--- Log opened Thu Mar 23 00:00:18 2023
00:06 < nmz787> fenn: I'm wondering if there's some way to re-use old and uncrushed soda cans as capacitors AND building wall material (maybe at the least for still-air insulation)
00:16 < nmz787> hmm, apparently one soda can capacitor holds 475pF... using this converter (https://lucidar.me/en/electronics/online-farad-to-watt-hour-converter/) with 0.000000000475 F and 48V yields 1.5200000000000002e-10 Wh (watt hours)
00:16 < nmz787> maybe there's a better soda can cap than this guy made http://www.tompolk.com/crystalradios/cokecancapacitor.html
00:20 < fenn> uh huh
00:22  * nmz787 still thinking of how to get around buying batteries for off-grid energy storage
00:23 < fenn> i think the point of the "coke can capacitor" is for tuning DIY radio receivers
00:24 < nmz787> yeah probably
00:26 < fenn> i wonder if any of those nanocatalysts that make fancy organic molecules from CO2 have been commercialized yet
00:26 < nmz787> my line of reasoning was lots of capacitors are circular, cans are circular, with a cut they could almost fit inside one another, milk jugs are a source of plastic/dielectric.... create a garbage-dump house that is also a huge capacitor
00:27 < fenn> HV capacitors are basically just oil soaked paper between sheets of aluminum, so it's not too far off
00:27 < fenn> bit of a fire hazard
00:28 < fenn> capacitors are not that great for storing energy though
00:28 < fenn> nothing is really
00:29 < nmz787> seems like moving electrons (without moving/re-arranging atoms too, as in electrochemistry) is the most efficient means of electrical energy storage
00:29 < nmz787> I guess that could be bogus reasoning
00:30 < nmz787> but the least mass moving....
00:30 < fenn> electrons moving in metal can also dissipate heat
00:33 < fenn> it's crazy there's not some kind of cheap organic molecule that undergoes a redox reaction like in a flow battery
00:36 < fenn> at room temperature or so
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00:45 < fenn> ok this is weird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microbial_electrosynthesis
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01:50 < hprmbridge> kanzure> @cpopell https://www.piratewires.com/p/crypto-choke-point and https://twitter.com/TuurDemeester/status/1637577347967721475
01:57 < hprmbridge> cpopell> @kanzure yah, I'm following it broadly, but it's not clear to me how much of this is still stuff following on from Signature, or if it's Plaid
01:57 < hprmbridge> cpopell> I'll find out sooner or later I guess
02:15 < hprmbridge> eleitl> In terms of energy per capita, a more relevant metric is net energy per capita, as EROEI of fossil sources is going down relatively quickly.
02:18 < hprmbridge> eleitl> Renewable isn't substituting other energy sources but being added to the total, so there will be only substitution when the other energy sources, foremost fossil, will start declining. Of course, we need all the energy we have in order to build out renewable, which we're not doing. The important part is fraction of renewable (minus biofuels, since these are fake due to low EROEI and being non-
02:18 < hprmbridge> eleitl> sustainable) of the primary energy total.
02:20 < hprmbridge> eleitl> World fossil (not net) energy per capita, based on BP's 2022 Statistical Review of World Energy (assuming Gail didn't screw up somewhere, do check her numbers) is https://i0.wp.com/ourfiniteworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/World-Fossil-Fuel-Energy-Consumption-Per-Capita.png?ssl=1
02:21 < hprmbridge> eleitl> I don't have a good total fossil EROEI trend data, so I don't know how fast we're declining in terms of fossil net energy per capita.
02:21 < hprmbridge> eleitl> Vaclav Smil probably has good data, but I doubt it's very current.
02:39 < hprmbridge> eleitl> fenn: there's a Finnish startup that attempts to use microbial electrosynthesis for producing food (proteins) efficiency is some 20% IIRC.
02:40 < fenn> i thought they were using methanotrophs
02:43 < fenn> hmm it hints at using hydrogen but not much detail https://solarfoods.com/science/
02:43 < hprmbridge> eleitl> The effort was definitely using MES. I just did a web search, there are several recent publications, so the field is not dead. Inasmuch it is successful, good question.
