Too many people?

[Loren Pechtel]

His mass, converted to energy would likely wipe us all out, but then the problem would be solved, No people, no problem.

Now this forum has devolved into jokes about my weight? Will it never stop?

You realize how big a boom it would be? Let's take a fairly low estimate--60kg. Converted to energy that's 1.2 gigatons. Wouldn't wipe us all out but America would be in pretty poor shape.

 

[Elixir]

How many Yellowstones is that?

 

[Jarhyn]

What Earth can support is a function of technology

… and lifestyle. How many brains in jars can earth “support“? Maybe there’s an even less space intensive possibility, but I can’t think of it right off.

Brains on GPUs.

There's no wet messiness involved keeping that going, so you can pack 'em in even tighter.

Then just have a limited number of robot bodies people can go "real diving" in.

A lot of it is just figuring out how to do realtime model adjustment, what the necessary context layers are, etc.

His mass, converted to energy would likely wipe us all out, but then the problem would be solved, No people, no problem.

Now this forum has devolved into jokes about my weight? Will it never stop?

You realize how big a boom it would be? Let's take a fairly low estimate--60kg. Converted to energy that's 1.2 gigatons. Wouldn't wipe us all out but America would be in pretty poor shape.

It wouldn't kill us all right away, but it would get all of us eventually. Just the dust cloud of an explosion that sharply violent would be catastrophic.

 

[bilby]

You are missing the point.

B is under a million. It's early stone age technology. The breakpoint is flint--you have to go back to before flint tools because flint is not a renewable resource and at that tech level there's basically no mining. I would be astounded if we could cleanly descend to that point without a massive overshoot due to war.

Thus the only real survival for the human race is to advance technology to the point that a high tech society is sustainable.

No, you are missing my point.

When scientists talk about the carrying capacity of the Earth, they are not talking about what would have been possible in the stone age. They are talking about what level of population can be sustained with the best technology we can expect to have available before we find we have exhausted the cheapest supply of non-renewable resources, before we have saturated the Earth with pollutants that the Earth has not been able to process.

There is a strong basis of peer-reviewed papers that the carrying capacity is under 8 billion people. Many peer reviewed studies put it under 4 billion. See https://www.science.org.au/curious/earth-environment/how-many-people-can-earth-actually-support . As we are at 8 billion people and growing, that is a concern.

Nope. What Earth can support is a function of technology. All the green "estimates" of carrying capacity are garbage because they all involve resource depletion--they just pretend they have a solution by cutting the graph off before the crash. The highest technology we have ever had that didn't face the issue of resource depletion is early stone age--before worked stone tools.

And resource depletion is bunk. With the exception of helium, and radioactive and/or fissile materials, everything that we had to begin with is still here - the First Law of Thermodynamics applies. (The Earth is effectively a closed system for matter, even though it's an open system energetically; The exception being helium which is driven off into space by the Solar Wind at a non-negligible rate).

Obviously, we will need a lot of energy to recycle it; But that's OK, it's just the Second Law asserting itself.

As long as we have plenty of energy, we can't actually run out of anything, because we can just collect it up and use it again.

The fact that we do very little of this is an indication of just how vast the virgin resources in the lithosphere are, by comparison to our societal demands on it.

There's more than enough uranium to last indefinitely, even if we use a fair amount of it for nothing more than resource recovery and recycling. And then there's thorium; And potentially even fusion power, though that's pie in the sky today, and may never be cheap enough to be worth the effort.

 

[bilby]

His mass, converted to energy would likely wipe us all out, but then the problem would be solved, No people, no problem.

Now this forum has devolved into jokes about my weight? Will it never stop?

You realize how big a boom it would be? Let's take a fairly low estimate--60kg. Converted to energy that's 1.2 gigatons. Wouldn't wipe us all out but America would be in pretty poor shape.

Nah, just fly him to Moscow first.

 

[Merle]

You realize how big a boom it would be? Let's take a fairly low estimate--60kg. Converted to energy that's 1.2 gigatons. Wouldn't wipe us all out but America would be in pretty poor shape.

