CryptoWitch
Live From New Vegas
No bio...
User ID: 301
CryptoWitch
Live From New Vegas
22d ago
Progress continues slowly on the mining project. I feel like most everything is ready, but the 'finishing touches' are frustrating. Distributors change prices and delivery timelines. Investors want to haggle over contract details.
On the bright side, finding a place seems to be going well. I've found half a dozen possibilities, though I won't be going into specifics for OPSEC reasons. Suffice to say that each one has over 100kW of power, and they nearly all are under $1000/month for leasing. One in particular has more than a megawatt available and is still under $1k a month.
Posted a comment in the old thread, replying to @waffles and giving a drawn depiction of how the heat exchanger system is designed.
CryptoWitch
Live From New Vegas
22d ago
Thank you for being (upfront!) willing to help! It is basically entirely a solo venture. I will have outside startup capital, but no help in making things happen. I do plan on hiring someone to babysit the miners; I don't want to live there, so the plan is to have someone local who can show up and do needed maintenance without me having to fly back each time. And thank you for the luck; my flight may be delayed another week (we'll see) due to last-minute contract wrangling with the investors. I think that's the most frustrating part for me.
It's not asking a lot at all; asking a lot is asking an internet stranger to look over my calculations! Here's my sketched-out P&ID; forgive me if it's not to scale and if I don't have a ruler with me. I hope it gets the idea across. If you have strong feelings about having a proper one, suggest a program to do so and I can make one up. This seems to me to be a useful skill to gain, anyways; my preparation consists of a sketch similar to the one I just made, along with a series of numerical calculations and markings.
Well, I'm not averse to downsizing the cooling. It's just such a small part of the overall cost that it seems to me to be okay to overbuild, especially since there is a potentially-unknown amount of extra heat being added. More specifically, the cooling system as is will cost about 3% of the overall startup cost (the miners are by far the most expensive part). That number includes generous margin of error; my actual predicted cost is 2348.75 (plus shipping), which is rather under 3% and anyways rounds up on some small parts. When I say that there could be additional heat being added... Well, I'd love to overclock the miners. Exactly how much I can do that by will be directly proportional to my ability to cool them. And cooling itself is generally going to be very easy; I mean, no worrying about chillers or anything, just dumping the heat outside.
With that said, adding provisions to connect additional piping in the future is a good idea. And, again, I'm not against downsizing the cooling... I just think that doing so would save me relatively little (0.5% of the project cost? limited upside) and have uncertain downside (potential lack of cooling).
CryptoWitch
Live From New Vegas
24d ago
I hope you've had a good weekend!
Thank you for the reference book. I've started looking it over; it looks like it's more in depth than I truly need, but it could prove to be a useful resource, especially if I want to learn more in the future. There's lots I'm unaware of.
As for the utilities... Well, let me give you some numbers (and my reasoning, for context):
Heat Exchanger: I'd like to build it for a 100 kW crypto mining facility, to start. It's possible that the actual facility itself will be smaller in terms of power usage (i.e. 65 kW to begin) due to some differences in the final miners being selected, but I'd like to overbuild the system so that it is relatively easy to scale. Additionally, the long-term goal would be to build up to a 1MW facility--but in that case, I'm thinking of just adding 9 more modular heat-exchanger-and-tanks. This is potentially somewhat less efficient (not to mention a pain in the ass to build out, compared to a larger and combined heat exchanger), but I think it would offer the advantages of 1) modularity, again, and 2) less single points of failure. This plan is very much subject to conditions; I will be flying to Irkutsk this coming weekend and seeking a place to build all this, and the available space will dictate a lot of what future scaling looks like.
The heat exchanger itself is going to have to dissipate 100 kW of energy, at a high potential temperature of 25C (July in Irkutsk). The median use case will be significantly easier, with an average yearly temperature around 0C and months of winter where the weather should stay around -20C. Before I get into details, I want to apologize for any confusion in terminology. As you noticed, I'm doing this from scratch, and my "experience" in this field is entirely autodidactic (my formal studies were entirely unrelated). Please bear with me if something is miswritten or doesn't work the way I think it does, and consider correcting me. I'm writing here to learn and improve, and iron sharpens iron.
