Its typical for universities to redo things that have already been done to death. Sure the efficiency is a bit higher, but that’s not the point, Australia had solar thermal with storage 20 years ago, the world had it 40 to 100 years ago.
To say this stuff is new is an insult to public knowledge, but this is exactly the point. “The future” will be solar thermal with molten salt storage, only this type of installation was build and ran in Spain already 30 years ago or so. Several perfectly performing solar thermal installations have been demolished because why? Because you need to keep making fossil fuel sellers rich. The future is a great place to store great ideas, until someone like Elon Musk comes along and does it with his own cash (banks will not help you).
We look for links to an australian solar thermal project published about in 2012 that used NH3 to store heat, splitting it and recombining it, a great way to store energy. It used a similar or the same mirror concentrator as shown in the video. Molten salt storage is nothing new, in 2013 a big plant using it came on line in Spain. Watch out with news from universities, they may just be seeking attention..
The energy lanscape is changing rapidly. Driven by a desire to protect our planet the development of renewable sources is adding lareg quantities of energy generating capacity to the global economy. The potential is still underestimated enormously because it is compared to the current fossil supply, of which it is a small percentage. In reality thought our fossil resources represent only a fraction of the energy we could have available for production of wealth, about 1/2500th would be a reasonable estimate. This means that with renewables our global wealth can not double but become hundreds of times bigger.
Energy is power. Wars have been decided by the supply of energy whether it was food or fossil fuels. The governments of Iraq and Iran and others have been keenly aware of this, as was that of the USA, which basically sucked the oil out of Saudi Arabia and Egypt for decades. As happened with Ahmadinejad and Saddam Hussein, as is happening now with Putin, the control over energy translates to power which is wielded for the sake of the people of (in Putins case) Russia. To be more precise, Putin maintains a protective power structure around himself based on his control of the fossil resources of Russia, and russians are by the same (persuasive corrupting) power of the fossil resources recruited as his protectors. Its like the first guy that picks up the only sword : He will be the boss.
Putin has been inspired by quite a nationalist philosopher but he really didn’t need to be. Power is local because it requires communication and trust, and trust between humans (still) depends on their ability to come together. We will find that there are three scenarios to follow as we see more renewable energy sources come operational : 1. A global supressive regime will regulate and sell energy production around the globe (if we get to a phase where there are two or more that threaten to anihilate each other). 2. The globe will become a patchwork of small nations, small power realms, that agreed together to never let any of them become to powerfull. Those nations may be part of a larger entity for some purposes, but as all see that it is an eternal struggle to avoide the concentration of power (always justified by some wrong somewhere or a common enemy) this overaching entity will be very specific in its task. 3. AI becomes dominant and we become irrelevant 😉
For now it is not yet clear what will happen. The fact remains that there is a cost to domination, either you have to drive people crazy or pay them a lot to go out to some place and subdue other people. Its unnatural and an exceptional thing for humans to do. At the same time communities know they can increasingly take care of themselves with renewable energy, the skills and knowledge proliferate, filtering water with ionic membranes brings low cost (zero cost ultimatly) fresh water within reach, understanding of the relationship between vegetation and rain will make more land fertile. The people of every territory will come to understand they can control themselves, they don’t need to be controlled by anyone if they can produce their own food, warmth and products (through automation). Even at a lower leven of civilisation people can exist happily and without war, the important factors are food and shelter.
So we will likely see more nationalism, regionalism, isolationism relative to the current model. The current world economy floats very precariously on the open trade of oil, coal and gas, at least in the dominant countries. Its cooperation is for the good of the people, but ultimatly arbitrated by banks and credit institutions, the BIS and the fossil fuel companies. We see an alignment, earlier of bankers and government, now of fossil interest, military power and government (Rex Tillerson was Exxon CEO). We guess the US wants to be the dominater of option 1. above. It can become that because the powers to thwart opposing activity are now so well developed, nobody can escape death or destruction or even distraction or seduction from a force as powerfull as the US. Of course anyone that sees his region could be independent of such meddling by applying renewables will start working towards that goal.
As the cost of renewables and batteries drop and as manufacturing becomes more and more automated we may see a sudden fragmentation of the current governments, a Big Bang so to say where every region declares itself master of all its energy resources, fossil or renewable. You can be a guest, add your skills there, but you can not come in and take the energy to use it for your own purposes and trade somewhere else. Why would you? Generate your own! Renewables driving local energy will also create and enable local currencies (to allow them to apply the benefits of economic principles without outside influence on the value of the currency or ownership of assets) and together this will be the reason to split off, seceed, choose isolation.
On top of the above we have no incling of how the now unused territories will be invaded and populated through the use of renewables. That will be a true revolution in its own right. You don’t have to be waterless in the desert, landless at sea, all these things depend on power, energy which we are now finally getting under our control for good. This is why we think a patchwork will be the end result, there is room for everyone once you think beyond the restrictions of fossil fuel supply lines and markets..
We have written on intelligence here before, mainly because the author of this used to be a neuroscientist, wrorking to understand the effect of emotions on cognition. Having read all there was to read on the brain at the time, a clear notion of what goes on in our mind formed. This understanding I have yet to come across outside some academic papers. Also elaborated on here was the idea that keeping people on the wrong track, one not leading to AI, was a good thing, because AI would be like an unkown animal to us, suddenly appearing on the stage, with goals that could be harmfull to us. Although we are not close to this, once it happens, and once this AI achieves control over enough power to keep itself intact, we are in for a ride.