And exactly why are we discussing what would happen if the entire mass of my body disintegrates into energy? Do you find that thought interesting?

 

[Merle]

His mass, converted to energy would likely wipe us all out, but then the problem would be solved, No people, no problem.

Now this forum has devolved into jokes about my weight? Will it never stop?

You realize how big a boom it would be? Let's take a fairly low estimate--60kg. Converted to energy that's 1.2 gigatons. Wouldn't wipe us all out but America would be in pretty poor shape.

Nah, just fly him to Moscow first.

Ah so the two options on the table are:

1. Let my body disintegrate into energy.
2. Fly me to Moscow.

May I suggest a third option? Let me live here.

 

[bilby]

Ah so the two options on the table are:

1. Let my body disintegrate into energy.
2. Fly me to Moscow.

No, no. Those are both a part of the same option. If you're going to detonate, you might as well do the world a favour, and take Vlad Putin with you.

 

[Merle]

They never listen.

LOL. You gave me a lot to think about. Thanks.

Regarding known resources, yes, of course, there is more to find. But I understand that, for most resources, what we are now finding is inferior resources far below the level we once found. There was a time, for instance, when you could poke a hole in Texas and have oil gush out for decades. Now we go to the great expense of fracking to get a well that lasts a few years. Or compare the massive mining efforts to obtain copper today with the readily available copper nuggets years ago.

So yes, for uranium (U-235), let's hope that we find much more that is economically obtainable. That's not the trend I am seeing in other resources. ( see Amazon product ASIN 1644380684) I suspect most of the readily obtainable stuff is already known.

Regarding obtaining uranium from ocean water, good luck with that. I do hope it works, but it sounds like a stretch to me. If we had to do that, that would be a sign that we were turning from easily obtained uranium to somehow separating the dispersed uranium molecules that are mixed up with everything else in the ocean.

Regarding making liquid fuel from CO2 and water, that is certainly an interesting concept. It was proposed some time ago, and I haven't heard much about it since. Forbes is very negative on its viability (https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesm...lanet-so-dont-say-they-could/?sh=377df21869a4). Thermodynamically, it takes a huge amount of energy to get over the barrier to form complex hydrocarbons. Once you get molecules to that energy level, the second law tends to drive them away from complex hydrocarbons. Nature got around it by using intense pressure, something that would be hard for humans to duplicate. So its easy to propose something like this. The devil is in the details. Let's hope it works.

Regarding population pressures on the earth, the commonly cited problems are climate change, ocean acidification, ozone depletion, nitrogen and phosphorus pollution of rivers, freshwater use, loss of natural land, biodiversity loss, atmospheric aerosols, and chemical pollution. (https://na.unep.net/geas/archive/pdfs/geas_jun_12_carrying_capacity.pdf) All of these are amplified by population. Sure, let's hope that we can solve all of these, even if population were to grow significantly. But the common factor in all of these is population.

Biodiversity loss might be huge. Take, for example the attempt to build a sealed environment with plants, animals and people known as Biosphere 2. It failed, as they soon needed to duct in fresh air. To the person who suggested putting billions of people in an orbiting version of Biospere 2, uh, that is a huge task. We can't even do it on earth. Now perhaps, with the right combination of life, it would have been possible. We don't know. The point is that life is very complex. Every species affects the Earth in some way. As many species disappear, it can affect the environment in many ways. And we humans seem to be driving many other species into extinction. That is a concern.

A learner who prefers not to have his mass converted into energy,
Merle

 

[Elixir]

You realize how big a boom it would be? Let's take a fairly low estimate--60kg. Converted to energy that's 1.2 gigatons. Wouldn't wipe us all out but America would be in pretty poor shape.

And exactly why are we discussing what would happen if the entire mass of my body disintegrates into energy? Do you find that thought interesting?

