Techonomy - Stewart Brand - Why We Should All Think Like Engineers

Q - What does a Biologist know about being an engineer ?
A - I [Stewart Brand] have the genes of an engineer. My father and brother were engineers and I was bit by the hacker bug early.
Q- Reinventing Infrastructure
Bridge is infrastructure, river is also infrastructure.
Radio spectrum is infrastructure but so is the environment
We are terraforming the planet but doing it badly, we should do terraforming well
Tweet your questions to:
@TCMYQA
whole Earth Catalog was libertarian. Ask not what your country can do for you, do it for yourself. Now we must act on a global scale.

Getting rid of coal - Fiat [government] driven or innovation drivent
Previously thought population control had to be fiat driven, only China really did it. Turned out that wealth and social trends caused population growth reduction.
fiat- good government policy can accelerate a solution
Be pragmatic - be an engineer and solve the damn problems
Environmental movement has legacy resistance to nuclear energy and genetically modified food. But no resistance to synthetic biology which is way more radical then GM food.
 

Comments

[Steve Shoop]

And where have you been? Old news, New Tune...

Professor of Physics Dr. Albert Bartlett
University of Colorado at Boulder,
>>>> September, 1969 http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=6A1FD147A45EF50D

Text: Arithmetic, Population, and Energy

http://hawaii.gov/dbedt/ert/symposium/bartlett/bartlett.html

About Dr. Albert Bartlett:

http://www.albartlett.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Bartlett

[Steve Shoop]

Opp's - First Post Truncated - repost

Professor of Physics

Dr. Albert Bartlett

>>>>September, 1969 http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=6A1FD147A45EF50D

Text- Arithmetic, Population, and Energy

http://hawaii.gov/dbedt/ert/symposium/bartlett/bartlett.html

http://www.albartlett.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Bartlett

[Steve Shoop]

Opp's - Second Post Truncated - repost

Professor of Physics

Dr. Albert Bartlett

-September 1969-

The Greatest Shortcoming of the Human Race is our Inability to Understand the Exponential Function

A mathematics professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder explains clearly and simply what the compounding the exponent means means to every day Americans.

Common Sense?

Upon a thorough examination of the factual growth numbers, it is clear that if we don't consider the realities of our addiction to growth, we may actually be setting our system up for a forced reduction in growth.

Video Arithmetic, Population, and Energy

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=6A1FD147A45EF50D

Text: Arithmetic, Population, and Energy

http://hawaii.gov/dbedt/ert/symposium/bartlett/bartlett.html

http://www.albartlett.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Bartlett

[Brian Wang]

I undertand exponentials. Humanity does not have to be confined to the earth. the resources of the solar system raise the level of energy and resources by over one million times.

Here is what it would take for a Yottawatt civilization

http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/01/what-would-it-take-for-yottawatt.html

10^15 W PW petawatt (the total energy flow of sunlight striking Earth's atmosphere is estimated at 174 PW)

10^18 W EW exawatt

10^21 W ZW zettawatt

10^24 W YW yottawatt (the Sun outputs approximately 386 Yottawatts)

A yottawatt civilization would be roughly equivalent to a Kardashev 1.75 civilization. Kardashev level One is able to access and use all of the energy of the sun that strikes the earth. Kardashev Level Two is able to use all of the energy of the sun.

Deep burn would mean using nuclear fuel about 100 times more efficiently than we do now. Burning all of the Uranium, Plutonium or thorium completely. There would only be waste material that has half life of less than 30 years left.

With deep burn and maximum mining of uranium and thorium we could get 1 million times more nuclear fission power than we do now. 100 times more efficiency and 10,000 times more material. 600 million tons per year.

So scaling up from about 400 gigawatts up to 400 petawatts. This rate of usage would go through the uranium in the ocean in about 6 years and would be going through the uranium and thorium in the crust at very good clip.

There is an estimated 40 trillion tons of Uranium and 120 trillion tons of thorium in the Earth's crust.

So it would take about 267,000 years to go through all of the uranium and thorium at the 400 petawatt rate.

Just using deep burn, factory mass produced nuclear reactors and ocean mining.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/07/deep-burn-and-seriously-scaling-nuclear.html

Nuclear fusion from Dense Plasma Focus or Inertial Electrostatic Confinement or magnetized targets could be on the verge of a breakthrough. this would provide cheap power for millions of years at very high usage.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/08/mr-fusion-scenario-what-if-there-is.html