"The carbon dioxide
released into the atmosphere by industry's
burning of coal and oil-—more than half of it during
the last generation—may have changed the
atmosphere's composition sufficiently to account
for a general warming of the world by about one degree
Fahrenheit."
"Even in an airplane the
number of vacuum tubes now approaches or exceeds a
thousand. Other machines, containing up to 10,000
vacuum tubes, up to five times more crystals, and
possibly more than 100,000 cores, now operate
faultlessly over long periods, performing many
millions of regulated, preplanned actions per
second, with an expectation of only a few errors per
day or week. Many such machines have been built to
perform complicated scientific and engineering
calculations and large scale accounting and
logistical surveys. There is no doubt that they will
be used for elaborate industrial process control,
logistical, economic, and other
planning"
"The carbon dioxide
released into the atmosphere by industry's
burning of coal and oil-—more than half of it during
the last generation—may have changed the
atmosphere's composition sufficiently to account
for a general warming of the world by about one degree
Fahrenheit. "
edit : this PDF looks like it has
been scanned, but the text is selectable. Not sure I
have seen this before.
This is done with OCR,
specially when digitizing things.
The Internet
Archive does this a lot. There was an old 90s book
that I needed but they never made an electronic
edition. So the internet archive, scanned and
digitized it with character recognition to make a
select-able PDF like this, as well an epub that can
be read on your phone like any other ebook.
Now
that book is available for anyone to borrow and
read. (its still copyrighted so you gotta access
it via their DRM controlled app/website, but
that can be easily broken and its better than not
having access to that book at all)
He means that Acrobat Pro
includes an OCR system that you can use to add a
searchable text layer to scanned documents. Readers
like Acrobat Reader and PDF.js do not perform OCR. You
won't be able to use them to search scanned
documents if the document creator did not run OCR.
Google runs its own OCR pass on scanned PDF
documents in order to index them better. It can be
annoying when you get a 50 page scanned document as
a search result and then find out that it
doesn't include a text layer, so you need to
run your own OCR or skim the whole thing to find the
relevant parts.
One of the few applications where ML-based image
recognition actually works reliably enough for
real-world applications; the USPS has been using
neural nets to read zip codes for decades.
"Consequently, a few
decades hence energy may be free—just
like the unmetered air—with coal and oil used mainly
as raw materials for organic chemical synthesis, to
which, as experience has shown, their properties are
best suited."
I am wondering why this
prediction is so off given how other ones are spot
on? How the situation back then made John von
Neumann believe it, and what happened differently,
moving this into the realms of fantasy.
Perhaps if
an another effort of a scale of the Manhattan
Project had happened, the concept of the
"free energy" would have been more
realistic.
"Too cheap to
meter" was a common assumption about the future
of nuclear power when it first began. If you only look
at the amount of power available based on the raw
materials, it's a reasonable prediction.
They
simply didn't take into account all of the
associated costs and complexities that would be
involved with the actual nuclear power plants, not
to mention the political and social complications.
That doesn't mean such a future can never
happen, it's theoretically possible.
We're simply in a place right now where
it's hard to imagine with our current level
of technology and our current energy
economy.
They didn’t expect that
government regulation would kill innovation in the
nuclear industry. If nuclear plants had not been
regulated so highly decades ago, we’d have abundant,
clean power today. We may have had hundreds of
thousands more dead from nuclear accidents, but that
would pale in comparison to the tens of millions saved
by phasing out coal earlier and pushing off climate
change.
> They didn’t expect that
government regulation would kill innovation in the
nuclear industry. If nuclear plants had not been
regulated so highly decades ago, we’d have abundant,
clean power today.
The regulation is basically a
liability shield and subsidy, the industry wants
more, not less, of it to build plants.
That doesn’t mean that
regulation doesn’t impede innovation, e.g. by
eliminating the incentive to adopt safer cycles.
Moreover, the onerous review of reactor designs means
there is a high incentive to stick with older designs
that have already been reviewed by the government.
(Thats a double whammy, because it makes newer, safer
designs harder to deploy while reducing the incentive
to deploy them.)
> If nuclear plants had
not been regulated so highly decades ago, we’d have
abundant, clean power today. We may have had
hundreds of thousands more dead from nuclear
accidents, but that would pale in comparison to the
tens of millions saved by phasing out coal earlier
and pushing off climate change.
And if wishes were horses .... It's hard to
imagine how any democratic society could have gotten
past the salience bias to make that happen. (Also,
there's the better-the-devil-you-know
familiarity bias working in coal's favor, to
say nothing of the political influence of voters
depending directly or indirectly on coal for their
livelihoods.)
EDIT: This also brought to mind the
trolley problem [0], with the added wrinkle that
it's not possible to predict with any
confidence which specific persons would actually
be injured or killed.
If nuclear plants had not
been regulated so highly decades ago, we’d have
abundant, clean power today.
