Envisioning the future

[Anenome]

The biggest change we can reasonably expect that will change everything probably isn’t rapid global warming, I don’t think it’s going to be anywhere near the effects the video shows, but rather the development of continued computer power and ultimately the singularity, meaning the development of true, human-level AI.

At that point everything changes, because we will have created recursive wealth creation–wealth that can create wealth automatically. And rather than this having negative social effects, it will instead result in the greatest wealth boost in the history of humanity, greater even than the industrial revolution.

Once we achieve a quantum leap in wealth, space colonization becomes a real possibility. So do flying cars. We could do flying cars today; the reason we don’t is that it costs orders of magnitude more in fuel to travel vertically than in a single horizontal dimension and thus the cost is too great to justify for most people. Those who can afford it already have flying cars–we call them private jets

Another major change will be a rapid decrease in the price of energy as solar takes off. Ultimately solar sources are nearly inexhaustible, especially if you branch out into space collection of solar material. Terrestrially, the best way to capture solar energy is probably to use light to split water and store the resulting gases, hydrogen and oxygen, for recombination later.

Not only does this solve the fresh-water problem (you can burn hydrogen to produce water while still keeping the original oxygen that was split off for energy purposes!), it’s also 100% clean energy, clean heat, infinitely recyclable, and storable in mass quantities.

The most exciting development along these lines I saw was the attempt to make a “light antenna.” Essentially, a tv antenna absorbs tv signals by being physically the wavelength of the signal it’s designed to pick up.

No, this is harder with visible light, much harder, because the wavelength is very small. It turns out that carbon nanotubes on the order of a few hundred microns in length may make perfect light receptors, and can pick up thereby nearly 100% of all the light that hits it! There’s technical challenges still to this approach, but the benefit of solving them is so large that I expect them to be surmounted soon.

[ClaytonB]

At that point everything changes, because we will have created recursive wealth creation–wealth that can create wealth automatically. And rather than this having negative social effects, it will instead result in the greatest wealth boost in the history of humanity, greater even than the industrial revolution.

I’m kind of “eh” on this - I think that computers will become more and more user-friendly and this inherently entails making them better at interfacing to the human brain which is AI. That said, I’m skeptical that it’s even beneficial to create a “brain-in-silicon” for economizing purposes when the more direct route (for the purposes of the owner of the silicon) is to simply create silicon-slaves that do what they’re told (the brain of a perfect socialist man). I’ll have to think on it more.

Once we achieve a quantum leap in wealth, space colonization becomes a real possibility. So do flying cars. We could do flying cars today; the reason we don’t is that it costs orders of magnitude more in fuel to travel vertically than in a single horizontal dimension and thus the cost is too great to justify for most people. Those who can afford it already have flying cars–we call them private jets

I don’t think we’ll ever have flying cars, it just doesn’t make sense. But I do think that air travel is going to increase to the point where it is nearly as commonplace as automotive travel is today. It will become the new middle-class mode of transportation, as difficult as that is to imagine.

Another major change will be a rapid decrease in the price of energy as solar takes off. Ultimately solar sources are nearly inexhaustible, especially if you branch out into space collection of solar material. Terrestrially, the best way to capture solar energy is probably to use light to split water and store the resulting gases, hydrogen and oxygen, for recombination later.

Not only does this solve the fresh-water problem (you can burn hydrogen to produce water while still keeping the original oxygen that was split off for energy purposes!), it’s also 100% clean energy, clean heat, infinitely recyclable, and storable in mass quantities.

Um, hydrogen is incredibly volatile, not a good way to store energy. I think that oil is king for the foreseeable future.

Clayton -

[Jargon]

Come on I don’t think that’s a fair analogy. It doesn’t make sense that a large deficit would force the other party to be responsible, and I hardly believed that the Kristols believed that to be true. The neocon plan was to have good times during (R) times, future be damned. They knew the Dems wouldn’t cut back but that didn’t matter to them. What ulterior motive do I have?

As I outined in the post, Russians obviously didn’t go fullblown libertarian because there’s no tradition of it there, and no activist community. Obviously they wouldn’t assume that everything were the state’s fault because that’s all they’ve ever one. There is however a burgeoning libertarian community in the states, whose strength grows with every new malcontent. Unlike Russia, there’s a ‘movement’ here to pick out the stragglers that fall through the political filter. There, there was only apathy.

The bulk of your response is an analogy to NeoCons. The ends here are completely different, as well as the application of the means. What do you think makes people become libertarians if not disillusionment with politics/statism?

[Phi_est_aureum]

I don’t think we’ll ever have flying cars, it just doesn’t make sense.

I just thought that this statement was interesting. Why the pessism towards the idea of flying cars? What does not make sense? Just curious.

[Anenome]

@Clayton

Um, hydrogen is incredibly volatile, not a good way to store energy. I think that oil is king for the foreseeable future.

You can create artificial oil using heat, pressure, and some basic organic molecules. They do it in the lab all the time. Not very efficient though. I expect bio-oils to take over oil-mining at some point, ala algae-based biofuel.

But, as for hydrogen, you are right that it is volatile. But you’re wrong that this constitutes an insurmountable problem. In fact they’ve already got something like a solution for it in early stages. What they do is store hydrogen in a solid–essentially a giant gaseous sponge. This limits how much hydrogen can escape from any rupture of the walls of the tank, effectively meaning that the hydrogen if ignited would burn off slowly as a fire rather than explode as a BLEVY all at once.

It could also be possible to circumvent the storage problem entirely, and store water as a fuel and hydrolize it into constituent gases in real-time as needed for a hydrogen-burning engine, using small buffer tanks that would store non-dangerous volumes of gasses.

There was a recent discovery of a non-platinum hydrolysis catalyst that’s cheap and easy to make, believe it’s nickel based.

Another way to store energy is as compressed air, which has similar energy densities to today’s electric batteries, believe it or not, and uses ambient heat and liquid-air to push pistons, creating a cold internal-air-expansion engine, analogous to a steam engine, except by using liquid-air there’s no steam, only air bubbling off its boiling point at room temperature Pretty fascinating idea actually, to resurrect the steam engine but use liquid-air, which cannot possibly explode or burn, and if the tank ruptures would simply leak into the atmosphere as… air. Perfectly harmless.