The funny thing here is that the idealization of the Greeks that you're up to here is directly inherited from the Romans who idealized the Classical and Hellenistic Greeks. But it's worth learning more about what the Greeks and Romans were really up to, since you've got ideas that are not well informed by the source material, and if you took the time to examine the evidence I think you'd be surprised at the sophistication of the Romans.
Also in this day and age the idealization of the Greeks is something that's largely an old cultural memory, but if you look at the Greeks in their ancient milieu, the "Greek Miracle" was largely an illusion based on lost earlier sources. The Greeks certainly were sophisticated intellectually and they've left a mark on history for it, but they didn't appear in as much of a vacuum as folks thought existed before modern archaeology.
>The Romans sacked Greece and killed Archimedes. All you have to do is look at the rate of mathematical and technological progress before and after Rome to see that Rome was a dark age.
So you really ought to take look at technological progress in Rome since you've got it absolutely backwards. The Romans were less inclined to sophisticated abstract thought than the Greeks, the sophisticated discourses on political theory especially were dead, and they weren't sophisticated mathematicians, but the Romans were certainly more sophisticated technologically than the Greeks.
Also the Greeks didn't just disappear once the Romans conquered their territory. The great Greek cities like Syracuse, Alexandria, Antioch, et al. carried on under the Romans while the Romans took great pains to preserve and promote Greek learning, while Roman engineering picked up every trick from every culture they encountered. You're surely familiar with the Antikthera mechanism, that was an orrery, a sophisticated Greek astronomical calculating device which the Romans continued to build for centuries.
The Romans had remarkably sophisticated technology which certainly eclipsed the Greeks on many fronts in architecture, aqueducts, et al. The development of concrete was a Roman invention that opened tremendous inventiveness.
I'd originally replied without really knowing anything about the topic, just noticed that you were avoiding responding to a specific point. Now that you're using dishonest framing like volume rather than mentioning cost. I looked up the cost, nuclear waste costs massively eclipse all other energy subsidies, the OP was right, and I think you know this based on your failure to respond honestly twice.
The argument was created by a churchman for churchmen, it wasn't intended or used as a popular argument, but it's worth understanding that c. 1000 CE this argument seemed compelling to literate folks who were introduced to it. If people had thought it was ludicrous nonsense they actually were free to say this, this is a philosophical argument, not doctrine, and the Church didn't have too much to do with supporting/opposing such things other than opposing philosophical arguments seen as heretical.
That's bronze. I'd assume any brass/bronze/copper to corrode away, that's what it does naturally. Now consider gold, stainless steel, and the many other inert materials humans work with. I assume 10,000 year old gold artifacts would look the same as the 5000 year old artifacts we know of which are very well preserved, and other similar materials would fare similarly.
The person you were replying to and the article you posted both make a point you're not addressing:
>Critics allege that the most important subsidies to the nuclear industry have not involved cash payments, but rather the shifting of construction costs and operating risks from investors to taxpayers and ratepayers, burdening them with an array of risks including cost overruns, defaults to accidents, and nuclear waste management. Critics claim that this approach distorts market choices, which they believe would otherwise favor less risky energy investments.[15]
At this point whenever I'm on a walk I clean up any plastic litter I spot and dispose of it. I live not too far from some creeks and retention ponds along a local flood plain where I know my neighborhood's storm drains are headed. Seeing so much plastic litter and other pollutants spoil a habitat that once supported a very vibrant ecosystem was sad to watch, and I'm doing whatever small things I can to help. But we need systemic change to deal with plastic pollution.
(The fish died from lawn runoff causing algae blooms as well - please be aware that if you live somewhere where it rains, then over fertilizing pollutes.)
We have fossils that are > 3 billion years old. While subduction does steadily erase the past, not everything subducts. See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craton
There's more. At the same time oil well holes are drilled many orders of magnitude deeper making them cross thousands of strata rather than being limited to a meter or two. Most oil drilling is in areas prone to subduction but there are areas in Canada where they're drilling over surface rocks that are hundreds of millions of years old. Those won't subduct soon and are far more discoverable than an animal burrow due to size. We've got around 1 million active oil wells in N. America, fewer than animal burrows, but in areas they'll be preserved in deep time and in sufficient numbers there's a reasonable chance of discovery.
It is a very long time, but we still do have a lot of fossils, and with many human artifacts they won't fossilize so much as just sit there in their strata - we make artifacts that don't even need to fossilize since they are already stable, chemically inert, and resistant to biodegrading or corrosion, and if they do corrode, then in the right conditions those would be a kind of fossil. Ancient life made left lot of traces and humans are currently leaving as many traces as any other species has ever left, and we're leaving artifacts and other traces spread all across the globe, even in the oceans. We have fossils from >3 billion years ago. Not everything subducts. There's existent areas of long term geology stability and those areas are as littered with human traces, artifacts, and other remains as anywhere else. I honestly can't imagine all traces of humanity being undiscoverable considering in 100 million years, in 400 million subduction and time will have erased a lot, but I'm pretty confident there would be quite a few discoverable traces if some future life form were to apply modern archaeological methods then, esp. given that the scale and scope of changes humans are making is massive and global. At the very least future paleontologists would see the effects of humans on their habitat in the fossil record of the ongoing mass extinction, but I expect much more would be discoverable than that.
It’s well worth reading about this. The ways that scientist have determined these things are complex but easily discoverable on the Internet.
Also, while I was using hundreds of millions because that was the timeframe of the original question, the reality is that we actually have fossils that are more than 3 billion years old.