The basic function of the heat exchanger is going to be copper piping flowing through the tank (filled with dielectric fluid) and around the miners. The miners themselves are fairly heavy, and will eventually require maintenance. Maintenance is a bit onerous; you need to disconnect the miner, pull it out, clean it with degreaser, and then you can operate on the actual issue itself. In turn, the heavy lifting means that the tank is going to be long and narrow, so that you can always stand by the edge and lift a miner, rather than trying to take one 'from the center', so to speak. Downstream of this comes the shape of the pipes. What I would like to do is to have them in a series of horizontal U shapes, with two miners inside each U, and the heat transfer fluid input/output connecting at the top of the 'U', for lack of better terminology. This means that there will be a significant number of inputs and outputs per tank, and as such I'll have it professionally fabricated.
So, 100 kW. The miners would prefer their cooling liquid input around 30C, and will output it around 55C, meaning I have delta_T of 25. Given the expected true maximum average temperature of 25C, I think that assuming occasional days of 30C outside is reasonable. This also conveniently gets us the same delta_T for the outside heat exchangers as the one internal to the tank, at the cost of potentially overbuilding the heat exchanger somewhat. As I understand it, this also makes the system more reliable, and regardless if we experience a truly anomalous spike in temperature (i.e. outside temps of 40C, above the record high temp there) we can switch the miners into low-power mode and decrease cooling needs anyways.
Calculating heat transfer seems to be Q = U * A * delta_T (or, for anyone else reading, heat transfer = material heat transfer coefficient [W/m^2] * area * difference in temperature). I know that I want to be able to dissipate 100 kW, and the heat transfer coefficient of copper pipe is 385 W/m^2. Delta_T is going to be 25 degrees. This leaves us with calculating the area, which is equal to 100,000/(385*25), or 10.38 m^2 of surface area. Now, surface area A = pi * diameter * length, so 10.38 = 3.1415 * 7.5 cm (0.075) * L. Solving for L gives us 44.06 meters of pipe. Notably, this also means we need the same amount of pipe inside the tank.
Now, the astute reader may note I used a pipe diameter of 7.5 cm. This is the pipe I have determined is the best to use for this use case. It's cheapest for moving large quantities of heat transfer fluid (and I need a flow rate of 4.938 kg/s).
Flow rate was determined as follows: Q = m_dot * C * delta_T (heat exchange = mass flow rate * heat transfer fluid specific heat capacity * difference in temperature). 100 kW = m_dot * C (which varies from 0.76 to 0.81 for various temperatures of 60% ethylene glycol / 40% water mix) * delta_T, which we determined to be 25C. Here, we get m_dot = 100 kw / (0.81 * 25), or 4.938 kg/s. I took the highest temperature's specific heat in an attempt to better model a borderline or edge case condition; if we look at a colder temperature outside (and presumably colder heat transfer fluid as a result) then the difference in heat exchange efficiency very rapidly outpaces the change in specific heat capacity.
So, needing a flow rate of about 5 kg/s, using large diameter pipe seems ideal. This keeps head pressure down on the pumps and makes it feasible to pump what seems to me to be a large amount of fluid per second. Specifically, with 60% ethylene glycol/40% water mixtures, 5 kg/s is equal to 3 kg/s EG and 2 kg/s H2O, with a density of 1.1132 g/cm^2 and 1, respectively, for a cumulative volume of 2695 + 2000 cm^2/s, or about 4.7 L/S, or (as pumps seem to be sold in m^3/h) 16.92 m^3/h.
Bringing all this back around, I would like to have 5 pumps in sequence, each capable of 4 m^3/h. This means that on the hottest expected operating days, the pumps will be running around 85% of capacity. I expect the average utilization to be significantly lower, however. Additionally, the external heat exchanger will have variable speed fans as well, also controlled (as with the pumps) by PID. The goal is to avoid overtaxing the pumps on hot days by also spinning the fans higher, and increasing airflow over the external heat exchangers.
