Pete Wildsmith

Pete Wildsmith

  • Commented on Covid on Mars
    The Martian city is not a single city. Not in the way we have on earth. It has more in common with a spacecraft or an airliner, in that the system is designed to be resilient to failure. When you...
  • Commented on Sucker bet (a thought experiment)
    By the middle of the century fully one third of the global population is going to live in places which, as of now, are being dealt the very shitty end of the stick economically. Then the turd-flavoured icing on the...
  • Commented on Sucker bet (a thought experiment)
    I'd support research and development institutions in the global South, in agronomy, water, energy and sustainable building; all funding predicated on the results being published Open Access. To support that I'd also fund the journals to peer review and publish...
  • Commented on Social architecture and the house of tomorrow
    https://www.euro-fusion.org/news/2018/june/dt-time-at-jet/...
  • Commented on Social architecture and the house of tomorrow
    Oil, coal and to some extent gas historically had a very high EROEI, energy return on energy investment. Oil lay around in puddles on the ground in Mesopotamia, oil came spewing out of wells in Texas under natural high pressure,...
  • Commented on Social architecture and the house of tomorrow
    For me the huge factor has to be the heat. I'm a cynic, which means for me 4C of warming by 2119 would be a happy outcome. Even 4C means the equatorial band is essentially uninhabitable, because you can't work...
  • Commented on Do my Homework
    A century ago the hero of our story would have been a train-spotter, or a fanatic autograph collector. She even wears something which physically looks like an anorak, though its main function is not to keep her dry but to...
  • Commented on What can possibly go wrong?
    I'll admit that I haven't read the rest of the thread, it's pretty imposing, but this comment about the Korg et al set off a train of thought about modular synthesis and how it's related to (for want of a...
  • Commented on 2117 revisited
    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...
  • Commented on Facts of Life and Death
    Mike, I've found your data point: food and drink as 11% of the (£531 per week) income of the average household, 2014 [ons]. Since the mean isn't a great measure of how it would affect lower and higher income households,...
  • Commented on What else can you do with a Big Dumb Booster?
    Much more planetary science! At that sort of cost per tonne (tonne! not kilo!) to orbit, a Neptune orbiter can deliver results within in a Congressman's career. If a risky Venerian adventure's launch costs fall by two orders of magnitude,...
  • Commented on Evolver
    I have failed in the 50 Ma constraint. I'll go with what as far as I'm concerned is a trope of 'future evolution': bigger, smarter bats....
  • Commented on Evolver
    It's only been 400 Ma since our own ancestors were doing this: https://youtu.be/FjQr3lRACPI?t=25 So I'm going to say, 400 Ma from now, distant cephalopod descendants with big hydrogen bladders doing their jet-propulsion shtick in the sky, hybrid aerostat/aerodyne style....
  • Commented on A game of consequences
    For outposts within the solar system, the example of the medium sized islands illustrates the model well enough. Not populated enough to constitute a civilisation individually, places like Iceland, New Zealand and Hawaii undoubtedly make use of surgeons and steam...
  • Commented on A game of consequences
    Sure, but what's the outcome? Where is the tension? Between private ownership and collective responsibility. I'll venture to say that successful space settlements further from Earth would be ones with a strong sense of collective ownership, which is not necessarily...
  • Commented on A game of consequences
    Economics as Cronus, consuming bureaucracy and politics - that sounds like the present to me. One definite characteristic of economics as currently applied is the treatment of externalities, most prominently what are beginning to be called "ecosystem services". In environments...
  • Commented on A game of consequences
    Perhaps defining self-sufficient/sustaining in the context of a space colony will be interesting. Here goes: At the level of the settlement, there would certainly be a high level of equipment redundancy, and it would be spatially distributed. This is already...
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