In 1996, a physicist named Alan Sokal submitted a paper to a non-physics academic journal. The paper argued that the idea of an objective physical reality was a social construct to keep scientific power in the hands of the elites. The paper was accepted and published. Three weeks later, Sokal publicly announced that the paper had been a joke, its logic and technical language either made up or used nonsensically, and the reason he submitted it was to test the integrity of the journal. This became known as the Sokal Affair.
Sokal exposed a fact that can sometimes make scientists uncomfortable: science is not inherently superior to all other collaborative methods of determining truth. It has to earn that status by being intellectually rigorous, which means defining terms clearly, making hypotheses that are falsifiable, accounting for all variables, taking unbiased data, and analyzing the data with the best, most applicable statistical methods available. If a journal allows papers that do not live up to these standards, that journal is no longer a vehicle of science, but of dogma.
After Sokal revealed the paper to be a hoax, there were cries of foul play. He had, after all, intentionally published a paper with false data and results. Fabrication is considered profane among scientists, and can result in the author being ostracized from the scientific community. However, the reason for this is because it spreads false information. Sokal’s purpose was not to spread false information, but exactly the opposite: to expose and prevent the spreading of false information by the journal.
Within the past few years, a team of academics followed in Sokal’s footsteps by submitting several bogus papers to a few different journals. Many of these papers, including a passage from Mein Kampf with key words swapped out, were accepted. Luckily, the Mein Kampf plagiarism wasn’t actually published. This became known as Sokal Squared, and also received blowback. It should be noted that Sokal Squared was not meant to discredit the fields being studied, but to expose the fact that it was being done wrong in these particular journals.
I believe the authors in the Sokal and Sokal Squared affairs did absolutely nothing wrong. In fact, what they did is perfectly in line with the scientific process, which is to continually test ideas from every different angle to see whether they can stand up to it. I think that every academic journal, from the natural sciences to the humanities, from the most prestigious to the peripheral, should be regularly put to a Sokal Test. By this, I mean that people from different fields of study, or who are not professional academics, should write nonsense papers using the journals’ jargon, and see if they get accepted. Anyone writing a hoax paper should be required to reveal the hoax within a reasonable amount of time. Journals that fail the Sokal Test will lose reputation points, and those that pass will gain prestige.
Science is an amazing vehicle for understanding the universe and what happens within it. It is naturally competitive, its scholars each putting forth their own theories and doing their best to prove everybody else wrong. To do this, they use every legitimate trick in the book: making sure all significant variables are accounted for, checking the data collection methods for bias, and many others. But these feedback processes are largely self-contained within each discipline, which means they can become corrupted and watered down. Instituting a Sokal Test would be an effective and equitable way to keep journals accountable to scientists in other disciplines, and to everyone who is interested in true scientific knowledge.
Friday, April 19, 2019
Friday, April 12, 2019
The Event Horizon Telescope – Science and the Human Spirit
Black holes are extremely dense. A black hole the mass of the sun would be the size of a small village. They are also extremely dim, giving off no light of their own. The only light that comes from a black hole is from its accretion disk, a swirl of matter bunching together and heating up as it falls into the black hole. All known black holes are extremely far away, in the hearts of star clusters and galaxies. And on Wednesday, the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration released humanity's first photograph of a black hole.
The Event Horizon Telescope is one of several modern feats of staggering ingenuity. Eight radio telescopes in Hawaii, Arizona, Nevada, Mexico, Chile, and Antarctica, were synchronized and pointed at the center of the galaxy M87, where a black hole 6.5 billion times the mass of the sun lies. Working together, these telescopes used interferometry to act as a single telescope the size of the entire Earth. This gave them the resolution they needed to collect a long-exposure picture of a supermassive black hole in radio waves.
The universe is stranger and more amazing than we can imagine. From the plains of Africa, to agriculture, to metallurgy, to the industrial revolution, to computers, to supercomputers, we curious humans have explored our world and created new devices of exploration in a cycle that grows ever more impressive. We do things that are bigger than ever before, and then we start on new projects that are even bigger. Someday we will have particle accelerators that go around the sun. Telescopes the size of the solar system. We will resurrect species that have gone extinct. Build artificial minds as versatile as humans, or even more so. Though we cripple ourselves with wars, and greed, and ideological disputes, there is a part of us that sees mystery and just wants to explore. And this spirit of curiosity within us moves us to bridge the gaps, to harness the synergy that arises when many work together for a common goal. And that goal: to learn more about this wonderful, strange, mysterious universe we find ourselves in.
 |
| Our first honest-to-God image of a real black hole. |
 |
| The galaxy the black hole hides in. |
The universe is stranger and more amazing than we can imagine. From the plains of Africa, to agriculture, to metallurgy, to the industrial revolution, to computers, to supercomputers, we curious humans have explored our world and created new devices of exploration in a cycle that grows ever more impressive. We do things that are bigger than ever before, and then we start on new projects that are even bigger. Someday we will have particle accelerators that go around the sun. Telescopes the size of the solar system. We will resurrect species that have gone extinct. Build artificial minds as versatile as humans, or even more so. Though we cripple ourselves with wars, and greed, and ideological disputes, there is a part of us that sees mystery and just wants to explore. And this spirit of curiosity within us moves us to bridge the gaps, to harness the synergy that arises when many work together for a common goal. And that goal: to learn more about this wonderful, strange, mysterious universe we find ourselves in.
Friday, April 5, 2019
Economics: Motivations and Incentives
[Retrospective note: this post is more of a case study of the modern American economy, and not as general as I would like. To see an updated version of this discussion, click here.]
In order for an economy to run, work must be done. Producing and distributing goods and services takes labor and organization. So naturally, the question arises, what motivates people to do these things?
The most common motivation for individuals throughout history, past and present, is the threat of poverty and starvation. You work, you get paid, you pay your bills. But given the opportunity, people will also work for other reasons. Some like the promise of wealth and moving up in the hierarchies of company and society. Others work because it provides joy and purpose to their lives. Still others have a strong sense of duty, and cannot rest unless they have given their fair share of effort toward supporting society. Others see problems in society, and their compassion moves them to help.
People also generally like to do what is right, especially if it is easy. For instance, if recycling means taking a load of trash in your car to a facility twenty miles away, not very many people will recycle. However, if there are conveniently-placed blue bins all over the place that somebody else takes care of, almost everybody will recycle.
