> My one hope for AI, robotics, self driving cars, is that they can enable people in cities to migrate back to rural places.
Wouldn't it be better, at least for the Earth, for everyone to live in cities? This way, more of the world can remain fairly untouched by humans, and it could still remain easy accessible from the city for recreational purposes.
The solarpunk ideal of living a rural life requires more road infrastructure, which cuts off wildlife routes and natural drainage, and even with EVs, still pollutes the air from tire wear.
That is my understanding too, but many people equate rural life with „natural“. Unfortunately the rural environment is all but natural. The cultural landscape that has been engineered over centuries all but displaced true wilderness and is largely devoid of biodiversity. The better we become at industrial agriculture, the worse the situation is.
That depends on the rural environment. Especially grazing lands, like north European coastal heathlands, may have been managed with controlled burns in between grazing for a thousand years, to the point that they have their own biodiversity, that may get lost if they are disused.
True rural farming is still bad for nature because the land is cleared of biodiversity to make way for farm land. It is arguably worse than cities because a lot more land per person is cleared.
The amount of people that want truly rural environments is infinitesimal.
Everyone wants a huge house with lots of land far from neighbors.
But then they want the state of the art hospital to be close. They want to be able yo reach the closest airport in max 1 hour. They want their kids to play with other kids, ideally without being chauffeured around endlessly, etc, etc.
What I've discovered is that humanity has mastered the ancestral art of "having the cake and eating it, too", also called delusion and/or hypocrisy :-)
A very large fraction of land (~50%) is currently used to grow biomass to feed 8 billion humans. Nothing about that land is 'natural' - it's a carefully engineered environment that's quite hostile to animal life.
The land that people live on, whether it's in a city, a suburb, or in a rural manner is a rounding error compared to those demands.
It's not that simple. Large herbivores are necessary for many environments and useful agriculturally even if we didn't eat them. Desertification caused by removing trees and grazing without replenishing, nutrients lost because sunlight and wind are scraping the bare soil, monoculture deserts and insecticides killing off pollinators and destroying ecologies... It's the factory farming and profit-motivated short-termist resource extraction that's a problem, not the cows and pigs. We can transition to sustainable methods without decreasing food variety.
some ruminants are good because they can turn inedible biomass into calories. However the scale at which we farm them is orders of magnitude beyond those levels.
Yes, but there weren't that many large grazing animals because most of the world was covered in woods, not pastures. Trees are the most successful large creatures and we've probably reduced their habitat by 50%.
That's the actual tragedy. Forests contain a lot more like per cubic km than pastures do.
We've already touched ~all of the arable and non-arable land that's near to where people want to live. Forests clearcut, swamps (and deltas and the Netherlands) drained, rivers rerouted, reservoirs established, plains tilled, roads built, mountains conquered: We've been shaping and expanding the habitable Earth as it suits us for a very long time.
We're humans. We do that stuff.
And we're natural creatures like the rest of them are.
Here's a fun thought experiment for you. If you dug a 1 mile cubic square hole. How many humans could you fit into it? The answer is not only all of us but about around an order of magnitude more on top. I'm not sure if this emphasizes how few humans there are, or how massive the Earth is. But it's the same point in both cases.
Some human activities can have an outsized impact, but the overwhelming majority of those activities remain necessary regardless of where people live, and some will have an greater impact with widespread urbanity since some things like energy/food/water can be relatively cleanly decentralized in rural settings, at least partially, but require complete centralization in urban settings.
> I'm not sure if this emphasizes how few humans there are, or how massive the Earth is. But it's the same point in both cases.
It emphasizes neither!
What you've described is a mass grave.
Quite literally so. If you killed all living humans (8.3billion), the mass-grave you'd have to dig to put them all in one place isn't quite large indeed!
Plus, humans on earth are affected by gravity, so any arrangement of them cubic squares instead of square miles is highly unintuitive, unusual and unnatural to begin with.
This doesn't say anything about habitable or fertile farmable area (measured in km^2, not in km^3) of the planet, or the number of people (that you've conveniently reduced by taking a square root of - twice! by packing them into a tightly packed cube)
For example, if you took 8 billion people and made them hold hands with each other tightly packed (0.5m per person) it would wrap the circumference of earth 100 times.
Now this actually says something about size of the earth!
If you divy up the land surface of earth by population, you get a rather small parcel of land, something to tune of 140m x 140m (this includes deserts and other mostly uninhabitable lands!)
Arable land would be a much smaller parcel of land still!
If you measure human land use in terms of arable land and living space per person, instead of mass-grave metrics the planet Earth is pretty much squarely over-populated and is very much stretching of what is sustainable.
