Future Tech The Sky Is The Limit

[Huntn]

I can imagine a future where with something the equivalent of

• The Real VR, think Simstim (read Neuromancer), a technology that taps into all of your senses and teleports your brain into an artificial setting, instead of watching a movie you could ride along with one of the characters… and people will get lost in virtual worlds if they can afford it.
  
  In the Book Count Zero, there is a trillionaire who spends his physical life in a vat (he is physically sickly) and for all entents and purposes lives in a virtual world of his choosing.
  
  Think of a life, where you never grow old (until you croak for real) have any physical characteristic, any setting you care to hang out in.
  
  
• A.I. Companions- We see different versions of them in movies from Data in Star trek to Joi in Bladerunner 2049. I see a huge market in full relationship AI companions. Saying this from personal experience, a marriage, a relationship in many cases is a lifetime of arguments and compromises. I’ve seen enough portrayals of smart human-like AI that if they can master handling your emotional, companionship, physiological and sexual needs would be a slam dunk Imo. The obstacle? Technology Android bodies and worthy AI.
  
  
  

  Can We Build ‘Her’?: What Samantha Tells Us About the Future of AI

  What will the next generation of intelligent computing look like? The movie Her has captured the public imagination with its vision of a lightning-fast evolutionary trajectory of virtual assistants, and the emotional bonds we could form with them. Is this a likely future? The film’s narrative...

  www.wired.com
  

  Blade Runner 2049 and the Role of Joi in a Joyless World

  We examine the importance of Ana de Armas' Joi in Blade Runner 2049, and what her relationship with Ryan Gosling represents.

  www.denofgeek.com
  
  
• Designer Babies- If you could choose the important characteristics of your baby, including being hereditarily disease free, specify a height not to be under, and a fast metabolism so it would not have to fight weight issues all their life, I can people choosing to do this.
  
  Research is underway to transform normal cells into sperm and eggs. In this way gay couples could produce offspring related to both of them
  
  
  

  Are Designer Babies Our Future?

  New research is showing that it may become possible for people have control over more than just the gender of the embryos they have implanted.

  www.babygaga.com
  
  
• Human Computer Implants- In Cyberpunk think Microsoft, a thumb chip you slide into a slot at the back of your head) We’ve already been augmenting the human body with the ability to walk, hear, see, why not learn or access an encyclopedia of knowledge, or be networked with specialized eyes that can project text like a screen to read text.
  I can’t vouch for the accuracy of this link, if it is a practical joke, but here is the idea:
  
  nanobrainimplant.com - This website is for sale! - nanobrainimplant Resources and Information.

  This website is for sale! nanobrainimplant.com is your first and best source for all of the information you’re looking for. From general topics to more of what you would expect to find here, nanobrainimplant.com has it all. We hope you find what you are searching for!

  nanobrainimplant.com
  
  
  

  Human Microchipping Is Here, and It’s About to Rock Your Skin’s World

  This is your epidermis as you have never (ever) imagined.

  www.allure.com
  

  15 examples of human augmentation technology in everyday life

  Across the globe, engineers, entrepreneurs, and policymakers are rapidly exploring new and marketable applications for human augmentation technology. Most of them are being designed to help people fulfill their long-lived desire to be smarter, faster, stronger, tougher, and more attractive, and...

  www.freshconsulting.com
  
  
• Automated Personal Transportation - It’s on the way and cities might just ban privately driven cars, and reduce traffic congestion by 70%. Imagine an automated Uber where you with buy in part ownership or rent. Vehicle on demand. A fascinating report heard recently on NPR says that the more highways you build, the more traffic you generate. In fact there are reportedly moves to remove highways.
  
  
  

  13 cities that are starting to ban cars

  To mitigate climate change and make cities more pedestrian-friendly, more policy makers around the world are aiming to ban cars. Most recently, Madrid announced that it will bar cars from downtown starting later this year.

  www.businessinsider.com
  
  
  

  The Science Is Clear: More Highways Equals More Traffic. Why Are DOTs Still Ignoring It? — Streetsblog USA

  Numerous studies have documented the phenomenon known as induced demand in transportation: Basically, if you build highway lanes, more drivers will come. And yet, transportation agencies rarely account for this effect when planning road projects.

  usa.streetsblog.org
  
  
• Moving all polluting industry off the Earth into space- I agree 100%.
  
