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Arglebargle III posted:Uranium is a lot harder to find than coal. Uhhh... I am not sure this is an accurate statement. It is more expensive to extract, but Uranium is probably more common. I could be entirely wrong, but seeing as we can extract uranium from seawater, and coal is limited to veins under specific conditions it seems to follow that it is less common. If you are talking about the US specifically, then yes, we have much less uranium than we do coal. Is the lack of Uranium reserves a factor in our lack of building new plants?
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Jan 6, 2020 17:42
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Fine economically useful uranium ores are harder to find. I'm not talking about uranium in parts per million in half the granite on earth. If you just Google it you'll see that coal reserves outweigh uranium reserves by two orders of magnitude. That's theoretical uranium reserves versus actual coal reserves. If you compare actual economical reserves coal is ten thousand times more common than uranium. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 18:25 on Jan 6, 2020 |
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Jan 6, 2020 18:20
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Arglebargle III posted:Fine economically useful uranium ores are harder to find. I'm not talking about uranium in parts per million in half the granite on earth. Counterpoints: fissioning Uranium produces 3 million times as much energy as coal. Only the very easiest to access Uranium reserves need to be accessed for a long, long time, and also nuclear reactions are able to use other fuels than Uranium. If energy-positive fusion is feasible, that's where technology would probably end up before the reserves are ever troublesome, since light elements are vastly more common than heavy ones.
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Jan 6, 2020 18:54
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Arglebargle III posted:Fine economically useful uranium ores are harder to find. I'm not talking about uranium in parts per million in half the granite on earth. Is that in years of use, or actual amount? Uranium is quite a bit more energy dense in comparison, so I'd be interested so see how many years of uranium vs years of coal at current use rates. Some googling isn't turning up much in terms of that. edit: Damnit, that's what I get for leaving a response tab open for half an hour without refreshing.
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Jan 6, 2020 18:55
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i never really get what the situation on these starting over fantasies are. the uranium the squid people from the year 100,000 would use is all the uranium we have left laying around that is more concentrated than any ore that ever existed. Like these stories always seem like a wizard removed everything on earth, the source of metal will be the rust of new york city, their fossil fuels and chemical stock would be a bunch of very dirty and unclean burning plastic we left around in huge piles.
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Jan 7, 2020 01:19
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You need a whole lot of coal to spin the centrifuges to refine the uranium. And to power the machines to dig enough earth in a reasonable amount of time. And it all has to be findable with "portable" (steampowered?) electronic devices, and that's where you might also have problems finding lithium if you want battery storage. There might well be alternatives to all these things but they would have a much higher opportunity cost, and the successor civilization might ultimately decide it's simply not worth the bother with technology because they're too busy barely scraping by with rocks and sticks.
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Jan 7, 2020 02:59
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Kesper North posted:You need a whole lot of coal to spin the centrifuges to refine the uranium. And to power the machines to dig enough earth in a reasonable amount of time. And it all has to be findable with "portable" (steampowered?) electronic devices, and that's where you might also have problems finding lithium if you want battery storage. There might well be alternatives to all these things but they would have a much higher opportunity cost, and the successor civilization might ultimately decide it's simply not worth the bother with technology because they're too busy barely scraping by with rocks and sticks. Ehhhhhh. You can do a whole lot of crazy poo poo if you have enough people and motivation and ignorance of other options. Your opinion on what a reasonable amount of time and effort is is going to be way different then someone who is unaware of powered extraction methods, to the point that your going to be seen as crazily unreasonable. Telsa Cola fucked around with this message at 03:27 on Jan 7, 2020 |
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Jan 7, 2020 03:24
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I guess what I want to articulate is that I don't agree that the premises of this discussion are well-founded. There seems to be a teleological sense to it, in that the underlying assertion is that all civilizations must proceed back up to nuclear power and electricity and so on, and the discussion seems to be focusing on the hows of speculating on how a civilization might leapfrog from biofuel steam power to nuclear. But in my view there isn't necessarily any justification for that. Our discovery of electricity was an accident that was enabled by the presence of a civilization in the 19th century level of technology. But there's no guarantee that any successor civilization - be it a human one or something else evolved from some other creature - would necessarily get to that level. This is my reasoning for why the present human civilization must not be allowed to collapse. I believe that the Great Filter is ahead of us. This might be the best and only shot we get.
