Imagine the amount of energy required to create a jet that large! The scales are so big, it makes me wonder if there isn’t an upper limit to energy density. How much energy can be in one spot before you inadvertently create a Big Bang?
Actually, in theory there is one place denser but our models show it can never happen.
The moment right after the big bang. As energy can never be created nor destroyed, all the energy in the universe was practically in one point in space-time a femtosecond after the big bang.
This is a misunderstanding. All the energy in our « observable » universe was compressed in that small size. We do not have any estimates of the size of the actual universe now, nor at a time shortly after Big Bang. For all we know, the universe might be infinite, both now and back then.
The whole concept of the Big Bang is a mind warp. The whole explosion must have happened in some… space-time thing to begin with. What was that immense point of matter and energy in? What was “around” it? We’ll never know.
I think there are some philosophical definitions in the way. The Universe is everything we know, it is made of space and time, so of course it cannot expand into any space as it contains all of it.
We don't know what's outside the Universe, so we can't say there is nothing, and we can't say there's anything, we don't know what it is expanding into, or if "expansion" even makes sense outside the Universe. If we somehow find out what's outside the known Universe, that will inevitably become part of the known Universe, so we will never know what's outside the Universe.
Consider a bubble rising to the surface of a pond. As the bubble breaches the surface, it extends beyond the surface and expands as the pressure reduces.
If you consider the surface of the water as a 2D plane, the bubble expands into a third dimension perpendicular to the others. The bubble's surface is made of the same water as the surface of the pond, and there is no hard boundary between them. The bubble pushes part of the 2D plane into the third dimension, which results in the water having more surface area than the total possible area of the 2D plane.
Area (space) has been created without creating matter or energy. The surface is simply extended into an extra spatial dimension.
The way I like to interpret the big bang is as a higher dimensional structure folding or knotting itself such that a bubble is forced into a 3D space. The bubble expands and thus creates more volume than is possible in the lower-dimensional surface the bubble was formed on. This is my ill-informed interpenetration of M-theory.
Dunno why, but much of mathematics and the universe in general makes much more sense to me when viewed in terms of dimensionality. Our universe is 'just' a 4D slice of a higher dimensional structure, and I find a certain kind of beauty in that. In another life, I'd have been a string theorist
Instead of thinking of it as a bang in an existing space-time, the way to conceptualize it is the collapsing of a universal wave function from a superposition of all possible universal states. Of which our universe is just one potential possibility. Space time is a function of the collapsing state.
I think I understand that to a certain extent. But where does the universal wave function exist to begin with? There must be some construct it exists within.
Why? I would look at Occam’s razor, believing there must be an outer layer (or a creator of god) just leads to an infinite regress. It’s much more likely that the thing is just eternal according to that logic
I’m a layman but I think I’ve understood this enough to repeat. The early universe is hypothesized to have been so uniform (gravity pulling in every direction) there was no net direction for anything to collapse to. Because the expansion was so quick, before the uniformity could be ruined due to quantum randomness, it expanded away from there being tons of or one giant black hole.
You also must remember the universe was always infinite (in this model). So for every particle there were particles in every direction from them, ie the universe not a point or point like because points have edges. It was (much much) denser, but still infinite and expanding from all regions.
Yes and it was never a point, it was just much much denser but still infinite. And so uniform there was no net direction for collapse before expansion took over.
Since there are conserved quantities like energy and angular momentum it is impossible that everything just collapses. If something collapses, there is usually a large amount of matter which does not collapse to carry away the energy and momentum of the collapsing stuff.
> They believe that they alone are capable of safely engaging with the world of ideas to determine what is true, and thus feel strongly that information and speech ought to be censored to prevent the rabble from engaging in wrongthink.
This is a particularly ungenerous take. The AI companies don't have to believe that they (or even a small segment of society) alone can be trusted before it makes sense to censor knowledge. These companies build products that serve billions of people. Once you operate at that level of scale, you will reach all segments of society, including the geniuses, idiots, well-meaning and malevolents. The question is how do you responsibly deploy something that can be used for harm by (the small number of) terrible people.
AFAIU by the time of British colonisation in the Carribean / West Indies, sugar was cheap and afforded plentiful calories (and caries) to the working class.
Along with (relatively) inexpensive tea, the practice of serving boiled water-sugar solution greatly improved health (given the lack of water treatment at the time), reduced alcohol consumption, and provided additional food energy. And that was by the mid-to-late 18th century so far as I'm aware.
