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All problems solved! No need to worry.........NanoRobots!

Discussions of conventional and alternative energy production technologies.
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Re: All problems solved! No need to worry.........NanoRobot

Unread postby TheDude » Fri 06 Apr 2007, 02:37:28

I kinda come to your defense after 6 pages of top-to-bottom dismissal of everything you're talking about and that's how you react?
The bit about cooling fans was more of a facetious statement. Didn't quite come out that way I see. Oh well, now you know. We had a guy here whose signature was a disclaimer about being a sarcastic cynic. Bet that saved some time.
Cogito, ergo non satis bibivi
And let me tell you something: I dig your work.
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Re: All problems solved! No need to worry.........NanoRobot

Unread postby jbeckton » Fri 06 Apr 2007, 09:18:16

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Heineken', '
')As for researching "going on," well, of course, people with your cornucopian mindset believe that all the human institutions will go on indefinitely, ever-enlarging and ever-progressing until we occupy every corner of known space.


Show me my post that claims that all the human institutions will go on indefinitely, ever-enlarging and ever-progressing until we occupy every corner of known space.

I'll save you some time, I never said that and you know it.

By the way, classical universities weren't 1 room school houses. You have watched too much little house on the prairie.

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Re: All problems solved! No need to worry.........NanoRobot

Unread postby Heineken » Fri 06 Apr 2007, 09:42:27

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('JasonHam', '[')i]It would be nice if intelligence could deal with global warming simply by turning up its cooling fans. Will these things have cooling fans? I'm curious about nano but this topic is just more static.[b]

That question shows how little you know.


I'm suspicious of people who go about asserting how little others know.

All we can ever really know is how woefully little we know.

One does not have to be an expert on nanotechnology, or any technology, to offer worthwhile opinions on how it relates, or might relate, to the world and its problems.

For example, I am not an expert on the internal combusion engine---far from it---but I can see reasonably clearly what it has done to us.
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Re: All problems solved! No need to worry.........NanoRobot

Unread postby jbeckton » Fri 06 Apr 2007, 09:52:10

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Heineken', '
')One does not have to be an expert on nanotechnology, or any technology, to offer worthwhile opinions on how it relates, or might relate, to the world and its problems.


Do you have to be an expert to express your opinion? Of course not but then again you are only expressing the opinon of someone who does not understand the technology and therefore, you must accept that your opinion doesn't hold much weight with someone who has atempted to, or does understand the technology.

Think about people that dismiss PO because they don't really understand the situation and you might see where I am comming from. Is it ok for them to dismiss it because from the outside everything looks warm and fuzzy?

Sure but I don't put much weight in their opinion on PO, just as i don't out much weight in your opinion of nanotech.

Fair enough?
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Re: All problems solved! No need to worry.........NanoRobot

Unread postby Heineken » Fri 06 Apr 2007, 09:52:27

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('jbeckton', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Heineken', '
')As for researching "going on," well, of course, people with your cornucopian mindset believe that all the human institutions will go on indefinitely, ever-enlarging and ever-progressing until we occupy every corner of known space.


Show me my post that claims that all the human institutions will go on indefinitely, ever-enlarging and ever-progressing until we occupy every corner of known space.

I'll save you some time, I never said that and you know it.

By the way, classical universities weren't 1 room school houses. You have watched too much little house on the prairie.

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Your position is classic straw-man stuff.

You are trying to bolix up the discussion by confusing higher education (universities) with grade school (one-room schoolhouses).

Nanotech research isn't likely to happen in one-room schoolhouses, right? My position is that formal education is likely to devolve to that level. The huge universities that foster such research are going bye-bye because they are no more sustainable than yer local mall.

Also, I never said you claimed that human institutions would go on indefinitely etc. I said that such beliefs are typical of the cornucopian mindset, which you appear to evince. If you're a doomer or something in-between, please enlighten us.

Yes, the picture of venerable Oxford is impressive, but there were only a handful of such institutions centuries ago, and they weren't building cyclotrons or researching how to turn the world into gray goo. They didn't have Olympic-size stadiums etc.

As I said, they were far fewer, far smaller, and far simpler than today's academic monuments to complexity, consumption, luxury, and excess.

In fact, most of their energies were devoted to teaching Latin and Greek! Until the late 1700s/early 1800s (and the time the fossil-fuel age started fulminating), scientific research was happening primarily at the fringes.
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Re: All problems solved! No need to worry.........NanoRobot

Unread postby jbeckton » Fri 06 Apr 2007, 10:12:43

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Heineken', '
')I never said you claimed that human institutions would go on indefinitely etc.


$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Heineken', '
')people with your cornucopian mindset believe that all the human institutions will go on indefinitely


?????

Again with the medication......but I digress.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Heineken', '
')In fact, most of their energies were devoted to teaching Latin and Greek! Until the 1800s and the dawn of the Oil Age, scientific research was happening only at the fringes.


Need I rattle off a laundry list of scholars from before the oil age that researched much more complex subjects than languages?

Picard, Pascal, Boyle, Newton, Savery, Stall, Newcomen, Frainklin, Watt, Lavouisier, Gahn, Volta, Kirchoff, Dalton, Biot, Avagardo, Faraday, Carnot, Joule, Pasteur.......... there are thousdands.

Once again you don't know what you are talking about, unversities will never be reduced to one room schoolhouses as evident by their prosperity before the oil age.

There will always be electricity and energy for those who can afford it, prominent universities will always be able to afford it.

Research will go on...