Now, the external heat exchangers will be the same total surface area, and will also be split into 5 modular parts. Bypass valves will connect the system in case of failure of one part. I am learning PLC control with Paul Lynn's excellent PLC Dojo. I certainly have much more I could write, but this is already getting long and I don't want to overwhelm you or anyone else reading! Happy to continue (perhaps in tomorrow's Tinker Tuesday) and discuss the external heat exchanger design, PLC principles and basic ladder logic I'm trying to create, and my plans for power (though this last is probably the thing I know least about). I invite any questions anyone may have.
My own questions/musings: -- Given the space between the coolant pipes and the miners themselves, does it make sense to target a lower temperature for coolant input, e.g. 25C, and count on admixture to raise that to 30C by the time it's brought into the miners? (Note: I'll of course be trying different temps and finding the best performance for my particular setup, but I think a professional opinion would be interesting) -- Do I want to install a propeller (fan?) in the tank to increase fluid mixing? -- Any advice on shopping for temperature or flow sensors that can be controlled via PLC? -- I was planning on using Ignition as a SCADA. Any advice on the best communications protocol?
CryptoWitch
Live From New Vegas
26d ago
You’re the man! Thank you for reaching out, I did figure there were some smart people here and I might get lucky :)
I appreciate the resource and will check it out. It’s late here and I’m calling it a night for now, but I’ll come back and go over what I’m thinking in more depth tomorrow. A sanity check would be appreciated. I feel confident that I can do this, but I am acutely aware that there are a bunch of lessons that have to be learned through experience… And that it’s both easier and cheaper for someone else to already have that experience.
CryptoWitch
Live From New Vegas
28d ago
I'm not the commenter you were replying to, but trivially, if all people with trait C (prodigies, 10x engineers, etc) exhibit both trait A and trait B, while people with only A or B do not exhibit trait C, you could say that trait B is necessary but not sufficient.
In this example, you could say that trait C (prodigy) requires traits A (IQ, intelligence, whatever) and trait B (conscientiousness, focus) or whatever trait D (open-mindedness to explore new research avenues, low neuroticism to avoid some of the pitfalls of high IQ, etc).
CryptoWitch
Live From New Vegas
28d ago
Could you expand a little on inducing neuroplasticity via antidepressants? A quick google shows a lot of academic articles speculating that the latest generation of SSRI’s effects are mediated via neurogenesis; are you aware of any protocols, bio hacking journals, or otherwise ‘here and now’ looks at this?
CryptoWitch
Live From New Vegas
29d ago
Small update for this week. Most of my prep work is already complete, so I’m in a bit of a holding pattern until I can finalize the purchase of the miners. Seems that part of the team from the distributor I’d like to work with is in Dubai for an expo, which slows things down. Ah well, it’ll come in time.
Beyond that, juggling investors is weird sometimes. I have raised a moderate amount of money for this project, and the people behind it have strange questions sometimes. I do my best to make sure they understand everything (the risks, how Bitcoin mining itself works, how the company is set up)… But there still abound small misunderstandings here and there. I’m not sure whether it’s my own issues with explaining, or their desire to make money taking precedence over reading pages of text.
CryptoWitch
Live From New Vegas
1mo ago
Will do! I admit, I wasn’t very familiar with it myself. I settled on it as a location because the electricity prices are the lowest in Russia, but the weather is ideal for this purpose as well.
I imagine it’ll be… Cold. Industrial. The Russians I’ve spoken to about it are rather grim when I mention I’ll go there.
As there seems to be interest in my coming bitcoin mining startup, I thought I’d lay out some of my basic assumptions here, and go over a few (simplified) numbers and the steps I anticipate going through in the next few months. If desired, I’m happy to answer more questions or get more specific, within reason.
Legal:
Here in Russia, the government recently legalized bitcoin mining, and is matching this with opening new crypto exchanges in Moscow and (possibly) St. Petersburg. There will be a new company code in the tax system specifically for miners, and there will be a registry of legal mining companies created in the coming months. For those not in Russia, this is meaningful for a couple of reasons. First, Russia moving in a pro-crypto way implies that there will at least be a few years of trying this liberalized regulatory state, decreasing the risk to an incipient startup of regulatory changes (albeit, not making them zero). Second, this is a trade with the miners to agree to pay relatively higher energy prices ($0.048/kWh) in exchange for legality. This is important because there are many ‘grey zone’ miners operating now; they leech subsidized power from civilian energy grids ($0.0176/kWh), driving up the prices for people and contributing to difficulties in the energy grid. There are also larger political considerations at play; increasing Russia’s connection to the crypto payments system allows them to (potentially) move away from the USD in terms of international trade, with the obvious advantages to both Russia and BRICS in general.