The economy does not primarily run on individual people, though. The real power behind an economy is in its businesses. Yes, businesses are run by people, but the businesses themselves can be looked at as if they have their own motivations. It is an emergent phenomenon. If we want to understand the driving force of an economy, it is businesses’ motivations we have to look at.
Like people, businesses have a variety of motivating forces. Some businesses want to provide high-quality services. Some aim to solve problems for humanity. But by far, the most significant driver for businesses is profit. Money allows businesses to grow and become more powerful, so the biggest, most powerful, most economically significant companies are the ones who orient their capacities toward making more money.
Naturally, profit-oriented companies want to increase their prices and lower their wages as much as they can, while still having people buy from and work for them. This is not aligned with the purpose of the economy, which is to meet people’s needs and provide an environment in which they can pursue meaningful lives. The most commonly championed counter-force to these self-centered practices is competition. In a competitive market, more workers apply for the companies with the highest-paying wages, and more customers buy from the companies with the lowest prices.
However, because competition makes wages higher and prices lower, companies don’t like it. So they try to get around the competition, by either putting the other companies out of business, or buying them out. Thus, competitive markets are unstable, because if one company pulls ahead a little bit, they have an advantage that grows at an accelerating rate. This leads to monopolies, companies that control a product’s entire market.
Companies are also prone to causing collateral damage. Pollution, for instance, as well as other kinds. If it is more cost-effective to dump your chemicals in the river than to properly dispose of them, you’re going to dump them in the river. Of course, it is best for all companies together if they don’t pollute, but for each company individually, it is more advantageous to pollute no matter what other companies do. This an example of the Prisoner’s Dilemma.
It is also a senescent behavior. Senescence is a term from biology, which refers to the deteriorative processes of aging. In economics, senescent behaviors are actions that give short term gains, but have negative effects that build up in the long run. The quintessential example of a senescent behavior in the economy today is carbon dioxide emissions, which build up slowly in the atmosphere over time, only causing problems after many years.
Luckily, there are ways to mitigate or guide the profit incentive so that it serves human interests. If a large number of people come together in a social movement and refuse to buy a certain company’s product, the company will lose out on profit unless they change their behavior. Workers can band together in unions to demand more reasonable wages and benefits. And the government can add incentives, like minimum wages, taxes, subsidies, regulations, and plenty of others.
Of course, companies will fight against anything that would reduce their profits. Not all companies, of course, but a significant fraction. They will try to use the government to reduce taxes, limit unions, repeal important regulations, and otherwise turn the tables in their favor.
It is important to note, however, that things are not black and white. It is not simply the good people versus the bad companies. Many companies do a lot of good for humanity, and we want the Elon Musks of the world to be free to do their thing. The key is smart legislation. It is not enough to simply be “for people.” When coming up with policies, it is important to make decisions based on the numbers and the science, so that we know it will help, and not accidentally make things worse.
Finally, we must remember that companies love to replace workers with machines, because a machine costs a whole lot less than a human. As robotics and artificial intelligence continue to get better, the space of economically relevant human tasks continues to shrink. This is both good and bad. Good, because companies can offer their goods and services for even cheaper. Bad, because people are having a harder and harder time finding work. We will talk more about this in discussions to come.
In order for an economy to run, work must be done. Producing and distributing goods and services takes labor and organization. So naturally, the question arises, what motivates people to do these things?
The most common motivation for individuals throughout history, past and present, is the threat of poverty and starvation. You work, you get paid, you pay your bills. But given the opportunity, people will also work for other reasons. Some like the promise of wealth and moving up in the hierarchies of company and society. Others work because it provides joy and purpose to their lives. Still others have a strong sense of duty, and cannot rest unless they have given their fair share of effort toward supporting society. Others see problems in society, and their compassion moves them to help.
People also generally like to do what is right, especially if it is easy. For instance, if recycling means taking a load of trash in your car to a facility twenty miles away, not very many people will recycle. However, if there are conveniently-placed blue bins all over the place that somebody else takes care of, almost everybody will recycle.
The economy does not primarily run on individual people, though. The real power behind an economy is in its businesses. Yes, businesses are run by people, but the businesses themselves can be looked at as if they have their own motivations. It is an emergent phenomenon. If we want to understand the driving force of an economy, it is businesses’ motivations we have to look at.
Like people, businesses have a variety of motivating forces. Some businesses want to provide high-quality services. Some aim to solve problems for humanity. But by far, the most significant driver for businesses is profit. Money allows businesses to grow and become more powerful, so the biggest, most powerful, most economically significant companies are the ones who orient their capacities toward making more money.
Naturally, profit-oriented companies want to increase their prices and lower their wages as much as they can, while still having people buy from and work for them. This is not aligned with the purpose of the economy, which is to meet people’s needs and provide an environment in which they can pursue meaningful lives. The most commonly championed counter-force to these self-centered practices is competition. In a competitive market, more workers apply for the companies with the highest-paying wages, and more customers buy from the companies with the lowest prices.
However, because competition makes wages higher and prices lower, companies don’t like it. So they try to get around the competition, by either putting the other companies out of business, or buying them out. Thus, competitive markets are unstable, because if one company pulls ahead a little bit, they have an advantage that grows at an accelerating rate. This leads to monopolies, companies that control a product’s entire market.
Companies are also prone to causing collateral damage. Pollution, for instance, as well as other kinds. If it is more cost-effective to dump your chemicals in the river than to properly dispose of them, you’re going to dump them in the river. Of course, it is best for all companies together if they don’t pollute, but for each company individually, it is more advantageous to pollute no matter what other companies do. This an example of the Prisoner’s Dilemma.
It is also a senescent behavior. Senescence is a term from biology, which refers to the deteriorative processes of aging. In economics, senescent behaviors are actions that give short term gains, but have negative effects that build up in the long run. The quintessential example of a senescent behavior in the economy today is carbon dioxide emissions, which build up slowly in the atmosphere over time, only causing problems after many years.
Luckily, there are ways to mitigate or guide the profit incentive so that it serves human interests. If a large number of people come together in a social movement and refuse to buy a certain company’s product, the company will lose out on profit unless they change their behavior. Workers can band together in unions to demand more reasonable wages and benefits. And the government can add incentives, like minimum wages, taxes, subsidies, regulations, and plenty of others.
Of course, companies will fight against anything that would reduce their profits. Not all companies, of course, but a significant fraction. They will try to use the government to reduce taxes, limit unions, repeal important regulations, and otherwise turn the tables in their favor.
