People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do. —Isaac Asimov
the pioneers of invention and of aviation in particular were quite as popular as the heroes of sport. For 1925, Google N-grams counts essentially the same number of mentions for the Wright brothers, Babe Ruth, and Thomas Edison.
From Wells’ script: [3] (The mob, by the by, is as well dressed as any other people in the film. It has the well-groomed look which is universal in the new world. It is not a social conflict we are witnessing. It is not the Haves attacked by the Have-nots; it is the Doers attacked by the Do-nots.)
La Cierva’s thought processes as he successfully solves the challenges of the autogyro, because he explains them in his very readable autobiography, Wings of Tomorrow.
however, they have tended to have a high accident rate. Part of the reason is that today, most gyroplanes are homebuilt ultralights piloted (even designed!) by their builders without much training in the type.
Are we going to be stuck with the 55-mile-per-hour speed limit forevermore? Is this the fastest we will ever go? —Moulton Taylor
The ConvAirCar very nearly succeeded. It was built by a major aircraft company (Convair). They had an ingenious marketing plan: they would sell you the car part, and have a chain of dealers at airports who would rent you the airplane part. When you bought the car part, you had a working car, whether you ever flew or not.
Imagine trying to build a mechanical clock that had to be accurate to a second a day, small and light enough to carry in a suitcase, but which would have railroad cars attached as the hour and minute hands. So the rotor hub is not only expensive to manufacture, but for safety must have constant maintenance by well-trained, intelligent, and motivated—read expensive—technicians.
The Leave It to Beaver family of the 50s had a life that was essentially as comfortable as ours is today, but worlds removed from that of the turn of the 20th century. Improvements since then, as seen by the average person, have consisted in remarkably large part of decoration or entertainment.
I am, and ever will be, a white socks, pocket protector, nerdy engineer. And I take a substantial amount of pride in the accomplishments of my profession. —Neil Armstrong
Medical care now costs six times as much as in the 60s: in 1960, the average worker worked ten days to pay for his health insurance; today, 60 days.
College tuition and textbooks cost in the neighborhood of ten times as much. Subways used to cost $5 million a mile; now, in New York anyway, $3 billion a mile.
In the Seventies, actual economic growth fell below a constant-growth trend line and never regained it. We went into a secular decline that has us further from the curve now (in dollar terms) than we were in the depths of the Great Depression itself.
We could have predicted over the last few years what the American government’s policies on oil and natural gas would be if we had assumed that the aim of the American government was to increase the power and income of the OPEC countries and to reduce the standard of living in the United States. —(Economics Nobel laureate) Ronald Coase
It is perfectly feasible to build GEMs that big; their efficiency improves with size. Furthermore they would not only have been faster across the oceans, but they wouldn’t need canals or docks—they could proceed across any reasonably level ground (or ice). This could have changed the face of worldwide shipping as much as containerization. But the GEM uses more power than a boat.
In 1973, the FAA banned civilian supersonic flight over the United States. The ostensible reason was noise, although the activists responsible for the push enormously exaggerated it. One of the major avenues of technological improvement we rightly expected in the 1960s was faster airliners. 40 years of advancement in aeronautics would let us field supersonic airliners that were much quieter today; but the ban remains, in a classic Catch-22 where there are no actual sonic boom noise standards, but the FAA wants to see the airplane first and then they’ll decide on the rule. In this case, we got the double whammy of energy starvation and regulatory strangulation.
Engines of Creation,
Solvay conferences of the 1930s that were so iconic in the development
There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things; because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them. Thus it happens that whenever those who are hostile have the opportunity to attack they do it like partisans, whilst the others defend lukewarmly, in such wise that the prince is endangered along with them.
the member of a mature scientific community is, like the typical character of Orwell’s 1984, the victim of a history rewritten by the powers that be.
A recent paper quotes the great cognitive psychologist George Miller on how hard it was to break the stranglehold of behaviorism on psychology: [41] The power, the honors, the authority, the textbooks, the money, everything in psychology was owned by the behavioristic school . . . those of us who wanted to be scientific psychologists couldn’t really oppose it. You just wouldn’t get a job.
I discovered, to my amazement, that all through history there had been resistance— and bitter, exaggerated, last-ditch resistance— to every significant technological change that had taken place on earth. Usually the resistance came from those groups who stood to lose influence, status, money as a result of the change. Although they never advanced this as their reason for resisting it. It was always the good of humanity that rested upon their hearts. —Isaac Asimov
Failures of the Imagination are much harder to spot, except in retrospect. All one can do is to stack one’s own imagination up against the experts’, always a perilous proposition. But we can still reasonably call it a failure because we must always keep in mind that there are things we don’t know.
One of the great tragedies of the latter Twentieth Century, and clearly one of the causes of the Great Stagnation, was the increasing centralization and bureaucratization of science and research funding. This meant that Failures of Nerve and Imagination, which are particularly strong among bureaucrats, instead of merely causing incorrect predictions from pundits, caused resource starvation and active suppression, and became self-fulfilling prophecies.
roughly 60 times as many scientific papers have been published since 1962 as were published in all the time before.
it may well be that ivory tower syndrome both enhances apparent scientific discovery and impedes useful application.
Cold fusion would have been a major embarrassment to high-energy physics. They would have lost not only funding, which in the zero-sum nature of science funding would have gone to cold fusion research, but to some extent the cachet of being the smartest kid on the block in science.
look at the impact the highway system did have. It’s estimated to have been responsible for something like a third of all economic growth in the booming, optimistic Fifties. The Interstate system alone is estimated [75] over the latter half of the twentieth century to have added about a trillion (1996) dollars to the economy, building up from nothing when construction started in 1956.
If you want to start an automobile company in this country you need a handful of engineers—and at least 1000 lawyers. —Arnold Kling
The number of pages in the Federal Register increased by 121 percent under Nixon.
Today, the federal regulatory code is over 175,000 pages long.
