Talk-Polywell.org

I'm out. I'm not playing the game. I've already said that. And good luck if you think you have any control over what your own descendants do or think. How dare you claim ownership of your descendants. Your own children will merely tolerate you. You need to realize that. I wouldn't be surprised in th...

I should have thought of this earlier: http://art-bin.com/art/omodest.html Not that big of a deal after we're regulating birth, right? :evil: Someone has been reading a bit too much malthus, methinks. There is a reason Malthus and Jonathan Swift published the ideas they did, because humans have bee...

So. All opposed. Interesting.

I don't understand what makes childbearing so sacred. It's open season on regulating anything else.

I have no problem "going first". A childbearing license system leaves plenty of choice. For example, if an applicant receives a license but decides it is worth more to sell it, then he/she can do that. Biotech is going to make this happen anyway. Currently it only costs $5000 to sequence the human g...

Use our intellect, our technical skills and ingenuity to find a solution for the problem. The other possibility is to fight wars and kill each other until there is few enough people for the available resources. Fighting wars over resources never gets out of season, it seems ;) I do prefer the forme...

So, what you're saying is, it's quite acceptable to issue a certain number of bear hunting licenses each year to prevent an overpopulation of bears, but it's not acceptable to issue a certain number of childbirth licenses to prevent human overpopulation. Regardless of the so-called morality of it, I...

You're assuming that collisions result in 100 percent transfer of energy. Most would not. What about collisions that are elastic and occur at an angle? I agree with Rider that the plasma would probably thermalize very quickly. Alpha particles for example are not like neutrinos, they don't just pass ...

I think people need to realize a population of 10 billion can do things a population of 1 billion can't. Like what? We're much better at self-organization than other animals. But are we really good enough for global organization? And would a population of 10 billion be easier or harder to organize?...

As people get richer, they want more leisure time. This means fewer kids, if any. Industrialization leads to a drop in the birth rate, Al Fin blogs about it regularly, among other sources. So, wealth per capita is tied to industrialization, which is tied to energy consumption. When energy supply de...

Population control has been suggested as a universal solution to problems such as limited resource depletion, food shortages, pollution, war, poverty, education, etc. It has been demonstrated to solve similar problems with game animal popuations, who are otherwise ravaged by diseases, starvation, te...

If you have the political will you could have population control.

And it wouldn't harm the environment.

a fusion reactor that uses H-bombs would work. One helluva engineering project that would be. AFAIK none of the nuclear weapons in the world currently are fusion-based. They are all fission-based and relatively low-yield, though each still powerful enough to wipe out a small city. As such, there wo...

Other than IEC polywell, which concepts do not operate in thermodynamic equilibrium? Any steady-state IEC polywell would also operate in thermodynamic equilibrium. The fusion products would immediately thermalize the plasma. A pulsed system is probably the only one with a chance of working. Probabl...

I'm not giving you any ammunition. But I AM a skeptic. And skeptics always have a reason. Hell, the skeptic is always right. You're the ones who are out to prove something. So prove it. So far polywell is no more than a gadget. Feed it a gigantic amount of power, and it might give off a few neutrons...

There were no flaws in the idea of a flying machine. People had been flying for centuries before the Wright Brothers, using hot air balloons and gliders. The success of aircraft has no bearing on whether fusion reactors will work. They are completely different technologies. Completely different phys...