Are African and Latin American countries with less
effective governments and less regulation are
leading the world in innovation, cheap nuclear
power, genetic engineering and so on?
A casual
disregard for the living and a "happily ever
after" fairy tale correlates pretty well with
a lot of cult and religious behaviours, and
associated human tragedies, but not very well with
actual happily ever after, I think.
Low regulation is a necessary
but not sufficient condition for innovation. You also
need the predicate technologies, precision
manufacturing capabilities, etc. But within the US,
where we have those things, loosely regulated
industries (like the Internet) have consistently
evolved faster than heavily regulated ones.
Yea, that is of my
understanding too. There was no need for any great
advance in that matter at the time. Now however, the
situation is different, and yet, not as pressing as
the global conflict back then to fund another
"Los Alamos".
I wonder if they had the
'capacity paradox' in mind, where the more
you can have, you more you will use. In the 50s energy
usage were quite minuscule compared to today I
think.
We have far fewer people than
growth rate at the time suggested; IIRC, around that
time growth was viewed as exponential with a doubling
period of ~35 years, had it continued the population
would be 10.74 bn now, nearly 1.5× what it.
So, no,
population (at least high population)
isn't something that was unforeseen.
The sequestration of atomic
technology (not just power) is one of the rare areas
where the interests of the good guys and bad guys
coincide.
Energy is free: we have a fusion
generator that runs 24/7 with no maintenance
and is so powerful it can burn out your retinas from
150 million kilometers away.
This was before Chernobyl,
and without Chernobyl the industrialized world would
probably be mainly on nuclear fission power by now.
This was also at a time when nuclear fusion energy
was theoretically possible but before half a century
of research has labeled the problem 'very
hard'.
Sounds a bit like the Jevons
paradox - we improve the efficiency of energy
consumption, but it does not result in it being free,
because demand increases to counter.
He made other incorrect
predictions in the same document. We continue to
(incidentally and carelessly) change the climate, but
have yet to achieve anything like the reliably
controllable weather he anticipated.
He also
incorrectly anticipated that atomic transmutation of
the elements would become a bigger trend than
chemical rearrangement of existing elements.
"It is worth emphasizing that the main trend
will be systematic exploration of nuclear
reactions — that is, the transmutation of
elements, or alchemy rather than chemistry."
As for why he was mistaken about nuclear power,
it's possible that he was extrapolating
from the fantastically rapid progress of nuclear
weapons technology. Fission was demonstrated in
1938, the first chain reaction in 1942, the
first fission weapon in 1945. The first megaton
scale thermonuclear explosion was demonstrated
in 1952 and serial production of thermonuclear
weapons began in 1954. Between 1944 and 1954 the
explosive power of the largest military bombs
went up by a factor of roughly two
million [1] [2]. There was a 2300-fold
leap from Grand Slam to Little Boy (6.5 tons TNT
equivalent to 15 kilotons) and another
thousand-fold leap from Little Boy to Castle
Bravo (15 kilotons to 15 megatons).
The
challenges of making useful power reactors for
electricity production are much different.
Civilian power reactors have to compete with
other electricity sources on cost. They have
to produce power for decades rather than a
fraction of a second. They are expected to
fully contain fission products rather than
disperse them widely as fallout. Recall that
at the time of this writing, 1955, no country
had yet built a power reactor comparable in
output to large coal or hydroelectric plants.
There had only been some small demonstrations
like the 2 megawatts of electricity produced
by the BORAX-III reactor. The actual
difficulties to be encountered at larger
scales were not yet known.
Finally,
"affordable" electricity was a
moving target. In constant dollars, large
American industrial buyers were paying 40%
less per megawatt hour in 1970 than they
were in 1950 [3]. Concerns about acutely
hazardous air pollution were not yet
widespread enough to justify a cost premium
over fossil-generated power. Widespread
concerns about greenhouse gas emissions were
even further off.
Within the U.S. - we live in
a profit-maximizing capitalist structure. Why would
any economic entity give something away for free when
a profit can be made?
I remember the immortal words
of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. about man being able to
master technology and yet not have have grown
comparably enough in spirituality to live as
brothers.
For the kind of explosiveness
that man
will be able to contrive by 1980, the globe
is dangerously small, its political units
dangerously unstable.-John von Neumann
Legend has it that when Gödel presented "On the
Completeness of the Logical Calculus" von
Neumann threw in the towel (on Hilbert's
program) on the spot.
"Even in an airplane the number of vacuum tubes now approaches or exceeds a thousand. Other machines, containing up to 10,000 vacuum tubes, up to five times more crystals, and possibly more than 100,000 cores, now operate faultlessly over long periods, performing many millions of regulated, preplanned actions per second, with an expectation of only a few errors per day or week. Many such machines have been built to perform complicated scientific and engineering calculations and large scale accounting and logistical surveys. There is no doubt that they will be used for elaborate industrial process control, logistical, economic, and other planning"
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