficient UK types of sufficient quality were applying. As I said, narrow skills (but not niche). There were also graduate slots, which they were having trouble filling (surprisingly).

    Having done quite a lot of interviewing-of-candidates over the years, it was surprising how often that (even after the CV filter and original chat) candidates just didn't "get" some basic software engineering concepts; not so much "five years of experience", but "one year of experience, five times over".

    Going back to your point:

    Several times over the decades, I searched the advertisements, looking for ones for senior, permanent technical staff... Short-term ones, to dig them out of a hole that their negligence had got them into, yes. Senior, permanent managerial staff, in charge of technical staff, yes.

    I wonder whether the expectation around "senior technical staff" is context-dependent. If you have a poorly-documented, lashed up system working in a narrow problem domain - then the perception (mistakenly perhaps) may be that it's more important to have someone internal who knows the system and understands the problem domain, than to spend the time (year or two?) bringing someone in; who has years of wider experience, but doesn't know "this" system's design drivers / compromises / flaws / gaping great errors.

    The expectation around "short-term" may be because senior staff are rather expensive to employ. It's a lot easier to get sign-off for two graduates than for a single experienced engineer - and if you're a "hack it fast and claim it works" firm, it may be (superficially) more attractive to seek ninety hours per week of novice work rather than forty hours of better-quality output. It's also a function of how you design your engineering teams' work processes; many firms operate on a "a senior engineer knows best and directs junior engineers; they don't do the work themselves" philosophy, hence "managing technical staff" rather than "having a balanced team".

    ...notwithstanding the worry that by taking your rather expensive new senior engineer onto a permanent contract, they turn out to be a total lemon and you can't easily get rid of them. After all, the key skills you expect of a senior engineer (ability to develop a robust architecture in a realistically complex system; to balance risk against effort against complexity) are somewhat more difficult to assess in an hour or two of interview.

    Throw in age and career profile. At the point where you're a senior engineer, you've likely started breeding or house-owning - and having dependents can make for a more conservative outlook on your career. Senior engineers tend to change jobs less frequently, hence fewer vacant posts to be advertised. They tend to be less free to move, and may have more pre-existing commitments (e.g. available hours, mortgaged rather than rented accommodation, etc)

    I agree that senior engineering positions are stovepiped, and often there is a ceiling imposed by geography (often "proximity to corporate HQ", problematic in a global firm) but I suspect that it's an aggregation of lots of unintentional weightings, than a single point of deliberate "nah, just burn through cheap ones". It might, possibly, be seen as analogous to "why aren't there more female SF authors?" debate that we had a few months ago.

    781:

    I suspect that the reason is quite simple, and doesn't get as far as feasibility - it's far more effective all-round to put engines on your barge, and allow it to operate under its own power.

    By analogy, what proportion of the world's freight is towed in floating Panamax+ barges by ocean-going tugs, and what proportion by Panamax+ style container ships? Why drag the entire frontal cross-section of the barge through the water, when you can drag only half of it through the water, and half through the air above it?

    If the argument for "cargo submarines! Eleventy!" doesn't hold up, why should the "Heinlein's 'The Dragon in the Sea' subtugs!" approach, pardon the pun, "hold water"?

    782:

    bevans1 wondered: "What I'm asking is if we have an immediate drop of economic activity and population of, say fifty percent in the next five years, will that change our destiny? I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed, but might that be a survivable event rather than extinction?"

    As Heteromeles notes, 50% is probably optimistic. In the exteme case, think "Martian colony": the central government of each country builds large walls around several small enclaves (tightly sealed to allow climate control at levels that will allow crops to survive) and stocks them with the brightest engineers and scientists they can find. Each engineer and scientist creates a wish list of equipment they need for modern technological civilization to survive (if they're smart, they do this via an online discussion so that every country gets the best knowledge they can on what equipment is truly necessary and perhaps divides their efforts; for example, Korea keeps the chip fabs whereas the U.S. and Europe keep pharma labs). Add a bunch of teachers, doctors, and farmers, plus a score of other professions (e.g., military to keep out the starving masses until they're safely dead). Humanity survives inside these enclaves, but not outside. Appalling suffering for a few weeks while this plays out.

    More likely, we'd see a less extreme version of the scenario, but with similarly high casualty rates. Someone really should be preparing this as Plan B in case things do get as bad as some of us fear. It's not the kind of planning you want to leave to the last minute. Hmmm... might be an interesting crowdsourcing project for some kind and highly educated retired person to lead. (Not hinting... way beyond my competence level and I'm not retired yet; coordinating this effort would be a full time job.)

    Heteromeles noted: "The problem is that with 5oC rise in temperature, you're likely to get something like a >>75% reduction in human populations from present levels."

    Quite likely. There's an old cliché about every modern city being 3 days away from famine and rioting. Quibble over the number if you will, but the basic concept is robust. As other threads in this blog post have noted, supply chains have a great many fragile links. There's some redundancy, but it only takes a few broken links...

    Heteromeles: "Under such conditions, it's difficult to keep your technical experts."

    It would require heroic and probably very nasty efforts, as I suggested above to bevans1.

    Heteromeles: "what's going to happen over the next 100 years, and what can I do to survive it. Unfortunately, the answer is a) I haven't much of a clue..."

    And there's the problem. If we start right now, we could create a blueprint for ensuring that a recognizable human civilization would survive if things go to shit. Many SF writers have explored this in contexts ranging from nuclear war (going as far back as Heinlein's odious "Farnham's Freehold") to comet impacts (including Niven/Pournelle's "Lucifer's Hammer"); their musings likely provide a good starting point for that blueprint, suitably amended and supplemented by advice from legions of experts. As H notes, there are too many unknowns to be certain. But still... shouldn't we be planning, just in case?

    783:

    So would Ronald Reagan, if you look at policies not feel-good rhetoric.

    784:

    "The plausible references I have seen indicate that steam, gas turbine and combined cycle engines died on the railways because the development was halted."

    The experimentation more or less did stop with mass dieselisation, but up until then there had pretty well always been some attempt to find something better than a plain steam engine going on somewhere. Not so much gas turbines because they weren't invented for most of that time, but combined cycle steam+diesel and innumerable elaborations on the plain steam concept were tried.

    The common thread with all of them was that while plain steam engines are shit on fuel efficiency, the simplicity of maintenance more than makes up for it - yes they need quite a lot, but it's all stuff you can do with a shovel or a hammer. More or less any elaboration, however, took out much more in increased maintenance than it saved in fuel. Even simple enhancements like compounding were rarely worth it because the drivers weren't taught to drive them appropriately to realise the advantages (though there also existed stupid designs with HP and LP engines not coupled together...) Even the more successful experiments ran into the difficulties of being one-offs.

    Hence the Evening Star still being recognisably an overgrown Rocket.

    "Several very plausible papers indicated that it wouldn't be hard to produce vastly better non-diesel locomotive engines..."

    Any of them available online (on non-obstructive sites)? I would be very interested in reading them. (I am aware of Da Porta's improved steam engines, but they are still far short of being better than diesels.)

    785:

    That's the mildly-optimistic projection, in that it is accounting just for what we know about and using rates from the recent geological past.

    It is very likely that there's something we don't know about (trapped methane, arctic algal blooms...) and it's overwhelmingly likely that the rate is too slow because rate and degree of the anthropogenic forcing doesn't have a precedent.

    786:

    That's a permanent hangover of Y2K, the main consequence of which everywhere in the anglosphere was a set of managers absolutely determined that they would never ever under any circumstances again find themselves in the position of having to pay technical people more than they themselves were paid.

    This is where "staffing companies" and such really take off; part tax dodge ("that's not payroll") and part social engineering to keep from acknowledging what people get paid, and also through a sort of gentleman's agreement a way to keep from having to do value calculations and impose arbitrary rate ceilings.

    It's not like it's news that "free market" really means "I win!", right?

    787:

    Ideograms seriously front-load the learning curve, which makes the idea of english becoming a fully ideographic language unlikely: ideographic languages work best when either a small elite is literate or where there's a heavy cultural emphasis on literacy, neither of which is currently true of anglophone cultures, nor would it be true of trade languages used cross-culturally.

    Japanese presents one way out: forgetting romaji & katakana (trade languages don't need separate alphabets to denote foreignness), you can combine a phonetic system with an ideographic one and use something like rubi (hirigana written atop potentially-unfamiliar kanji as a pronunciation guide), making a slow transition to an ideogram-heavy system easy while keeping some words phonetic for whatever purpose (in Japanese, words that have strict grammatical functions are kept in hirigana, as well as verb conjugations, while even obscure technical terms tend to be written in kanji, but this convention is more useful for academics, who use the same jargon all the time & need it to be shorter even if it's more opaque to outsiders; as an auxiliary or trade language, you might want the opposite behavior -- like in akkadian, where common words have ideograms but uncommon ones are spelled out.) English doesn't adapt well to a pure syllabet, so it's not like we would adopt anything much like hirigana.

    Another possibility is shown by Hangul (the writing system in Korean), which is fully phonetic but forms groups of 1-3 characters into clusters that look like single characters & represent syllables. Were we to transfer to a more phonetic spelling of english, it would be possible to take existing latin letters and cluster them in this way, bringing us half-way to ideograms because single syllables are much better predictors of semantic content than single letters are (many of them having etymological significance -- consider "con", "dis", "a-", and "anti" each being distinct single characters). Someone merely semi-literate could then sound out the characters.

    Emoji, as they are currently used, are not on a path toward becoming replacements for words. Instead, they have more in common with tone of voice and body language: they are used to modulate language by providing context, but they lack stable meaning to a much greater extent than words do and they are used only in contexts where stable meaning is unnecessary. It would probably take a top-down movement to turn emoji into a writing system for english; they are pictograms, not logograms or ideograms, and the gulf is vast.

    788:

    A submerged source of drag is generally known as a "sea anchor".

    Submarines get their hydrodynamic efficiency from being deep enough not to have a wake interacting with the surface; at 20 knots, that's plenty deep, it's not "just submerged". If you're not towing the cargo that deep, it'll be a very good sea anchor. (This is a lot of why towing at speed just doesn't happen, even for surface ships.) (If you ARE towing the cargo that deep, you have many other problems.)

    789:

    I'm not a huge fan of Banks, and felt like he'd badly missed something in the "Player of Games"....

    While I am perfectly fine with you (and undoubtedly many others) not liking Banks too much, I would like to say that maybe you misremember or didn't notice something in the novel you specifically mention.

    Spoiler ALERT

    In the final game the main character wins by applying Culture strategies and viewpoint vs. the type of societal/military/philosophy that the opponents favour.

    The game has become a proxy for a real war where the two different ways of thinking clash.

    This is clearly and vividly described in the book (unless it is me misremembering, but I do recall a description of how the Player's strategy was based on fluid collaborative build ups mimicking how Culture self-organizes itself).

    I do not remember any Allies general to become a subtle Axis supporter after the end of WWII, and the situation at the end of The Player of Games is basically the same.

    790:

    I think we're talking past each other. What I'm specifically expecting is that at some point it will become obvious to even the most clueless right-wing yahoo that global warming is real, plus we've lost Florida (and possibly other low lying areas in the southeastern part of the U.S.) It will be a huge story - pictures of downtown Miami under a foot of water, insurance companies going under,* an internal refugee crisis and probably a recession or depression. If we're lucky (for certain values of luck) we'll make it through the crisis without much drama.

    If we're not lucky there will be some kind of event which is seen nationally and brings the whole thing into very sharp focus, at which point I would expect not a revolution, but a series of gigantic riots which involve considerable violence against oil companies, banks, insurance companies and maybe a few of the really ugly right-wing religious figures. I expect that the rioting will be suppressed in exactly the manner you predict.

    If, at the time, our government is disorganized enough, or run by someone cynical enough, the rioting will not be suppressed. It will be allowed to burn itself out after destroying some of that government's political enemies... But I don't expect a "revolution" as we generally think of them. (Once again, note that predicting violence does not indicate agreement.)

    Following the loss of Florida I'd expect the U.S. to get behind a WWII-level effort to fight Global Warming, which will by then necessarily involve attempts at Geo-engineering** (which may or may not be successful.) Personally, I suspect that we're too late; the most recent presidential election was our last chance at a sane government which had all the resources needed to end carbon.

    Also, following the loss of Florida there will be people who attempt to point the way forward towards a future where we don't screw up. Whichever new philosophy of government and education gets there "firstest with the mostest" will probably become the Default American Philsophy, which is why I'm currently thinking about the best practices for running a society and how to sell them.

    I'm writing two stories right now about the aftermath of Global Warming. One of them is pessimistic and involves a woman who must whore herself out to feed her starving family, and must make that proposal to the "men with food" while her husband watches.

    The second story is optimistic and involves self-driving cars.

    • I'm not sure insurance companies will go bankrupt, but I wouldn't be surprised if some redneck congressman passes a law that forbids insurance companies from leaving low-lying areas. Trump would happily sign it so he doesn't lose money when Mar a Lago slips beneath the waves.

    ** Just out of curiosity, what do you think about the use of ferrous sulfate for ocean fertilization?

    791:

    ...why should the "Heinlein's 'The Dragon in the Sea' subtugs!" approach, pardon the pun, "hold water"?

    Herbert's, not Heinlein's, and it "held water" because the special circumstance of the story is that the submarine was stealing crude oil from a hostile territory and towing it home. The story doesn't work from a modern perspective, but the tech in the story was sufficient for suspension of disbelief when it was written in the 1950s.

    792:

    This issue that makes the difference is that unlike an allied general, The Player was blackmailed by one of the Culture's intelligence bots because he didn't want to leave home and didn't want to do the job. How that plays out after the book ends isn't explored, but I'm not sure it goes the way The Culture's minds want it to.

    793:

    I do not remember any Allies general to become a subtle Axis supporter after the end of WWII

    :) Then you'd be wrong... :)

    It took a few years, and the realisation that by the 1970s in Europe, NATO faced a similar situation as had the Wehrmacht in 1944 (i.e. facing superior forces, for a defensive campaign). So in the 1980s, the US Army and (allegedly) the British Army adopted the German concept of "Auftragstaktik", translating it as "Mission Command". Of course, the transition didn't exactly go perfectly; here's an article that was published in the British Army's "House Journal", the British Army Review.

    https://www.scribd.com/document/100986070/Prison-of-History-BAR-Summer-1998

    A good example of it in action is, ironically, the Battle of Goose Green. The original CO comes up with a nine-phase deliberate attack. It unsurprisingly gets bogged down, situation and plan diverge, and he gets killed trying to sort things out. His second-in-command (staff-trained at the Fuhrungsakademie der Bundeswehr) takes over, stops trying to overcontrol the battle, and wins it.

    794:

    This article is timely. Basically it states that migrants are still moving to Russia despite its average wages being below China's. Personally, I think that this article isn't really doing like-to-like comparisons, but the trend they describe is real.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-18/russia-still-a-migrant-magnet-even-as-wages-stay-below-china-s

    795:

    The tech is sufficient to suspend belief because it works. Dracones were originally proposed as tanker replacements but the idea never took off because of the development of supertankers and fears of oil spillages. They were to be towed by surface ships not submarines.

    They are now used after oil spillages.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracone_Barge?wprov=sfsi1

    796:

    Minireview: Hormones and Human Sexual Orientation

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3138231/

    Excerpt:

    'Two types of evidence support this notion. First, multiple sexually differentiated behavioral, physiological, or even morphological traits are significantly different in homosexual and heterosexual populations. Because some of these traits are known to be organized by prenatal steroids, including testosterone, these differences suggest that homosexual subjects were, on average, exposed to atypical endocrine conditions during development. Second, clinical conditions associated with significant endocrine changes during embryonic life often result in an increased incidence of homosexuality. It seems therefore that the prenatal endocrine environment has a significant influence on human sexual orientation but a large fraction of the variance in this behavioral characteristic remains unexplained to date. Genetic differences affecting behavior either in a direct manner or by changing embryonic hormone secretion or action may also be involved.'

    Not mentioned here is the one of the original studies on homosexuality that first suggested genetic involvement in sexual orientation: a statistically significant higher incidence of homosexual uncles on the mother's side. This also suggests X chromosome involvement which the review article also doesn't mention. But - no one knows which, how many or what sequence of genetic switches are involved. Or whether there's some type of chem communication between mom and fetus that might cause some of the relevant hormones to go up/down. Homosexuality has been around forever - it's one of our species' many stable variants which like hair/baldness seems to be passed down (mostly) by mom.

    797:

    I wasn't objecting so much to towing a big bag of oil so much as the other technical issues. For example, sending an unencrypted "squirt" would blast my suspension of disbelief into smithereens for a book written anytime in the last 30 years. It was real cool to read about in late 1970s, however.

    798:

    Re: 'Define ethics, as maybe opposed to morals as definitely opposed to "sin" ( Which only exists in the deranged minds of religious believers)'

    There's a difference between morality (what parents teach kiddies), law (social contract/rules) and ethics (universal concern). Ethics is for grown ups. Below is a table summarizing Erik Erikson's theory of stages of moral development which is still taught in developmental psych. (Erikson also wrote about religion vs. ethics.)

    https://it3psychproject.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/11eriksonstages.jpg

    In the US, pretty good chance that most for-profits pay attention only to law/legal obligations because that's the only thing in that geography that can hurt them. In Germany, corporations are not worshiped the way they are in the US so workers (as a class) have more social and legal rights overall. Plus (I think) Germany has a history of respecting its various guilds, and Germans guilds provide a variety of social/community services (e.g., pension and health plans). So, German guilds have historical, grass roots and financial clout. Therefore if such guilds show concern or alarm with an industry practice, German govt's, society-at-large and their corp's are likely to pay attention to them.

    Professional groups should be the ones that write up their code of ethics because they are the most expert at understanding what they are capable of doing with their skillset. And based on recent history, maybe EU/German IT/compsci folk will step up and design a code of ethics. In the US, one of the signs of a mature/established and respected 'profession' is self-regulation: Kudos to us - we're all grown up now!

