Soylent Green?

While I've certainly seen ChatGPT generate some false and even outright hallucinatory things, I've never seen it produce anything like these claims. I can see ways of getting it to produce such output, but it would requiring seeding the chat with a lot of pointed instructions to get the desired bizarre output; in other words my suspicion is a lot of these stories are basically reporting what amounts to manufactured chats meant to produce apparently bizarre results.

ISTM that you can't pick up hydrogen along the way unless you're moving as close to the same speed as the local drift.
OTOH, fusion does promise a lot more power/kg. whether it can deliver that in a controlled manner, however, may be another question.

I've read the articles, and I've gotten very close to installing home solar. Every article I've ever read says the same thing, which is that you try to get close to your average home power consumption. You don't size it massively larger. Because the power companies in California don't pay you if you produce too much power, and running up huge bill credits won't help if you don't eventually use that extra power.

And the folks storing extra power for backup aren't going to opt in to this sort of scheme anyway, because they won't want their batteries to be dead when they need them most.

Either way, even if you convince the people who overbuild the battery for backup purposes to sign up, none of what I said is wrong. Please, please tell me what I'm missing, because I *do* understand this VERY WELL, and I still don't see any plausible universe in which this isn't effectively just a storing energy with the same greenness as the grid except on days when dumping the extra power late in the day is immediately followed by a day in which the power from the solar panels would otherwise have been curtailed (which is the only situation in which that solar power wasn't already being used to make the grid greener).

The basic argument is that by not turning on a peaker plant, you're making the grid greener, but that falls flat when you realize that unless solar or wind power would be actively curtailed when you recharge the battery the extra time, that power used for recharging would not otherwise have been needed, and it has to come from somewhere, and if wind and solar aren't being curtailed, it comes from keeping some other kind of power plant online — natural gas in all likelihood.

It's a classic example of greenwashing. I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but there's no such thing as a free lunch here.

Batteries shift load, period; except when curtailment is involved, they do not make the grid greener. Period. Batteries plus extra solar panels can make the grid greener, but the solar panels are what makes the grid greener. The batteries just allow you to spread the greenness over a longer period of time. And yes, when you have so much excess solar that you get curtailment, batteries are needed for some of that solar to make a difference, but that's the *only* time batteries make the grid greener, period.

Coding arguably requires talent - although Microsoft has been proving consistently for half a century that you can be a successful software company with piss-poor engineers.

But even if AI produced perfect code, then producing software essentially requires no talent. I'm not saying it's a bad thing in itself, but it moves the act of producing software squarely into the realm of everyday mediocre accessible to everyday talentless people.

And on top of that, the fallacy is that AI simply doesn't produce anywhere near anything that resembles perfect code. But of course, Microsoft is desperate to have you believe otherwise...

I'll just say this: I'm glad I'm at the end of my career as a software engineer, because I didn't spend a lifetime honing my skills to end up a mediocre types-question-guy.

First, people probably won't ever live an average of 100 years. Second, you don't need a stable demographic profile. There's exactly no advantage to having elderly people onboard initially, for a number of reasons:

• Food production probably won't be able to be at full speed on day one unless you start the process long before you take off.
• Older people are less able to learn the new skills that they would need to be able to do repairs on the ship, etc., and are less likely to already know those skills.
• Older people are less able to do physical labor than younger people, and will therefore be more limited in their ability to contribute.
• Older people have fewer years to contribute before they stop being able to do so entirely and become a burden on the ship's limited resources.

I mean, if you want to all but guarantee that the younger folks turn sociopathic and throw the elderly out the nearest airlock on their 50th birthdays, a great way to start that story is by creating the generational ship with people of every age from day one, so that from the very beginning, they resent the elderly. If you actually want them to retain their humanity, you'll almost certainly want an upper age cutoff on the folks who go up in the initial wave.

And even if you decide that the cutoff should extend beyond child-bearing age, you sure as h*** don't want to bring twenty-four 90-year-olds. Half of them probably wouldn't even make it to orbit, and that's also not an accurate picture of normal demographics. There are fewer and fewer people the older you get, even if you ignore population growth, because some people die before they get to that age.

Over time, you want a fairly even distribution of age, but that will happen on its own. People don't turn 25 and suddenly say, "I want a baby." They have kids at different times, based on what's happening in their lives. Some won't have any kids at all. Some will have kids later in life. That means that the distribution going in doesn't really predict the distribution going out. There's a lot of entropy at work.

It probably does help, however, to have a roughly even percentage of people at each age throughout the age range where people typically have children. You don't want everybody to be 18, and you don't want everybody to be 45. As long as you have roughly the same number of people at each age within roughly the primary procreative band (ostensibly 18 to 60 for men, 18 to 45 for women, so probably pick the narrower of those two bands), you should end up with a fairly consistent rate of childbearing, in all likelihood.

It may also be problematic to not have children on the ship, because you would see a huge dip as though there had been no new children born for 20-ish years, and by definition, that wouldn't smooth out until about twenty years after the original crew dies. There are, of course, ethical questions about whether it is okay to do this, because kids aren't old enough to understand what's happening, and wouldn't really have any say in the matter, so it could also be problematic if you do have children on the ship, just in different ways.