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02:46 < hprmbridge> msnewgooty> Xanthobacter
02:46 < hprmbridge> msnewgooty> https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2021084159A1/en
02:47 < hprmbridge> msnewgooty> https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2987188/
02:47 < hprmbridge> eleitl> fenn: quinone in redox flow batteries doesn't fit your requirements?
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02:48 < fenn> quinone is what i was imagining but i've never heard of such a thing
02:49 < fenn> ok so why is this a new thing
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02:59 < hprmbridge> eleitl> fenn: economy dematerialization (decoupling) isn't happening, so the G7 GDP graph is unfortunately untrue. You would see it better in the global scale, where outsourcing is factored in. Not to mention that GDP isn't a good metric, and PPP-based GDP isn't that great either.
03:02 < fenn> the next graph on the page is world energy consumption: https://wtfhappenedin1971home.files.wordpress.com/2021/02/untitled-1.jpg
03:03 < fenn> i shouldn't stay up way too late arguing about energy stuff i know very little about and have no possible hope of changing
03:04 < fenn> good night
03:07 < hprmbridge> eleitl> Good night.
03:29 < hprmbridge> eleitl> fenn: economically, not even fast neutron breeders with closed fuel cycle are viable, and fusion plants will be several orders of magnitude more expensive, even its thermal ROI will be adequate, which it currently well below break-even. D-T fusion also has a breeding issue, since you'll need to breed several tons of tritium annually. I would discount fusion to be relevant for avoiding the energy
03:29 < hprmbridge> eleitl> trap.
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04:02 < hprmbridge> Perry> You seem to believe that we have no hope to do anything Eugen. I think this is both false and psychologically counterproductive. The former is the real problem, but the latter cannot be healthy.
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04:27 < hprmbridge> eleitl> I believe that we're facing a hard problem (potentially a predicament), so realism provides a better roadmap than optimism. Specifically, we need to focus on tactics (near term) rather than strategy. Specifically, how to avoid the energy trap. There are sub-problems, like creating an economic and financial system that can deal with a prolonged no-growth/contraction scenario, which blogs like
04:27 < hprmbridge> eleitl> https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/ discuss.
04:27 < hprmbridge> eleitl> Failure to address these adequately will result in a die-off. I think we can agree that would be rather unhealthy.
04:27 < hprmbridge> Perry> We are not going to be in a new growth scenario. That’s ridiculous.
04:28 < hprmbridge> Perry> and I am a realist.
04:29 < hprmbridge> Perry> even if I was just operating on a model free observation of the real world, there is no way we would probably be able to get into a no growth scenario, and we have had several recent breakthroughs that mean dramatic improvements in economic conditions.
04:30 < hprmbridge> Perry> I will happily make a Simon-Erlich bet. I recognize that you won’t.
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04:39 < hprmbridge> eleitl> I'm not trying to convince anyone, by taking on bets or repeating assurances. I think humanity has a very big problem, and offer factual data to look at it. I have no interest discussing whether e.g. SEEDS is a superior or a completely faulty economics model or whether there are small inaccuracies in https://escholarship.org/uc/energy_ambitions at the "it's just not true" level. It's definitely a
04:39 < hprmbridge> eleitl> waste of everybody's time.
04:39 < hprmbridge> eleitl> Sorry, afk. Bbl.
04:40 < hprmbridge> Perry> The purpose of betting is to make a prediction precise and to focus the mind on whether one really believes that it’s true. Bryan Caplan does it all the time for good reasons.
04:42 < hprmbridge> Perry> it’s been a cultural feature of whatever you call our clique for decades. And generally speaking, I tend not to believe the protestations of people who will not bet. Betting puts a stake in the ground. It prevents moving the goalposts. It forces intellectual honesty.
04:43 < hprmbridge> Perry> One does not need to put a large money amount of money down, but the willingness to bet even $10 indicates that one has thought through precisely what it is that’s one is claiming.