It’s not about flying. It’s not about aircraft. It’s not about maintenance of aircraft. It’s not about who is qualified to do maintenance. It’s an addendum, with three separate references back into the regulatory corpus, to the rules regarding who is allowed to do paperwork about maintenance.
Economists John Dawson and John Seater recently published a study in the Journal of Economic Growth, “Federal Regulation and Aggregate Economic Growth”,
Note that these studies explicitly avoid any consideration of the positive benefits the regulation might have—they are entirely an exercise in calculating the costs. However, it’s hard to imagine that regulation has produced so much value that the average American family would readily pay $132,000 a year for it!
It is commonly believed that regulation of things like medicine and cars is necessary to ensure safety. But life expectancy in the US rose from 47.3 to 68.2 in the first half of the 20th century, an increase of over 30 percent; but in the latter half, the age of regulation, only from 68.2 to 76.8, just 11 percent.
The US government itself estimates that the total cost of regulation in the US is nearing two trillion a year—$1.75 trillion in 2008. [88] The direct costs were $15,586 per household per year. This is considerably higher than it has been over the course of the Great Stagnation, and again it ignores benefits. It is easy to believe a two percent reduction going back to the Sixties. But by now it appears to be over ten percent of the economy.
The 1931 crash of TWA flight 599, in which Knute Rockne died, was the same kind of widely publicized disaster that sparked an outcry and gave impetus to the regulatory machinery. (Even though, as in the case of Elixir Sulfanilamide, it was private professionals who actually found and fixed the problems.)
There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. —Robert A. Heinlein,
Last year Congress passed 138 laws; agencies published 2,926 new regulations. Federal courts handled about 95,000 cases; regulatory administrative courts a million.
But the result was that the ruling has generally been interpreted as saying that regulators can do anything they want unless it is specifically prohibited in the enabling legislation. If a regulator charges you with a transgression, e.g. OSHA finds that your stair railings are 40 inches high instead of 42, even though there has never been any accident involving them, or that you have bags of ordinary beach sand that are not labelled “Poison,” [94] you don’t get to challenge it in a real court; you must plead your case in the regulator’s own “administrative court.”
Because of the all-encompassing breadth and specificity of the regulations and the clueless literality with which they are enforced, it is essentially impossible to run a productive business without breaking some of them. This leaves the individual agents with a free hand to say who they will shut down and who they won’t—a government of men and not of laws.
The world of antitrust is reminiscent of Alice’s Wonderland: everything seemingly is, yet apparently isn’t, simultaneously. It is a world in which competition is lauded as the basic axiom and guiding principle, yet "too much" competition is condemned as "cutthroat." It is a world in which actions designed to limit competition are branded as criminal when taken by businessmen, yet praised as "enlightened" when initiated by the government. It is a world in which the law is so vague that businessmen have no way of knowing whether specific actions will be declared illegal until they hear the judge’s verdict — after the fact. —Alan Greenspan
Until the 1980s, property and liability insurance was a small cost of doing business. But the substantial expansion in what legally constitutes liability has greatly increased the cost of liability insurance for personal injuries.
the cost of the U.S. tort system consumes about two percent of GDP, on average. If we assume this mostly started around 1980 when lawyers skyrocketed and the airplane industry was destroyed, the long-run compound-interest effect on the economy as a whole is startling: without it our economy today would be twice the size it actually is.
the effect of taking more than a million of the country’s most talented and motivated people and put them to work making arguments and filing briefs, against each other so their efforts mostly cancel out, instead of inventing, developing, and manufacturing things which could have made life better.
In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely. —Jerry Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy
The FAA, as a general stance and not just with drones, has a deep allergy to people making money with flying machines.
Amazon, the online marketer, famously proposed to use drones to deliver packages. Not only was this use illegal; the FAA wouldn’t even let them experiment with drones, and they had to go to Canada to do research and development.
I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all for fear of being carried off their feet.
come to think, it is a logical consequence enough. Strength is the outcome of need; security sets a premium on feebleness
For such a life, what we should call the weak are as well equipped as the strong, are indeed no longer weak. Better equipped indeed they are, for the strong would be fretted by an energy for which there was no outlet. ... This has ever been the fate of energy in security; it takes to art and to eroticism, and then come languor and decay.
What was necessary for the flowering of any one of the revolutions was that sufficient people in society had moved up the Maslow hierarchy to the point where esteem and self-actualization became their major concerns, and virtue signalling became more important than real-world results.
War ran out of steam as an effective selection mechanism around mid-20th century. Beginning with Korea, the battles were proxies done at arm’s length; the UN forces could (and did) bomb all the industry in North Korea to rubble, but it made no difference since the arms and materiel were coming from the USSR and China. The western world more or less froze the patterns of who was allowed to use what physical force upon whom in place. Then, paradoxically, competence in physical science and engineering was no longer the major factor in political power it had been in the previous centuries.
there is a pattern that we see recurring throughout history, when a successful empire expands its borders so far that it becomes the biggest kid on the block. When survival is no longer at stake, selfish elites and other special interest groups capture the political agenda. The spirit that “we are all in the same boat” disappears and is replaced by a “winner take all” mentality.
Unfortunately, the impulse of the Progressive Era reformers, following the visions of Wells (and others) of a “Scientific Socialism,” was to centralize and unify, because that led to visible forms of efficiency. They didn’t realize that the competition they decried as inefficient, whether between firms or states, was the discovery procedure, the dynamic of evolution, the genetic algorithm that is the actual mainspring of innovation and progress.
The more or less individualistic and self-reliant culture of the 19th century had been winding down as the frontier filled up, but it gave way with a bang as Americans arose “in their righteous might” to prosecute the war—under a completely centralized bureaucratic government structure. This was not only the military but civilian production planning on an unprecedented scale. We came into the Postwar World with the belief that such a structure worked, as it had not only won the war but left the US the pre-eminent industrial power in the world.
the power to see ourselves as others see us is missing, but is often compensated for by an ability to get others to see us as we see ourselves!