Engineering:
I will be beginning with the S21 Immersion Miner. Immersion mining is an interesting technology; the electronics are submerged in dielectric fluid, an insulating fluid that prevents electrical shorts but is far more efficient at heat transfer than air. Additionally, the miners can be sealed away from the air, preventing dust buildup and the gradual erosion of circuit boards, as well as decreasing the extremely loud sound inherent in bitcoin mining. I see this project as consisting of three parts: the tank, the heat exchanger, and the miners themselves.
The Tank:
This is the easiest part from my perspective, because I don’t need to make it. I will be organizing the miners two deep to make removal from the tank easy. They are individually fairly heavy, even when they aren’t full of oil, and I don’t want to deal with the potential for injury to either personnel or the miner itself when lifting it out of the tank. The tank will therefore be fairly narrow in the Z axis, very long in the X, and about half a meter in the Y. I’ll have it fabricated of thin steel plate to minimize weight and cost, and will have a series of holes drilled in and fittings for copper pipe installed in a U shape around each column of miners. On top, I will cut and fit large sheets of acrylic to cover the miners. This decreases the chance for dust to accumulate in the oil itself, at the cost of adding slightly to maintenance requirements (in terms of taking off the acrylic shell each time). The tank will extend approximately 10 cm above the top of the miners, and I will fill this space with nitrogen gas. Nitrogen will displace the air, decreasing the already admittedly low risk of the oil gradually absorbing water from the air via hygroscopic effects.
The Heat Exchanger:
This will be the fun part, from my perspective. All the electricity I use is turned into heat, which means I need to dissipate a lot of heat. I will install pumps in parallel, flowing heat transfer fluid through the tank to absorb heat and to the outside, where I will build a matching number of heat exchangers from copper pipe and variable drive fans. Both the fans and the pumps will be controlled via a programmable logic controller (PLC), automating their speed to match the heat transfer requirements. I note that the location where the facility will be, Irkutsk, is extremely cold. The average yearly temperature is 0C, with expected average monthly average temperatures in the negative teens over the winter. The record low temperature is -49C, which means that I need a heat exchanger that can be switched off or have very minimal flow to avoid overcooling the liquid. I have looked into special cold-weather bearings for the fans to avoid them seizing, and am planning to wait and see if they are necessary. At the moment, the plan for the external heat exchangers is essentially to run the copper pipe back and forth in an outside duct (a serpentine heat exchanger), and then place the fan at the outer end of the duct (‘sucking’, not ‘blowing’), so that the air actually hitting the fan will hopefully have been warmed beforehand. I will be monitoring pump speed, fan speed, heat transfer fluid flow speed, heat transfer fluid temperature, and tank oil temperature. I am currently learning PLC control logic to attempt to automate this process.
The Miners:
This is a bit of an unknown for me. I have never mined cryptocurrency before, and will have a lot to learn when setting them up. I would like to use BraiinsOS as their operating system, but Braiins does not currently support the S21 Immersion. This should change in the next few months, but in the meantime I will use the stock firmware.
Beyond this, I expect interesting challenges with hiring, security, and leasing industrial space with sufficient available power. The facility will begin as a smaller, proof-of-concept business, but if successful we will raise investment and scale.
I leave for Irkutsk in 9 days and want to hit the ground running. I’ll update next Tinker Tuesday with my progress finalizing things here before spending a winter in Siberia.
CryptoWitch
Live From New Vegas
1mo ago
I’ve seen that happen and it’s always a shame. Whether I liked or disliked the poster (or both, on different occasions—looking at you, Kulak) the incentives of making money on one’s writing push them to agree with the greater egregore.
This place is very useful! Iron sharpens iron. One of my hopes in posting is that someone with more experience might make suggestions that turn out to be helpful (and the other is simply to give back, in the sense of producing rather than merely being a consumer of the rest of the forum’s efforts). But yes, monetization is often a kiss of death for the spark of originality that makes something interesting.