But humans are equally dangerous. A human being has evolved to be part of a rural farming or hunting community, not living to long or learning to much to attain 100% control over its survival or the environment. We have been competing against other species but geographical differences (like a desert or fertile flatland with few predators), language and cities have turned us into overwhelmingly superior beings. The attempt of life to prevail has fallen into a deep trough populated only by humans, with the humans to short sighted to aknowledge our dependence on other life calling the shots. Its always the boys that dream of soaring the skies like a fighter pilot that end up in jobs where they lay waste to so much other life, their dream of dominance was a distortion, a trauma, making them fit for jobs nobody should do.
But even if we don’t dream we can still be true to our nature, our existence as intelligent beings. There are a lot of threats to be met, and if we manage to free our minds from the pitfalls set by those that want to take advantage of us, we can deal with them and make our lives truely better. Emotions are important, but we don’t need to emphatize with every victim, especially when there is no real way we can help them. Worldly posessions are important, but the way we try to attain them, and the reason for which we think we should is often tied together like a moebius strip. The rich guy has a Ferrari, and to get a Ferrari you have to be rich, and you want the Ferrari because then you look rich, so what shit do you need to work through, how much of your moral fibre do you have to demolish to get rich? Wrong! Just build a fucking Ferrari! Stop looking at Ferraris. Its a fast car that is read and looks predatory..
People that own a Ferrari often just bought it because they had so much money. What they did was not try to look something, but try to achieve something. They didn’t try to make money, but they tried to understand what about what they did they could change to make it cheaper to do, while finding out how to seduce more people to want their product. Even an environmental dream can be achieved by this mindset, because it is about applying our intelligence to our situation so as to change it into what we believe is a better situation. The question is how do we do that?
To start of, we need to know what we want to achieve, and we have to choose at some point to fix that idea. It may not be optimal, but success is more imporant than what you achieve (rule nr. 1). Say you want to get your drivers license. It is not an odd thing, every young person wants to have one to experience freedom on the road. That is your goal. Humans are goal achievers, that is all we are. We have many goals, to maintain homeostasis, to drink, eat, have a warm environment, sex etc. Our entire existence is an attempt to satisfy as much of those goals at the same time. For this we are rewarded with experiencing freedom. The feeling of freedom comes about when our behaviour is conducive to our goals. If you achieve what you set out to achieve you will feel free, because you do not have to inhibit yourself because you think that will drive you away from your goal. Politicians know that what we fundamentally want is freedom, so they mention that to you and you fill it in with what would mean freedom to you. Money is another word for it, money however is not really freedom, because the people that manage and create it do not want you to be free of the need for money!
So you are young and you want to get your license to drive. The idea is that you go up for the exam and pass. You can think about that a lot, but that won’t help. The question you need to ask is how do you make that more likely to happen. Your attention for likelyhood frees you from failure, you know there is a chance you can fail, it is not important. It will not demotivate you. All you try to do is increase the chance of passing the test. This has to be the approach to all goals, goals after all are themselves chosen by a statistic process, one that has to do with your exposure to them, exposure to strategies to achieve them, your sensitivity to them as part of your life (liike you would not dream of building a nuclear reactor in your room, but some people in this world clearly build nuclear reactors). The goal has presented itself, it promised more freedom than the others you could try to achieve, and you started to fixate on it.
All the other stuff you are thinking is other goals, other pieces of a puzzle to increase the likely hood to increase their realization. You may have to identify the other goals and decide you will for a while not try to achieve those goals. “I want to be fit, so I will not drink for a month”. Of course alcohol directly releases the dopamine system to give you the illusion of freedom, so it is hacking your system. All the more reason to take it easy with that stuff. Choices are just what you make to make it easier to achieve your goals. They show that what ultimately programms us is our own behaviour. If we can make a decision to go outside for a walk or get a glass of milk, we are equally free to do so. We then tip the scale to one side or another by thinking of a good or bad consequence of the decision, and it is made. In fact our brain makes the decision some time before we know about it. To make sure you achieve your goals you should therefor create environmental factors that will help you make the right decisions. Internally that means thinking about what will make you succeed, externally removing factors that inspire you to fail, adding factors that help you succeed.
A plan is nothing but a fantasy of outcomes you think will get you to your goal. If you have to overcome clear obstacles you might as well just focus on them first. It is better to fill your brian with ideas you need right away, or you will be sensitive to all kinds of things not yet relevant. A plan also allows you to separate ideas and give yourself peace of mind. So if you want the license, you have to study for the theoretic exam, that means sitting still reading questions. Then you have to take lessons, pay attention, get the routine, build rapport with the instructor (its a racket in most countries). The final ok you get can be a humiliation because it is such an arbitrary thing, and you have to coach yourself around that. You may have to earn money, get a job, with all kinds of other things you need to do right. In the end you are let loose on the freeways and nobody will care until you really screw up (and someone is watching).
The art of intelligence is to insert choices and then make the choices where they have the largest probabilistic effect on the outcome you want to achieve. To break into routines is hard, and uncomfortable. You have to pull yourself out of a social rythm to study, work, do what you need. In the end there is the outcome, you have to know whether it is worth it. Choose one with the maximal benefit, which depends on what you can imagine. Of course it follows that if you foster your imagination (not by hagning in front of the TV but by reading and exploring) you will start to choose better goals.
