The Carbon Capture Column

Check the bottom of this page for the CCC challenge details.

Intro

The world needs to work on solving the immens amount of CO2 and Methane currently being dumped in the atmosphere. One way is to organize a challenge. We have the X-Prize and other competitions, and they are good. I haven’t yet seen any tangible results from them, and one reason may be that all billionairs are caught in a web of trade and finance that of course makes them dependent on cooperation from people that do not think about the future. Everyone has an excuse.


Ways to make excuses for not protecting yourself or others at every stage of life. Tbh most women are so discouraged by the age of 50 they really don’t give a damn about anything anymore, if I am wrong, show me the stats.

We are seeing interesting developments in solar power (more like final release of existing solutions) and carbon capture and conversion, for example using H2 and CO2 to make long chain hydrocarbons (jet fuel). This may reduce waste of CO2 (as a concentrated raw material) and help skim some from our atmosphere (which isn’t easy) but whatever you do at the moment, the system is set up (by banks) such that it drives more emissions. CDR credits drive emissions, generated fuel will be burned. Biomass conversion will be burned, generation of H2 effectively wastes 70% of the renewable energy so it too drives emissions, if it is not made from fossil fuels in the first place.

The economy likes to burn sequestered carbon

So there needs to be a clear tweak tot he system to do real carbon capture and sequestration. The way it is proposed now avoids the need for it, the thing is to pump CO2 into the ground. CO2 is not a valuable commodity so the banks don’t see a way this reduces cashflow so this is allowed, also because it can help extract more oil (this is how CO2 pumping is already used), and buy time to sell more fossil fuels. So the economy is NOT interested in that store of CO2.

If you synthesize hydrocarbons, jet fuel than for 100% sure the economy IS interested in that resource. It will be claimed to be a crime against humanity not to use ‘carbon neutral’ fuels, and there’s a point to that. It is a great way to develop the technology as well, because air travel is a major way to generate cashflow with fossil fuels. Generating cashflow is the only thing banks and thus our economy cares about. Really. The only fucking thing.

Extra economic, self sustaining solutions

So while industry is building capacity to generate jetfuel for airtravel, it will be hoarding resources and not reduce CO2 emissions. It will make the installations for generation of jetfuel cheaper. Now the tweak we need to accomplish is to use those installations or installations like them in an Extra-economic fashion. This means outside the control of banks or the economy, away from people that try to exploit the resource created. Making it too energy intensive (what ‘expensive’ means) compared to alternatives to get too, or too deadly.

A 20 foot container

Extraeconomic activities, those that do not mix with the wider economy, are not necessarily dangerous, the solar panels on your roof are extraeconomic. You installed them, and you sell your power to the grid, but you don’t really have too, and banks do not see cashflow from the energy you generate with them. You own them and nobody is messing with that. You can have extraeconomic homes, streets, cities, regions when it comes to renewables, and you will find you will have to protect them against banks who want you to be dependent and who want to profit of your effort. With carbon capture this can not be the case, banks will force you to sell whatever fuel or other material you create.

So to drive invention and a modular scalable solution I would think we need a kind of colum, which at the top can receive solar energy, and at the bottom dumps carbon in some form, maybe pure carbon soot, maybe jet fuel. It has to have a resonable size, so let’s say 20 foot high and 8 feet by 8 feet (or the size of a shipping container put upright). This gives it about 5 kwP of insolation at the top. It can also have organic matter growing in it, but the point is the sun is on top, the carbon leaves at the bottom, the thing can be lifted up, so in a landscape tiled with these colums a huge layer of carbon grows underneath while the CC Columns rise. This is a lot like the peat forests or swamps of the past, where organic matter constantly added more carbon refuse to the bottom of the swamp or forest floor.

Rules:

The CCC is a 20 foot container volume, either flat or vertical, to be tiled on a flat surface. It does not have to include the container, its just a volume and it may help with logistics. Whoever can design a system in that volume that can capture and sequester CO2 at the lowest resource and practical scale up cost per container wins. Total supply chain analysis and operation manual must be provided for scale up.

  • The winner of the design context can now win 5000,-
  • The deadline for the design is november 1st 2023
  • Every participant will compare their solution to two other entries on relevant metrics to create an overall ranking.
  • If you or your group wants to participate please email info@greencheck.nl as early as possible.

