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@VD15 @p
I have a bad feeling that if she saw this fanart, she'd turn full yandere.

@CwalkPinoy @matrix
I mean... considering the standards these days... I wouldn't be surprised if it's the best movie of 2025. But I'm still not watching it.

What was the game that got flack last year for having an insanely long end credits?

@LukeAlmighty You're more optimistic than me, cause I don't see any kind of political willpower to build up nuclear. All I've seen throughout my life was tearing it down. When I was a kid, not even a teenager, I was certain that by now we'd have the majority of our energy being nuclear, with research being done to perfect solar panels for when we'd start running out of uranium.
There's been some advancement in solar panel tech, so at least that's something. But nuclear has been the biggest disappointments for me.

@LukeAlmighty Oh... ok... In that case, sure. I can agree with your original post.
But man... you really shouldn't use the word "conservative" in that way without expressly saying that's how you're defining it. And even then, you're still gonna get people angry at you for misdefining "conservative".

re: doomposting 

@Azur_Fenix @Nepiant
Solar wouldn't be that bad if battery tech wasn't shit and reliant on a scarce metal like lithium. There's an abundance of silicon on the planet, even if some of it would need more refinement, but you know you won't run out of it making solar panels. But lithium is rare and environmentally expensive to mine. So solar panels+batteries are just bad for a long term, main energy provider.
There are other energy storage solutions that you could couple with your solar farms, but batteries would still be the most efficient, and thus preferable.
You don't need space based solutions though. Ground based solar farms in deserts or other unusable land, and every inch of roof space is where the aim should be.
I like the idea of solar, but I'd like it more if the battery problem had a better solution than lithium-ion, that used a more abundant element. It's the biggest reason I much prefer nuclear for now.

Wind just kinda feels bad overall. You still need those batteries, and as weather gets more chaotic, they'll become far too vulnerable, with storms risking to destroy them. There will be situational locations where they will be good, but again not something you can depend on everywhere.

Geothermal is neat, and will continue working great for Greenland. I'm sure there are a few more geographical locations where it's viable, but otherwise we're not drilling down because it's not efficient enough.

Thorium is liquid salt initially, which then transfers the heat to water, boils it, and sends it to a regular generator.

For hydro generation, you won't get that many more dams constructed on rivers. But you might get inland artificial lakes, used for energy storage. You pump water in them with excess energy from solar or wind power, and when needed you run the water down through a generator.

Ocean turbines are gonna be a no go. As it is, there's a panic regarding the Atlantic current, because measurements show that it is slowing down, and scientists aren't even sure why, though the suspect is global warming and changing climate. So they might not be that dependable in time, and interfering with them could have drastic side effects planet wide. Better not.

@maxmustermann
You know what I hate about all this? All of these people KNEW this was coming. Every European leader KNEW that Trump was pissed off. And literally not one of them tried to approach Trump in good faith before hand, and negotiate these things before tariffs came. No one went and said: "I get that from your perspective our nations have unfairly took advantage of USA. What can we do to fix our relationship? How can we avoid tariffs that could hurt both sides?".
So I'm with you. They can get fucked with barbed wire up their ass, and I hope people punish their political leaders for this utter failure in diplomacy.

I mean look at this stupidity:
"Austrian Economy Minister: [...] hit republican states and his friends including tech firms". TECH FIRMS ARE NOT TRUMP'S FRIENDS YOU FUCKING UTTER MORON! Musk is literally the only guy in tech that likes Trump. Everyone else is a leftie that salivates at the idea of murdering him. I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of Tesla employees too are also severely anti-Trump.

Lesson I learned today: don't mark your post with "doomposting" if you intend for people to ignore it.

I guess it's true even on Fedi. People are searching for rage-bait. For things to be upset about. For negativity.

When I realized my post was gonna be a massive shit fest of a TL;DR, I thought I'd to the courtesy of putting a content warning, so it won't display it whole on people's timelines by default.
And "doomposting" seemed the most accurate title to give it. And I thought that the obvious negativity would make people less interested in it...
As Trump would say, WRONG!

Have you ever had an issue where for a second you weren't sure if it's spelled "small" or "smoll"... Internet culture is fucking with my brain so much sometimes.

I'm actually surprised people took notice of my doompost.

Again, I probably should have stressed more than my hypothetical scenario is a long shot. But it's one of those worst case scenarios that tends to keep me up at night, because scientific and technological development has always been something that fascinated me, and for the first time in my life, I see a possibility, even if it's a small one, for it to not just stop, but eternally reverse. And that kinda freaks me out.