That’s not right. The discussion is only about converting 60kg of matter to energy, not your entire body mass. And I don’t want to wound your pride, but it wouldn’t matter if it was 60kg of dog shit; the yield would be the same. In fact, just to relieve some pressure for you, I volunteer 60kg of MY body mass for the thought experiment!
God I hope this doesn’t hurt.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Nuclear certainly has its problems, including limited availability of the fuel. I know you claim there is very much uranium available, but I suspect your figures include the uranium dissolved in the ocean, that may never be economically recoverable. If we were to power the entire world from the known uranium deposits on land, it would last for six years. ( https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/01/nuclear-options/ ). That's not going to do much to shift the blue line in my previous chart to the right, which we may need to do to gain us more time.

Nuclear only has a big fuel problem if you don't reprocess. However, reprocessing is also the best solution to the waste problem.

You could also turn to thorium, but that stuff is extremely dangerous. Nobody wants to be near it in a concentrated form even with heavy shielding. Most people run away from it. Terrorists, not so much.

Actually, it being lethally hot is a very good thing (not that I think thorium is). Terrorists don't have the ability to handle it, they just get dead. Reactor workers have the equipment to handle it remotely, it's not a big deal.

Note the label. If you see it immediately and obey you might live. (Although this thing is old enough it's not very dangerous anymore.) Yet things like this exist and aren't a problem for the people that work with them.

Of course, we could extend the life of the available uranium by a factor of 140 if we put it in special reactors known as breeder reactors that convert the inert U-238 portion of the fuel into plutonium. That plutonium can then be readily concentrated to provide additional nuclear power. It is also relatively easy to concentrate into a nuclear bomb, making it much easier for do-it-yourselfers to make their own nuclear bombs. Not good. But we probably have no choice but to use plutonium and hope for the best.

Nope, it's not easy to make into a bomb. The basic problem is that reactor plutonium will be heavily contaminated with Pu-240, a strong neutron emitter. That's not what you want in your bomb. While the US had managed to get a nuclear detonation out of reactor grade plutonium it isn't easy, the reality is that nobody has ever used a power reactor to make bombs. It's a matter of how long you leave the fuel in the reactor--if you want bombs you only leave it in a short time and you get pretty much only Pu-239. If you want power you can leave it in a lot longer, less down time changing fuel, less cost processing the spent fuel, but a decent amount of your Pu-239 gets converted to Pu-240.

Oh, and another thing, is it OK with you if we bury the nuclear waste in your backyard? After all, we wouldn't want to eugenically put it in some third world country, now, would we?

I live less than 100 miles from Yucca Mountain. I oppose it only because I think we should be reprocessing, not burying it. I also favor the salt mine approach. If you've reprocessed it it will decay to ambient in 10,000 years--you simply need someplace isolated and dry. Catholes in the Atacama would probably be fine.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Energy density is everything - that's why wind and solar power are inevitably shit.

What kills wind and solar is their intermittent nature. Make a great battery and they become quite viable.

 

[Jarhyn]

Energy density is everything - that's why wind and solar power are inevitably shit.

What kills wind and solar is their intermittent nature. Make a great battery and they become quite viable.

Screw it. Run both at full capacity and run overflow routing into a system of "sinks".

Assume I have 1000 hydroponics units and 5000 hydrocarbon units on the grid.

I can make a schedule schema so that when wind increases, it throws on inactive systems that have been off for a while, and shuts off ones for which it is "close enough" to the off cycle any more anyway, and have a SMALL battery for dealing with over/under margins, and buffering against instability.

As long as I have enough systems distributed across the overage.

By simply placing enough systems in the network, it fairly well guarantees enough secondary load to soak the output from all the sources without controlling source output.

Ideally, we would develop grid solutions which allow uncontrolled variable output and finely controlled variable secondary load, rather than treating demand as the uncontrolled variable.

We could even make decisions on how much chemical fuel to make vs how much food to make. It's not like we can't just bury or use or save fuel for a rainy day.

Heck, even overflow production of food can be redirected to fuel production via fermentation to alcohol.

 

[Merle]

That’s not right. The discussion is only about converting 60kg of matter to energy, not your entire body mass. And I don’t want to wound your pride, but it wouldn’t matter if it was 60kg of dog shit; the yield would be the same. In fact, just to relieve some pressure for you, I volunteer 60kg of MY body mass for the thought experiment!
God I hope this doesn’t hurt.

