Books will be around for a while yet..

Apart from that, I imagine we'll get some sort of high capacity medium that can store data indefinitely for extraordinarily important data, which probably won't be available to ordinary people...

Every technological singularity leaves us with no visibility of how the economy would look on the other side.

A postman being disrupted in the nineties by e-mail would hardly be able to understand the concept of a social media manager. For a lot of functions the internet represented a singularity in it self.

Much as a 6 yo British coal miner couldn't envisage a nuclear power plant operator, we don't have the visibility to see what lies on the other side of the robotics/AI singularity. It might very well be shit, it might be heaven, we simply just can't tell (that's why such an event got the name singularity in the first place).

>Robots and AI tend to increase unemployment. High-level estimates say that AI and automation could affect or eliminate one-quarter of United States jobs.

The combine harvester (the industrialisation of agriculture) eliminated 90-95% of jobs, the sowing machine and standardisation of parts killed off the rest.

We somehow managed anyway.

The last place I worked, a team of 8 process operators had replaced several hundreds if not thousands of workers (producing about 1000 tons of animal feed a day).

>If for example you were able to create a wormhole that connects a point in Earth at sea level to a point above Earth let's say 1 kilometer --- you'd be able to drop an object on the wormhole at sea level, have it appear 1 kilometer above earth, have it drop 1 kilometer and by the time it reaches the ground it'll have gain kinetic energy more than the energy you used to push it through the wormhole.

You'd have air moving towards lower pressure area. Maybe move the wormhole a few km higher and install a wind turbine at the opening for infinite energy.

>Your molten salt reactor still ends up as a puddle of radioactive ooze on the ground if someone blows it up

It does solidify tho. But maybe an easily controlled solid doesn't sound as scary?

>and your pebble bed reactor turns into radioactive grapeshot if someone lobs a bunker-busting bomb right through your containment dome.

That's inventive if nothing else.

>As a species we are far too interconnected at this point for China to have any real unilateral ambitions without cooperation with the rest.

China got excluded from any and all collaboration with western space agencies. If they want anything in the sector, they need to go it alone.

>As a species we are quickly approaching the point where we either do the same predictable shit of world wars, greed , and control… or we learn how to cooperate enough to become an interplanetary species before we finally extinguish ourselves on this planet.

I agree. But sadly I really really doubt collaboration will win out.

>Without a microprocessor supply chain all of Xi’s galactic ambitions are in lockdown.

What part(s) of space exploration needs sub 7nm chips?

>Life comes at you fast. It comes at your exponentially faster in space.

While that indeed is a valid point, the Chinese approach seems a tad more agile than trying to get Congress aboard with changes in real time.

And since we are looking at France today. Have you seen the latest OECD growth estimates. Germany -0.3% and France +0,6%, 0.9% GDP difference and all of it attributed exclusively to energy availability.

That's a pretty massive one off cost you can throw on top of the bet on renewables.

So, since the eighties France has saved a "few" billion tons of CO2, has consistently lower CO2 emmisions today, has spent less establishing their carbon neutral capacity. But that is nullified due to one poor year where weather and covid delayed maintenance hit poorly?

Germany is restarting coal plants (and burning other nations forests) after investing a trillion in renewables. But the French energy system is the bad one?

>Also france is forcing a fixed price for electricity to the power stations, which is below production price. In turn they have to bail out the providers with tax money

How is that relevant? Do we want clean energy fast and cheap? Then French nuclear outclasses German renewables by a gigantic margin.

> In the end its more expensive and the rest of europe carries the cost of providing missing capacity.

EDf is bringing 30GW capacity online early 2023, as probably the only thing keeping Europe from ending in full blown Mad Max. If Germany hadn't shuttered 30GW of nuclear, we wouldn't have a problem at all...

>Are wind turbines dangerously radioactive for 200,000 years?

You don't even care about the massive environmental destruction your preferred energy source causes? You didn't even react to the staggering destruction a single turbine causes.

Is this a case of winning being more important than doing good?

Also, is nuclear waste dangerously radioactive for 200,000 years? No.

The thing with radioactivity is that the danger of it is pretty closely reversely correlated with the half life of the various isotopes. Stuff with a half life measured in seconds, days or months can really dose out some significant doses of ionising radiation, while stuff with half-lifes numbering in the tens of thousands of years is pretty harmless (from a radiological point of view).

>poison factories

Please elaborate.

>technologies that are actually green

A 13MW Haliade offshore wind turbine consists of 1 ton of neodymium, 63 tons of copper, 800 tons of glass fiber, 4000 tons of steel and 5000 tons of concrete.

The 63 tons of cobber alone requires breaking of approx 50.000 tons of ore.

The neodymium is such a hazzle to extract that practically only China has environmental laws lax enough to allow it. Leaving massive lakes of toxic and radioactive sludge.

The environmental footprint of your "clean" energy is completely of the scale.

>Lower cost saves more carbon per dollar. Faster deployment saves more carbon per year. Nuclear power costs about 5 times more than onshore wind power per kWh.

https://app.electricitymaps.com/map

Reality seem to disagree with your position. Rather fiercely even.

France decarbonised their electricity supply faster and cheaper than Germany. And with much much better results.

>average 23 times the emissions per unit electricity generated.

That's just a straight up lie. Where did you get that from? (Genuinely curious)

You don't think the energy situation across Europe would have been a tad lighter if Germany still had its full fleet of NPPs?