billytetrud

You're very wrong about that.

Eliminating "the need" for overhead wires seems like a terrible trade off when you're adding "the need" for expensive batteries and charging infrastructure.

You might be interesting in looking at the Lima programming language: http://btetrud.com/Lima/Lima-Documentation.html . It has ideas that cover some of these things. For example, it's intended to operate with fully automatic optimization. This assumption allows shedding lots of complexity that arises from needing to do the same logical thing in multiple ways that differ in their physical efficiency characteristics. Like instead of having 1000 different tree classes, you have 1 and optimisers can then look at your code and decide what available tree structures make most sense in each place. Related to your async functions idea, it does provide some convenient ways of handling these things. While functions are just normal functions, it has a very easy way to make a block of async (using "thread") and provides means of capturing async errors that result from that.

Have you ever had Nixta? It's a corn spirit with a very unique and pleasant flavor

I still don't see you making any constructive comment. If you're going to, make it your next one please. If you want an answer to your original rhetorical-looking question. The answer is no.

I'd be very surprised if you could convince me that solar or wind could eliminate the need for the majority of our electricity to be generated by base-load systems like hydro, coal, oil, or nuclear. Do you know what the cost of solar power is if you factor in storage needs?

Your question was full of self righteous snark and your response to my question was as well. Trying to tell me you were just "curious" and "asking for clarity" is 100% bullshit and you know it. If you want to actually engage in a conversation, drop the snark and I'll be happy to have a pleasant conversation with you. Otherwise, I guess we'll both have to be assholes.

enough of them

How much is enough? A von neumann machine shouldn't need to be that big. You can send a single one to a solar system and let it replicate itself indefinitely. A single seed can sprout an entire civilization.

If an intelligent species directed such an object to our galaxy, how close would is need to be for us to detect it?

We could probably detect it for many hundreds of lightyears if not orders of magnitude further. Why? Because an intelligent species capable of sending a von neumann machine to another solar system would probably be intelligent enough to make large scale infrastructure projects like dyson swarms. Such structures would basically be visible from any distance we could see the individual star from, which we can do from at least 50 million light years.

And not only that, but we could see evidence of a von neumann machine coming through in the distant past as well, even if for some reason its no longer active, because it would have left an enormous amount of artifacts behind.

When it is part of the question, how is it irrelevant?

Fair enough. But what I mean is that if life isn't "rare" (for any definition of rare really), one would expect to see a massive amount of evidence of life and civilizations etc. Since we don't see that evidence, we should assume either that life is rare, or we're not the "average" planet that the copernican principle assumes.

If it was on the other side of the galaxy, how would they know to send someone to our solar system

They wouldn't have to know. They would simply send spaceships everywhere and would happen across us by random chance within a million years.

I'm sorry but if you think the US had a "free market" for nuclear power, you're an idiot.

Thanks for the info. I did some more research and found out that Nuclear Power was indeed not subsidized from 1985 to 2000, but after 2000 some nuclear subsidies seem to have been created. However, while over 20% of the electricity in the US is produced by nuclear plants, only 1% of energy subsidies goes to nuclear, which looks like is approximately on par with subsidies for fossil fuel power.

I don't think we should be subsidizing power (or most things) but it seems disingenuous for an article to claim that nuclear power isn't viable because it gets subsidies, even tho fossil fuel gets at least as much subsidies per mwh as nuclear.

You're an idiot, goodbye.

Was the basic research funded by governments? Yes. Is subsidization necessary or even done for nuclear powerplants to be built and profitably run given that basic research as an already-existing stepping stone? No.

No it doesn't "turn out" that way. It is a self fullfilling prophesy where a government either grants a monopoly to a private company or to itself. There is almost nothing that would actually be a monopoly without government protection.

you eont get to have multiple roads or power lines to your home

Why the fuck not? You are asserting things that you clearly haven't thought much about. But I don't have time to try and change your mind. Your biases are clearly too ingrained.

Sounds like you're ignoring my whole post. I guess this conversation is over then.

turns out when you grant a for profit company a monoply they take advantage. every time without fail.

Yes. Granting anyone a monopoly (a corporation or a government) is always a terrible idea. Let's stop doing that.

No one was talking about France. angiosperm snarkily implied that Nuclear only works if its subsidized. He's clearly wrong. The fact that France does subsidize it isn't relevant. Nuclear in the US is not subsidized and yet is massively more cost effective than fossil fuel power plants.

Solar doesn't. Wind doesn't. Hydro does (usually). You know he was talking about solar and wind. Why are you being a turd? Hydro is tapped, we can't build significantly more hydro in this world.

I'm not sure why you think that Exelon didn't consider regulatory risk as one of the things that made it not make sense for them. It was certainly a large factor.

The idea that existing nuclear power plants are losing money because they aren't operationally competitive with oil and gas does not square with the facts. The total cost of running a nuclear plant is 30% less than oil and gas per kilowatt-hour. And if all our nuclear plants weren't 50 years old and saddled with massive overregulation, the operation and maintenance of a nuclear plant would probably be equivalent to running a fossil fueled power plant, which would cut ANOTHER 30% off the cost of nuclear because fuel costs of fossil fueled power plants are 4 times the cost of nuclear fuel per kwh.

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_08_04.html

And as for construction costs, you can see that the massive increase in construction costs in the early 60s and 70s was because regulation required enormous increases in staffing, which ballooned labor costs.

https://ifp.org/nuclear-power-plant-construction-costs/

And even so a nuclear plant should be expected to be profitable as long as you can manage to operate it for long enough without the government shutting you down (one of the major regulatory risks I mentioned).

