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Sure. It's a heuristic, not a logical proof. And, I mean, we can't get energy just by digging in the ground. We didn't just poof, start flying over the ocean

Sure. It's a heuristic, not a logical proof. And, I mean, we can't get energy just by digging in the ground. We didn't just poof, start flying over the ocean. We don't produce fertilizer just poof out of the air. Also: we knew before the Wright brothers that heavier-than-air flight was possible (birds). We didn't go from nothing to oil-fired modern powerplants in one step. If someone had claimed to generate electricity from something random in the ground -- even inefficiently -- without piggybacking on centuries of preexisting power generation technology, I'd probably have been skeptical. And my skepticism would probably have been justified.

murbard2 11y ago
We know from biology that nanoscale factories are feasible, we know from human intelligence that AI is feasible, we know from Newtonian mechanics that space elevators are feasible, we know from stars that fusion is feasible.
- aetherson 11y ago
  Yep. And if someone said, "I've developed a nanoscale factory that has output fundamentally similar to what a biological cell has," that wouldn't trigger my skepticism. People who imagine that in the next few decades, we'll have nanotechnology that is two or three orders of magnitude faster, less error-prone, more centrally controllable, and more versatile than biology do. I didn't say anything about AI or space elevators. I'm not skeptical about hot fusion the way in skeptical about cold fusion.
  - murbard2 11y ago
    Well, you said you disbelieve these things on the ground of them being too good to be true. I get that people are more likely to exaggerate the likelihood of success of some technology if it seems extremely promising, and thus one should be more skeptical of those... But given all the other information available, that's a very weak proxy. You can make your own opinion by looking at the science.

murbard2 11y ago

We know from biology that nanoscale factories are feasible, we know from human intelligence that AI is feasible, we know from Newtonian mechanics that space elevators are feasible, we know from stars that fusion is feasible.

aetherson 11y ago
Yep. And if someone said, "I've developed a nanoscale factory that has output fundamentally similar to what a biological cell has," that wouldn't trigger my skepticism. People who imagine that in the next few decades, we'll have nanotechnology that is two or three orders of magnitude faster, less error-prone, more centrally controllable, and more versatile than biology do. I didn't say anything about AI or space elevators. I'm not skeptical about hot fusion the way in skeptical about cold fusion.
- murbard2 11y ago
  Well, you said you disbelieve these things on the ground of them being too good to be true. I get that people are more likely to exaggerate the likelihood of success of some technology if it seems extremely promising, and thus one should be more skeptical of those... But given all the other information available, that's a very weak proxy. You can make your own opinion by looking at the science.