I think your intuition of 140m x 140m being a small parcel of land is rather odd. That's a land the length of about 1.5 football fields, in both directions, for each and every person. So for a small family of 4 people, that'd be nearly 3 football fields of space, in all directions, just for themselves. And there's enough space on Earth for literally everybody to have this, including newborn babies as they are part of the population we're counting.
Now factor in larger families and the fact that some people voluntarily will want to live in close quarters (even given a free choice of all options), and you get many football fields of space, again in all directions, for every single person. This is just absolutely massive. And I think calling deserts uninhabitable is quite odd given everything from Nevada to Saudi Arabia. Basically no lands are truly uninhabitable if we want to inhabit them, even including water as the gradually expanding territory of China is demonstrating.
And, as mentioned already, arable lands have nothing to do with population distribution. As you pack people into smaller quarters, you use up just as much arable land, if not more (due to minimizing decentralization possibilities), than you do with wider distribution.
> I think your intuition of 140m x 140m being a small parcel of land is rather odd.
I actually went into google maps/satellite of some very familiar places to me, and drew out a 140m x 140m meter squares just to get a feel how much it is. It's very much a small plot of land.
I rounded up, the actual plot of land given 8.3bil pop is closer to 134m x 134m.
Mind you, 134m x 134m per person IF you include all land area (so deserts, permafrost, high mountains and various unlivable areas), so in practice, it would be significantly less, so 95m squared give or take depending on what you consider "livable".
Of these 134m x 134m arable/fertile land would be only like 10% if I recall correctly.
And arable/fertile land is - ultimately - the bottle neck.
This does not in any shape or form emphasize "how few of people there are on Earth". Quite the opposite actually.
And every new person just makes that small parcel of land ever smaller.
> And I think calling deserts uninhabitable is quite odd given everything from Nevada to Saudi Arabia. Basically no lands are truly uninhabitable if we want to inhabit them, even including water as the gradually expanding territory of China is demonstrating.
And what happens to be the population density of Sahara Desert?
Plus, do you live or want to live in a desert yourself? No? Well then...
Nobody wants to live in "close quarters" in insanely polluted, noisy overpopulated shitholes like Dhaka, Mumbai or Karachi or deserts. Just so you know... people there never had a choice and were just spawned there.
Planet is overpopulated, the overpopulation is simply not evenly distributed. Mind you, as recently as 1950s your plot of land would be 3x larger, when pop of planet was "mere" 2.5bil.
Saudi Arabia is wholly dependent of it's oil reserves to make miracles happen in the middle of the desert.
At current oil consumption rates in the world, the total world oil reserves will last mere 47 years.
Then either some "magical transformation" will happen, or lots of people will end up poured in that square death cube of yours.
And only the fraction of people left alive in Saudi Arabia will go back to riding cammels instead of their sports cars and jeeps.
Betting that a "magical transformation" will happen in 47years is nothing more than wishful thinking.
Unfortunately people aren't really wired for long term planning and reason backwards from the conclusions in their mind as starting point instead.
Rather than derive conclusions from the observable, quantifiable and measurable - even if those conclusions end up being less than pretty.
I don't think you're discussing this in good faith. 134m^2 is well over 4 acres of land for a single person! That's larger than a typical small suburban subdivision for a single person. A minimal immediate family size for a sustainable society is 4 people. That's 16+ acres for every single family, which is just massive. And the overwhelming majority of the Earth's land is perfectly acceptable for habitation. I suspect you think the opposite of arable is inhospitable. It is not. Arable is a very specific definition of land, which land can be turned into through irrigation and other basic technologies. It's not a sort of fixed quality metric.
I'm not really following what point you're trying to make with the example cities. People move to urban areas for economic opportunities. It's thanks to the internet that deurbanization is becoming a more viable reality for more people, vaguely analogous to how vehicles enabled it at a different time in the past. Saudi Arabia existed before oil, so to speak, and will exist afterwards. Part of the reason you find them invested in basically everything stateside, to the chagrin of many, is because they're working to create a more sustainable economy. The nice thing about countries under defacto dictatorship type rules is the ability to carry out longer-term plans, even if they may sometimes be misguided. [1]
> I don't think you're discussing this in good faith. 134m^2 is well over 4 acres of land for a single person!
134m is a distance you can walk in a minute and a half. And you're already in somebody elses land.
The only way you can present this as some sort of large plot of land is if you take some already overpopulated suburban area as a reference point where houses are lined up like boxes right next to another. And that's your only point of reference and you can't even fathom anything else.
Subtracting the uninhabitable land from it, you basically get less than a mere hectare.
Accusing others of acting in bad faith is game everyone can play.
And it's very easy to do so since you're arguing how easily deserts, oceans or permafrost are habitable "if you really want to" (its just basic technology!) - when in truth it's achieved by pissing away one-time generational oil money to make it rain in the middle of the desert - no less.