  

  Jeff Bezos wants to move 'all polluting industry' into space to keep Earth clean

  The Amazon billionaire said in an interview with MSNBC that his Blue Origin sub-orbital spaceflight reinforced his intention to fight climate change.

  www.businessinsider.com
  
  
• What else? I’ll be happy to add any category anyone mentions and then link it to the post you make.

 

[User 189]

I can imagine a future where with something the equivalent of

• The Real VR, think Simstim (read Neuromancer), a technology that taps into all of your senses and teleports your brain into an artificial setting, instead of watching a movie you could ride along with one of the characters… and people will get lost in virtual worlds if they can afford it.
  
  In the Book Count Zero, there is a trillionaire who spends his physical life in a vat (he is physically sickly) and for all entents and purposes lives in a virtual world of his choosing.
  
  Think of a life, where you never grow old (until you croak for real) have any physical characteristic, any setting you care to hang out in.
  
  
• A.I. Companions- We see different versions of them in movies from Data in Star trek to Joi in Bladerunner 2049. I see a huge market in full relationship AI companions. Saying this from personal experience, a marriage, a relationship in many cases is a lifetime of arguments and compromises. I’ve seen enough portrayals of smart human-like AI that if they can master handling your emotional, companionship, physiological and sexual needs would be a slam dunk Imo. The obstacle? Technology Android bodies and worthy AI.
  
  
  

  Can We Build ‘Her’?: What Samantha Tells Us About the Future of AI

  What will the next generation of intelligent computing look like? The movie Her has captured the public imagination with its vision of a lightning-fast evolutionary trajectory of virtual assistants, and the emotional bonds we could form with them. Is this a likely future? The film’s narrative...

  www.wired.com
  

  Blade Runner 2049 and the Role of Joi in a Joyless World

  We examine the importance of Ana de Armas' Joi in Blade Runner 2049, and what her relationship with Ryan Gosling represents.

  www.denofgeek.com
  
  
• Designer Babies- If you could choose the important characteristics of your baby, including being hereditarily disease free, specify a height not to be under, and a fast metabolism so it would not have to fight weight issues all their life, I can people choosing to do this.
  
  Research is underway to transform normal cells into sperm and eggs. In this way gay couples could produce offspring related to both of them
  
  
  

  Are Designer Babies Our Future?

  New research is showing that it may become possible for people have control over more than just the gender of the embryos they have implanted.

  www.babygaga.com
  
  
• Human Computer Implants- In Cyberpunk think Microsoft, a thumb chip you slide into a slot at the back of your head) We’ve already been augmenting the human body with the ability to walk, hear, see, why not learn or access an encyclopedia of knowledge, or be networked with specialized eyes that can project text like a screen to read text.
  I can’t vouch for the accuracy of this link, if it is a practical joke, but here is the idea:
  
  nanobrainimplant.com - This website is for sale! - nanobrainimplant Resources and Information.

  This website is for sale! nanobrainimplant.com is your first and best source for all of the information you’re looking for. From general topics to more of what you would expect to find here, nanobrainimplant.com has it all. We hope you find what you are searching for!

  nanobrainimplant.com
  
  
  

  Human Microchipping Is Here, and It’s About to Rock Your Skin’s World

  This is your epidermis as you have never (ever) imagined.

  www.allure.com
  

  15 examples of human augmentation technology in everyday life

  Across the globe, engineers, entrepreneurs, and policymakers are rapidly exploring new and marketable applications for human augmentation technology. Most of them are being designed to help people fulfill their long-lived desire to be smarter, faster, stronger, tougher, and more attractive, and...

  www.freshconsulting.com
  
  
• Automated Personal Transportation - It’s on the way and cities might just ban privately driven cars, and reduce traffic congestion by 70%. Imagine an automated Uber where you with buy in part ownership or rent. Vehicle on demand. A fascinating report heard recently on NPR says that the more highways you build, the more traffic you generate. In fact there are reportedly moves to remove highways.
  