I'm not aware of any time or place where sugar was considered a luxury item, at least not for any substantial duration (say, excepting famine, economic recession, or war).
> I refuse to believe that he's reclusing in some island in NZ and even if he is I'm pretty sure he isn't just watching from the sidelines.
You don't know anything about him other than some videos and public appearances. He could be doing a myriad of things, including watching from the sidelines. I bring this up not to bash you but to point out a common misconception that we all fall into at times. We don't really know public figures and so a lot of our opinions about them are just projections of our own desires and biases. People you only see in public can be very different (in character or motivation) than you think.
> "Remember Y2K? Nothing happened!" is a super toxic lesson to take away from a rare success where people came together and fixed something instead of firefighting disasters.
My cynicism about Y2K comes from the fact that there were a lot of snarky articles written about how certain countries or companies were not Y2K ready but nothing bad seemed to happen to those countries either. It seems like a natural experiment was conducted and the results indicate there was no correlation between good outcomes and the work done to be Y2K ready.
I have no doubt that the armies of consultants did fix real issues but anyone working in software knows there is a never ending set of things to fix. The real issue is whether that work was necessary for the ongoing functioning of business or society.
"but nothing bad seemed to happen to those countries either."
Bad things still happened everywhere, despite all our efforts. How bad depends on your perspective.
Several people suffered a bizarre form of resurrection, which normally, Christians would be all over it and jolly excited. Pensions suddenly started paying out, tax bills became due from people long dead. If you were not a relative of one of those people it did not affect you and if you read about it, you'd have perhaps said "typical" and got on with life.
Some devices just went a bit weird and needed turning off and on again. Who cares or even noticed? Someone did but again, you did not hear about those.
I spent quite a while patching NetWare boxes and applying some very shaky patches to Windows workstations. To be honest, back then, timezone changes were more frightening than Y2K - they happen twice a year and something would always crash or go wrong.
The sheer amount of stuff that was fixed was vast and I don't think your "countries that did and did not" thought experiment is valid. Especially as it is conducted without personal experience nor much beyond a bit of "ecce, fiat" blather.
Nowadays time is so easy to deal with. Oh, do you remember when MS fucked up certificates and Feb 29 a few years back?
Your examples make my point. Some bad things happened but not on a catastrophic level that warranted the level of investment that was put into Y2K projects.
Most of the companies I was familiar with then did not have enough time or resources to check for and resolve every problem, and these problems were very real. At some companies the engineers were given autonomy, authority, and effectively unlimited budget to do literally whatever was required to mitigate any publicly visible failures that occurred. We had a lot of backup plans to keep operations running, sometimes literally paper and pencil, when the inevitable failures occurred. A lot of companies were furiously faking it and throwing people at the problem.
I directly witnessed a few near catastrophic failures due to Y2K at different companies, literally company killers. We kept everything (barely) running long enough to shore up and address the failures without anyone noticing, partly because we had prepared to operate in the face of those failures since we knew there was no way to fix them beforehand. It was a tremendous decentralized propaganda coup. No one wanted to be the company that failed as a result, the potential liability alone was massive.
The idea that what was averted was minor is a pretty naive take. I was genuinely surprised that we actually managed to hold some of the disasters together long enough — out of sight and out of mind — to fix them without anyone noticing critical systems were offline for months. IT was a bit more glitchy, slow, and unavailable back then, so the excuses were more plausible.
When things got missed things went _badly_ wrong and that spurred businesses to take rapid action to respond.
The first "Y2K" bugs where when banks' computer systems started messing up the calculations of long date financial securities/mortgages - decades before the millennium. Closer to the time Supermarkets started junking food that had a post 1999 Best Before date. Those were company ending problems if not fixed and so got overwhelming and rapid focus.
"... a lot of snarky articles written about how certain countries or companies were not Y2K ready..." I know you're talking about articles written after Jan 1, 2000. But there were a lot of articles written before then that were Jeremiah doomsday articles, so the snarky articles were reacting in part to equally wrong articles before then.
One article I recall in particular was in Scientific American some time in (IIRC) 1998 or early 1999. It prophesied (I use that word intentionally) that no matter how much money and effort was put into fixing the problem ahead of time, there would be all kinds of Bad Things happening on January 1. It called out in particular computers that were said to be unreachable, like hundreds of feet underwater on oil platforms. (Whether there actually were such computers, I don't know.) There was a sort of chart with the X-axis being effort spent on preventing the problem and the Y-axis being the scale of the resulting disaster. The graph leveled off while still in the "disaster" range, but still presented a clear message: "Give us more money and we can prevent catastrophes".
