/sci/ - Science & Math

it's shit. it's impossible to predict the future. ray kurzweil is a retard

rapture for nerds

fuck off sci-fi fags

>>4174784
> is it legit or shit?

It's shit. Kurzweil is yet another "wooj" (Western Yuppie Jew) who refuses to understand that the high-tech portion of our civilization is ONLY due to cheap petroleum. Since the cheap petroleum is already gone, and not-so-cheap petroleum is what we have now, which will lead to expensive petroleum in about 15 years, then we ever-escalating costs in order to support our hugely wasteful, energy-gulping civilization. Those costs have ALREADY caused another Great Depression, which we're only in the first years of. This particular Great Depression may never actually end, since just about the 15-20 years of its run will run smack into the Expensive Oil Era... then the real suffering will begin, SINCE NOTHING ELSE CAN REPLACE HISTORICAL PETROLEUM, FOR HOW CHEAP, DENSE AND PRACTICAL IT WAS.

moores law is true and is holding up well, trying to predict anything beyond 10 years is a little silly.

>>4174831
> bumps a shit thread to say how shitty and stupid the subject is
why peak-oil-caps-guy, why...

>>4174796
Isn't the whole point of science to make accurate predictions about the future?

(Not that the singularity is necessarily science.)

>>4174831
implying we wont be running on alternative energy sources the day we run out of petroleum

0/10

>>4174837
> implying we wont be running on alternative energy sources the day we run out of petroleum

What part of "NOTHING ELSE CAN REPLACE HISTORICAL PETROLEUM" escaped you? No alt energy source can replace petroleum.

That's why I use FUCKING CAPITAL LETTERS, so that you rubes can fucking SEE WHAT I WRITE.

>>4174851
>2011
>still thinking this

we can run the entire world on cow shit if we wanted

>>4174851

Why can no alternative energy source replace petroleum? Uranium and Thorium are as energy-dense as gasoline, so why couldn't we use those instead? There are engineering challenges to be had, but I would be shocked if they were intractable challenges.

>>4174831
YES! Also rant rant RANT rant RANT RANT rantrantrantrant rantrant RANTRANT and RANT RANT RANT RANT RANT RANT RANT RANT RANT RANT RANT RANT RANT RANT.

And if this mindless spewing of bile and fermented shit didn't convince you dumb peopel who still believe the woreld dosnt end tommorrow, all I can say is that your stupids.

>>4174851
No shit, we had cheap-ass oil. We're not going to be disputing that. But the new sources will be cheap enough for us to function. We will adjust how we do things.

Whos our god???
TECHNOLOGY!!!

Whos the prophet??
KURZWEIL!

And our holy book??
The shit he writes!!!

When is the apocalypse going to happen??
IN A FEW DECADES!!!

Whats our afterlife?
MIND UPLOADING!!!

Do you guysthink that this greedy jew actually believes what he preaches to geeks and new age morons.??
Hes just exploiting the market.

>>4174831

Why are you still here?

No one has to worry about running out of resources, God will bestow upon us a gift of an infinitely refilling oil well, just like the fish and bread of the New Testament.

>>4174933

>Do you guysthink that this greedy jew actually believes what he preaches to geeks and new age morons.??

Of course he does. He sf terrified of dying and fits his predictions to keep him alive indefinitely, so that he can remain deluded.

I don't get the haters

ray seems 100% legit

>>4175038

10/10

>>4175026

"fits his predictions to keep him alive indefinitely, so that he can remain deluded"

if his predictions to keep him alive indefinetly come true then he isnt deluded.

>>4175061

The point is they won't. He conveniently sets the dates to a time before he will die. That's not science, that's bias.

All of the things he talks about are theoretically possible with the right amount of time, but that time would almost certainly span hundreds of years.

>>4174933

You annoy me. You're creating a false parallel between 'the singularity' and religion.

Religion is baseless. The singularity is based on inductive reasoning. Seeing where things have been, where they are going, and extending their trend-lines a little bit.

The ONLY attack that can be brought against his ideas is the SAME attack that goes with anything based on induction - that just because things have been a certain way, doesn't mean they will continue.

Same 'anti induction' argument can be used to say 'the sun won't rise tomorrow.' Its technically correct, but not viewed as very substantial.

So yea, all you anti singularity fags can fuck off. There are NO arguments against the substance of what he presented in his book.

>>4175075

Ray takes commonly accepted sets of data and uses commonly accepted methods of extrapolation to come up with data that makes nerds on this board go RAH RAH RAH RAH RAH. Maybe he is right, and maybe he isn't; predicting the future will certainly not be perfect, but the man's concept of inventing technologies based on future technology is very forward thinking. Yes, there will be challenges that need to be overcome, and certainly some of them will be seemingly insurmountable at the time. But jesus fuck we put a man on the moon and that technology seems trivial now, and a couple hundred years ago that would have seemed insane. I'm not saying the man is right on all accounts, but his ideas are worth considering.

>>4175075
>Religion is baseless.

Now you're just showing that you don't know the least thing about religion. Which means that you're denigrating other beliefs to improve the standing of the singularity belief. IE - you're doing the same thing fundie xtians do to jews.

>>4175134
Extrapolation of data and making up fairy tales are not the same thing.

>>4175152
Agreed, but irrelevant, because religion is not making up fairy tales. Hell even making up fairy tales isn't making up fairy tales.

>>4175163

>>4175173
>projecting
>late december 2011

>>4175163

>Hell even X isn't X.

Religious logic at its finest.

>>4175188
That's not an equivalency. What you're missing is the nuance that fairy tales in reality are not your conception of fairy tales as meaningless fluff completely divorced from reality. I - clearly mistakenly - took it for granted that /sci/ knows about nuance in language.

