Tech Won't Save Us

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Tech won't save us...but it may save the Brains of Billionaires who Freeze their Brains!



I forsee a new trend among the Master's of the Universe!  They will freeze their Brains just before Death, and have them revived when they can be transplanted into a new body cloned from the DNA of their cells.  All the technology exists except for connecting up the brain to all the sensory organs, muscles and hormone producing glands.  Advances have been made in reconnecting severed spinal cord nerves to get paraplegics walking again, so it's not out of the question that could be done in 50 years or so.  Dolly the Sheep was cloned a couple of decades back, the only thing which has stopped Human Cloning from going forward are ethical issues.  The Chinese are probably working on that one also, as well as Dark Medcal Research here in the FSoA.

Yea, I know, it's Conspiracy Theory, but there's not really much other reason to be experimenting with thawing out frozen gray matter, is there?

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202405/1312814.shtml

Chinese revive Human Brain frozen for 18 Months

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[RE]

Personally I am not a fan of self-driving tech, and the idea of actually riding around in city traffic in a car with no driver does not appeal to me at all.  Not saying I wouldn't do it, if I had to get to the hospital for instance and a self-driving taxi showed up at my door, I would probably get in it.

However, in fairness to this tech, it seems to have been operating fairly well without a whole lot of reports of death and highway mayhem so far.  There have been incidents though of collisions which supposedly were avoidable the highway safety folks are investigating.  The thing is, you have to compare this to the number of avoidable accidents human drivers have given the same number of miles driven.  The record doesn't have to be perfect, if self-driving does better overall than people do, that should be good enough.  Of course it wouldn't be if you were the passenger in the car that got in an accident and want to sue the car for unsafe driving. lol.

For a cripple, being able to order up a vehicle to come pick you up (wheelchair accessible) would be very handy, and if it came in at a price significantly cheaper than the Cripple Cabs that have human drivers, I might be persuaded to risk using one.  However,these cab services aren't generally much cheaper, the money saved on not having to pay human drivers is pocketed by the stockholders and CEO of these companies.  This of course is why Muskrat wants to turn Tesla into a Robotaxi service instead of an EV manufacturer.

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/us-safety-probe-into-waymo-self-driving-vehicles-finds-more-incidents-2024-05-24/

US safety probe into Waymo self-driving vehicles finds more incidents

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[RE]

As a chef, the forced electrification of cooking apparatus is bad enough, but forced electrification of heating is just stupid, especially where the infrastructure is already in place for delivering the gas to individual homes.  Direct heating through combustion is more efficient than electric which has loss in power transmission and energy conversion, and Hydrogen can be substituted for NG as the huge amounts they project to come from electrolysis utilizing solar & wind generated juice arrive.  The grid is overwhelmed already with new demands from EVs & AI, adding heating demand to this just makes it even more impossible.

For folks heating their homes in Northern climates, I sure hope they have a backup of a wood/kerosene or propane fired system for the occasions the power goes out in the winter.  Nothing does a better job of taking out the power over wide areas for extended time than an Ice Storm.  Hurricanes  and Tornadoes are really only bad where they make landfall or touch down, ice storms can affect whole regions that go for 100s of miles as the right conditions move across the country.

Like everything else in the attempt to transition from FFs to carbon-free energy, political mandates are poorly thought out and generally unattainable.  If I was at all interested in trying to survive the necessary transition, my numero uno Prep would be a combo Wind/PV power generation system with an Electrolysis H generator and compressor for storage and H Fuel Cell for electricity generation as well as a rechargeable battery system for shorter term daily storage needs.  Then low power EV transport devices as well as a H powered ICE truck & tractor for heavy duty work applications.  I think you could put together everything for a small system for $100K, not including the heavy equipment which you would need to pick up old shit from junkyards and rebuild.  Nothing newer than maybe 1970ish on engine technology.  Absolutely NO computer controls.

For the vast majority of people who cannot afford such preps, I forsee a significant rise in finger and toe amputations after winter snowstorms in the big shities.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/05/25/houston-storm-shows-downside-of-forced-electrification/

Houston Storm Reveals Downside of Forced Electrification

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No day is complete anymore until some new, miraculous energy technology is announced by some new science publication I never heard of lauds it's potential to save a technofuturistic lifestyle at least long enough to send faster-than-light anti-gravity warp drive starships out to other galaxies far far away to populate the universe with homo sapiens meat packages, thus delaying our extinction past when the Sun goes Red Giant until the Universe either expands and cools down to Absolute Zero, or collapses on itself and restarts with another Big Bang.