  
  

  13 cities that are starting to ban cars

  To mitigate climate change and make cities more pedestrian-friendly, more policy makers around the world are aiming to ban cars. Most recently, Madrid announced that it will bar cars from downtown starting later this year.

  www.businessinsider.com
  
  
  

  The Science Is Clear: More Highways Equals More Traffic. Why Are DOTs Still Ignoring It? — Streetsblog USA

  Numerous studies have documented the phenomenon known as induced demand in transportation: Basically, if you build highway lanes, more drivers will come. And yet, transportation agencies rarely account for this effect when planning road projects.

  usa.streetsblog.org
  
  
• Moving all polluting industry off the Earth into space- I agree 100%.
  
  

  Jeff Bezos wants to move 'all polluting industry' into space to keep Earth clean

  The Amazon billionaire said in an interview with MSNBC that his Blue Origin sub-orbital spaceflight reinforced his intention to fight climate change.

  www.businessinsider.com
  
  
• What else? I’ll be happy to add any category anyone mentions and then link it to the post you make.

All I can think of is that one meme template...

 

[Yoused]

This may be an appropriate thread to speak of what happens when everything becomes too Star Trek: the Next Generation wonderful.

 

[fischersd]

Well, a few thoughts:
- Musk is less visionary by just creating better rockets and electric cars that we had the tech to make in the 90's
- A hybrid of capitalism / socialism will eventually make eduction free for all - so we won't miss out on the thousands of Einsteins and Hawkings than we already have.
- Tractor beams, enabling catapults that can launch objects into space with zero carbon footprint (ala Heinlein) is where we should be focused.
- And, why aren't we doing more with wormholes? That's the future of transportation. (points to free education).
- Oh - and implanting chips into our brains will have the same effect as giving kids calculators - we're impairing our potential. Evolution's actually a GOOD thing.
Exercise the mind.

 

[DT]

- And, why aren't we doing more with wormholes?

We will disclose what we're doing when you're ready ...

 

[lizkat]

We will disclose what we're doing when you're ready ...

Heh, but maybe we'll give you a preview just in case you're curious...

The Rise of A.I. Fighter Pilots

Artificial intelligence is being taught to fly warplanes. Can the technology be trusted?

www.newyorker.com

On a cloudless morning last May, a pilot took off from the Niagara Falls International Airport, heading for restricted military airspace over Lake Ontario. The plane, which bore the insignia of the United States Air Force, was a repurposed Czechoslovak jet, an L-39 Albatros, purchased by a private defense contractor. The bay in front of the cockpit was filled with sensors and computer processors that recorded the aircraft’s performance. For two hours, the pilot flew counterclockwise around the lake. Engineers on the ground, under contract with DARPA, the Defense Department’s research agency, had choreographed every turn, every pitch and roll, in an attempt to do something unprecedented: design a plane that can fly and engage in aerial combat—dogfighting—without a human pilot operating it.

The exercise was an early step in the agency’s Air Combat Evolution program, known as ACE, one of more than six hundred Department of Defense projects that are incorporating artificial intelligence into war-fighting. This year, the Pentagon plans to spend close to a billion dollars on A.I.-related technology.

All told, the L-39 was taken up above Lake Ontario twenty times, each sortie giving the engineers and computer scientists the information they need to build a model of its flight dynamics under various conditions. Like self-driving cars, autonomous planes use sensors to identify discrepancies between the outside world and the information encoded in their maps. But a dogfighting algorithm will have to take into account both the environment and the aircraft. A plane flies differently at varying altitudes and angles, on hot days versus cold ones, or if it’s carrying an extra fuel tank or missiles.

In 2024, if the ACE program goes according to plan, four A.I.-enabled L-39s will participate in a live dogfight in the skies above Lake Ontario. To achieve that goal, DARPA has enlisted three dozen academic research centers and private companies, each working on one of two problem areas: how to get the plane to fly and fight on its own, and how to get pilots to trust the A.I. enough to use it. Robert Work, who was the Deputy Secretary of Defense during the Obama Administration, and pushed the Pentagon to pursue next-generation technologies, told me, “If you don’t have trust, the human will always be watching the A.I. and saying, ‘Oh, I’ve got to take over.’ ”

There is no guarantee that ACE will succeed. DARPA projects are time-limited experiments, typically lasting between three and five years. Schifferle, at Calspan, told me, “We’re at the ‘walk’ stage of a typical ‘crawl, walk, run’ technology maturation process.” Still, it seems increasingly likely that young pilots will one day wonder how their fighter jet acquired the skills of a Chuck Yeager. When they do, they will be told about a refurbished Soviet-era warplane that was flown high above Lake Ontario by old-school pilots who were, in a way, writing their own obituaries.