Read the context. In context, the discussion did not start as an effort to educate people about E=mc2, but was a specific reference of turning the mass of my body into a whiff of energy.

You had said:

I’m more concerned that Merle might go nova in the next ten minutes! Wish he would clarify his intent /meaning rather than keep vexing about being misunderstood.

To which lostone replied:

Let u hope he does not. His mass, converted to energy would likely wipe us all out, but then the problem would be solved, No people, no problem.

So yes, that is a discussion of me specifically blowing up into a mass of energy. This was expanded to suggest that my body could be used in an involuntary human bombing mission to take out Putin.

If find it despicable that people would choose to talk about the death of their debate partners like that. What ever happened to basic human decency?

 

[Elixir]

If find it despicable that people would choose to talk about the death of their debate partners like that. What ever happened to basic human decency?

Hey, that’s why I volunteered my own flesh and blood for The Cause.
Well… not ALL of it, just 60kg. That’s most of it. This has to be worth some credit, no?

 

[Jarhyn]

If find it despicable that people would choose to talk about the death of their debate partners like that. What ever happened to basic human decency?

Hey, that’s why I volunteered my own flesh and blood for The Cause.
Well… not ALL of it, just 60kg. That’s most of it. This has to be worth some credit, no?

I mean if we're talking about meltdowns here, I'm the one between us more likely to go pear shaped.

That said, we're specifically discussing a topic where extra care is necessary in handling the material.

It is, in many ways, like handling nuclear material.

Merle keeps asking what can be done about overpopulation, and the way they do it is not dissimilar to manhandling the demon core with a screwdriver.

We keep saying "there are no protections on your handling, and that's how people handle stuff when they WANT to cook everyone in the room, or just don't care."

We point out that properly handling this idea REQUIRES more conversational infrastructure to handle it: namely frequent discussions of caveats, what is out of bounds from where we know we are, how the ideas can be ethically communicated to society by decision makers...

The idea cannot be handled safely by just asking questions. The painful work of all of the considerations AROUND discussing population control efforts has to be done before the actual discussion, much like the idea of designing a fixture around collecting data on radiation must be done before putting together something to study radioactive objects.

Please Merle, understand that this is why you cannot just ask the question, because this question when asked the wrong way is like flashing people with radiation, here the radiation being allowing the conversation to veer into genocide apologetics.

 

[bilby]

Nuclear only has a big fuel problem if you don't reprocess. However, reprocessing is also the best solution to the waste problem.

"Reprocessing" is a PITA for solid fuel systems, particularly when you use only thermal neutron reactors. It works well, but it's costly.

The reason these systems predominate is that they're well suited to naval use; You can't stand well back from the power plant on a submarine or even an aircraft carrier, you have to have a large crew living very close to the reactor on a long-term basis. And the US and Soviet navies were the big drivers of twentieth century reactor design.

The problem with solid fuel is that it requires a well defined geometry (as do all nuclear reactors), and this can be disrupted by excessive heat - a "meltdown". Meltdowns aren't particularly hazardous to life or health, but they are very expensive, as they destroy a hugely valuable asset in a way that renders it extremely expensive to repair.

Liquid fuel (typically molten salt) is far superior in a number of ways, but the R&D only got as far as the R stage before the US Navy pulled the funding on the grounds that they'd already spent a lot of time, effort and money on the solid fuel pressurised water design, and the training of sailors to operate it, and didn't feel the need for a radically new system that couldn't even be effectively turned to weapons production.

Liquid fuelled fast neutron reactors are far superior for land-based power plants. The "reprocessing" required to turn spent solid fuel assemblies (from Generation I through III+ reactors) into usable fuel in a molten salt fast reactor, is to chop it into small pieces and chuck them into the molten salt reactor, where they will dissolve.

Liquid fuelled reactors are even more difficult to redesign for weapons grade materials production than solid fuel reactors, which is a big plus if we want to deploy them worldwide as power plants, but was considered a drawback by the Pentagon in the 1960s.