I don't think anyone likes seeing their hopes and dreams potentially being crushed, and my hope and dream is basically for humanity to one day become a galactic civilization.

re: doomposting 

@Nepiant
Don't blindly trust Google's marketing. Nor Microsoft's for that matter, cause they also make big claims recently. Believe it when they actually put them in use, and your search results are powered by quantum computers instead of silicon.

re: doomposting 

@Nepiant Biological neurons work vastly different than silicon chips. For now we can only emulate/simulate neurons, and it takes much more power and physical space to emulate neurons than real neurons use.

For now, we have a better shot at growing biological brains in vats, finding some way to transfer our neuron pathways to those vat brains, and keep changing brains as they age, than to upload our brains to silicon.
Otherwise, we need to figure out a brand new way to create/grow artificial, physical, neurons, and not just simulate them in software.

re: doomposting 

@Nepiant
I used to think so too. But then I saw Germany closing down it's nuclear power plants before closing down it's coal power plants, and then opening up more coal plants as the Russia-Ukraine war started.
The only think I've seen in the last decade has been a complete inability of humanity to actually adapt when it comes to energy production. I've seen Greenpeace social panics take precedence over rationality. I have zero conviction that the future will be different.

re: doomposting 

@Nepiant
>Also, if trends continue
The trend won't continue. Silicon chips are already getting to the level where electrons can quantum tunnel out of the transistors. I think soon we'll count the width of transistors by the number of atoms in them. Silicon is coming close to physical limits.
And quantum computers are shit. They can't even really offer what they were promised to do, that is being able to performs computations that binary computers are unable to. Turns out, any algorithm you'd want to do on a quantum computer can be calculated on a traditional binary supercomputer computer too.

I'm sure medical treatments that can improve lifetimes will come. I've seen that there's been massive progress with diabetes for example. But immortality? Nah... I don't see uploading the human mind as something being feasible even within an extended lifetime.

Moore's law is basically dead. Even NVidia is saying it these days. Why do you think they're pushing for AI generation crap in video games (fake frames and AI upscaling)? Because they already know they can't cram that many transistors in the same space anymore.

@LukeAlmighty @Nepiant
A lot of this. Charcoal gives you poor efficiency. And you won't be able to grow trees fast enough to even maintain, let alone technologically grow, a society with a high number population.
Again, in the 90s, we were panicking because we were using too many trees to make paper. We were already burning other stuff for energy. In the winter, you're gonna use A LOT more trees to heat up a house than you'd use for your paper needs in the same amount of time.
You might have some steam stuff from charcoal, but you're not exploring advanced technology off of it.

@LukeAlmighty Thing is, if we lose enough technology or energy output, we simply won't be able to make us of nuclear material anymore. We won't have enough resources to build and ignite a nuclear power plant.

As for fusion... no... we've been "a decade away" for how long now? And we're still "a decade away". Best estimates are for a TEST production facility for 2040 I think. Which means, there's still far off from widespread adoption. And that's of course assuming the test goes well, and there isn't another Greenpeace social panic that sabotages everything... again. I'd rather maintain zero hope for fusion and be pleasantly surprised if it does happen. Fission is a known quantity, and we should have had a fission power plant at every corner by now (figuratively speaking).

Global warming is a bit more complicated than that, but I was trying to avoid the topic altogether. The whole sea level rising issue has been horribly explained by the media for as long as I lived. And now that I finally had someone explain it properly... yeah... it IS happening, and no EU "carbon plan" will stop it.

@LukeAlmighty Do/Did conservatives actually have foresight in all of this? Maybe you have some specific examples in mind, but to me it seems that conservatives have been struggling to react. The strong opposition to everything social-justice/feminism/woke has come from moderate liberals, or "centrist" types, that sometimes slowly moved rightward as the culture war progressed.

To me it seems like conservatives are still clueless about how bad things are. Meanwhile I was saying that social-justice, what we call woke today, was a religion for close to a decade. I've been doubting the new trans ideology for at least three quarters of that time. I've seen the intentional uglyfication of female characters in games since ME:Andromeda. I've called Antifa as being today's Nazis brown shirts since they first appeared.
I can't remember how many observations and hypothesis over what is happening I've thought about over the years that I've seen intellectuals discover from scratch years later than me.
Easy example, Gad Saad has been talking about idea pathogens for a few years now, and describing "woke" as such a pathogen. But this isn't new concept. I read "The God Virus" by Darrel Ray over a decade ago, before even GamerGate, and realized the social-justice/woke movement was essentially the same thing as Darrel Ray was describing. He just didn't have the foresight to generalize his concept, and he was just focusing on religion.

And I am definitely NOT a conservative. Back then I was liberal-left enough, that taking a political test that recommended what US presidential candidate best fit your politics gave me Bernie Sanders.