Today's new tech is Thermophotovoltaics, which will use Heat to directly produce electricity without the need of a power plant that uses turbines and magnets to do the job after the heat has been converted to work and mechanical energy first.  It would be a truly fabulous tech if the temps it works at were in the range of 0-200C, but sadly to get photons of sufficient energy your material has to be around 1500C, which is fucking hot.  To generate this heat, you would need to use something like an Arc welder.  Materials that can stay solid at temps like this are all ceramics, so I'm not sure exactly how they heat them up to begin with.  Like stories about Fusion power, you're only getting newz of a very small piece of the total problems involved with applying the technology.  They keep dishing out the daily propaganda though, because it reinforces the belief that technology and innovation will provide the infinite energy necessary for an eternity of Happy Motoring.

https://newatlas.com/energy/heat-battery-record-efficiency-grid-scale-energy-storage/

Thermal power cell harvests electricity from heat at record efficiency

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My regular favorite Techno-Hopium website that has all the Green Hydrogen propaganda articles in really badly translated English today has an Apocalyptic warning that the growing global water scarcity problem is going to leave us--horror of horrors--WITHOUT TECHNOLOGY!         Apparently for the editors of this rag, this consequence is an even more terrifying outcome than crop failures and insufficient drinking water. 

They also quote Elon Musk as saying that the exponential growth of AI is going to explode so fast that "by 2025 the demand for electricity from AI will be so high that it could "devour electricity and transformers.".  This level of hyperbole is just a little bit over-the-top of course, but it is very true that not only does AI consume gobs of electricity to run all those microprocessors, because they also produce mega-Joules of waste heat they require a lot of water to keep from melting into globs of plastic, silicon and rare earths metal that don't think so well. lol.

Now, a well designed closed loop system should be able to cool your server farm of supercomputers without taking fresh water heating it up and spilling it out into a river, but like with nuclear power plants that's what often happens if the water is available because it's cheaper.  And of course these new AI data centers are even being planned with their own dedicated Nuke Puke plants to run them.

Aficionados of AI and its "great potential" to solve all the problems of mankind tend to overlook or at least downplay the huge energy demands of this technology.  With the kind of build out being projected, they're talking doubling and tripling electricity consumption in a decade.  I can't stress enough how ludicrous this idea and goal is.  Who in their right mind realistically believes we could generate that much new electric power with carbon-free renewable energy AND upgrade the power distribution grid enough to handle such a demand increase in a decade?  There just is no way that can happen.

The problem seems to be that nobody stands up when some Tech Billionaire proposes building a Data Center and says "Uh, no, we don't have enough water to do that."  Rather they say, "OK, you tell us we must have this data center to keep up with the Chinese, so who can we take water from so we can make it happen?"

Every tech billionaire basically wants his own AI system.  It's the new status symbol among Billionaires instead of Super Yachts and Private Jets.  You're not a Mover & Shaker unless you have your very own Juice Hog slopping up electrons to think for you.  There's no central planning, no sense of realism here, as though the AI will take care of this problem itself.  The job of AI is to solve the problems caused by AI, in a kind of perpetual motion machine.  Insanity has arrived.

https://www.ecoticias.com/en/water-energy-problem-experts/2866/

Water is scarce, but we have an even bigger problem: experts are already warning that it will leave us without technology

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[K-Dog]

Humans do not use the intelligence they have well.  Using intelligence humans do not even have can't possibly forebode a better outcome.

Everyone is excited about the problems A.I. can solve, forgetting humans do not know which problems to solve.

[RE]

I had an epiphany last night, reinforced now by this article on water shortage resulting in technological collapse.

I recently got a password for the Netflix account we have here for the Activities department.  So I now have this additional supply of mindless entertainment being cranked out by the corporate media.  Most of the titles are for movies and TV series that have been produced over the last 10-20 years, though they do have a good deal of "classic" older stuff as well.

For the new titles though, I was simply amazed at how many of them have Supernatural themes and characters with Magical Powers.  Witches and Sorcerers are very popular.  Vampires and Werewolves also.  Zombies are everywhere.  Kids always have Mutant powers.  This along with of course the whole Superhero genre, and Sci-fi that violates all the laws of physics.  Media and pop culture is consumed with Magical thinking, and I now believe this explains why even really smart people accept the hopium being pitched out by the REAL scientists in the renewable energy field.  They also are infected with Magical Thinking, or what I now think of as Harry Potter disease, because I trace back the beginning of when this stuff slammed into pop culture, which was with the first Harry Potter movies.  The first one was released in 2001, there were 8 all together.

Since real science has failed  to come up with new inventions as fast as they appeared in the first part of the 20th century, people have returned to the kind of Magical beliefs they had before the scientific revolution.  Go back to before 1700 or so, belief in Miracles and Witches was common.  Religion is full of claims like people living 100s of years or God speaking to them.  This sort of acceptance of unprovable ideas and events became less common as science demonstraated all the marvelous things that could occur.  Naturally, people expected this would continue.

But it hasn't.  Science ran up against the limits of natural law, and stuff like the speed of light became impassable barriers.  Gravity can't be escaped or turned off.  Stars are too far away to get to.  Humans don't want to accept that this is all there is, and at least while you are a living meat package there's nothing more to aspire to.

To resolve this problem, we create fantasy worlds which satisfy the desire for something more meaningful.  It's why Joe Rogan actually DOES believe Terence Howard's nonsense, which I discovered after reading an interview with him where he describes how "blown away" he was by his revelations and it took him days to process it all.

Harry Potter disease is what really dooms us.  It's the deep seated need Homo Saps have that there is something more to life and existence than we get with what is available in the physical world.  Now that science fails to provide more, we return to the supernatural and magical thinking.

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