By xaosseed
I can’t remember what the meat of this evenings argument has been, I’ve drunk rather too much of the fine ales that Aberdeen has to offer and have .. possibly missed the points on some of the counter arguments but I remember that the evening ended on me arguing that one should try to live forever, or at least not accept that say 80 years was ‘it’ and thank you good night after that.
It was an argument with an old classmate, this is a guy who can wrangle a hot swedish blonde as a bedmate when a) wasted and b) on a train in the wrong direction on new years night. He’s lucky, in the Napoleonic sense, and yet he doesn’t, or possibly for spite refuses, to see the point of reassessing the priorities and capabilites of medical sciences come say, 2050 to see if they can do more for him. I think he’s nuts, but then I think you scrape on as long as you can to see what the future hold because goodness knows theres fusion up ahead and after that everything changes.
This has been typed with one eye shut to counter durkenss, this is tiring and thus I abed. Hasta.
No related posts.
6th of August, 2008
We can expect medical science to improve to amazing degrees over the next half-century. I don’t think it is true that our generation is the one that will be eternally extended by medical science (I’m not certain any generation will ever be that lucky).
As for everything changing with fusion, I’m curious to know why? It seems to be another method for generating power, but it’s not infinite, it’s still subject to the thermodynamic tax.
6th of August, 2008
mmm entropy.
intelligence is like a system for minimising your local entropy at the usual cost.
And the sun will die out sooner or later, so we will run out of fusion energy eventually (why do we bother with magnetic confinement technologies for fusion when gravitational confinement in the sun works soo much better?)
Lastly, if death is no longer inevitable, where does the concept of euthanasia go? (that i think is the most interesting question)
6th of August, 2008
I believe it’s gv.iowa who believes that by the time our numbers are up we’ll be able to just get uploaded into the matrix.
7th of August, 2008
Well, fusion does have a thermodynamic tax and its far from a perfect solution, but it is to my eyes the least worst solution. It will probably always be a rich mans plaything because a fusion plant will be a very expensive high precision piece of kit and thus unlikely to be globally deployable but the fact that its feed stock is deuterium, which you can extract by centrifuging any random seawater means that once you’ve got a fusion plan, your supply line runs to the nearest seashore. This, for places like Japan and Europe, will be the game changer because there will no longer be the same desperate compulsion to maintain accees to the current energy source of choice - crude oil.
Once its no longer ‘all about the oil’ - even if only by showing that its not the only practical option any more - then that shifts the geopolitical landscape and, wearing my realpolitik hat, makes it less needful for the West to be quite such bastards to the rest because it will no longer be necessary to do so to sustain the way of life to which we are accustomed.
Fusion will mean people can be profligate about power - heating, lighting, etc. - but at least it’ll be at the cost of generating helium which is either saleable or dissipates into space versus vomiting carbon into the atmosphere and parbroiling us all.
The biggest thing about fission/fusion is that they can do base load - if doesn’t matter if its cloudy, or the wind is down, a nuclear plant can provide power under any circumstances where ‘renewables’ are variable and you can’t promise that a hospital will always have its minimum required load from a solar plant or a wind farm. Currently our base load is all hydrocarbon, which is polluting - so is fission, but fusion wouldn’t be.
9th of August, 2008
In response to the question of fusion as a panacea: it is true that fusion does have fuel limits, and there is always the laws of thermodynamics getting in the way of efficient energy use.
However, some back of the envelope calculations suggest that there are an absolute maximum of about 2e16J available from estimated oil reserves, while from oceanic deuterium I would estimate that there is about 7e31J available: 15 orders of magnitude more.
While neither of these figures is easily accessible, the difference is such that I’d be more concerned about the sun burning out than even our planet running out of deuterium. Also, when we have that level of energy available to us, interplanetary travel shouldn’t be too hard (electrolyse oceanic water, perhaps?) so other fuel sources become available. Jupiter, for instance, is thought to have an even higher Deuterium abundance than earth.