Not only did I not know anything much about this, I didn't expect to bump into more of it in The New Yorker. But then that's what some of The New Yorker's one-off pieces and and quirky profiles do still have on offer.

So welcome to another glimpse of USA tax dollars at work. In this case it's about a project that will involve sorties of pilot-supervised but otherwise AI-guided dogfights using warplanes in protected military space over Lake Ontario.

Yeah we're not the only country determined to take "technology" ever onward, and so it would seem that arms races will continue to escalate even if we also see better toasters and cars and ways of generating renewable energy.

Still I also hope that the developed countries are all devoting at least some money every year to teaching the ultimately superior advantages of nonviolent human interactions, with or without the assistance of AI.

Unless we can collectively lean more towards mixing competition with cooperation, and refrain from fantasies of world domination, we're eventually going to let AI push one of the big red buttons and beat the Sun to wiping us all out.

Sometimes it doesn't seem like we've got very far along a constructive path to avoiding mutual annihilation. We still figure climate change mitigation is something optional, but something nearing a trillion dollar military budget every year is essential. Think about that for a minute...

 

[Huntn]

Heh, but maybe we'll give you a preview just in case you're curious...

The Rise of A.I. Fighter Pilots

Artificial intelligence is being taught to fly warplanes. Can the technology be trusted?

www.newyorker.com

Not only did I not know anything much about this, I didn't expect to bump into more of it in The New Yorker. But then that's what some of The New Yorker's one-off pieces and and quirky profiles do still have on offer.

So welcome to another glimpse of USA tax dollars at work. In this case it's about a project that will involve sorties of pilot-supervised but otherwise AI-guided dogfights using warplanes in protected military space over Lake Ontario.

Yeah we're not the only country determined to take "technology" ever onward, and so it would seem that arms races will continue to escalate even if we also see better toasters and cars and ways of generating renewable energy.

Still I also hope that the developed countries are all devoting at least some money every year to teaching the ultimately superior advantages of nonviolent human interactions, with or without the assistance of AI.

Unless we can collectively lean more towards mixing competition with cooperation, and refrain from fantasies of world domination, we're eventually going to let AI push one of the big red buttons and beat the Sun to wiping us all out.

Sometimes it doesn't seem like we've got very far along a constructive path to avoiding mutual annihilation. We still figure climate change mitigation is something optional, but something nearing a trillion dollar military budget every year is essential. Think about that for a minute...

Many predicted, including myself thst we’ve seen the last generation of in-aircraft fighter pilots*, now until the AI is up to snuff, put some teens in front of a monitor with Joystick, throttle, and rudder pedals, then look out. Then when the AI gets up to speed, give the system a good name like Sky Net…

* A human being in a tradional fighter could never compete with a competent AI in a combat drone. Easy example, the drone would simply out-G the human being.

The future of humanity? Completely up in the air.

 

[Nycturne]

- And, why aren't we doing more with wormholes? That's the future of transportation. (points to free education).

Not sure if this post was meant to be sarcastic or not...

The math for wormholes and the Alcubierre drive isn't super great at the moment. The worst hurdle is figuring out how to not need negative energy/mass (a sign that something may not actually be a real thing we can do). The second worst hurdle is that wormholes are looking like they require the total output of more than a few stars if you want to create one. Which means it's simply going to be easier to complete a project like converting the entirety of Mercury into a Dyson swarm as an energy source. And then do it a few more times around other stars.

- Musk is less visionary by just creating better rockets and electric cars that we had the tech to make in the 90's

Reuse and cadence is kinda important for getting the scale needed to start on larger space projects. Things like space elevators or skyhooks, and centers of operation for exploiting resources away from the surface of our own planet. And I'm not entirely sure the pieces that enable that level of reuse for SpaceX today would have been doable in the 90s. But hard to know for sure when nobody seemed to even think it was doable until it was already being done.