    799:

    Re: Global warming - Zika

    Pretty confident that the spread of Zika is associated with changes in climate as its primary carrier is a mosquito that prefers a nice hot and humid habitat. Zika poses many serious problems: lifelong effect on the next generation, the virus is now known to preferentially eat fetal brain tissue, the results are lifelong - possibly even transmissible across to the next generation, Zika is also fairly long-lived in adult human tissue - sexually transmitted up to six months after infection/detection in sperm, etc.

    And, there may be other viruses out there that do similarly catastrophic long-term damage to our species. Or, Zika just might hitch a ride or team up with some other even faster spreading, longer living virus. So, if you're looking at Nazi-level population control and/or breeding a race/species of idiots - this is the way to do it.

    800:

    We definitely need a Zika vaccine post-haste! (But it was more important to deny Obama a win than have a Zika cure, because racial stuff.)

    801:

    The racism re: Obama is stupid. Or is race transmitted solely through the Y chromosome? Obama's mother was white. Maybe the bigots are more upset that she was an educated (PhD Anthropology) atheist who researched/wrote about women's rights.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Dunham

    802:

    I started looking at various projections that are available, all of which are slightly different as you would expect. I think the most optimistic one, on many levels, was 80% reduction in emissions by 2020 (this one was done a few years ago). They predicted a mere additional 1.1 degree C increase over the next forty years and the usual rise in sea levels. They also offered the caveats that we don't have a clue what other effects will emerge. It was not any more credible looking than the much worse projections.

    It's looking more and more like mine shaft time.

    803:

    Sadly, I'm pretty sure that racism, mixed with stupidity, is an explanatory 30% factor in US politics. Under that assumption, US politics makes sense.

    I forecast absolutely no blowback to oil companies, beyond a series of tedious lawsuits. Brown people, on the other hand, should probably prepare for serious issues.

    On a more depressing note, I recall a guy postulating that, assuming automation works out (which it will), we can solve the problem of basic income by developing a civilization with fewer people.

    804:

    Re: 'Zika'

    Recently published: 'A live-attenuated Zika virus vaccine candidate induces sterilizing immunity in mouse models'

    http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nm.4322.html

    805:

    Probably, but it was decades ago. A search would find something, I am sure, but perhaps not the ones I saw.

    806:

    Nope. I started looking c. 1985, and did it at intervals thereafter. It's a very British phenomenon, and is one reason we have so few innovative companies any longer.

    807:

    While I am not a fluid dynamics expert, I do know a bit. Sorry, but you are simply wrong. Submarines are potentially more efficient than displacement vessels, because of the lack of a bow wave losses.

    808:

    Just a random thought: if unconstrained positive ideas are "blue sky," what do we call ones dealing with climate change? If you believe Peter Ward, you might call them "Green Sky ideas," after his thought that a climate changed Earth would be like the earliest Triassic, and the sky would be green rather than blue due to changed atmospheric conditions.

    The problem is that it's tricky to get a green sky, as this article explains. It's more likely that future skies will be white or whitish, from some combination of lofted dust and chemistry change. If you've ever seen a smoggy day, that's the color I'm talking about.

    So which sounds like a better alternative to blue sky speculation, green sky speculation or white sky speculation?

    809:

    Insurance companies will not go bankrupt. They are among the entities most aware of long term risks. Instead (as has mostly already occurred with flood insurance in the US) they will not cover certain risks in certain areas. Flood insurance in the US has been mostly underwritten by the Federal government. However, as that gets more expensive it is beginning to be questioned.

    The greater risk is to those banks with heavy exposure to coastal real estate. Already, increasing awareness of flood risk may be impacting property values. I suspect that the portion of mortgages which default due to flood risk will be manageable and the combination of unwillingness to insure and unwillingness to lend will gradually push people away from low lying coastal areas. For a country like the United States, two meters of sea level rise is expensive but not catastrophic.

    For America, I'm more worried about other changes such as temperature rise and weather patterns than I am about sea level rise.

    810:

    I've always seen "blue sky" used to mean speculations unconstrained by concerns of practicality, rather than positive speculations. I assumed the etymology meant you were speculating so hard you lost touch with ground, but didn't check that.

    811:

    How that plays out after the book ends isn't explored, but I'm not sure it goes the way The Culture's minds want it to.

    Again I'm reminded that our Time Lines aren't the same ones. Massive spoilers for our time-line version, not sure about yours.

    Here's how our version worked:

    1 Culture / SC engineers a scenario where The Player is challenged by a young unknown upstart and cultivates a situation where The Player doubts zis own skill and so when given the opportunity, cheats in order to win (via SC). They, of course, like pee tapes, 'have it on file'. 2 The loss would be minor in the Culture (no-one cares if you cheat, that's the whole point about the starting vignette where the 'game' is simulated ground combat and why The Player isn't interested in VR) and the only impact is to The Player's own self-image. 3 The entire story hinges on "The Game" (cough Glassbead Game, wonders how someone is doing with Greek Anarchists) being a diplomatic move. The Player is ostensibly supposed to be PR managed into a 'good showing, loss' as a sop to the desires of the tripartite gender hierarchy that exists (and remember, The Game has very real world impacts, from career paths to outright castration - well, loss of ability to procreate, just as important), and the Media shows 'this reality'. Of course, The Player wants to continue, and SC wants zim to continue... 4 The Empire knows it's playing an existential Game with The Culture. SC knows it. The Player does not, which is why ze initially plays in the style of the Empire. (Cultural osmosis as Winning Strategy). The denouement shows The Player dropping the style of The Empire and start playing from a Culture point of view. 5 By winning, The Player doesn't understand (until too late, although the inherent and creative cruelty in the punishments suffered by those ze beats should be a tip-off) what the outcome necessarily is: The Emperor and SC do. 6 SC wins The Game by destroying it - via the same mechanics that are used to place The Player into the situation. i.e. Self-Image-Immolation. Only, The Emperor = The Empire so... 7 The Player is chosen precisely because ze shares the same Self-Image as The Empire, but at the same time, is also Culture Level Educated / Adaptive. 8 "Victory via Osmosis via Embracing Difference" vrs "Hierarchical Rule Sets Stance" is one of the major themes. 9 "Arrogance is only Arrogance if it's not True". The Player proves that ze is the best: but at huge moral (and literally lives) cost, something ze's ammoral stance on Games has shielded zer from. The Player is notable for eschewing most of The Culture's 'tricks' for biological species rather relying on 'Natural Genetic Talent and Mind Training'. The actual point is a not-too-subtle prod by the Minds that, yes, of course they could have faked an Avatar and done the same thing (and probably could have reduced the suffering of all involved) but that would mean the self-immolation of their own self-image. i.e. that biologicals still have the ability to operate at least close enough to Minds to not be treated as house cats. 10 The entire book isn't about The Empire, it's about The Culture's own existential self-image crises and how that gets played out on a cruder, nastier, more visceral and poorer realm. (Both in meta and literal terms, because, you know, Capitalist Empire). Look up in the posts that "need medication", you'll spot the same theme.

    And so on.

    Our version seems to be a bit more complex than your version. I hate stepping down Meta-Levels.

    p.s.

    Genitalia don't become Bongs. Dualism in your Minds, literally proving some things.

    812:

    The Player is notable for eschewing most of The Culture's 'tricks' for biological species rather relying on 'Natural Genetic Talent and Mind Training'

    From memory of our version, The Player has zer Drug Glands removed to participate in The Game. i.e. deliberate "handicap". (Yes, it's #2017 - phrasing has gone the way of the lightsaber).

    11 Not-very-subtle SC vrs The Empire where "everyone gets free healthcare, er.. Drug Glands" vrs "Survival of the fittest / Meritocracy with explicit social conditioning to ignore the hidden advantages of hierarchical systems"
    813:

    Submarines (the Albacore-hull rounded-bows ones) are certainly more efficient than surface vessels; you just have to look at the rated power and the claimed speeds to tell that.

    That doesn't mean they don't displace water vertically when submerged or that this water doesn't interact with the surface; one thing about high speeds submerged is that they're detectable from the surface wake if the submarine is "too shallow". (Exact numbers are unsurprisingly hard to come by, but this is one reason nuke boats don't have as much of an advantage in the littoral against diesel-electric as you might expect.) It's one of the reasons SWATH ("small waterline area twin hull") designs have problems; you can keep the wake down by having little hydrofoil pylons connecting above the surface and below the surface, but you don't realize as much of a speed advantage as you'd expect from "no bow wave" because the below-the-water hulls interact with the surface as you speed up.

    814:

    Not "of", "within". Naughty naughty.

    It's 'Privilege' done right.

    12 The Player's own self-image is predicated on being 'different / orthogonal / better' than the average Culture citizen, with the added in-joke / irony that The Player is self-aware enough to understand that such sociological mores are largely outdated (I cannot remember if it's our version or your version that has the line "...a murderer would get a missile drone nanny and not get invited to any of the good parties" but it's in both) while by Empire standards ze's a freak who fundamentally plays The Game for the wrong reasons. i.e. Personal Aesthetic Appreciation of the FORM rather than the actual, gritty, climb up the greasy pole of what's played for. Ze's an anathema, because ze only cares about the FORM of The Game and the rules and the meta-play, not the great model wives, concubines and wealth you get from playing it.

    ~

    So, there you go: published 1988, providing a critique of what America did with the whole idea before it did it.

    815:

    Sigh. Do a GREP.

    You can literally detect submarines via displacement / gravity differences from Space these days (or, at the very least, either find Cthulhu, Nessie or the probability of a passing 'sub).

    You're working on old assumptions.

    Subs are still useful because (MAJOR FUCKING OPSEC BREACH HERE) the targeting software for nukes isn't agile enough to keep up with their speed, even if you know where they are. Or... did you ever wonder why everyone tested nukes underwater?

    816:

    Any hints for useful search terms? Obviously I don't expect you to remember titles or authors, but stuff like what kinds of engine technologies they were basing their proposals on and what kinds of modifications they were proposing to them ought to enable me to pull something up.

    817:

    Frank, thought you might find this interesting:

    https://mosaicscience.com/story/climate-change-deadly-epidemic-chronic-kidney-disease

    Long story short: dehydration can cause chronic kidney disease. Workers in tropical regions are coming down with it in large numbers, apparently linked to extreme weather events linked to climate change.

    https://www.karger.com/Article/FullText/441265

    Summary: An epidemic of CKD has led to the death of more than 20,000 lives in Central America. The cause is unknown, but appears to be due to recurrent dehydration. Potential mechanisms for injury are renal damage as a consequence of recurrent hyperosmolarity and/or injury to the tubules from repeated episodes of uricosuria. Key Messages: The epidemic of CKD in Mesoamerica may be due to chronic recurrent dehydration as a consequence of global warming and working conditions. This entity may be one of the first major diseases attributed to climate change and the greenhouse effect.

    818:

    Um, why would we bother going after the Saudis after oil ceases to be an issue? Why would we care? Besides, we got in bed with the Saudis decades ago for the sake of cheap oil and 9/11 was just the price of doing business. Note that Dubya didn't bother to go after the Saudis and we had to wait until Obama before bin Laden met his end. We could have broken with the Saudis after 9/11. We chose not to and we can only blame ourselves for that. Iran I understand even less - they're Shi'a, they're not the ones funding Islamist terrorism against the West. Sure they embarrassed us with the hostage crisis but we did overthrow their government decades before that so it seems silly to hold grudges. Might as well call it even.

    819:

    It's not the government that will declare Miami lost, it'll be the insurance companies. One day, after a big storm, they'll look things over and no one will be willing to provide insurance at an affordable price. And the rest of the country will be reluctant to jack up their taxes to insure Florida over and over again. So all the more sensible businesses and people will pack up and leave, probably with some government subsidies to help them along. Some crazies will stay behind but fewer with each storm. The conservatives won't bring Florida back any more than Trump can bring back coal jobs.

    820:

    But ve have mine-shaft gap!

    821:

    Insurance companies will not go bankrupt. They are among the entities most aware of long term risks.

    Did you read my footnote?

    822:

    You may well be right. It's been awhile since I read the book, and I'm not enough of a fan to dedicate the necessary hours to rereading it (if I can find it) to continue the argument. Suffice to say I found it a little disappoint, particularly after the build-up it was given.

    I did enjoy The Wasp Factory, however. That one might be worth a reread.

    823:

    Um, why would we bother going after the Saudis after oil ceases to be an issue?

    Fifty years of pushing Islam toward fanatical Wahibism, with nasty effects in a couple dozen countries. Once they run out of oil, the blowback begins. Which country/business/post-oil revolutionary movement gets them is immaterial. They're going down. Kiss Riyadh goodbye.

    (Once again, note the difference between predicting violence and agreeing with violence. I don't like what will happen to the Saudis, I just think it's going to happen.)

    824:

    The Player has zer Drug Glands removed to participate in The Game. No

    825:

    Fifty years of pushing Islam toward fanatical Wahibism, with nasty effects in a couple dozen countries. Once they run out of oil, the blowback begins. Which country/business/post-oil revolutionary movement gets them is immaterial. They're going down. Kiss Riyadh goodbye.
    I'd expect to see a flood of very wealthy Saudi refugees settling down in London, Paris, New York and so on while less-connected supporters of the former regime get the chop. Probably literally.

    Anyway, thanks to the fact that that Saudis have been pumping that oil money to support Wahhabism there is a crapload of very fanatical, very devout young men who have had very little to do except to study the finer points of fundamentalist islamic doctrine. Welfare collapses, kingdom collapses... These guys will have a very specific ideas about how society should be organized after Allah "withdrew his support" from the corrupt and decadent royal house.

    But this time there will be very little american interest, as the oil is gone. Caliphate will be restored in ISIS style.

    826:

    The original and non-perjorative meaning is that they are unconstrained by existing assumed limits. Many blue sky hypotheses are extremely practical, but what isn't known is any way of getting there.

    827:

    Actually, the numbers are quite easy to come by, but you need to look in the right places: scientific / engineering references, written largely in mathematics. I doubt that many are online - I can't name any, but have seen some. Yes, you need to be deeper as you go faster (and the vessel is bigger), but not enough to be a major problem. This is is all known, proven technology.

    The arguments against are NOT feasibility or efficiency, but the dangers OGH described and the fact that submersibles are really only suitable for some cargoes.

    828:

    Sorry, but not a lot. I found a few fairly minor links when I looked a few days back, but a proper search would almost certainly find something. It's not really my area, unfortunately. They were all combined-cycle engines, of one sort or another. I remember that some were talking about free-piston and other Stirling engines. My understanding is that a practical modern design would take a standard turbine generator and put another stage on the back: this would lead to one with a power output somewhere north of 10,000 horsepower, but there may be smaller ones around.

    http://www.energy.siemens.com/hq/en/fossil-power-generation/gas-turbines/sgt-100.htm

    829:

    This could be Trump's big infrastructure project. The US will convert abandoned mine shafts into luxury hotels, shopping malls, and military bases so that we might preserve a nucleus of human specimens.The real problem might be preserving a nucleus of human society in order to be able to eventually recreate not only our science and economy but our communities and society as a a whole. We must not have a gemeinschaft gap.

    830:

    You can literally detect submarines via displacement / gravity differences from Space these days... You're working on old assumptions.

    No, we aren't. Please don't confuse "fantasy pages you found on the internet" with reality. Last time around, you insisted that VLF/ELF comms arrays were for detection. There's a reason that the CASD boats drive around very slowly and quietly, to the extent that they have at least once collided with each other.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Vanguard_and_Le_Triomphant_submarine_collision

    831:

    "Adopting enemy tactics because these proved effective" <> "aligning themselves with enemy's philosophical/political stance".

    For your (undoubtedly interesting, but IMHO completely off the mark) example to actually disprove my point you should find Allies generals deciding that yes, Jewish and other "Untermensch" were actually a problem and that the best way to deal with it was to erase specific groups from the face of Earth.

    832:

    the ">" was actually an attempt to write "not equal", but the first angle bracket was eaten up, so please interpret it as "!=" and not as "bigger then"...

    833:

    You can literally detect submarines via displacement / gravity differences from Space these days

    Do you mean detection by gravimeters or gradiometers in space? If so, nope:

    http://www.dtic.mil/get-tr-doc/pdf?AD=AD1012150 https://arxiv.org/pdf/1208.2377.pdf

    Or do you mean some other effect, like gravity-induced distortion of the sea surface?

    834:

    The angle brace characters are interpreted as HTML tags; you want &LT or &GT for "less than" or "greater than", and generate them as & LT or & GT without the spacebars

    835:

    Emojis... from the ancient Engineers' Dictionary: icon: a small, fuzzy, indistinct picture used to replace a clear and perfectly comprehensible word.

    And no, emoji do not substitute for body language.

    mark

    836:

    regarding developement of languages:

    1st:

    Could universal translation be even more fine grained? leading to translations between each persons own brand of for example? So people would eventually stay in their own personalized language bubble, a machine translating between these bubble-specific words and structures. Also combined with this or the reason for this or the end result (I dunno) could be the complete stagnation of language evolution. the total opposite of what you described. since we all (critical mass) uses some kind of autocorrect on our devices, could a more potent variant of this (which understands, what we want to say and chooses the best methods for us) lead to complete dependency on these systems? therefore the evolution which is driven by humans changing or misspelling, misusing or inventing words/grammatical structures could be halted completely because it is cemented by fewer and fewer (in the end: One single (maybe dictatorially controlled)) autocorrect system. (autocorrect system could in this case be something that translates intention into language - whatever words/pictures/sounds this language would have in the end)

    --> neuro-research just (recently) found out, that while using gps-services like google-maps to find places, our coordinative system in the brain is actually shutting down completely. So longterm-wise we're not learning the way to remember the next time we go somewhere, but am just learning to depend on these systems. younger folks growing up with this might not even develope a coordination system anymore. -> growing up with autocorrect-ultra(tm) might prohibit future-humans from ever inventing a new way of language at all.