It is important to note, however, that things are not black and white. It is not simply the good people versus the bad companies. Many companies do a lot of good for humanity, and we want the Elon Musks of the world to be free to do their thing. The key is smart legislation. It is not enough to simply be “for people.” When coming up with policies, it is important to make decisions based on the numbers and the science, so that we know it will help, and not accidentally make things worse.
Finally, we must remember that companies love to replace workers with machines, because a machine costs a whole lot less than a human. As robotics and artificial intelligence continue to get better, the space of economically relevant human tasks continues to shrink. This is both good and bad. Good, because companies can offer their goods and services for even cheaper. Bad, because people are having a harder and harder time finding work. We will talk more about this in discussions to come.
Friday, March 15, 2019
Why Success is Rare
Here in the USA, we are told a story. The story is that if we work hard and persevere, success will be ours. We are bombarded with stories of people who pull themselves up by their bootstraps into their dream lives. Sports players making it to the big league. Coal miners becoming rocket scientists. Homeless people becoming millionaire businessmen. These stories are inspiring, and make us feel that if we just work hard enough, we too can achieve the success we dream about.
Success means different things to different people. For this discussion, we will define it as is how well you are able to achieve whatever you set your life toward.
I, too, hope for success. It is my dream to one day walk into the Sci-fi and Fantasy aisle of a Barnes & Noble and see a book with my name on it. But when I think about the millions of people who write books, or at least want to write books, those shelves in the bookstore start to look very small.
This is an example of the Pareto principle, or the 80/20 rule. The Pareto principle is the observation that, for any measure of success, 80% of it is held by 20% of the people who seek it. This also applies for sub-sections of the distribution, meaning 64% of the success is held by 4% of the people (80% of the 80% is held by 20% of the 20%), and so on. Of course, this is only a general observation across large numbers of people in many different areas of life. Within small groups of people, the numbers may be different. But overall, it shows us that success is rare.
Like any statistical rule, the Pareto principle is not baked into reality, but shaped by a number of different factors. Part of it is because work also follows the Pareto principle; on average, 20% of workers do 80% of the work. But this is not the whole story, and it, too, needs to be explained. So let’s look at some of the reasons these 80/20 rules exist.
We are not born blank slates. Each of us has different personalities, interests, and talents, which affect what we can be good at, and how good we are at them. No amount of hard work is going to turn the average truck driver into a groundbreaking theoretical physicist, or the average biologist into a world-class basketball player. So part of the success equation comes from natural-born talents and interests.
Another thing to consider, and an unfortunate fact of our society, is that the playing field is not level. Many people are born too poor to practice and make use of their talents. Others are born into social minorities, groups of people for whom, by tragic accidents of history, the deck is stacked against. These are roadblocks against success.
We live in a dynamic economy. The opportunities that are available today will be gone tomorrow, taken by those who were in the right place at the right time. In order to find a niche, it helps to know people who can vouch for you and get your name out there. Connections and good marketing are essential for success.
From these four areas; effort, innate qualities, societal factors, and economic environment; we can begin to see the picture of success more clearly. If we were to put success into an equation, it would look something like this:
Each of these things contributes toward one’s probability of success. If one of them is lacking, the others have to make up for it. The amount each part contributes is different for every endeavor.
What can we learn from this? Well, to me it says that we should not judge people for being unsuccessful. Our effort and choices only get us so far. Most people, even if they give life their all, are just going to be average. And if someone is not doing well in life, that does not necessarily mean it is their fault. It gives me an appreciation for the sports player who will never make it into the league. The writer who will never be published. The musician who posts online and gets only five downloads. The hard worker who will never run their own businesses. There is nothing wrong with these people. They are average. Normal. And they should be respected and allowed to live out their lives doing the things that are meaningful to them, even if the world around them does not view their contribution as important.
Success means different things to different people. For this discussion, we will define it as is how well you are able to achieve whatever you set your life toward.
I, too, hope for success. It is my dream to one day walk into the Sci-fi and Fantasy aisle of a Barnes & Noble and see a book with my name on it. But when I think about the millions of people who write books, or at least want to write books, those shelves in the bookstore start to look very small.
This is an example of the Pareto principle, or the 80/20 rule. The Pareto principle is the observation that, for any measure of success, 80% of it is held by 20% of the people who seek it. This also applies for sub-sections of the distribution, meaning 64% of the success is held by 4% of the people (80% of the 80% is held by 20% of the 20%), and so on. Of course, this is only a general observation across large numbers of people in many different areas of life. Within small groups of people, the numbers may be different. But overall, it shows us that success is rare.
Like any statistical rule, the Pareto principle is not baked into reality, but shaped by a number of different factors. Part of it is because work also follows the Pareto principle; on average, 20% of workers do 80% of the work. But this is not the whole story, and it, too, needs to be explained. So let’s look at some of the reasons these 80/20 rules exist.
We are not born blank slates. Each of us has different personalities, interests, and talents, which affect what we can be good at, and how good we are at them. No amount of hard work is going to turn the average truck driver into a groundbreaking theoretical physicist, or the average biologist into a world-class basketball player. So part of the success equation comes from natural-born talents and interests.
Another thing to consider, and an unfortunate fact of our society, is that the playing field is not level. Many people are born too poor to practice and make use of their talents. Others are born into social minorities, groups of people for whom, by tragic accidents of history, the deck is stacked against. These are roadblocks against success.
We live in a dynamic economy. The opportunities that are available today will be gone tomorrow, taken by those who were in the right place at the right time. In order to find a niche, it helps to know people who can vouch for you and get your name out there. Connections and good marketing are essential for success.
From these four areas; effort, innate qualities, societal factors, and economic environment; we can begin to see the picture of success more clearly. If we were to put success into an equation, it would look something like this:
Success = hard work + passion + talent + social status + niche + connections
+ marketing
Each of these things contributes toward one’s probability of success. If one of them is lacking, the others have to make up for it. The amount each part contributes is different for every endeavor.
What can we learn from this? Well, to me it says that we should not judge people for being unsuccessful. Our effort and choices only get us so far. Most people, even if they give life their all, are just going to be average. And if someone is not doing well in life, that does not necessarily mean it is their fault. It gives me an appreciation for the sports player who will never make it into the league. The writer who will never be published. The musician who posts online and gets only five downloads. The hard worker who will never run their own businesses. There is nothing wrong with these people. They are average. Normal. And they should be respected and allowed to live out their lives doing the things that are meaningful to them, even if the world around them does not view their contribution as important.