But by the end of the Sixties, that had largely disappeared: people quit building backyard fallout shelters, schools quit holding air-raid drills, and so forth. But if people’s risk perception level is resistant to change, there are other ways than reckless driving to increase it. One obvious way is simply to start believing scare stories, from Corvairs to DDT to nuclear power to climate change. In other words, the Aquarian Eloi became phobic about everything specifically because we were actually safer, and needed something to worry about.
The Green religion has essentially superceded Christianity as the default religion of western civilization, especially in academic circles. Since the sixties it has developed into an apocalyptic nature cult, centered around climate change. Green ideas have become inextricably intertwined with a perfectly reasonable desire to live in a clean, healthy environment and enjoy the natural world.
The vast majority of the Eloi Agonistes who “believe in climate change” are not scientists who know anything about the enormously complex Earth climate system. They believe what they do because they have been told it by authority figures; they attach a moral significance to their beliefs; they believe that they are better people because they believe it. Belief in a human-caused climate apocalypse is a shibboleth in intellectual society. They react to skepticism not with careful self-searching reconsideration, but with the scathing inquisitions of heretic-hunters. This is a recipe for religious faith, not scientific knowledge.
I believe future historians will judge this irrational hatred of nuclear energy as the single greatest reason why greens lost the climate debate. The obvious contradiction between green claims that we face an existential climate crisis and their vehement opposition to nuclear power is what led me and I suspect many other skeptics to question their claims. —Eric Worrall
The main result of our burgeoning ergophobia was that a lot of inventiveness and engineering resources got shifted from doing new things, and doing things better, to doing the same old things, usually not as well, but using less energy
Eric Hoffer had noted that “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”
When Greenpeace turned anti-science by campaigning against chlorine (imagine the sheer stupidity of campaigning against one of the elements in the periodic table), I decided that it had lost its purpose and that, having achieved its original objectives, had turned to extremism to try to justify its continued existence.
the diversion of so many of the most talented and motivated members of the last several generations from productive pursuits to expensive virtue signaling is one of the main causes of the technological slowdown and the Great Stagnation.
The Xhosa meme plague is clearly something of a dramatic outlier in the history of religious fervor run amok. But it stands as a stark reminder that when social feedback, superstition, hopes and desires, and the suppression of doubt and skepticism (“faith”) line up, the resulting movement can make an entire people believe and do horribly self-destructive things, completely at odds with common sense, which would be clearly insane in an individual.
A society in which everyone believes in a god who “knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake!” is one in which people are more to be trusted, more likely to cooperate, more likely to trade instead of fight. Norenzayan backs up this hypothesis with an impressive array of experimental and historical research. In a civilization where belief in a Big God is effectively universal, there is a major advantage in the kind of things you can do collectively. In today’s America, you can’t be trusted to ride on an airliner with a nail file. How could you be trusted driving your own 1000-horsepower flying car?
Nina Mazar, Chen-Bo Zhong, Do Green Products Make Us Better People? Psychological Science 21,Issue 4, March 5, 2010
In popular culture, the basis of morality had shifted from lifelong training by precept and example in the hard-won knowlege of your forefathers, to whatever feels right. The latter is far more susceptible to self-deception and virtue signalling.
Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.
The idea that everyman could have an automobile—having of course to drive it himself, with the concomitant implication that the roads would be filled with amateur drivers—is simply missing. This was a notion farther from the mind of the fin de siecle intellectual than time machines or invaders from Mars.
There’s plenty of cheap land out there, 25,000 times cheaper than land in Manhattan, and up until the Stagnation people were making more and more use of it. The trend has stopped, if not reversed. The national investment in transportation infrastructure peaked in the Sixties:
In 1974, cars were required to have an ignition interlock that prevented them from starting unless the seatbelts were fastened. (The national 55-mph speed limit was also a 1974 innovation.)
In the 20th century, tumbling transport costs weakened the gravitational pull of the city; in the 21st, the digital revolution has restored it. Knowledge-intensive industries such as technology and finance thrive on the clustering of workers who share ideas and expertise. The economies and populations of metropolises like London, New York and San Francisco have rebounded as a result.
As the Duke and Mr. Wells point out, this isn’t something particularly new. Travel at will was a prerogative of the aristocracy or the new political elite. The question, among others, that we started out to ask was why we don’t have flying cars by now. The obvious answers, such as that they were technologically infeasible, or even that they would be too expensive, turned out not to be right. Instead, perhaps the really fascinating question turns out to be why we ever got the family car in the first place.
Virtually every time I bring up the subject of flying cars to an acquaintance, I get much the same reaction. After an initial giggle and and reference to the Jetsons, people opine that they could never become the common mode of travel because the average person who drives a car couldn’t fly a plane.
There were 122,000 airmen casualties total. [142] It is quite reasonable to say that the wartime way of thinking—get the job done whatever the cost—served to obscure the very real dangerousness of flying (especially since they sent fliers out with as little as one hour of training in the aircraft they were flying). It is quite likely that this contributed to a false sense of what risks we would accept in the peacetime post-war world as compared with the benefits of flying.
The FAA and pilots associations make a big deal of flying safe, and thus paradoxically spend a lot of time talking about hazards and dangers and accidents, resulting in an anecdotal impression of a dangerous undertaking. The people who actually know would be my insurance company. The price for my all-hazards airplane insurance, covering everything from hitting a sparrow on approach to crashing into someone’s house, is less than $800 per year, in other words comparable to car or home insurance and considerably less than medical.
The leading cause of death among active pilots is ... motorcycle accidents.
We are absolutely flat-out terrible at flying when we lose visual contact with the ground: you literally cannot tell which way is up. In fact it was solving the problem of control, attitude and steering, that was the Wright brothers’ seminal contribution to flying. They made bicycles, after all, and understood the importance of balance, and how it tied in with steering.
If you tried to fly to lunch commercially, even if the actual flight itself were instantaneous, you would do nothing else that day.
The essential thing to note about Jevons’ Paradox is not that people are using more energy; it is that they are getting more total value than the mere price reduction would have predicted. More people get tomatoes; the farmer makes more money; so does the gas company. Everybody is better off.