    2nd:

    Supposing uploadin brains is possible in the future, but still not entirely cheap compute-wise. Could big ultra-computers be mostly occupied with simulations of important(tm)? Could it be a luxury to have a brain-structure that is simulated down to the exact shape of each of it's neurons? Or maybe even down to the chemical processes between synapses? Poorer folks would be reduced to a mere network of neurons, each modelled by a simple set of ordinary differential equations (Fitz-Hugh nagumo or something). Lacking the sublte randomness of some thoughts? People could constantly be tempted to reduce their own entropy while trying to see any negative effects. The lower class would be essentially automatons - grainy landscapes of conway's game of life... Having truly random noise introduced in your digi-neurons would be a luxury only optainable by rich folks. Or - you would have to make a compromise of either 'living' slow as a high-res simulation, of fast with less resolution.

    Also an interesting question for me would be entropy as a luxury. Living your live in a simulation, but having a low-entropy version of it, since memory is better used elsewhere. You would be rewarded for accepting repetitiveness in your experiences - it could be compressed easier. You would be rewarded for experiencing the same as other people, since this experience (a computer game, film, musical piece) would only take its space one time.

    837:

    "Adopting enemy tactics because these proved effective" is not the same as "aligning themselves with enemy's philosophical/political stance"

    Actually, the example I gave was exactly that... My "Goose Green" example wasn't "adopting enemy tactics", because it wasn't really the tactics that changed, and certainly not half-way through a contact battle. It was that the two commanders had radically different philosophies about how to direct that battle, with Chris Keeble "aligning with the enemy's military/philosophical stance" (only in part - e.g. not regarding the burning of villages, or the murder of civilians and prisoners, as entirely legitimate acts).

    In order to change from Befehlstaktik to Auftragstaktik, the British Army had to change its entire philosophy of operations; its "doctrine". No longer does "the boss know best"; no longer does said boss say "here is what I want to achieve, and here is how I want you to do it". Now the person "on the spot" is thought to know best; and the boss says "here is what I want to achieve, and this is why" - the subordinate figures out for themselves how best to achieve those aims.

    This was a big cultural change, and the article I linked to showed how that culture change ran into problems. You might fight the same battle, with the soldiers on the ground following the same low-level tactics, but have arrived at those tactics using an entirely different philosophy. It's unlikely, but possible...

    https://www.arrse.co.uk/wiki/Auftragstaktik

    It's a lot less simple than just saying: "that's just tactics", even if the German to English translation of the terms I used would suggest it...

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission-type_tactics#Doctrine

    838:

    One aspect of current 100%-organic human memory is that every time a memory is called up (used) it is then re-laid in a slightly altered form. A computer-interfaced memory would probably not work the same way. Good if you want to retain a perfect memory of a chess game you played 10 years ago. Bad if you're in counseling for PTSD or some other anxiety-related condition.

    839:

    Why would any Saudis want to move to TMay's isolationist Britain. Or do you think that cheap real estate in itself is a sufficient motive. If yes, then may as well pick up even more and cheaper real estate in Russia.

    840:

    So, positing that a similar proportion of recorded media survives the next hundred years as survived the last (as far as I know single-digit percentages, at the most), the concept of history is going to look very different. What's striking about the rise of video is that it seems to be able to make history vivid and dramatic enough to pass for entertainment.

    You can see a sort of early version of this in the History Channel and 'best of some decade' shows, but should the Cambrian explosion of "content" survive the century even vaguely intact there'll be an absolutely obscene quantity of this stuff. There is probably less variety in early 21st century culture than a hundred years prior, but all of that variation is being recorded, providing valuable raw material for the popular historians of 2117 to substantiate their theories about the rise and fall of the Holy American Empire or how the roots of the Australian Rebellions of 2081 really lie in the counterculture of Jakarta circa 2045. Except the second one's really a 'We love Jakarta in the 2040s' in disguise.

    841:

    "I remember that some were talking about free-piston and other Stirling engines."

    Ahhh... free-piston engines! I had completely forgotten about them because you so rarely come across them.

    Not the same as a Stirling engine (though you can make a free-piston engine that uses a Stirling cycle). The big feature is that the pistons are not mechanically connected to anything; they are reciprocated by bouncing them off a chamber of trapped air acting as a gas spring. Usually diesel (though they don't have to be), and capable of achieving very high compression ratios which enable them to ignite fuels that won't burn by themselves in a normal diesel.

    They are useful as gas generators to feed a gas turbine (ie. the sole route of energy extraction is via the exhaust gases). The compression of the intake air is handled by the pistons rather than a compressor driven off the turbine, so the energy required to do it is abstracted before the gases are exhausted; consequently the turbine inlet temperature is lower than a "straight" gas turbine, and there is no need for the compression stage to handle large amounts of bypass air as well as the combustion air so as not to melt the turbine. So they don't suffer from the constant-compressor-load problem of the straight gas turbine; full load efficiency is higher, and there is the potential for much better part-load efficiency.

    However, that potential is very difficult to realise because the lack of any direct mechanical control over the piston movement makes it very difficult to achieve stable operation over a wide range of operating conditions, and even more so under rapidly-changing conditions. The problem is particularly acute since the things can't tolerate even one misfire. This is the main reason why the researchers in the 60s lost their enthusiasm for the idea.

    These days, though, with vastly greater processing power available both for implementing control systems and for running simulations of a design, I would expect that overcoming the problem would be very much easier and excellent cranked-diesel-beating results could be obtained.

    An alternative method of energy extraction which could provide even greater efficiency, by eliminating the turbine altogether, is to take advantage of the high piston speeds to extract energy electromagnetically. Again I would expect this to be much easier now than when the idea was first proposed because of the development of extremely powerful rare-earth permanent magnets.

    842:

    I was being flippant and so forth and deliberatly aiming for a joke (look up Chinese satellites new, and laser connections to earth - green range frequency as well, the type that has deeper penetration into water. cough). But, no really, you're out of date: your search terms are "Cortana, Debye, SQUID" and throw in some "big data processing".

    Hunting submarines with magnets The Economist, Nov 2016

    Impact of emerging technologies on the future of SSBNs BASIC / PUGWASH conference, PDF, Look for the talk by Professor David Caplin Emeritus Professor of Physics, Imperial College London

    And there's a load of old Russian stuff about wake detection that was "dismissed as largely make believe" ... until recently.

    Oops.

    843:

    Oops. That PDF is from Sept 2016. So, yes: "new" break-throughs and all that jazz.

    Then again, no-one has explained how the US military got taken for a $8 billion ride over blood testing, and there's those Iraqi bomb dectectors, so Cortana might be smoke and mirrors.

    Interesting name though, someone's a HALO fan.

    844:

    Since Martin is being all super-frowny, here's the picture /article of that Chinese satellite:

    Mozi lifted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center on August 15 as the first satellite capable of engaging in quantum communications by creating entangled photon pairs over great distances to test the feasibility of this type of communication technology for operational application.

    China’s Quantum Communications Satellite begins ambitious Testing Program Spaceflight 101, Aug 2016 (decent little space blog).

    Might be interesting, I mean, if you had space/weight constraints:

    At NPL we have developed a particularly straightforward method for nanoSQUIDs using focussed ion beam (FIB) fabrication. Starting with a simple bilayer film of Nb/W in a single lithography step, this milling process allows the loop diameter to be reduced down to 100 nm, with the incorporation of nanobridge junctions of the order of 60 nm width [3]. Our nanoSQUIDs have shown non- hysteretic I-V characteristics over a temperature range from 6K to 8.5K, also demonstrating exceptionally low magnetic flux noise performance (<200 nφ0/Hz1/2 at 6.8K where f0 =2x10-15 Wb is the quantum of magnetic flux) [4].

    NanoSQUIDs NPL, commercial website.

    nose wiggle

    But I'm just making things up, really.

    845:

    Sorry, image in article:

    The world’s first quantum satellite Micius is doing “very well” in space after its launch earlier this month, with all on-board scientific instruments meeting or exceeding expectations, a senior scientist involved in the project said...

    The green beam was laser light at the 532-nanometre bandwidth, and the red beam was 671nm. Both were signal beams used by scientists to establish a physical link between the satellite and a ground station before the start of quantum communication – “just like a handshake before the talk”, Wang said.

    ‘Handshake’ shows China’s quantum satellite performing even better than expected, says scientist South China Morning Post, Aug 2016 (SCMP is China's English language version of RT, so expect nothing but glowing stories, but it's fairly sophisticated and well put together... and copies the RT format in sticking to the Truth as long as it's ok'd by the top dogs).

    link text

    846:

    This is by way of a question, since the actual study is less than surprising. (Complexity metrics.) Is research related to banned psychoactive substances still happening in the UK? (This is a UK/New Zealand study.) Increased spontaneous MEG signal diversity for psychoactive doses of ketamine, LSD and psilocybin (19 April 2017) Punchline: These findings suggest that the sustained occurrence of psychedelic phenomenology constitutes an elevated level of consciousness - as measured by neural signal diversity.

    Also, from Brazil, what claims to be a double-blind randomized placebo-controlled trial, a little older, don't see an earlier link (but perhaps there was). Rapid antidepressant effects of the psychedelic ayahuasca in treatment-resistant depression: a randomised placebo-controlled trial (27 Jan 2017)

    Mentioned upthread acquiring a very cheap EEG rig (a high-function toy basically), 1 forehead electrode (plus earlobe). Hate hate hate hate bluetooth, but was fun to play with for an hour, learning how to make shapes on the visualizations, playing with making what graphs claimed to be gamma/high gamma spikes (and longer) and the like. Need more better electrodes! ( ref: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4806709/ )

    847:

    Yes. Common knowledge. Now wonder why they're all Hell-Bent on banning them all. And careful, if you get into the whole Laser / Frequency / EEG stuff, well: remember a forum member here.

    Bright Lights attract Big Fish.

    ~

    p.s.

    Hidden joke within article:

    Lixing-1, a small satellite mission operated by the Institute of Mechanics at the China Academy of Science, was ejected shortly after Mozi had separated from the Long March 2D rocket.

    理性

    Interesting one that.

    848:

    It was pretty obvious to me (and this was my speciality) that Theranos was not what it claimed. Even the claim to run precise chemistry tests on capillary samples was dubious since capillary samples are difficult to take without contamination by tissue fluid. It's good enough for general monitoring of glucose using point of care systems but not biochemical profiles. Their secrecy and apparent lack of FDA approval were also bad signs. The main promoter of military use for their systems later joined the Theranos board which already consisted of political high fliers who had no background in Pathology.

    849:

    Disclaimer: not an expert, so rely on your type of Minds viewpoints on the science angles.

    The issue was always:

    1 Young, beautiful, "drop out because so brilliant" female CEO 2 The sheer weight of the board (I mean, go look at it - the combined clout is akin to a fucking Bilderburg conference) 3 The money: $8 bil. Allegedly all spent? 4 The front-facing science was always bunk (the closest I have to this is knowledge of sperm samples, but you'd be surprised at the X-over)

    So:

    5 What the fuck were they actually doing with Blood and Genetics and so on? It's literally impossible to burn $8 bil on a magic box and not have slush funds setup (cough Oliver North cough). 6 So far, no-one has found where the churn & Burn went.

    Dodgy.

    On the off chance you're one of the Good Ones left (there's only 163 of our kind left, globally, they're running the entire psychopath line of Mental Weapons this year), something to ponder over:

    (Scene) Young woman, 22-26, brilliant in her field. Discussions. She's being sent to Madagascar by [redacted - commercial company] as part of funding for her Masters degree. On food and sourcing non-contaminated 'feed stock'.

    Now, answer me what the holy fuck does Madagascar produce that's unique, barring Lemurs, the last bastion of slavery in the world (last government to make it illegal... it like fucking 1983 or so) and so forth?

    Nothing.

    Literally nothing a Masters level degree could dig up over 'food supply' there. Unless, of course... your food stock wasn't exactly... "homosapiennormative".

    ~

    TL;DR

    Look @ Trump and Thiel etc. US military was attempting to locate something in blood. They spent $8 bil on it.

    It really wasn't anything to do with the magic diagnostic box from Dune.

    850:

    Oh, and Martin, do me a solid. Check the pre-ELF joke submissions via GREP - it's a long paper, +200 pages, PDF on the subject. PHD, I don't know... It also (I seem to remember) it pre-dates the links from the Economist and PUGWASH by... I don't know.

    Guess?

    6 months or so, at the very least.

    So: As a sign of professional courtesy, at least check that you're not referencing something that might turn around and spank you. Eh?

    Really solid hint here: This is a SETUP and if you GREP you're going to feel the BURN.

    851:

    Rumor has it that Patton had some very anti-Semitic opinions and I believe he read German (because a reference was made in one of my books about WWII to Patton having read Rommel's book.)

    852:

    Given your record for accuracy, honest reporting & clear observations, I assume you mean Captain Pugwash ???

    [ Rather than This? ]

    853:

    In other news, we're now just days away from breaking through 7.5b people in the world. According to this clock: http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/ The figures are based on UN estimates and the UN Demography group's next bi-yearly report is due in the next few months. The constant linear growth of +80m/yr is still happening.

    If, and it's a big if, business as usual continues and we don't have a LtoG peak, crash and burn then the global population will hit around 12b by 2117. And that's with the UN predicted slow down in absolute growth through the mid part of the century. Which makes it about the most optimistic projection.

    854:

    The majority of Madagascar plants are not found anywhere else in the world. Cancer drugs have been developed from the Madagascar vinca. It's not unreasonable to research their plants and folk medicines. Theranos had been operating clinics in retail premises in California for a while and some of their money must have come from this. A compact and versatile blood analyser, the iStat developed by Hewlett Packard and then sold to Abbott has been available since at least the 1990s. This can also be used for arterial blood gases, necessary for treating badly wounded soldiers and impossible to measure usefully on capillary blood. Kodak had a solide state analyser based on film technology used by the military much earlier. I knew somebody ex-RAF who used these in Bosnia. It look like the US services rejected Theranos.

    855:

    Cortana

    Yes, Cortana has been on the edges of the nonacoustic submarine detection world for decades and has come up with many such ideas. Maybe this one will work out.

    It is true that Cortana's founder, KJ Moore, is quite knowledgeable about such things, both domestic and foreign: https://tinyurl.com/krmzxgo

    856:

    Sharing a bit of sciency-news (6 Apr 2017), potentially some substantial improvements in drip irrigation cost (including energy, which means solar pumps would be more viable). They claim some sort of stochastic search (GA) for exploring models. Can imagine a future where this is coupled with per-plant sensors/controls (and option of plant species/variety heterogeneity rather than monoculture), but plain drip irrigation is much much better than dumb irrigation.

    New design cuts costs, energy needs for drip irrigation, bringing the systems within reach for more farmers Shamshery then coupled the mathematical model with a genetic algorithm—a computer program that simulates evolution of, in this case, various parameters in a dripper. For instance, the team selected a range of dimensions for certain features and tested their flow behavior in simulation. They discarded those dimensions that produced undesirable water pressure, and kept the better performers, which they fed back into the algorithm with a new set of dimensions.

    I'm too far out of my knowledge areas to evaluate the paper: Modeling the future of irrigation: A parametric description of pressure compensating drip irrigation emitter performance (6 April, 2017)

    857:

    EEG stuff, OK, TX. By way of explanation I assumed that playing at replicating parts of this paper was OK since it has over 1200 citations: Long-term meditators self-induce high-amplitude gamma synchrony during mental practice (2004). (a recent paper that referenced it: Increased Gamma Brainwave Amplitude Compared to Control in Three Different Meditation Traditions(2017))

    858:

    Sub detection via magnetic fields is very old news. Look up the fortifications put in place at Scapa Flow during World War 1. We've been in an arms race of getting better magnetic sensors and better demagnetizing our boats and ships better over the century since then.

    859:

    Hmm. MIT researchers working on western agriculture. What could possibly go wrong?

    The late Bert Wilson had a suitably opinionated reply (see #1 and 6 at http://www.laspilitas.com/classes/Garden_Myths.html. If you're into gardening with California natives, laspilitas.com is a goldmine of information).
    Mind you, Bert was a specialist in California native plants, so this isn't true about all crop plants. Still, unless the plant is bred or evolved to grow well in a marsh or riparian area, drip irrigation isn't necessarily the best or even a good solution.

    Getting more to California agricultural problems, water dissolves salts, and plants take up water and transpire it out their leaves (they have open circulatory systems, whereas we have closed ones). If you have any salts in the soil and use drip injudiciously, the plants draw dissolved salts into their root zones as they take water in, leave the salts in the soil to concentrate, and eventually their root zones get too salty for the plants, at which point they die. River water tends to have a lot more ions in it than does rain water (since it's been leaching rocks for awhile), so when you're irrigating with river water, if you're too water efficient, you can salt your field or garden. If you're being efficient, every once in awhile you need to either get a lot of rain to disperse the salts, or you need to flood irrigate to wash the salts away, downstream to places with names like Kesterson Wildlife Refuge or the Salton Sea. These areas were (and are) the halide sumps for the San Joaquin and Imperial Valleys, which were sea floor once upon a time and as a result have some salts in the soil. Irrigating them with river water exacerbated their problems.

    860:

    Tx, that's interesting, happy to be educated. Yes, (US) East Coast person. The link has a stray trailing "." that was easy to miss. http://www.laspilitas.com/classes/Garden_Myths.html

    If you're being efficient, every once in awhile you need to either get a lot of rain to disperse the salts, or you need to flood irrigate to wash the salts away, downstream to places with names like Kesterson Wildlife Refuge or the Salton Sea. Is there still a net water efficiency gain even with occasional flood irrigation? The Salton Sea was, 20 years ago, the weirdest place I had ever visited. Saw Burrowing Owls there for the first time.

    861:

    Heteromeles (860) reported the problem with irrigation: that as long as evaporation and plant transpiration exceed inputs of water, there's a high risk of net movement of salts into the rooting zone. The only solution is using tons of water to flush the salts back deep into the soil.

    This is a huge problem in much of northern China, and is seriously endangering their food security. (I assume it's also problematic elsewhere, but China's the area for which I have firsthand knowledge from the journal manuscripts I edit.) It's a bit of a slow-motion apocalypse.

