unchocked
unchocked on Hacker News
Geophysically, there are 3 pillars to climate stabilization:
1. Emitting fewer greenhouse gasses. Need to do that more than ever, but we are now in overshoot so…
2. Actively remove greenhouse gasses from atmosphere. Will need to do that, but land use and dirty energy trends away from net negative. Also, it’s a 100 year project once started.
3. Shade Earth. Not regions, The whole globe. There are two ways to do that:
a. Stratospheric aerosols
b. Planetary sunshades in space, at Sun-Earth L1.
That’s the whole solution space, conceptually. As long as we continue to fail within that space, we will suffer compounding effects of unmitigated climate change.
Worth noting that aluminum is the most abundant metal of the Moon’s highland geography, thus excellent for bootstrapping beyond Earth.
This lowers p(doom) for me.
It makes sense that reinforcement learning on reasoning about coherent principles should bias toward principled action in real situations.
Probably also illuminates moral interpretability.
Philosophically, this looks like breaking the training data limit in the same way that humans do: by using an internally consistent view of the world to imagine new scenarios and integrate them into an updated worldview.
Feels like 1999 all over again. This time, I think it really is different.
It is insane that the Paris agreement requires a centered 20-year running mean of global surface temperature to define global warming thresholds.
That bureaucratic sleight of hand builds roughly a decade of delay into the system. Sclerotic by design.
Missing from the article: Jared Isaacman offered to fix Hubble for free, and NASA turned him down.
Best one-lesson favor I ever got was dimensional analysis in high school.
Do it, and most basic physics is trivial.
Hop David is the person on the internet who the author wants to talk to about whether their math on orbital tethers is correct.
Engineering an improved rubisco into the food supply (or the notional biological carbon capture stream) would significantly boost to the carrying capacity of our planet.
FWIW, the SO2 injection rate for climate engineering is about 1/10 of our current tropospheric injection rate from burning fossil fuels.
I bring it up to illustrate that we are already making consequential choices about the climate.
There is no chance that we will remain below 1.5C. Because there is (rightly) moral value attached to staying below 1.5, that fact is (also) hard to accept.
The formalized narrative makes sense through a values-based lens, as does the conversation moving through stages of grief as geophysics makes itself felt.
No, just put them inside a radiation shield and pump heat out. Same protocol for the humans.
ChatGPT is the perfect VC. Superhuman pattern matcher, and unable to recognize any signal w/ non-zero Shannon entropy.
Exact replacement. POSIWID.
Fuckin’ A… I don’t have a charitable explanation for why folks are holding their breath for another neutron source, while the world burns.
Worth noting that the Outer Space Treaty prohibits “weapons of mass destruction” in space, though that is generally interpreted to apply only to nuclear weapons.
Seems naive that, as the article claims, nations might agree to limit their detection technology to enhance survivability of their adversaries’ nuclear forces.
If “ocean transparency” comes to pass, it seems much likelier that we’d have to deal with a realignment of the MAD calculus.
I will hazard that the problems with nuclear are not technological but political, and the economic problems with nuclear are there because of political reasons.
France gets ~75% of its power from nuclear, safely and economically. France inhabits the same physical world as the rest of us, but is different politically.
If there were a will, there would be a way. If the environmental movement had paid more attention to James Hansen's testimony in 1989 than it did to Chernobyl in 1986 then we would be living in a different world.
There is no amount of damage from nuclear accidents that will be worse than what we are suffering from climate change, with no end in sight. Proliferation is another story, but how's that going anyway...?
No mention of what the tool does. Anyone know?
Which traditional mores might you have in mind, and how would you suggest others (North Americans?) should think about them?
Long term hydrogen storage isn't that bad with the proper architecture. You need a cryocooler which can be powered by the nuke, and thermal shielding for the tank which in vacuum is thin film and of minuscule weight.
Hydrogen leakage and structural embrittlement are overblown, i.e. the Space Shuttle tank is one of the most mass efficient architectures in history and it was full of liquid hydrogen. Terrestrially, you can buy a Toyota hydrogen car today. Materials matter, but people act like the thing needs to be made of 4" plate and will fall apart if you look at it. Scaling helps here too, as volume increases to the third power while wall area increases to the second.
The thing will, if there is any sense in the architecture, be assembled in orbit so gossamer heat shields and the like won't be a problem, nor will an extended assembly program that makes with a separately launched nuclear reactor.
For ISRU Mars return, water is incredibly abundant and there's no concern with "wasting" residual oxygen. For lunar applications, water may be scarce but oxygen is abundant in regolith.
You can't beat hydrogen as a fuel. As the lightest molecule, you get the highest exhaust velocity for the least energy input.
A 95 4Runner restored to like new condition would be an excellent ride today, Gad mileage notwithstanding.
Run out vs. new is a straw man w/r/t/ old tech vs new.
You are exactly mentioning it, and the concern is ridiculous as almost every non-plant thing excretes CO2 and breathes oxygen.
Given that there's nothing forcing the Fed to unload these mortgages, the option of putting them on the market (thus driving commercial mortgage rates higher) seems like a policy lever that will be good to have, cooling real estate inflation selectively separate from the federal funds rate.
Yes, indeed, and they offer signal and TOR instructions as well OFC, don’t visit with a work/personal devise if considering whistleblowing.
Well, it was founded by the NSA 12333 whistleblower, and assisted in representing the Facebook whistleblower, so… a pretty good chance?
For potential whistleblowers: there are legal avenues to expose wrongdoing.
http://whistlebloweraid.org offers free representation to those navigating the process, founded by a (legal) NSA whistleblower.
Another reminder of how much less overhead human-scaled systems require.
In this case, the battery swapping robot is you.
While the essay is cringe, given the enriched pool of unbounded ambition here I want to address the clickbait title.
If you want to be a trillionaire, the first question you should ask is why: to what end?
That kind of money is power, and power is just a means to an end. What do you believe in? What needs doing in the world? Follow that, and if you get it right you'll find the means will follow.
If you need to feel better about yourself, build a secure life and learn to be content.