[ExI] [tt] Smaller, cheaper, faster: Does Moore's law apply to solar cells?

[Eugen Leitl]

On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 07:19:44AM -0700, spike wrote:

> OK, well Kelly I sure hope you are right on this one.  {8-]  All our
> alternatives look seriously flawed to me.

Spike, this is frustrating. You're an aerospace guy.
You know numbers. I give you numbers you don't even
comment on.

The only flaws I can see are of the "duh, we've wasted
last 45 years, bet on the wrong horse, and now we woke
up to an expensive mistake". Yes, this sucks. Yes, there
will be pain to fix past sins of omission, lots of pain,
in fact, but the longer we wait, the more painful it gets.

At a meta level, we have a serious problem. Collectively, we're
stymied even by comparatively easy problem space like figuring 
our energy and matter supply issues in general. This shouldn't
be hard.  The comments I see (and I see a lot of comments, including
offline) indicate that people are completely out of their depth. 

There will be much, much harder problems down the line (though
perhaps not if we insist on dropping the ball). Building superintelligence
and relinquishing control to it to baby us henceforth strikes me more
of a problem space variety, even if it can be done on time. 

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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