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Jan 7, 2020 03:44
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Well, but we can bound the discussion based on access to resources for beings capable of surviving on an Earthlike world and the environmental conditions that are likely to exist. That makes it more than strictly teleological. I'm not proscriptive about what is or isn't possible, but most likely anything that lives above water and is the same size and shape as humans is going to have to face the same problems humans faced, backwards and in high heels. It would be unrealistic of us not to acknowledge that and carry it in mind at all times.
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Jan 7, 2020 03:54
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Kesper North posted:Well, but we can bound the discussion based on access to resources for beings capable of surviving on an Earthlike world and the environmental conditions that are likely to exist. That makes it more than strictly teleological. I'm not proscriptive about what is or isn't possible, but most likely anything that lives above water and is the same size and shape as humans is going to have to face the same problems humans faced, backwards and in high heels. It would be unrealistic of us not to acknowledge that and carry it in mind at all times. I mean, humans have just done such wild stuff. Most of it is really good, but none of it was actually required for anything. Like we didn't just make electricity, we made electricity and provide it in some form to 6 billion people, we didn't just progress from horses to spaceships, we did that in one generation, same with stuff like all the first world largely ending slavery, food being so abundant that global hunger has dropped from 60% to 9% in less than a century and most people in the first world at greater risk for consuming too much food. Like a lot of that stuff is real neat, but like, as a species we would still be here if we didn't do it that way. Like we overproduce everything so so much compared to what is required to have just any civilization. Like it's really good we live in a country where we can watch the MCU instead of labor in slavery while only 14% of the population is allowed education or electric light or whatever, but like, if we met some aliens with no coal who had to develop slower and under crappier conditions it wouldn't really matter. Like sucks for them, and that brings so real big moral issues where we might not like those guys one bit, but it's not like cosmically it would be a big deal if we only had 10% the capacity to generate power and like, just only had 10% of the people that do now have access, then lived under slowed progress and much shittier conditions. It'd be a big deal for the people that lived under it, but like, it wouldn't topple the planet or inherently automatically cause everyone to go extinct or anything.
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Jan 7, 2020 04:30
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https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pkedvy/strange-dark-matter-findings-could-rewrite-the-universes-history I thought this was an interesting article if only to show how little we know about the fundamentals of the universe, how it was built and how it actually works. I love Dark Matter as a subject. 85% of the universe that we can't even observe, just it's effects. Putting on my Scifi hat it does make me think that statements about immutable laws of physics might be jumping the gun a little bit. We have no idea what avenues the discovery of dark matter might open up.
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Jan 7, 2020 07:23
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DrSunshine posted:I guess what I want to articulate is that I don't agree that the premises of this discussion are well-founded. There seems to be a teleological sense to it, in that the underlying assertion is that all civilizations must proceed back up to nuclear power and electricity and so on, and the discussion seems to be focusing on the hows of speculating on how a civilization might leapfrog from biofuel steam power to nuclear. But in my view there isn't necessarily any justification for that. Our discovery of electricity was an accident that was enabled by the presence of a civilization in the 19th century level of technology. But there's no guarantee that any successor civilization - be it a human one or something else evolved from some other creature - would necessarily get to that level. Just pretend we're like all (people who post in this thread and like each of us can pick 2 other goons each) been transported to the far future and have one shot to try to rebuild human civilization. Electricity is a massive advantage for any civilization because it stores so much energy and frees up so much labour for specialization into more skilled fields and allows enough leisure for people to focus on the arts and sciences. Suppose we have only limited access to coal; maybe enough for prototype proofs of concepts but not enough to run more than a few machines and definitely not enough to hold up the load of national civilization wide infrastructure like railways or electricity generators. What alternatives could we use? Could you jury rig enough steam plants together with enough miles and miles of pipes to spin a centrifuge? Generate electricity for trams? Run enough railways to transport resources? What if we had a massive (FF7) midgard sized steam engine with pipes spreading like tendrils and civilization living along the pipes for heat and power. What are the engineering and material sciences limits of steam that we stopped iterating towards because petrol showed up at the right time?
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Jan 7, 2020 07:28
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Raenir Salazar posted:What are the engineering and material sciences limits of steam that we stopped iterating towards because petrol showed up at the right time? Some level of distillation recapture would be great for drinkable water, while we're at it, but wouldn't be very efficient outside of colder climates.