Party which will most likely wrap up with mass starvation (globally) when the pumps run dry (47 more years of this! give or take!)
No sane person arguing in good faith would make arguments like this:
"Well, planet isn't overpopulated, there's still a lot of room in the desert! oh, you can inhabit the oceans and permafrsot too! You could live on top of the Himalayas (you don't, but you could!) Oh, the sky is the limit! Oh, yes!"
You aren't actually interested in truth, you're simply really, really want to and are programmed to multiply, and are working backwards (rationalizing) how actually planet isn't at all overpopulated or resource constrained, etc. That's what's actually happening. It's textbook.
Farms - with a near infinitesimal number of farmers compared to the numbers living in cities .. exactly as things are trending now.
It's common enough, here at least, to have a small family cropping 13,000 old school acres - tilling, seeding, waiting, harvesting, etc with big machines and Ag-bots.
Let's see, I didn't make any claim about untouched - although I do have some strong positions on wetlands cover, corridors, wild old forrest, et al but that's a whole other aside.
I'm just here to point out farming and livestock at suprisng to many scales can be operated by fewer people than you might expect.
as for: > no-one can afford to be shipping food halfway round the planet.
what does the Atlas of Economic Complexity type datasets currently say about food volume tonnages and trip lengths? I know that our local farmers co-op
handles handysize to post-Panamax vessel shipments from Australia, United States, Canada, South America and Europe to key grain markets in Asia, Europe, Central America and the Middle East.
The challenges for grain shipping going forward likely fall about getting sufficient production of non fossil origin methanol fuel variations for shipping engines.
And yet, farmers still need roads, and hardware stores, and grocery stores, and hospitals, and HVAC and plumbers and before you know it, you need villages for all the people those people depend on, along with their families.
Farming communities have already had these things, the broad pattern is that fewer and fewer of thiese thigs are needed as fewer and fewer people are needed to work the same land.
Urbanisation ratios have increased, farm worker percentages decreased, average land area holdings increased so stores, schools, etc. are closing.
As time passes now, more an more old farm hoses are vacant island in an ocean of larger consolidated workings.
Fewer people are needed to work megafarms, but the basic needs for these services don't go away entirely. As a result, moving people to the urban centers still leaves you with all the things that you hoped urbanizing would get rid of- roads and rural communities.
Perhaps reread the upstream and pay close attention to the usernames and who said what.
> all the things that you hoped urbanizing would get rid of- roads and rural communities.
I spoke about the actual real in this moment trend that is already happening; increased urbanisation, I said nothing about wanting to see the end of roads or rural communities - although I'm a big fan of seeing less human impact on larger areas of managed land - land that includes agriculture, mining, native reserves, cropped treelands, etc.
We do have the capacity to ship massive tonnages of grains, meat, fruits, livestock around the globe and we use it ensure sufficient pipelines to feed a billion+ global population across all seasons and weathers.
Costs at that scale are large, transcontinental railways across mountains, lifting tonnages against graivity in addition to rolling friction, braking energy and return to steady motion energy repeated for frequent stops and loading, transfer, loading times add up.
Per tonne per kilometres costs of floating container ships and binned grain ships are easily competitive.
There are points to be made about the lower tonnages of picky people foods, lobsters, fancy beef, a Bugatti Chiron tucked away amidst a cavern of self loading basic electric cars .. but there's still an underlying current need to transport food from source to demand.
The costs of global shipping transport is iron mining, steel formation, build times, fuel production, fuel side effects, and so on - fuel side effects are a bit of a pressing issue, and have been since at least that 1967 absolute banger by Syukuro Manabe and Richard T. Wetherald they chose to call Thermal Equilibrium of the Atmosphere with a Given Distribution of Relative Humidity
> But it's more ecologically sustainable to eat what grows where you live.
> But it's more ecologically sustainable to eat what grows where you live.
Depends on the food, if you're clearing land for a new crop (which many countries have done historically and still do today) then it's not sustainable. And if the native crops are simply not as good nutritionally as the new crop then it's better to eat the new crop even at the ecological cost of the native one, e.g. potatoes vs barley in Ireland.
I'm not sure what you're referring to in your second sentence, not sure why picky eaters wouldn't like meat and potatoes or what that has to do with shipping in general, not even the fact that we do indeed have the capacity and will to ship food halfway around the world already today.
> And if the native crops are simply not as good nutritionally as the new crop then it's better to eat the new crop even at the ecological cost of the native one, e.g. potatoes vs barley in Ireland.
Potatoes and barley both grow pretty well in the UK.
The problem with eating things like soya over here is that you can only do it if you burn a city's worth of diesel every single day to power a container ship to bring it, and it's farmed using horribly unsustainable methods.