While it is true that over deep time less and less survives due to subduction not all areas do, and human activity covers vast surfaces now leaving many artifacts and traces. You should also consider that we do have fossils from > 3 billion years ago. Certainly not everything will survive but there’s no question some human traces will persist for hundreds of millions of years.
We have fossils from the Cambrian period ~500 million years ago that include many traces of holes from burrowing animals. We've identified animals from ~500 million leaving many different kinds of traces as well as from fossils. 500 million years from now humans will have left many remaining traces. While older fossils are rare and precious, there's no generalized entropy that just destroys all old things (until there's a supernova/mega-meteor/etc., eventually the planet will be gone with enough time). In the right conditions much can be preserved for hundreds of millions of years. Many human artifacts like gold and other inert metal tools will be around besides the many physical changes we've made across the surface of the Earth.
As soon as coins appear in a geologic stata they become the most common archaeological artifacts found from humans, and at this point we've got hundreds of billions of them spread all over the globe with many becoming lost in spots where even if they were submerged in water, they could easily still remain intact for hundreds of millions of years. Not all coins are inert, but many are, and many really are going to stick around millions of years. While volcanic heat and pressure can mangle inert metals, not many other natural processes will. There's no magical entropy that would cause inert artifacts in geologically stable areas that some coins would wind up in to just lose their form magically. In our world today there's a lot of stainless steel, gold, and other inert artifacts that are going to persist for hundreds of millions of years. It's not like there's volcanoes everywhere, nor do tectonic plates subsume everything - we've got Cambrian fossils after all...
Coins in the right conditions last two thousand years easily (I collect ancient coins, have some that are 2500 years old that are in excellent condition). I expect in the right conditions some would last a few hundred million years. There's plenty of other non-biodegradable, chemically inert, discoverable things like stainless steel tools, gold jewelry, and other artifacts that humans make that could easily persist for millions of years.
Teleprinters/teletypes go back further than you think. The first were in the 1800s. By the early 1900s teletypes had already become standardized around the time IBM developed the 80-column punchcard.
Lower-cased letters have both ascenders and descenders. Fitting both of those in 8 pixels is doable but leaves you with either the clipped ascenders or mangled descenders that you see in old 8-pixel lower-cased typefaces - your method works, but the results are poor. Upper cased Latin letters are far more amenable to rasterizing down to small sizes than lower cased.
Though the real reason behind the question is that teletypes printed in upper case, early computers copied teletypes and followed that convention which carried on through the 8-bit era.
While this account comes from Plutarch, Suetonius also relates the same story. Suetonius, of course, was much more interested in a good story than any concept of truth and was writing in roughly the same period as Plutarch relating tales told and retold long after whatever original events there were transpired.
This dark earth is often referred to as terra preta which has been a subject of study for a long time. The debate on whether it was intentionally made vs other explanations has been going on for a while, the posted article adds more to the human-made explanation, more on terra preta here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta
I used to ROM-boot my Classic back in the day, it was nice to have a built-in recovery volume. These days if you use a Mac Rom-inator II[1] it supports booting System 7 from ROM, and it'll even create a RAM disk the system boot from, making the system ephemeral but modifiable. I have one in my SE/30 and it's been helpful to have that built-in recovery volume - no floppies needed.
Please do not drag in unrelated, tangential threads, especially flame-bait material like this. Regardless of what you believe about the original topic, dragging this into totally unrelated threads only creates problems and is a disruptive behavior.
Old person here - this does not resonate with my experience at all. It's been the middle class driving consumer technology since the '60s at least. The stuff that was "solved" almost always turned out to be breathless reporting hyping technologies that didn't pan out for various reasons.
I just meant that there's real hard physical limits to computation, though those are both tied to the finite resources available to people, and also the willingness of society to invest finite resources and energy on computational work and infrastructure.
>Is there some limit where AI just can't get better?
Yes, without question. There must be, in fact. Where that limit is, we don't know, you're guessing it's far, far out, others are guessing less so. At this point the details of that future are unknowable.
The advertisements were what was driving the counterfeiting. It was by giving Apple a page without third parties injecting ads into it that they handled the counterfeiting issue.
I keep records of butterfly sightings. This is the worst year I've ever seen by far. In a normal year queen butterflies are one of the most abundant migrants. So far I have seen 0. I've seen no swallowtails of any species at all, and massively reduced numbers of typical species or none. But that's because of the drought, not glyphosate.
He was using glyphosate as a weed-killer and getting it on his hands and feet. Way higher levels of exposure than any foods. Also if you're afraid of glyphosate, the Roundup-ready crops are the ones to avoid especially - soy, corn, canola, sugar beets. There's no Roundup-ready wheat, oats, or nuts. (edit: apparently it's used as a desiccant so it winds up in cereals as well - lovely, though still there's no evidence it's got dietary effects).
I'm not really concerned about its dietary effects since there's no evidence there, but as an amateur entomologist the effects of Roundup on butterfly populations have been devastating - in the past milkweed was pretty hard to completely weed out by hand, but modern farming can clear hundreds of acres of every trace of milkweed with Roundup/glyphosate.
>falcon and all of spacex is based on ignoring advice from others, especially “industry experts”
Not in the least. SpaceX hires a lot of rocket scientists who are industry experts. They're more agile than the entrenched players since Boeing/Lockheed legacy space programs weren't efficient but SpaceX has relied upon expert consultation and expert advice from folks in the industry to build their rockets. I don't see them as building from first principles at all, they're building on what's come before standing on the shoulders of the rocket engineers who've come before.