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06:16 < muurkha> nmz787: yes, it's true that capacitors have the highest round-trip efficiency of all energy storage systems
06:18 < muurkha> fenn: why do you have no possible hope of changing them?
06:20 < muurkha> eleitl: presumably if fossil-fuel power becomes more expensive because of scarcer fuels or carbon taxes, then either renewables will substitute fossil, or nuclear reactors will become economically competitive
06:20 < muurkha> though, in the nuclear case, at a higher economic cost of energy than before.  maybe energy would be 20% of the economy instead of 10%
06:21 < muurkha> Perry: did you mean "We are not going to be in a no growth scenario"?
06:32 < hprmbridge> eleitl> muurkha: we need cheap energy in absolute terms to maintain current level of complexity. The specific ECoE numbers can be found in materials on https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/
06:35 < hprmbridge> eleitl> Perry: I know about this strange habit. Ditto prediction markets. I don't think much of these. The problem with the fundamental "not moving the goalposts" that it's impossible to nail down all the goal posts in something that's a sentence, or a short paragraph. As compared to https://escholarship.org/uc/energy_ambitions or the summary of discussions about SEEDs.
06:35 < hprmbridge> eleitl> I don't care about being right. I care about finding solutions which work, and actually make these happen. Which is why I've given up on transhumanism in general and cryonics in particular. These communities never get anything done.
06:41 < muurkha> Well, they've vitrified quite a number of heads by now.
06:42 < muurkha> Perhaps that will turn out to have been important at some point.
06:45 < hprmbridge> eleitl> Cryonics as practiced has basically no quality control. For the background, see the complete http://chronopause.com/chronopause.com/index.html -- it starts at http://chronopause.com/chronopause.com/index.php/2011/02/06/welcome-to-a-new-world/index.html
06:47 < hprmbridge> eleitl> I've ridden that particular dead horse for many decades. Unfortunately, it has failed for human factors, not because the science or technology behind it is fatally flawed.
06:48 < hprmbridge> eleitl> The human factors behind cryonics' failure are related to that of tranhumanists, except transhumanists as a whole never even get their hands dirty. With some notable exceptions, though I would call them primarily technologists and scientists and not transhumanists.
06:51 < muurkha> I'm not sure how it could be otherwise, at this point; we'll only be able to figure out what kinds of cryopreservation damage are irrecoverable once we start recovering people from cryopreservation, if that happens.
06:52 < hprmbridge> eleitl> Need to do some work again, bbl.
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07:14 < hprmbridge> eleitl> The best kind of damage is the one that doesn't happen, i.e. is preventable. The current culture doesn't care about that. At all.
07:32 < hprmbridge> nmz787> Are there any scifi where we just keep on with business as usual in terms of living with the high energy consumption we're currently used to, but when it runs out we just deal with it happily and move on? Where everyone says "it was great while it lasted".
07:32 < hprmbridge> lachlan> sounds unnecessarily depressing
07:33 < hprmbridge> nmz787> As in, not dystopian, just matter of factly.
07:33 < hprmbridge> nmz787> Shit changes, that's clear from all historical data of the whole universe
07:33 < hprmbridge> nmz787> It doesn't need to be depressing.
07:34 < hprmbridge> lachlan> given that everyone’s quality of life would massively drop, it would be difficult to come up with a realistic story that doesn’t feel depressing
07:35 < hprmbridge> nmz787> Maybe we all live happily ever after, working the seaweed fields.
07:35 < hprmbridge> nmz787> Plenty of people already glamorize "back to nature".
