I ran into a book by Ray Kurzweil (a name which reminds me of synthesizers) called The Singularity is Near. In this book he states that major events in the Universe are happening faster and faster and at some time in the future, an infinite number of events will occur just before a certain time which he calls the singularity. These events could start with the creation of the universe 13.7 billion years ago. Kurzweil then follows that with formation of the Earth and Sun, formation of life, Cambrian explosion, and so forth until he concludes with the Industrial Revolution, the car and airplane, the television, the computer and the Internet. Each of these events come sooner by a certain factor than the previous. If this factor is constant, it follows that these events converge to a point in the future, the singularity, which Kurzweil calculates will be somewhere around 2045. Kurzweil continues to describe events beyond this; in fact, two of his six stages of existence follow the singularity.
Is there any such thing coming up? Certainly an infinite number of events can't occur in a finite time. As this singularity is reached, the process breaks down. So what's going to happen? I tried to see if there were any singularities in my life. I found at least two of them, and possibly others. Both of these two singularities had catastrophic results. This says that singularities are not necessarily positive. Indeed, what could be happening is a conversion to a time when we run out of oil, have huge global warming effects, have a number of wars going on, and so forth. The consequences for humankind of this kind of singularity are huge; maybe our world civilization will collapse.
What will things be like if a singularity like the one Kurzweil occurs? In both of my singularities, I wound up in a world or existence substantially different from what went on before. It was like entering a new world. So that is how I expect this singularity will behave. Something earthshaking will occur then, and a new world order will ensue. In 2045. Well, we will have to see if this happens.
Sunday, March 26, 2006
Saturday, March 18, 2006
We Were Warned, or Were We?
I saw "We Were Warned: Tomorrow's Oil Crisis" on CNN at 2006 March 18 2000 EST (8 pm) and was disappointed by the documentary for several reasons:
1. The ads did not go with the documentary. One of them was a Lexus ad for this fancy schmancy car that advertised all that's great about it except fuel economy. Another one was about how cool it was to have a cell phone that wasn't a cell phone because it was a video game with cell phone capability.
2. An executive from Exxon-Mobil said we had 100 years (or was it billion barrels) of oil left in this country if they could dig for it. What I know is I think of this Hubbert curve for our country peaking in 1970s after a discovery peak in the 1930s, and then I think of world production peaking in the 1960s and drawing the curve from there, except that the executive wants to push out the right side of the curve as though it were Pinocchio's nose.
3. The main problem I found with this documentary was that it used an unlikely double disaster scenario as its base point for discussion. I think it would have been better if it had shown absolutely no Katrinas, Ritas, al-Qaedas, bin Ladens, planeattacks or any other such deviations from business as normal and still shown that the effects of the crisis would still occur: high oil prices, empty Wal-marts, no tourism, people fighting with each otehr, and plunging stock markets.
4. I do note that that point that another poster made about the ethanol from sugar cane solution working only in Brazil showed up absolutely nowhere in the documentary.
5. I also note that for the hurricane on Houston they used footage from Rita, and for the disaster in Saudi Arabia, I think they used footage from Persian Gulf War I.
A better documentary is "The End of Suburbia". I have heard of a 90-minute documentary called "Oil Crash" but have absolutely no idea as to how to see it. In the meantime, CNN needs to try again with its documentary on peak oil and come up with something that is more likely.
1. The ads did not go with the documentary. One of them was a Lexus ad for this fancy schmancy car that advertised all that's great about it except fuel economy. Another one was about how cool it was to have a cell phone that wasn't a cell phone because it was a video game with cell phone capability.
2. An executive from Exxon-Mobil said we had 100 years (or was it billion barrels) of oil left in this country if they could dig for it. What I know is I think of this Hubbert curve for our country peaking in 1970s after a discovery peak in the 1930s, and then I think of world production peaking in the 1960s and drawing the curve from there, except that the executive wants to push out the right side of the curve as though it were Pinocchio's nose.
3. The main problem I found with this documentary was that it used an unlikely double disaster scenario as its base point for discussion. I think it would have been better if it had shown absolutely no Katrinas, Ritas, al-Qaedas, bin Ladens, planeattacks or any other such deviations from business as normal and still shown that the effects of the crisis would still occur: high oil prices, empty Wal-marts, no tourism, people fighting with each otehr, and plunging stock markets.
4. I do note that that point that another poster made about the ethanol from sugar cane solution working only in Brazil showed up absolutely nowhere in the documentary.
5. I also note that for the hurricane on Houston they used footage from Rita, and for the disaster in Saudi Arabia, I think they used footage from Persian Gulf War I.
A better documentary is "The End of Suburbia". I have heard of a 90-minute documentary called "Oil Crash" but have absolutely no idea as to how to see it. In the meantime, CNN needs to try again with its documentary on peak oil and come up with something that is more likely.
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
Telescopes Will be Better in 2050
At the latest meeting of the Richmond Astronomical Society, someone brought up an article in the BBC on the Internet that said that telescopes will be worthless by 2050. The article maintains that global warming, which increases cloudiness, and jet contrails will combine to form a haze that ground telescopes will not be able to penetrate.
