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Spellflame said:
… she would be able to write the eqasions of the math needed to do what is shown
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I mean, I'm pretty sure that the Source Documents have that math, I just haven't felt the need to read it.

OTOH Taylor could probably watch the video and have the formula written out by the end of the same episode, at the same time take the drive someone came up with as a result of their question and optimizing it without even seeing the design specs.
 
deathofrats0808 said:
When you say Type, are you referring to the Kardashev scale? Because that doesn't really work on the scale of a single person. And tech doesn't actually relate to those types unless it's linked to the storage and control of energy. Further, the Kardashev scale is impossible to apply with such a small scale implementation as the fic has presented. Her inventions might lead to Earth becoming a Type II or III civilization, but her tech doesn't enter those categories on its own.
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I mean, yes you're correct. Since the Kardashev scale is intended for civilizations it's not related directly to a person or their tech level.

That said it's a mostly straight line to position tech level to a Kardashev level. Sure you could brute force getting to type 1 or 2 with low tech, it's not really 'useful' to discuss - i'd probably argue the probability of brute forcing T3 is effectively impossible. Having a pure gravity / reference generator, depending on canon/apo a stupid type of energy production, supernew materials - Taking an obvious logical approach to using that to gain Type1 or 2 is not too difficult. All it would take for T1 is to independently produce, absorb the equivalent solar radiation, or alter physics so you're working on the equivalent energy fallen on earth by the sun. IMO this can be theoretical, not actual - humans currently have no real method of achieving this.

From what we've seen asking Taylor to move earth would not be taken as absurd, producing solar panels in km size wouldn't also. Heck just a physics breaking power source at this stage would be normal. Type2 would be harder to extrapolate without a genius making new solutions but imo isn't really a stretch when you add more time.

Either way, that's just where my head goes - feel free to disagree.
 
bob_says_hi said:
I thought she did something like that but other than the ZPM i couldn't actually find it. Just a lot of references to 'generators'. Maybe i just need to reread it all again anyway, it's so enjoyable to read.
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So, I got completely lost in your guys conversation, and was drooling at my screen trying, and failing to understand what you were going on about.
But this, this up above here? That's gravy. Sweet Beef Gravy.
I'm hungry now, bye!
 
bob_says_hi said:
I thought she did something like that but other than the ZPM i couldn't actually find it. Just a lot of references to 'generators'. Maybe i just need to reread it all again anyway, it's so enjoyable to read.
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Yes, she used a subspace tap she had on her to power her ZPM recharger. She also put one in her latest phone in lieu of a battery.
 
Some questions about her Subspace Taps: How well do they scale up, and how well do they play together in close proximity to each other? If Subspace Taps are limited in their yield per cubic kilometer of real space, then for large scale power applications some other generator design may be useful...
 
bob_says_hi said:
I mean, yes you're correct. Since the Kardashev scale is intended for civilizations it's not related directly to a person or their tech level.

That said it's a mostly straight line to position tech level to a Kardashev level. Sure you could brute force getting to type 1 or 2 with low tech, it's not really 'useful' to discuss - i'd probably argue the probability of brute forcing T3 is effectively impossible. Having a pure gravity / reference generator, depending on canon/apo a stupid type of energy production, supernew materials - Taking an obvious logical approach to using that to gain Type1 or 2 is not too difficult. All it would take for T1 is to independently produce, absorb the equivalent solar radiation, or alter physics so you're working on the equivalent energy fallen on earth by the sun. IMO this can be theoretical, not actual - humans currently have no real method of achieving this.

From what we've seen asking Taylor to move earth would not be taken as absurd, producing solar panels in km size wouldn't also. Heck just a physics breaking power source at this stage would be normal. Type2 would be harder to extrapolate without a genius making new solutions but imo isn't really a stretch when you add more time.

Either way, that's just where my head goes - feel free to disagree.
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The Kardashev scale is mostly intended for hard-science purposes, I think. What usefulness it has largely vanishes when the ways the energy is being used make a mockery of conventional physics.

Reference frame generators at the low end greatly outperform rocket or aircraft drive systems, and further up the scale enable the Gravity Bomb, while operating AFAICT on power draws more befitting household electronics.
 
bob_says_hi said:
I thought she did something like that but other than the ZPM i couldn't actually find it. Just a lot of references to 'generators'. Maybe i just need to reread it all again anyway, it's so enjoyable to read.
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Strictly speaking the reference frame generators are also power generators. The household batteries they contain do not supply the power for their function. Sort of like how your car battery is used to start a car, but that activates something more effective than the battery.
 
as described the gravity engines are pretty obviously a perpetual motion machine. It takes basically no work at all to make them function as a power plant. For an obvious example have a field with reversed gravity on one end of a tank, pulling water up and onto a tune that feed through turbines back into the tank it just got pulled from.

and this is just the easiest way to do it using current power infrastructure.
 
bob_says_hi said:
All it would take for T1 is to independently produce, absorb the equivalent solar radiation, or alter physics so you're working on the equivalent energy fallen on earth by the sun. IMO this can be theoretical, not actual - humans currently have no real method of achieving this.
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If the ITER project works out I suspect we'll be a type 1 civilization in about 30 years. The majority of the cost associated with ITER are not things needed for a commercial fusion power plant and if someone even moderately intelligent can standardise the components used to build one the cost could easily drop to below what you'd pay for a modern nuclear plant, but with 10 times the energy production.

If they can demonstrate viable fusion in 10 years (5 years after first fusion) a commercial scale power plant will have been built in the early 2040s and lots more will come online in the remaining ten years. If we had cheap and safe power production we could easily find projects that would use it up and it might even reverse most of the damage we have done to the Earth in the process.
 