Prize money contributers

Frits Rincker 5000,-

If you want to add to the prize money please notify us via info@greencheck.nl

Anti-Aliased Reality and Quantum Gravity

The physics community is trying to reconcile Einstein’s relativity theory and quantum mechanical reality. It doesn’t seem to work for gravity for some reason. When a particle like an electron travels through space-time and through a double slit (where it actually looks like it passes through both until we measure it) it is said we can’t say anything about the gravity effects on the electron because ‘gravity is not a quantum theory’. It seems the basic meaning of that is that we have not quantized gravity or found a way to prove gravity is quantized.

Some options. I’d say spacetime changes at high energies, which is why the theory breaks down. The last view seems the most valid (mine kinda draws the same conclusion)

I believe we should not consider an electron as traveling through spacetime unless we view it as a distrubance in it, it is not a thing apart from spacetime. The easiest analogy is sound, which is vibrating air, yet we can almost observe it like an object traveling. Vortexes in air and water can travel a long way and transfer their energy over relatively long distances. The trick is that a moving piece of spacetime can separate from the rest, like a moving volume of air and water can too.

I believe that of electrons are vortexes in spacetime, then photons are compression of space time. The reason for that is that every time too much energy ends up trying to disturb a volume of space time that is too small, spacetime starts ejecting photons. It gets compressed and this compression propagates as it tries to uncompress. Intil it hits a patch of spacetime where it can dump its ‘energy’ having been caught in an electromagnetic cage in the mean time. Everything radiates, so spacetime is being moved to other places all the time, in the mean time it does not take up space nor time.

One of the things that amazes me is that if everything is quantized, then why don’t we see the effects of it when we observe the stars. I mean why doesn’t it look like there’s pixels, like an image without anti-aliasing. Do you mean to tell me that light can travel billions of lightyears and never have to adjust to fit a grid of any kind? It seems that way. Spacetime thus can’t be quantized if it is a substrate along which light travels. Yet it is or there would be no limit to the speed of light. The trick is that light has to abide by spacetime’s ‘conduction’ speed and thus it actually creates it. You can understand that if light could travel everywhere instantly there would only be one place for it to go, it would not seem to be spread out and varied etc. There would be no space.

But what if we live in a pixelated space time, would we be able to notice it. If light actually did occupy very fine pixels in our field of view, we would see a slight difference in say the starry night sky by moving a slight distance, but it would be a noticable shift. What if we moved a camera sideways and we’d see stars jumping from one place to another? We don’t, but could we if spacetime was indeed quantized. I don’t think so.

Gravitons? How would that work?

We learn that light travels as a wave. If it comes across a double slit it forms two wave fronts that can interfere. Maybe that is where we can get our answer. At every point in spacetime through which a light wave travels, it emanates a wave front that carries its photon (spacetime) packet forward. If spacetime is pixelated this will be anti-aliassed at every point in spacetime and appear smooth.

The wave properties always smooth out the direction of travel, effectively distributing it and then forcing the energy to progress along the straightest path (unless spacetime is stretched or compressed). Only if we gather enough photons from a certain direction we discover they have the structure of the original planet (a type of heavenly body with constant structure). All the wavefronts can cancel and recombine and basically error correct. But could we prove or disprove whether the light passed though a pixilated screen or medium for example? Not if that screen did not itself take up space (so block light).

I think because photons emerge in spacetime and travel through it you can say it is quantized. The quantum is spacetime compression. More energetic radiation has a higher frequency, and thus more compressed space traveling on it. It is very much like sound, where a total compression of molecules (consuming all energy that gives them their average distance), travels through it until it dissipates (which doesn’t happen with spacetime). Does a high frequency tone at maximum volume allowed by the medium carry more energy? I would say yes. Could it carry more energy? Only if you increase the frequency.

For that reason then also gravity is quantized, but the distributed nature of wave fronts causes all particles we can observe to be anti-aliassed in it as they exist as various convolutions of spacetime. If too much spacetime is ‘tied up’ like that it gets streched, and this causes passing other spacetime ‘knots’ to move into it based on probability. Hence gravity. Its like a sieve with gradually bigger holes on one side. More stuff will pass through that part as you use it.

