[ExI] Silence in the sky-but why?

[Tomasz Rola]

On Thu, 26 Sep 2013, John Clark wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 Tomasz Rola <rtomek at ceti.pl> wrote:
> 
> > [J. Clark]:
> > > So what? We don't need to deploy it in the coming ten years either.
> >>
> >
> > >The thing that worries me is that for the coming 10 or 20 years
> > civilisation's back is barely covered. At least this is impression I get
> >
> 
> You get that impression because you've been listening to Eugen Leitl too 
> much. Eugen has said some intelligent things over the years but lately 
> when it comes to energy issues he,..., well it would be impolite to say 
> he's full of shit so lets just say he has an excess of fecal material. 

He may get too emotional sometimes, at least for my taste [1]. Maybe this 
means something good about his intentions? As of some of you guys making 
fun of his worries, there are moments when your optimism level resembles 
me of certain figures from Monty Python shows (if there is no such show, 
it sure should be). Just MHO.

As of news, I read quite some of them. I have even read some news long 
before I subscribed here (yes, there were news then, too). Sometimes I 
disagree with Eugen and but sometimes I think what he says is worth closer 
look. That's all.

[...]
> >> we will run out of Thorium in the crust of this planet in 6 billion
> >> years.
> >>
> >
> >
> > 3/4 of the crust is below water, thus a bit harder to get to
> >
> 
> So we will run out of Thorium in 1.5 billion years. The Earth will become
> uninhabitable in just 800 million years when the sun starts to run out of
> hydrogen and starts to get off the main sequence.

Maybe. I don't think it will make sense to pulverize every cubic meter of 
rock just to have a gram or few of Th. Doesn't look economical. So I still 
do not buy your assertion with so many zeros on the wrong end. Since U is 
only slightly (3-4 times) less omnipresent in the crust, you should say 
now "we will run out of U in 400 million years, so we don't need Th at 
all". Why then you get so emotional about Th? We have 1/4 of the crust to 
mine for U. Leave the hapless greens and start building nuke plants :-).

[1] I don't think humanity cares much about its future and any problem so 
far has been successfully solved, stealing first, then killing and as a 
last resort, cannibalism. So not much to fret about really - seems like 
anything aimed higher than those solutions is not going to get significant 
traction. This of course has some good sides, like our silence will be 
inspirational for some better brained species, because for us it obviously 
is not, we just keep asking, never dare to formulate answer, heh.

Regards,
Tomasz Rola

--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.      **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home    **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened...      **
**                                                                 **
** Tomasz Rola          mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com             **