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Post by littlerift on Mar 9, 2017 14:06:46 GMT
I'm not quite sure how the website is envisioning us preventing the high energy electrons and exotic matter from decaying before they become much use, and as we don't know what those exotic particles might be it's hard to know how they could be used. But, picotechnology itself aside, if we could manipulate electrons to that degree then it will almost certainly mean we have some form of quantum computing and an incredibly powerful ability to interact with atoms to the point where matter transmutation and similar processes will become far easier than today. We could restore the world's helium supplies and keep greenhouse gas levels in the perfect position, we could create new synthetic elements that would further our ability to produce fission and fusions, and we could completely clean any radioactive waste materials. Scarcity in terms of rare elements and fuels would become a thing of the past.
So, the technology itself is a bit of an unknown, but with what you would need to have in order to have picotechnology you could cure a vast number of the worlds problems.
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Post by subunit on Mar 9, 2017 18:49:37 GMT
Progressive telologies are unscientific and ahistorical. Diminishing returns is a thing. Read Nicholas Rescher's "Scientific Progress", go look at the amount of trouble people are having scaling down <10nm processes.
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Post by The Astronomer on Mar 10, 2017 1:17:26 GMT
Progressive telologies are unscientific and ahistorical. Diminishing returns is a thing. Read Nicholas Rescher's "Scientific Progress", go look at the amount of trouble people are having scaling down <10nm processes. I find this sounds like antiscience comment.
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Post by subunit on Mar 11, 2017 20:20:59 GMT
Progressive telologies are unscientific and ahistorical. Diminishing returns is a thing. Read Nicholas Rescher's "Scientific Progress", go look at the amount of trouble people are having scaling down <10nm processes. I find this sounds like antiscience comment.No, the application of empirical study to the scientific method and scientific progress itself is the essence of metascientific thought. Linear extrapolation from poorly-understood historical trends without any consideration of the biophysical or thermoeconomic limits on those processes is quasi-religious zealotry.
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Post by subunit on Mar 11, 2017 20:28:42 GMT
Honestly there's nothing more frustrating to me as a practicing scientist than the "I Fucking Love Science" crowd. If you love it, put the work in, get a grounding in the philosophy of science and an understanding of the material conditions that have permitted scientific progress to occur. Science isn't an idol you worship by posting Carl Sagan memes as new toys pop out at an exponentially increasing rate. Nature puts very real, very significant limits on scientific and engineering endeavours, and the failure to understand this is responsible for a lot of the naive scientism that passes for empirical thought about our likely futures these days.
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Post by Enderminion on Mar 11, 2017 20:37:13 GMT
Honestly there's nothing more frustrating to me as a practicing scientist than the "I Fucking Love Science" crowd. If you love it, put the work in, get a grounding in the philosophy of science and an understanding of the material conditions that have permitted scientific progress to occur. Science isn't an idol you worship by posting Carl Sagan memes as new toys pop out at an exponentially increasing rate. Nature puts very real, very significant limits on scientific and engineering endeavours, and the failure to understand this is responsible for a lot of the naive scientism that passes for empirical thought about our likely futures these days. let dreamers dream, they might give scientists money.
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Post by subunit on Mar 11, 2017 21:09:33 GMT
Honestly there's nothing more frustrating to me as a practicing scientist than the "I Fucking Love Science" crowd. If you love it, put the work in, get a grounding in the philosophy of science and an understanding of the material conditions that have permitted scientific progress to occur. Science isn't an idol you worship by posting Carl Sagan memes as new toys pop out at an exponentially increasing rate. Nature puts very real, very significant limits on scientific and engineering endeavours, and the failure to understand this is responsible for a lot of the naive scientism that passes for empirical thought about our likely futures these days. let dreamers dream, they might give scientists money. Part of my immense frustration with the ideology of progress is that, practically speaking, basic research gets less funding and less of the diminishing supply of our civilisation's spare joules as a result- if research isn't "translational", if it's not commercialisable within <arbitrary number uninformed by empirical data> years, it doesn't get funded. The expectation that scientific progress is tending toward some kind of singularity or techno-wonderland (a liquidated theological concept if there ever was one) is a cognitive frame that makes it literally impossible for decisionmakers to understand the actual reality of diminishing returns and exponentially increasing costs in maturing fields.
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Post by The Astronomer on Mar 11, 2017 23:51:06 GMT
Would be fun to show our transparent mobile phones to the Romans. With their knowledge, they'd think it's utterly impossible.
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Post by thorneel on Mar 12, 2017 0:00:06 GMT
Honestly there's nothing more frustrating to me as a practicing scientist than the "I Fucking Love Science" crowd. If you love it, put the work in, get a grounding in the philosophy of science and an understanding of the material conditions that have permitted scientific progress to occur. Science isn't an idol you worship by posting Carl Sagan memes as new toys pop out at an exponentially increasing rate. Nature puts very real, very significant limits on scientific and engineering endeavours, and the failure to understand this is responsible for a lot of the naive scientism that passes for empirical thought about our likely futures these days.
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Post by subunit on Mar 13, 2017 6:28:05 GMT
Seriously though, if you're at all interested in futurology and you haven't read Rescher's "Scientific Progress", you owe it to yourself to do so. Rescher is a tremendous badass and one of the very few people who actually bothered to go and theoretically describe both philosophical and material limits on scientific development in a way that actually generates testable hypotheses. If more scifi authors/game creators/etc read his work, we'd have more genuinely good hard scifi and fewer boring delusions of technophile fantasists.
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Post by The Astronomer on Mar 13, 2017 6:32:15 GMT
Seriously though, if you're at all interested in futurology and you haven't read Rescher's "Scientific Progress", you owe it to yourself to do so. Rescher is a tremendous badass and one of the very few people who actually bothered to go and theoretically describe both philosophical and material limits on scientific development in a way that actually generates testable hypotheses. If more scifi authors/game creators/etc read his work, we'd have more genuinely good hard scifi and fewer boring delusions of technophile fantasists. Where can I find it?
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Post by thorneel on Mar 13, 2017 10:35:18 GMT
Seriously though, if you're at all interested in futurology and you haven't read Rescher's "Scientific Progress", you owe it to yourself to do so. Rescher is a tremendous badass and one of the very few people who actually bothered to go and theoretically describe both philosophical and material limits on scientific development in a way that actually generates testable hypotheses. If more scifi authors/game creators/etc read his work, we'd have more genuinely good hard scifi and fewer boring delusions of technophile fantasists. Where can I find it? Seconded. A quick online search gives a very interesting protrayal: http://www. iep.utm .edu/rescher/
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Post by subunit on Mar 13, 2017 16:49:58 GMT
Seriously though, if you're at all interested in futurology and you haven't read Rescher's "Scientific Progress", you owe it to yourself to do so. Rescher is a tremendous badass and one of the very few people who actually bothered to go and theoretically describe both philosophical and material limits on scientific development in a way that actually generates testable hypotheses. If more scifi authors/game creators/etc read his work, we'd have more genuinely good hard scifi and fewer boring delusions of technophile fantasists. Where can I find it? The library if you don't want to pay for it, but you can get a used copy on amazon for ~$10. It's an older book but the basic dynamics Rescher describes haven't really changed in the 40 years since he wrote it, so it's still in print if you want a new copy, I think.
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Post by srbrant on Jun 2, 2017 22:58:49 GMT
In my story's universe, most of the Human and Transhuman factions have a strict prohibition on any robots smaller than a starving deer tick. So there may need to be a workaround.
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