Global warming is a serious problem. However, I think that telescopes will be better in 2050. This is because of peak oil. Professor Gerry Gilmore of Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy maintains that air traffic will increase, increasing the number of jet contrails, which produce artificial cirrostratus clouds that obscure the sky. He says, "You get these contrails from the jets. The rate at which they're expanding in terms of their fractional cover of the stratosphere is so large that if predictions are right, in 40 years it won't be worth having telescopes on Earth anymore - it's that soon."
No, Professor Gilmore. You did not take Peak Oil into consideration. There may not be any jet planes flying in 2050 to make contrails with. These planes require fuel, and you assume that jet travel is just simply goinjg to increase without limit. Instead, oil production will peak, probably between 2008 and 2010, and decline from that point on. By 2040, only a fraction of today's oil will be produced. From this must come the fuel for jet aircraft. It follows that far fewer aircraft will be flying, unless some way can be found of powering aircraft other than with petroleum products. So actually, the contrail situation will be better.
Global warming will wane, also. It is fueled by fossil fuels, and these will decline after 2010, and so will global warming. There may be some temporary increase due to coal, but if clean, renewable alternative fuels are developed, these will dominate in 2050, meaning a sharp decrease in CO2 emission. Further, energy prices are sure to rise dramatically, due to peak oil, and so people will invent new means of conserving electricity, and hence generation of power from power plants. These may include such things as a device that will turn out lights unless people are in the room. If these proliferates, the cities will turn dark at night, and the stars will come out.
All of this means much better viewing in 2050 than now. Don't move or take apart Lick, Wilson, or Palomar Observatories! These telescopes will be much more useful functioning under beautifully starry skies in the year 2050. That is, unless peak oil and an energy crunch prevents power for clock drives and equipment from coming into the observatories.
This blog also appears in Here and Above.
Global warming is a serious problem. However, I think that telescopes will be better in 2050. This is because of peak oil. Professor Gerry Gilmore of Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy maintains that air traffic will increase, increasing the number of jet contrails, which produce artificial cirrostratus clouds that obscure the sky. He says, "You get these contrails from the jets. The rate at which they're expanding in terms of their fractional cover of the stratosphere is so large that if predictions are right, in 40 years it won't be worth having telescopes on Earth anymore - it's that soon."
No, Professor Gilmore. You did not take Peak Oil into consideration. There may not be any jet planes flying in 2050 to make contrails with. These planes require fuel, and you assume that jet travel is just simply goinjg to increase without limit. Instead, oil production will peak, probably between 2008 and 2010, and decline from that point on. By 2040, only a fraction of today's oil will be produced. From this must come the fuel for jet aircraft. It follows that far fewer aircraft will be flying, unless some way can be found of powering aircraft other than with petroleum products. So actually, the contrail situation will be better.
Global warming will wane, also. It is fueled by fossil fuels, and these will decline after 2010, and so will global warming. There may be some temporary increase due to coal, but if clean, renewable alternative fuels are developed, these will dominate in 2050, meaning a sharp decrease in CO2 emission. Further, energy prices are sure to rise dramatically, due to peak oil, and so people will invent new means of conserving electricity, and hence generation of power from power plants. These may include such things as a device that will turn out lights unless people are in the room. If these proliferates, the cities will turn dark at night, and the stars will come out.
All of this means much better viewing in 2050 than now. Don't move or take apart Lick, Wilson, or Palomar Observatories! These telescopes will be much more useful functioning under beautifully starry skies in the year 2050. That is, unless peak oil and an energy crunch prevents power for clock drives and equipment from coming into the observatories.
This blog also appears in Here and Above.
Wednesday, March 08, 2006
Chain Reactions
I am a member of a church supper group. Dinners are scheduled once a month, in which a bunch of couples come to this one couple's house who hosts them and prepares a dinner for them. This allows us to get to know each other better. I thought of what happens if not enough couples are assigned to the dinners. If only 4 couples are assigned at a time, then if one or two can't make it (this can easily happen), then the hosts have to reschedule the dinner so that they all can make it. So there would be a large number of reschedulings; these would conflict with other dinners, church, and other events and cause more reschedulings. This reminds me of something I saw back in the 1950s in shows, perhaps on Walt Disney's Tomorrowland, of a demonstration of a nuclear fission chain reaction.
In such a chain reaction, a neutron hits an atom of Uranium 235 or Plutonium 239. This causes the atom to split, ejecting energy according to E=mc2, two smaller atoms such as those of barium and krypton, and one to three more neutrons. These in turn would hit other atoms, which in turn would break up into two smaller atoms and produce more neutrons. The number of free neutrons grows exponentially until the entire chunk of uranium or plutonium is consumed. The resulting energy is tremendous, and produces the familiar mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion.
In the 1950s they demonstrated the concept by covering an empty room's floor with mousetraps with ping pong balls on them. Then someone would throw a ping pong ball into the room. The result is dramatic. Almost instantly, the air would be filled with balls pinging and ponging all over the place. This demonstrates the concept well, but I realized that this experiment can be used to model other things as well, after seeing a Java applet from my alma mater that demonstrated this concept at http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/models/Mousetraps .
