Talk-Polywell.org

I'm not sure Japan is especially grateful for having a couple of nukes thrown at it.. Japan should be very greatful that something finally pushed Hirohito to fall on his metaphorical sword and defy the Generals. Had he not, Bull Halsey would've been proven correct, and Japanese today would be a lan...

Of course, what really changed things was the Enlightenment. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_enlightenment Disagree. What really changed things was the Renaissance and early Scientific Revolution (which predate the Enlightenment by 200-400 years). The Renaissance (or as far back as the Gothic) sho...

A couple hundred years? Maybe, if the disaster was external and not sociological. Rome had a lot of knowledge and technology, and if the monks hadn't preserved it (and expanded on it), Europe would have taken a lot longer than it did to re-emerge from barbarism... The Romans had knowledge and techn...

Like most older societies, the Greeks were more or less constantly at war. Likely the first thing they would do is build better weapons and conquer their neighbors. Their democracy would probably not become as liberal as ours until living standards had vastly improved. It never would've become like...

Dave, The Chinese are taking the Taiwan/South Korea approach to gaining self government. Authoritarian rule to provide an economic base. Then a transition. It takes about 30 years. Agree about stage one. Its the model used across all of East Asia. Keiretsus, Chaebols, etc. Build up advanced heavy i...

Scientific revolutions come in waves. We are at the end of the easy gains from computing power. The next wave (nanotechnology? biotechnology?) hasn't started producing enough gains to affect our current situation. I look at things in a VERY broad & generalized way. Calling something the "informatio...

I'm not saying we'll see a total collapse during our lifetimes (or ever - but that's a whole other issue), or that we're anywhere near total understanding and mastery of the physical universe. Total collapse - only if an object the size of Mars hits this planet in this century. As for the physical ...

I don't believe in singularities. I gather from quantum mechanics that the universe is fundamentally finite. If relativity disagrees, I get suspicious. Planck length squared or cubed does define the fundamental quanta of volume, which rules out singularity. Yes, I know squared is area, not volume, ...

Maybe 300 years ago that was true, but we're too high on the curve now. With the advent of AI and artificial life, in a century humanity may not even exist as something we would recognize or comprehend. The Singularity??? A wonderful religious symbol, but the Techno-Rapture has as much real world p...

When I left EMC2, they had just received a very scarry-looking pallet piled high with high voltage capacitors. I forget how many farads at how many volts that constituted, but it was for a relatively small experiment. They were an off-the-shelf model, but intended for very high discharge rates. Com...

My perspective takes the long view. Centuries of cultural evolution. The long view is probably unknowable beyond ~50 years (and maybe a lot less than that) barring a technological collapse. The Singularity is near. Similar basic dynamics have been identified by multiple people. Spengler, Toynbee, e...

I'm not sure the Khmer Rouge is a good advertising point for the concept. The Khmer Rouge were very bad villagers. The Amish are good villagers. They live their philosophy, but they don't inflict it on others. Say that after being stuck in a line of cars behind a buggy for the nth time. :D Duane

i already seached for the pdf From: http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20050170447_2005172301.pdf those longitudinal electical waves sure are intersting for ftl comm. and that you only need 40 Mw to power a plane. Interesting. The longitudinal/scalar waves function exactly as tach...

MSimon wrote:DJ,

I note you live PA. You must be totally aware of the bicoastal elites. I will say no more.

The area I live in is actually quite rural, beyond the peripheries of the Philadelphia & BWI urban sprawls. This is Amish Hell, PA.

Duane

dj, America has avoided the worst features of urbanization by inventing the suburbs. My apologies. I was working with very abstract metaphor. The world-city isn't a city per se. Its the core cosmopolitan zone of a civilization. In antiquity and all other pre-industrial societies it needed to be con...