Regarding “the company made the new tech incompatible with the new tech to force people to buy the new”, I’ll invoke Hanlon’s razor.
I worked for a software company that was bought out by a microscope company, because they realized making a new software from scratch for each microscope was very expensive.
They did not have the know-how to reuse the software.
And yes. They were that bad at software, when they bought us out, colleagues of mine audited the software they were writing for their newest microscope, and it was so bad they threw out the whole thing to start from scratch, with proper software engineering practices.
Also, there is an open source toolkit that is pretty good at reading microscope data called VTK (IIRC it’s developed partly by Zeiss, one of the two main microscope manufacturers).
But look how fast we can make those little fuckers go!
It’s just like slot car racing, round and round, but… you know… faster. And yeah, it’s more expensive than a regular slot car track, I guess. But still, those particles will beat any slot car you care to pick! So there’s that. Welllll not those fancy slot cars with them high performance motors, I mean, that’s a completely different ballgame there, we can’t compete with that.
But still, those particles whizzing around, it’s gonna be pretty cool. I reckon we should do it.
So anyway, thank you for reading my financial proposal for the SuperLHC.
Not just science, factory equipment that needs ancient computers to function too. If you’ve ever wondered why some old PC parts are surprisingly expensive on eBay…
Out of curiosity, I ran through some sample quizzes of the A+ exam a while back. Managed to pass, but I had to dig out a lot of my old knowledge about IDE master/slave setups and COM port settings and the like. That may be partially due to A+ being a silly, meaningless cert, but it’s pretty clear there is a need for that crap still.
Imagine if only 1/10 of all countries GDP gouvernement spending went to scientists and the patent bullshit didn’t exist ? We’d be mining asteroids and sipping coffee on Mars.
Venus would take longer, but would be vastly easier to terraform to a habitable world. The atmosphere should be able to be transformed into an earth like atmosphere by dumping a few comets and some bacteria in. Might take the bacteria a few thousand years, but they did it here in Earth caused the first mass extinction.
We might wanna check to see if any bacteria exist on Venus first, but honestly if there are, they haven’t made the evolutionary jump in the last 4 billion years, so I doubt it will happen just cause we add the necessary water.
While we are at it, we may as well solve the dark forest problem, turn the solar system into a massive spaceship, and extend the life of our sun, by turning Mercury into a solar thruster/ star lifter.
I’m partial to the idea of converting Mercury into a star lifter / thruster / planetary shade. Blocking sunlight to Venus would cause the atmosphere to cool, then freeze and fall as snow. Then you can disassemble Venus too for more raw material. That’s a massive store of carbon, oxygen, and sulfur. Solar powered mass drivers operating out of a planetary vacuum cut costs of launching material into space.
People often object to the idea because we can’t afford it, it’s too difficult, or out of concern for preserving those planets. Yeah, we won’t be doing all that. It will be our descendants in the far future. A task for new civilizations, over eons. Discovering life on Mercury and Venus is a long shot. But if it is there, it’s doomed without human intervention. Convert those two planets to Dyson swarm, and they’ll have matter for countless orbital habitats, not just for whoever humans evolve into, but for nature preserves too.
Don’t disassemble Venus. That planet is far too easy to terraform. Disassemble Mars, asteroids, and the various otherwise useless moons, comets, asteroids, and proto-planets in the heliosphere
Well, I understand the argument for terraforming, and I’d bet good money we will terraform it long before disassembly, but I’m more of an O’Neil Cylinder / Dyson Swarm kind of guy. I prefer the idea of overwhelming surface area via orbital habitats rather than colonizing gravity wells. I also don’t trust Venus not to catastrophically resurface itself and refill the atmosphere with CO2 and sulphuric acid in a mass volcanic event.
Long term, but far too soon the Sun will expand into a red giant and devour Mercury, Venus, and likely Earth as well. If it’s possible to employ a Dyson Swarm to lift material from a star to reduce its mass, then it may be feasible to prevent or mitigate the red giant phase to preserve Earth and extend its habitability, perhaps indefinitely. If preserving the birthplace of known life seems more important than building a copy in a more precarious orbit, then we ought to sacrifice that copy to expand the Dyson Swarm and mine the Sun faster. Mercury first though. We’ve got time. Mars can probably go too.
Oh yes, and if the notion of slowly altering Earth’s orbit by tossing asteroids past us ever needs to happen, then surely rapid firing 2 or 3 planets worth of material across our bow ought to get the job done much faster.
