My prayer for a giant coronal mass ejection...

[AuH20]

I think the same is true for those who hope for a total economic collapse in the belief that utopia will finally ensue. What comes out the other end could be even worse than what we live with today. "And out of the ashes, a Phoenix will rise."

Utopia? There can be no utopia as long as **** sapien roams the planet. A reset would simply be about punishing the leeches and bad actors who have enslaved millions, but rest assured, villains will arise once again to torment others. Ever deal with weeds? You can never get rid of them.

[AuH20]

Or the billion(s) who would subsequently die of starvation due to a lack of modern agricultural equipment and logistics.

You really wonder whether the modern welfare state may have made things ten times worse on this planet by essentially just buying the population time? They may as well as start tattooing expiration dates on people's foreheads these days. Useless eaters without any appreciable survival skills are not going to emerge out of the other side of the chaos tunnel, if you get my drift.................... And they have the gall to label libertarians as not being compassionate.............

[Anti Federalist]

When someone makes a great action movie without $#@!ty suspension-of-disbelief-smashing CGI in it, and gets masses of people to go to it and love it, I'll consider it possible for society to live without technology for any length of time.

FWIW, Hollywood was bitching that last summer's movie sales were in the toilet.

See what happens this year.

http://www.boxofficemojo.com/yearly/?view2=ytdcompare

[helmuth_hubener]

A very smart poster gave me a message that actually, the tubes in radios are electronics. I thought I'd share my reply with the class, since some of you may be interested in these things as well:


You don't actually need tubes. Crystal! All you need is a tree, some wire, and some rusty razor blades, in one of the simplest implementations (actually done by prisoners of war in WWII, who often didn't even have the tree).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIdHsjfbckw
https://softsolder.files.wordpress.c...des-nisley.pdf

However, you are actually right, because while a rusty razor blade or corroded copper penny (or a lump of a mineral like galena or fools gold) might seem very primitive, it is rectifying, and so technically it is a diode (I think?), and a diode is classified as an electronic component. No way to build a radio receiver without a diode... or is there?

It looks like in the end I am right after all, it is possible:

https://www.google.com/patents/US7450790


If you are interested in this kind of stuff, you might enjoy reading:

http://topshelfbook.org/wp-content/u..._knowledge.pdf

[Anti Federalist]

A very smart poster gave me a message that actually, the tubes in radios are electronics. I thought I'd share my reply with the class, since some of you may be interested in these things as well:

The very first semiconductor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat%27s-whisker_detector

However, you could build a spark gap morse transmitter without a rectifier.

[VIDEODROME]

The world has shrunk over time in a way. By that, I mean to many different groups of humans are to close together or bumping into each other or our ideologies are.

Maybe the best thing Tech could do is get us off this planet into space so that groups of humans with irreconcilable differences can part ways.

[paleocon1]

Having observed man's nature for my existence on this ball ......................

your urges o curse are coming from the dark side

[helmuth_hubener]

However, you could build a spark gap morse transmitter without a rectifier.

Transmitter, yes. Absolutely.

Of course, one hitch (you'll never guess): spark gap transmitters are illegal.

[CPUd]

What a perfect video clip for the conversation at hand.

For an hour, a solid hour, I was in a movie theater sitting jaw agape because there was something happening on screen which was resurrecting a piece of my childhood and not actively $#@!ting all over it.

I've become pretty accustomed to that over the last 15 years. I've never seen the Lord of the Rings movies past the first one, I've never seen SW episode III... it just got to the point where I wasn't going to sit still while some money-grubbing jackass squatted over the theater seat and squirted diarrhea in my hair.

Ah, but Fury Road - here was proof that it didn't have to be that way!!! For a solid hour!!!

Some of you may be noticing right now that the run time on that film is 120 minutes.
It crept in slowly at first. A little whiff of something off at the 1 hour mark. Was it just a fart? Wait, there's another... if that was a fart, it was a wet fart.
Then at around the 100 minute mark we started getting the perfectly in-focus guitar careening toward the camera during a slow-motion accident.
And I realized something wet and stinky was slowly dripping down my bangs.

I secretly hope that most of the people involved with that movie realized that they were waxing up Fonzie's skis. That they hated it, but had to do it anyway.


It's the exact same with technology.
Are you right that it's taking over our lives? Yes.
Would it be nice if someone did something about it? Yes.

But how long would it last, really? An hour? That one Mad Max Fury Road hour?

You'd get a brief reprieve, maybe lasting into a third or fourth month. But that's it.
It's not possible to live without this stuff anymore. It's just not going to last.

When someone makes a great action movie without $#@!ty suspension-of-disbelief-smashing CGI in it, and gets masses of people to go to it and love it, I'll consider it possible for society to live without technology for any length of time.

Until then, well, you better hope the CME takes out all the factories too, and everything in a concrete basement that would have been shielded, etc, etc. Because unless it does, it's all starting right back up.

You'll probably be glad to know it was intentional:



The filmmakers claim the effects were about 80% practical and 20% CGI.

[ChristianAnarchist]

Until then, well, you better hope the CME takes out all the factories too, and everything in a concrete basement that would have been shielded, etc, etc. Because unless it does, it's all starting right back up.