For example, Peak Oil. If you clicked on the mousetrap URL and ran the Java app, notice the graph on the bottom, measuring the number of balls in the air. Now compare this with the curve that is used to demonstrate the concept of Peak Oil. Don't they look similar? It's because similar concepts are involved.
Oil was discovered in 1859. At first, only a handful of Pennsylvanians used the oil. But these people talked to others about this wondrous substance, and other people started to dig for oil. These in turn did wondrous things with the oil, such as invent and operate automobiles and aircraft, and this led others to want the oil. This kept spreading all over the world, resulting in a growth in the use of oil that resembles the up side of the Peak Oil bell curve. However, as people began spreading around drilling for the oil, less and less oil was available to find and drill for. This puts a damping effect on the growth of oil production, until eventually the damping will exceed the growth and turn it into an exponential descent or decay. The same thing happens with mousetraps or uranium, as the chain reaction runs out of mousetraps to spring or uranium atoms to fiss.
In both cases, the determining differential equation is the same: y' = Ay(C - y) . C is the total capacity of the system, and A is the rate at which neutrons or ping pong balls are generated per neutron or ball strike. Solving the equation and graphing the solution results in a bell-like curve called the logistic curve.
The equation can be used to describe other behavior as well. Take people living in a city around 1900. They live in decent neighborhoods. But some get dissatisfied and move out farther from the city so they can have more room. These people are like ping pong balls that get ponged and hop out to land on another mousetrap. This causes more people to move out. This accelerates as the once livable neighborhood deteriorates in the inner city. Eventually the suburbs get crowded and people move out even farther from the city. This causes the inner suburbs to deteriorate as well. Look at the Java applet again. Doesn't that red blob remind you of a typical city with development going on? It's fueled by oil, of course.
The equation can be used to describe bacteria in a Petri dish, viruses in the body of a large animal, the growth of the Internet, the growth of automobiles, and in fact, the growth and decline of just about any product or fad. It's an equation we need to live with. We live in a world that moves on in logistic curves, and Peak Oil happens to be one of these curves.
In such a chain reaction, a neutron hits an atom of Uranium 235 or Plutonium 239. This causes the atom to split, ejecting energy according to E=mc2, two smaller atoms such as those of barium and krypton, and one to three more neutrons. These in turn would hit other atoms, which in turn would break up into two smaller atoms and produce more neutrons. The number of free neutrons grows exponentially until the entire chunk of uranium or plutonium is consumed. The resulting energy is tremendous, and produces the familiar mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion.
In the 1950s they demonstrated the concept by covering an empty room's floor with mousetraps with ping pong balls on them. Then someone would throw a ping pong ball into the room. The result is dramatic. Almost instantly, the air would be filled with balls pinging and ponging all over the place. This demonstrates the concept well, but I realized that this experiment can be used to model other things as well, after seeing a Java applet from my alma mater that demonstrated this concept at http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/models/Mousetraps .
For example, Peak Oil. If you clicked on the mousetrap URL and ran the Java app, notice the graph on the bottom, measuring the number of balls in the air. Now compare this with the curve that is used to demonstrate the concept of Peak Oil. Don't they look similar? It's because similar concepts are involved.
Oil was discovered in 1859. At first, only a handful of Pennsylvanians used the oil. But these people talked to others about this wondrous substance, and other people started to dig for oil. These in turn did wondrous things with the oil, such as invent and operate automobiles and aircraft, and this led others to want the oil. This kept spreading all over the world, resulting in a growth in the use of oil that resembles the up side of the Peak Oil bell curve. However, as people began spreading around drilling for the oil, less and less oil was available to find and drill for. This puts a damping effect on the growth of oil production, until eventually the damping will exceed the growth and turn it into an exponential descent or decay. The same thing happens with mousetraps or uranium, as the chain reaction runs out of mousetraps to spring or uranium atoms to fiss.
In both cases, the determining differential equation is the same: y' = Ay(C - y) . C is the total capacity of the system, and A is the rate at which neutrons or ping pong balls are generated per neutron or ball strike. Solving the equation and graphing the solution results in a bell-like curve called the logistic curve.
The equation can be used to describe other behavior as well. Take people living in a city around 1900. They live in decent neighborhoods. But some get dissatisfied and move out farther from the city so they can have more room. These people are like ping pong balls that get ponged and hop out to land on another mousetrap. This causes more people to move out. This accelerates as the once livable neighborhood deteriorates in the inner city. Eventually the suburbs get crowded and people move out even farther from the city. This causes the inner suburbs to deteriorate as well. Look at the Java applet again. Doesn't that red blob remind you of a typical city with development going on? It's fueled by oil, of course.
The equation can be used to describe bacteria in a Petri dish, viruses in the body of a large animal, the growth of the Internet, the growth of automobiles, and in fact, the growth and decline of just about any product or fad. It's an equation we need to live with. We live in a world that moves on in logistic curves, and Peak Oil happens to be one of these curves.
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