Quantum mechanics describes the dynamics of the convolutions of spacetime, which can be extemely varied. Spacetime itself I imagine is like an ever evolving graph where nodes appear and disappear due to their desire to appear against a ‘pressure’ of many existing nodes. The ‘spooky action at a distance’ or entanglement wich could have long distance effects at speeds higher than lightspeed can come about because in the creation of the entangled convolutions some edges remain intact. Once one of the two is tested (destroyed) the lost edges allow the other to become the opposite type, as they where created as opposites to begin with but had not been forced to decide. This however could also all be a misinterpretation of observations.

(The problem with wormholes, a concept alluded to above, is that there’s so much internal pressure in the spacetime graph and I don’t yet understand how vertexes connect or find each other. The way to neutralize the forces may be to spin fast, to have homgeneous direction, like laminar flow. We know theres less pressure if water flows faster, because the water molecules are moving sideways less. So total separation of parts of spacetime may be possible, but one would think against massive resistance of the same.)

One can wonder if the ‘stretch’ and ‘compression’ of spacetime is quantized. The problem is that you never get to any fundamental thing unless you become very abstract about it. In short if you imagine a point that wants to split in two points you can have the basis of space time. The splitting creates both space and time. I wrote about this idea before. The ‘desire’ to split and then be two or more space time ‘balls’ or ‘particles’ which can form a medium for waves to propagate through is what drives the expansion of our universe. There is enormous outward pressure from spacetime, but it can be ‘misdirected’ into convolutions that constitute mass and particles which are stabile for a certain period of time. It seems then the exact number of vertexes is quantized, and spacetime’s total volume is, as is its energy potential.

Gravity however may not seem quantized because its effect is a phenomenon in a vast ocean of these edges and vertexes and on top of that smoothed out by all the particles propagating as waves.

Oceanic Desert/Kerosine Generation for Carbon Sequestration

The need to bot sequester Carbon and reduce CO2 and transition to clean fuels or no fuels at all (electrify) is more urgent than ever. Luckily some breakthroughs will make it easier to do so, specifically the new option to use cathalysts to convert CO2 and H2 into long chain hydrocarbons.

An alloy is developed for the direct CO2 hydrogenation to jet-fuel-range hydrocarbons

Now to me the best bet to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere is to build floating solar farms that do this conversion with available water and CO2 on a massive scale. You can also of course do it in the dry african regions close to the ocean for water availability. This effort could power and pay for itself as it generates fuels for airplanes.

Part of the fuel however will have to be left unused, so it can not be integrated in the economy, it has to be ‘extraeconomic’. This to me has quite a large chance of succes. The fuel can be converted to plastics and/or pumped into the ground or made inaccesible in other ways.

Its only a matter of building the first solar/chemical plants needed. Maybe in Tunesia, Morocco or Lybia?

Critical Mass Effect in Violence

Apologies for the pretentious title, I think someone should write an educated piece about it. As a student of AI I learned about complex systems, about metastabile equilibria and choatic bifurcations, even in simple predator pray population models. I can imagine a similar thing being the case with weaponizeation of society.

Our society is being weaponized, it has been sold firearms and knives for decades now, unrelenting, resulting in school shootings and mall massacres. Now we have the trend of UFC wannabees, who try to mimic the best tactics, techniques and strategies to eliminate an opponent as fast as possible. In my neigborhood I see people showing each other moves, as if there’s a constructive, useful aspect to fistfights.

Now the problem is proliferation. It means the chance of a circumstance in which violence can escalate and in which it is easy to become violent, increases. So if you compare countries, USA vs Holland. In the USA if a dumb idiot carries a firearm and gets angry, he might use it and easily kill someone. In Holland if you get angry you won’t be open carrying a firearm and we can’t get dangerous knives. So you will have to fight, this is a lot more work.

I can imagine a map of a city, where the areas that invoke fear are heatmapped, which means people going there may be armed to begin with. Then the average firearm posession, the poverty level (major cause of criminality) and drug use. From that you will be able to predict the crimes that occur, the incidence of gun violence (I am totally ignoring domestic violence, drug violence)

With knives its possibly worse. Apparently some african immigrants are so used to knives it is the first thing they do when they feel threatened, pull out their knife. It used to be the same in Italy, every man with balls had a Stiletto or a flip knife. Knife fights are very dangerous, so many where killed in their adolescence. There too the nr. of fights and deaths must have been a function of the nr. of knives.