There was nothing conservative about me observing this crap and opposing it. None of the thought leaders or "intellectuals" that shaped me before were conservatives. It wasn't conservative values that lead me to realize "bruh, progressivism is bad" before the word became mainstream.

So I really am curious what specifically you have in mind when you say conservatives have decades worth of foresight. Because I don't think this was what I experienced so far in this culture war.

doomposting 

I've been thinking about something last night. I'm starting to think that this could be it, that what we're experiencing right now is the height of human civilization on Earth.
I think that, because we didn't build up nuclear energy in time, we will fail to make the transition away from fossil fuels fast enough, we'll run out, and we'll reach a point where we won't be able to make enough energy to sustain societies as they are today.
A collapse will come. But that's not the real issue. The real issue is that without an abundance of oil anymore, without that much cheap energy, human civilization won't be able to rebound, and will basically remain stuck to somewhere around steam engine stage. At best we might see steampunk become a reality.

I've been thinking about something similar for some time. Humanity owes its technological advancement to fossil fuels. To forests and critters of countless millions of years ago that died and got buried before they could decompose.
As such, ANY intelligent alien civilization NEEDS to evolve on a planet that has fossil fuels in the ground already. If an intelligent life form evolves before fossil fuels get created through geological processes, or where they don't exist for any other reason, that's it. That's a technological dead end for them. They'll be stuck at a medieval stage, forever.

"But muh solar power" NO! You're not gonna make solar panels from burning wood. If you're struggling to barely melt metal, you're not gonna have the cheap resources needed to experiment and research anything more than a basic axe and a sword.
And remember the social panic there was in the 90s, that we were cutting down all trees to make paper? Now imagine trying to sustain a high population civilization that BURNS only wood for everything.
You are not building a technological civilization off of wood. At the very minimum you need coal, but realistically you need oil. No civilization, alien or otherwise, will EVER make the transition from burning wood to solar panels. Same goes for wind. You think you'll create fine copper wire to make electric engines and generators by burning wood?

Now going back to humanity. If societies collapse. That's it. We don't have readily available oil. The reserves we still have need highly advanced machinery to extract. Machinery that might not survive a collapse, or that we'll lose the knowledge of how to use.
We still have a lot of coal, but I'm not sure if even that is easily exploitable anymore. Can you still find coal with nothing more than pickaxes as tools?
After the collapse happens, there will be no more smartphones, no more computers, no more internet, anymore. Ever. For as long as Earth continues to orbit around the Sun, humanity will continue, but will remain stuck in much more primitive societies.

This is not something I expect to happen in the next decade. Not in our lifetimes either. Could take a few centuries. But I think it could happen.
Our energy needs are growing too fast. First cryptocoin and now AI have been the world's dumbest ideas when we're struggling to deal with finding energy alternatives. And dumber ideas are sure to be on the horizon still.
IF nuclear energy had been abundant, this wouldn't have been an issue. But instead of growing nuclear capabilities, we've decimated them. Now there's talks about a revitalization. But projections for the first batches of new generation nuclear power plants are for like 2050 or something. And that's assuming the political willpower is maintained until then. Which... fucking hell people... western nations can't keep it together for 5 years, let alone decades.
Even if I assume mere stupidity, and not outright malice, the world's political system is essentially trying to kill humanity.

But going back a bit, with energy usage growing so fast, at some point something will collapse. If people start rioting and pillaging AI server farms and solar plants, if people start chaos and revolutions, you think energy plants will survive? You think fragile solar panels will be intact? You'll have South Africa style situations where the infrastructure will be compromised, and left in taters to the point where you can't even use every bit of energy making capacity you have left to create new solar panels, new windfarms, etc.
You won't be able to grow back, because trying to ration energy for basic industry instead of population needs will just get you a free noose around your neck as part of a new population revolt.
And solar panels wear out. So do wind farms. You won't be able to replace them, more and more of them will fail, until you have nothing left and are back to burning wood to stay warm during winter.

If you had an abundance of cheap oil, gas, coal, sure you can build back. Just burn more and more. But you're not building back from solar and wind.

I don't think it will happen within our lifetimes. So unless you care that much about your great-grandchildren, this really isn't something that will affect you. Not something you should care about.

But if you have some deep optimism and hope that one day humanity will reach the stars, if you're like me and hope humanity will exist forever more, discover everything there is to discover, explore all the deep blue and the cosmos, reach the pinnacle of science and technology that we can't even imagine yet... If you're romantic in that way... this is a sobering thought to consider.

@WhitestTemplar Honestly, probably the first time I opened one of his videos, but the title made me curious ("This Video is for Wanted Criminals Only"), and it was short enough that I wouldn't be wasting much time.

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