Friday, March 8, 2019
The Hard Problem of Consciousness
Consciousness:
The Hard Problem
Dualism
Physicalism
Idealism
Identifying Consciousness
Consciousness. It is the one part of reality that we experience directly, rather than as a mental representation. Consciousness is the experience of existing and experiencing. When we are awake, we are conscious. When we dream, we are conscious. We are not conscious when we are sleeping dreamlessly, or when we are in a coma, or when we are dead. Without consciousness there is no color, no sound, no taste, no beauty, no meaning; only physical reality.
So what is it, and how is it possible for it to exist?
This question has been debated by philosophers and scientists for thousands of years. The very existence of consciousness seems at odds with everything else we know about reality. Nevertheless, we know it exists, and we know it absolutely, which we cannot say about anything else.
There is plenty we do know about consciousness. We know that while you are thinking or feeling or tasting something, there is activity in the neurons in your brain, and each sensation correlates with a different pattern. It is reasonable to assume that in the future, we will have machines sophisticated enough to read exactly which neurons fire, and figure out how to know what is going on in someone’s consciousness, to read their mind, just by reading the patterns in their brain.
But that is only the Easy Problem of consciousness. To understand consciousness, we have to tackle the Hard Problem: how is it possible that consciousness exists at all?
There is a famous thought experiment called the Philosophical Zombie. In this experiment, we imagine a person who looks exactly like a regular human being, who acts the same, their brain works the same, and they can have conversations with us that are just as sophisticated as with anyone. When you ask the zombie if they are conscious, they say yes. But they are wrong. They have no consciousness. There is nothing it is like to be them. They experience no color, no sound, no light, no time. They are nothing more than a bunch of matter functioning as a complex machine.
Taking this a step further, we can imagine an entire universe full of philosophical zombies. Perhaps a universe just like ours, planet for planet, particle for particle, person for person. In this imaginary universe, there is an exact copy of you, and an exact copy of me. But no one is conscious. They believe they are conscious, and have conversations about metaphysics, but they are wrong.
Our search for the nature of consciousness will take different directions depending on whether or not the Philosophical Zombie thought experiment is valid. If it is, then consciousness must be its own physical substance, different from anything else that we know of. This is known as Dualism. On the other hand, if it is impossible for a zombie universe to exist, then consciousness is not its own substance, but a property of other parts of physical reality. This is called Physicalism. As this series goes on, we will examine theories of consciousness from the perspectives of dualism, physicalism, and more.
The Hard Problem
Dualism
Physicalism
Idealism
Identifying Consciousness
Consciousness. It is the one part of reality that we experience directly, rather than as a mental representation. Consciousness is the experience of existing and experiencing. When we are awake, we are conscious. When we dream, we are conscious. We are not conscious when we are sleeping dreamlessly, or when we are in a coma, or when we are dead. Without consciousness there is no color, no sound, no taste, no beauty, no meaning; only physical reality.
So what is it, and how is it possible for it to exist?
This question has been debated by philosophers and scientists for thousands of years. The very existence of consciousness seems at odds with everything else we know about reality. Nevertheless, we know it exists, and we know it absolutely, which we cannot say about anything else.
There is plenty we do know about consciousness. We know that while you are thinking or feeling or tasting something, there is activity in the neurons in your brain, and each sensation correlates with a different pattern. It is reasonable to assume that in the future, we will have machines sophisticated enough to read exactly which neurons fire, and figure out how to know what is going on in someone’s consciousness, to read their mind, just by reading the patterns in their brain.
But that is only the Easy Problem of consciousness. To understand consciousness, we have to tackle the Hard Problem: how is it possible that consciousness exists at all?
There is a famous thought experiment called the Philosophical Zombie. In this experiment, we imagine a person who looks exactly like a regular human being, who acts the same, their brain works the same, and they can have conversations with us that are just as sophisticated as with anyone. When you ask the zombie if they are conscious, they say yes. But they are wrong. They have no consciousness. There is nothing it is like to be them. They experience no color, no sound, no light, no time. They are nothing more than a bunch of matter functioning as a complex machine.
Taking this a step further, we can imagine an entire universe full of philosophical zombies. Perhaps a universe just like ours, planet for planet, particle for particle, person for person. In this imaginary universe, there is an exact copy of you, and an exact copy of me. But no one is conscious. They believe they are conscious, and have conversations about metaphysics, but they are wrong.
Our search for the nature of consciousness will take different directions depending on whether or not the Philosophical Zombie thought experiment is valid. If it is, then consciousness must be its own physical substance, different from anything else that we know of. This is known as Dualism. On the other hand, if it is impossible for a zombie universe to exist, then consciousness is not its own substance, but a property of other parts of physical reality. This is called Physicalism. As this series goes on, we will examine theories of consciousness from the perspectives of dualism, physicalism, and more.
Friday, February 22, 2019
Fixing Kingdom Hearts 3's Story
This discussion may contain minor spoilers.
Kingdom Hearts is a video game series with a deep and involved story full of metaphor and metaphysics, revolving around themes of what makes us human and what gives life value. Unsurprisingly, it is one of my favorite stories of all time. So when Kingdom Hearts 3 was released last month, promising a grand finale to the story that had been building up for many games over 17 years, I and millions of other fans dove into it and lost ourselves in Square Enix/Disney/Pixar wonderfulness.
For a while, it was great fun, taking Sora on an adventure through the worlds of Tangled, Toy Story, and Monsters Inc., fighting alongside Buzz Lightyear and Mike Wazowski. But then I started to feel disillusioned with the game, and looking at the internet, a large portion of the fan base was too.
Why were we disappointed? Was it because we had been excited for the game for so long, and there was no way it could possibly live up to our expectations? That might be part of it, but thinking back on the story with a critical perspective, I have identified a couple of major weak points with it.
The first weak point, and most important, is that the writers seem to have forgotten that the story was meant for a video game. A video game has something that movies and books do not: a player. The person experiencing the story is playing the game, doing work and overcoming challenges. In a good video game story, the actions of the player are what drive the story forward.