Any ordinary, active man, provided he has reasonably good eyesight and nerve, can fly, and fly well. If he has nerve enough to drive an automobile through the streets of a large city, and perhaps argue with a policeman on the question of speed limits, he can take himself off the ground in an airplane, and also land—a thing vastly more difficult and dangerous.
The appliances of 2014 will have no electric cords, of course, for they will be powered by long-lived batteries running on radioisotopes. The isotopes will not be expensive for they will be by-products of the fission-power plants which, by 2014, will be supplying well over half the power needs of humanity. —Isaac Asimov (1964)
gasoline costs less than twice the price of the crude oil it’s made from
Consumer retail energy runs about five times the commodity price of the raw fuel, at a rough average. (The exception is that gasoline costs less than twice the price of the crude oil it’s made from
the cost of the uranium going into power generation is trivial compared to the other costs. We could reduce even that by a factor of ten by going to a thorium fuel cycle, but one of the main reasons that there hasn’t been any major push to do that is that the uranium is already so cheap, on a per-kWh basis, that it’s not worth the bother.
Average price of a year’s energy, in chemical fuels: $6,553. In nuclear, $5.80.
It’s not the absolute price of something that determines whether it makes sense to meter it, but the marginal price—what it costs you to generate one more kilowatt-hour, given that you’ve already built all the capital equipment and covered all the fixed overhead costs. It doesn’t mean it’s free, or even cheap—it just means you pay a flat fee, as you do for local phone service or basic cable.
The cost of actual electricity delivered to your home is due to the cost of the capital—the reactor and generating plant, but also the transmission lines, substations, power grid control centers, and so forth—and overhead, including maintenance and a truly staggering regulatory burden that multiplies the cost by an order of magnitude.
A hip flask of heavy water, or a one-inch cube of uranium, contains more energy than the average American uses in a lifetime
nuclear fuels produce one to ten million times the energy per weight of chemical ones, and thus requires the extraction of a million times less raw material, and the production of a million times less ash, than fossil fuel for the same amount of energy. At the point where we were mining as much nuclear fuel as we are fossil fuel now, and thus spending as much for fuel as the current power industry, we would be generating a million times as much power.
fuel costs are essentially trivial compared to fossil. The actual cost of power is all capital, actually even more so for nuclear than for so-called “sustainable” forms. A wind turbine uses up more lubricating oil than a nuclear plant uses uranium, per kilowatt-hour generated.
the first bottleneck would be power transmission, to be ameliorated by smaller, more numerous, and mass-produced modular reactors. The second bottleneck would simply be that we didn’t have the ways and means to use that much power!
you can create artificially radioactive isotopes of various elements by exposing them to neutrons (e.g., in a reactor). Typically the isotopes produced this way decay by beta emission, that is changing the extra neutron into a proton by firing off an energetic electron. Beta radiation can be blocked by a couple of inches of water or a thin sheet of metal (for average energies—the betas from tritium are stopped by a piece of paper).
We really, really should have had atomic batteries by now. And guess what? Your iPhone would never need charging, and your Tesla would have a range of 3.5 million miles. It is a possibility.
One of the reasons that computers improved so rapidly in price/ performance over the past half-century is that the physics of computation don’t present the kind of “glass ceiling” that supersonic flight does for airplanes. (Another of course is that computers were essentially unregulated.)
Molten salt reactors using thorium and integral fast reactors using uranium-plutonium alloys could achieve a 99% fuel burn-up, improving both fuel efficiency and waste production by a couple of orders of magnitude over the 1960s designs we’re still using.
Nixon banished a reactor that was virtually meltdown-proof, left comparatively little long-lived waste, made it more difficult to fashion a bomb from the waste, ran at friendlier atmospheric pressure instead of the potentially explosive pressurized environments of conventional reactors, and ran at much higher temperatures, making it more cost-effective as an electricity generator.
Proven reserves of uranium could power the globe for 77 years; of thorium for 6472 years.
Thorium is often present in coal as a trace impurity. Typically, there is as much energy present in the thorium—which just goes out the smokestack—as we get from burning the coal.
one of the main reasons thorium reactors weren’t developed in the Sixties. The U.S. government wanted a source of weaponizable uranium and plutonium. They went in with the mindset that we would control all the reactors and that the fuel cycle that gave us the bomb-grade stuff was a good idea. But that means that there has been a built-in block against making nuclear power generally available.
The other main reason was also military in origin—it was simply that pressurized water reactors had been designed and developed for the Navy, and it was easier to copy and scale up in a bureaucratic regime where not innovating is always easier than innovating.
In the molten salt reactor, the design works the opposite way: cooling, enough to keep a plug of salt frozen, is powered by the reactor itself. If the reactor or generator fails, the plug melts, and the fuel flows into a sump where it’s too spread out to maintain a reaction.
The major problem with thorium as a nuclear fuel is, as mentioned, that uranium is too cheap already.
All the cost is in regulatory compliance, and that would increase, rather than decrease, with an innovative new set of reactor designs and fuel cycles.
the combined power of corporate industry to resist any change that might threaten their dividends. What do you think happened to atomic power?”
At first sight, this manifestly suicidal neglect looks so perverse that a sheer inability to perform the work, owing to a loss of technique, might appear to be the only plausible explanation. Yet no historical evidence of this hypothetical loss of engineering technique appears to be forthcoming; and the true explanation seems to be that the abandonment of the works was not the cause but was rather the consequence of a decline in population and in prosperity which was itself the result of social causes.
The faith in technology reflected in Golden Age SF and Space Age America wasn’t misplaced. What they got wrong was faith in our culture and bureaucratic arrangements
But the more centralized and bureaucratized science and technology has become, the more Failure of Nerve, much less Failure of the Imagination, produces not amusing mispredictions but official obstruction.
There is as much headroom in physics and engineering for energy as there is in computation; what is stopping us is not lack of technology but lack of will and good sense.
The actual measured dose over most of the release was less than having a couple of CT scans in a year. 1600 people died in vain, died not from radiation but from radiophobia.
