Kurzgesast – In a Nutshell is a site with short videos on all sorts of futuristic topics. Here is one on the Dyson Sphere. It talks about a seemingly-plausible approach to a Dyson swarm where small, cheap solar satellites are used to beam solar energy to factories on Mercury, which is used along with materials on Mercury itself to make more satellites and more factories to make satellites in an exponential manner. Sounds good except for the possibility of a runaway exponential system redirecting increasing amounts of solar generation in new directions, and the ethics of possibly disassembling an entire planet into construction materials.
Category Archives: Web Article Review
Oliver Stone on Recent U.S. History
Oliver Stone is adding a chapter to his 2012 book The Untold History of the United States covering 2012-2019. He basically argues that in 2012 things were not great but getting better, while in 2019 “the unthinkable has become thinkable”. The litany includes continued threats of NATO expansion, wars in the greater Middle East, backing out of the Iran deal and historic Cold War-era nuclear weapons treaties, expanding the nuclear arsenal, threatening behavior against North Korea and China, and continuing to deny and ignore climate change.
In my view, while the U.S. adversaries are not blameless, we need to understand that their governments feel legitimately threatened by our government. The U.S. government has the world’s largest military, the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, and has used its military frequently and unilaterally against weaker countries. A path to real peace would have to include some credible means of convincing other countries that we will not attack except in self defense, and we don’t have the track record to convince anyone of this. And in a world where the food supply and coastal population centers are going to start coming under threat from nature, humanity needs to be unified and undistracted to have a chance to deal with other threats.
500-year plan
Here’s a 500-year plan for Mars colonization from a group at NYU. It appears to rely heavily on genetic engineering to allow future humans to handle the rigors of space travel.
why people don’t smile in old photos
I always wondered this. I think the first black and white photos I ever saw were from the Depression era, and I just assumed people were…depressed. But I noticed later that a frown is typical of most old photos. I’ve also noticed that this is not just an American thing, but true of other cultures. When people would show me pictures of their grandparents, they would have a stern expression, and pictures of their grandchildren at the same age would be all smiles. You even see pictures of families together where the grandparents look pretty fierce and everyone else is smiling.
This video says that early on people treated a photo as though it were a portrait being painted. It was a rare thing that might only happen once and was expensive. There would just be this one picture for people to remember you by. There was also the practical matter that early on, you had to sit still for 10-15 minutes and it was hard to hold a smile that long. The video also talks about the practice of taking pictures of the dead, including children, which I found sad but it makes a certain sense. In some cases that might have been the only photo taken of the person.
what’s new with longevity treatments
This article in The Week mentions a few things.
Humans grow fewer blood vessels in their muscles with age, which is believed to result in the gradual breakdown of vital organs. The same pattern exists in mice. In 2018, Harvard researchers fed mice a chemical to manipulate the gene associated with blood vessel growth and found that old mice subsequently were able to run on a treadmill 56 percent longer. While that work continues, biohackers are transfixed by nootropics — “smart drugs,” amino acids, and other supplements that purportedly boost cognitive abilities and prevent brain aging.
Mainstream scientists and doctors are still saying nay. I don’t know but exercising to keep the oxygen level up seems like a good idea.
Allan Savory
Here’s an interesting 2013 TED talk by Allan Savory, where he talks about his theory that intentionally grazing livestock at high densities, while keeping them bunched and moving as though they were a herd of wild herbivores pursued by predators, can reverse desertification and make a big dent in climate change. It all sounds very scientific and proven when he explains it. I also recall though that there are criticisms that he is resistant to sharing his research results with other scientists in a way that would allow them to reproduce his research and verify his findings, which a serious scientist would normally do.
measuring blood pressure through your @$$
This seems like a good idea actually – a toilet seat that measures your heart rate, blood pressure, and oxygen level. It’s designed for hospitals, but it makes a lot of sense to me. It would happen automatically, built automatically into your daily routine and with no wasted time or extra effort. You could have it sent right to your doctor if you wanted to.
geoengineering and rice yields
Would injecting sulfate particles into the atmosphere to counteract global warming affect rice yields in the tropics? Yes, according to this paper, but not in the direction I guessed. Even though rice is a tropical crop, it is sensitive to temperature – higher temperatures decrease its yield, and the effect of lowering temperature would be greater than the effect of having less light, leading to increased yield. At least in this study which wired together a complicated climate model with a complicated rice yield model.
Costa Rica
Costa Rica is planning to go carbon free by 2050. The trick is that most of their electricity is already hydroelectric, so what is left is to electrify their transportation system and then use that electricity to run it. This exact recipe won’t work everywhere, but the lesson is that electrifying opens up options for how to generate that electricity down the road.
Philadelphia to Pittsburgh hyperloop
The Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission is apparently studying the idea of a hyperloop that could theoretically make the trip from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh in half an hour. Initially they are looking just at freight. The larger context is that the Pennsylvania Turnpike has the right of way, is not doing well financially, charging trucks to carry freight is the core of their business, and they are worried about some killer app coming along. Good for somebody at a dinosaur organization like this to have a little bit of vision and actually get a real study funded.
Of course, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh are not really connected in a socioeconomic sense other than being part of an anachronistic and mostly irrelevant political entity. Philadelphia is part of the Boston to DC metro corridor, and Pittsburgh is somewhat isolated but part of a loosely defined region that might include Cleveland, Cincinnati, even Chicago and Detroit if there were really good rail links in place. Put a really fast rail link in place between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, and now you could buy a super cheap fixer up house in Pittsburgh and commute to your job in New York or Chicago.