mac01021

The GP was just setting a lower bound of 1B to establish a basis for calculating the cost to move humanity offworld. The cost for 5B people or 7B people would be even more cost prohibitive.

But also the shrinkage would not have to happen abruptly. In theory you might be able to get to a population of 1B over the course of 200 years without the kind of catastrophic meltdown you're describing.

If you liked the first one you'll probably like the second one too.

It sounds like the GP probably hadn't seen an avatar movie before?

So then they'd have formed on earth - no panspermia required?

The wings on the thopters described in the novel by Frank Herbert were more bird-like than insect-like.

I don't know which type, if either, will be more practical to build as materials technology improves.

Is training with dropout still a thing? Does that mess this up?

I think it's at least strongly implied in the movie that he has to work much harder than (for example) his genetically superior brother to achieve the same level of performance. So maybe you're both right.

I think you're both right. Introducing H2 as a fuel only helps matters if the energy used to produce the H2 is not from fossil fuels, and probably hurts otherwise.

Right now the world produces a small fraction of its electricity cleanly and the rest using fossil fuels. If you want to divert some of that human energy consumption from heating/cooling/cooking/lighting/computing to H2 production then how do you make sure the diverted energy is from clean sources and that those consumers don't take it upon themselves to fill the new hole in their lives with additional fossil consumption?

If you're going to say we should create petawatt-hours-per-year of additional electricity generation capacity in order to do this, that sounds great but the infrastructure doesn't exist and it will take decades-to-centuries to build it.

So, I'm very much in favor of developing and maintaining the technological expertise required to use H2 for energy. I'm not nearly as convinced when it comes to trying to deploy it at scale in the 2020s.

I don't know what this LOHC stuff really is, but it's easy to imagine that dissolving H2 in in an existing liquid would be much less of an undertaking than inducing it to become C8H18 or whatever.

OS kernels tend to use them simply because they don't have malloc at their disposal and so it's most practical to stick to fixed size memory chunks, right?

Are you sure it's not just that their hair and fashion styles are those of a previous decade and that that triggers the "this person is old" neurons in your brain?

> How so?

Modern industrial farming practices, designed to optimize agricultural output per unit of labor, are an ecological and environmental travesty. They require the widespread use of pesticides and toxic fertilizers that are decimating the biosphere. Monocropping unsustainably degrades soil quality. And the large contiguous areas used for industrial agricultural operations are extremely disruptive to wildlife.

The most obvious solution to the above is an agricultural system with many more, much smaller farms, where human beings do the work currently done by machines and chemicals.

> Produce is labelled not just down to a country level, but to individual farms, and often you'll see meat for sale in shops include not just the code for the farm, but the full name too.

Is this true across all of Europe? If not, what country are you in?