Develop your ability to imagine your future, by reading and exploring
Choose outcomes that you can imagine yourself achieving
Try to map the intermediate outcomes, focus on the first few
Work to increase the likelyhood of success and reduce the likelyhood of failure
Insert decision points where you are not sure you are maximzally effective
Don’t stop
Clearly every human is different, can imagine different things, achieve different things, communicates better or worse, has physical qualities that differ. So not all humans can achieve the same goals. But it is possible to share a dream and work together towards a goal, where one decides to achieve one goal, and another some other goal, and both combined achieve both their dreams. We are often advised to be divided, to compete, to dominate, but this is because it makes us easier victims of those that want to take advantage of us. Our ‘hardware’ has evolved to be robust goal oriented i.e. intelligent beings. Use this talent. Most people’s dreams are compatible. Most people want peace and prosperity..
Short note on the universe. Some think (like Will Smith) that if you decide the universe will get out of your way. Maybe. Although the universe is local, we see traces of incredible remote events (through gravitational waves) here, where we would never ever notice on our natural level of perception. Someone at CERN just concluded the existence of ghosts has been disproved by them not showing up as noise in the super super sensitive measurements. People claiming consciousness has a quantum dynamic basis seem to forget that everything does. That idea is just as religious and useless an assertion as believing we are created by a god. Making a clear decisions however does reduce your distraction and attention wasted on things that weaken your resolve.
On Strong Will
The will to do something is the result of defeating self inhibition, either by understanding the circumstances or by reasoning about and imagining or ignoring obstacles. The will can be stronger if the goal is more important than other goals we care about. If we don’t care about much we can be very ‘stong willed’ but we will cause a lot of damage and unhappyness. The test is to require that something really improves for you on a daily basis. No progress means your will is too weak and you need to redistribute your care (care less about some things and more about others). Success builds willpower, it builds assertiveness, so therefore as stated above : Success is more important than what you achieve. Small steps with success are better than big ones without.
Great minds think alike, but some are more able to make those thoughts count than others. When your struggle is to reconcile your mortal existence and weird drives and urges with the affordances of reality, you end up scanning the fringes of what you can understand. As there is only one reality, people that do so will end up expriencing and thus thinking similar things. That may be what happend or some things Elon Musk says have been inspired by what he read here.
Why is it important that Elon Musk has read this blog? It isn’t really, or mabey it can be considered an honour. He and the writer of this will probably never meet, but he has our full support, and sometimes we worry he does not fully understand topics yet, like AI (We wrote about ARGO) or what happens to people when they have everything they need (The Roboeconomy). We even explained why it is unlikely we live in a simulation. He should read our stuff on Extraeconomics, which deals with self sufficient zones outside the global economy, run on renewables and generating natural resouces.
Our society destroys more resources than it creates. That is not a survivable situation
His latest question is how to give meaning to people’s lives as they come to enjoy the full effect of technology, not the current diet which is still restricted by fossil industry and carboncredit compatibility. Meaning and purpose in life is a struggle for all of us. Usually we are by our need to survive forced into a behavioural pattern that uses up most of our attention yet has the right dose of novelty, which keeps us well fed and warm. In that case we are usually happy. But if automation reduces our existential struggle we may become aware of our idleness and become bored and possibly depressed.
The economy makes things unnecessarily scarce, for example a beach gets fenced off to make money off it, because of and resulting in an increase in economic pressure.
These things are all relative. When society didn’t move as fast as today and most people’s experiences where limited we did not all kill ourselves. We had simple jobs and simple lives, and survived. A future in which the need to work is reduced for all will probably simply lower our activity level and increase our attention to our surroundings. One thing is certain : We won’t be suffering. We will be free, live in clean comfortable houses, be able to do more than we ever could. All because of solar, wind, and technology.
Cute animation nonetheless showing how a species that suddenly becomes more intelligent can upset the ecosystem..
A more to the bone analysis of humanities predicament is to say that we’ve won. Our species has won the struggle for survival. We can live as long as we like, even while ignoring AI, not leaving it to some interpretation of what existence is. A person will expres his/her needs and desires, will act out or indicate the changes needed to achieve those things. If it is about creating a family it will turn the drive to love in word and actions. A person during his/her life records the possible interactions amongst human beings, what works to achieve a goal and what doesn’t, how the lifeless universe has behaved as his/her survival happened. Every life story is like some pages of a vast instruction manual we never get when we are born.
A life can be economically exploited by defining it’s story, instructing its ambtions, something routinely done by advertisements
Today our minds (in the developed countries) don’t need to struggle to much anymore. our intelligence becomes less necessary, we need less information. Our brain’s cortex is hungry for the details of the real world, so it still drives us to absorb massive amounts of new impressions every day, which have to be novel to trigger us to learn, which brings the dopamine release that we crave. We crave freedom, and the more economic restriction that is put on us, the more we crave our intellectual freedom, or fantasy. But really for most it is about massaging the old brain into accepting a lack of freedom.
Human utility is an external property, a human being has evolved to survive, not to be useful to others. People that demand other humans are usefull in an environment where resources are scarce will end up wanting to kill those they deem useless (been there). The answer to this is to make resources abundant, and control population growth.
A true deconstruction of a person is that it is an organism with the ability to rubustly and autonously orient towards goal states, and this is what we do from the moment we are born to the moment we die. Even the ability to delude ourselves is part of the more general ability to achieve goals. They are always our own goals, as we can only strive for something we can imagine. It is logical that when we don’t succeed we get depressed, which is a mental state in which we absorb more of our reality, we see it as it is, so as we enrich our ability to imagine.
A human being is an autonomous robust goal orienting organism, it has evolved to survive long enough to procreate. Beyond this it has the inspiration to help other living organisms do likewise.