07:35 < hprmbridge> nmz787> (Lifestyles)
07:38 < hprmbridge> lachlan> And some people live it
07:38 < hprmbridge> lachlan> Certainly a limited number of people can live off the land comfortably
07:38 < docl> not sure you need that much energy per happy human in a nanotech world
07:38 < hprmbridge> lachlan> But not 8 billion
07:39 < hprmbridge> nmz787> Maybe those depressed people have bad genetics, and are pruned from living in this future, and the happiness of the entire population is uplifted
07:39 < hprmbridge> lachlan> If that were the case, it would have already happened
07:39 < hprmbridge> nmz787> Plenty of people already also love the challenge of being thrifty
07:40 < hprmbridge> nmz787> In this scenario the energy abundance keeps them afloat
07:40 < hprmbridge> lachlan> It would have already happened before we had energy abundance
07:41 < hprmbridge> nmz787> Why? You don't think the intervening years could have encouraged bad genetics (or mindset)
07:41 < hprmbridge> nmz787> Whiny complainers
07:42 < hprmbridge> nmz787> Bad attitude havers
07:42 < docl> spoiled energy-rich kid mentality
07:45 < hprmbridge> lachlan> back in my day, only those who politically and financially oppressed others had the time for intellectual pursuits—and we liked it!
07:48 < docl> IMO nobody will be eating seaweed unless they want to in the energy-constrained core of the saturated lightcone. subsistance level digitoids and biologues will have far more efficient ways to reformat CHON than photosynthesis
07:49 < hprmbridge> nmz787> Farming crickets?
07:50 < hprmbridge> nmz787> IDK it'd just be fun to see some positive "we're making the best of it"
07:51 < hprmbridge> nmz787> Seems like a better future than the movie where they prune society once a year in a sanctioned killfest
07:53 < hprmbridge> lachlan> it’s very difficult to write a compelling story that takes place post-scarcity because adversity quickly becomes unconvincing
07:54 < hprmbridge> nmz787> Yeah we'd all be friends
07:55 < hprmbridge> nmz787> No need to convince, just avoid it
07:56 < docl> well there's no true post scarcity. you have to get the atoms from somewhere. and probably tons of systemic risks to navigate in such a world
07:59 < hprmbridge> nmz787> Oh wait, i didn't mean post scarcity, i meant post energy system collapse
07:59 < hprmbridge> nmz787> Post abundance
08:00 < hprmbridge> lachlan> I knew what you meant, that thought just occurred to me after you mentioned movies
08:01 < hprmbridge> nmz787> Idiocracy was seemingly close
08:02 < hprmbridge> lachlan> I just don’t see how a story could acknowledge that things were better before and not just feel like all the characters are in denial
08:02 < hprmbridge> lachlan> Idiocracy was an interesting take
08:02 < hprmbridge> nmz787> It was a good fun story
08:02 < hprmbridge> lachlan> Yeah
08:02 < hprmbridge> eleitl> If you lose 90+% of population quickly, it's rather depressing.
08:03 < hprmbridge> nmz787> It'd probably be isolated, like living in the modern world today is
08:03 < hprmbridge> nmz787> As in, small nuclear families probably less personally affected
08:03 < hprmbridge> nmz787> Or already impoverished families that are cleverly making ends meet
08:04 < hprmbridge> lachlan> does this scenario involve the collapse of industrialized farming?
08:26 < hprmbridge> eleitl> Without lots of cheap energy and chemical feedstock industrialized farming is impossible. Some (becase 8 billion people times 130 W or so is a pretty large fraction of 18 TW total) food calories take up to 10:1 fossil to food input.
08:27 < hprmbridge> eleitl> Right now our nitrogen fixation rate is considerably diminished. We'll see its impact on harvests in the coming years.
08:32 < docl> I think tech stagnation arising from an "if it ain't broke don't fix it" mentality is a key obstacle, and stuff like food shortages in developed countries could send a pretty strong "it's broke, fix it" signal. not trying to be a constitutional optimist here, I just think there are equillibrium forces involved. peak oil getting delayed by fracking was one tiny sliver of this kind of thing
08:34 < docl> the surplusenergyeconomics blog seems to be about the premise that energy is the fundamental behind economics, but I think coordination of effort is at least equally fundamental. and when there's abundance, people don't have the incentive to coordinate
08:58 < muurkha> I looked into the fossil food calories thing a couple of years ago.  It's true that there are some foods where the energy input to fertilizer is greater than the energy output from the farm.