>>4174933
What do we want?
THE SINGULARITY!

When do we want it?
NOW!

>>4175134
fundie christians are joos, just joos who recognize the jooish messiah

come up with another example

>>4175216
you will never make that mistake again

>>4174859
> Why can no alternative energy source replace petroleum? Uranium and Thorium are as energy-dense as gasoline, so why couldn't we use those instead? There are engineering challenges to be had, but I would be shocked if they were intractable challenges.

You can't use those instead because you're just too stupid to READ AND UNDERSTAND PERFECTLY CLEAR FUCKING ENGLISH.

I said that petroleum had THREE CHARACTERISTICS all at once, All At Fucking Once, ALL AT FUCKING ONCE:

1. CHEAP
2. DENSE
3. PRACTICAL

No other fuel in the universe delivers use THOSE THREE THINGS ALL AT ONCE, like petroleum does.

1. Petroleum was SO FUCKING CHEAP, since all we had to do was drill for it. Deposit pressures often just drove the oil right up our pipes, so it hardly needed to be pumped at first. Then deposits became more and more depleted, and so pumping now required, always.

2. Petroleum is ENERGY DENSE. Wood, peat, coal, natural gas, hydro-therm, hydro-potential... NOTHING of those can beat petroleum's energy density. Nuclear power does, but nuclear power is EXPENSIVE and HORRIBLY IMPRACTICAL.

3. Petroleum is VERY PRACTICAL. It stores and transports very easily, being a stable liquid. Its fractions are easily obtained. The primary fractions of gasoline, diesel and kerosene (jet fuel) are fairly safe and it takes minimal training to handle them effectively.

Time for you retards to face facts: Nothing replaces cheap, dense, practical PETROLEUM. Anything you'd choose instead is going to invoke remarkably different economic handling, which pretty much makes your lives A WHOLE LOT WORSE. Do you want to go back to shoveling coal into your furnace? Clue: You don't have a fucking choice, since the petroleum is DEPLETING, and you're going to have to stop using it, since it will either be priced out of your range, or it simply won't be available for a commoner like yourself.

>>4175373
why, hello angry simian guy! warmed up to natural gas as an alternative yet?

>>4175373
>>4175373
wow you are pessimistic, why are you even here and not busy crying in your bathroom?

>>4175373
You must be a real hoot at parties. Like the one guy who gets totally wasted in the first half-hour and then starts raving about the alien anal probe he got.

Dude, relax. You're gonna die of a brain embolism at the rate you're venting.

>>4175373
Sage

>>4175373
What is hydrogen?

Seriously, why is the automotive industry so hellbent on introducing electric cars when electricity is hard to store in large amounts (fuckhuge batteries that weigh a lot).

Why not just start making a hydrogen run car, the technology isn't that much different than current petroleum based engines.

I mean, yeah you have some shizzle with it being a volatile gas, but it is nothing a few clever blokes can't figure out.

Also, tiny hint, hydrogen is the most fucking common shit in the goddamn universe. Fuck. I don't think we'd run out of it in a few years.


For large scale power, why not make more nuclear power plants and invest more monies in fusion research. And then you see countries like Germany ban nuclear power plants, I mean what the flying fuck?! Right now Italy needs to import power to cover it's needs, and when all of Germany's NPPs go down then they too will depend on other countries for power (I bet Poland if getting ready to make like 50 NPPs just to fuck with Germany and sell them power).

Holy fuck am I mad, this world is being run by cumguzzling faggots with their only interest being the size of their bank account. God damn.

>>4175398
> warmed up to natural gas as an alternative yet?

It's an alternative for those who don't have many places to be. It can't match the energy density of gasoline or diesel. Running our road-based society on NG vehicles will be expensive and slow. A total loss of 25% of today's jobs is the least you'd expect, which of course would crash and crater the American economy.

But you knew that. Didn't you?

>>4175447
> I mean, yeah you have some shizzle with it being a volatile gas, but it is nothing a few clever blokes can't figure out.

Tiny hint: The light gases simply can't pack the same energy punch as the much heavier hydrocarbons. H2 and CH4 are PUNKS, compared to gasoline, diesel and kerosene.

A hydrogen-based economy is necessarily a much smaller economy. And that means the American economy must crash. ALL RATIONAL ANALYSES of alternatives, reach that same conclusion: The transportation-heavy, debt-riddled, 70%-consumer American economy must crash, create a vast crater, which then BURNS. So the market for alternative vehicles must ALSO crash, create its own vast crater, which ALSO then burns.

YOU RAN EVERYTHING ON CHEAP PETROLEUM. Since nothing can replace that cheap, dense, practical fuel that everything runs on, then you're in fucking TROUBLE.

I read through this entire fucking thread and learned nothing about the "Singularity."
This thread is full of nothing.
0/10

For ocean travel there's wind and solar.
For flight there's wind, solar, hydrogen and pressurized air.
For near traffic there's your legs, on pedals or in sneakers.
For far traffic there's electric trains and cars and hydrogen.
For general electricity, there's nuclear, natural gases, hydro, wind, solar, solar thermal, ocean currents.
For fieldwork there's draft animals, solar, hydrogen and wood gas.

For lubrication, there's synthetic oils and hard, ultra-slick materials.

And that's just from the top of my head, I'm sure some clever engineers can come up with even more ways to move the equipment.

Kurtzweil is an intellectual jerk-off. Yeah the singularity is an interesting idea, but Kurtzeweil's contribution to it, outside of identifying it, is basically zip.

Not only that but the guy is a self-involved tool.

>>4175373