Building an app for winter sports. You can download the map for a ski resort, and use the map to see where individuals in your group are, and suggest meetups (summits) on the map, and everyone gets a personalized route generated to that point.
Add in some evolutionary strategies, and you have the recipe for a good sci-fi book: a fungus in Chernobyl rapidly outpaces its competitors due to its ability to absorb radiation. Each iteration grows and reproduces faster, until it is so blindingingly fast that it begins to outpace the output the fuel rods produce.
The world rejoices as this fungus is perfect for cleaning up nuclear waste products, until we realize that it evolved to function outside of Chernobyl and begins to eat everything it can reach. Mankind launches into a desperate struggle for survival as the fungus lays waste to large swathes of land.
They don't eat the radioactive material and make it not radioactive.
[Assuming they use the radiation to get energy [1].] They just wait patiently until the radioactive atoms decay and emit radiation, like a gamma ray, and then absorb the gamma ray and use the energy. The half life of the radioactive material does not change.
[1] I still doubt this claim, but let's go along assuming the best case.
Consider when organisms must pass, that these ancient fungi likely still consume the host... Thus, on a 8000 year timescale most fungi doesn't necessarily need to pursue food that naturally dies in around a century.
Yeasts are already sharing your body along with numerous other organisms that are often harmless or even beneficial. Best not think about it too much if you are uncomfortable with seeing yourself as a mini ecosystem. =3
rivals the aspen grove "Pando" as the known organism with the highest living biomass and perhaps rivalled by a colony of Posidonia australis on the Australian seabed that measures 200 square kilometres (edited)
I'm trying to work out how the fungus evolves to grow its food source by causing radioactivity increase?
It can concentrate radionuclides, but the step function after inducing some criticality is likely to cause reproductive difficulty (stopping fungus evolution).
Plus: heavy metals combined with organics have a tendency towards being nasty poisonous
I will write it one day. Right now other more fully-formed creative projects are taking precedence.
I do know that when I write it it'll be a different take, because it'll be my voice and perspective and a synthesis of the media that makes me, me.
But as they say, writing is hard. :)
My parent comment deals more with the idea that some fantastical sci-fi ideas or inventions become less fantastical the longer you sit on them. The idea for a touch-based slate computer in TNG was pretty cool! Now everyone has a tablet, and that took only about 20 years.
I don't believe other literary genres have this unique problem. If I came up with a Game of Thrones-esque fantasy story, I wouldn't need to worry about the worldbuilding becoming "outdated." (Maybe in esoteric cases like dinosaurs not having feathers before we discovered that they do, etc.)
Also, doesn't matter if it's been done before either. Lots of very popular books are quite similar to books published before them. Sci-Fi is not immune.
There's all sorts of memes about SciFi films that borrowed ideas and motifs from earlier works... but often when you did, it comes out that the earlier works also borrowed those pieces.
I had a similar thought, ideas are cheap. Loads of people are like "I have this GREAT idea for an app, I just need a developer to build it!"... as if the idea on its own has value.
Unfortunately and / or fortunately thanks to AI tech, anyone with an idea can now throw it at an AI and see it materialise.
This! Since our money is being inflated away, hard assets like precious metals, bitcoin, and real estate get bid up because those with cash bleed out purchasing power.
Assuming our models of the universe are correct, and faster than light travel is impossible. There are very strong reasons to believe this, but perhaps we can cheat by stretching and compressing space around us.
Without having checked the study because I can't open the link on this machine: does it also take recycling of the metals into account? There's also cost in placement (which are very significant in places like the North Sea for instance), and digging up the rare earth minerals and such.
No, no mentioning of recycling. It only look at average energy output, converts it into what a natural gas power plant would do to get the same amount, and compare it to an estimation of green house emissions from producing the turbine. They do mention creating the estimation of production emissions from 28 wind turbine LCA studies of 22 on- and 6 offshore locations, so it sound like they include placement costs, but I can't say for sure. on- and offshore turbines may not be built identically.
The fundamental question that the study ask is if the wind turbine would replace an existing natural gas-fired power plant, how much less green house gases would it produce compared to keeping the natural gas-fired power plant, and how does that compared to the production emissions of the wind turbine.
Nuclear is so expensive the only reason anyone builds them is governments wants a source of nuclear trained people around for military purposes (either bombs or navy ships).
Battery backup isn't a needed as much as many thing in the real world. Those gas power plants we already have are not going anywhere, so we still use them when there isn't much wind. Though battery is something we should be building instead (and are).
Wait, what? There are also a number of countries that operate nuclear plants purely for civilian electricity production. Military applications are not the primary motivator.
Instead, civilian energy demands and energy independence are the motivating factors. Look at how Ontario leveraged its electricity supply in the early days of the trade war.
