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  • Commented on Cutting their own throats
    What benefit to society at large if the lord of the rings is public domain? New line cinema can knock licensing costs off it's budget, but the movies won't cost us less at the box office, or be copyright free...
  • Commented on Cutting their own throats
    Regarding the 70 year copyright period, I'm always surprised it's such a big issue. Is everyone really so interested in Steamboat Willie? Because that's what would become public domain. Most modern Mickey Mouse incarnations are more recent, and he is...
  • Commented on Three wishes
    1) The ability for any vertebrate animal to enjoy biological immortality and even rejuvenation by simple expedient of ingesting a ubiquitously available substance every 6 months. Here "biological immortality" means that a human can perpetually look, feel, and think as...
  • Commented on I'd hate to have his email inbox right now ...
    As for why explore/colonize space now, (for a value of now stretching from the late 50s to next decade) I'd say it's because we had the excess societal resources to attempt a grand project like that. It's not clear that...
  • Commented on I'd hate to have his email inbox right now ...
    Right, von Neumann machines are my favorite somewhat plausible "magic wand"; exploitation of space resources is just one of their many capabilities. That said, if we do get self-replicating robotic factories the whole economic and political order is going to...
  • Commented on I'd hate to have his email inbox right now ...
    #90 and #91 come from people who make fun of what they think space colonization fans would put on the table as advantages of the concept. Second-guessing other people's arguments is fun but it wouldn't give any insights to why...
  • Commented on I'd hate to have his email inbox right now ...
    Regarding the substantive issue of space colonization, the "anti" arguments boil down to: 1) Space travel is too expensive 2) There's nothing there worth bringing back Point 1, cost, is being actively addressed by a number of companies, including but...
  • Commented on I'd hate to have his email inbox right now ...
    That's right, it's not forbidden by physics to establish permanent off-Earth outposts. But "not forbidden by known physics" is an extremely low bar for plausibility. Most arguments in favor of near-medium future Grand Space Projects like asteroid mining, a manned...
  • Commented on Trick Question
    While I have the ear of biologists and people interested in starship biology... Is it at all feasible to turn chemotrophic organisms into something humans can eat? How many steps would it take and how much embedded energy loss would...
  • Commented on Microbes grow the starship
    There's no free chlorine or bromine on Earth either, but many more organisms produce halogenated compounds containing them and many more distinct chlorine and bromine compounds are known from natural sources. It probably comes down to bond energy: simple fluoride...
  • Commented on Microbes grow the starship
    I think it's interesting to consider the roads not traveled by organisms, both on the molecular level and on a larger scale. Fluorine, in the form of fluoride-containing minerals, is common and widely distributed on earth. It has proven an...
  • Commented on Why I've been quiet lately
    So we're looking at the equivalent of an asteroid 3-5 km wide mass-wise, except that this is where the simulation falls apart. Mass isn't surface area, so the structure actually needs to be bigger to work. Either it's an asteroid...
  • Commented on Because I am a glutton for punishment ...
    Charlie, I don't recall if you have been asked/answered this question before: why do you write more mundane SF now? There is no implied criticism to this question. I think Rule 34 is the best SF I've read in the...
  • Commented on Post-oil ...
    On autonomous vehicles: My previous comments have been completely non-speculative, focused on facts and figures. I would like to get a little speculative for a moment. What impact might autonomous vehicles have on energy and transportation patterns? It appears that...
  • Commented on Post-oil ...
    According to a May 25 report, U.S. dependence on imported oil fell below 50 percent in 2010 for the first time in more than a decade, thanks in part to the weak economy and more fuel efficient vehicles, the Energy...
  • Commented on Post-oil ...
    On energy density: There is indeed a huge gap between chemical fuels and everything else. The gap between gasoline and coal is smaller than you imagine; dry bituminous coal burns to yield 24-35 megajoules per kilogram. Gasoline yields 43-47 megajoules...
  • Commented on Post-oil ...
    On renewable liquid fuels: This is the worst news. Renewable liquid fuels are pretty expensive and limited, at least compared to the rate at which Americans have enjoyed consuming them for the last 50 years or so. Places where land...
  • Commented on Post-oil ...
    On nitrogen fixation: The Haber-Bosch process catalytically combines hydrogen gas with nitrogen gas from the atmosphere to produce ammonia. Ammonia can then be oxidized to produce nitric acid. From this key, ammonia, we derive the panoply of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers:...
  • Commented on Post-oil ...
    Here's my question for a post-oil world 50-100 years out: silicon, graphene, hypothetical biocomputer, or abacus and slide-rule? How about infrastructure? Will we still have the web, or will it be a jury-rigged system of independent cell phone towers and...
  • Commented on Post-oil ...
    On rare elements: There are basically 8 elements that you may have heard about as supply-limited and crucial to the future of renewable energy and associated technologies. They are lithium, gallium, indium, tellurium, lanthanum, cerium, neodymium, and dysprosium. The last...
  • Commented on Post-oil ...
    On solar conversion efficiency: The most efficient actually-available terrestrial PV systems I know of are made by Amonix. They are concentrating solar systems that use multijunction cells to achieve about 28% system-level conversion efficiency with 1000-fold sunlight concentration based on...
  • Commented on Because I am a glutton for punishment ...
    There's even a political angle here. The nitrogen fertilizer industry is an integral part of the military industrial complex, and you can look at the massive amounts of cheap corn produced by the US as a consequence of the MIC's...
  • Commented on Because I am a glutton for punishment ...
    The Victorians seeing the need to fix nitrogen for fertilizer (they saw mass starvation sweeping the globe ca. 1920 if a way wasn't found to increase food supplies). This was with a world population around 1.5 billion. The ability to...
  • Commented on What am I missing?
    A possible weird development: Machine Precognition, named in the tradition of machine vision, machine learning, etc. In the general case, predicting the future is absurdly difficult. Predicting the next several seconds in spatially limited domains is a much more heavily...
  • Commented on What am I missing?
    Good points about the social constraints on meals. In my social circles serving light meatless meals would never be a slur on host or guests. That goes back to my earlier comment about the structural advantages I had even when...
  • Commented on What am I missing?
    Ah, so all you're really interested in is pushing a rather odious right-wing talking point rather than actually finding out why people have the eating preferences that they do. You could have save me some effort if you'd just said...
  • Commented on What am I missing?
    Your question contained an invalid presumption, that you need stay-at-home adults to prepare potatoes instead of packaged foods that say "microwaveable" right on the label....
  • Commented on What am I missing?
    See "Access to Affordable and Nutritious Food—Measuring and Understanding Food Deserts and Their Consequences: Report to Congress" by the USDA, 2009. According to their research, only a small minority of Americans are stuck in food deserts without a vehicle --...
  • Commented on What am I missing?
    This morning, I was discussing an example with my partner: would you be willing to double your food cost if it meant that you lived longer and had fewer health problems? In the US, we've gone for cheap food at...
  • Commented on "These Aren't the Worlds You're Looking For"
    You only need continuous energy supplied for the share of it that goes to non-interruptible manufacturing activities, like refining aluminum and silicon. Even then you do not necessarily need full power at night, just enough to (e.g.) keep your electrolytic...
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