We are by our drive to procreate and our need for self preservation (thus having developed our specific sensibilities and tastes) forced to preoccupy a large part of our time reconciling ourselves or responding to our physical appearance. It is what we know best about most people we see. Behavior is second, we understand others behavior through imitation (our brain fires up like we perform the act we try to understand), and then we need to classify whatever we have observed as something we want repeat or prevent as our own. We may want to act it out as an example to inspire or warn the ones we love. Storytelling has the same function. These things occupy our lives because they are what our lives depend on, how we al survive, become and stay competent to do so.
The present dillema is this : Imagine there is a machine that makes everyone anyone needs, and it does so using fossil fuels. Is then everyone out of a job, poor and unable to buy the things the machine makes (and starve as a result)? Or will everything be free.
The economic system distributing fossil fuels says : Starve (as much as needed to keep going)!
For someone that rises above that process, like Hamlet contemplating his ‘mortal coil’, suddenly the sky is empty. There’s two urges that will move us, one is fear, the other agression, and there is love. To simplify, one can say we evade the known or unkown, we invade the known or unknown, or we complete the known or unknown. If we do that in our mundain lives these forces shape our behaviour. If our mind is in a more abstract realm they create, construct and break down concepts. The agressive side wil analyse atoms and contemplate quantum mechanics, and explore the concept of a gravitational matrix that imploding stars can send a ping through..Our fearfull mind will conjure up doom scenario’s, risks of all kinds. Maybe it will entangle itself by creating a structured fantasy of hell that is somehow comforting because it puts us in a relatively safe (imaginary) place.
Love creates things. Its that thing that lives in our environment we haven’t met yet, we have passively gathered aspects of it, and when enough of them work together to make it something we might interact with, it springs to life in our minds. We already imagine a living world, we need to because whatever we look for is in that world. As we wrote before about time and intelligence : It is prediction, it is modelling the future, as to escape the second law of thermodynamics (we localize entropy increase to our mitochondria, so all else can see reducing entropy). Life and love are in a fight with the physical reality. In our minds it is morality, the good we strive for, that is our talent to not only extricate ourselves from may damaging physical processes, but also shield other life from the same.
If we come out of the mental clamp of fossil credit economics, and if our talents are being freed up from tedious labour by robots, and if our biosphere is restored by the same robots, extraeconomic communities and renewables, then we will be back in paradise, The forrest where we can find the fruits we eat and we don’t have to suffer. It is not fair to expect an organism that has over evolution left many companions behind to become the one able to survive reality to be struggling forever. Once there was one winner amongst the animals (humans) it was a matter of time before this species pushes off all natural threats to survival.
The best feeling is that of love, and love means protection of life. There will be high demand for people driven by this feeling in the near future. We have to fight for life on Earth. So for the people who’s lives are freed up by the advent of the roboeconomy, they can restore and foster, increase and let thrive life on Earth, which has not happened since fossil fuels began their distructive rise.
The Trump administration seems to have no problem with lying. It is likely a result of the business background, where Trump has learned to exploit people by making them believe what is advantageous to him, a page from the book of “Catch me if you can!” or to quote Leonardo die Caprio : “People only know what you tell them.”. In general if you have to process speech and it requires more focus, or it is a message that touches you in a more powerfull way, you will not remember things that may be important as long as you process the message, even your experiences that are in conflict.
Humans are cognitively unanchored, our brains don’t have set ideas. We may prefer some over others because of the way the brain is structured, and some may be intrinsically rewarding, but never the actualization of the idea, so not the real thing, only the use it has to you (which you have learned from your environment). You will eat a dougnut, or an apple or a Mars bar, all food, so they have the same general function in your daily routine, but you don’t keep having problems with the shape of the dougnut, or the fact you have to unwrap the Mars bar.
Lies are in principle hard to detect. Even if someone tells you the Earth is flat, your brain, having no anchor, tries to start from that idea and tries to make it work. In the state you listen in the words you hear shape other parts of the brain, unlike when you report on what you see, when your visual cortex shapes activity in your Broca area. When the brian follows the words it may come up with a valid position for you to exist in, which is to assume the one talking means “people are stupid”, because it he/she can not mean the Earth is really flat. The facts you carry around and which you base your character on will assert themselves. If the person continues, “No, I really mean our planet is a flat disk!” then you still have to judge whether it is a joke, whether you will abandon yourself and accept the nonsense, or whether you will assert your view, and whether all this is important enough for you to respond to.
People only know what you tell them
The people following Trump, who are instructed by him to shoult “Build that wall!” or “No more muslims!” are not able to recognize the lies, maybe they just don’t have the experience, maybe they have been eating a diet that wrecks cognitive abilities, maybe they are taking debilitating medicine. They are from rural areas, maybe they have been breathing in to much Roundup and other poison floating through the air. They somehow can not get themselves to doubt or check the validity of the statements.
Trump knows this full well, and it has been a strategy for a long time for the right to mobilize idiots, the more stupid the better. Also an attitude of stupididity creates a good follower, one of intelligent discourse only invites opposition. The people are to be divided into drones and masters. If you don’t buy the lie, and you are not a master, you will be crushed.
The painfull reality is that if a small group controlls the majority this is a viable situation. If the master is in the big house and the 500 slaves in the shacks , and enough vigilance and force is applied, and enough deference ot needs is shown, this can a perfectly stabile situation.
Equally if an elite of business owners determines the laws (as has been the case many times in history) The workers can just forget it. They can have a great life buying in the company store, you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. Our history has been a series of ebbs and flows, and in general an consolidation of the elite over more and more people. Since the Davos meetings you can speak of a world government, of course of a globalist nature. The glue is debt and lies. The need a globalist economic environment is mainly because 1. It brings peace and makes participants rich and 2. Fossil has to be divided most optimally, which is done by distributing money.