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Jan 7, 2020 07:48
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FFT posted:One that jumps out immediately is where is all of this water coming from, exactly? And you'd want it as free from impurities as possible if only to cut down on cleaning down-time and corrosion. I mean you want to cut down on it when the goal is reducing costs; when you're boot strapping civilization back like you're the USSR in the 30's with the 5 Year Plans some things can slide. From a "bad future" dystopian scifi novel perspective you can actually work that in your favor by having your underclass being all the people whose lives consist of maintaining the machines so the society living "above" (or below? Depending how bad things are?) get to live in luxury.
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Jan 7, 2020 08:09
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Snowpiercer did it with "up front" Lots of others as well with plenty of variety, to be fair
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Jan 7, 2020 08:11
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FFT posted:Snowpiercer did it There's something about the aesthetics of that one mining town in FF6, Marsh? Marth? I don't remember, its the first town you visit with all the pipes and steam because I think you're only options are steampunk or magitek and the Empire has a monopoly on the latter. So you got these mining towns where the exhaust of the steam engines is being used for warmth and there's something really interesting about that aesthetic. Similar feeling with the Imperial capital location in the game which is apparently an arcology.
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Jan 7, 2020 08:14
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Narshe? And it just sounds like a recipe for being either hot and damp or cold and frosted at all times
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Jan 7, 2020 08:45
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Raenir Salazar posted:What are the engineering and material sciences limits of steam that we stopped iterating towards because petrol showed up at the right time? In real life, since the start of the 20th century, warships started to move towards steam cycles with heat provided by burning fuel oil. Ships that were powered exclusively by coal stopped really being a thing around World War 1, and older ships that were kept in service were often refitted from coal-fired boilers to oil ones. World War 2 was by and large fought by warships with oil-fired steam turbines, or in some cheaper mass produced convoy escort designs, cheaper reciprocating steam engines also fired by oil. While ships nowadays often use gas turbines and reciprocating diesel engines, nuclear-powered ships of course still use steam. And of course, steam cycles are still really common in commercial power stations. So the answer is... steam never stopped being of interest because oil started being a thing. A society that lacks fossil fuels isn't going to strap cylinders labelled "steam" to things as power sources like it's the Zybourne Clock because they discovered One Weird Trick that we didn't in real life, because steam power generation is still an active area of research. FFT posted:Narshe? District heating with steam pipes transmitting heat to places started to be a thing in real life in the 19th century, and is still a thing. For instance, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_steam_system Cogeneration, or combined heat and power, is a concept where power plants produce both electricity and heat, including as steam or hot water for a district heating scheme. This is also a thing that has been and still is used in places: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogeneration Seems to work just fine without being wet and bad. The idea of "steam power" being a thing that we stopped working on that future post-apocalypse humans could iterate upon to degrees we've never dreamed of is just nonsense BattleMaster fucked around with this message at 09:15 on Jan 7, 2020 |
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Jan 7, 2020 09:02
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Raenir Salazar posted:Could you jury rig enough steam plants together with enough miles and miles of pipes to spin a centrifuge? Generate electricity for trams? Run enough railways to transport resources? What if we had a massive (FF7) midgard sized steam engine with pipes spreading like tendrils and civilization living along the pipes for heat and power. What are the engineering and material sciences limits of steam that we stopped iterating towards because petrol showed up at the right time? Oh uh also any pressure containment failure would be catastrophic unless you're maintaining severe efficiency losses in regulating the pressure safely over distance. Might as well be running watermills at the end points, too.
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Jan 7, 2020 09:15
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Killer robot posted:It's lower quality because it's younger. Over time more moisture and volatiles will be pushed out. Today's high quality coal was peat or lignite millions of years ago. Gotcha. Do you think it would be able to be produced in significant qualities? As I said, it's my understanding that coal was reaaally helped by wood not being able to rot.
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Jan 7, 2020 11:56
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dex_sda posted:Gotcha. Do you think it would be able to be produced in significant qualities? As I said, it's my understanding that coal was reaaally helped by wood not being able to rot. what does plastic turn into under heat and pressure over millions of years?
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Jan 8, 2020 14:56
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:what does plastic turn into under heat and pressure over millions of years? This is actually something I've wondered a few times myself over the years. Would it turn back into oil? I wonder if anyone has done an experiment to see. Some neat exoplanet news: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-second-planet-may-orbit-earths-nearest-neighboring-star/ Scientific American posted:A Second Planet May Orbit Earth’s Nearest Neighboring Star Almost certainly an ice world, but still extremely cool that there's exoplanets right in our stellar neighborhood!
