adrianN

If we restrict ourselves to programs that can be stored inside the physical universe, suddenly everything switches from undecidable to O(1) :)

all code possible to run on a computer already exists

You have to be careful; that line of thinking might get you trapped in L-space. You’d need a very skilled librarian and possibly a bag of peanuts to get back out.

TFA claims that lights don’t reduce crime, but I‘d like to see the exact meaning of that statistic (eg dark places are less frequented hence less crime?).

Putting astronomy on the dark side of the moon would probably work better than putting it into space because you can use some local material for construction.

If your country’s industrial and defense policy relies on individual consumers making choices that are worse for them on almost all metrics, it’s time to think about on worse payroll your politicians are.

You can buy faster bikes than what is allowed at the Tour, so the only concern would be making records incomparable.

I don’t think that it is possible to both allow the use of LLM and not mandate them in modern metric driven work places. Either you ban them or you force people to use them for game theoretic reasons: they are slower than their peers and quality of the work is harder to measure than quantity. All you achieve is shifting the blame to the employees if the LLM messes up. Come to think of it, that probably is a highly desirable outcome for the decision makers, so perhaps that will actually be the policy that becomes universally adopted.

Alpha particles are essentially Helium, so by breeding large amounts of highly active alpha emitters you can produce Helium much more effectively than by fusion.

I guess you never have to deal with text if you think that’s enough? What kind of software do you write in C?

Is there even a government under true capitalism or is it more like the lunar anarchy described in „the moon is a harsh mistress“?

From memory: The sky was the color of a TV tuned to a bad channel

Cycling 50kWh of batteries daily seems like a very unusual level of consumption.

We could have smaller transportation with combustion engines too, but the margins are lower and they cover fewer use cases, so marketing larger vehicles works really well.

I would read that SCP

Most roads are not used for delivering goods, so if we'd just reduce private car use that would already be a great improvement. If you want to go even further, rail has a lot of potential left.

You can look up the carbon cycle on Wikipedia, it is fairly well understood where atmospheric carbon can go. Most processes that sequester carbon long term take geological time spans. So unless you think we engineer sequestration at a rate comparable to what we emit today, atmospheric carbon is here to stay for a really long time. Personally I think we won’t be able to scale sequestration technology sufficiently in the next decades to make a dent in the carbon levels.

Optimistic of you to assume it’ll only be fifty years. Do you expect humans to adapt that quickly? The climate will be messed up for centuries at least

Interesting! Nevertheless I believe it is true that bike and pedestrian paths are much cheaper to construct and maintain than roads for cars and trucks.

Road wear increases with the fourth power of axle weight iirc. Bike paths are orders of magnitude cheaper and need a lot less space.

One example is the requirement to have parking spaces.

There is little hope for that as long as driving is heavily subsidized.

Far-out theories need solid evidence to be believable. However, there is not even circumstantial evidence to suggest that anybody was five decades ahead of public technology. You might rather claim that the military has super advanced aircraft, at least we have lots of sightings of UFOs doing apparently miraculous aerial acrobatics.

I wonder how they use balcony solar for blackouts. The systems I know shut themselves off if the grid goes down.

That would be a rather expensive robot vacuum.

I feel like you could get a lot more quality of life improvement for more people with the money if you spent it on low tech solutions, eg more efficient cooking stoves for people still cooking with biomass, or solar microgrids for areas without electricity.

The people here prepared a list: https://drawdown.org/

Solar doesn't need a lot of land. If we used all the land we currently use to grow biofuels for solar instead we'd be able to cover most of our energy needs already.

I just recall how massively supply chains were disrupted by a few percent of the population having a very bad cough a couple of years ago and extrapolate to a situation where billions are dead, agriculture is fucked for years or decades and major infrastructure is destroyed.

Any high technology has incredibly long dependency chains. I think you seriously underestimate the difficulty of bootstrapping, say, WW2 level tech from irradiated wastelands after major nuclear exchanges.

It will just take at least three or four generations to get back to 90's climate, provided we don't trigger any irreversible tipping points, like the melting of the permafrost, in which case the climate is messed up for millennia.