\strikeout off\uuline off\uwave offBiofuels/Biomass
If you are thinking of splitting wood, not atoms, please remember that lumberjack is the number one most dangerous profession.
It’s probably worth pointing out that Chernobyl was not a sanely designed American power reactor, but a Soviet design whose primary purpose was breeding plutonium, hidden behind a facade of power generation.
We had a confluence of bad design decisions at TMI, some of them made by the U.S. Congress. U.S. law specifically prohibited using computers to directly control nuclear power plants.
Most intermediate level waste is barely radioactive at all. If you put a completely legal luminous watch in a barrel containing half a tonne of dirt, that dirt would technically be intermediate-level nuclear waste according to the regulations.
Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper. —George Orwell
The stagnation in progress in nuclear technology has made the problem of proliferation worse, not better.
On the other hand, at the current levels of sophistication in molecular genetics, one would be considerably more likely to succeed in a major terrorist action by playing around with the flu virus. It might well be the case that if we allowed a small amount of nuclear material onto the black market, we might distract them into less productive pursuits.
at the current levels of sophistication in molecular genetics, one would be considerably more likely to succeed in a major terrorist action by playing around with the flu virus. It might well be the case that if we allowed a small amount of nuclear material onto the black market, we might distract them into less productive pursuits.
Construction costs for nuclear power plants skyrocketed after the establishment of the DOE. Horizontal line is the pre-1980 average, at $1175/kW. At today’s prime rate of 3.25%, that would amortize to about half a cent per kWh.
If the extra nuclear generated electricity had substituted for coal and gas generation, about 9.5 million deaths and 174 Gt CO2 may have been avoided.”
The Energy Reorganization Act of 1974 abolished the AEC, handing its regulatory powers to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. That entity’s sole focus on safety resulted in lengthening construction times for plants from four to 14 years.
Innovation is strongly suppressed when you’re betting a few billion dollars on your ability to get a license to operate the plant.
In this environment, “good-enough” is the enemy of “better”. Humans learn by failing. It’s the way we learn to walk, talk, and ride a bicycle. Our environment today has little tolerance for failures at any level. There’s no room for Thomas Edison’s approach to innovation in today’s world. On top of all of this, or perhaps because of it, the nuclear industry invests less on R&D, as a percentage of gross revenues, than practically every other major industry you might name.
The startup company NuScale is intent on developing modular reactors, small enough to be built in a factory, and thus cutting costs, construction times, and so forth significantly. NuScale has to date spent $505 million dollars [175] just to produce the 12,000 pages of paperwork the NRC requires simply for an application.
Each already-approved, already built, already licensed, already operating nuclear plant spends an average $4.2 million per year, purely on regulatory paperwork.
The reason for Navy nuclear success is because there has always been one strong experienced person in charge and accountable, standing like a stone wall against the bureaucratic onslaught.
President Reagan that has worked effectively for 34 years. [The Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program has] been protected from the 970,000 Pentagon bureaucrats whose paralyzing bloat has made a hash of most Army, Navy and Air Force weapon programs. The reason for Navy nuclear success is because there has always been one strong experienced person in charge and accountable, standing like a stone wall against the bureaucratic onslaught.
[The Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program has] been protected from the 970,000 Pentagon bureaucrats whose paralyzing bloat has made a hash of most Army, Navy and Air Force weapon programs. The reason for Navy nuclear success is because there has always been one strong experienced person in charge and accountable, standing like a stone wall against the bureaucratic onslaught.
The Navy has over 6000 reactor-years of accident-free operation. It has built 526 reactor cores (for comparison there are 99 civilian power reactors in the US), with 86 nuclear-powered vessels in current use.
People today know a lot less, and know a lot more that ain’t so, about technology in general and nuclear power in particular than they did in 1962.
The low-hanging fruit of nuclear power was left to rot on the ground and sprayed with the kerosene of hysteria and ignorance.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation.
There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize.
Choking progress in one field of energy, nuclear being the key case in point, has raised the price of other forms of energy and ultimately of everything.
Where costs haven’t actually gone up, they haven’t gone down as fast as they would have under the historic trend. A huge amount of effort, from engineers to construction workers, has been misplaced to make things more efficient at energy use than they would otherwise need to be.
A great deal of misinformation is in circulation in regard to the energy situation on Planet Earth. Some writers have argued, for example, that worldwide living standards could be brought up to decent human minimums without a corresponding increase in energy usage. That just isn’t so. Power consumption and standard of living go hand in hand. ... For every watt of power a citizen uses, his nation produces a dollar a year in goods and services.
We do have an economy now that produces twice as many dollars of apparent economic activity per watt of energy consumption than in 1970. But those who claim that is a good thing are missing the point. We have made energy itself more expensive; dollars per kWh generated in the US has increased by 300% while actual power generated has increased by only 26%
In this inconceivably enormous universe, we can never run out of energy or matter. But we can all too easily run out of brains. ... If, as is perfectly possible, we are short of energy two generations from now, it will be through our own incompetence. We will be like Stone Age men freezing to death on top of a coal bed.
if you find a book on nuclear physics, check the copyright date! Books written in the 1950s or 1960s and reprinted in unaltered form are on offer to students in the twenty-first century.
(It may be that quantum chromodynamics forms an adequate theory, but if so it is in the same way that quantum electrodynamics is an adequate theory of the weather.
The really crazy footnote is that now that it has been remembered and rescued, Berkeley is on the hook for bales of paperwork for licensing and documentation from the NRC. It’s illegal to possess even 2.7 micrograms of plutonium in the US otherwise.
notwithstanding its importance and all the documentation it should have had all along, it had been completely forgotten.
Technologists by and large do not understand this. We have for fifty years played Charlie Brown, cluelessly running to provide new, better forms of power in the vain hopes of social acceptability. But the football is always yanked away, the new energy is always demonized, and it never penetrated our thick heads that we are playing a mug’s game.