In the Kingdom Hearts games, Sora flies off to a bunch of worlds taken from Disney movies, on a quest to save the universe. However, in Kingdom Hearts 3, the reason Sora is sent off to the worlds is because he is missing an important magical ability, and he has to go find it. After each world, we get a cutscene about the story. But instead of relating to what Sora has just done, it jumps far away to where other characters are doing the important things. It makes the player feel Irrelevant. This is fixed at the end, of course, when Sora becomes the key figure in defeating the bad guys and resolving all of the loose ends, but the players are already frustrated, and that frustration colors the ending.
 |
| A very important scene, which happens far away from Sora. |
The second big weak point with the story is the heroes’ goal. The good guys know the bad guy’s evil plan: to have seven guardians of light clash against thirteen seekers of darkness, which will reforge the 𝜒-blade and give him power over Kingdom Hearts. (If you are confused about what this means, don’t worry, everybody else is too.) So then, what is the good guys’ strategy to foil this evil scheme? It is . . . to gather seven guardians of light to fight the thirteen seekers of darkness.
 |
| If you're wondering why there are 9, Donald and Goofy don't count. |
The solution to this is easy. The characters already have an a compelling alternative reason for their mission; their friends need to be saved. They have no reason to want to gather seven guardians of light, so they should not talk about that as if it is important to them. Instead, they should worry about what it will mean for the final battle, and that should hang over their heads as they knowingly but unwillingly serve the bad guy’s goal.
Also, they could have just gone into the final battle with six heroes instead of seven, intentionally leaving one behind. (One of the characters is an obvious choice, as I’m sure all of you who have played the game will agree.) This could have made for an interesting twist, where the bad guy reveals that he has foreseen this possibility, and has a way to bring their number back up to seven.
Despite its flaws, I love the game. I was a big Kingdom Hearts fan before Kingdom Hearts 3, and I still am after it. The ending was everything I hoped for, and I am quite pleased that they are going to continue to make games with a new story.
Friday, February 8, 2019
Awesome Energy Sources of the Near and Far Future
Energy. It is the magic ingredient that makes the difference between an empty, lifeless universe and one teeming with action. Whether it is by eating food to fuel our bodies, producing electricity to power our homes, or atoms fusing together in the cores of stars, energy is what makes everything possible.
In our ever-growing world, we use more and more energy, both as individuals and as societies. Energy production and technological progress go hand in hand. Sometimes, inventions of new methods of generating power, like the steam engine, lead to a boom in growth. Other times, a growing economy builds up the resources to transition to new kinds of energy. We are in the midst of one such transition right now, with solar, wind, and other types of renewable energy creeping up to take the place of fossil fuels. But what about the future? Are there other ways of generating power in large amounts that we have yet to invent?
The answer is a definite yes. Thanks to modern physics, we know of many ways to store and produce energy that are possible, but beyond our current technology or the resources.
Nuclear Fission
Before we go there, I want to nod to an underappreciated method of generating power that modern physics has gifted us, and which already exists: nuclear fission.
Now when many people hear “nuclear,” they think “bombs.” But it’s really referring to the energy stored in the bonds between the protons and neutrons in the nuclei of atoms. If you look at the periodic table of the elements, you will see that all of the elements are numbered from 1 to 118 (as of when this post was published). This number is the number of protons in the atom’s nucleus. There are also neutrons, but those aren’t counted on the periodic table. Since saying “protons and neutrons” can get tiring, when they are referred to together, they are called nucleons.
The energy in the masses of the nucleons and the bonds between them is different for each atom. From Hydrogen, the energy per nucleon goes down, until we reach iron. After iron, the energy per nucleon goes back up. This means that if elements heavier than iron break apart, they release energy. This is called nuclear fission, and we already harness it in nuclear power plants around the world.
Nuclear fission is not very popular, because people associate it with harmful radiation. However, nuclear reactors are actually among the safest ways to generate power. There are an enormous number of safety procedures, many of them redundant, to protect everyone inside and near the plant from radiation, and to prevent meltdowns. The number of people who have died from nuclear reactors in the 70 years they have been around is less than 100.
However, there is a downside. Nuclear power may kill basically nobody today, but the risk goes up over time. This is because when uranium is fissioned, it leaves behind nuclear waste, radioactive material that is dangerous to stand near. Some of this can be used or purified, but some of it just has to be stored away in special warehouses for ten thousand years until it becomes safe. In the meantime, we continue to use more energy, nuclear power plants keep getting built, and the waste keeps piling up. So nuclear fusion has many advantages, and much less risk than people think, but the risks it does have last a long time.
Nuclear Fusion
On the opposite side of the periodic table from fission, we get nuclear fusion. Fusion occurs when two atoms come together to create a larger atom. If the product is iron or anything lighter, energy is released. The sun and stars get their power by fusing hydrogen and some other elements in their cores.
Nuclear fusion requires extreme temperatures and extreme pressures. Our best reactor design is the tokamak, which uses strong magnetic fields to confine super hot hydrogen plasma in a donut shape. However, we have not yet built a tokamak that can generate more energy than is used to heat the plasma, so commercial fusion remains a technology of the future.
Fusion power would be an incredible prize. It is way more energy-dense than any other power source we have tapped into, including fission. It uses hydrogen, which is three times more common in the universe than all of the other elements combined. There is almost no waste; the product at the end is mostly helium, which is about the least harmful substance in the universe. And if something goes wrong and the containment is broken, there is no meltdown. The machine just shuts off.
There is a lot of cynicism in society about fusion power. After all, people have said it is only 20 years away for over 60 years. To the average person, that sounds like no progress has been made. But that is not true; progress has been made, and is still being made today. The problem is that it is hard to predict when research will be finished, because that would require knowing the results ahead of time.
Another reason people are cynical is because fusion seems too good to be true. The fuel for it is everywhere, and it would yield so much energy that compared to the amount we use today it might as well be infinite. It is immensely more friendly toward the environment than fossil fuels or fission. It is such a great positive with so few downsides that it feels too good to be true.
But that kind of thinking is based on human intuition, not on facts. Behind the scenes, fusion research continues to press forward and make progress, and right now there is a tokamak is in the works called ITER, which is designed to produce ten times more energy than it takes. The perception that it is no closer than it has ever been is just an illusion.
What about beyond fusion? Surely in the vast, wide universe there are other power generation options that might become available to us in the far distant future? Why yes, there are.
Solar Satellites
The sun is a giant gravity-powered fusion reactor, and it is putting out enough energy every second to power the entire current world economy for eight trillion (8,000,000,000,000) years.
You read that right. Eight trillion years of human civilization. Every second. Our planet is floating in a sea of practically limitless energy. If only there was a way to go and get it.
In the future, after much technological and economic growth, we might be able to. The idea is to launch satellites into Earth orbit, with giant curved mirrors that focus the sun’s light into a collector, which is hooked up to a laser that would beam the energy to power stations on the Earth’s surface. This will be far more efficient than land-based solar power, because there are no clouds and no night in space, and there is virtually no limit to the number of satellite collectors we could add to the grid.