    The primary virtue of drip irrigation is that it conserves scarce water. The kinds of sprinkler systems and open reservoirs you see in many agricultural areas are pretty much optimal methods for losing most of your water to evaporation. Alternatives (e.g., drip irrigation) are expensive, but they may be the only viable solution in some regions. The best alternative is to grow only plants that can survive without irrigation in a given environment, but that doesn't lend itself well to modern agriculture.

    862:

    Yes, I know.

    You didn't read the links though (I added the APL since the Economist hadn't the depth to actually link to the tech that's making it more interesting again):

    We have predicted that the sensitivity of a sufficiently small SQUID should be adequate to detect the reversal of a single Bohr magneton moment [5].

    At NPL we have used an ultralow noise nanoSQUID to measure the hysteretic magnetization behaviour of a single FePt nanobead at a temperature of around 7 K in a magnetic field of only10 mT. We also shown that, using nanomanipulation, the nanobead can be accurately positioned with respect to the SQUID loop and then removed without affecting SQUID performance. This system is capable of further development with wide ranging applications in nanomagnetism.

    shrug Some might get the jokes about HAARP and ELF stations this time. (And yes, I know: 7kelvin isn't exactly field comfortable: cuprate semiconductors).

    ~

    Anyhow, look at the PUGWASH PDF if you're interested. The stuff about detecting whale movements from 400km away without acoustics should raise your eyebrows, surely?

    p.s.

    I'm not actually interested at all in submarines, since they harm Whales (however 'passively'; active sonar is a total fucking disaster in ecological terms), but people here are. So I like to show willing and provide tit-bits (while tongue-in-cheek being clueless about them).

    Note how many Whale links I get in return.

    863:

    So far as I know, the problem with irrigating with river water goes back to Iraq, which once upon a time was Mesopotamia, the Fertile Crescent, where civilized irrigation with river water was probably first invented (although I'm sure it's been invented independently many times).

    Over the thousands of years that the Fertile Crescent has been farmed, a lot of farmland has become too salted for anything useful to grow, which is (so far as I know) why there's a lot of desert in modern-day Iraq. Some of it used to be farmland. Before it got too salty, they were growing things like barley in the semi-saline soil, and before that, they grew wheat, which is even less salt tolerant.

    Basically, you can flush a lot of salt away with a flood, which is how Egypt kept the Nile Valley fertile until the Aswan High Dam was built. If you farm near a river and the river floods your fields, you get a bunch of silt (new nutrients) and you get your salt accumulations washed out to sea, both of which are good. Note that this isn't terribly inefficient, because during a flood, you've got a surplus of water. Water efficiency matters most strongly when there isn't much. As I understand it, the problems start when the irrigation is far from a flooding river, and there's not enough flood or even rain to wash the salts back away from the root zones of the plants. There's things you can do (like applying gypsum) to temporarily ameliorate the problem, but so far as I understand it, irrigating by running river water through an aqueduct is not a long-term sustainable solution. It's more of a short to medium term one.

    Absent a miracle (such as CRISPR-type technologies being used to make a bunch of halophytic, high yield crops), I suspect a LOT of farmland all over the world is going to be lost to salted soil. This will likely happen in the Imperial and western San Joaquin Valleys, elsewhere in the American southwest (especially where they're watering with Colorado water), northern China, the Middle East, North Africa, (including Egypt unless they lose that idiotic dam), probably around the Sea of Azov, probably Australian, and I don't know where else. Unfortunately, there's probably a famine or three and a lot of farmers migrating hidden in this little summary, and that's going to be part of 21st Century history as well.

    864:

    Absent a miracle (such as CRISPR-type technologies being used to make a bunch of halophytic, high yield crops), Ah, but you mustn't do that! THAT would be GM of crops & we all know that all GM is EEEVILL, don't we? (/snark )

    865:

    Sort of; degaussing naval vessels was invented to reduce the likelihood of them triggering magnetic mines, rather than to reduce the range at which they could be detected by a Magnetic Anomaly Detector.

    The use of MAD to detect submarines only really became any sort of a thing after the launch of the USS Nautilus (SSN-571) in 1954. Prior to that everyone relied on sonar in blue water and that was only after ASDIC was invented in 1918 or so.

    866:

    Back before the PBI was (illegally?) sold off by Thatcher, eventually to Monsanto, it was experimenting with GM to introduce rust resistance into grass. But they pointed out that conventional plant breeding (including crossing with other species with desired characteristics) was equally effective. The reason that there was a reaction against GM was its abuse by Monsanto etc., including some extremely dangerous practices.

    There are lots of useful borderline halophytic plants, several of which are important food crops already (e.g. dates). GM isn't critical to such developments, but might help; putting the effort in is.

    867:

    Sorry about that; I looked at the first screen on the Economist before its paywall kicked in, and missed the relevant page in the pdf. The SQUID does look interesting; especially with this thread's timeline in mind. Not likely to do much soon (30km range with cold superconductors, if I read it right), but we'll likely get the materials science right sometime within the century. Navies will definitely look weird in 2117.

    868:

    I am only too well aware of that. Every time GM is mentioned, everyone starts screaming about Monsanto ( Who are evil bastards, let's not mess-about ) But, GM doesn't have to mean "M" - see also Rothamsted ... who are getting loads of shit from ignorant & stupid protesters, whilst they are trying to develop blight-free spuds, to take just one example

    869:

    I am fully aware of that - at one point in my career, I worked very closely with Rothamsted (not that part), but I don't limit my interest to what I am focussed on. The same point applies to blight, incidentally - GM isn't critical, just helpful. But I am not saying that it shouldn't be used, under proper control.

    870:

    "We must not have a gemeinschaft gap."

    Superb pun on the Dr Strangelove meme. Plus you suggest a possible lubricant to slide infrastructure spending through Congress, just reclassify civilian construction projects as military or quasi-military items and put them on a hugely expanded Defense budget less susceptible to conservative interference. Historical comparison with Eisenhower's interstate highway build-out helps explain how he managed to coax funding from budget hawks. His frustration in Europe trying to get tanks through French hedgerows contrasted with the ease of moving armies over Hitler's autobahn, inspired his vision of a U.S. linked together with advanced road systems by which troops could be speedily delivered wherever fractious uprisings occurred, labor militants and race agitators beware. Ike's participation as a young officer in suppressing the World War One veterans' Bonus Army march on Washington lent credibility to such a concept. Then just coincidentally the new roads enabled the rise of a suburban commuter lifestyle and the immense economic boom it provided. And when Arkansas governor Faubus tried to keep black students from entering state universities, these same roads permitted Ike to promptly deploy federal troops to overpower potential defiance by state militia men. A win-win all the way around through imaginative budget accounting.

    871:

    we all know that all GM is EEEVILL, don't we?

    For what values of "we all" does that hold? I.e.,how much beyond Europe and the US? Is it much found in, for example, China and India?

    872:

    Very good question. Answer comes there ... anybody out there?

    873:

    There are a bunch of problems to be disentangled here.

    One is that there isn't a "salt tolerance" gene. Plants have a number of different ways of handling salts. Some crop relatives (notably barleys) are quite salt tolerant already, and it's not that hard to breed a salt resistant barley that has decent yields, so far as I know. AFAIK, farmers switching wholesale to barley is a good sign that the fields are getting salted up. If a crop doesn't have any salt tolerant relatives, you're pretty much stuck playing franken-geneticist to get the genes (and by extension, the plant structures) into your plant. That's still a bit beyond our capabilities, IIRC.

    The second problem is that salt tolerance generally comes at the expense of yield. If you don't mind cutting your crop yields way back, you can get some salt tolerance. Note that cutting yields when the population is still increasing creates its own problems.

    The third problem is ecosystemic. Monsanto, fractured monolith that it is, tries to engineer industrial ecosystems to the twin goals of maximizing profit and retaining intellectual property. That's where their reputation for being evil comes from, and it isn't entirely unearned. An alternate approach can be seen in Kerala for example, where they have a native, salt-tolerant variety of paddy rice. It's low yielding, so there was a big push to replace it with high yielding industrial varieties or to replace the paddies with shrimp farms. Unfortunately, Kerala is coastal and getting inundated with salt water, so (even though this article is from 2014), I understand there's a push on to revive the old variety. The local politics are intense (there's also a push to turn those paddies into shrimp farms), and the system when it works is designed to be multicropped, so that even though the rice yield is lower, the farmer makes a living through getting other produce in.

    And that's where I'll end this. If we're stuck engineering systems where the only goal is to produce huge amounts of grain for cities, then we'll have to engineer crops to withstand higher amounts of salt. This probably won't work in the long run. If politics weren't an issue (and neither was supporting huge numbers of people in cities), farmers/peasants could probably get by with multi-crop systems, each of which have lower yields, but which collectively let the farmer/peasant make it through the year and possibly make a little money. Such a system has to be freeware on the intellectual property side, so this doesn't incentivize big companies to engineer crops that will survive it, although NGOs might go for it. The point here is that it's not just a technical challenge, it's a large set sociopolitical ecosystem challenge, and that's a bit harder to do than just making franken-halophytes. It's far from impossible, but you've got to start by getting profit maximization off the motive table and not depending on a few farms to feed warehouses full of people in cities.

    874:

    Heteromeles raises some important points. Implicit in these points, therefore worth making explicit, is that ecology has its own equivalents of "The Cold Equations".

    First, there's no such thing as a free lunch. Everything has costs, and the piper must be paid. Plants and other organisms have really tight energy budgets, and when you need to steal energy from one function to support another (e.g., salt tolerance), that energy has to come from somewhere (e.g., at the expense of grain yield).

    Second, with a few simple exceptions, genetics is a very, very complex subject. There are few quick and easy fixes, and they rarely work as well as more complex solutions. Most important problems involve multiple physiological systems and thus, multiple genes that interact in complex ways. Only rarely is there a "silver bullet".

    Third, we SF/F readers tend to look for technological solutions when the real problem is human behavior. In many areas, the environmental carrying capacity simply won't support what we want it to support, and we shouldn't try. Irrigating water-demanding crops in areas with insufficient water will always be a recipe for disaster. Sure, you can take the water from somewhere else, but that also has consequences. You can't rob Peter to pay Paul, as the saying goes. Instead of converting prime farmland around cities into suburban sprawl, we should be protecting this area. Doubly so if the climate is wet enough to support water-demanding crops.

    Ecology. You're soaking in it. G

    875:

    David Brin once made an intriguing whimsical suggestion that every century really begins in its fourteenth year, e.g. WWI and the Russian Revolution is when the twentieth century really starts to look distinctively twentieth century. It's almost certainly just pareidolia, but the last few years have felt kind of weird, and it's intriguing to speculate that this may be because we're children of the twentieth century and now is when the twenty-first century is really starting to look distinctively twenty-first century. Running with that, things to watch:

    • The centrist liberal capitalist consensus in the West seems to be breaking down, widening the Overton Window; politics is starting to look more like the 1930s, with more space for both far left and far right.

    • I see a suggestion of the big world conflict of the twenty-first century being liberalism vs. a decentralized hydra of reactionary movements. It will be messier than than WWII and the Cold War, because the reactionary side won't be so much an axis as a loose clustering of vaguely like-minded people who sometimes feel solidarity with each other and sometimes don't, and because the USA and Western Europe will be another theater of conflict instead of a (relatively) secure base for the liberal side.

    Intriguingly, if you run with the "every century starts in its fourteenth year" paradigm, 2117 will be around the time period when this paradigm in turn slides into dead history and is replaced by something else. If I were writing space opera, 2117 might be a couple of years after first contact with the Galactic Federation.

    876:

    Second, with a few simple exceptions, genetics is a very, very complex subject. There are few quick and easy fixes, and they rarely work as well as more complex solutions. Most important problems involve multiple physiological systems and thus, multiple genes that interact in complex ways. Only rarely is there a "silver bullet".

    That's an interesting point, and a question. Given that our present genes and higher-order systems are the result of mindless selection operating over gigayears that finally got to a mess that somewhat works, can the same results be achieved more simply by design? Or is what we've got now, messy as it is, the best that can be done?

    877:

    Evolution never gives you the best, it gives you just good enough to get away with. If you take the set of any given organism's functions, for most of them there is probably some other organism that does that function better, because its particular niche was such as to tighten the definition of "good enough to get away with". Moles have worse eyesight than weasels but weasels are worse at digging than moles.

    Certainly you could start from the same point and do better by directing the process. The problem is simply that the problem is so enormous. But it is still possible at least to imagine brute-force methods such as simulating an ecosystem down to the DNA level with tighter constraints than existed in reality, and then using the DNA recipes it provides to instantiate a humanoid that doesn't get a dodgy back, or a pandaoid that doesn't try to run on processing wood in a carnivore's digestive system.

    878:

    Third, we SF/F readers tend to look for technological solutions when the real problem is human behavior.

    This. Just this.

    And, in the worst kind of gosh-wow, sci-fi nerd mode, "Are there any plants that fix salt, thus facilitating its removal from the soil?"

    879:

    Yes, well done.

    The actual joke is this: H.S.S manages to make sonar totally militarily redundant five years after the last whale goes extinct after being deafened for 100+ years. (That's discounting the fresh water issue), so the Earth's Oceans go permanently silent (barring Booop type physical ice movements and, of course, the Big-C).

    Thatsthejoke.jpg

    And no, there's no excuse. Fucking psychopaths.

    No, really: that's the reality and the joke.

    And you little fuckers want to take me on? Ok then.

    880:

    No, really.

    It's a Genocide joke that you're too fucking ignorant to even understand what fucking horrors you've been doing while Murdoch TV shouts out "SIEG FUCKING HEIL, BURN THE IMMIGRANTS".

    You're literally doing Holocaust for .... what?

    ~

    Muppet: "Hatred WON!! WE WON!! WE WOOOOON"

    Muppet: "She embraced the darkness!!"

    Me: "Yes, you imagined that, children: in the same way the Whales won the award for last conscious Mind to exist in Earth's Oceans. Let's just say, it doesn't mean what you think it did"

    Well done: you're fucking Dead (Inside, Outside, Higher Ascension Side, All fucking Sides - we play for fucking keeps m'lad).

    L'Enfer - fuck that noise, your Minds are sooooo boring. Silence isn't what you thought it meant, ask the Whales beaching themselves: The Sound of Silence YT: Music: 3:05

    ~

    Promise: Once the Oceans go silent, so do your Minds too.

    881:

    Almost certainly, yes. Any demigod that specialises in omniscience could do it :-)

    It is probable that understanding our own genetics and its expression completely is forever beyond us (i.e. Goedel's limit applies). That can't be proven, but the claims to the contrary are all based entirely on wishful thinking, and are logically equivalent to a belief in an afterlife.

    882:

    I disagree. That's at a MUCH more subtle level of stupid than most of the questions of that type. It's been seriously considered (by scientists) for some contaminants, and has been used for mineral extraction since time immemorial (both potash and soda from seaside and tidal zone plants). While decontaminating salt-poisoned land won't work, the reasons need a bit more understanding of plant metabolism.

    883:

    Give the existence of Distichlis_spicata (Salt Grass) in the U.S., it's probably not a stupid question at all, but I felt like I should acknowledge the concerns of the question I was replying too, because relying too much on the "gosh wow" stuff and not enough on changing social ideas is a very bad idea.

    That being said, I have no idea whether Salt Grass can be planted in overly salty soil and do any remediation, though it does "sweat" salt.

    884:

    Hmm. You have a point. I wasn't aware of a plant that excreted salt!

    885:

    Allen Thomson wondered: "Given that our present genes and higher-order systems are the result of mindless selection operating over gigayears that finally got to a mess that somewhat works..."

    One quibble: Yes, evolution is "mindless" in the sense that it lacks conscious direction. But there is a "direction" and it doesn't necessarily lead to optimal design. The direction isn't "mindful", but it exists and is directed: natural selection leads toward better adaptation to the current environment. (I suspect, but cannot prove, that flexibility of response in case the environment changes is another design "goal" of evolution.) The result may seem primitive, but is surprisingly sophisticated, robust, and highly tuned when you look into the complex control systems in most modern organisms. Some of them are damned impressive designs. Hormone signaling and feedback loops come to mind.

    "... can the same results be achieved more simply by design? Or is what we've got now, messy as it is, the best that can be done?"

    To a limited extent, yes. For example, there are many single-gene mutations that we know are fatal or seriously deleterious. Using techniques such as CRISPR and its inevitable descendants, it should be possible to fix such defects and end up with something much better. For relatively simple systems based on a small handful of genes, the computational complexity shouldn't be beyond our reach; it should be possible to simulate those gene networks well enough to allow tampering and probably even improvement.

    But for anything more complex, it's a dauntingly complex computational problem. For example, simulating the dynamic interactions among a human's 20K genes (plus likely 100 times as many noncoding chunks of genome that function in ways we don't yet understand but that probably involve regulation of the genes) seems far beyond current and near-future computing technology. It seems like the kind of thing that would make climate simulation models look like a kindergarden class project. The 37-odd trillion cells in a typical human body seems to be several orders of magnitude large than the number of grid cells in a modern global climate model, and climate models typically include only dozens rather than thousands of processes per grid cell.

    Give computer science enough time and enough powerful computers, and simulating a genome with the goal of improving it still won't be easy, but at least in theory, it should be possible. Simulating a genome in software is being attempted now on a relatively small scale. Once you can do that, "the rest is just engineering". If you can muster enough computing power and software sophistication to scale up the system to highly complex organisms (trillions of cells and thousands of genes), you could impose external selection pressure on the model to optimize one or more functions (e.g., chemical reactions), then look at the results to see how the simulated genes differ from the current status.

    886:

    But surprisingly strong pareidolia:

    2016: All Hell breaks loose across the Anglosphere, potentially endangering the gains of the Enlightenment; 1914: Lamps go out all over Europe and they do not see them lit again in their lifetime; 1815: Final defeat of Napoleon I, institution of the Holy Alliance; 1714: Hanoverian dynasty imported into Britain, decisive shift of power in that country to Parliament; 1614: Last meeting of the Estates General in France before the revolution, decisive shift of power in that country to the monarchy; 1517: Luther publishes his 95 theses; 14??: [Can't think of anything earthshaking] 1314: Execution of Jacques de Molay, Death of Philip the Fair, Battle of Bannockburn; 1214: Fall of Beijing to Genghis Khan;

    A bit Eurocentric, I'm afraid, but there seems to be a pattern of sorts.