Even though the national waste repository at Yucca Mountain has been blocked by activists since it was designated in 1987 and never opened, fission produces so little waste that all our power plants have operated the entire period by basically sweeping it into the back closet.
We shall hate you more if you succeed than if you fail. —H. G. Wells, Things to Come
Chrysler built a turbine-powered car in the 60s, more as a concept car than to sell (it would have been way too expensive in those days). But as one of the demonstrations, they gave the President of Mexico a ride in one burning tequila as its fuel.
The learning curve as a rule of thumb says that cost declines as the inverse logarithm of units shipped.
the flying car is not a replacement for the car; it is a replacement for the airplane.
When a researcher announces a nano-transistor, it means he poked at nanotubes with an STM for 5 months and got 17 usable structures, of which 3 worked reliably.
The difficult we do immediately. The impossible takes a little longer.
It is far too easy to make assumptions in modeling and simulation that the recalcitrant real physical world refuses to agree with.
Using the machines invented in the meantime, each hour of human labor today produces 300 times as much as it did seven centuries ago. Your medieval counterpart would spend a year to make as much as you make in a day.
The promise of nanotech is that that could happen again. Things that now take us a year’s work could be done in a day. And your $3 million flying car costs just $10,000. It is a possibility.
By the time I began to study computer science in the Seventies, the theoretical foundations had shifted completely away from anything based in neural circuitry, to metamathematics and symbolic logic. In particular, feedback as a major organizing principle had almost entirely disappeared.
The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.
The entire history of computer science has been one of learning, by painful experience, just how many errors are made by a programmer even tackling a simple, well-understood problem with well-understood techniques in a completely controlled environment.
but my warnings went unheeded. I conclude that there are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.
but my warnings went unheeded. I conclude that there are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.
there are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.
The first method is far more difficult. It demands the same skill, devotion, insight, and even inspiration as the discovery of the simple physical laws which underlie the complex phenomena of nature. It also requires a willingness to accept objectives which are limited by physical, logical, and technological constraints, and to accept a compromise when conflicting objectives cannot be met. No committee will ever do this until it is too late.
The early AI programs were written exactly the same way we write laws and regulations: sit down and write rules—in words—for everything you can think of beforehand that might happen. Give a system like that a task exactly like the one it was designed for, and it works like a charm. Give it one even a tiny bit different, and it has a tendency to do something outrageously clueless.
People are generally terrible at unraveling complex chains of causality through the economy, and will typically blame whomever is most closely associated in the public mind with any problem. They blame aeronautical engineers, not regulators, for the lack of flying cars. They blame oil companies, not price controls and drilling bans, for an energy crisis. And at least to some extent they blamed technology, not the fact that it was being suppressed, for the economic malaise of the Seventies. That in turn called for more regulation, which suppressed more technology, in a runaway feedback loop.
in our public intellectual circles there appears to be no feedback that punishes wrong predictions. It doesn’t seem to matter that they keep predicting catastrophes that don’t happen; that somehow seems to give them more rather than less credibility
academia (and thus the popular-science press) is awash in deep-seated pre-scientific superstitions with tremendous memetic staying power—because in the absence of running up against reality on a battlefield, ideas are evolutionarily selected for intuitive appeal rather than for objective truth.
Intellectuals hate progress. Intellectuals who call themselves “progressive” really hate progress. —Stephen Pinker
Only in academia and government, where nobody faces consequences for failure, do you find people who are stupid enough to believe they know what is going to happen. —Eric Worrall
There is certainly a feedback to the horror story industry, but as we have seen it has nothing to do with whether the stories are proved right or wrong in reality. Pundits and organizations profited greatly, both in money but perhaps more importantly in prestige; and this is the feedback that counted. But the scare industry is completely unregulated, and its profits come at the cost of a great social externality: the pollution of knowledge with dire falsehoods.
scare industry, whose main product consists of intentionally poisoning children’s minds.
even in the best human-designed bureaucracies, the primary function of the system will ultimately become insulating decision makers from accountability and feedback. The simple and obvious reason is that people don’t like to be held accountable, and if allowed to design the systems they work in as they like, will put in plenty of insulation. And once that happens, cynicism sets in and the “same boat” spirit evaporates.
You can’t push back against a program, or bureaucracy, that simply cannot listen.
In the classic case of the energy crisis, for example, when energy in the form of oil becomes scarce, the price rises. This is a signal and incentive for several things: oil users economize and cut back on less valuable uses. People try to move oil from places where it is plentiful (and cheap) to places where it is scarce (and dear). Others begin to spend more resources and effort on finding new supplies or inventing substitutes. These are all exactly the things any sensible governor would do in the case of a shortage. But instead, cynical pols (notably Nixon) said, “Oh, horrible, the price of oil is too high,” and instituted price controls, anesthetizing the pain of overuse, choking the incentive to create new supplies, and causing an energy crisis where none existed before.
It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong. —Thomas Sowell
The only major writer who was close to the mark was Heinlein, who predicted a takeover of the US government and ruling class by a religion hostile to technology, and a hiatus in space travel.
Over the past 50 years, the planning of cities has been taken over by anti-technological ideologues, and their management by political machines interested far more in retaining their grasp on power than in the welfare of their citizens.
Liquid ammonia contains more hydrogen per gallon than liquid hydrogen does!
Actual blown wing designs in practice get lift coefficients in the range of 5, but don’t use as much power—power is cheap in simulation!
cars are no longer designed to look like jets and rockets the way they were in the Fifties; on the highway, you want the aerodynamic forces pressing the car down on to the road instead of trying to make you lose contact!
As with the case of self-driving cars, the question isn’t when and whether the autopilot can be made perfectly reliable. It can’t. The question is when and whether it can be made more reliable than a human pilot.
Commercial airplanes have had steadily improving autopilots for decades, to the point where on the average flight the human pilot isn’t actually necessary.
There are about 20,000 airports in the US, of which roughly 5000 are open to the general public.