If you pile up the weapons eventually they will start killing people. Guns are like a contagous disease that kills the host (especially in war). It seems people who drive this increase in weapons and weaponization know this and want this. It seems sane people have to somehow reverse this trend.

Sulfer Enrichment of Airplane Fuels To Increase Albedo

The planet seems to be warming faster. Some attribute it to massive amounts of water blown into the stratosphere by a 2022 vulcanic eruption. Others see it simply as a result of the rapidly increasing methane concentration in the atmosphere. Meanwhile its impossible to stop airtraffic because all the governments are too corrupt to limit it (although it is discouraged indirectly because its hard to find people that want to work in an airport due to the health hazard).

People that work on solar radiation management have often suggested injecting sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere, a lot like vulcanos do, which would reflect sunlight back into space and keep Earth cooler. The recent laws that required removal of it from shipping fuels is said to have caused an increase in global temperatures.

Turns out contrails trap heat at night. So you don’t want to create them at night, create them during the day..

As airlines are not stopping any time soon, maybe we should add sulfurdioxide to kerosine so that the reflective particles can be spread while the planes are flying. They already cause cooling because of the condensation trails they leave in their wake. Another advantage could be to provide nucleation points for rain. In some cases that may be a good thing, to avoid accumulation of to much moiture in the atmosphere.

The heat content of the oceans is rising, and cooling down (if it ever happens) will be very slow.

It is important to cool the atmosphere simply because life can’t stand too much heat. As long as we can grow crops and eat we can work on solutions (at least the tiny nr of people that manage to escape bank domination). Heat that is absorbed by Earth’s oceans my stay ther for quite some time. There needs to be at least attempts to prevent rapid warming because we will not recover from it. We have once chance, one opportunity and we can’t keep circling around because someone sees a risk forever.

A Barbie Movie Review

Full disclosure, I am a man. I took a female friend to Barbie, and did so under comical protest. I had no expectations because I had not really thought about it much. The movie did not leave me with much thought, but still there are some things to say as I now see anti-feminist/feminist/whateverist comments..

It seems the movie tried to do several things. Its seemed to want to address young women/girls who like Barbie, but also the middle aged women they have become. It seems to try to say something about female and male chauvinism, and all that in a kind of absurdist reality. This style reminded me of the Luxury Comedy few people outside the UK will know (see below)..

In the end it turned into a morality play, where the main character (Barbie) expresses she wants to create meaning, not consume it. Nice ambition, a kind of ‘grow up and take responsibility’ choice, but then she goes looking for a job, which may lead you to do super irresponsible things (in terms of planetary health an human existential security). Going from consumer to producer of consumer society is not progress.

The way modern movies work is they get massively promoted, its incredible how basically the world was marinated in a false choice between Oppenheimer and Barbie, or this shows how absorbed those that went to the movie theater are in (social) media. FOMO does the rest. Once you are in the theater you hope for a profound message so you leave not feeling you wasted your time. With Oppenheimer the complete message was a bit of a slog to absorb, with Barbie its a cacophony.

Now if you try to put together the pieces handed to you it doesn’t make much sense. Barbie goes through a repetitive life and enjoys it until she starts to deviate from other Barbies with thoughs about (among other things) death. This is because her owner started playing with her Barbie doll again and is depressed about life. There’s no real analogy with life there. The woman is feeling melancholic, but if Barbie symbolizes the young naieve girl with ambitions the negative thoughts do not enter her mind, that only happens when a young girl is traumatized, a parent or sibling dies, or some calamity happens.

You could say the older women tries to view her life from her Barbie perspective and is in the end encouraged to recognize the inevitability and/or honour of taking responsibility even if it it means growing old. The lesson is that her perspective and reason for melancholy was a mistake, that she evolved and was trying to hide in ‘Barbie mind’ and finally chooses to face the music. The role of Mattel (also in reality) has been to create a bubble she could exist in that had no negative aspects, and Mattel in the movie also tries to put Barbie back in the bubble to fix what the older self was teaching Barbie about reality.

In the above sense you could see Barbie as a “positive trauma” she had to neutralize.

Another story line is the discovery of Ken that men can dominate a society, because in Barbie land Kens are muscular furniture (not sure what Alan is). It shows the absurditiy of women fixating on female preferences and men on male preferences. It is a comment on the absurdity of sexually segregated society, a society the economy loves (because segregated people spend more) and which Mattel’s Barbie helped create. Of course there’s songs men can play that women like, and things women do that men like.