But Musk? I don't think he was required to accomplish this. But it's clear that the SpaceX team is doing good work, IMO. They are demonstrating working technology that will help make the next generation of space projects easier to accomplish.

 

[User.45]

Well, a few thoughts:
- Oh - and implanting chips into our brains will have the same effect as giving kids calculators - we're impairing our potential. Evolution's actually a GOOD thing.

Do calculators cause brain bleeds and infections? 'cause until that issue isn't solved, brain implants will have difficulty scaling up from the present use of deep brain stimulators (which are super cool).

 

[Huntn]

Well, a few thoughts:
- Musk is less visionary by just creating better rockets and electric cars that we had the tech to make in the 90's
- A hybrid of capitalism / socialism will eventually make eduction free for all - so we won't miss out on the thousands of Einsteins and Hawkings than we already have.
- Tractor beams, enabling catapults that can launch objects into space with zero carbon footprint (ala Heinlein) is where we should be focused.
- And, why aren't we doing more with wormholes? That's the future of transportation. (points to free education).
- Oh - and implanting chips into our brains will have the same effect as giving kids calculators - we're impairing our potential. Evolution's actually a GOOD thing.
Exercise the mind.

All automation is bad in a way, but it is inevitable, whether it is kids with calculators, they do still teach them the fundamental, but then how much is retained? And what about those super computers doing 10 years of work in a week (or something like that)?

In aviation, autopilot reduces piloting skills, but flight computers help prevent pilot errors.

I’d like to think that a chip slotted into your head would expand your abilities, but the reality is you might just become more reliant on the chip and less capable on your own.

A semi-regular theme in SciFi stories are the civilizations that have become overly dependent on computers/AI and some version of they forgot how to function on their own, or it is AI now calling the shots.

 

[Nycturne]

A semi-regular theme in SciFi stories are the civilizations that have become overly dependent on computers/AI and some version of they forgot how to function on their own, or it is AI now calling the shots.

I’d probably say that there are things that fall into the category of “we can be doing something better with our time, automate it” and things that fall into the category of “this is something we shouldn’t be cutting humans out of the loop of”.

I’m not sure the ability to drive a car is something humanity benefits from, and don’t really feel like using machine learning to automate vehicles is a bad thing. I’m honestly of the opinion that we need to be making our cities more walkable with better mass transit rather than continuing down the path of car dependence, though, which colors my views here.

But at the same time, I’m not convinced that using ML models is suitable for things like sentencing. Especially as it seems to slap a veneer of objectivity on society’s existing biases that get baked into the models. Things of this nature start to push us down the path of the sort of dystopia you describe, but it doesn’t even need AI. It just needs a black box algorithm nobody wants to touch because it’s “objective”.

 

[Herdfan]

All automation is bad in a way, but it is inevitable, whether it is kids with calculators, they do still teach them the fundamental,

We were the mean parents who forced our daughter to know her multiplication tables and be able to do simple math in her head.

Although I do love the meme about 80's teachers telling us we wouldn't always have a calculator with us and how we showed them.

 

[Yoused]

The math for wormholes and the Alcubierre drive isn't super great at the moment. The worst hurdle is figuring out how to not need negative energy/mass (a sign that something may not actually be a real thing we can do).

It does seem pie-in-the-sky mindfapping. Although,

In terms of a potential technology, warp drives “are greatly lacking,” he and one of his colleagues wrote in a recent preprint paper. He has now turned his attention to known phenomena, such as black holes. The warp drive concept, however, retains its fascination, especially for Trekkies—and for a few gravitational physicists, who occasionally publish variations on the idea.

Some of these papers have shown how to reduce the bubble’s mass requirements so that the total mass needed to deform spacetime would be less than that of our sun. But no one was able to get around the problem of negative energy—until Lentz took it up during the lockdown in Göttingen. In his enforced isolation, Lentz found a way to construct a warp bubble using only positive energy. In so doing, he may have overcome the greatest objection to warp drives.

What made it possible was a special feature of the geometry of spacetime that Lentz discovered buried in the general theory of relativity—more precisely, in Einstein’s field equations. These equations can calculate how a particular distribution of matter and energy deforms spacetime. Researchers can also use them, as Alcubierre did, to determine the mass and energy needed to produce a specific curvature of space.​

maybe the pie just needs a crust.