Nuclear power plants in the past generally took 7 years to build and pay off in 16-24 years. While a natural gas plant can be built in 2 years and pay off in 8 years. Nuclear power plants are so cost effective tho, that if you can manage to run it for 17 years, you'll make more money than running a natural gas plant.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UC_BCz0pzMw

Pointing to the best run government power company says nothing about the average government run power company. And I don't know why you think cheap rates for a government power company are particularly special. The rates are subsidized by your taxes. What's the real cost? I bet its hard to even find out.

a previous conservative Goverment saddling it with 16 billion of extra costs due to grift

Oh really? A government run monopoly being involved in grift? How surprising. Guess what? That's what happens with government run companies. You can't simply wish away the opposing party. And I bet the party you like best also does awful crap you conveniently ignore.

For every great nationalized business you can point out, I could point out 100 that are awful wastes of money.

I'd like you to concede that your snarky comment about subsidies implies things that are incorrect. Nuclear is not subsidized and has never been widely subsidized. https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspec...

Perhaps space travel isn't easy or fast at all

Except we have excellent knowledge about lower bounds on how easy and fast space travel can be. And its plenty fast enough to explore the entire galaxy on geological timescales. Voyager 1 is traveling at 17 km/s which would take it 1 light year every 17,700 years. Given that the galaxy is 100,000 light years across, that means that Voyager 1 could travel across the galaxy in 1.7 billion years. A spaceship built for that purpose would take vastly less time.

Voyager weighed less than 800 kg. Using the [rocket equation](https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/ideal-rocket-equation) and a realistic exhaust velocity for methane/oxygen of 3280 m/s, you can see that you could accelerate a voyager 1 sized craft to 3000 m/s with about 1200 kg of fuel, which is less than $1 of fuel, no joke (https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2022/02/spacex-reusable-rocket...). Of course it takes a lot of money to just get that fuel into orbit: $1500/kg with a falcon heavy. But that means you could send a voyager-1-sized craft to space with the fuel it needs to achieve 3000 km/s for a mere $3 million (not including the cost of the craft itself). And harvesting methane and oxygen on smaller planets would bring down that cost by a lot.

At that speed, the craft could cross the entire galaxy in 9.6 million years. A blink of an eye on geological timescales. And if we really cared enough to spend more than a couple million dollars on this thing, we could get it there orders of magnitude faster using propulsion systems way less shitty than a methane-oxygen rocket.

With just 1% of the energy the sun outputs in a single second, you could accelerate 100 voyager 1s to 1% the speed of light.

In short, if you think space travel is a barrier, you're plainly very wrong. Even with today's technology we could send machines throughout the galaxy in a pretty short period of time. In the near future, that time will drastically reduce.

we can send and receive signals much easier than we can send and receive space crafts

And yet there are vastly larger motivations for sending a spacecraft than sending a signal. You might not be aware that nearly all radio signals that escape the earth are not powerful enough to be detectable above noise further than 1/2 a light year out. https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/33939/when-do-...

There's no reason to believe we should be able to detect alien radio signals unless they are intentionally aimed at us and meant for us. Also, you can't see a radio signal that passed by 1 million years ago. Whereas you certainly would be able to see evidence of a von neumann swarm having done that.

Say only 2 or 3 planets in a given galaxy end up developing intelligent life, is that rare?

Whether anyone would consider that "rare" or not is irrelevant. The puzzle would be: if even ONE intelligent speicies existed out there more than several million years ago, why haven't we seen evidence of their space craft?

maybe intelligent life is common enough but it tends to rarely progress past a certain point of development due to wiping itself out

Yes, this is of course the premise of usual solutions to the fermi paradox. However, those solutions are often either "maybe nukes will destroy us" or "maybe something we don't know about yet will". Neither are super satisfactory as answers.

it does not seem inevitable

The belief that intelligent life isn't inevitable is not inconsistent with the belief that intelligent life usually will happen from any life given enough time. Why are you positioning those things as opposed? They are not.

I got so tired of dealing with Google's AMP so I switched to Firefox just on mobile. It's fine, tho the url bar doesn't work as well as on chrome. Other than that I've gotten used to it well enough. I'm starting to hate everything Google does. All their products are steadily getting worse and worse as they get more bloated. I'll consider switching to Firefox on desktop.

?? How does that show a failure of the free market??

Are you blind? The only reason we have so much solar and wind is because of massive subsidies.

Nationalized industries are great for like 5-10 years, after which it becomes clear they have no ability to make effective plans or react to a changing market.

Nuclear projects don't get funded because of regulatory risk, not because they're "too expensive".

I see you've been massively down voted, even tho none of them can manage to even disagree with your facts. Regardless, I don't think greening offsets the millions that die from air pollution every year, not including any climate change effects.

Nuclear only costs more because of outdated and intentionally obstructive regulations lobbied for by the oil industry (who also funded environmental groups willing to hate nuclear btw). Even with the massive over regulation of nuclear power in the US, nuclear is STILL more cost effective in the long run, and has only not been done because the risk of the government deciding to shut down their project or add untenable barriers mid construction has been too great to risk it. And don't give me "levelized cost" bs, that is skewed unrealistically against nuclear.

Saying there is "no evidence" is factually absurd. There are a whole host of possibilities for practical long distance space travel. At very least for small light-weight robots. And it even seems possible that we can viably transport our entire solarsystem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3y8AIEX_dU . No evidence indeed... only if you lack imagination.