Now when you think about giant lasers shooting at the Earth, you might worry that they would be used as weapons. However, you need not fear, because there are ways of designing the satellites such that weaponizing them would be impossible. If the output is limited and a sufficiently long laser wavelength chosen, then they won’t be able to hurt anyone or anything.
You can read more about solar satellites at the US Department of Energy website.
Antimatter
So far, we have talked about things that are more or less within the everyday person’s imagination. Now it’s time to take things to the wild parts of physics. In fission and fusion, the energy we get comes from a fraction of the mass getting converted into energy by Einstein’s equation E=mc2. But most of the mass is still there after the reaction. Might there be a way for us to get all of it? The answer, is yes. And it might surprise you to learn that there are more ways than one.
90 years ago, the underappreciated physicist Paul Dirac was playing with one of his equations, when he discovered that there should be particles that are exactly like electrons, but with a positive electric charge instead of negative. Positrons. Since then, we have discovered in lab experiments that there are oppositely charged versions of all particles. These negative doppelgangers of matter are called antimatter. And when particles of matter collide with their antimatter counterparts, they are annihilated, and all of their mass turns into energy. In nuclear fusion, only 1% of the mass gets converted into energy. This means that a matter-antimatter power plant would yield a hundred times as much power!
Unfortunately, because antimatter gets destroyed when it touches matter, it is extremely rare. There isn’t enough around to collect and put into reactors. In fact, the vast majority of the antimatter on Earth is created in particle accelerators, taking the same amount of energy to make as we would get from it. So someday in the far future, rather than being an energy source, we might use antimatter as an ultra-high capacity battery.
A cartridge of antimatter the size of a D-cell would carry about 1/10 the energy of an atomic bomb. And it would very easily explode like one too. You can’t just put it in a bottle, because touching the sides of the bottle would make it go boom. The only way to contain antimatter is to use ultra-precise magnets. Needless to say, if we accumulated enough antimatter to run a power plant with, such a plant would be extremely dangerous. So although it is physically possible, I don’t see us or any future civilization using antimatter as a power source.
Micro Black Holes
As I mentioned earlier, there is another way of getting all of that sweet energy locked away in mass: black holes. Specifically, microscopic black holes. You have probably heard that anything that enters a black hole can never get out. That is true, mostly. However, black holes lose mass very slowly by giving off light in a process called Hawking radiation. Maybe I will try to explain it in a future post, but for now, the important thing is that it exists.
Hawking radiation is usually extremely slow. As in, the slowest process in the universe. But the smaller the black hole, the faster and more powerful the radiation. If you have a black hole, say, the size of a proton (the mass of a mountain), it will put out about the same amount of power as a fission plant, and will last for hundreds of billions of years.
I did my calculations at this handy dandy site.
Of course, there are some questions that arise when we talk about using black holes for anything. First of all is safety. It’s a black hole! Won’t it suck in everything around it and cause lots of destruction? Surprisingly, no. The point of no return is called the event horizon, which is what we mean by the “size” of the black hole. In our case, it is a lot smaller than an atom, making it difficult for anything to get trapped inside. However, anyone closer than 50 meters would feel a force from the black hole equivalent to Earth’s gravity, which means we want to give the black hole a lot of room.
Speaking of which, how are we going to hold the black hole? It is as heavy as a mountain and tinier than an atom, so what is stopping it from falling straight through the table, the floor, and to the center of the Earth? One option is to give it a small electric charge, and have it spiral around in a magnetic field. That magnetic field would require quite a lot more power than our mountain-mass black hole would give off, but we could solve this by making the black hole smaller, which would both reduce its mass and give it a higher energy output. However, there is a better option: build the power plant in space. There is no down in space, so the black hole would just float there, coasting along the gravitational landscape along with the ship that carries it.
Another important question is how we get a black hole of that size. The smallest black holes in nature that we know of are around 3 times the mass of the sun, when enough matter falls onto a neutron star to push it past its Schwarzschild radius. Unfortunately, the rest of the universe will have cooled off and died by the time these black holes’ hawking radiation is enough to use as an energy source.
However, only technology is stopping us from making artificial black holes. Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity showed us that energy has just as much gravity as mass, so if we shoot powerful enough lasers into a small enough point, a black hole will appear. Of course, we need to generate all of that power in the first place, so like antimatter, micro black holes would probably end up more as batteries than power sources. That is, unless life can figure out a way to survive the googols of years until the naturally-occurring black holes are small enough.
Black Hole Spin
There is another way to use black holes for energy generation. Big black holes, in fact, not microscopic ones. This comes from the fact that black holes have spin. What exactly it means for a black hole to have spin is a very complicated topic, so we’ll save it for another day. You can pretend it means the event horizon is revolving around the center, if that makes it easier. The important thing is that there is energy in the spin, and given the right technology and resources we could get to it.
It might surprise you to learn that gravity does not pull objects together. Instead, Einstein showed us in the General Theory of Relativity that space-time is pulled toward the gravitational source, and objects float along with it. It is like a stick floating on a pond with a drain pipe. The drain does not pull the stick toward it. Rather, the stick floats along with the water toward the drain. There is another effect of gravity predicted by Einstein’s equations, which is rare enough that we have never directly observed it. When an extremely massive object like a black hole spins, the rotation pulls space-time around with it. This is called frame-dragging. If regular gravity is like water flowing toward a drain, frame-dragging is like a whirlpool.
When a black hole spins, its frame-dragging is so strong that it creates a region of space outside the event horizon called the ergosphere, where in order to stay still as seen from far away, something has to travel against the black hole’s spin faster than the speed of light. This means that if something dips into the ergosphere without entering the event horizon, it gets a major boost in speed and kinetic energy. This energy comes from the black hole’s rotational kinetic energy, making the black hole’s rotation slow down ever so slightly. Since the object hasn’t passed the event horizon, it can get back out, and we can use its extra kinetic energy for electricity.
The most efficient way to do this would be to build a sphere of mirrors around the black hole, and let light bounce around inside. Every time the light goes through the ergosphere, it picks up some of the black hole’s rotational energy. If there is an opening in the mirror contraption for the light to get out, it becomes an energy fountain. For a visual and entertaining explanation about black hole spin power, check out Kurzgesagt’s video on it.