CryptoWitch
Live From New Vegas
1mo ago
Glad to hear your interest, I enjoy your posts (though I myself am mostly a lurker).
Don’t worry about shilling from me, at least. The reason I posted here (as opposed to the main thread) was because I’d like to share the process. I anticipate it being an interesting journey.
In short, I am planning on beginning with a 100 kW facility in Irkutsk, Russia. Irkutsk is one of the largest cities in Siberia, and offers significant hydroelectric power availability due to its proximity to Lake Baikal, the world’s largest freshwater lake by volume.
I’m familiar with Hashrate Index, but thank you for sharing!
As for your exchange… Again, thank you for sharing. The area I’ll be in is a large industrial one; I hope to not be dealing with consistent power outages, but we shall see. I’ll consider it if I see a larger future need to hedge against changes in hash price.
Edit: I’m out of the US, and think using this could be difficult.
CryptoWitch
Live From New Vegas
1mo ago
I will soon be founding a Bitcoin mining startup. I have never mined crypto before, but there are a confluence of factors (cheap power, extremely cold weather, low taxes) that make me believe the region I have selected is ideal, and make me willing to spend the time and effort on beginning this company.
As part of the process, I will be finding an industrial site, learning to program programmable logic controllers (PLCs), and designing as well as building a heat exchanger. This will involve some skills I have never done before (brazing, the aforementioned PLC control, setup of BTC miners) and some I have (I’m comfortable with industrial machinery, though far from experienced).
Is this something that the people of the Motte would be interested in updates on?
CryptoWitch
Live From New Vegas
1mo ago
Okay, I’ll bite: I’m obviously less clued in here than you or pbmonster. Where do you disagree with them? What sort of problems are being ignored or minimized?
CryptoWitch
Live From New Vegas
1mo ago
This is fascinating food for thought. I have some minor disagreements—namely, I don’t think a literal iPhone drone would be able to power extended flight (“many miles”), nor that sleep mode with passive sensors would massively increase operational life… (“you can’t ever leave base”).
But, big picture, you paint a convincing view of the future. If we look at the set of “drones under $1000” rather than literal converted iPhones, I think it’s a rather larger space of possibilities. Scary to imagine.
CryptoWitch
Live From New Vegas
1mo ago
Very interesting, thank you for the explanation!
Since it sounds like you’re more educated on this than me, where does this leave us with humans? I can accept that it isn’t inherently impossible to handle drones (though I note that a single PDC would still be overwhelmed by a swarm)… But humans don’t have PDCs, radar, or the electrical generation for any of that.
Regarding EM warfare vs drones, sure, you can be fully autonomous and protected. But it’s a trade off, isn’t it? Full autonomy seems to me to favor larger drones, rather than disposable and cheap swarms. It’s also more expensive, I’d think.
How do you see the future of drone warfare, or warfare in general?
CryptoWitch
Live From New Vegas
1mo ago
I appreciate the ideas, but want to pop in with a relevant point of information. The sound can be (strongly) mitigated. There are extant and 3D-printable rotor designs that do so, and they’d be soon be adopted if sound-tracking caught on. Additionally, and notably more effectively for larger drones, you can play counter-frequency sound to directly cancel out the wave amplitude, as we see in modern stealth helicopters.
So, sound tracking is tricky. You could certainly make the argument that this just reduces reaction time (and you’d be right); but that reduced reaction time due to less overall sound is critical. Additionally, I think RandomRanger is suggesting that drone swarms are the future; most area of effect weapons (like your shotgun idea) are still going to be generally pointed in a direction. This means a semi-autonomous swarm moving from multiple directions would be very, very hard to bring down.
We’ll see. EMP on your position could work, at the cost of any electronics you’ve got on you. Potentially we will see electromagnetic field producing weapons that could neutralize a wide angle… But there we run into power density issues (at least for infantry—a mobile platform could afford to have large batteries, capacitors, and the power production to fill them).
But it won’t be easy, at least for a while. It may well be that the human warfighter is on its way out.