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Jan 9, 2020 15:26
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DrSunshine posted:This is actually something I've wondered a few times myself over the years. Would it turn back into oil? I wonder if anyone has done an experiment to see. It does.
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Jan 9, 2020 18:01
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Raenir Salazar posted:Just pretend we're like all (people who post in this thread and like each of us can pick 2 other goons each) been transported to the far future and have one shot to try to rebuild human civilization. Electricity is a massive advantage for any civilization because it stores so much energy and frees up so much labour for specialization into more skilled fields and allows enough leisure for people to focus on the arts and sciences. This is what people don't seem to get. It reminds me of one of my favorite parts of a Hitchhiker' Guide to the Galaxy book. Where Authur finds himself on a desolate planet and realizes he only knows how to make sandwiches. Doesn't know how to make electricity or build a house or make medicine or successfully farm, or make a space ship. Knowing what I know about humans, if there is a massive catastrophe where there are only say a few million peoples left it very much depends on who those people are to try and restart any of this technology and it probably won't be their top priority instead of maybe staying alive for the night. You could hand me all the books on how to remake a nuclear reactor, but guess what, I can't do it. 1glitch0 fucked around with this message at 08:58 on Jan 14, 2020 |
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Jan 14, 2020 08:56
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1glitch0 posted:This is what people don't seem to get. It reminds me of one of my favorite parts of a Hitchhiker' Guide to the Galaxy book. Where Authur finds himself on a desolate planet and realizes he only knows how to make sandwiches. Doesn't know how to make electricity or build a house or make medicine or successfully farm, or make a space ship. Eh? I'm not sure where you're coming from or how it relates to my post. Like that doesn't have anything to do with the question being posited. Yeah we know most normal people can't, who cares, have fun with it.
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Jan 14, 2020 14:53
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1glitch0 posted:This is what people don't seem to get. It reminds me of one of my favorite parts of a Hitchhiker' Guide to the Galaxy book. Where Authur finds himself on a desolate planet and realizes he only knows how to make sandwiches. Doesn't know how to make electricity or build a house or make medicine or successfully farm, or make a space ship. That seems very silly, humans figured it all out once just fine, figuring it out again with pre-knowlage of exactly what is possible and general examples on what is and isn't right is a near infinite head start. If there is books that just say it, there is literally no reason someone can't follow a book. Even just someone randomly spouting words they heard in connection to a thing would be such a vast leap forward from where real humans got ideas.
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Jan 14, 2020 17:07
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Having a book full of ideas with explanations, even highly technical ones, is infinitely better then just rediscovering everything from scratch. The kicker is that no one is really going to bother with all that poo poo until day to day life settles down more. No-one is going to be working on rebuilding a nuclear reactor or whatever day 2 of the apocalypse.
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Jan 14, 2020 17:39
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Telsa Cola posted:Having a book full of ideas with explanations, even highly technical ones, is infinitely better then just rediscovering everything from scratch. Even just a list of things that exist and a vague poorly done word cloud of some ideas of things involved would be enough to lead progress forward decades. Like even just a list of things that can exist and the barest "I think it has something to do with X" is huge.
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Jan 14, 2020 17:48
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Another way of considering about it would be you design and build in the present a space-time telescope that lets you peer into the future; and you discover humanity destroys its own civilization 5,000 years from now; your telescope isn't accurate enough to peer sooner than that to know what went wrong so you can't change the future by avoiding it, you gotta now build time machine or time capsule, prepare yourself and a crew of people to travel 5,000 years into the future with no return trip to fix things.
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Jan 14, 2020 17:52
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Well, at least if you travel into the future, you can't gently caress up the past, so I'd say go for it
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Jan 14, 2020 18:02
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Raenir Salazar posted:Another way of considering about it would be you design and build in the present a space-time telescope that lets you peer into the future; and you discover humanity destroys its own civilization 5,000 years from now; your telescope isn't accurate enough to peer sooner than that to know what went wrong so you can't change the future by avoiding it, you gotta now build time machine or time capsule, prepare yourself and a crew of people to travel 5,000 years into the future with no return trip to fix things. build a tonbee convector, see the future is wonderful then guilt everyone into making the future good to live up to the future you promised then admit on your deathbed the future actually sucked and you tricked everyone into making it good.