    887:

    I'm sure Heteromeles will return shortly to tell me what's wrong with the idea, but who knows, maybe I got lucky.

    888:

    .. Salted soil is not solved by genetic engineering, it is solved by Civil engineering. Specifically, either building your irrigation and drainage systems correctly in the first place, or by coming in after and fixing the mess. This is another of those problems that can be solved by the liberal application of construction workers and computer models. Uhm. Quite profitably so, even at least sometimes - Buy salted lands for a song, build drainage and up the capacity of the irrigation system by a fifth, have non-salted lands in a couple of years. Profit.

    889:

    Only works if the water's available. The political problem of saying "we need to cut the irrigated land by a third so the remaining land is irrigated enough is, well, challenging isn't going far enough.

    Chinampas -- farming wetland -- might be a better plan than drain-and-irrigate. And if so, maybe a way to do things like restore the Louisiana coastline. But straight up irrigated grain fields are a really tough thing to keep going in a context of uncertain rainfall.

    890:

    Fix salt? Then what do you do with it?

    A couple of misconceptions here: salt by itself doesn't inhibit productivity. Mangrove swamps and salt marshes are tremendously productive places. They aren't great places for GRAIN, and therein lies the problem: we don't have any good grain or food plants that are thoroughly adapted for salt. Some, like coconuts and others used in atoll agriculture, do pretty well, as does barley and some other seashore crops, but we can't easily raise a huge crop of grain on seawater. A franken-halophyte would be a food plant that produced a lot of food on seawater or at least really brackish water.

    Anyway, plants deal with salt a couple of ways. One of them is to literally blow it out the leaves, so that it crusts on top and falls on the soil. Crystalline iceplant (Mesembryanthemum crystallinum) is notorious for this: the crystals are salt, and it has the bad habit of salting the soil around it. Salt can also be sequestered in tissue (like hairs) or an organ (generally leaves) and thrown off by shedding said tissue. At that point it ends up back in the soil, unless there's water to carry it away (as with mangroves, which IIRC tend to salt their leaves and then drop them back in the ocean). Some plants just run with saltier tissues, and can be poisoned with too much fresh water (I think Nitrophila falls into this category). Or plants can expend energy sucking up the water and trying to keep the salt out, and IIRC, this is what most plants do to cope. There are two problems with this approach: it burns carbs that could be used for something else, and the salt tends to concentrate in the root zone where it's been excluded until there's too much salt to deal with. This last is why flushing the field periodically is so essential.

    Hopefully this helps explain the problem. Basically, if you want to grow crops on brackish water, you want to engineer a plant that doesn't spend much energy dealing with the salt buildup so that it can turn that energy into food for you. The problem is that there isn't (to my knowledge) a good phylogenetic overlap between plants that are really salt tolerant and plants that make good grains or roots. That suggests to me that you're going to have to do a lot of transferring of genes around to get your halophytic crop, and that's why I'm calling them franken-halophytes: you can't get there simply by crossbreeding crops and wild plants.

    Actually, saltgrasses aren't a bad choice. If I recall right, there's been a fair amount of breeding already done to try to turn them into forage grasses for cattle. That's not nearly as good as having it produce huge, tasty grains, but it's a start.

    891:

    I happen to agree that engineering is a way to deal. But politics is even better than engineering: after all, why do we spend so many money and resources trying to farm in the western US? Wouldn't those resources be better spent improving agriculture in the eastern US where it rains and salts generally aren't a problem?

    That doesn't solve the problem for irrigated agriculture in other parts of the world. The big thing to remember is that food is basically fancy water, produced from even more fancy water. If you're robbing water off farms to give it to cities, you're basically saying you want water more than food (in other words, it's a short term solution). This doesn't mean that you can't make some better choices, but the politics around water and food are a lot more complicated than most people want to deal with. For example, growing rice in California seems stupid, until you realize that some of the rice fields are subsidized by the Nature Conservancy to serve as wetlands for migrating waterfowl, because the natural wetlands were wiped out in part to provide water for the crops. So is that rice good or bad? Similarly, almonds are more water efficient than many grains, but the advantage of annual crops is that if you don't have water, you can not plant them, whereas if you don't water your tree crops, you lose them and all the years of investment that it took to get them producing, so switching from something like wheat to something like almonds decreases water use, but it locks in that lower water use, which is problematic in a place that experiences big droughts. And so on.

    892:

    I don't think conventional risks (nuclear war, global warming, resource depletion, plague) present a high risk of total human extinction. Humans are a numerous, widely dispersed, highly adaptable species; a species like that is hard to kill off. I do think there's a nontrivial risk of human extinction by 2117, but most of it comes from technologies that do not exist but may be invented by then (e.g. strong AI).

    Restricting discussion to conventional risks, I'm much less worried about total human extinction than about "Earth in 2117 has a few tens of millions of humans and most of them are impoverished subsistence farmers" type scenarios.

    Talking about that possibility, the "you can't step into the same river twice" principle is worth keeping in mind. A low-tech society that started out with twenty-first century culture and bits of remaining twenty-first century knowledge is probably going to look different from a low-tech society that started out with hunter-gatherer culture and knowledge. For instance, their medical knowledge will probably be better (germ theory, hence better sanitation and antisepsis practices and simple vaccination), hence lower death rates, hence smaller families ("outercourse" being used as low-tech Pill substitute). That plus twenty-first century starting values might mean higher status and more freedom for women. Similarly, I wonder whether monarchy would be as ubiquitous without path-dependency from the easiest ways of inventing government.

    "You can't step into the same river twice" also applies to successful reactionary movements. They can't really turn the clock back, and they're probably trying to turn it back to some distorted theme park version of the past anyway.

    On that last note, a little dichotomy to play with:

    -- Reactionary societies as more oppressive than the past they imitate, because reactionaries take the elite ideology of the past at face value and hence miss its more nuanced reality, and because reactionaries are fueled by grievance in a way "we've always done it this way" conservatives aren't.

    -- Reactionary societies as less oppressive than the past because reactionaries are still running off modern moral "common sense" and reinterpret the past in ways that make it more palatable to their modern values.

    893:

    Reactionary or regressive societies, maybe. What about reactionary / regressive leaders, especially f they are jealous sociopaths ( Trumhelm/Trumpolini or Kim J-U or Maduro or .....

    894:

    Salt could be removed from irrigation water before delivering it to the fields.Ion echhange resins or zeolites would harvest the salts. On a small scale plants have be grown in clay or resin pots with ion exchange properties using salt water instead of fresh.
    It all depends on cost.

    895:

    Then what do you do with the salt-laden zeolites? It takes energy to move them around, backflush them to remove the salt etc. If you succeed you now have millions of tonnes of salt sitting in the treatment plant's yard, what do you do with it? You can dump it in the ocean but if you do that the place you dump it gets very brackish and the local ecological balance gets smashed into underwater desert (a problem with the outfalls from existing desalination plants). And and...

    The situation in 2117 in a lot of places is going to be lots more and maybe too much freshwater rainfall thanks to warmer ocean surface temperatures and warmer air to carry moisture inland. My first-iteration model of California's future, for example is a lot more rainfall but less winter snowpack on the mountains lasting a shorter time due to rising temperatures in the spring = floods and mudslides.

    For a lot of the world fresh water isn't really in short supply even today though. For example Tokyo in Japan gets 1500mm of rain a year (compared to supposedly wet Seattle which only gets about 1100mm), and water availability is certainly not the limiting factor in agriculture in those places.

    896:

    My initial thinking about salt grass was that you could plant it in soil that has grown too salty, mow it every month and take away the stems, then pull the salt-grass out a couple years later after it had cleared the salt.

    But the discussion above of "proper" irrigation makes it clear that this is probably a "second best" option.

    897:

    Interesting. Apparently something called a "hydroxyl radical" can affect the amount of methane in the air per a recent NASA study.

    To my layman's eye, this looks like really good news, particularly if one imagines that geoengineering might prove useful against climate change.

    898:

    Yeah, that's the scenario I wrote about in Hot Earth Dreams a year and a bit ago. Since Charlie was good enough to give me his blog to announce it, I'm very happily returning the favor by not tooting that particular horn in this particular thread.

    Personally, I agree with you that 2117 is likely to have a lot fewer humans than there are now, that they are likely to have a lot lower standard of living than we do now in the US, and probably they won't be my near relatives (just from pure luck of the draw).

    That said, this thread was supposed to be about a 2117 where that didn't happen, so that's why I'm trying to be all upbeat and everything. After all, OGH is a science fiction author, why not write about a more pleasant future?

    899:

    Going way back to #31,

    The result is that AI programs will have emergent behaviours that are beyond our ability to analyse.

    Yeah. It seems to be happening already:

    https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604087/the-dark-secret-at-the-heart-of-ai/

    No one really knows how the most advanced algorithms do what they do. That could be a problem.

    900:

    Apparently something called a "hydroxyl radical" can affect the amount of methane in the air

    And how! OH is a major player in atmospheric chemistry. (Something I learned on my way to not getting a PhD in planetary astronomy.)

    http://acmg.seas.harvard.edu/people/faculty/djj/book/bookchap11.html

    901:

    Interesting As in: "interesting Times" Um

    902:

    Heteromeles, I feel I should clarify that I'm actually an optimist: that was a "while we're brainstorming, here's a few thoughts on pessimistic scenarios" post, not a "here's what I think is the most likely scenario" post.

    Moving to general discussion, I find Robert Gordon's "Is Economic Growth Over" interesting because when writing a standard space opera type future it's the thing I'd point to and say "I'm assuming a world where this describes the near/medium-term trajectory of technological and economic growth." If you run with it:

    • The scientific revolution is an S curve and we're already past the steepest part, which was the ~1870-1970 period when technologies invented in ~1870-1900 such as electricity, internal combustion engines, and modern sanitation were applied, refined, and had their spin-off innovation spaces explored.

    • Economic growth may return to historical norms (i.e. very slow by our standards) within a hundred years or so, with the world's leading regions having a per capita GDP of ~$90,000 by then (which would make future people about twice as rich as modern Americans, assuming similar distribution).

    • The paper doesn't speculate much on what the technology of 2100 will look like, but I think such a scenario pretty clearly precludes Singularitan futures and probably the "robots do almost everything" scenario too, because those should translate to massive economic/productivity growth (I'd think the "robots do almost everything" scenario should be at least comparable to going from an economy where 90% of people are farmers to one where 2% of people are farmers).

    I'm rather skeptical that this scenario will actually play out in real life, but it does pass the smell test for me in two ways: I suspect a time traveler from 1890 would be more blown away by 1950 vs. a time traveler from 1950 in 2010, and so far despite much anticipation to the contrary the computer revolution seems to have been mostly an information and entertainment revolution, not a robot and strong AI revolution.

    Some speculation on this:

    • If this happens, it'll change the way people relate to historical time. I remember reading somewhere that Medieval culture didn't make as big a deal about age differences as we do. I figured this probably had something to do with the Medieval world seeing a lot less intergenerational change, so people related better across age gaps. "Old people are involuntary immigrants from a foreign country" is a lot more true today than it was back then; back then a 60 year old and a 20 year old might have various gaps in perspective, but at least they'd probably have grown up "in the same country," so to speak. Technological progress running into a severe diminishing returns curve and slowing down a lot would create intergenerational dynamics more like the Medieval world. If we follow Gordon's projected curve, this process might be underway by 2117. I think we might actually already see it in the First World today if the changes from 1950 to today had been purely technological.

    • If technological advance hits a severe diminishing returns curve and slows down a lot, the economy grows primarily as a function of population growth and increased access to resources (I think Marxists call this "primitive accumulation"?). The bad news is this means more zero sum competition - hopefully MAD-like dynamics will prevent a resurgence of violence. It probably also means more class tensions, as it makes it hard or impossible for elites to credibly promise a rising tide that lifts all boats (if productivity growth has slowed down since the 1870-1970 period, maybe we're seeing this in the West now?). On the plus side, it may encourage space colonization.

    903:

    Correction to previous post: the paper's title is "Is U.S. Economic Growth Over," not "Is Economic Growth Over."

    904:

    Somes J noted: "The scientific revolution is an S curve and we're already past the steepest part..."

    I think it's more correct to state that "the" scientific revolution (a wording that assumes only one) is actually a long series of scientific revolutions, with a new S curve beginning some unspecified time after the previous curve levels out. And there are usually different curves for different fields of science.

    What you tend to see is things stabilizing for a while, then someone comes up with a paradigm shift or thinks their way around a particular roadblock or discovers something completely new, and the S curve starts over again.

    Anyone who thinks we're even close to the end of science hasn't been paying attention to the last millenium or thereabouts. Heck, they haven't even been paying attention to the list of unsolved problems in each modern scientific discipline.

    905:

    We are very near the limits of unassisted comprehension/cognition, though.

    And we know with some confidence that history matters to neural-net AIs. So one outcome is that the preconceptions of whoever does the initial neural net education in a discipline will become intractable limitations forever.

    (Another outcome is that the AIs can talk; you can get anything you like out of that one.)

    906:

    Well, we've got a bunch of horribly complex problems to sort out. Given that we've done our best to avoid them rather than deal with them, to me, the likeliest scenario is that global civilization shatters. Without the infrastructure to move food around globally or detect and find cures for pandemics (note that these are things we have problems with now), probably a lot of people will die. This will inevitably both lead to civil unrest and be an effect of civil unrest (public health goes away in war zones), and probably a lot of people will die. This will lead to further crumbling, mass refugee movements that discredit the idea of nations states that can defend either their borders or their citizens, people losing faith in "the system" (which is actually a complex of systems) and not trying to fix it, leading to further collapses, until finally, over decades, we get to a state where people can survive on local resources in local communities, and possibly the few small nations that remain are trading with each other, but little more than that. Climate change will keep rolling on for centuries thereafter, but people will be stuck with adapting locally or migrating. Getting food from around the world during a crop failure, or getting water from hundreds of miles away during a drought, both will be impossible without the infrastructure that people didn't fight to keep working in the previous decades.

    Anyway, I'm optimistic that the human species won't go extinct.

    Now, if we want to avoid this situation (and personally I do), we do need to fight to keep a lot of infrastructure working. For example, with weather getting wilder, we'll all benefit from ways to both store food and to ship it from where there's a useless surplus to where there's a famine, ideally without massive profiteering. This may sound all capitalistic, but it's basically the way both the Inkan empire and their predecessors worked. The Andes are notorious for having wild weather and frequent crop failures, and empires there, to the extent they worked (and they were quite predatory) also moved resources around, as did villgaes. If you want to have civilization under such wildly unpredictable conditions, you need to store a lot of food and resources (much more than we do now), and be able to move those resources (and sometimes people) around so that surpluses go to areas where there are deficits, and you need to move those resources very efficiently and for very long distances. HOW we do this is another question, since you can theoretically manage such a system with anything from a command economy to capitalism, and in both cases, there are serious potential problems (with everything from profiteering to inept managers) that need to be overcome.

    907:

    Separate idea, to pitch to the engineers (and naval architects?) out there. In 2117, to deal with the increasingly unpredictable global climate by moving resources (especially food, but also people) around, we'll need big ships.

    We'll also be without fossil fuels, and I strongly suspect that we're not going to have the passenger jets that we have now.

    Okay, now that you've stopped hyperventilating that of course we'll have passenger jets you nitwit don't you know that we have to go fastfastfast, here's the actual question:

    What does a big cargo and/or passenger ship of 2117 look like? Remember, that monster, even if it's smaller than the behemoths of today, won't run on fossil fuels.

    Do we do the easy thing and just assume that we'll have big cargo ships that run on ammonia rather than bunker fuel, park offshore, and get lightered in to whatever docks have survived a century of sea level rise? Where would you build such a thing? Or do we get more "exotic," and rig cargo sailing ships, but instead of flying canvas, they have wing sails as their main rig (probably derived from the aeronautical technology that's no longer used in passenger jets), kite sails in place of spinnakers, and engines to maneuver in harbors? Or something even more exotic, like the Suntory Mermaid 2 wave propulsion system?

    SO what do you think? If we need to move bulk goods around the world in 2117 to keep civilization functioning, how do we do it?

    908:

    Steel sailing ships ought to work.

    The primary limitation on size of historical sailing ships was the strength of wooden hulls. If a ship gets lifted at bow and stern by waves, the centre is an unsupported beam - think a bridge - and wood can only take so much strain.

    At the end of the 19thC and into the early 20thC iron and steel sailing ships were being built. (I've visited one in a NZ maritime museum.) They were very tough and economical to run, but ships with engines were better at keeping schedules.

    Wing or other modern sails, sure, but primarily because they need less crew than because of efficiency.

    909:

    Sails are still terrible at keeping schedules. This means any trade that relies on them must not be time critical, and needs serious warehouse space at both ends to buffer the supply chain. The last bit gets quite expensive. And well, naval nuclear or naval ammonia driven fuel cells with synthesis happening mostly in equatorial regions with absurdly cheap electricity are both very affordable solutions, so I expect sailing ships to stay recreational.

    A side note here - ammonia driven ships would be very well suited for Magnetohydrodynamic drives, because the fuel cells output electricity, not steam or kinetic energy, so the overall system becomes very straightforward. So very low sound pollution of the sea.

    910:

    ... And aircraft running on an ammonia-fuel cell powertrain dont have to, and probably will not, look very much like jet air planes at all, because the primary consideration becomes turning electricity into airflow as efficiently as possible

    911:

    1415 saw two quite important events in Europe, the battle of Agincourt, that caused the Kingdom of France to collapse, and the execution of Jan Hus, that caused the Hussite Wars. Out of Europe, the first years of the XV century saw the incredibly bloody and destructive campaigns of Timur/Tamerlane.

    912:

    Also Hugh Fisher at #909:-

    Allow me to submit into evidence the SV Glenlee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenlee_(ship) . Steel-hulled sailing ships are already a thing!