CryptoWitch
Live From New Vegas
2mo ago
We all know the coming monarchy will run on Temple OS.
CryptoWitch
Live From New Vegas
5mo ago
INTJ is just Myers-Briggs for autist, I guess.
But seriously, another INTJ reporting in. If I recall correctly, it’s among the rarer MBTI types. I wonder if you’re right about your assessment of this place as having massive overrepresentation.
Have we ever done surveys or tried to get a handle on the demographics here? Given the amount of wrong think/number of witches, it might be interesting. Or people might not want to participate and we’d see skew as a result.
CryptoWitch
Live From New Vegas
6mo ago
Thank you, that’s helpful!
CryptoWitch
Live From New Vegas
6mo ago
Of course; anything that works (beyond VSIMR or solar sails, as another commenter helpfully pointed out) requires some law-of-physics updates. But I will point out that this is exactly what is claimed.
A veteran of such storied programs as NASA’s Space Shuttle, the International Space Station (ISS), The Hubble Telescope, and the current NASA Dust Program, Buhler and his colleagues believe their discovery of a fundamental new force represents a historic breakthrough that will impact space travel for the next millennium.
“This discovery of a New Force is fundamental in that electric fields alone can generate a sustainable force onto an object and allow center-of-mass translation of said object without expelling mass.”
“There are rules that include conservation of energy, but if done correctly, one can generate forces unlike anything humankind has done before,…”
“Essentially, what we’ve discovered is that systems that contain an asymmetry in either electrostatic pressure or some kind of electrostatic divergent field can give a system of a center of mass a non-zero force component,” Buhler explained. “So, what that basically means is that there’s some underlying physics that can essentially place force on an object should those two constraints be met.”
I’m not strongly arguing for this being The Real Deal; as another commenter pointed out, put it on a satellite and prove it. Rather, my interest in this is as a thought exercise: consistent force production from electricity allows us to do all kinds of wacky stuff, up to and including interstellar travel on reasonable timeframes, pursuant to your definition of reasonable. 1G acceleration, as is claimed in this particular instance, would get us to Alpha Centauri in a little over six years; 12 years if we are slowing down at the halfway point. This is well shy of “generation ship” type speculation, and would turn intersolar travel into something feasible in a lifetime.
Now, hefty grain of salt and all that. I’m skeptical myself, and recognize this is extremely speculative. Not only are there large engineering challenges in building such a spacecraft (or proving that one of these propellantless engines can produce thrust), there are also a whole slew of known unknowns (interstellar hydrogen or small molecule impacts at an appreciable percentage of C?) and unknown unknowns.
At the same time, it also solves some problems. Consistent acceleration, likely even under 1g, removes a lot of the problems of extended stays in microgravity, and if we’re hypothesizing advanced extrasolar civilizations anyways… Then it stands to reason that we would not be the only ones who would discover such things. It would “raise the ceiling” on intrastellar travel, so to speak.
I’m happy to be able to discuss it. While my own priors are low for any individual ‘game changing technology’ coming to fruition, we do know there are yet-unexplained physics; we live in exciting days, in both the positive and negative sense, to be able to more seriously start investigating these fringes.
CryptoWitch
Live From New Vegas
6mo ago
In the spirit of bringing life into the thread, I thought I’d share something a little different.
Dozens of stars show signs of hosting advanced alien civilizations
Two surveys of millions of stars in our galaxy have revealed mysterious spikes in infrared heat coming from dozens of them.
A summary won’t do it justice, and I encourage anyone interested to read the linked article; it’s not long. In short, though, researchers checked out approximately 5 million stars (in our galaxy—close enough to look well at and potentially one day visit) for anomalous ratios of infrared heat to light. The idea here is that if a star is giving off a lot of light that is being captured, it will heat whatever is doing the capturing up significantly. This is suggested to be possibly due to either unusual debris fields around these stars, which would be unexpected due to their age (most planetary collisions happening early on in a solar system’s lifetime, and these stars being older)… Or due to large amounts of sun-orbiting satellites soaking up solar power, a Dyson swarm. Our exoplanet imaging is still very much in its infancy, and we have already discovered planets that seem to bear biosignatures. The latter explanation is plausible, at least.