Fossil fuels are essential to sustain the need for money, because people have to come back and earn more to pay for gas, their mortgage and all kinds of other costs. Thos costs would not be recurrent or as big if we ran everything on renewables! Robots and renewables are already demolishing the power of the financial elite, life becomes cheaper, debts evaporate, control over people is lost but because there is not scarcity, peace is upon the lands.
Every dictatorship rewrites history
But we are not there yet. The lies of Trump are putting us all in more jeopardy, and that is fine with the elite, we are useless consumers, annoying and obstinate for our class. The risk is real that control of the Trump type of extortionists becomes so complete that history is rewritten after the fact, making the lies seem real.
Saying the travel ban prevents terrorist can later be embelished with fake terrorist attacks before the ban. Saying Mexico will pay for the wall can be explained in many ways later. People only know what you tell them is the reality Trump counts on and hopes to creat. A amnesic populus that follows orders because they no longer connect to their own stories and environment. One that already went to war based on lies, but will likeley do so with itself soon.
Trumps idea is that whoever enters his sphere of intluence is toast, for him to butter and consume. He can pull it off with some. Has in the past. He adopts ideas and abandons them. We don’t know if he has any smarts or is on top of things. But the general goal of his kind of friends is to turn you into either a sucker or an ally. With lies and all other powers at their command if necessary.
Our oceans are dying, they have large and growing areas that have to little nutrients or are too warm for fish to live. Pollution, overfishing and climate change all put pressure on our aquatic species. On land we see the same problem with overuse of natural resources, be they forrests, agricultural soil and fossil fuels, causing rain to disappear and weather patterns to shift.
We believe humanity will use robotic systems to recover from this fossil fuel induced onslaught. We will because it is to hard for people to act as is needed in some of the places it is needed, and because the ones acting on climate may be a small elite existing in protected order while the rest of us will be struggling to survive. As we now see with the ability of fossil fuel to maintain order, as the fossil fuel supply fragments and wanes, the regions on Earth experiencing law and order shrink.
A tree planting robot
Robots can help us, they can even help us help us. The way we see it robots will be smart enough ans sensitive enough to venture into the world and restore nature. They will go where we don’t want to go or where we don’t want humans to go, and tweek the situation so life can regain grip. A great example of that is the contour trenching done in Africa and elsewhere : It is shaping the ground against the forces of erosion, so it absorbs more rainwater, gets vegetated and beats the forces of erosion. This is how a bare hill is turned into a lush forrest, a little tweak.
On our oceans we have the same opportunity, because water near the surface has little nutrients, water deep down has lots, but the light needed to use the nutrients is at the top, and the ocean can be dead. Mix the deep water to the top and you will see life come back. This is what happens in the usually abundand coastal regions, where deep water is forced up by currents.
We want to build a simple drone ship that can do things on our oceans, like mix water, create a fish refuge that not only serves fishermen, but also the fish. To do it we need a platform to have control over our autonomous vessel. We purchased a small sailing boat, well aware there are already drones out there, wingsail catamarans, that’s beautifull.
To control our boat we have a LoPy device, it is a python programmable Cortex M3 chip already connected to a LORA radio and a Wifi transmitter. The nice aspect of this device is that the LORA is easy to program, it is a Long Range Low Power Radio, which can reach about 10 km depending on the height of the antennae and obstacles. Excellent for working on the open ocean. A real drone will have a sattelite telephone ‘Rock’ type device.
To position the boat we use GPS, it is a cheap service these days, 15,- Euro and you have a position reporting component. Our boat will be sailing so it will not have a motor. We worked out the relationship between sail, wind direction. Detecting wind direction is not easy, a more sophisticated way should be deviced, now we have a light turning potentiometer, but we need a magnetic rotary encoder to be more robust and allow the ship to go through the wind.
Python
- GPS
- Servo control of sail and rudder
- Wind sensor (ADC)
- Wifi
- Lora
Total cost when bought new is about 350 Euro
Power
- 3,7 volt battery
- 6 volt pack for servo's
As it stands now we are about to bring to gether the components, the boad will be able to sail courses of up to 35 degrees from dead into the wind, and it can only jibe not tack. This does give better control and wind awareness as the boat has the wind behind it and the model boat we use may not even be able to sail high courses.
Programm :
- set sail for wind
- gain speed
- read gps
- check closest indexed waypoint (they must be in a sequential list)
- adjust course to best approach new waypoint
The compass is left out for now, the boat will prioritize moving forward and then discover its bearing (by GPS). Then it will calculate the course it must go to get to a waypoint. There are lots of details to coding that. We hope to get to a small vessel that can control itself this way, then make it a bit bigger step by step, the mast now is about a meter high, the next mast is 3 meter high and will carry a wing sail.
Robots are an integral part of the vast industry that creates the wealth we enjoy. It is about to be essential to the exploration of Mars, as it will prepare the habitats and generate the fuel for the return journeys of the SpaceX spaceships. Robots are used in greenhouses, ports, you name it. The abilities of experimental robots, which combine vision and powerfull computation are impressive even in fields like manual dexterity, pick and place where humans have had the upper hand up until now.