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E M Berner said:
If the ITER project works out I suspect we'll be a type 1 civilization in about 30 years. The majority of the cost associated with ITER are not things needed for a commercial fusion power plant and if someone even moderately intelligent can standardise the components used to build one the cost could easily drop to below what you'd pay for a modern nuclear plant, but with 10 times the energy production.

If they can demonstrate viable fusion in 10 years (5 years after first fusion) a commercial scale power plant will have been built in the early 2040s and lots more will come online in the remaining ten years. If we had cheap and safe power production we could easily find projects that would use it up and it might even reverse most of the damage we have done to the Earth in the process.
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Hitting Type 1 as a planetbound civilization might be hard on the ecology even if it is clean generation. That's a lot of added heat in the system.

Also it's around 500 times what we use currently. Frankly, using that would be quite hard even if it was too cheap to meter. Not to say impossible, but whatever you're using it for is going to require a lot of capital.
 
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Problem: According to Randall Munroe, you can't use mirrors to capture any significant amount of the sun's output.

Solution: hey, I just read his cartoons, I don't manage the physics.
 
sdwood said:
Problem: According to Randall Munroe, you can't use mirrors to capture any significant amount of the sun's output.
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Well no, you'd vaporize whatever the mirror is made of long before you get there.

The word 'mirror' in this example is nothing more than a placeholder concept for whatever clarke tech bullshit eventually does the job when we get that far.
 
Aineko said:
Hitting Type 1 as a planetbound civilization might be hard on the ecology even if it is clean generation. That's a lot of added heat in the system.

Also it's around 500 times what we use currently. Frankly, using that would be quite hard even if it was too cheap to meter. Not to say impossible, but whatever you're using it for is going to require a lot of capital.
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Four things I can think of that could use up a lot of those Joules.
Charging electric cars/trucks/boats (if every vehicle is electric) and producing fuel (from water and co2) for airplanes and ships is the first.
The second is desalinating enough water to sustain most of the world's food production and bio material needs (forests and other biomass).
Producing most of the worlds chemicals such as fertiliser, cement, plastic etc. without pumping any more oil would make a good candidate for number three.
Smelting of all the ores that produce the metals we need without using any fossil fuel source would probably be a good fourth candidate.

The future can be completely green and sustainable but it will take abundant cheap and clean power to accomplish.
500 times the energy we use today will also let us use power hungry methods to completely recycle all of our trash, the very last of it (the stuff you just can't do anything else with) being stuffed in a plasma furnace and sorted using electric and magnetic fields once every molecule has broken down into individual atoms in a hot plasma state. Had the idea for doing this 25 years ago after reading a sci-fi book, 20 years ago I figured out why we couldn't, 5 years ago I figured out that we probably would have the ability before I finally croaked of old age.
 
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TypoNinja said:
Well no, you'd vaporize whatever the mirror is made of long before you get there.

The word 'mirror' in this example is nothing more than a placeholder concept for whatever clarke tech bullshit eventually does the job when we get that far.
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To be clear, my understanding of what he said is that it would take _more energy than the sun gives off_ to try to collimate everything into a single direction.

At which point you should just build a giant fuck-off laser.
 
E M Berner said:
Four things I can think of that could use up a lot of those Joules.
Charging electric cars/trucks/boats (if every vehicle is electric) and producing fuel (from water and co2) for airplanes and ships is the first.
The second is desalinating enough water to sustain most of the world's food production and bio material needs (forests and other biomass).
Producing most of the worlds chemicals such as fertiliser, cement, plastic etc. without pumping any more oil would make a good candidate for number three.
Smelting of all the ores that produce the metals we need without using any fossil fuel source would probably be a good fourth candidate.

The future can be completely green and sustainable but it will take abundant cheap and clean power to accomplish.
500 times the energy we use today will also let us use power hungry methods to completely recycle all of our trash, the very last of it (the stuff you just can't do anything else with) being stuffed in a plasma furnace and sorted using electric and magnetic fields once every molecule has broken down into individual atoms in a hot plasma state. Had the idea for doing this 25 years ago after reading a sci-fi book, 20 years ago I figured out why we couldn't, 5 years ago I figured out that we probably would have the ability before I finally croaked of old age.
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Of your four, only the second one isn't already included in that energy supply that you're talking about expanding 500-fold. Other than the efficiency losses in atmospheric carbon fixing, I suppose, but that's incidental compared to the budget in question. 500 is a big number, especially when it's multiplying something that's already big enough to be hard to grasp.

A plasma torch and atomic sorter is wildly overkill for recycling pretty much anything, though it might make a nice reductive example for an audience under the delusion that there were things that literally can't be recycled.
 
Aineko said:
A plasma torch and atomic sorter is wildly overkill for recycling pretty much anything, though it might make a nice reductive example for an audience under the delusion that there were things that literally can't be recycled.
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Yea, I read a sci-fi story about a planet of trash and even then we had begun sorting our trash so I couldn't understand where it all came from. I had learned in school basically the week before about charged particles moving in electric and magnetic fields so I simply thought that it would be a simple matter to sort anything in the same way (I was 15).

Took me another 5ish years before thinking on the problem again and concluding that even in a best case scenario it would be sort of wasteful of energy since it would be hard to recover even 25% of the energy expended.

5 years ago I read an article about how much energy humanity in 2050 might produce under different scenarios (viable fusion being one of them) and I remembered the plasma sorting "recycler", it wouldn't be feasible to use on all trash but the worst of it should probably be run through something like it simply to keep it from laying in a landfill somewhere.

All the other stuff can probably be recycled either through mechanical sorting, chemical breakdown or biological digestion, much cheaper than plasmafying it.
 
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