I said build not operate. The world situation has changed, 50 years ago nuclear power was a good idea to build. If you have a working nuclear power plant I'd generally keep operating it, and do small upgrades over time. However building a new one is something you should only do if you have military needs. (note that showing off is sometimes a military need)
Nonsense, by that logic Lithuania should have been a #2 military power long time ago (having built nukes from a civil nuclear reactor) (it used to operate #2 largest nuclear reactor in the world, now it would be #4).
Most of the cost of nuclear is in construction so extending the life of existing nuclear power stations as long as possible makes sense. However new nuclear in Europe has been much more expensive and even France has lost the ability to build new nuclear capacity cheaply.
You can do the same with a nuclear power plant and calculate how much power it generate and how much green house gases that represent if it was produced by a natural gas-fired power plant. Fuel cost is a thing, but to my knowledge they are fairly minor in terms of greenhouse emissions when compared to burning fossil fuels.
Batteries/storage do not produce energy so they don't displace any energy in this kind of calculations. They can be viewed as a small efficiency increase of existing wind turbines, in which case they do have a form of greenhouse gas payback time, although the energy must not be counted twice for both the turbine and battery, and the increased wear and tear on the wind turbine may impact the result.
Wind generally has an production rate of around 50%, which mean that countries like Denmark that has already reached over 100% wind production still only have energy for half of their consumption. This mean the storage need is fairly massive, which they currently solve by importing energy from fossil fueled thermal power stations, nuclear and hydropower from nearby countries. Constructing more wind power at this point does not seem economical for power companies, and any storage solution like lithium, reverse hydro, and so on are also not economical (as in, there is basically zero investment into it outside of government subsidized initiatives). As such, wind has in that location seem to have reached its ability to displace any more fossil fuel.
My experiences with tiling window managers is that they struggle in judging a modal screen like a confirmation box or detachable/dockable mini-containers like the interface of certain programs like GIMP. Considering those as new tile-able windows tends to be a hinderance instead of increasing productivity.
For example, GIMP works without any issues. And the productivity boost is tremendous, for me it's very hard to work on anything else. I barely encounter programs where it does more harm than use.
Especially having multiple desktops with different names allow me to localize windows so much quicker than looking through a dozens of terminals manually.
Right now, I do have: 1 mail, 2 web, 3 gimp, 4 chat, 5 notes, 6 terminal, 7 ssh cluster
They do struggle with that, or rather some developers struggle with not making assumptions about the way a user's window manager is laying out their windows?
I use StumpWM, and for the few applications that this becomes a real problem it is possible to run those in a floating windows group that works just like a minimalistic non-tiling window manager. I think this is a common features of tiling window managers.
Bitcoin mining is currently at 52% renewable. This is a very significant number, since most other industries aren't nearly that renewable. Are you going to go for a plastic or paper car because steel foundries aren't producing steel on renewable power?
The key is emissions, not energy use. If I have a process that benefits mankind (a global, decentralized, permissionless hard money that doesn't suffer from politics or unelected officials) and I am using 100% renewable energy, then there is no environmental cost.
Bitcoin mining is very cutt-throat. It is a bleeding-edge, hyper-competitive business of reducing margins. Because I only needs an energy connection, some HVAC and internet connectivity, miners are very mobile and can move from place to place after setting up shop somewhere. This means that they seek the absolute lowest energy cost (the difference of paying 1c more per kWh can be essential) means that they are the energy consumer of last resort. Hydrodams and other renewables often produce at moments that demand is lower, and having a bitcoin miner nearby that is willing to gobble up all your excess production means your solar farm or hydrodam suddenly makes a profit at most times of the day.
It also means that investors are more willing to invest in renewable energy in places where formerly, building this infrastructure was impossible. There is a village in Malawi, Afrika where building a hydro dam was possible, but not financially sensible. None of the villagers had electric appliances, so building the dam meant running it would not be profitable for a very long time. Now, you can just add a set of bitcoin miners and run the dam at 100% capacity until people start installing freezers, televisions, etc. This benefits the investors, the villagers, and the bitcoin ecosystem.
Bitcoin's environmental costs is a highly politicized complex puzzle that is hardly as negative as the mainstream media and anyone that hasn't researched it claims it is. It bothers me to no end.
Another alternative to using an exchange is to actually spend the bitcoin on a good or service. There's quite a few places where you can use Bitcoin to buy things, like web hosting, socks, coffee, and more.
Expected time to first block confirmation is always 10 minutes. If the last block was found 10 minutes ago, then the expected time to the next block is still 10 minutes. It is always 10 minutes until it is actually found, at which point it is still 10 minutes.
The only thing that can change value is if the global hash rate significantly changes. This is why we have the difficulty readjustment every 2016 blocks (give or take 2 weeks).