Somehow I haven't been able to find that article. Maybe SciAm suppressed it when the outcome turned out to be way short of a disaster.
There was also a TV (remember that?) news site or three that planned coverage beginning on midnight December 31 somewhere in Europe (Russia and China were off the map, I don't remember about Japan). Of course the news was that there was no news. (Yes, there were some computer programs that died or spit out junk, but nothing rising to the level of news.) I think it was an hour or two after midnight Eastern Time (US) that they ended the news cast.
Was there a Y2K problem? Of course. But it was largely taken care of before January 1, 2000, Y2K Jeremiahs notwithstanding.
> I also remember around 1975 getting all excited about solar and getting told that costs were dropping so fast that in five years solar would be cheaper than power produced from coal or natural gas
My understanding is commercial solar (as opposed to household solar) is cheaper than natural gas so that prediction is at least partly true
Not really, the over-cited LCOE of solar/wind does not account for the cost of (its increased need of) battery storage. As time of use does not align with the time of generation. Also, battery storage has its own ongoing costs with battery degradation.
You can tell solar+storage is cheaper than anything else except conditionally wind at least in the US because people have stopped building new generation capacity for anything else.
What is the point of citing theoretical values like LCOE when we have direct practical information on predicted profitability?
Energy producers in Texas are are adding 8x as much solar capacity (24 GW) as natural gas capacity (3 GW) [1] over 2024-2025. Do you believe that the entire Texas power plant industry is deliberately choosing less profitable and capital inefficient generation?
That could be the case, they may optimistically forecasted or undercounted potential future problems, but at this point in time their calculations seem to show that solar is tremendously more cost efficient to deploy over its expected lifetime.
It could also be the case that there are just subsidies for renewable energy in Texas that tip the balance. But at the scales we are now discussing, 10-20% of total energy generating capacity, the total value of those subsidies would need to be quite tremendous (in the G$ to 10 G$ per year range).
There isn’t a free market for energy really, it is a global marketplace and the government of every major player puts their thumb on the scale.
Governments are investing in solar because they want to be ahead in the renewable economy, where energy literally just falls from the sky. Is that a subsidy? I guess. It is also a good strategic move.
Are petrochemicals taxed or subsidized? I have no idea, it is a big tangled web. What are the costs of staying plausibly friendly with Saudi Arabia and other OPEC members, who pays that bill?
I’m not going to try and defend either way, but I don’t believe anybody who says they have an answer. If they did manage to analyze the entire global economy somehow (where to even start) I don’t think they’d post the answer here.
Wouldn't the answer be to provide a simple number for the cost of a thing (oil, solar, wind, etc), that removes the government subsidies/taxes from the equation.
Otherwise, you can tax what you don't like to oblivion or subsidise what you do like until it appears viable, but in neither case are you getting a true picture of the cost. The subsidies/tax moves a simple cost question, into the murky world of politics and society and opinion.
We are only pretending to discuss costs if the social infrastructure is determining taxes/subsidies.
Right. This is to say there nothing real or authentic about the numbers we are given. Solar numbers will shrink or inflate as a function of subsidies or taxes. The whole thing is operating within the confines of government largesse. It's nothing to do with the actual cost of energy, those numbers are a mystery.
> The state has a monopoly on the purchasing of healthcare services, it is illegal in most provinces to buy any healthcare for your family.
Why is it illegal to purchase healthcare privately? When I lived in the UK, I skipped the NHS and used my private insurance all the time to avoid all the issues you listed. Why not make it available to those that can afford the option?
Well, obviously I strongly disagree with this justification, but it's thought that if you allow for private healthcare options, that will suck resources out of the public system. If I use my own money to pay for the attention of a doctor, that's me taking that doctor away from the public system, making everyone else worse off.
Not sure if you're trying to downplay the problems or just offering a tip, but "You can flee the country and pay out of pocket somewhere with a functioning healthcare system" isn't much of a defense. Millions of Canadians aren't able to afford flight, hotel, time off work, arrange care for their dependents etc to go down to the states for weeks to resolve health issues. Not to mention, not all Canadians are even allowed to go to the states (people with criminal records, for instance). Also, hopping on a flight isn't an option for people with ongoing needs.
Yes those are real issues, and I didn’t necessarily mean to go to the United States, lots of people in the US also flee the border for certain medicine.
It’s, of course, a both/and situation. Try to improve things at home while searching for options if needed.
I do believe there is a bit of absurdity going on where parts of the Canadian system are trying to save money though by offering suicide.
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