7 ms·
Even if it takes 200 years it is likely still worthwhile. Unfortunately we, as a culture, have a problem seeing and planning across generations. https://longnow
by twobitshifter 5y ago
Even if it takes 200 years it is likely still worthwhile. Unfortunately we, as a culture, have a problem seeing and planning across generations.
https://longnow.org/ https://longnow.org/
- m_fayer 5y agoI'm happy to hear someone make this point. Rather than sneering "vaporware" when decades fail to crack a problem, I would prefer us to keep in mind that if we never try multi-generational projects, we will never taste the fruit of multi-generational projects, and those are some sweet fruit indeed.
- kiba 5y agoI am not sure if we have a project that spans multiple generations? It would be easier to do a project that provide some kind of immediate benefit while having long term multigenerational long term effect. Science is kinda that way. We get immediate knowledge with long term unknown payoff.
- Out_of_Characte 5y agoThe Netherlands would like a word. Holding back the sea was a monumental project that will definitely last generations to come. Maybe not as exiting as high temp superconductors and fusion but still a nationwide unique product.
- HWR_14 5y agoIt may last for generations to come, but did the original development take generations?
- kuschku 5y agoOld-school land reclamation worked by putting woven fences in the water where waves would deposit sand over decades and centuries, slowly growing the land bit by bit. Those versions were already multi-generational projects. (I'm citing the techniques used in the north frisian wadden sea, I'm unsure if the same techniques were used in west frisia as well)
- HWR_14 5y agoOh, that's very interesting. So I'm guessing that technique was used to make areas that were put of the water during low tide, and then eventually dikes were added to make them dry land?
- kuschku 5y agoExactly. But this technique only allows you to get land that's exactly at sea level, so dikes are absolutely necessary. This also means you need drainage systems to remove the water from already reclaimed land, as it's still exactly at sea level and will be relatively wet marshland otherwise.
- Out_of_Characte 5y agoThats why the netherlands built those old school windmills. thats how land was reclaimed below sea level. They no longer serve the same function but are used instead for small shops and for tourists.
- fragmede 5y agoMany churches built before the industrial age took multiple generations to build.
- bluescrn 5y agoModern civilisation may not have multiple generations left. And it might not even take an all out nuclear war, social media may turn out to have been even more destructive than nukes.
- sdunwoody 5y agoNot a scientific achievement, but doesn't the Sagrada Família count? "On 19 March 1882, construction of the Sagrada Família began ... It was anticipated that the building would be completed by 2026, the centenary of Gaudí's death, but this has now been delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic." Continuing construction (admittedly not continuosly) for roughly 150 years is pretty impressive in my opinion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagrada_Fam%C3%ADlia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagrada_Fam%C3%ADlia
- pmontra 5y agoDecommissioning a fission power plant and storing nuclear waste in a safe way? That's probably a multi civilization project. The easy part first.
- cft 5y agoAlso in the era of family businesses, businesses were much more sustainable, sometimes competitive over hundreds of years. The useful lifespan of a modern public company is much smaller.
- treis 5y agoIt runs into the spaceship problem where later iterations of a spaceship reach the destination first because new technology allows them to fly faster. At some point (maybe) materials and other technology will develop enough so that fusion becomes feasible on a decades or so timeline. Or solar & battery technology will develop to the point where fusion isn't really needed.
- netcraft 5y agoI was just talking about this the other day, its formal name is called the Wait Calculation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_travel#Wait_calculation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_travel#Wait_calcu...
- rytill 5y agoBut if the first spaceship was never developed, would the second spaceship have been?
- treis 5y agoSure because you develop technology while working on achievable goals. As an example, what could someone in 1920 do to help develop fusion power? Pretty much nothing that would be practically useful today. But they had stuff they could achieve which laid the groundwork to what we're doing today.
- lovehashbrowns 5y agoBut then you run into things that you only discover while trying to do something practical. Like the space shuttle having to land--NASA developed grooved runways specifically for this purpose and now they're on our highways. https://www.nasa.gov/centers/langley/news/factsheets/Groove.html https://www.nasa.gov/centers/langley/news/factsheets/Groove.... There are technologies, materials, and methods we've developed, tested, and perfected because of some specific need. I mean, how much of the internet do we have today as a result of CERN having to store and share vast amounts of data and information? Sure, you can say /eventually/ we would've come up with alternatives. But a lot of the internet and technology in the 90s came as a direct result of CERN doing practical things. How would we know we'd need solid state drives today if we didn't develop a need for hard drives? The same can be said of NASA, the space shuttle, the Hubble telescope, etc. Going back to CERN, maybe it would've been better to wait for the Superconducting Super Collider because it was going to be more powerful than the Large Hadron Collider. But so far only one of these particle accelerators has detected the Higgs boson.
- soperj 5y agothat's perfect analogy, since most fruit & nuts are multi-generational projects.
- danenania 5y agoIt's also good to have a number of these things in the oven, because it's hard to predict when a sudden discontinuous leap might make practical in the short term something that previously seemed like a multi-generational project. I presume almost no one in 1920 could have imagined that anything approaching the output of fission energy would become common in their lifetime.
- time_to_smile 5y agoWe're currently on course for having trouble existing across generations. The path we're on now I don't think meeting fusion goals will be big concern if there's anyone around to even be concerned.
- andruby 5y agoTrue, but if we can crack fusion energy, we can stop burning fossil fuels and we might even have ample energy to extract CO2 from the atmosphere.
- orangepurple 5y agoWe already have the capability to economically capture atmospheric carbon with existing nuclear power generation systems
- antisthenes 5y ago<poignant joke about being able to capture atmospheric carbon since the dawn of time>
- Filligree 5y agoFusion produces a lot more radiation than fission, AIUI. What makes you think it will be any more politically viable to scale out than fission reactors?
- ClumsyPilot 5y agoThere is no nuclear waste, what radiation are you measuring to come to this conclusion? neutrons that dissapear the moment the reactor switches off?
- Filligree 5y agoActivation of the reactor walls. The neutrons don't disappear; they're absorbed, and some fraction of the atoms that absorb them become radioactive themselves. I've seen lifetime estimates ranging from five to ten years for the walls, after which they'll be high-level waste.
- amelius 5y ago> we, as a culture, have a problem seeing and planning across generations From a political perspective, there is little incentive to plan further ahead than the current administration.
- can16358p 5y agoYup, that's exactly the problem. We need to find an incentive for the ones in power to invest in things that would be good for the future. Maybe I'm going too far but in the future cryonics and being frozen and be brought back when the promise of these investments be resolved in the future might create some incentives. Even though this seems super-scifi for now, it probably won't be in about 100 years.
- frabcus 5y agoYes! As a concrete example, people spent all of the C19 trying to fly, learning lots about aerodynamics along the way (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_aviation#19th_century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_aviation#19th_centu...). This culminated in the Wright Brothers making the final improvements that made it work. A century or two to get fusion would be quite efficient.
- whiskyant 5y agoWould it? We could have hundreds of runaway-meltdown proof nuclear fission reactors now if we wanted.