I think it would be longer than that. I've spent a lot of time in manufacturing and most everything in a factory will die and stay dead without electronics. Just getting some way to generate the electricity needed for the factory would take many years as every piece of equipment would need new circuits. Don't forget rust. Without movement machines start to rust up and then you need to remove the rust and lubricate them when you do finally get power. You also have the fact that with fewer people in the world and no way to pay them (other than barter) it will be hard to find anyone who is not very busy just trying to get food for themselves and their families. Hunting and agriculture will be the immediate needs and trying to fix a factory machine will be at the bottom of the list of priorities. Ever looked in the control panel for modern machinery? No longer simple relays, electronics EVERYWHERE. Sure, you can rewire for relays but how long will that take and most relays will be burned out so you either need to find good ones or start manufacturing those (someone will, no doubt but they will be VERY expensive and poor quality). Yeah, I think about 100 years of reprieve for a really good CME...

[ChristianAnarchist]

Have a good day!

Cheer up!

Hang in there.

http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of...rating-returns

The Bad News: The odds on the human race are, 8 to 5 against.

The Good News: Those have always been the odds.

Excellent essay. I have to say I did not read every word of it but I did "get" what he's saying. Our minds or essence may be able to continue on through technological integration. A singularity may be the "ultimate freedom". I have to say the idea is an interesting one and may result in me reconsidering my forecast of the future... IF we can avoid destroying ourselves with nuclear or biological means PERHAPS reaching singularity is the ultimate expression of "liberty"...

Perplexing...

[fisharmor]

I think it would be longer than that. I've spent a lot of time in manufacturing and most everything in a factory will die and stay dead without electronics.

It took less than 50 years to go from factories that only required motive power to factories that relied on electronics, but it'll take longer than 100 years to get back to having factories at all?
The industrial revolution of 12th century Europe took less time to go into full effect than you're proposing it would take modern man to recover, and they were hand carving cogs out of wood.

Just getting some way to generate the electricity needed for the factory would take many years as every piece of equipment would need new circuits.

And waterfalls stop working from a CME as well?

Don't forget rust. Without movement machines start to rust up and then you need to remove the rust and lubricate them when you do finally get power.

I forgot about the microchip inside a can of WD-40.

You also have the fact that with fewer people in the world and no way to pay them (other than barter) it will be hard to find anyone who is not very busy just trying to get food for themselves and their families.

I happen to know there are an awful lot of people like me out there, who are perfectly capable of doing all sorts of useful things, but don't, because we are much better paid spending 40% of our time reading technical material, 40% of our time repeating or translating that material to people too stupid or lazy to do it themselves, and 20% of our time arguing online about what TEOTWAWKI would be like.
You mean I might be FORCED to give up on this life on the hemorrhoid farm and go out and have something to show for my life instead?
The only reason I continue to do this nonsense is to feed my family. If I'm all of a sudden forced into having to feed my family by doing the things I currently have to carve out special hours of the week to do for fun, I'm not exactly going to consider it a hardship.

Hunting and agriculture will be the immediate needs and trying to fix a factory machine will be at the bottom of the list of priorities.

The stores will be lit and filled with new products before the last deer is harvested from my suburban neighborhood. And at that point I can actually start growing vegetables instead of just watching them get eaten by the damned deer.

Ever looked in the control panel for modern machinery? No longer simple relays, electronics EVERYWHERE. Sure, you can rewire for relays but how long will that take and most relays will be burned out so you either need to find good ones or start manufacturing those (someone will, no doubt but they will be VERY expensive and poor quality).

Get ready for it.... NO. I haven't looked inside the control panel of modern machinery.
I've looked inside an lot of 1980s vintage machinery.
I've looked inside a bigger amount of 1920's-1950's vintage machinery, where, again, all you need is motive power. Most of this machinery is available currently for a pittance, or even an offer to haul it out of someone's garage.


There's only one reason why a TEOTWAWKI level CME would take longer than four months, and that's if the professional criminal caste got involved and actively tried to stop progress.
You and I know perfectly well they would try.

But you know what? If my non-online-bitching skills aren't actually worth anything, I still have guns, and bullets would still work fine, and I'd be perfectly happy to pull guard duty for businesses, if it meant my family could eat. I'd have to settle for arguing with fellow guards instead of people across the globe, but hey, I'd probably get outside more.

[acptulsa]

And waterfalls stop working from a CME as well?

This!

I forgot about the microchip inside a can of WD-40.

And this! A thousand times, this!

As far as I'm concerned, all the predictions of doom coming from the status quo concerning what would happen without the status quo are paid commercial programs by the status quo. And pure bull. Only two things could possibly keep us down--an unwarranted belief in the status quo and concerted sabotage by disaffected former beneficiaries of the status quo.

It's just another, 'If you're against the Department of Education you're against education itself!!'-style propaganda campaign, preying on that fear of the unknown often experienced by idiots.

[ChristianAnarchist]

Fisharmor is probably right about the 100 years being too long. Perhaps 50 is more like it but whatever time it is, it would maybe give us a little time to get smarter. One can only hope. One thing I'm certain of, if we keep going technology is VERY likely to end human existence. I would take whatever reprieve we can get.

I'm not certain that fish gets the magnitude of the event I'm talking about. This type of event will make generators worthless. The waterfalls will still be there, of course, but you better start winding your own generators because you will not likely find any with intact windings (I could be wrong here, only one way to find out...). Yes, if someone has funding and time they likely could make advances VERY quickly since we already have the knowledge base. The event I'm talking about would leave few people with the inclination to "create" because they would be spending all their efforts on being fed. Money would be worthless and banks completely gone because everything is electronic. They would not even be able to bring their books back online from "backups" because they too would be fried. Employees cannot be paid (worthless money) so they go home and scrounge for food. Besides those who die instantly from the event many more will die in the weeks and months after due to lack of medical care. Yes, I realize this is a grim picture and it's not like I "wish" for it. It's simply the only way I see mankind might survive a bit longer...