Unfortunately, extracting a black hole’s rotational energy requires letting some mass fall into the black hole. This is because of something called the Penrose process, which I wish I could explain, but I don’t understand it. The details don’t matter today, though, because it has a bad consequence; the black hole increases in mass, meaning we have to wait longer before it shrinks to sub-atomic size and we can use its Hawking radiation as a power source. It will be a kind of poetic tragedy that the last civilizations in the universe, by taking the energy they need in order to survive, seal away some of the precious energy into a future beyond their grasp. Not to worry, though. Before then, we have billions and trillions and higher-tier-illions of years to figure out how to stick out the long dark purgatory of the black hole era.
In our struggle today to replace fossil fuels with renewables, it's easy to forget that there will be more to the story in the future. As poor countries develop and developed countries get wealthier, our consumption of energy continues to increase exponentially. In another century, we may get vast amounts of energy from space lasers, or from mini-suns we create. Even after all of the stars die, there will still be enough energy to last for a long, long time.
In our ever-growing world, we use more and more energy, both as individuals and as societies. Energy production and technological progress go hand in hand. Sometimes, inventions of new methods of generating power, like the steam engine, lead to a boom in growth. Other times, a growing economy builds up the resources to transition to new kinds of energy. We are in the midst of one such transition right now, with solar, wind, and other types of renewable energy creeping up to take the place of fossil fuels. But what about the future? Are there other ways of generating power in large amounts that we have yet to invent?
The answer is a definite yes. Thanks to modern physics, we know of many ways to store and produce energy that are possible, but beyond our current technology or the resources.
Nuclear Fission
Before we go there, I want to nod to an underappreciated method of generating power that modern physics has gifted us, and which already exists: nuclear fission.
Now when many people hear “nuclear,” they think “bombs.” But it’s really referring to the energy stored in the bonds between the protons and neutrons in the nuclei of atoms. If you look at the periodic table of the elements, you will see that all of the elements are numbered from 1 to 118 (as of when this post was published). This number is the number of protons in the atom’s nucleus. There are also neutrons, but those aren’t counted on the periodic table. Since saying “protons and neutrons” can get tiring, when they are referred to together, they are called nucleons.
The energy in the masses of the nucleons and the bonds between them is different for each atom. From Hydrogen, the energy per nucleon goes down, until we reach iron. After iron, the energy per nucleon goes back up. This means that if elements heavier than iron break apart, they release energy. This is called nuclear fission, and we already harness it in nuclear power plants around the world.
Nuclear fission is not very popular, because people associate it with harmful radiation. However, nuclear reactors are actually among the safest ways to generate power. There are an enormous number of safety procedures, many of them redundant, to protect everyone inside and near the plant from radiation, and to prevent meltdowns. The number of people who have died from nuclear reactors in the 70 years they have been around is less than 100.
However, there is a downside. Nuclear power may kill basically nobody today, but the risk goes up over time. This is because when uranium is fissioned, it leaves behind nuclear waste, radioactive material that is dangerous to stand near. Some of this can be used or purified, but some of it just has to be stored away in special warehouses for ten thousand years until it becomes safe. In the meantime, we continue to use more energy, nuclear power plants keep getting built, and the waste keeps piling up. So nuclear fusion has many advantages, and much less risk than people think, but the risks it does have last a long time.
Nuclear Fusion
On the opposite side of the periodic table from fission, we get nuclear fusion. Fusion occurs when two atoms come together to create a larger atom. If the product is iron or anything lighter, energy is released. The sun and stars get their power by fusing hydrogen and some other elements in their cores.
Nuclear fusion requires extreme temperatures and extreme pressures. Our best reactor design is the tokamak, which uses strong magnetic fields to confine super hot hydrogen plasma in a donut shape. However, we have not yet built a tokamak that can generate more energy than is used to heat the plasma, so commercial fusion remains a technology of the future.
Fusion power would be an incredible prize. It is way more energy-dense than any other power source we have tapped into, including fission. It uses hydrogen, which is three times more common in the universe than all of the other elements combined. There is almost no waste; the product at the end is mostly helium, which is about the least harmful substance in the universe. And if something goes wrong and the containment is broken, there is no meltdown. The machine just shuts off.
There is a lot of cynicism in society about fusion power. After all, people have said it is only 20 years away for over 60 years. To the average person, that sounds like no progress has been made. But that is not true; progress has been made, and is still being made today. The problem is that it is hard to predict when research will be finished, because that would require knowing the results ahead of time.
Another reason people are cynical is because fusion seems too good to be true. The fuel for it is everywhere, and it would yield so much energy that compared to the amount we use today it might as well be infinite. It is immensely more friendly toward the environment than fossil fuels or fission. It is such a great positive with so few downsides that it feels too good to be true.
But that kind of thinking is based on human intuition, not on facts. Behind the scenes, fusion research continues to press forward and make progress, and right now there is a tokamak is in the works called ITER, which is designed to produce ten times more energy than it takes. The perception that it is no closer than it has ever been is just an illusion.
What about beyond fusion? Surely in the vast, wide universe there are other power generation options that might become available to us in the far distant future? Why yes, there are.
Solar Satellites
The sun is a giant gravity-powered fusion reactor, and it is putting out enough energy every second to power the entire current world economy for eight trillion (8,000,000,000,000) years.
You read that right. Eight trillion years of human civilization. Every second. Our planet is floating in a sea of practically limitless energy. If only there was a way to go and get it.
In the future, after much technological and economic growth, we might be able to. The idea is to launch satellites into Earth orbit, with giant curved mirrors that focus the sun’s light into a collector, which is hooked up to a laser that would beam the energy to power stations on the Earth’s surface. This will be far more efficient than land-based solar power, because there are no clouds and no night in space, and there is virtually no limit to the number of satellite collectors we could add to the grid.
Now when you think about giant lasers shooting at the Earth, you might worry that they would be used as weapons. However, you need not fear, because there are ways of designing the satellites such that weaponizing them would be impossible. If the output is limited and a sufficiently long laser wavelength chosen, then they won’t be able to hurt anyone or anything.
You can read more about solar satellites at the US Department of Energy website.
Antimatter
So far, we have talked about things that are more or less within the everyday person’s imagination. Now it’s time to take things to the wild parts of physics. In fission and fusion, the energy we get comes from a fraction of the mass getting converted into energy by Einstein’s equation E=mc2. But most of the mass is still there after the reaction. Might there be a way for us to get all of it? The answer, is yes. And it might surprise you to learn that there are more ways than one.
