Closed fission fuel cycles are scifi, safe, clean thorium separation doubly so. And the largest uranium mines and deposits like Inkai would produce more power as solar farms than uranium mines.

Even in northern ireland in mid winter GHI is about 1kWh/m^2

That is over 1kW time averaged hitting the space required to park a single car. A small 2 bedroom apartment sharing its roof are with apartments above and below has about the world average final energy hitting its roof in ireland in mid winter.

Space is not even slightly a problem.

It's not that the AI will be in charge. It's that it gives the next tyrant more power.

> For example: randomness can be modelled as an information process. It's probably one of the easiest ones there is. It only seems complex because our brains are bad at handling iterative probability, or even non-linear change

You can model stochastic systems, but a turing machine cannot produce a non-deterministic output. You can model the random system as a whole, but there is no rule saying when each particle will decay.

It could be some variant of superdeterminism/bohmian nonsense, but that's even more mystical than souls. A block universe or many worlds doesn't tell you why you're the you experiencing one branch and not the you experiencing another.

There is the kinda-open question of whether there are physical phenomena that cannot be modelled as an information process. True randomness would be one. Free will (insofar as the phrase is at all well defined) would potentially be another.

If so then all physical phenomena are not reducable to information processes and "meaning" could be one.

Your presupposition that understanding cannot emerge from a table of numbers and some rules for multiplying and adding them is your conclusion that there is no understanding or new meaning that can emerge.

Your conclusion is identical to your assumption, so you're just extremely arrogantly saying nothing, then even more arrogantly falling back to an argument from authority where someone else did the same thing.

And yet you're the one sophomorically insisting on a conclusion with no supporting logic or evidence.

I know what a transformer is. Define understanding and prove there isn't any in one.

It's also not a chinese room because it's not indistinguishable so the argument is doubly stupid.

All of Searle's no-simulation arguments consist of making an information processing machine out of silly parts, hiding how much information such a system would contain, and then saying 'look those parts are silly! There can't be meaning here'. It's pointless and circular.

But neither you nor he have defined meaning, and are saying nothing about whether or not meaning is an emergent property. Facile dismissals based on the presumption that it cannot emerge are what's hollow. Pointing out how tautogical that argument is is not.

It's perfectly coherent, unlike the Chinese room arguments.

The chinese room is just an exercise in shuffling complexity around and argument from incredulity. Nothing is proven other than the human in the room isn't the person being spoken to, which we started with in the premise.

I would have thought redundancy would be the way to go. Four or five different ecosystems which are isolated and produce enough of a surplus to export food and air for a year or two. Refugees can move into a quarantine zone while restoring their ecosystem.

They're still >20kg when plastic, and the last few I saw were steel and weighed as much as the fuel.

LiFePO4 was a huge jump in cycle count, charge rate and cobalt usage but charge rate wasn't even state of the art once commercial. Lithium was a huge jump in density. Hard carbon anodes were a huge jump when first investigated, but small hop once commercialised. Various low nickel and low cobalt cathode improvements were 20-40% better than status quo when discovered. Some Zinc based chemistries are a huge jump from what was normal when discovered, but are niche now.

The techniques and knowledge also apply to other things.

You also need to include regen. And the fact the tank has a weight.

1kWh/kg is roughly on par with a small reciprocating ICE.

> None of these 50% gains that always get talked about ever come to anything, but over time it all adds up.

They often do, it just takes a decade, so it looks like another 5-8% improvement when it hits market.

You've got the second part down if you believe that subsidizing oil infrastructure with public money whilst oil companies make record profits is the only possible way to have a stable society.

If they have an operating profit, they don't need subsidy, they need to pay for it themselves. If they don't want to after knowingly signing the death warrants of hundreds of millions for the last 50 years, seize their assets and throw them in jail.

> There is no justification for impeding emergency vehicles.

If this is the issue then the police could shut down the road and keep cars off it, or enforce the laws stating cars must make room. Protestors impede emergency vehicles less than traffic does.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwcSikkEVIY

So oil is making the wealthy parts of their society money and they don't want to. Gotchya.

Seems like the solution is to stop them making money until they figure out a better answer.

If the cars are a major part of the problem, then the means of directly stopping the problem to indirectly stop the problem because literally everything else has been tried seem pretty justified.

Your logic would say someone who responded to being shot at by disarming the gunman was a thief.

If this is necessary (it's not, but pretend that it is), tax it back out downstream (or upstream) the distribute it as a dividend.

People will have the same net buying power, the 'necessary' investment still gets made, and there's no net subsidy. There's no downside.

> Thinking about this application in space. Is this efficient enough to run continuously on a journey to Mars? 4,000 lbs of thrust, would that provide some mild gravity to passengers on board? Enough to mitigate health challenges to traveling passengers?

No. Nothing chemical powered will do this, nor will nuclear thermal systems with a solid core or known electric systems.

Rockets that directly eject fission or fusion products might.

You're attacking solar derived energy and dog whistling fossil fuel hydrogen. The motivation is obvious. This 'just asking questions' act fools nobody.

Which continues to be fossil fuel propaganda.

You continue to dog whistle gas with carbon capture (which is fictional) whilst not being brave enough to say it out loud.