    913:

    What do you use the salts for? It could be a resource not a waste product. We mine salt now a lot of which is used on the roads. It's a feedstock for the chemical industry - the chemical industries of Cheshire were based on it's proximity to salt mines. Failing all else dump it into the sea where a lot of it (the river derived irrigation water) was headed anyway.

    914:

    What about WWII, the most destructive war in history? Oh, nowhere near the beginning of the century. The Second Treasonous Slaveholders Rebellion of 1861, regarded as incredibly important to Americans, again nothing to do with xx14 (as was the First Treasonous Slaveholders Rebellion of 1776). Etc., etc. It is always the Worst of Times and currently we are close to that xx14 date and it is the Worst of Times so there must be something significant about xx14.

    915:

    Actually I mostly agree (for example the 30 Years Wars 1618-1648 doesn't fit, and neither does the Taiping Rebellion, by many estimates the most bloody war ever fought on this planet and probably the reason China is so decided to crash seemingly harmless movements like Falun Gong) but I can't help being fascinated by the ebb and flow of History and how some centuries seem destined to be dominated by Spain, or France, or Britain... or the good old USA.

    916:

    Childhood lead exposure explains about 90% of the drop in crime, a far higher % that was claimed for abortion, and it holds up everywhere we have data, from neighborhoods to cites to states to nations. Super bad stuff, and you don't get better (but, if the exposure stops, at least you don't keep getting worse).

    917:

    Solar electric zeppelins could totally be a thing!

    Take the Hindenburg as an example, and the Solar Impulse II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Impulse , the Hindenburg has a cross section equal to about 44 of the aircraft, which have a weight of about 1/3 that of the zeppelin, and put out about as much power as the zeppelin's engines could. Also note that the aircraft has batteries for night operation, and some structural weight, plus the solar cells do not cover its whole area.

    After this had bounced around in my brain a month or two, it occurred to me that you could probably get some sort of efficient building certification for it, so it would be an LEED Zeppelin. ;-)

    918:

    The obvious thing to use the salt for is sodium-chemistry batteries. (There really isn't that much lithium; there is lots and and lots of sodium.) Which leaves the chlorine, but there would presumably still be a need for bleach and water purification. (Poly-vinyl chlorides, not so much.)

    919:

    It takes 12 minutes to charge a Tesla to 80%, and 30 minutes total to get it to 100%, why bother swapping them? The battery is the chassis structural member, unlikely that you can keep that and swap it in less than 12 minutes.

    920:

    Not "swap in place of charging"; "swap because a better battery tech has come out". (Or "the rest of the car is fine but this battery pack has been used up and should be recycled".)

    So if someone gets a better battery chemistry, Tesla might be in financial pain -- that that battery manufacturing investment -- but the cars could straightforwardly adopt it. This is much better than "diesel versus gas?" when it comes to traditional car design.

    921:

    I've posted this before. The service now discontinued as far as I know owing to lack of demand.

    https://youtu.be/aZU0wnpyhF8

    922:

    Yesterday was the day we blew through 7.5b people in the world. (according to the UN) http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/

    If business as usual keeps going, and barring black swans or LtoG style crash and burn, we'll hit 10b in roughly 2050, and somewhere over 12b in 2117. This seems unlikely to me!

    --

    On Electricity and Ammonia, too much relatively clean electricity changes the game somewhat. I'm curious though if ammonia production can be turned up and down to take advantage of electricity production. The electrolysis probably can, but the main process is high pressure and high temperature so probably takes hours to start or stop.

    923:

    Women's education + "Hang all the priests" Should stop it before we make 9b ( or even 8, though that seems unlikely )

    924:

    Be careful of that Hans Rosling Hopium. Every two years the UN demographic unit release their report and every two years they pull the date for 10b back. We had the transition from geometric growth to linear growth around 1970. We're still waiting for the transition to falling linear growth in absolute numbers. And each year we don't get it, we add another ~80m to the total. Despite falling extreme poverty, increased wealth, better education and so on, fertility in Asia and Africa isn't falling as fast as would be expected. And the next big numbers just aren't very far in the future. 8b is probably only 6 years away. 9b is probably only 18 years away. That's not much time for any dramatic change in the trends (barring collapse/apocalypse/4horses).

    925:

    Yes, that would be a good thing, I rent a room from my ex wife and her husband, we all chase her four kids (3 mine, one her new husbands), I take her and my youngest to the park almost daily, while we target the child support in our divorce settlement, really, money flows as needed, and food is shared. I don't have a romantic or sexual relationship with them, but we are closer than roommates. But, the state cannot handle anything other than an adversarial relationship between us, which has led to some annoyances.

    926:

    I've bogged down in reading this lengthy discussion, but the argument above about the Nissan Leaf suggests a very real thing: the increasing split between rural and urban environments and facilities. For reasons of population, cities get a lot of investment that rural areas don't, and their density makes them easier to serve. Rural people are disproportionately disadvantaged with respect to internet access (too expensive to run cable; too far from the exchange for DSL; etc); they are likely, as the electric vehicle discussion said, to struggle to get dense enough provision of charging stations for electric vehicles; they are harder to get provisions and water to in a crisis; healthcare is less accessible; everything is less accessible.

    The reason the NY state capital is in Albany and not NYC was to ensure that the interests of farmers and the rest of the state were balanced against those of NYC. The UK does not have that: everything is in London (or has been until now). Lots of issues piled up into the EU referendum, but one was surely the split between urban and rural voters and their needs. This split will only continue to widen as urbanization proceeds apace (which is the UN's prediction), and as the rural population continues to shrink it will be even more left behind, except for the few insanely rich who live there on gigantic estates.

    So the benefits of much of the tech stuff we talk about that's leading to the internet of things and smart cities won't be a rural reality, just an urban one. By 2117 someone growing up on the edge of a small town in the Scottish Highlands who somehow scrapes together enough education to qualify for the University of Edinburgh might find the learning curve of simply understanding how to function in the city too steep to climb - while that person's counterpart from Bangalore functions perfectly because all the tech is supplied by the same vendors, and the human culture is, as Charlie says, dominated by a few megacultures that are at least somewhat familiar to everyone.

    wg

    927:

    I don't see the Rural/Urban split being that great; "Deprived" inner city youth can be just as lost in the Undergraduate Jungle as your "Rural" youth, they both have some exposure to the National Media culture (Cable/internet), part of it again is the "Only College Graduates get good Jobs" meme, while the liberal arts curricula and syllabi have been eviscerated. Things like knowing there was a Thirty Years war, Napoleonic Wars, and an American Civil War, and (hopefully) being able to put them in context, proper sequence, etc.

    They can't even get WWII right, for values of right.

    (Minimum, the Nazi's set a benchmark for Evil, and the Japanese were worthy second Banana's; The Japanese did a particularly (deliberate) good job of shifting the frame of reference to themselves as "victims" post war, one explanation for why Asian politics is still such a swamp)

    (Our essential ally of convenience, Joe Stalin, only rates four of the five swastika's on the evil scale) And his legacy was (sort of) finally wound up in 1989.

    Things like the Taiping Rebellion and the Erie Canal? Only really weird nerdy types have even heard of them. Or 40/10/2 and the nature of the old three tier distribution system. Business is a very popular major these days, but don't ask them about corporate policies about Wage Theft, mentioned above. The interchangeable lump of labor to be consumed as a resource is a given, all those who didn't go to college.

    Sorry, I spent a couple of minutes watching some of the hundreds of "rural" commuters in their single occupant vehicles headed for jobs in the Walmart corporate HQ nexus. These people refuse to acknowledge how much "government" support there is for their "rural" life style (standing in front of a laundromat 12 road miles or so from HQ). Rural Electrification, Water (Still a modest Federal Program for that) and the whole complex supporting their Road usage. Their kids may ride the school bus, but that is the ONLY contact with "public" transit they intend to ever have. And the schools all need/use federal dollars.

    928:

    I agree that the divide is between rich and poor, more than rural and urban. Rural areas have huge wealth disparities too, and some do have the excuse of being far from a fiber network, as you correctly point out, this excuse doesn't work in the inner city. The other thing to factor in (or out) is racism. Many rural poor Americans are white, many urban poor Americans are black or some other race, and American politics, racist as it is, doesn't like to group these two.

    That said, Asian politics isn't a swamp because the Japanese played the victim card. You can blame Douglas MacArthur for that. What happened as Japan was heading towards surrender was that the USSR opened a new front against them and attacked in Manchuria and the Sahkalin Islands (which are a bone of contention between Japan and Russia to this day).

    After August 15, 1945, given that the social situation in Japan was a shambles (they're the only country ever aerially bombarded into submission). Communists were leading riots, famine was looming, and there were no intact roads, bridges, or railways. MacArthur unilaterally decided that the best way forward was to prop up Hirohito, even though everyone knew he was a war criminal, because if the US insisted on forcing Japan to become a full democracy in its 1945 state, MacArthur was afraid that it would have fallen entirely to the communists. That's why there's a far right streak in Japanese politics (and in the Yakuza) to this day.

    In Korea, basically the communists were the only ones fighting against Japanese occupation from about 1910-1945, even though Koreans had repeatedly petitioned the US to intervene. The US had a plan to send in OSS agents ahead of a possible planned invasion (NAPKO) but that was scheduled to be deployed on August 15, and wasn't used until the Korean war, when they dusted off the plans, tried to use them to infiltrate North Korea, and utterly failed. But I digress.* Anyway, the US had a plan (DOWNFALL) to invade Japan if the nukes had failed. It would have cost more than 1 million US lives and many more than 5 million Japanese lives, so the nukes saved quite a few lives, ironically. Instead, with the Soviets marching through Manchuria and pouring into the north of Korea, Dean Rusk and Charles Bonesteel, who were young US Army officers at the time, implemented a smaller version of DOWNFALL on the Korean peninsula, and arbitrarily drew the dividing line between the zone of Soviet Occupation and the Zone of American Occupation at the 38th Parallel-ish. In Korean geography terms, this was beyond stupid, as it divided several historical provinces and bisected a mountain that an old prophecy said had to be held by a ruler if the peninsula was to be united (the Americans had no clue about that, of course). In any case, Korea War or no, that division line has held to this day. Given that the US had done precisely nothing to help the Koreans until 1945 (including failing to protect them against Japanese expansion and failing to help Koreans fight for their freedom from Japanese occupation), it's a real miracle that South Koreans and Americans get along as well as we do. Ditto Japanese and Americans. And Japanese and South Koreans.

    But the "swamp" is a relic of Cold War politics from the get-go, not of Japanese revisionism. I understand China's frustration, since Japan and Korea were their client states for pushing 1500 years before the US stuck its oar in, but that's where we are at the moment.

    *NAPKO was such a bizarre operation that I tried writing a fantasy around it. Someday I'll complete that beast, but that's why I know so much about Japanese and Korean politics around WWII.

    929:

    There wasn't anything the US could have done militarily in the Korean peninsula in the aftermath of the battle of Manchuria except the Soviets ran out of fuel and war-making materiel and had to stop about half-way down the peninsula. They were a victim of their own success and overran the original targets with ease but they only had supplies in reserve for those original targets -- basically their entire eastern campaign against the Japanese was put together logistically after Berlin fell in May 1945 when they had finished destroying the German Fascists. For historical reasons they put more effort in taking the Kurile and Sakhalin islands, lost in 1905 to the Japanese although they don't seem to have done anything much with them since.

    930:

    "Rural" in US politics is code for "we have no black people here", just like suburban development was intended to produce communities with no black people. This gets used to produce a presumption of virtue.

    US politics only makes sense if you start from racism. It's not a minor ancillary influence, it's the main driving force.

    There used to be an economic requirement to have a lot of people doing the work of agriculture and thus distributed over the landscape. That's not likely to come back. (I expect there's going to be a bigger slice of the economy going into food production, but the current share is so small there's a lot of room. And most of the increased labour intensity is likely to be in relatively urban locations.) Economically, rural areas get innovations developed in cities and have since there were cities, that isn't new at all.

    I'd say the core problem with rural regions is no capital reserves; you're expected to take on debt to weather bad crop years. This doesn't work well at the best of times and is certainly policy. (That preference for control over success again.)

    931:

    So the benefits of much of the tech stuff we talk about that's leading to the internet of things and smart cities won't be a rural reality, just an urban one. By 2117 someone growing up on the edge of a small town in the Scottish Highlands who somehow scrapes together enough education to qualify for the University of Edinburgh might find the learning curve of simply understanding how to function in the city too steep to climb

    I'm not so sure about that - having grown up in a small town on the edge of the Scottish Highlands, and scraped enough education together to get into Edinburgh ;) the differences were social rather than technical. Young students from rural areas coped in 19thC / early 20thC, and their future shock might have been as great (indoor plumbing! water on tap! electric light! horseless carriages!)

    I rather suspect that (as in the cities) technology won't be evenly distributed - there are several projects that are trying to push serious bandwidth (the key limiting factor) out to rural areas; they might not have the gadget du jour, but they'll know what it is and what it does.

    The Highlands aren't as separated as some rural areas in the USA; a USAian friend of the family came from the South, and told of areas within Kentucky where the roads only penetrated in the 1920s; and where they still spoke the Queen's English (i.e. Queen Elizabeth I, not II). He may have been exaggerating for effect, but the Highlands were never so isolated (coastal traffic, for a start).

    Much as we urban sophisticates may poke fun at teuchters (on seeing a bus: "Look, Ma, a hoose wi' wheels!") I don't think it's going to be a problem in 2117 Scotland. Go to the Royal Highland Show at Ingliston - it's rural Scotland come to one place, for a couple of days each summer. Well worth a visit, but there's no observable difference in technology carried; plenty of braw lads with iPhones.

    932:

    Heteromeles noted: "... the best way forward was to prop up Hirohito, even though everyone knew he was a war criminal."

    Correct me if I'm wrong (you've clearly studied this more than I have and my knowledge is now quite old and in need of updating), but Hirohito's role is still being hotly debated. Until recently, Hirohito was largely believed to be a puppet of the military and other powerful players. That is, although Hirohito clearly approved many actions before and during World War II that we now consider to be war crimes, those actions would have gone ahead with or without his approval. A more recent revisionist theory suggests he was actually a powerful player and fully responsible for Japan's actions, but what little I've read by proponents of that theory suggests much axe-grinding without any smoking guns to support them axes.

    To be clear, (i) I am honestly interested in learning more so I can update my mind map and (ii) in no way do I believe that being a puppet condones Hirohito's approval of unconscionable actions. A man of great courage and principal would refuse to comply, probably at great personal cost.

    933:

    To my knowledge, the best book on the subject is Richard Frank's Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire (BigMuddy Link). It's based on records that were released in 1995 (50 years after the end of the war), and it was written to answer questions such as whether the nuclear weapons were justified in body-count terms or whether the emperor knew what was going on and was an active player. The answer was yes to both. The idea that Hirohito was a puppet was (IIRC) how MacArthur excused not removing him.

    The body count issue justifies the use of nuclear weapons rests on the details of DOWNFALL, which was the Allied (largely US) plan to invade Japan and end WWII. Frank had access to both the Allied and Japanese plans. The bottom line was that both powers had essentially the same strategic plan, so nothing in the Allied invasion would surprise the Japanese and vice versa. It would have been a blood bath on both sides, although the Japanese would have died in far higher numbers, since they were planning human wave defenses using civilians armed with spears and zip guns. Indeed, the Japanese were banking on it being such a terrible blood bath that public opinion within the US would halt the invasion before it reached Tokyo, which shows you how much they valued the lives of their people by that point. And yes, Hirohito knew and approved of this.

    Where things get weird (and weirdly relevant) is that, on the day the Emperor surrendered, there was an attempted coup to topple him. It was expected and it failed. This was an endemic problem in Japanese politics since I believe the early 30s: Mid-level functionaries and officers would often attempt to kill (or at least remove) their superiors if their superiors strayed from their favored ideology. As a result, those superiors tended to toe the ideological line, even when it made no strategic sense. One of the tenets these underlings held far too dear was the idea that Japanese never surrendered, and that's what led to the attempted coup against the emperor himself. While revisionists would argue that this ideological violence puppeted the emperor before and during the war, the odd thing is, his family was part of this system for decades, and had ample chances to quell it. They didn't. Guess it worked well enough for them while they were an expanding empire?

    The reason I point this out is that, in the US, we've got a group of Tea Party Republicans who seem to think the same way as those fascist Japanese did. In England too, perhaps, among the Brexiteers? This kind of extremist thinking is dangerous. While it stiffens the spine of leaders who would otherwise be politicians and compromise (do or die has that certain ring to it), it's ultimately too inflexible to survive. Still, when you look at the damage the Japanese caused in Asia, and the damage it took to break this ideology, it should give us both pause and a reason to actively deal with the current outbreaks of extremism.

    934:

    Heteromeles, thanks for the history update.

    935:

    In England too, perhaps, among the Brexiteers? Yes But, their influence is, if not gone, fading very fast. There's an awful lot of "How the fuck do we either get out of Brexit, or make it as soft as possible" doing the rounds right now. They are making a hell-of-a-lot of noise, probably because they realise they have been rumbled.

    936:

    Rising carbon dioxide levels, ocean acidity may change crucial marine process Without comment (other than "we suck"; focused panic please!!!, and of course that new science is increasingly showing CD/JLM to be correct.):
    Trichodesmium is thought to be responsible for about 50 percent of marine nitrogen fixation, so a decline in its ability could have a major ripple effect on marine ecosystems. "This is one of the major sources of nitrogen for other organisms in the open ocean," said Sven Kranz, assistant professor of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Science at Florida State University and a co-author of this study. "If Trichodesmium responds negatively to the environmental changes forced upon the ocean by fossil fuel burning, it could have a large effect on our food web." Paper says same thing, access required for more than abstract: The complex effects of ocean acidification on the prominent N2-fixing cyanobacterium Trichodesmium (from conclusions Our study reconciles previous results that show opposite effects of acidification on Trichodesmium and demonstrates a significant decrease in N2-fixation by this prominent diazotroph at the seawater pH expected for year 2100, particularly under the Fe-limited conditions that prevail in large oceanic regions (7). Because Trichodesmium is estimated to contribute up to 50% of marine N 2 -fixation (30), acidification could lead to a decline in the supply of new nitrogen to oceanic ecosystems, and this effect would be magnified if other diazotrophs were similarly affected.