08:59 < muurkha> But they're things like lettuce, which people don't eat for calories.  The staff-of-life crops that produce most calories (grains, oilseeds, potatoes) are pretty far on the other side of the balance.
09:01 < muurkha> That is, the food calories produced by the farm are enormously greater than the fossil-fuel calories consumed by the agribusiness system.
09:01 < muurkha> 8 billion people times 130 W is 1 TW
09:02 < muurkha> Which is, yes, a pretty large fraction of 18 TW in some sense.
09:02 < muurkha> I mean it's 5%, not 0.001% or something.
09:04 < muurkha> It turns out that the majority of the food calories produced by agribusiness are actually consumed by livestock, something like three fourths.  So agricultural yields have to fall by three fourths before falling harvests necessarily result in hunger.
09:06 < muurkha> Which is not to say that sufficient inequality of distribution can't result in hunger; it already does.  But that's not really a question of energy adequacy.
09:22 < docl> as I understand it, a common cause for starvation conditions is politicians / the public not understanding that price caps will predictably result in less food being produced rather than the same amount produced at a lower price
09:28 < muurkha> produced or imported
09:31 < hprmbridge> eleitl> muurkha: particularly the 10:1 claimed fossil caloric input factor would increase the fraction by one order of magnitude. So clearly 10:1 is the upper margin, applicable only for a fraction of agricultural production.
09:37 < muurkha> I think you can find crops for which it's a lot higher than that.  Saffron, for example, or cocaine.
09:51 < muurkha> For whatever reason the energy value of crops is never included in statistics like the IEA's 18 TW estimate of world marketed energy consumption
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13:48 < kanzure> "Sparks of artificial general intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4" https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12712 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.12712.pdf
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15:03 < hprmbridge> lachlan> A magic orb would be great right now
15:10 < hprmbridge> Perry> I think Eugen has single-handedly reduced my interest in this channel. I’m sorry old friend but you have become a nattering nabob of negativity. It’s like staring into a void of despair. I don’t buy it and I’m also not going to waste time on it.
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16:30 < L29Ah> who's Eugen
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16:34 < fenn> L29Ah: eleitl
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17:03 < hprmbridge> lachlan> just ignore him then
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17:38 < juri_> just do what i do: disengage generally, unless people are actually doing stuff.
17:38 < juri_> also, do things that are only tangentally related, and feel miserable that you can't solve the whole problem yourself.
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17:50 < kanzure> why are copies of "when money dies" selling on ebay for $1,000? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Fergusson_(MEP)
18:29 < kanzure> a proposal for a 10km interferometric radio telescope on the moon https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.02216
18:35 < superkuh> Talk about proposed DSA-2000 radio array which has so many elements it behaves like a filled aperture and does not require fancy tricks like earth rotation or frequency synthesis to fill the UV plane. Data out is directly images and not multiple TB of baseband visibility voltages. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ws7Xfb1iFZQ&t=25m58s
18:48 < hprmbridge> lachlan> the atomicsemi fomo is real
18:52 < kanzure> some older articles:
18:52 < kanzure> https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2018/06/21/cosmic-engineering-and-the-movement-of-stars/
18:52 < kanzure> https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7XyTMYnBCKmKLxeC8/so-you-want-to-colonize-the-universe-part-2-deep-time
18:53 < kanzure> https://sites.psu.edu/astrowright/2013/02/17/waste-heat-part-vii-seti-beyond-the-milky-way/
18:56 < kanzure> https://maxmore.substack.com/p/the-dont-panic-about-ai-collection
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20:55 < hprmbridge> nmz787> Idk he didn't reply to a simple question of mine when he posted about it a few days ago in a semiconductor server... Doesn't mean anything but it irks me
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22:02 < hprmbridge> lachlan> I’ve never seen him reply to anyone on Twitter
22:03 < hprmbridge> lachlan> I think he’s just not interested
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--- Log closed Fri Mar 24 00:00:19 2023