Why Nuclear Power Dooms Humanity to Extinction
January 29th, 2009
science, sustainabilityRecently, I discovered John McCarthy’s (creator of LISP) pages on sustainability that he’s been working on for many years. Prof. McCarthy is a proponent of using nuclear energy to achieve sustainability on this planet, and he has a lot of good information on his site. According to him, we’ll enjoy perhaps a billion years of sustainable energy with the nuclear fission available from materials on this planet. He also thinks conservation of energy (applying mental effort and resources to the reduction of energy consumption) is a huge mistake.
I too think nuclear energy is an important energy source to explore, but I am not as “extremely optimistic” as Prof. McCarthy. Conservation of energy, particularly fissionable materials, is not a huge mistake. My argument is:
- The amount of fissionable nuclear material on the planet right now (and indeed, in the solar system) is the most there will ever be. Fissionable elements decay at a fixed rate, and new heavy elements are only created in a star’s death.
- Energy consumption has historically grown at a pace faster than population growth. In addition, cheap energy makes people optimize other (larger) economic factors. In other words, when gasoline prices are cheap and stable, people will move further from cities, where housing prices are cheaper, and consume more fuel in transportation between the city and themselves. This leads to energy consumption expanding to consume any additional supply.
- Space travel is widely recognized as the only infinite-horizon survival mechanism, for any life form (or: any life form that is confined to a single planet is doomed to extinction in the longest term). The more we understand about physics, the more we are certain that the theories of relativity are true. There don’t seem to be any shortcuts to getting around the universe; it just takes a huge amount of time and energy.
The biggest misconception that most people have is exactly how much energy or time it would take to move a sustainable colony from the earth to another solar system (and no other planets in our solar system seem to be habitable). It is several orders of magnitude larger than traveling within our solar system, which is already almost prohibitive to do via chemical propulsion. Human interstellar travel using chemical energy is basically impossible.
Well, nuclear fission has 10 million times (7 orders of magnitude) more energy than chemical reactions. The power and energy density in nuclear material makes it ideal as a portable long-distance fuel. Other energy conveyances for interstellar transport have been proposed, but every one is almost as ridiculous as using the LHC to construct our own personal wormhole. (Fusion has the capability to generate even more energy, and the materials are abundant, but it’s pretty much not going to work out for energy production either). The huge amount of energy required to get to another star in a “reasonable” amount of time (only hundreds of years) means that it’ll even take a fair amount of fission fuel.
So, consuming nuclear fuel to satisfy our insatiable thirst for domestic energy may prevent us from ever leaving this planet. And our continuing disregard for the potential long-term effects of our short-term actions will very likely amplify those negative long-term effects. Nuclear haste makes nuclear waste.
Don’t get me wrong: we absolutely need to continue developing fission technology, for both space travel and energy emergencies here on earth (heaven forbid the aliens come and we don’t have powerful enough lasers to destroy them). This development should go beyond theoretical research, to large-scale engineering and “field tests” that may as well be used as civilian energy sources. But to retool our civilization’s energy infrastructure to rely on “abundant” nuclear energy is a huge mistake: without active conservation, our consumption will grow to take advantage of as much energy as we can produce, we’ll be consuming a fuel that is absolutely finite, and that fuel won’t be available when the asteroid is 50 years away and we really do need to get off the planet.
And that’s why abundant nuclear power ultimately dooms humanity to extinction.
Stumble it!Minesweeper Automation
October 26th, 2008
code, games, portfolio, projectsA few years ago, I was playing a lot of Minesweeper, and I realized that I was spending most of my time implementing two very simple rules repeatedly:
- If the number of mines indicated by this square is equal to the number of neighboring mines already flagged, clear any uncleared/unflagged neighbors.
- If the number of mines indicated by this square is equal to the number of neighboring mines already flagged plus the number of uncleared neighbors, then flag all uncleared neighbors as mines.
These rules should be obviously correct to anyone who’s ever played Minesweeper; in fact, I can’t even imagine making any progress in a Minesweeper game without them. So I decided to implement these rules in Gnomine, the open source version of Minesweeper that comes with Gnome on Linux. It only took me a few hours before I had this patch (applicable to gnome-games v2.20.1). Of course, this patch assumes that no mines are ever incorrectly flagged, but I think that’s a reasonable assumption.
And after playing with it, it’s surprising how much of the board can be cleared mechanically before you ever even get to any interesting decisions. When the sweeping does stop, what’s left are a few random decisions, where you can’t do any better than a 50/50 guess, and also the genuinely interesting positions where you have to apply set theory to make deductions.
I sent this patch off to the gnome-games mailing list owner, and have yet to receive a response. I’m sure that adding minor features to gnomine is absolutely no one’s top priority, but maybe if someone else has been similarly inspired, they might find this patch useful.
On the bright side
October 15th, 2008
news, politicsAt least the 10% of my 401k that I lost today is not as much as the 10% I lost yesterday.
As a side note, it is interesting that the stock market performs better and with less volatility during Democratic presidencies:
Using the Dow Jones industrial average as the benchmark, Stock Trader’s Almanac shows a $10,000 investment compounded during Democratic presidencies since 1901 would be worth $279,705 after 48 years. The same $10,000 investment during 56 Republican years would have been worth just $78,699. If you adjust for inflation, the value of a $10,000 investment under Democratic presidents is $33,426.The inflation-adjusted value under Republican presidents is $26,145.
President Palin Bumper Stickers
September 18th, 2008
politicsThe very idea of Sarah Palin being President of the United States (POTUS) scares the piss out of me. It’s not just her take on the issues (well, the ones she’s actually thought about) and her ignorance and her appalling lack of experience–though they should be enough to disturb any conscious American who cares about their country. But her brazen disregard for some basic principles of democracy has left me dumbfounded. Trying to ban books from the library, and firing the librarian who wouldn’t? You can hardly make this stuff up.
So I got inspired to spread the message, both about Sarah’s Scandals and the horror that may soon be her presidency. (Do you really think McCain will live long enough to become a Maverick again?) I found zazzle.com and went on a tear.
The great thing about bumper stickers written in the future satirical tense is that if the unthinkable comes true, they actually become more stylish. At least until President Palin signs the Protect America First Act into law, which bans any bumper stickers which do not contain a Pro-Palin message.
Share and enjoy!
Youtube to MP3 Converter
August 19th, 2008
code, portfolio, projectsMy mom found some of her favorite music on Youtube. She’s been looking for some of these songs for a long time, and now that she’s found them, she’s scared that Youtube will pull them and then she won’t have them again. She wants to download them so she can listen to them whenever she wants. The CDs are out of print. There are several torrents of this artist’s music that were around in 2006, but now they have 0 seeders (and 3 leechers). legalsounds.com has them for 10 cents apiece, but I cautioned her against giving her CC number to the Russians.
I know the quality of audio on Youtube is pretty bad, but she doesn’t care. She’s excited that she can finally listen to these songs again, and she’d be content with just having an mp3 constructed from the Youtube videos. In fact, she’d be ecstatic.
How hard can this be? I’m learning some jQuery myself–it’s all the rage, what with the mashups and the AJAX–and I thought I could make a simple client-side webpage that AT LEAST just gets at a user’s favorites from youtube and prints the URLs of each .flv for download. Youtube has a nice little API, you just GET from a sensible URL, and it returns XML. jQuery has some nice functionality to get elements from the XML and I would just add a few rows a table with the right information. No problems anticipated.
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