(note: the source is not Weekly World News or High Times, this is from Sci-Am)

 

[Huntn]

It does seem pie-in-the-sky mindfapping. Although,

In terms of a potential technology, warp drives “are greatly lacking,” he and one of his colleagues wrote in a recent preprint paper. He has now turned his attention to known phenomena, such as black holes. The warp drive concept, however, retains its fascination, especially for Trekkies—and for a few gravitational physicists, who occasionally publish variations on the idea.​

​

Some of these papers have shown how to reduce the bubble’s mass requirements so that the total mass needed to deform spacetime would be less than that of our sun. But no one was able to get around the problem of negative energy—until Lentz took it up during the lockdown in Göttingen. In his enforced isolation, Lentz found a way to construct a warp bubble using only positive energy. In so doing, he may have overcome the greatest objection to warp drives.​

​

What made it possible was a special feature of the geometry of spacetime that Lentz discovered buried in the general theory of relativity—more precisely, in Einstein’s field equations. These equations can calculate how a particular distribution of matter and energy deforms spacetime. Researchers can also use them, as Alcubierre did, to determine the mass and energy needed to produce a specific curvature of space.​

maybe the pie just needs a crust.

(note: the source is not Weekly World News or High Times, this is from Sci-Am)

In terms of a potential technology, warp drives “are greatly lacking,”
What does that mean, greatly lacking? Lacking in probability or lacking in capabilities?

 

[lizkat]

A semi-regular theme in SciFi stories are the civilizations that have become overly dependent on computers/AI and some version of they forgot how to function on their own, or it is AI now calling the shots.

Yeah, well some slots in the food chain still aren't worried about that, are they... and they might even be winning.

Consisder the “zombie ant fungus”. It takes over the mind of an ant, usually a member of the carpenter ant species, causing it to depart its usual behavior and climb up a branch only to hang onto the underside of a leaf, where the fungus then further attacks and proceeds to mummify the hapless insect. Then the fungus sprouts like a mushroom from the head of the ant and releases its spores to float through the air to expand its ant-foraging range. Only thing saving some ant colonies is that the fungus can be fatally infected by its own species...​

On the other hand we don't know exactly HOW this fungus takes over the mind of the hapless ant. Good chip implants?

 

[Nycturne]

Yeah, I do now remember some of the more recent work around the math for a warp field, but it’s clear that this is still very much in the area of “neat idea” rather than something we can apply technology to anytime soon, and may still require the ability to do construction on the scale of multiple star systems anyways before the ideas we are aware of so far enter the realm of feasibility.:

Creating such a spacetime geometry in reality would involve a complicated layering of rings and disks, not made of solid material but of an extremely dense fluid of charged particles, similar to the substance found in the interior of neutron stars, Lentz says.

“None of the physically conceivable warp drives can accelerate to speeds faster than light,” Bobrick says. That is because you would require matter capable of being ejected at speeds faster than light—but no known particles can travel that fast. Furthermore, the bubble could not be controlled by occupants of the spaceship itself because they would lose contact with the outside world, owing to the extremely strong curvature of space around them.

So, we just need to be able to create neutronium and have an outpost at the destination already, in addition to the energy demands. Easy.

Here’s the thing, I really would love to see stuff like this become reality one day. But there’s so many real problems in front of us before these things enter our reachable horizon that I’m more chomping at the bit at the stuff that’s just out of reach. Give us a space elevator so we can start doing large scale construction in space, and the automation required to start churning out elements of a space-based energy collector system and you can start to see some massive leaps in what can be done by humanity by getting us access to more energy than we have now by orders of magnitude.

 

[Yoused]

Creating such a spacetime geometry in reality would involve a complicated layering of rings and disks, not made of solid material but of an extremely dense fluid of charged particles, similar to the substance found in the interior of neutron stars, Lentz says.

So, we just need to be able to create neutronium and …

There is a reason it is called "neutronium" – it is only plausibly composed of neutrons, which lack actual charge. How neutronium behaves is unclear. We know that neutron stars generate X-rays, but it is not certain whether that is out of the ball itself or because of the way the matter swirling around it is affected by the strong spacetime gradient.

