[wolfram]

They’ve been building accelerators with KE’s of 8 MeV’s since the late 30’s, since we only need about 3 MeV’s, I actually think making one from scratch may not be too hard.

[wolfram]

zapkitty wrote:

You know what really scares me about fusion thrusters?

Kzinti?

You misremeber your future-history, it’s call the kzinti lesson because they learned to fear humans with fusion thrusters in orbit.

[wolfram]

I thank you for the suggestion, lament at your observation that this is a small field of research, and find it interesting how many lebedev’s have published to arxiv.

[wolfram]

I can’t see it, and I even made an account to help this time.

[wolfram]

Proof of some concepts. To verify it could be a useful power source it would require holding onto a certain concentration of ions at certain temperatures for certain time periods, reliably.

They’ve shown they can heat enough ions very reliably, they need to verify their theories on containment.

[wolfram]

jamesr wrote: I also note from the report: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CRPT-112srpt75/pdf/CRPT-112srpt75.pdf

Some other interesting points…

Did I misinterpret that, or did all those points lead to shoring up the diminishing petrol fuel sources and maintaining nuclear weapons stocks? nothing actually “productive”? :face palm:

[wolfram]

At the hobbyist level, at least. but many wonderful things have come from hobbyists, so don’t let that stop you.

[wolfram]

Rezwan wrote: The cost…”Kurzweil ingests “250 supplements, eight to 10 glasses of alkaline water and 10 cups of green tea” every day and drinks several glasses of red wine a week in an effort to “reprogram” his biochemistry.[45] Lately, he has cut down the number of supplement pills to 150.[46]” I want PIE! Do or die! The red wine sounds OK.

yeah, kurzweil’s method is expensive [em]and it doesn’t work.[/em] Should we say that all nuclear fusion is going to be exhorbitantly priced based on how expensive ITER is, or heaven forbid, NIF?

Longevity is so under developed at the moment that predicting some of it’s inherent properties and then assuming your predictions have to be true is intellectually dishonest. Consider the various possibilities, Will it work equally well on all specimens? few treatments work universally as it is now. What kind of cost will it be? will those costs be amenable to economies of scale? what parts of our biological system does it interact with? There are so many parameters wiggling about that we could fill books with speculation and collect no data.

I mean I could postulate a particular brand of immortality (gain an increase to your life span proportional to the amount of life span of the person you murder) which is totally ethically reprehensible, and I could equally well postulate one that is much more acceptable (vaccine against natural death that, as an unavoidable side effect from gene repair mechanisms, renders you sterile). Both are completely fictional, both have completely different arguments about whether or not they are good.

For an interesting collection of thoughts people have already had on immortality, consider http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Immortality

We can see that some effort has already been put into characterizing the various types of fictitious states of human longevity, obviously types 1 and 0 are physically impossible due to A.) entropy and B.) a lack of authorial intent in the universe, type 6 would kind of suck, type 3 or 2 is probably the goal of the transhumanists, types 9 and 10 are ethically dubious. I could go on and on.

[wolfram]

I think people who despise immortality mostly don’t do things that take time. Try being an experimental arborealist when you only live to be 80, you’ll get through maybe 2 generations of black walnut trees! Why do you fiat that this yet undiscovered longevity treatment will /have/ to cost absurd amounts? Computers used to cost so much it was assumed only 5 would exist, now the raspberry pi came out and it costs prox 20 bucks and the distribution companies servers collapsed under the load of demand. The consensus was that fusion research took vast quantities of resources, Dr. Lerner is making legitimate headway for a pittance in comparison to some of the other groups. And I can’t speak for other disciplines, but I know at least in physics they are becoming more relaxed about “crazy” theorists. Not a century ago Boltzmann was ridiculed to the point that he committed suicide just because he used atoms in his theory of statistical mechanics even though they wouldn’t be proven to exist for another few decades. Now we string theorists and people who assert the big bang didn’t exist and the community is [em]fine[/em] with that. If they can come up with experiments that would only be explainable by their theories then bam, they’re the next physics rockstar. I look forward to a future of 7 billion patient and free hobbyists.

[wolfram]

This is delightful, we should have a party! How bout a rousing game of diplomacy to destroy the community cohesion we so enjoy?
edit: BTW, who do we have to talk to about getting an advance copy of the article? I’d like to peruse it and talk with some of the faculty here at U of Iowa.

[wolfram]

Some things I was taught about the Carnot cycle make me want to call shenanigans on that statement, but the fact that my statistical physics is pretty weak and you’ve been doing physics longer than me is giving me pause.

[wolfram]

Is the heat dissapation problem also magically solved? the amount of energy used by an exponentially growing populace is also exponential, I did some back of the envelope calculations to try and figure what rate the radius of populated space would have to grow if power were growing exponentially, given that temperature would be the fourth root of power. if you have exponentially growing power, and surface area can grow at most with the square of your radius growth, eventually your frontier will have to grow at faster than the speed of light. I’m still advocating the population pyramid had better be a rod.

[wolfram]

Both are things that could be done, and both reflect different stances on what you’re trying to accomplish. If the concern is that immortality oppresses the new comers then take steps to level the playing field for new ideas, if the concern is that society attains perfection at the discovery of immortality than clearly we should make sure that the status quo never gets upset.

[wolfram]

If we’re still using some form of democracy after we’ve developed functional immortality, we could consider having the power of an indivuals vote decay assymptotically to zero with time, to off set the fact that they’ll have had more time to accrue other kinds of influence. This way we still give the next generation space to breathe. Also, if we reproduce at replacement levels (each person only making 1 more person in the course of their life times) the population will only grow linearly with time (assuming death rate=0, laughable, really), which is much more manageable than the exponential malthusian cluster fluff that would happen eventually at reproduction above replacement.

[wolfram]

Also, the twitter account has a link to the new 2011 report, a delightful summary with some numbers to stew on. Commercial supplier coming up with the next batch of switches could double as being a prudent step 1 to mass roll out, having the specs for important components already worked out and ready to mass produce. You know, should they work as expected.

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