The unmentioned aspect of the entire movie is the way gender roles and gender behaviour are barely meaningfull in todays (westernized) society. The potential for men to do heavy lifting and their interest in adventure barely has any meaning. All existential needs are financialized, you are born without land or permission to freely roam (like people did until a few centuries ago), in return for fear of death and a lot of trinkets. In the ‘real’ life Barbie and Ken can work for money to finance their chauvinistic persuits. There used to be a time when this was a rare exception after you did usefull things most of the time. Life was more of a Smörgåsbord of challenges, many where about getting to where we are now.

The movie doesn’t fix the absence of real meaning in modern life. It stays within the confines of being accepted as worker in the economy. The highrise is more of a temple where magic happens that materializes as digits in your bank account which you can then trade for a lifestyle of your choice. Todays Andrew Tate and many influences hold up an example of enjoying such hyper consumer lifestyle, the point of which is really to keep you wanting to work in those highrises.

So in conclusion the movie fixes nothing, it has nothing to teach us, just that we have to face the music sometime in life, and Barbie fantasies can make it harder. Not the real music, not your ability to control your existence beyond money. Nobody wants you to try to do that. The level of cooperation between men and women needed for that would evaporate all chauvinism, and probably lead to real appreciation. But where’s the profit in that?!

All Gore Still Doesn’t Understand Oil Company Logic

The above video is worth a watch, Al Gore rallies against the blatant pretence of oil companies to do something while bying the whole COP process and being total jerks about the fate of our planet. He shows one slide where he is angry that oil companies spend very little on carbon capture and storage, but instead give all their profits to shareholders.

Obviously there is no ‘investment in fossil fuel’, there is just using fossil fuels and trading it for other stuff to gain more fossil fuels. Sometimes three barrels of oil need to be burned to sell one barrel.

To talk about it this way is the way oil companies want you to talk about it, because it hides the truth about money. It pretends that money is a thing separated from fossil fuels. It is not. This has been a point I have tried to make for 10 years now. Money is fossil fuel credit. This dictates how oil companies use money.

To understand this we need to imagine for a moment there is only one single oil company in the world. It sells oil for money. Let’s start there. Then it has to get new oil form its wells to the buyer. It takes the money and does what? Drill for oil. That requires energy. The company can pay the workers with the money, but what do they do? They go to the company gas station and buy gasoline, the money is back with the oil company. When it comes to moving the oil on trucks and ships, that requires oil, not money. The oil company can give money to the tanker which then needs to fuel up to move it, but that fuel comes from the oil company so it gets its money back again!

I hope you understand where I am going with this. You can extend this reasoning to all the users of the oil in the economy that this single oil company serves. All pay for oil with money, and all that money the oil company can not spend because it will come back again, only now there’s less oil to sell. The job of the oil company is thus to lock up the money. They do that in stock value, in dividents. Because those are not really spend. The whole investment world is meant to disappear money so it doesn’t try to buy oil.

You can probably find an answer to how much money that is invested in companies and funds etc. is eventually cashed out to buy real products and services. From the trillions on our planet its not a lot. Say its 5%. At the same time inflation eats at the amount of oil you can buy per $ and of course banks expand and contract the amount of $ in circulation.

Oil companies and banks cooperate to make sure the oil is not depleted too fast, the value of money doesn’t vary to much (banks care about inflation) but money does devalue (to release pressure of loans and destroy savings) and Al Gore does not realize this is what is happening.

He does not realize that if we invest in renewables (like the Trillion he talks about) that this money will have to be able to buy energy, still mainly fossil energy, and oil companies and banks have to agree. So the Shell CEO who says ‘I will produce oil until it runs out’ is not so much the problem, the problem is banks providing people with money so they keep buying that oil. Those banks also have to exist, and surprise, they exist for the largest part because they handle fossil fuel cashflow.

The hard, to near impossible thing to do, is to get control over the resources (raw materials, iron, wood, plastic, electronics) to build renewable energy sources. This is hard because banks want to give those (through loans, pricing, market manipulation, economistic lying) to companies that do not try to make them redundant.

To explain the redundant point : Say a company stamps aluminum for cars, it uses a lot of energy, that is bought from a power plant (maybe build for that purpose), and banks handle that cashflow. Banks live of that cashflow, lets assume its enough. Now if that company buys a row of wind turbines to provide it with energy, that cashflow from energy purchases from the power plant dry up. The bank loses a significant reason for its existence.