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Jan 14, 2020 18:08
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:build a tonbee convector, see the future is wonderful then guilt everyone into making the future good to live up to the future you promised then admit on your deathbed the future actually sucked and you tricked everyone into making it good. You don't know if this isn't actually bring about that future due to complacency. I.e it won't help you if it was a result of an asteroid strike which depending on image quality and location might not be distinguishable from any number of other destructive events ultimately outside of the ability of foreknowledge to help with.
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Jan 14, 2020 18:43
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dex_sda posted:Gotcha. Do you think it would be able to be produced in significant qualities? As I said, it's my understanding that coal was reaaally helped by wood not being able to rot. Coal definitely formed at higher rates before anything could digest lignin, it's just not terribly rare since either, especially in wetlands and other low oxygen scenarios that limit decay. Peat is basically baby coal. In a hypothetical "humans die off after using all fossil fuels, tens of millions of years pass before corvids develop the steam engine" scenario they won't have today's stupid amounts of coal but I'm pretty sure they'd have enough to spark an industrial revolution.
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Jan 14, 2020 18:50
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Killer robot posted:Coal definitely formed at higher rates before anything could digest lignin, it's just not terribly rare since either, especially in wetlands and other low oxygen scenarios that limit decay. Peat is basically baby coal. In a hypothetical "humans die off after using all fossil fuels, tens of millions of years pass before corvids develop the steam engine" scenario they won't have today's stupid amounts of coal but I'm pretty sure they'd have enough to spark an industrial revolution. So if we had unfurled continent wide fires etc and the ground was layered with heaps of charcoal, does that eve tually become coal-like after x million gears of pressure increasing?
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Jan 14, 2020 21:52
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We may have a satellite collision tomorrow https://twitter.com/LeoLabs_Space/status/1222304111527374853
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Jan 29, 2020 07:58
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WAR CRIME GIGOLO posted:So if we had unfurled continent wide fires What do you mean, "if"?
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Jan 29, 2020 09:31
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1glitch0 posted:This is what people don't seem to get. It reminds me of one of my favorite parts of a Hitchhiker' Guide to the Galaxy book. Where Authur finds himself on a desolate planet and realizes he only knows how to make sandwiches. Doesn't know how to make electricity or build a house or make medicine or successfully farm, or make a space ship. You’d be able to make a water wheel or windmill to process grain, and later generations could build a dam or wind generator off of that, and even later generations could build batteries and solar/nuclear generators off of the power from the dams or wind generators. Hell you could even solve the battery issue by just using pumped hydro everywhere - it’s terribly destructive on the environment, but so is the coal and plastic based society we’ve built. I understand that coal and oil might make things easier but there are absolutely pathways from rocks to nuclear generators without them. This idea that coal and oil make us special and no one could possibly have our technology level without them just seems like another self congratulatory homosapien circle jerk. Given the size of the universe there are surely a massive number of species that have advanced way more than we have with way less resources.
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Jan 30, 2020 19:31
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:That seems very silly, humans figured it all out once just fine, figuring it out again with pre-knowlage of exactly what is possible and general examples on what is and isn't right is a near infinite head start. If there is books that just say it, there is literally no reason someone can't follow a book. The thing you're missing is that the process by which all modern poo poo got developed has resulted in incredibly optimized versions of everything that require massive industrial processes to reproduce. It's just as likely they would look at a modern version of a thing and conclude there's no possible way to build any version of it because they lack access to all the incredibly specific things that go into the modern version but are not actually core to the original lovely inefficient versions that the technology started from. Your point here is like, "well, if they're working from a iPhone then clearly they'll be able to build at least an Altair..." but that logic doesn't actually follow. Despite both being computers, they're engineered completely differently. Modern light bulbs are increasingly becoming another example of this. Would discovering a modern LED bulb actually lead to being able to build something similar to the early filament bulbs? I don't really think so. I think given enough time technology could re-develop, but I really don't think it's as easy as Ash making his own gunpowder in Army of Darkness. ErIog fucked around with this message at 01:03 on Jan 31, 2020 |
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Jan 31, 2020 01:00
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I don’t think anyone is arguing that it’d be as easy as the fictional movie Army of Darkness, just that knowing a thing is possible makes striving for it easier. If you’re aware that information can be sent and received via radio waves, then you’re a billion steps closer to inventing radio than if you literally have no concept that it could exist.
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Jan 31, 2020 01:13
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We've had the concept of FTL travel for nearly a hundred years 
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Jan 31, 2020 01:24
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