Only 500 or so offer commercial flights. In fact there are only about 6000 commercial airplanes.
you and your engine get breathless at about the same point).
many private planes got into the air. It is surprisingly antediluvian
primary reason that modern skyscrapers are built in interesting shapes, with twists, holes, anything except a simple rectangular parallelopiped. Yes, it does make the building look more interesting, but the main effect is to break up the buffeting vortex street generated by the simple regular shape, and significantly reduce dynamic wind loads.
London, where the cost of real estate pushes the merely affluent people so far to the periphery that it is only really practical to make friends along a single train line.
Just as with radiation or regulation, a moderate amount of other people is beneficial, but an overload is not.
With molecular sorting, isotopic separation, and nuclear processes, seawater contains as much energy per gallon as gasoline, mostly as deuterium, lithium, boron, and uranium.
Build more roads and you will get more traffic. The new traffic represents people now able to do things they they wanted to do but could not, before, afford the cost in time. Keep building roads until the total traffic does not increase when you add a new one.
there are 100,000 airliner flights every day worldwide.
There is plenty of room and resources for hundreds of billions of very wealthy humans without using the Earth at all—we can afford to set Earth aside as a natural preserve or managed park or whatever combination we like.
Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won’t just take us. It’ll take Marilyn Monroe, and Lao-Tzu, and Einstein, and Morobuto, and Buddy Holly, and Aristophanes, and all of this…all of this…was for nothing. Unless we go to the stars.
A dark age is not when you’ve forgotten how do something. It’s when you’ve forgotten that you could. —David Altrogge
all actual historical human empires have collapsed: two of them, the British and the Soviet, within my own lifetime.
Industrial regulation began in 1887 with the ICC, and continued in the early 20th century with a series of price control measures on railroad travel—the economic equivalent of applying a tourniquet to the patient’s neck. Then with the railroads on the edge of collapse in the face of the needs of WWI, President Wilson simply nationalized them.
Typical piston engines produce less than a horsepower per pound of engine weight. Gas turbines produce 2.8 at private airplane turboprop size and 5.8 in the GE90 airliner engine. Modern rare-earth electric motors are in the same ballpark. But a Drexler electric motor, as mentioned in chapter 4, would produce about 3 billion horsepower per pound.
Nuclear power densities and nanotech power needs are roughly matched, like chemical fuels and steel machines.
There are something like 4 billion tons of uranium dissolved in the Earth’s oceans. That works out to be over 100 quadrillion watt-years of energy, enough to supply the current American 10 kW level of power to 10 billion people for 10,000 years.
We could put the entire world back on the Henry Adams Curve and the only environmental impact would be to make the oceans imperceptibly less radioactive
The oceans contain 4 billion tons of dissolved uranium at any given time, but ocean floor rocks contain 100 trillion tons, deposited from the water over geological time.
The oceans contain 4 billion tons of dissolved uranium at any given time, but ocean floor rocks contain 100 trillion tons, deposited from the water over geological time. If we took out enough to lower the concentration, it would simply start leaching back out of the rocks to maintain the equilibrium.
One of the major technological revolutions going on right now spells the nearing end of humanity’s first major world-changing technology: agriculture. Currently it looks like this: build a big warehouse-sized building. Inside, it looks something like a Walmart, but with the shelves going all the way up to the ceiling. Everything on each shelf is a growing lettuce, lit by special LEDs on the shelf above. The LEDs emit only the frequencies used by chlorophyll, so they are an apparently whimsical purple.
Something like 80% of the land under cultivation in the US produces feed, mostly corn, soybeans, and hay. A much greater chunk of land goes to direct grazing. Right now all of that land serves primarily as a very inefficient solar collector, gathering the energy necessary to drive the rearrangement of atoms from CO2 back into hamburgers.
For 60 years, General Atomic has been making and installing reactors for research that, unlike the big Navy-derived pressurized water reactors used for commercial power generation, are inherently safe—safe enough to be left in the hands of a drunken graduate student.
The TRIGA stands as a straightforward existence proof that safe reactors can be designed. How small could we make one? In a neutron-reflected, solution-based, moderated reaction, for example, the critical mass of plutonium-241 is 0.246 kg: just over half a pound, or 3/4 of a cubic inch. [246] Cf-251, as noted above, if you have the nuclear technology to produce it, comes in at less than an ounce. Given how dense it is, that’s just one third of a teaspoon.
I’m doing nothing but back-of-the-envelope rumination here, but it does seem likely that with nanotech level engineering, the basic physics would allow for a reactor that would fit in a closet and produce on the order of a megawatt.
Nobody in their right mind would build a reactor like this for power production today (except on a space probe); it would be like buying a million-dollar computer in the 1960s just to play solitaire. But after 50 years of Moore’s Law, we do the equivalent all the time and think nothing of it.
With the physical productivity of a nanotech industrial base, what would be a ridiculously expensive way of powering a household, or a vehicle, could be perfectly reasonable given the other benefits: put your home anywhere, including a mountaintop in the Canadian Rockies, or on the south Pacific, or indeed surfing the jet stream at 50,000 feet. No power lines, no oil or coal deliveries, no emissions.
A home reactor providing an average 100 kW, about right for the Henry Adams curve in the Jetson era, would produce about an ounce of fission products per year. Most existing reactors running at that kind of power level don’t even bother to remove it from the fuel assemblies.
In the Second Atomic Age, Litvenenko would have gotten a text from his left kidney telling him that it had collected 26.5 micrograms of Polonium-210, and what would he like to do with it?
Full atomic control means that we do not have to thermalize chemical potential energy to use it. This in turn means that you don’t have to strain the bounds of material science to accomodate ultra-hot temperatures in your engine. It also means you get three or four times the usable energy from a given quantity of fuel, instead of sacrificing it on the altar of thermodynamics.
they might have millions of tiny blades interacting with the air in regimes small enough that sound and turbulence are avoided.
the hydrogen plasma is compressed so much that one gallon of it weighs 1200 pounds. (Under Earthly conditions, 1200 pounds of hydrogen would fill a balloon big enough to lift 7 tons.)
a volume of solar core equal to the displacement of your Subaru’s engine (and weighing 660 pounds) only produces half a watt of power.
the fission bomb used to ignite the thermonuclear reaction isn’t at 15 million degrees; it’s at 400 million degrees, so hot it’s not white-hot, or even UV-hot, but X-ray hot.