This is pretty far from standard culture-war fare, but I suspect that there are enough rationalists and futurists here to find it interesting. There are also a few potential links:
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- What does the future of our society look in a universe where life is entropically favorable? That is to say, what if life is not rare, and instead happens consistently whenever the right conditions are present for long enough?
This implies that there is either a way through the theorized AI apocalypse, or perhaps that silicon-based life continues growing after taking over from carbon-based life (the “biological boot loader” thesis). While I’m rather attached to my carbon-based existence, it’s at least heartening that in this scenario something is still happening after AI takes over; the spark of life hasn’t left the universe. Unless all that power is going to making paperclips, I suppose.
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- What sort of societal organization is optimal for a galaxy in which we can expect to interact with numerous alien civilizations? We have (thankfully) yet to encounter grabby aliens, but the game theory seems logical; in an environment where there are limited resources and an ever-expanding population, conflict is inevitable (by historical earth standards).
Does it make sense to enforce population control on a cosmic scale, discouraging humans from expanding to other stars to avoid conflict? Could the “dark forest” hypothesis make sense, where offense is favored over defense and civilizations hide as much as possible?
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- If we were to travel to other stars in the distant future, would the expected travel times result in human speciation, or such a long remove that cultural exchange and even biological exchange is kept to a minimum? Or is there an “optimal human”, which genetic engineering and biotech could potentially bring us towards as a local maximum?
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- Is this all bullshit, and are we alone in the universe, forevermore?
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- Does anyone have any thoughts on the spate of propellantless propulsion efforts currently being made? Somewhat like perpetual motion machines, or room temperature superconductors, or fusion… This is a topic that has very high expected returns, and thus a high expected gain in fame or financing from lying about experimental results. But I do note that fusion seems to be moving forward; while LK-99 didn’t pan out, there are still groups working on things inspired by it, and it seems like lessons learned are leading to next generation superconductors. My point here is that if the laws of physics allow it, we seem likely to eventually create it… And we are yet to discover a Theory of Everything, so who’s to say whether something like propellantless propulsion is possible?
Mods, I apologize in advance if this is insufficiently culture-war adjacent to deserve posting here. I didn’t think it worthy of its own thread, and feel like it’s perhaps healthy for the Motte to have some fresh topics as well. I’m a devoted lurker and thought I should do my part.
Edit- My list got butchered. Trying to fix it, but it seems the method I chose of writing multiple paragraphs after a question is disfavored.
CryptoWitch
Live From New Vegas
10mo ago
Huh. Interesting. I’m happy to believe you, but yeah, that makes you a weird outlier.
So does achieving that kind of deadlift in only two years, especially with a former endurance background. That makes it gaining strength harder, not easier, as you’ll have turned more muscle fibers into Type I fibers. All the same, good for you! I wasn’t built to deadlift; my proportions are wrong for it. Bench press and squat were better for me. That said, I got my strength total as high as I wanted it. After a point, powerlifting felt not worth it any more for me. My body hurt, and I didn’t want to keep bulking to become competitive at my height.
Do you still deadlift or lift competitively?
CryptoWitch
Live From New Vegas
10mo ago
A BMI of 20.3 is 5th percentile for all Americans (for easy statistics). Women are much more likely to be very low BMI than men; what do you suppose that makes him? 3rd percentile? I’m pretty comfortable with calling that far on the left tail of body weight distribution.
I’ll agree with you about the PEDs; he claims to not have been though. It’s believable enough, though makes him a bit of a freak. Still, they do exist, so who knows?
Thank you! Good to hear I’m not off my rocker.
I have not considered the possibility of a coolant leak… It’s a good question. The idea was to bend the copper pipe such that the pipe in the coolant tank was one piece, with the connections being the only part that could leak, but you bring up a good question.
With that said, things are (hopefully temporarily) on pause. The Russian government’s new mining law came into effect on the first of November (yay, since that’s what legalizes this project) and they announced some upcoming mining location bans.
Boo, since they were not specific about exactly where mining would be banned. Right now I think we would be in the clear, but it doesn’t make sense to move forward until I’m certain. I don’t love sitting on my hands here.
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