    937:

    The Emperor in Japan in the run up to and after the Meiji Restoration in the 1860s was a figurehead adored by the people as a patriotic focus but almost entirely isolated from Japanese society to the point that they were mutually unintelligible -- the Court spoke a different version of Japanese to the local population (a bit like how the Russian Romanov's court's language was French). The radio broadcast of the Emperor's recorded surrender speech in August 1945 was the first time most of the population had even heard his voice and the words and phrasing were not comprehensible to most of them.

    I don't see what Emperor Hirohito could have done before the war and during it to change things. If he had attempted to do so he would have been deposed or done away with quietly and a more serene puppet put in his place. His upbringing and education did not permit him to be any kind of a liberal or other than what he was, a bird in a gilded cage. MacArthur lucked out in having him to prop up the Occupation.

    938:

    I suspect you're thinking of the shogunate, which preceded the imperium.

    Look up the Meiji Constitution, which was what Hirohito ruled under. There was a Japanese Diet and House of Peers, but the Emperor was the executive who personally appointed the ministers of state who signed laws into action. Power resided in the emperor because of his status, not in the people.

    939:

    And, very important - MacArthur was very right-wing in his views & opinions & it suited him, even before other factors came into play

    940:

    He's not. You are confusing the constitution as written with that as read, and it is the latter that is relevant here. In the UK, the sovereign also has those powers - in theory.

    941:

    The American head of state is a directly elected President with power and independent capabilities but it is not necessarily a feature of many other democracies, including (nominally) pre-war Japan. Hirohito was an isolated and uninvolved figurehead who appointed the ministers of State he was told to appoint, in much the same way Queen Elizabeth the Second of UKoGBaNI selects her Prime Minister from a candidate list of one presented to her by the House of Commons. Or else.

    942:

    Usually. After the no-absolute majority election in 2010, there was a very definite pause. To the point that I remember the "Private Eye" front-page, showing a pic of HM QEII, with a speech-bubble: "Come on you lot, or I'll toss a coin!"( Or "Hurry up, you lot, ... )

    943:

    Let's see if we can try this again.

    I see that my earlier post was deleted by the moderator, because he didn't like that it was a "drive-by" post. Well, sadly some of us have real work to do and can only visit the blog on occasion. My mistake was trying to post something real while I didn't have time to write slowly. I look at these post as "Easter Eggs" that I've been scattering around the web for decades. Most are gone because the sites are gone, but be that as it may. If this post remains I won't be able to "chat" the way some do to expand on my comments, because I have books to finish. Everything I can possibly add is already in the various links. You simply need to read the articles, and click on those links inside the articles. In other words, I can show you the door, but you have to open it.

    I'm coming at all this as a retired Civil Engineer. Steel and Concrete are my religion. If you design and build a bridge, it must be built using reality, not wishful thinking. "Belief" will not make the bridge carry its design load, or make it last its design life. In reading this blog over the years I have been appalled at how little real world, hands on, nuts and bolts, experience that most posters have.

    Don't get me wrong, I enjoy this blog. I look at it as an IA that can answer an amazing range of questions. I routinely harvest great ideas that I use in my own stuff. Trust me when I say, that the Space Cadets that post here are cherished. Don't ever change.

    To start: For those people who understand the implications of the Carrington Event, that if it occurred now, that billions would die over a hard year of no power or transportation, you will have no problem understanding what I'm saying.

    BTW, if at any time you simply cannot let go of your bizarre religious beliefs about "man made Global Warming" and need to call me a "Denier", simply declare TL;DR and skip the post. I won't be offended.

    The Al Gore BS of The Inconvenient Truth is filled with clear contradictions and lies. Remember, he is a politician, not a scientist. He has used fear to build a vast fortune by making people believe his BS, hook, line and sinker. His lies are leading to wasting billions to fix non-problems. To creating a mindset where when anyone points out that he is "wrong" the person is declared a "denier" and is shunned. That is religious "belief" not science.

    When he says that there will be vast deserts and super storms, that is not physically possible. You cannot have deserts if super storms are occurring.

    When he says that the Earth will heat up until all of the polar ice melts, raising sea levels, flooding coastal cities, "runaway greenhouse effect", etc.... Once again, not possible. The Earth will restore the balance as soon as the Arctic Ice clears, and they have known this for over 60 years. You can start an Ice Age by warming, rather than cooling. That insight was buried by consensus science because they did not have a way to stop the Arctic Ice from clearing. Now we do, with simple engineering.

    • Basically, the Arctic Ice covers the Arctic Ocean, preventing evaporation.

    As soon as the Arctic Ice clears, evaporation will occur, causing massive rainfall and snowfall over the North and Middle Latitudes. Snow will cover most of the North. Clouds will cover the Northern Hemisphere into the Middle Latitudes. All this reflects sunlight away from the Earth, causing cooling. At some point the Arctic Ice will be restored, and that restores that balance. This has happened in the past, at least ten thousand and six thousand years ago.

    • At no time can the Earth warm up enough to melt the Antarctic Ice and cause sea levels to rise. There is no "runaway greenhouse effect".

    Now, the knee jerk reaction to that statement causes people to go nuts. They instantly say, "Then we can just go on polluting with no future cost!"

    Once they have their little outburst, I have to calmly explain the part that they clearly missed. The part that is similar to the Carrington Event where billions will die during the time that it takes for the Earth to cool and rebalance.

    Today is April 29th. I live here in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Last night we had eight inches of snowfall in my neighborhood. This was a warm winter. More snow fell today at my house than most of the winter. I did not have to go outside and shovel snow from the walk and the drive this winter. Some winters I have gone out half a dozen times to shovel up to a foot of snow each time. During the winter of 2007, there was a week where the city shut down. People had to get up on their flat roofs to shovel the snow so that the vents were not covered. Cover the vents, people die.

    This week I was literally planning to have a new cooler installed to replace my old one. It has been very warm the past month. Then we had basically a blizzard during the night. We do not have city snowplows to clear the streets. There are people who put a snowplow attachment on the front of their pickup and clear the street of snow. The guy just drove through a bit ago. Once the snow stops falling, and the sun comes out the snow will melt and clear, because it has been so warm lately the ground is still warm.

    If you have been paying attention over the past decade to the extreme weather that is often blamed on "man made Global Warming" but is not really, you will have noticed how extreme snowfall, or extreme rainfall, can shut down a region, killing people. There is something called ARkStorm. It is about atmospheric rivers that can deluge an area. This is real, and is being studied. It caused massive flooding in California over a century ago, that if was repeated today, would kill millions. All this is happening now, in the current cool, dry, conditions.

    • If the Arctic Ice is allowed to clear, it will make ARkStorm seem like a gentle storm.

    There is a silly disaster movie that I enjoy watching, The Day After Tomorrow. YouTube the trailer if you get the chance. They basically have a superstorm bury the North in snow, in just a matter of days. The movie may be silly, but the results are the same.

    • All it takes is one bad year of snowfall, and billions are dead. All it takes is one bad year of rainfall and billions are dead. And both will happen, so you can see why I'm not concerned with Al Gore babbling about "man made Global Warming" that will never occur.

    If the Arctic Ice clears, the storms will not occur in a matter of days, it will relentlessly occur over decades, possibly centuries of snowfall and rainfall before the balance is restored, and the Arctic Ice stops the evaporation.

    That's why it is imperative to prevent the Arctic Ice from clearing. You can waste billions trying to reduce "green house gasses", which will be completely ineffective. We did not have "man made Global Warming" ten thousand and six thousand years ago when the Arctic Ice cleared in the past.

    Haven't you ever wondered why people in the North were living in caves while Egypt and India were building civilizations. All that is due to the extremes created by the Arctic Ocean being clear for brief periods of time over the past ten thousand years. The past five thousand years of cool dry conditions have allowed the North to develop, and turn the Cradle of Civilization into a desert. But I digress.

    So you can see why I scoff when people babble about "man made Global Warming". Why I laugh when people label me as a "denier". Why I call it religious BS. Because you guys do not have a clue about what is real.

    We can deal with a modest cooling, but we can't deal with an ice free Arctic Ocean. That's why it is vital to understand geoengineering to keep the Arctic Ocean from being free of ice. Something as simple as a hose held up by balloons spraying sulfur into the upper atmosphere, like when a volcano erupts, can make all the difference.

    In closing: The sun will come out tomorrow, all this snow will melt. This time. I can start planning on getting my new cooler next month to handle the summer months. This time.

    Articles to read, videos to watch:

    The Coming Ice Age

    They mention the Sahara desert in the article, saying in 1958 that:

    And, finally, human witnesses were tracked down in southern deserts. During this past year archaeologists have brought back new evidence that the Sahara desert was green and fertile and thriving with civilization when glaciers froze life in America and Europe. Ewing and Donn had deduced that an open Arctic Ocean would have caused rain in today’s deserts. Now, from the caves of the Sahara, came ancient man’s vivid drawings of the animals that he hunted on the once grassy desert.

    Recently, National Geographic found that ten thousand and six thousand years ago the Sahara was wet. That indicates at least two times when the Arctic Ice was gone and ice ruled the North.

    Lost Tribes of the Green Sahara

    Even now, with the Arctic Ice still in place we are subject to massive floods that can destroy regions and life. It's called ARkStorm, and it's real. Follow the links in the article.

    Every 200 years California suffers a storm of biblical proportions — this year’s rains are just a precursor

    These are the interviews about the proposed fix to keep the Arctic Ice in place. Simple engineering.

    CNN & Former Microsoft Head Talk Of Geo Engineering The Planet Part 1 OF 2

    CNN & Former Microsoft Head Talk Of Geo Engineering The Planet Part 2 OF 2

    944:

    people who understand the implications of the Carrington Event ...... yes. I have asked this question several times, answer has come there none. But then I am, technically, an engineer.

    However: When he says that the Earth will heat up until all of the polar ice melts, raising sea levels, flooding coastal cities, "runaway greenhouse effect", etc.... Once again, not possible. WRONG How can I tell you are wrong? Do you know what a Raised Beach " is? There are plenty in the UK, showing when, during previous interglacials, sea-levels were considerably higher than at present - at at ;least 2 levels - & those situations were "stable" enough to last long enough for beaches to form ....

    I'm not concerned with Al Gore babbling about "man made Global Warming" that will never occur. Errr ... I venture to disagree - try the mass-observation science project "Nature's Calendar" (Google for it) that I'm involved with? If the warming is NOT man-made, then where is it coming from, then?

    We did not have "man made Global Warming" ten thousand and six thousand years ago when the Arctic Ice cleared in the past. ALSO WRONG The Arctic Ice did not clear, it remained - what happened was that the continental Ice retreated, but the N Polar ice-covering remained. So also false.

    [ See also latest post #686 in next thread forward ]

    945:

    Never mind 2117, or even 2017

    What about 1517?

    Like THIS Yes, 500 years since Luther shattered the Catholic Church's grip on Europe, possibly an unalloyed good, but at what a price, especially when you consider what Luther said about "Reason" & the Jews.

    Um, err ....

    946:

    "Steel and Concrete are my religion."

    Even when other materials are better? And, yes, those often include wood.

    "... the implications of the Carrington Event ..."

    "At no time can the Earth warm up enough to melt the Antarctic Ice and cause sea levels to rise."

    It's happened in the past - look up dinosaurs in the Antarctic. The rest of your statements on climate science are similarly wrong, with a few nuggets of partial truth.

    947:

    Lockheed did some research on hydrogen powered passenger jets in the 1970s, it was a reasonable choice then, though you wind up with huge (H2 is 1/7 the density of water, so your tanks are BIG) tanks in the fuselage. They said it would be feasible then, if you had the infrastructure. So we just need the motivation to build it, and replace our jets (which we will do over 30 years anyways).

    948:

    yes. I have asked this question several times, answer has come there none. But then I am, technically, an engineer. There have been discussions (other than your comments :-) over the years here about CMEs and Carrington-class events. Commonly used as a plausible potential civilization destruction event. Anyway, on point, the primary tool we (collectively; not personally involved and not an expert) have is early warning, from direct observation of the sun and more important from solar wind observatories at L1 (1.5 million kms): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_objects_at_Lagrangian_points SOHO and ACE (and maybe DSCOVR?) in particular, and NOAA provides data realtime, e.g. http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/real-time-solar-wind A fast CME at 4000 kps[1] would give about 6 minutes warning time, and alert levels would be way up since the flare would have been spotted and analyzed.

    I don't know the current state of preparedness; here's a few year old report (2013) for North America (pg 14 of interest): https://www.lloyds.com/~/media/lloyds/reports/emerging-risk-reports/solar-storm-risk-to-the-north-american-electric-grid.pdf

    I don't feel like arguing with allynh other than to note that the CO2 isn't going away and has (at least) two major effects: forcing, and ocean acidification. The modeling for the later sucks since it involves modeling multiple complex ecosystems.

    [1] From 2012, a CME nearly that fast: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/stereo/news/fast-cme.html

    949:

    As I understand it, the reason for no clear answer is that we don't have much of a clue of the probabilities and timescales. However, a mere Carrington-class event would NOT do what allynh said - at least not at present. It would cause chaos, and might well kill billions (indirectly), but most places would have most power and transport back fairly quickly. Yes, for a long time, weather forecasting would be pants and there would be restrictions on air traffic, communications etc. - but there are very few critical services that simply would not work without satellites. And most power and telephone lines already have serious protection against surges - lightning isn't exactly rare.

    950:

    Well, the basic science of climate change is the same as we use in greenhouses, and anyone with some equipment can look at the absorption spectrum of CO2 in the infrared and see what's going on. The basic equation underlying climate change was put out by Svante Arrhenius well over 100 years ago.

    Or, if that's too much work, you can look up something published, such as https://www.skepticalscience.com/empirical-evidence-for-co2-enhanced-greenhouse-effect-intermediate.htm

    Still, I'm strongly reminded of the (now retired) cell biologist at UW-Madison who taught Bible classes in the lab on the weekends, and who didn't believe in evolution. He was a personable guy, too. Still, being a professional, even with tenure, doesn't mean that you don't let belief get in the way of reality, nor does it mean you're right in conflating your beliefs with reality.

    951:

    There's your problem, getting climate science from Al Gore. If you could actually be bothered to engage seriously with the science you'd get a much better idea of what is going on.

    The feedback scenario you describe sounds plausible, but unless you've done the work to calculate it using proper physics in a model, it won';t get any traction, whether with us or real scientists. Anyway, there are a few problems with it.

    1) the current warming is due to CO2, which no matter the negative feedback given, will continue to act as a forcing no matter how white the northern hemisphere gets. 2) Atmospheric circulation is moving a lot of warmer air around, especially northwards. For example here in Scotland we've had some amazingly warm winters this century, 8 or 10 degrees above average, meaning that any snow which might fall melts pretty rapidly.
    3) There might be signatures of a similar event in the climate record 6k years ago, but I note that real paleoclimatologists are usually tentative in their conclusions at that range of time. Moreover, the modern CO2 level far exceeds that from that time, therefore things are very much rather different.
    4) Sea levels are already rising, due to thermal expansion and melting of ice at the edges of continents. Anyone who tells you all of Antarctica is going to melt is an idiot, but conversely that doesn't need to happen to give us catastrophic sea level rises. 5) Your postulated decades of snowfall and rainfall is just bonkers; there's no record of any such event in the past, and you undoubtedly haven't done the mathematics about it either.

    Oh, and finally, what do you have to say about the CO2 levels in the atmosphere? Man made or accidental? And oceanic acidification? That's rather important with regards to ecosystems.

    952:

    The thing that historians still discuss is, why did Luther's demands actually spark something, when numerous other reforming and breakaway movements and sects in the past, didn't. I can't recall specific arguments, but it was quite interesting reading about it all a while back.

    953:

    Partly, "The time was right" (!)

    Unlike the previous century's Hussite Rebellions & the activities of the Lollards in England ( the latter heavily supported by the "Yorkist" monarchs, but persecuted by the Lancastrians & early Tudors, because they needed church support) the excesses of the RC establishment had grown not lessened & they refused to heed the "warnings" The pope whom Luther specifically rebelled against was: Leo X - a Medici, & corrupt, even by the lax standards of the time. Unlike the Hussites, this time it was different, & all sorts of shite broke loose, all over Europe

    954:

    Well that's the thing, as far as the arguments go, the catholic church had been as excessive as before, and with groups like the Cathars, or indeed the Hussites, had exterminated rival variations before.
    I've never heard that the lollards were heavily supported by the the yorkists.

    955:

    I was curious to see if my post was still there. It is. Thanks...

    Briefly, to Greg @945:

    When I hear comments about sea level rising I have to ask: Did the sea level rise or did the land sink.

    Remember, the ground beneath your feet is anything but static. The crust is a dynamic system, constantly changing in real time.

    • When they built Hoover Dam, they had to compute how much the crust would sink under the weight of the lake water.

    • Look at the Isthmus of Panama, and note that the sea level for the Pacific does not match the sea level of the Atlantic.

    When people think of "sea level" they assume that everything else is static. This is not like watching the level of water in a bathtub. The crust is constantly changing, in real time, and the sea level is "local" not "global".

    New Gravity Map Reveals Lumpy Earth

    The Arctic Ice did not clear, it remained - what happened was that the continental Ice retreated, but the N Polar ice-covering remained.

    Think about what you just said. Of course the Arctic Ice was covering the Arctic Ocean, that's why the "continental Ice" retreated. There was no more evaporation from the Arctic Ocean to feed those glaciers.

    • If the Arctic Ice clears, you have glaciers covering large parts of the North.

    What is a "glacier". A glacier is a "river of ice". How do you feed a river, with rainfall and snowfall.