Considering the eons involved with stripping both inward planets down to the last bucketful though, I’m certainly in favor of a few millennia to fully explore and research them both beforehand.
I’m not seeing why the same couldn’t be said for Mars, drop some mold spores and water bears down there, maybe some photosynthetic bacteria, slowly build a blanket of CO2 to warm the planet, melt/release the water from the surface, a thousand years gives a habitable planet, no asteroid steering required.
Mars is roughly a single order of magnitude larger than The Moon, in mass. The Earth is roughly 81 times the mass of The Moon. Mars doesn’t have a magnetic field protecting it, and can’t unless we add a significant amount of metals, and mass to the planet. It also doesn’t have an atmosphere due to the two previous facts.
Meanwhile, Venus is roughly the size of The Earth at a scale of 4.8673 : 5.97222. It doesn’t have enough water though. It also doesn’t have a large iron core to create a magnetic field to protect the inhabitants. However, we could re-route several comets fairly easily to impact Venus giving it a small amount of mass, but also all the water that is needed to start the bacteria creating a Nitrogen rich atmosphere that has a large percentage of Oxygen, turning Venus into a tropical planet that will lose its atmosphere in a few billion years. To counteract this, as we throw 20-30 comets at Venus, we should also throw 100-200 Iron rich asteroids at Venus so that they will be absorbed into the molten core and form a magnetic field for Venus.
Now we have 2 Earth-like planets in a few hundred to thousand years.
To create such a gravitational well on Mars, so that we aren’t constantly losing both our normal skeletural muscles, but also more importantly, our organ muscles, you would have to create a stable black hole in the core of Mars, or you would have to bombard Mars, and its pathetic moons, with millions of asteroids.
To create a long term naturally stable, new earth, Venus is just closer to the masses that we actually need. By dropping just the comets onto Venus you just added a lot of mass, and that gets Venus even closer to being “Earth-like.” We will have to give Venus a comparative moon, but with asteroid mining, and starlifting, that shouldn’t be an issue.
By using Mercury to create a solar thruster, we gain access to unlimited space dust, that will form unlimited asteroids for us, in the Kuiper Belt.
Would be neat if they found a way to only spend like 200 billion a year (the GDP of Hungary and as much as the second biggest military spender) on the people grinder.
I don’t think even a purely defensive military could be that small for the US. We have a lot of coastline on two oceans, plus distant holdings in Alaska and Hawaii. Even discharging Guam and the like would still be a lot of ground and ocean to cover.
My googling says the US spent/185b on the DHS for this year and has 100b for FY2024, which includes the stupid mexico wall. I’m sure there would be more things to deal with not included in that number and it would take time to transition, but any reduction is a positive gain if you ask me.
But we spend nearly $200 billion just paying salaries. We spend the most because we are also an expensive country to live in and that means paying the folks who volunteer a decent wage.
We would have to significantly downsize the military personnel and pretty much operate as homeland defense only.
It’s currently used to monopolize important discoveries and technologies. The Huawei debacle is the biggest proof. No country should be able to control another’s technological advance based on weither they’re friends with them at the moment or not. Also, it’s not like big tech stealing from small/medium enterprise never happens. Either they just buy the company or strangle it one way or another to bankrupt it and then buy it for cheap.
You make the patents too easy to get and it fucks the little guy over as the big corps hoover up all the ideas. You make them difficult or impossible to get then that also benefits the big guys over the little guys as they will just steal people’s ideas and produce them for cheaper with their existing infrastructure which creates an even bigger monopoly.
There is a sweet spot that society is trying to reach. It’s imperfect like any system but it’s far far better than having no system.
You’ve not even considered that in order to get a patent granted you have to disclose your invention to the public which stops big corporations hoarding too many trade secrets.
All in all, the idea that patents shouldn’t exist benefits nobody except the large corporations. Say goodbye to start ups growing in size if that is the case.
Just because big tech does these things doesn’t mean we should remove any pretense of rules against it. If they want something a little guy has, they should buy it, not take it for free.
I like to analyze art ( usually alone and in my mind ) so bear with me. His art is Very interesting but it’s always big robot/drone/ megalithique structures in an open field. While I can totally imagine a big robotic mascots rotting away for months after a malfunction, his work more akin to the 50s view of what the future would be but with modern lenses/tech than a plausible future . In the steel vs digital war, the digital won and his work doesn’t show any of it.
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