Neutronium-dense rings of charged particles is an absurd notion. Neutron, by definition, is matter that has overcome electron degeneracy pressure, so imagining QED charged particles at that density is pure fantasy. Now, if they produced QCD charge imbalances, that could be really interesting.

But the point is that there is math that suggests that the alcubierre field could in theory be generated without using negative energies. Actually accomplishing that is currently way beyond us, but one element of impossibility has been dealt with.

 

[Nycturne]

There is a reason it is called "neutronium" – it is only plausibly composed of neutrons, which lack actual charge. How neutronium behaves is unclear. We know that neutron stars generate X-rays, but it is not certain whether that is out of the ball itself or because of the way the matter swirling around it is affected by the strong spacetime gradient.

Neutronium-dense rings of charged particles is an absurd notion. Neutron, by definition, is matter that has overcome electron degeneracy pressure, so imagining QED charged particles at that density is pure fantasy. Now, if they produced QCD charge imbalances, that could be really interesting.

But the point is that there is math that suggests that the alcubierre field could in theory be generated without using negative energies. Actually accomplishing that is currently way beyond us, but one element of impossibility has been dealt with.

I was being (somewhat) flippant with my comment, as you don’t just create any degenerate matter. But you do touch on the phrasing in the article that is odd here. Neutron fluid doesn’t have charge, but the claim is that you need similar densities. Now this may just be that the paper’s author was trying to refer to electron degenerate matter, and oversimplified, but it is a bit of a contradiction in the statement made in the article. “Similar to neutron fluid” isn’t a good enough description to say what is actually required here. If your comment about QCD charged material is actually right, then it’s possible the author was referring to quark degenerate matter? If so, yeesh. Good luck with that.

So yes, there is a formulation of a warp field that doesn’t require negative mass/energy (I’ll happily admit that I forgot about that more recent news), but still contends with many other fundamental issues and unknowns. I still argue the math doesn’t look super great here.

Since you bring up x-ray emission though, the answer is both. A similar process in x-ray binaries is in play when the x-ray source is either a neutron star or black hole accreting matter from a partner, although the magnetic fields that produce jets for a neutron star and for a black hole are driven by slightly different processes to my knowledge. But the neutron star itself is hot enough that thermal emission is going to include X-rays even when not part of a binary. But of course, modeling the thermal emissions is a bit more complicated than for a main sequence star where you can use black body radiation as a rough estimate.

 

[Roller]

In the Book Count Zero, there is a trillionaire who spends his physical life in a vat (he is physically sickly) and for all entents and purposes lives in a virtual world of his choosing.

This theme was explored in several Star Trek TOS episodes. In The Gamesters of Triskelion, the Providers were brains in vats, and at the conclusion of The Menagerie Part 2, Christopher Pike and Vina were able to live out their lives without any of their disabilities, although it was never said where their physical bodies went. In Return to Tomorrow, Sargon and two other beings transferred their minds from spheres to Kirk, Spock, and Mulhall in what was supposed to be a temporary arrangement while they built permanent hosts. Of course, that didn't work out as intended.

 

[Huntn]

Agrivoltaics: Combining an electrical crop with your soybeans. Very interesting, heard this reported on Science Friday NPR. Of interest plants don’t need all of the sun they are getting, and when overexposed they sweat using water to keep their temps under control, using water. So the technology will reduce water consumption ob the farm. Solar arrays will be built that rotate out of the way for tractors, and shade the plants after they have had their fill of sun.

Largest agrivoltaic research project in U.S. advances renewable energy while empowering local farmers

The global installed capacity of agrivoltaics, or the co-development of the same area of land for both solar power and agriculture, has grown rapidly from

www.solarpowerworldonline.com

The global installed capacity of agrivoltaics, or the co-development of the same area of land for both solar power and agriculture, has grown rapidly from about 5 MW in 2012 to approximately 2,900 MW in 2020. One of the largest driving factors for this growth is the need to continue to build solar projects to mitigate climate change in the face of dwindling available non-agricultural land. According to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), by 2030, utility-scale solar could cover almost 2 million acres of land in the United States. A recent Oregon State University study also estimates that converting just 1% of American farmland to agrivoltaics would not only meet the nation’s renewable energy targets, but also save water and create a sustainable, long-term food system. Additionally, agrivoltaics have been shown to increase crop production, solar panel efficiency as well as farmer income.