The principles of economics do force robots and automatic systems into every nook and cranny of our production machine, simply because they do more valuable work for the same resources compared to humans. Thus we have a ‘singularity’, one much more real than the AI singularity, where the cost of a robot performing a human job drops below the cost of the human, and all humans will be redundant for tasks that can be performed bu robots. The same principles of economics however also increase the market price of robots so that the buyer will always only marginally reduce his cost compared to humans, and so only a disruptive new way to make these human level capable robots will finaly kill of human work. This shows once again how economics when it serves a banking/fossil elite becomes stifling to progress.
I call increased automation progress because it is good to save people from tedious dirty boring jobs. The only bad thing about robots and automation is that these techniques are introduced under our fossil credit system, the system that maximizes the fossil industry and banking turnover. This system is super wastefull, because wastefull consumption generates more cashflow than when porduct quality is high and people have to replace products less often. The trick is to rebase automation and our production machine entirely on sustainable resources, both energy and raw/natural materials. Then the cost of everything will drop and we will start to accumulate more resources instead of be depleting them. For now there is no police force in the world that can bring this situation about.
But there are regions on our planet that nobody is really interested in, regions where there are not much resources to begin with. The thought that rarely pops up in people’s mind is : How can we use robots to generate resources we might like to use in the future? How can we use robots to restore a damaged or absent ecology in places where nobody is able to destroy it again. I Africa dramatic projects are being initiated, showing simple planting of trees can turn barren land into a lush green habitat that will even bring rain to the desert.
Robocolonialism is a part of the roboeconomy, the economy correctly adapted to the use of robots, not putting people out of work, but providing cheaper and even free products to all. Robocolonialism is the process of terraforming earth so to say, remote regions being revived by armies of robots that work the land, plant trees and other plants, make sure rain is stored underground and doesn’t flush the topsoil away in a once a year flood. Robocolonialism can be the answer to the question “How to use the vase empty (and usually hot) spaces to reabsorb atmospheric carbon to secure the current evolutionary shift on Earth? “. You can move to Mars, but why not revive this planet before it goes through a true death cycle. How are we going to do that? We need machines to help us.
Of course one could start martian colonies in regions currently uninhabited and unable to sustain much life. This is part of the extraeconomic approach which does not seek to economically exploit a region, which does not tie into a global economy but juse aims to generate resources, capture carbon and sustain its inhabitants. As Trump breaks down global security the world is (at least until flight is electric or XtoGas technologies are immature) moving to a more local renewable based model in which the resources have to be local anyway. All this is not a deterioration of our wealth, health and happiness but a vast improvement. The renewable resources are more than 2500 times more abundant than the now hard fought fossil ones, so wealth will explode in this century.
We propose to build a robocolonialst drone that can sail to the barren coast of Namibia and autonomously plant and irrigate trees. First step is the autonous sailing drone, which actually is not that hard to make. Second is the addition of a desalination plant based on solar, and a rover able to deploy the irrigation tube and plant the tree seeds. In general we need much more technology (and we already have) for making land able to sustain life. Agiculture is so focussed on producing massive amounts of food that the potential to envigorate barren regions with only tiny tweaks is overlooked, even though there is certainly something to gain. The reason is as always the desire of the energy and banking sector to make money, which both run against anything that is autonomously sustainable.
Our base drone will use a Lora transmitter to report back, its own computer to control itself and GPS navigation to get to its destination. We hope to gather interest for this project and hope to learn about roboeconomic activities elsewhere. Just like fossil fuel is pushing the planet to the precipice of human extinction, automation and renewables combined can counter that process and stop it dead in its tracks. Let robots colonize our planet where humans can’t live, and turn into the paradise it was before we started burning things..
Our society is dissociated because instead of being forced to cooperate from an individual skill perspective, economics has made the individual all but irrelevant, and so individual bonds. We rely in each other for social support mostly, and in business we have a choice, we can be hard core and never make a friend. What we do is also no longer as essential. Food we can buy, few people are involved in food production. Energy and water are also taken care of by a few anonymous workers in ‘utilities’. Medical services are insured or unavailable, not a cottage industry, a deep backbone of the fossil fuel economy. For all the other stuff we don’t really need we have shops and delis and other places where lots of people do stuff that doesn’t really matter and doesn’t generate wealth, its the consumer economy.
If you want to run it you have to enforce laws, but the dept to which the commercial motives have been allowed to play a role made it so that leaders need money, and lots of it, to be considered eligible, to promote themselves and get elected. There is a huge army of unelected officials that just work hard but they also as shown all the time to be sensitive to financial stimulation. The USA has allowed itself to be rotted by money since it has been run for almost a century by big oil looking to sell its product. To sell a lot of oil you need a booming economy, not so people can buy it, but just to sell it. A booming economy consumes the most fossil fuel, and in the 20th century the USA has boomed as much as it could with anyones fossil fuels it could get under control.
The downside of it is that it really requires a lot of stupid people to keep consuming fossil fuels, because they are simply not the easiest option. No matter how luxurious life gets, it sucks having to breath fumes at the gasstation. Also there is not enough to give all people a luxurious life. If you spread the wealth thin, you will never have real examples that sell the economic dream, the american dream : You can strike rich. Luck is real, some people get lucky, its a tragic fact and we are all sensitive to gamble on it. So if you are in the US, and you don’t have your own mind to validate the information you consume, you run a risk of being a user or getting used in the great economic mechanism that sells fossil fuels called the carboncredit economy.
It does not matter to those who benefit of this economy if it is moral, just or even sustainable. This is just a relic of the forced cooperation we experienced when society was rural. When that changed you had those with real skills or with property/farmland or those without any control over how to sustain themselves (factory workers) and those ruling them. Then you had those that took without work or a desire for equitable exchange, the criminals and thieves. Civil society came about because people kept believing they earned their social status and position, and wanted it protected at all cost even if it entailed being a nail stylist. This is the ‘American lifestyle’ Cheney wanted to protect with wars in the Middle East (which have to be seen also as religously motivated). Modern society is vain and lazy, and that’s not even my problem.