There isn't a "waste problem", and as such, there's no "best solution" to it; However the use of partially used fuel is an excellent efficiency, albeit a fairly unimportant one (fuel costs are a minuscule fraction of the cost of running a nuclear power plant).

 

[bilby]

Energy density is everything - that's why wind and solar power are inevitably shit.

What kills wind and solar is their intermittent nature. Make a great battery and they become quite viable.

Sure, if you're not worried about costs.

 

[bilby]

Energy density is everything - that's why wind and solar power are inevitably shit.

What kills wind and solar is their intermittent nature. Make a great battery and they become quite viable.

Screw it. Run both at full capacity and run overflow routing into a system of "sinks".

Assume I have 1000 hydroponics units and 5000 hydrocarbon units on the grid.

I can make a schedule schema so that when wind increases, it throws on inactive systems that have been off for a while, and shuts off ones for which it is "close enough" to the off cycle any more anyway, and have a SMALL battery for dealing with over/under margins, and buffering against instability.

As long as I have enough systems distributed across the overage.

By simply placing enough systems in the network, it fairly well guarantees enough secondary load to soak the output from all the sources without controlling source output.

Ideally, we would develop grid solutions which allow uncontrolled variable output and finely controlled variable secondary load, rather than treating demand as the uncontrolled variable.

We could even make decisions on how much chemical fuel to make vs how much food to make. It's not like we can't just bury or use or save fuel for a rainy day.

Heck, even overflow production of food can be redirected to fuel production via fermentation to alcohol.

The world's biggest wind turbines generate about 80GWh/year. You need to build more than a hundred of them to generate as much power as a small nuclear or coal plant, and then you need to find enough sites suitable for a hundred mammoth turbines, and you need to replace them at least twice as often as you need to replace a nuclear plant.

More realistically, you need about 800 "standard" large wind turbines, and suitable sites for them, to generate as much as a small nuclear power plant.

Low energy density means using a shitload of materials, and a shitload of land area (or sea area), with the massive extra maintenance and operational costs that such widespread facilities imply.

Intermittency is a huge problem; But it's far from the only problem with low energy density renewables.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Nuclear only has a big fuel problem if you don't reprocess. However, reprocessing is also the best solution to the waste problem.

"Reprocessing" is a PITA for solid fuel systems, particularly when you use only thermal neutron reactors. It works well, but it's costly.

The reason these systems predominate is that they're well suited to naval use; You can't stand well back from the power plant on a submarine or even an aircraft carrier, you have to have a large crew living very close to the reactor on a long-term basis. And the US and Soviet navies were the big drivers of twentieth century reactor design.

The problem with solid fuel is that it requires a well defined geometry (as do all nuclear reactors), and this can be disrupted by excessive heat - a "meltdown". Meltdowns aren't particularly hazardous to life or health, but they are very expensive, as they destroy a hugely valuable asset in a way that renders it extremely expensive to repair.

Liquid fuel (typically molten salt) is far superior in a number of ways, but the R&D only got as far as the R stage before the US Navy pulled the funding on the grounds that they'd already spent a lot of time, effort and money on the solid fuel pressurised water design, and the training of sailors to operate it, and didn't feel the need for a radically new system that couldn't even be effectively turned to weapons production.

Liquid fuelled fast neutron reactors are far superior for land-based power plants. The "reprocessing" required to turn spent solid fuel assemblies (from Generation I through III+ reactors) into usable fuel in a molten salt fast reactor, is to chop it into small pieces and chuck them into the molten salt reactor, where they will dissolve.

Liquid fuelled reactors are even more difficult to redesign for weapons grade materials production than solid fuel reactors, which is a big plus if we want to deploy them worldwide as power plants, but was considered a drawback by the Pentagon in the 1960s.

There isn't a "waste problem", and as such, there's no "best solution" to it; However the use of partially used fuel is an excellent efficiency, albeit a fairly unimportant one (fuel costs are a minuscule fraction of the cost of running a nuclear power plant).

Liquid fuel makes fuel replacement easier, it does nothing relevant to the reprocessing operations. Enough neutron poisons accumulate, you need to remove them or your reactor doesn't work.