Sorry to ruin the climax of your doomer porn.
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Re: All problems solved! No need to worry.........NanoRobot

Unread postby jbeckton » Fri 06 Apr 2007, 10:28:02

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Heineken', '
')My position is that formal education is likely to devolve to that level. ("one room school houses")


And the evidence against your position is that the very same universities were huge before tho oil age and there is no reason to believe that that wouldn't be able to achieve the same stature after the oil age.

Your counter claim is an ill advised opinion, nothing more, the evidence and history, two things lost on you, suggest you are wrong.
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Re: All problems solved! No need to worry.........NanoRobot

Unread postby JasonHam » Fri 06 Apr 2007, 11:00:58

Sorry, thedude, I posted that late at night and I was in a bad mood. Please accept my apologies.

And , Heineken, I have to go with Jbeckton on this one. History and facts. Pretty tough to argue agianst that.

and on a more serious note:


Laura Ingles was babe.
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Re: All problems solved! No need to worry.........NanoRobot

Unread postby Heineken » Fri 06 Apr 2007, 13:36:18

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('jbeckton', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Heineken', '
')My position is that formal education is likely to devolve to that level. ("one room school houses")


And the evidence against your position is that the very same universities were huge before tho oil age and there is no reason to believe that that wouldn't be able to achieve the same stature after the oil age.

Your counter claim is an ill advised opinion, nothing more, the evidence and history, two things lost on you, suggest you are wrong.


And your views, of course, are accepted fact, and not opinion?

After economic and environmental collapse, nothing people do will be "huge." Human activity will get smaller, more limited, and more localized. There'll be no foundation for nanotech research and other arcane, fantastically expensive pursuits (which is my whole point, which has flown cleanly past you).

Your view of history is distorted by the fact that, until now, history has proceeded more or less along a vector supported by underlying and seemingly limitless resource abundance. Growth. Dissemination. Flowering. A long period of economic exploitation.

This is all about to reverse, permanently.

The old colleges and universities were not huge by today's standards, BTW. They were relatively small and quaint, intent on training gentlemen by imbuing them with Latin and Greek and perhaps some maths and philosophy; the sciences, though gaining ground, were at the fringes until relatively recent times (by which "times" I include many in the list of luminaries you rattled off).

A few miles to the west of me is a university with 15,000 students. It has facilities and pursues research that would have made a teach at Olde Oxford gape.

Your biggest error is in assuming that we will return to the same level of prosperity after the Oil Age that existed before the Oil Age. (Such as it was, of course.)

Wrong. The foundation for that prosperity---a healthy, abundant natural world---will have been knocked out from beneath our feet, and the energy needed to extract what little remains will be expensive and scarce, not cheap and "inexhaustible."

What we'll be left with will not be sufficient to support exotic research at the frontiers of science. After collapse, where will those multi-million-dollar research grants come from? The facilities and equipment and supplies and materials? The highly trained personnel? The transportation and communication systems necessary to connect it all?

We'll be more concerned with daily survival, in fact.

I don't dispute that my position is a matter of opinion.
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Re: All problems solved! No need to worry.........NanoRobot

Unread postby jbeckton » Fri 06 Apr 2007, 14:00:42

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Heineken', '
')Your biggest error is in assuming that we will return to the same level of prosperity after the Oil Age that existed before the Oil Age.


No I think we wil be better off because we will have electricity, I say worst case is just as well off.

If you really think that early universities scientists were primarily interested in teaching Greek and Latin, I will assume you have not been to college.

Learning Greek and latin was very helpful when working with an international community of scientists. They did not have the internet to transalate articles written in diffferent countries, they needed to be able to read them themselves. Most college graduates today learn foriegn languages, it is by no means he focus of their degree.

My point is that it is a historical fact that major universities can R&D new technology w/o oil. The first steam engine was built almost 2000 years ago.

One day kids will laugh in school when their teacher tells them that people used to think the world was going back to the stone age when oil was depleted, just as many of us did when we were told people used to believe the world was flat.

If you are going to dispute something, at least have a loose understandig of it so you are not left making philosophical arguments because you have no real idea of what you are talking about.
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Re: All problems solved! No need to worry.........NanoRobot

Unread postby Heineken » Fri 06 Apr 2007, 21:06:09

JBeckton, people who don't agree with you "have no real idea of what they're talking about." That's at the core of all your commentary. You're so focused on disparaging me that you pay very little attention to what I'm saying, and indeed frequently misinterpret me.
You make me out to be an illiterate ignoramus. I will leave it to others to read my posts and decide if that is how I sound.

It all comes down to scale. Yes, the universities of yore did scientific research and taught science, among many other things, and helped bring us to where we are today. But they lacked the means to pursue today's kind of research, just as tomorrow's schools, if they even exist, will lack those means. There is a huge difference, in terms of costs, equipment, etc., between the sort of basic research that led, for example, to the isolation of oxygen as a gas and nanotech. As I tried to explain, the fantastically complex, infinitely demanding system that makes modern advanced research possible will not be there. So the advanced research will end.

That's why I think nanotech and similar modern investigations will ultimately be irrelevant.

You see things differently. That's because you see a different set of consequences following on Peak Oil, Global Warming, Peak Water, Peak Food, other environmental catastrophes, and the possible coming economic implosion than I do.

Saying that everything will be fine because there will be electricity seems like a grotesque simplification. And, will there be electricity? Enough of it? Sufficiently affordable? For how long?

I suggest we conclude this by agreeing to disagree and letting go of the personal sniping. Good day.
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