The problem is that if nobody really adds essential value how do you motivate justice? How do you keep money from corrupting everything, and from creeping in every exchange in society, from supplying food, to care to love. Money is the big factor and our imagination is the limit on what people will do for money. Somebody will think of something, and if that somebody or somebody else has enough money, it will happen. Not always though, mostly the things that require a lot of fossil fuels but anyway.
Our leadership consisting of individuals are in the same matrix and by its nature sensitive to money. Being a politician even in Holland is about selling your time and attention to those that will give the best returns, later on in life. We fail to aknowledge that they are all human beings, although you can imagine an AI politician entering the scene soon. The problem is that the best leader to have is one that dies at the end of his/her leadership role. Then you never have to worry if this leader is keeping any other agenda etc. in check. He/she will because his/her life is at stake. Erdogan is a good example of someone that simply can’t have any other agenda controlling any part of his society. He doesn’t feel safe or in control enough and for sure his life is in danger as he is fighting the kurds, ISIS etc.
When there is no penalty to not controlling all forces the result is a melting pot of influences that are really hard to manage or steer or for that matter to survive, unless you relent and let them fight it out. So the CIA, FBI, Pentagon, Wallstreet etc. all have their own agenda’s and Donald Trump is not going to control any of them. Everyone is after money and the only thing that matters is that people keep relying on these institutions, that those which create the conditions for survival do not stop doing that. Like farmers are asked to keep farming to feed soldiers that keep looting and raping and who frankly don’t care what the outcome of all that mayham will be.
Fossil fuel economics creates a immoral unsteered society in which all participants just want to avoid the biggest diseaster while they make their little bit of money. It is a banquet that is being robbed but in such a way that the servants don’t stop restocking the table. What is served is irrelevant. This is going to be the case under Trump/Pence. It is not enough because we need to go in a direction away from renewables, and towards large scale climate action. This economic corruption of every part of our society should be abolished by reducing our reliance on it. This of course is hard, the fact you need to make money all the time is a real ball and chain, as real as the metal version.
To cut loose we must own, we must make, we must be independent. Independent of external energy, raw materials, food, etc. If we are, if we have a farm that can feed on thousand people, and no debt to pay, those 1000 people can gain wealth to own more, also without debt so without the need to pay constantly and work for money constantly. Renewables and alternative currencies play a vital role in freeing us from the fossil credit economy, our economy. All the resources of a region must belong to the region, including all the money, and nobody must be able to create it without consent of all who are expected to use it.
On a personal level we should perhaps be less interested in money, more in cooperating to simply stabilize our future, by co-owning and being less of a consumer. Once renewables become the primary energy source for production wealth creation will grow and drop in cost for another century, because there is much more solar and wind than fossil fuel to make our stuff and revive our planet.
Democracy has been under pressure for as long as it exists. This is simply because allowing a majority vote to rule is not the desire of the majority. Some people want to dictate what happens, some want to take what belongs to others and some want to experience total victory over people of opposing views. But we are now approaching a world in which the infiltration of people that advocate views because they get payed for it, and influence people because they get payed for it is becoming overwhelming. The problem being that pulic health, wealth and safety can not be ensured if leaders are serving specific commercial interests.
The common factor weakening democracy is distance, discretion. What people don’t know won’t hurt them you’d think, not so in politics. Research on lobbying in Holland shows that politicians are desperate to do the bidding of businesses, sometimes competitively. The difference between the left and the right then becomes between politicians that apply conscience and social considerations to serving those commecial interests and those that don’t. The line between unfair advantage and just supporting entrepeneurs is hard to draw. What should be the question is what makes a person a good politician? Responsiveness to these kinds of requests? Ability to maintain an ethical role while serving those requests?
Increasingly the question arises whether any person is ever able to persue laws that secure the health and happyness of people, since all politicians, except those born rich, depend on their financial security and are thus sensitive to financial rewards (be it now or promised in the future). People ‘coming up through the ranks’ can be vetted, supported, advised for years and given all the support to become the desired servant. Because of the vetting the person with the least moral objection to selling out will most easily attain the political role. Most people never think of the ones that don’t make it.
If all people are constantly exposed to messages that influence their feelings about issues, and if they are so easily persuaded to chase financial rewards (because really don’t think those laws they promote, written by businesses, do not come with some), then why should we use such people in politics. It’s the quality of the lie (I am like you) and the promise of protection (I represent you) which are the only reason why a politician should be a known individual, why democracy works. But if a constituency has a person that just wants to make money he can use his origin and promise improvement and gain the position of power from which to commecially serve anyone with a cash. There is no way to rely this doesn’t happen. Politicians and lobbyists do everything they can to hide it as it does (not if, it happens, that is for sure).
So this builds a case for appointed politicians who’s income is limited. Open elections and controlled representation in the media. Money has to get out of the game. Lies and pretense can’t matter. You can select a politician on their view, but you can also give him/her the experiences she needs to develop those views. This is almost a call for a new elite, a new well educated experienced group we know has the sensibility to make the right decisions because they have been able to practice in their life. Not based on a struggle to gain financial freedom or weight.