On the other hand, not having any school-aged children for at least the first five years means more time to spend preparing the habitat for future increases in head count, building spare parts out of raw materials, leaning how the ship works, coming up with rules and procedures to ensure that things run smoothly, etc. And the only real disadvantage would be that it would take two decades before you would start having replacement people who are old enough to do useful work, which is probably fine if you cap the age at 45 or so, because by the time they're ready to retire, you'd have the first batch of replacements, and you probably won't lose *that* many people in the first twenty years. So the only big impact you'd expect from not starting with children onboard would be a 20-year-long dip in mortality when the oldest of the original crew reach their typical lifespan.

So really, I'd say that it's critical to be evenly spread across child-bearing ages, and that's probably the only thing that really matters much.

You can't count that power twice. Even if you assume that every drop of power that goes into the batteries comes from the solar panels, you're still taking away power that would otherwise have been sold back onto the grid, which means using some other non-solar power somewhere else that would have otherwise been solar power.

Put another way, before this change, every drop of the power produced by the solar panels (ignoring curtailment, which by definition this can't change, because batteries can't be charged beyond full) was either being used by the household, going out onto the grid to make the grid greener, or charging the batteries for later use to make the grid greener.

To the extent that this charging was already occurring, the shift in utilization of the battery's output means that the power that otherwise would have gone to the household from the solar panels later at night would come from a dirtier grid power source (except to the extent that the household wasn't running down its batteries fully, which while possible, is rare).

To the extent that the charging was in excess of what came from the solar panels, again, that power came from the grid, at grid levels of greenness.

So regardless of whether you're looking at the power that appears to come from the solar panels or the power that comes from the grid in excess of the solar panels' capacity, the power effectively is no greener than the grid, with the sole exception being situations in which *all* of the following are true:

• The customer's battery storage is so massively overbuilt that they typically don't run it down with their own usage before their solar panels start recharging the batteries the next day.
• The customer's solar panel array is sufficiently overbuilt that it can fully recharge the battery in a single day.
• The extra power dumping occurred the evening before a day in which the excess power would have been curtailed.
• The customer's charging software isn't already selling back that excess power at night for arbitrage purposes.

One could reasonably ask why such unicorn customers are paying PG&E for grid-tie operation in the first place — all three or four of them.

You don't take 2400. You take probably more like 800 people of child-bearing age, ideally pre-coupled. You have a two-children-per-family policy, i.e. when the first generation are born, you have about 1600 people. By the time the third generation is born, the first generation are starting to die off. You keep safety margin for the occasional happy accident.

Besides, you have to build everything to handle significantly more people than you plan to have, so that if some piece of equipment fails, everybody doesn't die. That margin should be big enough that you'll never have to worry about such things unless you didn't plan correctly.

I don't consider that a "kind and gentle" response, but if he described the code accurately, it does seem warranted.

If I parsed that correctly it was the eggs that were green, not the ham.

If it's made out of mushrooms, it's not coffee. OTOH, mushroom flavored coffee might be quite good...it would really depend on both the coffee and the mushroom.

By the time we can build that, we'll be using asteroids and small moons for raw materials.

Genetics is important, but "chaos" is equally important. Development has lots of attractors where really small initial differences yield extremely different results. OTOH, most chaotic developments are bounded in their differences. So you may not be able to predict individual differences, but can do better at the population level.

2400 people is enough that nobody there would know everyone else. That's probably important. OTOH, we don't know anything about designing stable societies in an environment with rapid technological change and fast communications. The only stable societies that we have record of have been low-tech with minimal contact with outsiders. Even those have often been brittle under stress, but much of the population has been able to survive collapse and rebuild.

Yeah, but 400 years is a bit longer. They'd need a different reactor design. Perhaps one that works on waste from the current reactors, but they might need to take along (or build en-route) mechanisms to refine the waste again as it kept decaying.

(N.B.: I didn't even THINK about doing the math, but reactors that require high level radioactive fuel won't keep running long enough, but one's that use less active fuels could. Of course, they'd be a lot larger. If you're going to use an RTG, and you want it designed for this purpose, I think you'd want to design it for a fuel that had a half life of 800 years. So it would need to be a lot bigger for the same amount of power.)

Practical, no, but that doesn't necessarily mean it isn't worth considering. The real question is whether there's enough data to determine that it would sustain life, and if not, whether you would have be able to bring along enough fuel to turn around and come back, while still being able to handle any other navigation needs along the way (e.g. avoiding stray asteroids). I don't even have any concept of the fuel requirements for something like that, because there's no way to know what you're going to encounter beyond the expected delta-v requirements.

No, as long as you have adequate redundancy for critical systems, enough hull thickness and steering to avoid collisions with something that can cause too large a hull breach, enough spare compressed air far enough inside the ship to repressurize after fixing minor leaks, and adequate raw materials and tooling to make spare parts to fix things that break, you shouldn't need a large number of ships.

You should probably have at least three ships, though, traveling in parallel at a close distance, with the ability to dock them to one another in case one becomes completely unusable for some reason, so that the other two can divide up the defunct ship's crew among them, and ideally tow the defunct ship alongside while they try to find a way to fix it.