The worst part is the banks. You have to get lucky to be allowed to use online banking without agreeing to some sucky TOS.

If I run some AI model on my GPU and power my computer via solar power and some batteries, am I actually contributing significantly to GHG emissions?

Like what is the embodied energy of an AI model?

As usual, pundits and scientists confuse what is and what could be with the truth. For example plastic recycling isn’t possible because “right now economics don’t make it profitable”. Meaning capitalism is killing us, not plastics. I suspect the same is true for AI.

True. I think about it now as a kind of physics problem. You have political energy measured in dollars on each side. Volunteers to help bring the political message across for free can be converted into dollars too. There are a lot of people concerned or outright scared out of their minds about environmental concerns like climate change. One sight has multiple orders of magnitude more political energy to spend. For example on counter measures, or boosting extreme vegan voices to cause disruption, advertising or media stories or think tanks or lobbyists. And the “technology” to manage this political energy is rapidly advancing too. So no amount of “this is the right / wrong choice” argument is going to change anything. There is only power.

You’d need to grow the third party / greens by having them become a viable party in local elections and state elections first. The greens have failed to do that. Which means they have no chance except to spoil the election.

Not sure what sapphire means, but here is the article. Just appending records and differential backups would seem to be the way to go.

the new optical disks are claimed to be “highly stable so there are no special storage requirements.” The researchers tout an expected shelf life of 50 to 100 years

I had (naively) hoped that starlink wouldn’t even need a license to operate in a specific country. When their satellites eventually fully communicate between them without ground station it becomes incredibly powerful. Sort of like one of those ancient world wonders. Technology now allows to live and work everywhere in the world or on the ocean in seasteads.

Unfortunately it’s owned by greedy oligarchs and the planned multiple constellations make a kessler syndrome more and more likely.

I wish there was a cheap and millennia-long lasting microfilm you could transfer books to. A projector is a pretty simple device to operate. Hmm that reminds me of “Last Words (2020)”.

Well yeah but BluRay is still much more expensive and smaller capacity. Lets hope this new 125TB disk works out

M-Disk is rated to last like 100 1000 years. They are also working on a 125 Terabyte CD. Optical storage is the way to go.

I think you need to compress the air and cool it and you get condensation. I think the advantage of baking the soil would be that the concentration of water vapor would be higher so less energy.

Hmm… maybe the smartest way would be to just build greenhouses and pump compressed air into it. Plants grow, absorb CO2, release oxygen and water. At night you lower insulation and condense excess water out of the air. What is left is a surplus of oxygen. Of course that requires a ton of glass.

I dabble a little (3D printers, composites). I’m thinking more about 30-100 years for actually living on moon or mars like a real self sufficient colony instead of missions.

I do believe mechanical engineering can be represented in a way that is accessible to AI. It doesn’t need general knowledge or sentience. Not just the generative stuff we have now in CAD, but more like the AI that can generate images. Ways to generate infinitely complex “nonsense” machines isn’t hard, but AI can then learn of how to work more intuitive.

At some point we’ll have an AI that can design, supervise manufacture / CNC and robots to assemble and then control all the machines we need for this. Of course the design would have lots of human input at start. But robotics are improving and deep AI is able to do remarkable things already. Eventually we would feed all the existing CAD designs and function and physical laws and material science into an AI as a lot of data and then suddenly you can bootstrap an entire industrial society fully automated. But every step and progress towards that goal would make it that much cheaper and easier to do.

Of course that’s sci-fi but so is the idea of living on mars :)

True, and you have more gravity. On the other hand you have perchlorides. Obviously you need water but I thought they did find some already near the south pole on the moon? (EDIT: Yes but apparently little and not very concentrated). I didn’t know there was so little carbon though.

Thanks, I was rather agreeing with you. And the whole thing is murky with lots of disinformation and feints on both sides. You kinda have to thread a thin line between US empire, liberal, socialist and Russian propaganda to find anything. My main gripe is that the narrative on the lib side is so obviously false and constructed in a way that makes demanding diplomatic solutions impossible. It’s maddening!

Here is an interview with an Pascal Lottaz an “Ukrainian Associate Professor for Neutrality Studies” who was arrested and Amnesty International helped to get asylum in Finnland. His youtube channel features discussions with academics about current topics.

Basically most of it ends in the hands of the military industrial complex.

It’s sad to see that the libs are just as post-truth as the magats are. The doublethink is honestly astounding. Not only is the US and NATO good (except for gaza) but it’s also evil to invade other countries that pose a threat to national security (unless the US does it). Everything Putin says is a lie and he’s Hitler and will always attack if we let him. Nato is completely harmless and a NATO armed Ukraine never was a danger to Russia except now when they managed to hold their own for so long and now shoot back into Russia after being so well armed by NATO. Why would the Russians not like NATO? Russians are Orcs because they are Nazis, except Nazis aren’t Nazi’s if they are Ukrainians. There was never any interference with e.g. the Euromaidan coup except we welcomed Ukraine into NATO and the EU with open arms and the CIA works excellent together with Ukraine intelligence services. Oppression is bad but Slava Ukraina and banning Russian is fine. Anyone who wants piece is a warmonger and Putin apologist. We are finally the good guys again! Stop the whataboutism of the entire history of US meddling and coups and illegal wars!

The historical facts are pretty clear how this conflict came about and why. It was a miscalculation - They didn’t think Russias economy could support so much arms manufacturing. They also thought China wouldn’t back Russia. But of course they did because they know they are next lol. There have been like 40 meetings between Putin and Xi Jinping and this war has brought them together. They are expanding BRICS and making new connection with the global south.

Of course this is still a win-win for the US empire and the oligarchs however this ends. They won’t let it escalate to nuclear war and the wealth transfers are massive. The only losers are the taxpayers and the Ukrainians and Russians.

Lets not talk about the insane level of greenhouse gases emitted because of this war.

Well yeah, then underground in lava tubes. But then the moon would be much easier for building habitats to live in.

There is a sort of paradox. To do any of this in any scale would be much more likely with automation. And automation, like robots being able to build robots and then factories and anything else is coming especially with the recent advances in AI and computer vision etc. And then such megaprojects won’t be unthinkeable any more. But then it would probably also be easier to build a mega space habitats mining the moon. Without automation, it might never be worth it to actually colonize there so it’s better to wait a few more decades.

First photo looks rather unspectacular: https://www.space.com/nasa-solar-sail-space-photo

NASA also has a “spot the diamond in the sky” challenge haha: https://www.space.com/nasa-solar-sail-space-photo

There is Spacecraft_radiation_challenges.

I believe simply using enough water would be perfectly fine for shielding. The problem is using enough of it and the extra weight.

In Stowaway (2021) - IMDb they have a special room that is shielded using electromagnetism.

You’d probably need to grab ice balls rich in nitrogen ice from the kuiper belt and somehow hurl them on a curse to impact mars. And do that a lot. Or maybe build a railgun on Triton to shoot nitrogen bullets at mars

The wikipedia article mentions the idea of superconducting rings build around mars surface. They could also be used for energy transport. This is basically already possible with current technology.

Maybe it’s also possible to somehow extract energy from the solar wind but that is only speculation on my part.

Yeah The Expanse is awesome but they are mining rather big ice chunks. In the Starcarrier series they find a giant shipyard churning through protoplanetary disk. Which sounds kind of ideal for mining raw materials for e.g. space habitats. But I guess a low gravity moon or asteroid would work just as well.