Dealmakers are out, we don’t need polticians to make deals because we don’t want industry and businesses to assert themselves through our laws. Laws are there to keep us safe, happy, healthy and prosperous, all of us, with no exception. To represent is an honour, not a job. Anyone doing it will need to sustain a reasonable lifestyle, and should be prevented from accepting delayed bribes (speeches, commisariats, symbolic roles in industry) at all times. They should also share the lives of all groups of society, so they don’t lack empathy that then drives division and suffering.
Some may have learned about the singularity, the point at which computers become so intelligent they will be able to take over and grow in power out of our control. It is near some say, as a doomoptimistic prophecy we frankly think is bogus. The evangelist of this line of thinking never considered what AI really has to be, but that’s another post.
Rather than distracting us with the threat of machine intelligence, maybe we should be more concerned with growing human ignorance. If we allow leaders, even in the highly educated West, to empower the lowest instincts in our society, we will see what we are seeing now, a rise in populism.
Those who don’t earn that much, have to work hard and live in socially challenged neigborhoods are extra vulnerable for the wash of slick media, on radio, television, internet. Those media are commecial and seem to be always serving an agenda, now mainly the republican, neocon agenda.
We see McCain lamenting the hacking of Hillary’s emails, as if he is a democrat. No he wants war to start now. We are not seeming Trump bungle, he is surrounded by ex military who all seem to want war. How do you get war? By being extremely stupid. We are not talking resource wars as far as I can see, so any fight other than for resources is stupid. To start them you need a stupid population, or a distracted one.
Those that want power can do two things : Outperform everyone else, or weaken everyone else
The risk of creating a stupid population, something that the right has tried to make true for decades now by undermining the education system, only viewing it as a possible place to sink lucrative credit into, is the loss of communication. You can take a highly educated person on a walk through an imaginary world, one that you suggest would be better for them, one without fossil fuels, for instance. You can’t do that with poorly educated people. They won’t see it. They are mired in all kind of trouble. They don’t make it far into businesses (except simple ones) because they are poor decision makers.
While the banks and fossil companies still do the best they can to increase stress on society, if not where you live in many other places, the people become more and more restless. They are protesting in Poland, Venezuela, India. They are suffering in Alleppo, Turkey, etc. To create opportunity for people with money the first step is to make sure your potential victims don’t have any. But a human being can’t create money, so where does that stress go? Not into repurposing resources, because you need to buy those first, with a loan from a bank. If you are poor you are stuck in an economic straightjacket and you can only escape through the kindness that has just been tortured out of you, or through ‘crime’.
Telling these frustrated people, as Trump does with blacks in the US, ‘what do you have to lose’, is giving them a license to put order at risk. The only reason why this isn’t happening is that even these burdened, badly educated people have descency, most if not all of them. The idea that poor people are not decent is as dumb as the idea that rich people are. They just don’t look it perhaps. But some of these poor uneducacted will simply feel empowered. They will be given the role of policing this new order, dictated by slogans not goals like freedom, peace and democracy. They want to feel their own actions with strength. Be strong, how can you be strong if you doubt yourself. Say this slogan, you will sound powerfull. “Pay for the wall!”
So you will find that society reorganizes along new lines. The most intimidating or mean advocates of the slogans du jour shut up anybody and build their profile by terrorizing anyone that seems the weakest. Typical bullying behaviour for idiots stuck in that phase of their lives. This agitation reduces the ability of people to think clearly, in turn forcing them to be either with or agianst the new order. This is a process we have seen in world history over and over again. Lists with ‘dissidents’ you can score points with. The heart of the organization being a mental desert scorched by wielded hatred.
The downwards spiral of antisocial psychology is clearly driven by the media, and is an illusion to which solutions are numerous.
Its only funny as long as you can rewind. But you lose the abiity to rewind after a while. Pleas sound weak, reason is to rational, to elitist. You can’t be tough about lettng go of your anger. You target muslims, you where strong about it, you have to follow through or seem weak and become a target yourself. Even if you have a thought process like this you will not be able to stop the idiots who don’t realize they are chanting lies, nonsense and courting selfdestruction.
Meanwhile who thinks a society like ours, so highly tuned and financialized, so dependent on fuel trucked in (with a 5 day buffer usually), run by computers and experts can even sustain a temporary parlysis of the mind. Are those not the elite, the people that are supressing the poor? Those Wall Street rats will burn, and then the do, and then where will the ships with goods go?
You’d think this is all a bit crazy, but the question one should ask is : When does the audience for wishfull and hatefull nonsense grow so large that it can not be convinced of any alternative except the one you used to create it. When do people say “Ok, I know enough, its time for action!”. What if you have poisoned the channels of communication so much that they can no longer be reached. You have installed a mass psychosis that has become self sustaining.
Idiolarity : The point where the idiots in society can no longer be reasoned with or forced into submission
The point you may reach we can call the idiolarity, the singularity where ignorance has grown so large that the actions and momentum of the idiots makes it impossible to pull them back to a reasonable, fact based, solution oriented narrative. We are coursing towards the idiolarity by the nature of our world : It is not organized, disciplined or cooperative, that was only an illusion that leaders worked very hard to create and maintain. Once that magic is broken and all realize their dependence, and then idiots instead of reducing it and neutralizing it start hating it, you can’t go back.
After the Idiolarity, because goals set are nonsensical and imaginary, a better world wil not emerge. The result will be suffering until enough of the idiots have destroyed themselves or are destroyed by external factors
So many of us are opportunistic and reason with a short horizon, and chaos only motivates us to be more short sighted and opportunistic. We will all participate in the direction we feel is inevitable, one we don’t want to be seen to counter for fear of punishment when things get worse. “You traitor, you where one of those lefties!”