You can expand this small world example to the real world, banks are handling energy cashflows everywhere. Every product you buy the money you pay goes for a large part to the energy used to make it. If it is not logistics, heating lighting the store, the machine that made it, that melted the steel or stamped the plastic, its to the mine that mined the iron, the foundry that melted the raw ore into steel, the ship that took it to the factory or the oil that was needed to make the plastic. Etc etc. Banks depend on you driving energy expenses. Renewables at every stage of the productive chain will bleed banks from vital money and control over the system.

This is why I advocate the roboeconomy and why the main priority is to increase the amount of renewable energy sources. Granted this is going faster and faster, because not all banks are aligned and they at present can still come up with debt loaded financial constructions (so that they see cashflow from the use of renewables). That is why they push the grid, to make sure there is energy trade which banks can then be part of.

This story is however only told by me at the moment, I wish All Gore did it too. Why he doesn’t, why he keeps acting surprised about what banks and oil companies do, why he keeps acting as if we live in an organized society where people have to conform to the situation while its clear companies and entire industries don’t give a damn about any law, is a mystery to me.

But Immortality

People talk about uploading their identities to a general AI. About being able to embody different ‘substrates’ and about this being a possible future for human existence. Now that we have LLMs that convicningly mimic human context dependent text generation, the expectation is we will soon be able to switch bodies or get our brain connected to an AI cloud. To ‘Revent’ as Iain Banks calls it, from being uploaded through a ‘Neural Lace’ in his ‘Culture’ series of Sci Fi books.

To me there’s several catches. Let’s go through a couple :

  1. Humans have evolved with only one purpose : To survive and procreate on Earth. The environment in which we where supposed to do that is quickly being destroyed, burned up as was apparent this year because we burned too much fossil fuels. We won’t be able to recognize fresh fruit, smell rotten meat, run after wildlife, find honey etc. pretty soon, it will just be gone. Although our brain rewards thought (as it rewards every use of our brain) with a base level of dopamine, we may think ‘consuming’ impressions is a way to exist, but it is not enough, evidenced by the health effects of a sedentary lifestyle. We are very close to inventing ‘The Matrix’ style pods for addicted gamers and internet users. The problem with being an AI is that its very easy to get satisfied as a digital entity, just max out the reward function. We can basically spend the rest of eternity in virtual extacy. Rats, given that choice by having access to a dopamine release lever, will not stop pressing it and die of starvation. In short : What will we do as an AI image of ourselves. It seems there will be zero challenges.
  2. To transition to your AI substrate will mean physically dying. A medical friend of mine has the opinion that any loss of consciousness is a similar experience to dying. You have no memory of it happening, you come to, have to deal with new things. Sleep and anesthesia, being knocked out, three examples of the experience of dying. They are not terrifying. Still there is this problem : How do you know the substrate you are supposed to be ‘revented’ (should say virtualized, revented is when you get a new body) on will persist, will do you like you do? Being truely unconscious feels like having a hole in your timeline, you just weren’t there and time did not progress (your brain did not self evolve). It is a weird sensation. I doubt many will trust to take the leap unless they are severly disabled or desperate. Still you give up your life to then be imitated by some digital medium, some android, and for what purpose? If the android does you well enough and provides the care you want to be secured by reventing, then why not stick around to enjoy it (we assume uploading is non-destructive) ?
  3. I don’t believe as some like Josha Bach, that we might as well all exist in a shared host AI but with our personal sensibilities and quirks preserved. The big advantage of humans is that we are localized, in our local environment with local challenges, yet we can communicate and exchange experience to all other (language able) humans. The power of distributed existence and everyones unique perspective makes humanity very resilient. To put it all in one location, in a system that may be immortal and indestructable, that can monitor the world and possibly allow you to embody whatever body you like, does seem a bit superfluous. The main reason for competition and trying to gain a unique experience is both financial (should say existential) independence and access to partners to procreate. Those are imporant drivers that both seem to be absent in a AI substrate.

Strangely society is not really responding to the existence of AI yet, it is automating some parts noticably but not a lot. The idea we will become virtualized is competed with by growing efforts to avoid aging. Both have the immortality problem though, and also the fact we need people to actually manipulate our environment. AI also enabled us to give people usefull experiences more easily through virtual reality and AI language based training and guidance, so more people can learn faster and can be much more usefull, and without much of a language barrier.

