Dangers of Global Warming

On Fri, 16 Oct 2015 18:01:42 -0700 (PDT), wrote:

On Friday, October 16, 2015 at 9:47:44 AM UTC-4, Chris L Peterson wrote:
On Fri, 16 Oct 2015 05:07:40 -0700 (PDT), wrote:

I'm hoping for transporters.

Riding a transporter --- DEATH!!!

It destroys the original and creates a clone.

"You" are destroyed every fraction of a second and a new you comes
into existence. You don't need a transporter for that.

(Also, there are two types of transporters. One type copies the
original and recreates it elsewhere, and the other physically sends
the original particles.)

peterson, you are truly insane. There aren't "two types of transporters"... there aren't ANY transporters, they are pure fantasy not even science fiction.

Actually, quantum transport has been achieved. It isn't a fantasy at
all. And while large scale transporters haven't been made, the
possibility that they might be remains. The idea is far from "pure
fantasy". The first sort is almost certainly nothing more than an
engineering problem, fully possible given our knowledge of physical
laws. The second type is more speculative, but not strictly
contradicted by any know laws (and actually verified for single
particles).

On Fri, 16 Oct 2015 22:03:39 -0600, Chris L Peterson
wrote:
There is no doubt at all that in 10 years electric cars
will be charged as quickly as we now put gas in tanks.

That would require a charging current of hundreds of kiloamperes.
Wouldn't just replacing the discharged batteri with a charged one be
a more reasonable option?

On Friday, October 16, 2015 at 10:18:40 PM UTC-7, Paul Schlyter wrote:
On Fri, 16 Oct 2015 22:03:39 -0600, Chris L Peterson
wrote:
There is no doubt at all that in 10 years electric cars
will be charged as quickly as we now put gas in tanks.

That would require a charging current of hundreds of kiloamperes.
Wouldn't just replacing the discharged batteri with a charged one be
a more reasonable option?

The batteries in a Tesla, for example, weigh 1200 lb/544 kg ... good luck exchanging those in just a few minutes...

On Friday, October 16, 2015 at 12:14:24 PM UTC-6, Chris.B wrote:

Booze is readily available and does not lead to 100% drunks amongst the global population.
Smoking has broken its hold on well educated populations.
Would legalizing drugs really result in 100% take-up of dangerous narcotics?

That's not really the question.

As you've noted, beverage alcohol is legally available.

As it happens, Europeans, due to unsafe local water supplies in ancient times,
often used relatively weak wine as a primary way of relieving thirst, avoiding
water.

This means that people with poor alcohol metabolism were selected out.

Some other people, though, lived on relatively unpopulated continents, filled
with streams containing clean, fresh water. And so they did not develop the
ability to efficiently metabolize alcohol.

So, if one looks at what alcohol has done to Native Americans, one can get a
good idea of what might happen if heroin were legalized. (And, incidentally,
this makes me suspect, given the tenor of our times, that since we can't
discriminate by restricting the access of Indians to alcohol - eventually
Prohibition may make a comeback.)

As it happens, just today I learned of *another* example.

I was re-reading Moonraker. Bond was reading a memo about "Philopon", the new
Japanese murder drug!

I wondered if this was a name made up by Ian Fleming, so I did a Google. And I
learned that Philopon was a Japanese trade-name for... methamphetamine. During
the war, Japan encouraged its people to take the stuff, so that they would stay
awake longer to work long shifts in war production - and to make them less
hungry, so as to be able to cope with food shortages.

It stayed legal in Japan for a short time after the war, but its addictive
nature led to overuse, and violent crime. Making it illegal - and enforcing
those laws - did reduce the crime problems from that source significantly.

Basically, then, whether or not it's wise to outlaw, say, marijuana, it
definitely is the case that there are _some_ drugs that are even worse than
alcohol and tobacco.

If LSD was easily available, it would be easier for people to - as a prank, or
for premeditated malicious purposes - to slip some into a person's food or
drink.

Because alcohol and tobacco are legally available, it's not too hard for
someone to get hold of them in order to distribute them to minors. That, too,
would be easier with other drugs if they were legal.

Of course 100% of the country wouldn't use drugs if they were legal - but
*more* people would. And drug use has a good chance of making people
unemployable - thus a drag on social welfare. As well, for the same reason, it
can make people *unfit for military service*.

We haven't figured out how to get the economy working well enough to provide
full employment. (I can supply some hints. It would be more practical to
stimulate the economy enough to produce full employment if such stimulus did
not threaten to upset the balance of payments. Hence, trade agreements that
restrain governments from raising tariffs when necessary cause unemployment,
and need to be replaced by ones based on linking tariffs to the balance of
payments.)