Trucks move about 10 billion tons of freight in the US each year, or 30 tons per American.
If we let machines put us out of work, it will be because of a failure of imagination and the will to make a better future! —Tim O’Reilly
The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom. —Isaac Asimov
One of the reasons that we have stumbled moving from Level 4 of wealthiness to Level 5, is that we don’t have a clear idea of the advantages it could bring us.
Employees steal about $50 billion from American businesses each year, causing about a third of business bankruptcies
you can suspend a live mouse in a 17-tesla magnetic field, as the field interacts with the diamagnetic properties of the water in the mouse’s cells. Similarly, you can attract liquid oxygen to a magnet because it is paramagnetic. You could in theory cause an increase in pressure in the air with a field in the hundreds of tesla range, although it would wreak havoc on pretty much anything else. In the meantime, of course, we can suspend trains with magnetic fields we can generate and control now, though their altitudes are measured in millimeters. We don’t know a way to levitate a car using magnetic forces at the altitudes of interest to us, but we certainly
you can suspend a live mouse in a 17-tesla magnetic field, as the field interacts with the diamagnetic properties of the water in the mouse’s cells.
How likely is any of this to be real? I would have to put it down in the low single-digit percents—but that does not mean we shouldn’t be pursuing it. It means we should be pursuing hundreds of things like it. Space Pier
How likely is any of this to be real? I would have to put it down in the low single-digit percents—but that does not mean we shouldn’t be pursuing it. It means we should be pursuing hundreds of things like it.
The energy cost of sending a 10-tonne payload to the top of the tower by elevator is about 10 GJ (2778 kWh or $138.89 worth of electricity at 5 cents per kWh), which amounts to 1.4 cents per kg.
In still air on a clear, sunshiny day, a cornfield depletes all the CO2 in the ambient air in 5 minutes flat.
you would have decoupled the Earth’s temperature from the atmosphere’s CO2 content. There is no reason to believe that the optimal levels of the two correspond
A hurricane is a self-organized heat engine running on sea-surface heat.
the accidental impact on climate of current (fossil fuel) technology is at least three orders of magnitude smaller than the intentional impact of a mature nanotechnology.
Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these. —Ovid
The one invariant in futurism before roughly 1980 was that predictions of social change overestimated, and of technological change underestimated, what actually happened.
Bridge building had peaked in the 1960s, and traffic congestion now is 5 times as bad as then.
Around 1980, developments in liability law destroyed the private aviation industry. Regulation exploded; a significant proportion of decisions in business went from being made by people who were forced to balance costs with benefits to being made by bureaucrats with no concern for costs.
We have let complacent nay-sayers metamorphose from pundits uttering “It can’t be done” predictions a century ago, into bureaucrats uttering “It won’t be done” prescriptions today.
Should the cultural pendulum swing back, should we lose our idiotic fear of energy and regain the Henry Adams curve, or should there arise elsewhere a culture that has the same innovative spirit that we had just a century ago, huge technological advances could happen almost overnight as experimentation regains the lead, using all the “pent-up knowledge” of the past half-century as the overhang collapses, the dam breaks, and the technium surges into the forbidden valleys.
Technologies that provoke antipathy and promote discord, such as social networks, are the order of the day; technologies that empower everyone but require a background of mutual trust and cooperation, such as flying cars, are considered amusing anachronisms.
it would enable the productivity of the entire US military-industrial complex in an area the size of, say, Singapore. It’s available to anyone who has the sense to follow Feynman’s pathway and work in productive machinery instead of ivory-tower tiddley-winks. The amount of capital needed for a decent start is probably similar to a well-equipped dentist’s office.
The rapid Progress true Science now makes, occasions my Regretting sometimes that I was born so soon.
they assumed the future would be powered by nuclear energy, or more precisely by engines that would stand in the same relation to the “atomic piles” of the day that gas turbines do to medieval black-powder cannon.
The future isn’t what it used to be.
At a weighted average, the world could be 16 times as wealthy as it is now, if only our political systems were honest and competent. 15 times the world’s output is an enormous value, simply sitting there waiting to be reaped.
If not for the stagnation of nuclear physics, this would be an enormous overhang; it remains a substantial one. We clearly know enough to advance a couple of generations in power reactors in one jump.
Your ground car and your home’s power unit will be refueled upon annual maintenance.
As we slid from an optimistic world toward a pessimistic one, science fiction reflected the shift. From the technocratic utopia of Things to Come, to the future-as-now-but-improved background of Forbidden Planet, The Jetsons, and Star Trek, to the dystopias of modern SF in the vein of Terminator and Blade Runner, SF tracked our loss of faith in the future.
Dystopia used to be a fiction of resistance; it’s become a fiction of submission, the fiction of an untrusting, lonely, and sullen twenty-first century, the fiction of fake news and infowars, the fiction of helplessness and hopelessness. It cannot imagine a better future, and it doesn’t ask anyone to bother to make one. It nurses grievances and indulges resentments; it doesn’t call for courage; it finds that cowardice suffices. Its only admonition is: Despair more.
Perhaps the most salient misprediction of Golden Age SF was that it largely assumed that society would remain wise enough to allow technology to continue improving life.
Asimov stoutly maintained in his writings and talks that it was only science and technology that had ever improved human life, and that putting one’s faith in politicians, priests, and crusaders was a fool’s errand.
The Great Stagnation was the Qing Dynasty self-strangulation rerun at internet speed. The internet itself is the printing press of the information age; remember that the printing press was responsible not only for the rise of science but for centuries of religious wars as people escaped the yoke of the centralized information control of the medieval Church.
Remember that the medieval Papacy was just as venal, grasping, entrenched, and held sacred and infallible by a large segment of the people as is our monstrous bureaucracy today. And yet the Reformation happened. It is history that teaches us to hope.