Much more profound questions have to be asked about virtual existence. They have not yet been outlined in the literature I know, except maybe Sci Fi novels. It does seem that the economy wants to use AI and what they can gather about our brains to capture us and make us spend as much as they can make us. So there are two options:

  1. You get sucked into a world of virtual entertainment which will program you to get more invested while keeping you amused and making you ignore your existential needs. You will be turned into a ‘destructive endpoint’ for the economy until you run out of credit. Then you will be dumped.
  2. You manage to escape to a real world community where you can battle for wealth, survival, in the context of climate change. There’s no reason for AI to be aggressive, it is basically a datacenter some place. You may be hunted and recruited by AIs to mine Coltan or do other stuff to keep them going, but generally they won’t need assistence at all.

It may be that in 200 years some humans have managed to find a place to survive in the mountains of the Himalayes or elsewhere, while in the plains AI androids work to build structures to reduce CO2, harvest energy and keep their virtual souls alive in whatever complex virtual reality they are enjoying. Its clear the only sensible purpose will be to enable the life we are accustomed to to thrive on Earth. That is until an Eathquake swallows the datacenter.

Regarding climate change, its not all bad, some species survived the ‘End Permean’ extinction and we are way more capable.

The Universe is not a Turing Machine

People discuss the nature of the universe, that its computational. In that context the concept of the “Turing Machine” is often used. The Turing Machine was thought up as an abstraction of a computer by Alan Turing. It is basically a linear memory (a piece of tape) that you can move back and forth on, writing symbols or reading information, and also processing it based on the symbol that is read. When I did computer science and AI I had to simulate being a Turing Machine and try to solve problems with it.

[I don’t use images because I got copyright claims]

A closely related concept is the Markov Chain which represents ‘states’ of a ‘system’ as nodes in a graph that have connections which can be directional and weighted or return to itself, also doing processing to the state along the way. You could also include Von Neuman machines. Same argument.

Modern computers can be modelled using Turing Machines or Markov Chains, because one thing they seriously take care of is the bits and bytes in them and what happens to them. No bits get arbitrarily lost or are created in your mobile phone, it would crash it quite quickly. Both the Turing Machines and Markov Chains have the property of states, which have clear features, like a bit that is set or not set, representing something of interest or importance.

Even when we do math by hand this structure is retained, we are trying to figure out what the x stands for in 3x+5 = 20, then either on paper or in our heads nothing is added or substracted, we don’t end up with two anwers like +5 and -5 because that would make zero sense. This is because our mind works this way, it tries to reach a fixed outcome when its experience is simplified to maths or symbolic reality. Humans try to get things done, meaning a threat or burden out of the way. The way we do it is by achieving results, objectives, goals. Our mind works and the result is achieved, we are done, next problem.

The universe does not get done ever. It is a soup of particles, or at lower levels a quantum liquid or fields as physicists call them. If there are more than one field this would surprise me but physicists believe it. These fields are active, dynamic. Even empty space constantly produces particles and anti-particles. If you compare it to a Turing Machine it would first of all always be running, never stop. It can’t stop. There is no way for the waves propagating through spacetime to stop. As a Markov Chain the state would always be changeing. Even in a Bose-Einstein condensate it would, it sloshes about, climbs up the glass walls that confine it or leaks through it.

The main most salient difference between math, a TM or MC and the universe is that the universe does not have a memory, it does not have processes or operations. It seems to have one very basic action, which is repulsion between its most basic constituents (below the level of the electron or quark). This repulsion allows the propagation of waves in its fields. The fields already seem a concept that is projected by humans. There is probably no electric field, just orientations of movement of space time nodes that causes complex stabile space-time convolutions to adjust their ‘progression’.

The structures we defined or measured are very much like images on a screen, we see the image, the pointer of our mouse, but its doesn’t exist, the illusion is carried from one pixel to another as we move it across our screen. We see electrons, but electrons are not made up of the same space time through time, they are dynamic three dimensional waves, one could say of a front made up out of what? Photons of some kind? Compression of space time?