90 years ago, the underappreciated physicist Paul Dirac was playing with one of his equations, when he discovered that there should be particles that are exactly like electrons, but with a positive electric charge instead of negative. Positrons. Since then, we have discovered in lab experiments that there are oppositely charged versions of all particles. These negative doppelgangers of matter are called antimatter. And when particles of matter collide with their antimatter counterparts, they are annihilated, and all of their mass turns into energy. In nuclear fusion, only 1% of the mass gets converted into energy. This means that a matter-antimatter power plant would yield a hundred times as much power!
Unfortunately, because antimatter gets destroyed when it touches matter, it is extremely rare. There isn’t enough around to collect and put into reactors. In fact, the vast majority of the antimatter on Earth is created in particle accelerators, taking the same amount of energy to make as we would get from it. So someday in the far future, rather than being an energy source, we might use antimatter as an ultra-high capacity battery.
A cartridge of antimatter the size of a D-cell would carry about 1/10 the energy of an atomic bomb. And it would very easily explode like one too. You can’t just put it in a bottle, because touching the sides of the bottle would make it go boom. The only way to contain antimatter is to use ultra-precise magnets. Needless to say, if we accumulated enough antimatter to run a power plant with, such a plant would be extremely dangerous. So although it is physically possible, I don’t see us or any future civilization using antimatter as a power source.
Micro Black Holes
As I mentioned earlier, there is another way of getting all of that sweet energy locked away in mass: black holes. Specifically, microscopic black holes. You have probably heard that anything that enters a black hole can never get out. That is true, mostly. However, black holes lose mass very slowly by giving off light in a process called Hawking radiation. Maybe I will try to explain it in a future post, but for now, the important thing is that it exists.
Hawking radiation is usually extremely slow. As in, the slowest process in the universe. But the smaller the black hole, the faster and more powerful the radiation. If you have a black hole, say, the size of a proton (the mass of a mountain), it will put out about the same amount of power as a fission plant, and will last for hundreds of billions of years.
I did my calculations at this handy dandy site.
Of course, there are some questions that arise when we talk about using black holes for anything. First of all is safety. It’s a black hole! Won’t it suck in everything around it and cause lots of destruction? Surprisingly, no. The point of no return is called the event horizon, which is what we mean by the “size” of the black hole. In our case, it is a lot smaller than an atom, making it difficult for anything to get trapped inside. However, anyone closer than 50 meters would feel a force from the black hole equivalent to Earth’s gravity, which means we want to give the black hole a lot of room.
Speaking of which, how are we going to hold the black hole? It is as heavy as a mountain and tinier than an atom, so what is stopping it from falling straight through the table, the floor, and to the center of the Earth? One option is to give it a small electric charge, and have it spiral around in a magnetic field. That magnetic field would require quite a lot more power than our mountain-mass black hole would give off, but we could solve this by making the black hole smaller, which would both reduce its mass and give it a higher energy output. However, there is a better option: build the power plant in space. There is no down in space, so the black hole would just float there, coasting along the gravitational landscape along with the ship that carries it.
Another important question is how we get a black hole of that size. The smallest black holes in nature that we know of are around 3 times the mass of the sun, when enough matter falls onto a neutron star to push it past its Schwarzschild radius. Unfortunately, the rest of the universe will have cooled off and died by the time these black holes’ hawking radiation is enough to use as an energy source.
However, only technology is stopping us from making artificial black holes. Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity showed us that energy has just as much gravity as mass, so if we shoot powerful enough lasers into a small enough point, a black hole will appear. Of course, we need to generate all of that power in the first place, so like antimatter, micro black holes would probably end up more as batteries than power sources. That is, unless life can figure out a way to survive the googols of years until the naturally-occurring black holes are small enough.
Black Hole Spin
There is another way to use black holes for energy generation. Big black holes, in fact, not microscopic ones. This comes from the fact that black holes have spin. What exactly it means for a black hole to have spin is a very complicated topic, so we’ll save it for another day. You can pretend it means the event horizon is revolving around the center, if that makes it easier. The important thing is that there is energy in the spin, and given the right technology and resources we could get to it.
It might surprise you to learn that gravity does not pull objects together. Instead, Einstein showed us in the General Theory of Relativity that space-time is pulled toward the gravitational source, and objects float along with it. It is like a stick floating on a pond with a drain pipe. The drain does not pull the stick toward it. Rather, the stick floats along with the water toward the drain. There is another effect of gravity predicted by Einstein’s equations, which is rare enough that we have never directly observed it. When an extremely massive object like a black hole spins, the rotation pulls space-time around with it. This is called frame-dragging. If regular gravity is like water flowing toward a drain, frame-dragging is like a whirlpool.
When a black hole spins, its frame-dragging is so strong that it creates a region of space outside the event horizon called the ergosphere, where in order to stay still as seen from far away, something has to travel against the black hole’s spin faster than the speed of light. This means that if something dips into the ergosphere without entering the event horizon, it gets a major boost in speed and kinetic energy. This energy comes from the black hole’s rotational kinetic energy, making the black hole’s rotation slow down ever so slightly. Since the object hasn’t passed the event horizon, it can get back out, and we can use its extra kinetic energy for electricity.
The most efficient way to do this would be to build a sphere of mirrors around the black hole, and let light bounce around inside. Every time the light goes through the ergosphere, it picks up some of the black hole’s rotational energy. If there is an opening in the mirror contraption for the light to get out, it becomes an energy fountain. For a visual and entertaining explanation about black hole spin power, check out Kurzgesagt’s video on it.
Unfortunately, extracting a black hole’s rotational energy requires letting some mass fall into the black hole. This is because of something called the Penrose process, which I wish I could explain, but I don’t understand it. The details don’t matter today, though, because it has a bad consequence; the black hole increases in mass, meaning we have to wait longer before it shrinks to sub-atomic size and we can use its Hawking radiation as a power source. It will be a kind of poetic tragedy that the last civilizations in the universe, by taking the energy they need in order to survive, seal away some of the precious energy into a future beyond their grasp. Not to worry, though. Before then, we have billions and trillions and higher-tier-illions of years to figure out how to stick out the long dark purgatory of the black hole era.
In our struggle today to replace fossil fuels with renewables, it's easy to forget that there will be more to the story in the future. As poor countries develop and developed countries get wealthier, our consumption of energy continues to increase exponentially. In another century, we may get vast amounts of energy from space lasers, or from mini-suns we create. Even after all of the stars die, there will still be enough energy to last for a long, long time.
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