    Look at Kilimanjaro. People are complaining that the glacier on the mountain is disappearing because of "man made Global Warming". The glacier is disappearing because they have cut down the surrounding forest to plant coffee. Coffee plants do not put out as much moisture as trees do, thus the amount of snowfall on the mountain has gone down. Plant more trees, and the glacier will come back.

    If you look at each glacier that is "disappearing" you will find that snowfall from some nearby region has decreased because of cutting down forests.

    To Elderly Cynic @947:

    "Wood", good one. We use it to form the concrete, then discard it.

    "At no time can the Earth warm up enough to melt the Antarctic Ice and cause sea levels to rise."

    It's happened in the past - look up dinosaurs in the Antarctic. The rest of your statements on climate science are similarly wrong, with a few nuggets of partial truth.

    The English language is a powerful tool, I just wish more people actually understood it. But I digress.

    Notice, I used the word "can", not the word "did". My statement was based on the Earth as it is presently configured, and how it will act in the foreseeable future.

    The discussion of dinosaurs opens up a can of worms that you are not ready to accept. If you are having problems understanding the simple fact that "man made Global Warming" is impossible then discussion of dinosaurs and the early Earth is a "bridge" too far. (GET it, "bridge", HA!) So lets focus on one step at a time.

    • When the Arctic Ice clears, billions die. We will die.

    And to your other comment @950:

    However, a mere Carrington-class event would NOT do what allynh said - at least not at present. It would cause chaos, and might well kill billions (indirectly), but most places would have most power and transport back fairly quickly.

    Sorry, but "kill billions (indirectly)" is precisely the point. Power gone, transportation gone, over a year will kill those billions while they are trying to restore things fairly "quickly". It is not an extinction level event, but we will not be around to know the difference.

    To Heteromeles @951:

    Sorry, but we are talking about "man made Global Warming" as impossible, not the "greenhouse effect" which is actual science. Ten thousand and six thousand years ago when the Arctic Ice cleared and the Sahara was green, there was no "man made Global Warming".

    The Earth, in its current form, is only livable because of greenhouse gasses like CO2(2%), Methane(3%), and water vapor(95%). Water vapor is the largest greenhouse gas. To spend billions trying to limit the "emissions" of the smallest greenhouse gas, CO2, is not effective. Think about it. If CO2 is a "pollutant", then you have to make beer illegal. Ain't gonna happen.

    The best way to deal with CO2 is what I have been proposing for years.

    • Reforest the historically modern deserts.

    Have you ever wondered how the Silk Road ever came into existence. I mean, come on, it crosses vast regions of trackless deserts. Those guys in the past did not simply load up their camels and head west with a load of silk, hoping to find a market.

    The Silk Road is the remains of a once fertile, highly populated region, that became a desert because the Arctic Ice covered the Arctic Ocean, shutting down the life giving rains. As the Middle Latitudes dried up, the towns did as well, but the Silk Road remained. Over the centuries the deserted towns were cannibalized for fire wood, leaving mud bricks.

    I have been saying for years that the system called Hügelkultur is effective for growing "Food Forests".

    Wiki - Hügelkultur

    Wiki - Forest gardening

    Plus, look at this website for great pictures about Hügelkultur

    Hügelkultur compresses the natural process of forests and soil growth from a century to less than a decade. You start out growing fast junk trees, then fruit and nuts, then a mix of hardwoods like oak. You would use the "10% Rule" of only harvesting 10% for commercial use. The rest is there to build soil.

    • Forests are soil's way of making more soil. You of all people know this.

    Try doing Hügelkultur on a small scale and see what I mean. I've been trying to get people to try the system to get more direct feedback. I have no place to store all of the crops generated from even my small backyard, so I haven't tried it.

    Build food forests and you will have an explosion of animal life, that lives, and dies, ultimately feeding the soil. It takes low tech, lots of people doing the work. It cannot be automated. If they had hired everybody in Iraq and Afghanistan to grow food forests to absorb CO2 then there would have been no decade long war. But I digress.

    The only thing that is stopping people from reforesting historically modern deserts is the myth of primeval landscapes. That "man" should not disturb the "natural" systems. BS. Point to any old growth forest and I will point to a glacier that sat in the same place just a few 10k years ago. Man has been using fire as a tool to shape the forest, burn off junk wood and plant food forests for hundreds of thousands of years. Man using fire, shaping vast areas, is what shaped man as a "tool user". They are still finding large areas of the Amazon where food forests and fisheries were common.

    • Early man "made" the Earth a garden, he didn't find it that way, and we can make the Earth a garden again.

    And don't get me started on setting up offshore communities in the "desert" parts of the Pacific to add iron to make the oceans bloom with life. I've already spent a huge block of productive time on these posts already. Basically, use the "10% Rule" there as well to only harvest the biggest fish, leaving the rest to soak up that nasty CO2 that you think is a "pollutant".

    This has been fun, but I really need to get back to work. I have books to finish.

    BTW, all the snow is gone. The sun came out and melted everything, except on the mountains. The sun came out, this time. If the Arctic Ice clears, simply because no one sees the problem, there will be no "this time" for us again.

    956:

    There were Lollard sermons preached in the presence of Edward IV, & if he hadn't dies early, &/or Richard II had kept his throne, there were definite movements towards a limited national reformation within catholicism in Britain - a bit like "Gallicanism" only more so. But, Henry Tydder took over & it relapsed back to the usual catholic murder & torture. [ See the burning of Falstof for an example ]

    957:

    Did the sea level rise or did the land sink. The sea-levels rose & fell, in line with the amount of ice-cover. Your "land sinking" is cobblers, unless you are in a subduction zone, or other really active volcanic area, like the bay of Naples (!)

    There was no more evaporation from the Arctic Ocean to feed those glaciers. Bollocks. The Arctic "Ocean" was covered in an even thicker coating of ice.

    If you look at each glacier that is "disappearing" you will find that snowfall from some nearby region has decreased because of cutting down forests. This is why the glaciers in Switzerland & Austria are retreating is it? More bollocks.

    the simple fact that "man made Global Warming" is impossible NOT EVEN WRONG As someone else has pointed out Start HERE OK?

    six thousand years ago when the Arctic Ice cleared NO, didn't happen. WHAT are you smoking?

    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

    OTOH Hügelkutur is a n other way of getting "Terra Preta" As I am doing on my allotment plotlets. The productivity is amazing.

    958:

    Hügelkutur is an other way of getting "Terra Preta" As I am doing on my allotment plotlets. The productivity is amazing.

    I'm glad somebody is using the system. Some of the things they have done look amazing.

    We have watersheds here in New Mexico that consist of pine forests. They routinely go up in flames because the life cycle of pine requires fire.

    I have watched vast areas go up in flames, going "moonscape" by burning not just the trees, but the soil itself. We had areas where the forest floor level dropped two feet as the soil burned down to bare dirt.

    The Los Alamos fire was on the other side of the hills from my house. The ash plume covered my house. The sky turned dark. I could see the Sun as a red disk. The ash fell on us like snow.

    A few years ago Arizona had massive fires as well. I was up on the roof, setting up the cooler, when the western sky turned black. I thought a thunderstorm was coming in. It was a dense cloud of smoke from Arizona sweeping in. From my roof I can usually see for miles. That day I could not see a block away.

    The Sangre De Cristos mountains east of Santa Fe had a major fire decades ago. It left a vast eagle shaped scar visible on the west side. Over the years that I worked at the Highway Department I saw that scar fill in with Aspen. It's one vast tree sharing the same root system. Each fall it turns color, each spring it turns green.

    For decades they let locals go into the forest to cut firewood. The Forestry people would mark the trees, and let the locals go in and clear out the brush and old wood. In the 80s, the environmental groups forced them to stop the practice, setting us up for more fires over the years.

    I would like to see them try Hügelkultur instead. Cut down the existing pine and use the trees to create the berms to catch water, while building a diverse forest. Someone pointed out that you can spend a billion dollars on a watershed and get more clean water than from a billion dollar water treatment plant. One puts lots of people to work with little profit, the other is all about profit over jobs. I'd rather have the watershed.

    One of these days I may try to get a Hügelkultur test project started and see what we can do.

    Thanks...

    959:

    Most local councils now collect properly biodegradable "waste" & then warm-compost it in concrete cells, allowing the temperature to get to between 70 & 85 for some time. It chars to a very dark grey. Said councils then distribute it to anyone who asks for it, though there is a snag - you have to be able to take about 5 or 6 tonnes at a go. Our allotments get 2-4 deliveries a year ( 5 if we're lucky ) Given our base soil is London clay, the admixture of "magic black council compost" & said soil is wonderful - even better if you can interleave horse-manure & shavings of other horse bedding from stables, & thus re-using another "waste" product. It is both relatively free-draining, yet also water-retentive, unlike the clay, which is either waterlogged or cracking. The worms & other small macrolife in the soil LURVE this mixture, as do the microorganisms. It also seems to promote fungal/mycorrizial growth too, as far as I can see. What's not to like?

    P.S. There are still plotholders who put in on in teaspoonsful, whereas I dump it on by the barrowload, if I can.

    960:

    If I may be forgiven for returning to the topic, the US Congressional Research Service has just published a CRISPR-Cas9 conspectus for the edification of the Representatives and Senators. (Me, I think it would have been best not to bring the subject to their attention.)

    Advanced Gene Editing: CRISPR-Cas9 https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R44824.pdf

    961:

    There are still plotholders who put in on in teaspoonsful, whereas I dump it on by the barrowload, if I can.

    I knew that a teaspoonsful is 5 cc, but had to look up barrowload.

    http://homeguides.sfgate.com/volume-wheelbarrow-81476.html

    So like 60,000 to 180,000 cc. Many teaspoonsful.

    962:

    Greenhouses are not heated by the "greenhouse effect". They allow in light and heat but the roof prevents heat loss by convection. And as you say anyone who had access to IR spectroscopy can verify the absorbance and emission spectra of CO2. Unfortunately spectroscopy in not commonly understood by deniers.

    963:

    Where the aforesaid black compost is concerned, I reckon that my wheelbarrow, full, is approx, 50kg, so that 20 barrowloads = (approx) 1 tonne. Over the past 5 years, I think I've put about 4 - 5 tonnes on, to a total area of approx 15x30 metres [ 450m^2 ]

    964:

    Or is the singular of teaspoonsful teaspoonful? Hard to remember. Probably depends on whether the second s is for singular possessive or plural. Or something.

    965:

    Not really. The reason you put glass on a glasshouse is to let the visible spectrum in, and to keep the IR reradiation in as well, so that it stays warmer than it would otherwise. Now there are a bunch of other structures also called greenhouses which provide some shade, such as the plastic houses where I live in San Diego, and they do work by preventing convection.

    In any case, since I worked in greenhouses for a number of years, keeping the insides within a livable temperature range was always a major problem in the summer. Every greenhouse I've seen outside the poles (or Mars) has all sorts of windows and louvers, even in the roof, to force convection in the summer. They're far from air tight. They also whitewash them in the summer, to cut down on the light coming in.

    966:

    From Wikipedia However, R. W. Wood in 1909 constructed two greenhouses, one with glass as the transparent material, and the other with panes of rock salt, which is transparent to infrared. The two greenhouses warmed to similar temperatures, suggesting that an actual greenhouse is warmer not because of the "greenhouse effect", but by preventing convective cooling, not allowing warmed air to escape.[16][17]

    More recent quantitative studies suggest that the effect of infrared radiative cooling is not negligibly small, and may have economic implications in a heated greenhouse. Analysis of issues of near-infrared radiation in a greenhouse with screens of a high coefficient of reflection concluded that installation of such screens reduced heat demand by about 8%, and application of dyes to transparent surfaces was suggested. Composite less-reflective glass, or less effective but cheaper anti-reflective coated simple glass, also produced savings.[18]

    967:

    And, both you & Mike C forget - if not removes, certainly lowers by a huge amount the heat losses due not only to convection, but simply the wind blowing past! Certainly louvres or vents are needed, especially in the roof - otherwise mine would easily get to over 40C in June-August, which would not be good for the plants inside. So I crank the flaps up! After the end of April ( but earlier this year ), my excess-light input is cut down by the large "Black Hamburg" grape-vine growing in there ( It's roots extend outside the building )

    968:

    Approx conversions:-

    1 "navvy barrow" = 1 cubic yard = 1 ton (not tonne) of concrete.

    969:

    Concrete is about twice as dense as water, so a cubic yard of it is closer to 2 tons than 1.

    970:

    I sit corrected! ;-)

    Having said which I have seen full navvy barrows of concrete being wheeled up ramps by one man! :eek:

    971:

    You may actually find that it's closer to one ton than two - while concrete's density is about 2, a cubic yard is much smaller than people tend to expect[1]. Specifically, a yard is 0.9m, so a cubic yard is 0.90.90.9 = 0.729 cubic meters. (So density 2 gives 1.46 tons/m^3.)

    [1] Just one of those things; most people's brains don't do linear to cubic conversions at all well.

    972:

    A heavy duty builders' wheeelbarrow is 175 litres / 220 Kg. My allotment wheelbarrow is 90 litre and I use it to transport 110L bags of water to my allotment, A cubic yard is just under 765 litres. More than 4 tines the size of a heavy duty builders' wheelbarrow.

    973:

    Wet concrete is usually slightly denser than 2, and a yard is slightly more than 0.9 metres, so Mike Collins is right.

    974:

    Looking back on 2017/ Trump-think of it this way: Stross' Glasshouse was a metaphor for the metaphysical present, how the OS controls this sim reality. Metaphysical is a word of convenience for what used to be called the supernatural which has little meaning anymore.

    The metaphysical dimension has permanently intruded on what used to be called everyday reality. Maybe it always has. Their are no space aliens bc "They" R us and by us I mean posthumanity of which I seem not to be a member.

    Supposed fantasy and SF movies like certain SF novels are the zeitgeist hinting at how reality works behind the veil. Tomorrowland by Disney is one. It shows a dimension existing next to this one. In the beginning this quantum wormhole dimension of 1963 is a teeming Gernsback Continuum. At the end it was empty except for a ruler, Gov. Nix, his crew and an AI called the Monitor. Implications for the future? Many. Of course the US space probe arrived at Pluto the same time the movie was released and we got pics of the real Nix, god of shadow and moon of Pluto.

    Trump's election has logical reasons and also that we are living in extreme times - extreme weather, extreme height in both sexes, extreme displacement, extreme politics and thinking. (Hey, especially this comment)

    Other movies: They Live, Truman Show, Jacob's Ladder, and the more recent, Fantastic Beasts, Dr Strange, John Wick 2, GB'ers 2016. They don't speak in any kind of deep code that only I understand. They all but come right out and tell you. And the wall of separation between the 2 worlds must not be breeched. Like in Fantastic Beasts, what used to be called the everyday world must have no direct or remembered contact with the one next door.

    975:

    And the wall of separation between the 2 worlds must not be breached Really?

    "Great wits are to Madness close allied, And thin partitions do their bounds divide"

    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

    But I do agree that something has gorn worng with "reality"

    976:

    That is a relief (not least for the builders! ;-) ) and I guess you can understand why the devices get called "navvy barrows"?

    977:

    I should probably have checked I wasn't rounding by habit when I was pedantising someone else's rounding, shouldn't I? :)

    978:

    Been there - done that :-( We have only one non-human posting here, and even it makes mistakes!

    979:

    Well said.

    Don't forget Donnie Darko, and all its variations.

    980:

    I had to look "Donnie Darko" up & read the plot.

    Religious claptrap.

    If you are going to have parallel worlds, it's much more likely that it/they will be like (the later versions of ) H B Piper's ones, with corrupt politicians & kludges & mistakes, & no "gods" at all.

    981:

    Sorry, Greg, but this is another case where it's best to actually watch the movie.

    There is nothing about "religion" or "gods" nor about "parallel worlds" in the movie. I can't even see where you got any of that. If you look at the wiki page it has a basic description of the film.

    This is basically the standard "time reset" story. No "parallel worlds" simply the classic resetting the worldline. You can find this same concept woven through SF and Fantasy. It's a standard trope, used in a huge number of stories. Here are some examples you may have seen.

    The Man Who Could Work Miracles by H.G. Wells, story and movie

    The Brass Bottle (1964 film)

    Doctor Strange - comics and current movie

    Each story resets time, undoes events, and returns the worldline to an earlier point. In many stories this is treated as a palimpsest and some characters are aware of the changes. It's that memory of the changed events that has made Donnie Darko into a cult classic.

    There are two versions of the movie, so far: the "original" and the "director's cut". The director's cut was trying to make the movie clearer to writer/director, Richard Kelly, and the audience. Each time the writer/director is at conventions and tries to explain what the movie is about he gets farther from the source of the concept.

    If you watch his other movies, Southland Tales and The Box you will see him wrestling with the same concepts as Donnie Darko.

    Basically, it's like a Zen kaon, the more he tries to explain the movie the farther away from the actual events he gets.

    "Cellar door"

    982:

    DD does not have to die. He knows the jet-engine is going to crash into his bed. He can choose not to be there when it comes down. So why does the fuckwit commit suicide, then?

    983:

    The book he reads in the movie was written by the old woman, Roberta Sparrow, describing her understanding of such resets that she lived through, The Philosophy of Time Travel. She thought such loops in time were actually outside of reality, and that unless the loop was resolved, that reality would be destroyed. So in his mind, him staying in bed was a way to save everyone.

    That's what made it a cult classic. It's that dichotomy that confuses the writer/director, Richard Kelly, and causes him to rehash the story over and over when he is at conventions, and when he made his other movies.

    The reality is, Donnie was probably stuck in a time loop, reliving the same event, which is why he has the blackouts and hallucinations, and what only appears as prescient knowledge. That time loop is what fed the vortex that threw the engine back in time to crash into his bedroom.

    Watch the "original" and watch the "director's cut". Watch the special features and listen to the commentary to see what I mean.

    This is similar to Groundhog's Day. Until the character achieved a level of understanding, he could not move to the next day. And consider this, he may not be free of his time loops. For all we know, he then relives that new day over and over, until the next new day.

    984:

    Spam spam spam spam spam spam eggs chips and spam above I think!

    985:

    Now gone. Sorry, been away.

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