The stuff I eat (he says, drinking a cup of Colombian coffee, okay okay, hypocrisy) is grown using techniques and ecological impact more-or-less unchanged from the dawn of agriculture. We use Massey-Fergusons now rather than horses or oxen but there would be nothing stopping you going back to horses, and indeed with diesel at nearly two quid a litre it might well be worth looking at that.
If you're going to live underground(and you'd have to on Mars) you might as well do it here, at the bottom of the ocean, or if you're feeling particularily ambitious - even on the moon. There is literally zero advantage to doing it on Mars, except for the achievement.
What's the difference? All have to live under central planning, all have to live with hubris of the rich and elites, at least Mars sounds way cooler than living in cities.
If you think Musk doesn't want central planning, you're sorely misunderstanding his point of view.
Musk wants to be a founding father. And just as the OG founding fathers, his problem isn't necessarily with the centralization part in general, but with the centralizing being done by others. There's a reason the original American voters were all white land owning men (and in some cases, slave owning men!).
It would also be better for the earth if there were no cities and everyone went back to village farming and local communities. I also don't see that ever happening nor do I want to ive in a city.
These are just syntax differences, which not only are easy to learn but I believe aren't the primary goal of the language, which is to bring the benefits of Rust's type system to Go.
As for int and float64, this comes from Go's number type names. There's int, int64, and float64, but no float. It's similar to how Rust has isize but no fsize.
I think it is occasionally used with "the," i.e. "the conscious" (referring to the conscious part of your body, for example). Adjectives sometimes become nouns this way, like "the poor"
I searched the Corpus of Contemporary American English ( https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/ ) for 'conscious_n', which means the token "conscious" with a 'noun' part-of-speech tag.
There are five results. All five of them are tagging errors:
If we scan to get enough info, then model the cells well enough, and have enough computers to run the simulation of the models, then the input-output of the emulation of the brain will be the same as the input-output of the original brain. It will act like it is conscious. [adjective, modifying it]
Well, first we work on working the body together, so that we can go places with both of us conscious. [adjective, modifying both of us]
Lady Bertram looks barely conscious. [adjective, modifying Lady Bertram]
In a few years, he believed, this institution would be needed in Ukraine, as new conscripts became more religiously conscious. [adjective, modifying new conscripts]
It is in this sense that Rahner means that grace is conscious. [adjective, modifying grace]
Examples 3 and 4 are so far from being nouns that they're being modified by adverbs.
It seems safe to conclude that in fact there is no nounal use of the word "conscious".
> Adjectives sometimes become nouns this way, like "the poor"
That isn't actually what's happening in "the poor". The position occupied by the token poor in that phrase can be filled by all kinds of things:
God loves everyone equally. The rich and the poor, the just and the unjust, the sane and the schizophrenic, the possessed-of-billions-of-dollars and the penniless...
Do you want to argue that "possessed of billions of dollars" is a noun?
We can apply our in-passing observation from earlier and contrast the fully-awake with the barely-conscious. Here, as above, it's impossible for conscious to be a noun, because it is being modified by an adverb. And it's... dubious... for barely conscious to be a noun phrase, because it is headed by conscious, which we know isn't a noun.
> Is my impression correct, that in general "the {thing}" is a noun phrase without implying anything about {thing} itself?
Yes, with some minor caveats:
1. Some people prefer to see "the {thing}" as a 'determiner phrase', where 'determiner' is the name for the part of speech to which the belongs. You can call it a 'noun phrase' without losing anything meaningful. 'Noun phrase' is definitely a better term if you're not deep in the technical weeds of grammatical analysis.
2. There are conclusions you could draw about {thing}, but they're more complex than "it's a noun". It's fair to just not talk about them.
3. In language, there are always problems somewhere for any analysis. (Which is why an unbroken chain of transmission can have Latin on one side and French on the other.) I wouldn't even say that a noun phrase with that structure exists at all in an example like "The more you say it, the more I think it". But that particular construction is weird enough that I'm perfectly comfortable saying it's just outside the scope of your qualifier "in general".
This article[0] investigated the payload. It's a RAT, so it's capable of executing whatever shell commands it receives, instead of just stealing credentials.
I wonder if GitHub would rule it a copyright violation if the source code was rewritten by an agent, i.e. copy my answers but change a few words. Legally, if the original source code is copyrighted then an agent rewriting it likely doesn't lose that copyright, but I wonder if GitHub would go through the effort of determining whether it was a derived work.
Wouldn't it be better, at least for the Earth, for everyone to live in cities? This way, more of the world can remain fairly untouched by humans, and it could still remain easy accessible from the city for recreational purposes.
The solarpunk ideal of living a rural life requires more road infrastructure, which cuts off wildlife routes and natural drainage, and even with EVs, still pollutes the air from tire wear.
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