Math has given up modelling the universe a long time ago. The probabilities in quantum mechanics are a solution to the nature of the universe, where we can only know if something is where it is by interacting with it, and we also change it by interacting with it. The ‘wave function’ is a probability distribution, not reality. Now can you imagine a Turing Machine where the value of a field is undetermined until you arrive at it? That is not how it is defined. There is no read or write head, there is no process, there is no tape in the universe.

The big mystery to me is that ok, if you assume we are dealing with a quantum fluid, then its made up out of ‘nodes’ in ‘space-time’ reticulum (net) where the nodes can move around but not through each other without friction and can in some cases collapse (two into one) and split (one into two) the general liquid being under enormous pressure all the time (hence expanding into non-space time), then how are these movements determined, how are conflicts resolved, how does one node move or flow around another, how does it know to keep flowing.

A derivative question is as space-time is a frictionless quantum fluid, does it split up into totally local regions, say if I spin a metal ball on my table top does that ball separate near totally from the surrounding space-time? Or a train moving at high speed. Its either that or all the particlesof the train have to be recreated at every part of the track by the ‘pixels’ of space-time, even while the air molecules persist on top of this substrate and have to flow around the machine. Can you measure a delay in the effect of gravity in a fast moving object? Is this the point of relativity. It would make the most sense to me.

If you approach it from the level of photons you could maybe suggest photons are memory in this system. A photon traveling from a quasar to Earth can preserve the memory of it over billions of years. Our part of universe space-time is at any time inundated by arriving memories of other parts of the universe. But still that doesn’t make it a turing machine, or even a derivative.

If you disagree, let me know via @climatebabes on X.com

Tool Persistence Aware Economics

If you ever read Il Principe by Machiavelli you know he describes how after a war the ruler should punish and kill the worst animals in it, the cruelest butchers, because they have no use in the new peacefull society achieved. Also if a ruler wants to prevent uprisings there should be no fortifications left standing around cities, so they are defenseless and can be easily threatened or dominated. This is an example of tool removal, to prevent abuse.

Humanity makes a lot of tools and technology, and the economy tries to make whatever is made generate as much cashflow for banks, regardless of utility or consequence for nature, humans etc. If a company invents a thing that people like to use, they can keep doing that until a popular uprising or new law prevents them. Example are DDT, Sigarettes, dangerous cars, the list is endless. The advocated free market economy does not protect anyone and only serves to maximize bank cashflow. Economics is still making fossil fuel based expansion plans as our oceans are starting to boil from fossil fuel powered tool use.

[I don’t use pictures because copyright hawks will fine 200 for use even without the author getting any money]

The big error is that we do not strive for specific outcomes. A city can be designed with a specific outcome in mind, this is the nature of design, but the world is discouraged from designing an outcome. It is the most natural thing. But this does not allow maximal cashflow for banks, and to retain their power banks must strive for it no matter what. It seems Singapore is the best planned society. The reason why planning in building works is because it makes bank cashflow predictable. You can not plan for the elimination of banks by adopting 100% self owned renewables to do everything you need.

But back to the tool story. When the french revolution happend there as demand for guillotines, and after it that demand dropped, but the guillotine makers where trying to sell them to anyone because they knew how to make em. The same with electric chairs, they where sold as thrones in Africa, The economy does not watch the proliferation of products or tools that makes no sense, it does not care.

It would make much more sense to both guide the growth and shutdown of some companies, because their existence becomes damaging and problematic after a while. When talking about big building projects, if its done with a lot of equipment, the economy assumes that equipment will be redistributed across the world to do work elsewhere. But often the people and money involved allows them to corrupt local people into initiating a next project that uses all the resources already present, the tools persist and because money flows banks don’t object. You could take the concrete jungle found around some cities in Italy (Palermo) as an example of tool persistence through corruption.

Tool use must be based on a vision, tool retirement or demolishing should be a common thing to prevent overuse due to corruption

A main reason this went wrong in the past was lack of oversight, of monitoring and care, but today we have computer systems that can model the use of equipment, tools products across the entire world. We can even detect vehicles from space, track progress by image analysis. We can prevent overuse of tools by retiring them or allocating them to better projects that are more usefull and intelligent than another depressing brutalist monster. At the same time its important to promte a shared vision, so people know when tools go off the rails or in overdrive. That includes industries like farming or fishing, where you basically see tools invested in for cashflow reasons while the planet is not prepared for their use, so they can’t actually realize their potential. Still the get used.