We haven't figured out how to eliminate the other disappointments and sorrows
of life. So laws against drugs reduce the temptation to resort to them that
many people might encounter at one time or another.

"Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker." That may be, but many of the illegal
drugs are much quicker than alcohol in having destructive consequences -
intrinsically, not just because they're illegal. Which is a legitimate reason
for making them illegal.

John Savard

On Friday, October 16, 2015 at 6:38:59 PM UTC-6, wrote:

Self-driving cars will not be able to cope with the tunnel problem.

If you mean that self-driving cars are dependent upon GPS, obviously that can be
solved by having them also use another navigational system - and fitting
transmitters for that system to every vehicle tunnel in the United States.

That would be a tall order for a tiny number of experimental self-driving cars,
but *if* there were some reason why it would be a good thing if self-driving
cars became commonplace, say because they reached such a level of development
that it would actually reduce the number of car accidents if that happened, I'm
sure the effort would not be viewed as excessively daunting.

John Savard

On Friday, October 16, 2015 at 7:09:38 PM UTC-6, wrote:

In the episode where the transporter coughed up two Captain Kirks, one good and
one evil, one cannot posit that either of them was the original; they were two
entirely separate, self aware individuals, yet initially they did not know of
each other's existence. The original Captain no longer existed, ie he was dead.

When the two were recombined by the transporter they each ceased to exist.

That would seem reasonable.

However, there are alternate possibilities.

Look up such terms as "split-brain patients", "Wada test"... or, in the realm
of science-fiction, the fate of Hovan Du in "The Master Mind of Mars".

So the notion that each of the two bodies contained a *part* of the original
Captain Kirk, but these two parts were temporarily separated from each other,
is not intrinsically impossible.

John Savard

On Friday, October 16, 2015 at 10:03:42 PM UTC-6, Chris L Peterson wrote:
There is no doubt at all that in 10 years electric cars
will be charged as quickly as we now put gas in tanks.

It certainly _is_ true that one can't say tht electric cars are as good as they
will ever get. They are quite likely to improve.

How much they will improve, though, is not certain either.

Charging electric cars as quickly as one fills a gas tank... requires either high voltages, or a lot of current.

And, for that matter, a gas tank is... a container of fluid. A rather simple
object. A storage battery is not likely ever to get that simple and that cheap.
And to be able to be filled, emptied, and re-filled as many times without
deterioration.

Of course, though, if one got the gasoline-fueled tanks off the road, one could
make a passable electric car with *lead-acid* batteries - back in the 1890s or
so, they did just that.

As well, while an insulated cable similar to the hose from a gas pump would
seem to require some un-anticipated advances in materials science not to raise
safety issues if one were to charge an electric car as quickly as one filled a
gas tank...

one might instead just drive the car over a spot from which giant metal
cylinders might ascend to make contact with its charging terminals, solving
both the problems of current-carrying capacity and keeping the motorist well
away from the electricity involved.

Using solar power to produce synthetic fuel from water and the carbon dioxide
in the air, or using truly surplus biomass to make methyl alcohol, are two
rather obvious carbon-neutral alternatives that seem far easier to employ than
perfecting the electric car. I don't think we know what the future of personal
transportation is yet.

John Savard

On Friday, October 16, 2015 at 11:18:40 PM UTC-6, Paul Schlyter wrote:

Wouldn't just replacing the discharged batteri with a charged one be
a more reasonable option?

Certainly, but that has its own problems - how do you guard against motorists
abusing batteries, or being falsely accused of abusing batteries?

I mean, there's a reason all the people on a given block don't share one
electric lawnmower. And the wastefulness of materials involved could be dealt
with if people just passed down their lawnmowers through multiple generations;
then the capital investment would be fully consumed before being discarded.

John Savard

wrote:
On Friday, October 16, 2015 at 8:30:32 AM UTC-4, Mike Collins wrote:

So it makes sense to use that parked time for charging.

IF you happen to be parked at a charging station.


Or anywhere with an electricity supply.

On Saturday, October 17, 2015 at 2:41:13 AM UTC-6, Mike Collins wrote:
wrote:

IF you happen to be parked at a charging station.

Or anywhere with an electricity supply.

While one sees people getting away with charging their cell phones all over the
place, people with electric bills to pay might take exception to someone
plugging in their electric car just because there's an outlet handy...

Electricity does cost money, and I would think that an electric car uses a
fairly large amount of it.

John Savard